Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind

Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind visuallydocuments the explosion of Grunge, the Seattle Sound, within the context ofthe underground punk subculture that was developing throughout the u.S.in the late 1970s and 1980s. The book serves as a companion and contextualbackdrop to the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition, which opensat Seattle’s Experience Music Project in 2011. This decade-and-a-half musicaljourney will be represented entirely through the lens of EMP’s oral history andpermanent object collection, an invaluable and rich cultural archive of over800 interviews and 140,000 objects — instruments, costumes, posters, recordsand other ephemera dedicated to the pursuit of rock ’n’ roll.Taking Punk to the Masses focuses on 100 key objects from EMP’s permanent collection that illustrate the evolutionof punk rock from underground subculture to the mainstream embrace (and subsequent underground rejection)of Grunge. These objects are put into context by the stories of those who lived it, culling from EMP’s vast archive oforal histories with such Northwest icons as Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, cartoonist Peter Bagge, design legend Art Chantry,Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson, Sub Pop founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, the Screaming Trees’ MarkLanegan, Nirvana’s krist Novoselic, photographer Charles Petersen, Soundgarden’s kim Thayil, and dozens of others.From the Northwest’s earliest punk bands like The Wipers, to proto-grunge bands of the 1980s like Green River,Melvins and Malfunkshun, through the heady 1990s when bands such as Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice inChains and Mudhoney rose to the national stage and popularized alternative music, Taking Punk to the Masses is the firstdefinitive history of one of America’s most vibrant music scenes, as told by the participants who helped make it so, andthrough the artifacts that survive.Over the past 15 years, Experience Music Project has amassed over 800 filmed oral history interviews with musicians,producers, club owners, fans, and others associated with every genre of music. These interviews, along with themuseum’s massive artifact collection, form the basis for every exhibition. The exhibition Nirvana: Taking Punk to theMasses includes footage from over 100 interviews. A selection of those interviews are included in a DVD, exclusive tothe Taking Punk to the Masses book.