Static TV Blog: Grunge

Unlike the book signing I went to a few weeks back with Iggy Pop, Grunge was an era that looking back totally changed my life. I am sure I am not alone. The entire movement itself made me aware that other music was out there that the main stream media wasn't telling me about. It made me dig deeper then what MTV and my alternative radio station were playing. The beauty of it is that it was still a time when MTV was playing videos, and Clear Channel didn't own the air waves.

Now, I was young when Kurt Cobain passed away. To be exact, I was 11. But luckily for us, not all of us were 11 when this movement changed rock music forever. At the young age of 19 Michael Lavine started snapping pictures of street punks in Seattle with his Leica M2 camera and grew a love for taking pictures. He then went to school at Parsons here in New York, and through some great coincidences got an opportunity to photograph all of the Sub Pop bands in the early 90s that were passing through New York along with a host of other bands of the day. This whole story is beautifully told by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore in the forward of Lavine's new book titled, Grunge. Moore himself appears a few times through out the book.

The first half of the book itself is a great time capsule of the youth of the early 80s in the Seattle area from when Lavine first moved to Seattle from Denver in 1983. The photos showcase so well the energy and fashion of the time. The rest of the book are stunning photos of the bands that defined the grunge era of the late 80s and early 90s from Dinosaur Junior, Sonic Youth, and the Meat Puppets to Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden to name a few. It is so great to see these bands in their prime. The end of the book also has a brief bio of all the bands in the book.

Definitely worth getting if you are someone like me and want have something to remind you of how amazing the fashion of the early 90s was!

Here are some pictures from last nights signing with Michael Lavine and Thurston Moore