Mark Yarm is a former senior editor at Blender magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Bonnie, and is in no way related to Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm.
“Yarm’s affectionate, gossipy, detailed look at the highs and lows
of the contemporary Seattle music scene is one of the most
essential rock
books of recent years.”
—Kirkus Review, *Starred Review*
“Hardcore fans of grunge will treasure this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Yarm, a former editor of Blender, interviewed more than 250
musicians, scenesters, and record business types
to deliver a personal, comprehensive history of grunge music…Highly
recommended.”
—Library Journal
"Mark Yarm has assembled the gospels of Grunge music. Here is a
warts-and-elbows refresher course for those of us who still find
our memories of the era a little hazy."
─Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
"A very noble record of the grunge scene—and an excellent addition
to the growing library of oral history music books."
—Legs McNeil, coauthor of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral
History of Punk and the forthcoming Resident Punk
"Great oral histories are rare. Hewing a narrative from all those
chaotic and often conflicting memories with testimony alone and no
guide-prose or stage direction is difficult. Making that somehow
intimate and epic is nearly impossible. When a writer pulls it off,
as Mark has with Everybody Loves Our Town, it's really a gift: the
subject or scene finally gets its definitive record and the reader
gains what feels like a room full of brand new friends. One of the
best rock reads in a very long time."
─Marc Spitz (co-author We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of
LA Punk, music blogger VanityFair.com).
"In Everybody Loves Our Town, Mark Yarm collects and dispenses
remarkable insights about a genre no one even wants to claim as
their own. As a child of grunge—who spent a humiliating chunk of
the 1990s in an Alice in Chains t-shirt—I loved this book; it
clarified so many things about a sound and a time I thought I
already knew."
─Amanda Petrusich, author of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost
Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music
"A deeply funny story, as well as a deeply sad story--the glorious
Nineties moment when a bunch of punk rock bands from Seattle
accidentally blew up into the world’s biggest noise. Mark Yarm
gives the definitive chronicle of how it all happened, and how it
ended too soon. But the book also makes you appreciate how weird it
is that this moment happened at all."
─Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is A Mix Tape and Talking To Girls
About Duran Duran
"A definitive, irreplaceable chronicle of one of rock-n-roll's
greatest eras. It should sit tall on any rock lover's
bookshelf."
─Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind The Pollacks
“In an attempt to trace the real roots of grunge, journalist Mark
Yarm compiled an exhaustive oral history from the people who lived
it. In his book Everybody Loves Our Town, there are interviews with
everyone from the early adopters to those that were late to the
party, but nevertheless helped extend [grunge's] shadow of
influence by turning it into a look for the world to emulate.”
—The Fader
“This massively readable tome gathers recollections from every
grunge band you’ve ever heard of (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden,
Melvins) and some you haven’t (we hardly knew ye, Skin Yard)…The
genre’s first truly comprehensive insider history…It’s gossipy…and
fascinating, with so much backstabbing and death it’s like
Shakespeare, if Shakespeare had written about heroin addicts with
bad hair.”
—Revolver (4 out of 4 stars)
“An impressive display of reportorial industriousness… It’s the
feel-bad rock book of the fall.”
—Bloomberg Businessweek
“Oral history is an art in itself. It’s why Everybody Loves Our
Town will endure as a classic of monumental scale.”
—Paste Magazine.
“For hardcore fans or people just curious about what the fuss was
all about, Mark Yarm’s excellent new book –Everybody Loves Our
Town: An Oral History of Grunge” is well worth the read. Yarm has
done an admirable job of assembling an engaging, funny and
ultimately sad narrative by letting the people who helped create
the Jet City sound talk about what happened in their own
words."
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Yarm’s account captures the essential tension that made the era so
compelling.”
—Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune
"We finished all five hundred and forty-two pages of this book in
two days, abandoning all responsibility (this, friends, is why we
do not have children; had there been any children about us, we
would have locked these unfortunate creatures in the bathroom, so
as to not be distracted) and staying up until two in the morning,
reading whole chunks of it out loud to poor long-suffering Support
Team."
—TheRejectionist.com
Mark Yarm's superb book, Everybody Loves Our Town: A History
of Grunge details the dramatic rise of the grunge movement and all
of its players, including Cobain, Love and Vedder, told through the
voices of the people that lived through it."
—Hollywood Reporter
“I came away from this book with a big smile on my face. Lots of it
is like a gray day in western Washington; you’ve been kicked out of
yet another band, and your girlfriend is spending far too much time
with the drummer from the Melvins or the Screaming Trees. In the
end, though, “Everybody Loves Our Town" made me want to be young,
stupid and lucky again. Mainly, it made me want to be young.”
—The Washington Post
“Everybody Loves Our Town should inspire new conversations about
the unique culture and people that made grunge so unusual and
unforgettable to so many fans. The book is timely, as 2011 marks
the 20-year anniversary of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Pearl
Jam’s multi-platinum debut album, “Ten.” Everybody Loves Our Town
is as good an excuse as any to put on an Alice in Chains CD and
curl up with a good book about some great old friends with whom we
haven’t spent much time in a while.”
—The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Everybody Loves Our Town is authoritatively researched and
compiled, often very funny and always just a little bit sad.”
—Buffalo News
"Like a very extended and entertaining all-night bulls--- session
among everyone who mattered during the late-'80s/early-'90s music
scene."
—Seattle Weekly
"The scope is encyclopaedic and the closeness to the subject
unparalleled."
—Record Collector
"A wild ride that is in turns uplifting and tragic."
—Your Flesh
Named one of the top music books of 2011 by UK Telegraph
"Riveting, gossipy, and impossible to put down until the last quote
has been read."
—New York magazine's Vulture blog
“This exhaustive oral history features unknowns, cult figures,
supporting players and stars; each gets the time he or she deserves
as Yarm pieces together the arc of a scene that built itself from
scratch, blossomed beyond most people's dreams, and then crashed.
Yes, there are plenty of Kurt Cobain stories. But there's much
more, too— indelible characters, weird scenes, creative chaos,
laughs and tragedy and lots of cheap beer.”
—NPR.org
"Gen-X music geeks: Here’s your holy grail."
—Tulsa World
"The best book on music I've read this year."
—Omaha World-Herald
“This volume could have been a huge, snarky compendium of gossip
and score settling from the inhabitants of a claustrophobically
insular local music scene. And it is, but in the best possible
way—and it’s also much, much more…. Yarm has culled the story of
grunge from the people who created it, and their testimony is
remarkable for its eloquence and its passion and its fairness and
its anger.”
—Lev Grossman, Time (named one of the magazine's Top 10 nonfiction
books of 2011)
“A Herculean work of interviewing and editing which gives everyone
a voice, from the biggest stars to the lowliest foot soldiers… .
Though the Seattle scene’s stew of folly, feuding, rampant
drug addiction and a startling number of fatalities might have
made for a voyeuristic tale, Yarm leaves the reader full of
empathy for young men and women swept up in a cultural
moment they couldn’t control.”
—The Guardian (named a best music book of the year)
“Exhilarating … Mark Yarm’s brilliant and exhaustive oral history
of grunge is full of … vivid observations. Some 250 interviews
with those intimately associated with the most unlikely
musical sensation of all time piece together a story that is
hilarious and tragic and utterly gripping.”
—Sunday Times of London
A Gawker.com Best Thing We Read All Year selection
“[A] lively, funny, melancholy and exhaustive oral history … For
all its eventual compromise and dissolution, Seattle was briefly an
exhilarating pop cultural moment to rank with the greats. Yarm’s
labour of love has well and truly done it justice.”
—Time Out London
“If you loved the ’90s and you haven’t read this book, you MUST.
I’m absolutely obsessed with Mark Yarm’s masterpiece right
now.”
—USAToday.com’s Pop Candy column
"Full of so many entertaining stories and thrilling anecdotes that
we have read it cover-to-cover TWICE. You should do the same!"
—VH1.com
“The definitive oral history of the Seattle music scene,
period.” —Alternative Press
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