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David Scherer Water
By David Scherer Water
What happened to Olympia after a band from this city became one of the most successful acts in the history of recorded music?
What happens to a small, deliberately anti-commercial music scene when one of its sons becomes a global superstar?
Thirty-five years ago, Nirvana escaped the gravity of this creative incubator and released an album that would become one of the most consequential records in popular music — and Olympia has been living in its shadow ever since.
Modern Olympia music history is a city skyline made of dozens of appropriately sized buildings. Then there’s this one, odd, enormous skyscraper rising like a middle finger, and almost no one can appreciate its proportional absurdity.
I don’t think Nirvana is more important than Olympia's other bands. It’s just that for 35 years, Olympia's entire music culture has been provoked by it.
Some don’t accept this. Why should they? Nirvana sits so high up there, it’s impossible to compare them to another band — let alone compare them to the total combined influence of every other group to come out of this town.
Yet, every Olympia musician who came after Nirvana had to confront the possibility — or impossibility — of becoming the next Nirvana.
Some wanted nothing to do with commercial success.
Some wanted it.
Some wanted it, but pretended not to.
Some wanted to be successful without becoming what Nirvana became.
Nirvana wasn’t just Olympia's greatest musical export — it’s our greatest distortion field.
Consciously or not, everyone absorbed a tragic distortion: You can do this here.
Layer 1: The incubation
None of it would have been possible without Evergreen. Remove the college from Olympia and you don’t have the music scene. Evergreen created the fertile ground, drawing young musical misfits into town. Even the ones who never attended benefited from the school's resources and culture.
The Olympia model was (and still is) extraordinarily accessible: cheap shows, nontraditional venues, people putting on their own events, bands sharing bills, audiences participating rather than merely consuming.
In an
Olympia Music History Project interview, one local describes the experience of seeing $3 Nirvana shows, emphasizing how inexpensive, reachable, and utterly ordinary an Olympia concert felt at the time.
Kurt Cobain lived here, wrote songs here, played here, went to shows here, and absorbed the culture. The city's early DIY infrastructure — small living-room venues, informal networks, student-run radio at KAOS — was simply the environment in which Nirvana developed.
You saw a band on Tuesday, and you started your own on Wednesday.
Layer 2: The distortion
That local magic went by undetected for a long time. But then, the world — after suffering two decades of scarce authenticity in music — swallowed Olympia whole. Grunge, the forsaking of clean proficiency for ragged realism, became the dominant force in popular culture.
Olympia became a global product.
People came here because of what they had heard about the place. Nirvana demonstrated a terrifying new possibility: You could start a band in a damp basement, and then become unimaginably famous.
It created a weird feedback loop: Olympia produces an unusual music culture → Nirvana becomes enormously successful → the world becomes obsessed with Olympia → Olympia's music scene has to figure out how to survive being watched.
Suddenly, K Records and Kill Rock Stars existed in a universe where a local indie label was expected to produce global phenomena. The first Kill Rock Stars compilation actually included Nirvana; almost overnight, the world started scrutinizing a tiny town's living-room pressings for the next messiah.
During the gold-rush years of the mid-1990s, it seemed like anyone shouting into an open microphone was tagged as the next Cobain and offered a record deal before sunrise. The money was intoxicating. Some of Olympia’s graying machers are still chasing it. That’s the distortion: it altered everyone's conception of what was possible, turning an egalitarian haven into a talent scout's safari.
Layer 3: The counter-attack
And yet, Olympia's response wasn't simply to imitate Nirvana or sell out to the highest bidder. That's what makes the story even more interesting.
Instead of folding under the gravity of the skyscraper, the city generated an entire counter-ecosystem whose values weren't reducible to commercial success: Riot Grrrl, Beat Happening, Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, the International Pop Underground Convention, Yoyo.
The IPU itself is a perfect example: a local event that deliberately brought the outside world to Olympia on the town's own terms, rather than requiring Olympia musicians to leave home and seek permission from corporate gatekeepers.
If you measure influence strictly by records sold, money made, and cultural penetration, Nirvana absolutely annihilates the sum total of everything else this town produced.
But that’s a corporate metric. Olympia's real influence is harder to count: the labels birthed on kitchen tables, the shows people learned to put on themselves, the women who radically claimed space on stage, the cities around the world that built their own scenes using our blueprint.
How people stopped being consumers and started being creators — that's where the story gets complicated. That complication is where Olympia lives, and it’s what I am most proud of our city for having.
The change was contained. Olympia kept its core. Somehow, Olympia’s newest bands continue to blossom in good numbers. Some of them even make money.
As proof of this town’s real, un-distorted output — and to show just how crowded that skyline actually is underneath the skyscraper — check out this list. I’ll give anyone a nickel for a band or musician with a strong connection to Olympia that I left off:
Andras Jones, Anna Oxygen, Arrington de Dionyso, Bangs, Barn Band, Beat Happening, Beck, Bikini Kill, The Blow, Bratmobile, Broken Water, The Burnt Toast Society, Calvin Johnson, C-Average, Chris Sand / Sandman, Christian Mistress, Citizen's Band, The Clocks, Cool Rays, Courtney Love (the musician), Courtney Love (the band), Dead Air Fresheners, Dennis Driscoll, The Drugs, Dub Narcotic Sound System, Earth, Eprhyme, Erica Freas, Excuse 17, The Family Stoned, Fitz of Depression, The Fleetwoods, The Frumpies, GAG, Get The Hell Out Of The Way Of The Volcano, G.L.O.S.S., godheadSilo, The Good ‘Ole Boys From Way Back, The Go Team, The Gossip, Growing, Guidon Bear, The Halo Benders, Heather Dunn, Heavens to Betsy, Heliotrope, The Hive Dwellers, Hot Club Sandwich, ICU, Internal External, Jason Traeger, Joey Casio, Karp, Kicking Giant, Kimya Dawson, Little Red Car Wreck, Lois Maffeo, Love as Laughter, Lync, Mac Dawg, Macklemore, Mecca Normal, The Microphones, Milk Music, Mirah, Miranda July, Mocket, Moldy Peaches, Morgan and the Organ Donors, Mu, The Need, Nikki McClure, Nirvana, Nomy Lamm, The Old Haunts, Old Time Relijun, The Previous, Rickie Lee Jones, The Righteous Mothers, RVIVR, Satisfact, Scream Club, Sleater-Kinney, Some Velvet Sidewalk, Spider & The Webs, Steve Fisk, Super Duo, Team Dresch, Tender Forever, Tiger Trap, Timothy Brock, Unwound, Vendredi’s Bag, Warren Lee, Western Hymn, White Boss, Witchypoo, Wolves in the Throne Room, госкино.
In 1992, when he was 19, David Scherer Water named his band "The Grateful Dead." They played four shows in Olympia to predominantly disappointed audiences. In their defense, the band name had a period at the end and their flyers warned: "We’re taking the worst parts of this band and making them worse. A lot worse. We have longer solos, more drugs, and a lot of tuning." Not much has changed. David rambles on endlessly, uses lots of drugs, and somehow still hasn’t warmed up. His latest writing reflects this.
Kdubmaps
It is also worth noting that because of all of those bands and musicians creating such an ecosystem that a ton of outside acts came here to record. I love walking by the building where one of my favorite Modest Mouse records was recorded in downtown Olympia. Amazing music is in the bones of this area
Wednesday, September 9 Report this
meowrika
Tall Toad. That Stupid Club. Diplomatic Immunity. COCO. Elliott Smith (debatable). Helltrout.
I could go on, but only a nickel?
Wednesday, September 9 Report this
Hardlyable
Holly Gwinn Graham.
Give my nickel to charity.
Wednesday, September 9 Report this
Virge13
Briarfinch….they’re fairly new.
Thursday, September 10 Report this
KinesthesiaAmnesia
You missed Cindy Wonderful! She did everything the boys did, except backwards (maybe not literally) and in roller skates (literally).
Monday, September 14 Report this
KinesthesiaAmnesia
Also missed Le Tigre! Which I've always thought of as an Oly band made by Oly grrls, even though everyone else argues it's a NYC band.
Monday, September 14 Report this
warrenh50
I remember Jude Bowerman playing around here a lot!
Monday, September 21 Report this