My fixation on them notwithstanding, exhaustion and despair were by no means the norm at Microsoft. It was only at the end of their careers that employees there would give in to them, overwhelmed at last not so much by Gates’s demands as by their ceaselessness. The more you strived at Microsoft, and the greater your success, the more Gates demanded of you.
This had two effects that I found strange. One was that employees were energized rather than demoralized by the company’s voraciousness. They got high from it, coming to work under the most stressful of conditions visibly alive with a fierce joy, and leaving late at night feeling, at worst, blissfully tired. The other was that I was just as energized as they were. You could feel electric life in the air. Something in the atmosphere of that place took away my need for sleep, rest, television, and purposelessness. I turned into an aging juggernaut, a knowledge worker without portfolio. For more than a year, I would rise at 4:00 a.m. every weekday and catch a 4:45 bus that got me to the ferry terminal in time for the 5:35 sailing, the first one of the day. At 6:10, the ferry would land in Seattle and I would join the parade of longshoremen, Boeing workers, attorneys and stockbrokers walking off the boat. I would walk six blocks to the corner of Fourth and Union, and board an express bus full of food-service workers, hotel maids and software engineers that would deposit me on the Microsoft campus a few minutes before 7:00. There I would transcribe tapes, read e-mail and watch the team members I was following arrive one by one, all of them well before 9:00. Then I would begin a day of attending meetings, doing interviews, and typing transcriptions, notes, impressions and e-mail. I would leave at 5:30, make my way by bus, ferry and bus back home, arriving at 7:15. I spent all my commuting time in both directions reading company documents just like all the attorneys and technologists around me—real adults with real jobs, deadlines, obligations and ambitions.
Life outside of Microsoft was barely noticeable, so wrapped up was I in the struggles and lives of the people I was stalking and in the problems posed by Sendak’s development. Seattle, the city I would pass through from my home in the Sound to my work on the other side of the lake, was a barely noticeable blur. My family faded into the background. I took on the preoccupation—and the preoccupied air—of the people around me at Microsoft. It was as if I had been sucked into a parallel universe. I was aware that there was another, more real universe around me, one that evoked fond and distracting memories, but I could not bring myself to turn my attention to it for as long as I was v-fredm@microsoft.com, a card-carrying citizen of the Microsoft Empire.
Most of my days were spent in the office I shared with Kevin Gammill, a 25-year-old programmer who had been working at Microsoft first as a contractor, then as a fulltime employee, for seven years. Gammill had grown up in Gig Harbor, a small town southwest of Seattle, worked as a counterman at Kentucky Fried Chicken, delivered pizza and worked as night manager for a Gig Harbor Pietro’s Pizza outlet, worked one summer for United Parcel Service, been a student assistant in the University of Washington computer lab, and signed on at age 18 as a software developer for Microsoft. He worked as much as 120 hours per week while carrying a full academic load, majoring in computer science. He was shifted from contractor to employee when he was 21, during an IRS crackdown on Microsoft’s use of temporary workers. He married another Microsoft employee, Nicole Mitskog, that year, and the two bought a home in Kirkland, ten minutes by car from work. Within a year, their daughter, Cassidy, was born, and they settled into life as an upwardly mobile Microsoft couple.
Mitskog had grown up in North Dakota, then gone to the University of Texas at Austin and, like Gammill, started working for Microsoft while still in college. She had been at Microsoft longer than Gammill and now was one of the company’s “technical evangelists”—people who go out to hardware and software companies and attempt to persuade them to develop products taking advantage of coming new Microsoft operating-system features, like those supporting display and manipulation of multimedia elements. Both she and her husband were reputed to be among Microsoft’s brightest employees, and both had earned substantial bonuses, raises and stock grants every year they had worked at the company.
In many ways, Gammill was the consummate 1990s Organization Man. He was on an established career track at Microsoft, earning generous raises and bonuses every six months and moving up the salary ladder as quickly as company custom allowed. He and his wife had a large investment portfolio that they managed carefully, and had opened a coffee house, called Seattle Bean, in New York City. They were stolid, politically conservative, extremely wealthy 20-somethings with an unwavering devotion to their employer and lives that were extremely conventional and staid by any standards I could imagine. To be 25 years old with a house in the suburbs and more than a $1 million in a diversified asset portfolio was, from my perspective, to be tragically, prematurely adult.[75]
For all of their seriousness and level of achievement, though, Gammill and Mitskog were still like kids. Adult behavior looked funny on them. Gammill wore a T-shirt, shorts, and boat shoes without socks nearly every day to work. I was at their house for dinner one night when I came upon Mitskog standing helplessly in the kitchen, carefully reading cookbook instructions on how to boil asparagus.[76] She read the beginning of the instructions, turned to the stove, carefully turned on the burner under the pan of water she had placed there, and turned back to the book. She looked as if she had never before set foot in a grown-up’s kitchen.
Gammill, too, came across as a brash and irreverent kid rather than a prematurely serious adult. His favorite quote about Seattle came from a Beavis and Butt-head episode: “Seattle, yeah…that’s that country where everybody’s cool.” His hardest habit to break after getting married was sleeping with the radio turned up loud all night long. “Nikki didn’t care much for that,” he told me. Once a month or more, he would walk from his home down to a nearby video arcade, called Quarters, and play games for hours at a time. His favorite game was Total Carnage.[77] His favorite word was “sucks.” He drank Redhook beer with Rabelaisian fervor. He was an avid sports fan and even more avid fan of rock music. He faithfully attended as many shows as he could, whether they were held in outdoor arenas on the other side of the state or in downtown Seattle bars and clubs. The schedule he kept on his computer at Microsoft might have recorded, on any given day, a business matter, two or three meetings, and a rock show: “9:00 Mail stock to broker! 10:30 New palette meeting. 2:00 Technology update. 5:00 BOC and Bathtub Jin,” this last appointment being in a downtown Seattle tavern.
The most paradoxical thing about Gammill was the way he combined zest for upward mobility with tremendous devotion to hopelessness. While his career and wealth were soaring into the stratosphere, his mind and heart were fixated on death, depression, futility, the struggle to endure being human, the horrors of American family life, the inevitably bad ending all relationships have, and the essential ridiculousness of human expression and achievement. I read him a quote from Samuel Beckett one day—“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”—and his eyes lit up the way my oldest daughter’s had the first time she tasted chocolate. He became enthralled to the point of demanding readings almost daily. I would open one Beckett book or another and select a quote at random. “And backsliding has always depressed me,” I read to him one day, “but life seems made up of backsliding, and death itself must be a kind of backsliding, I wouldn’t be surprised.” “I wouldn’t either!” he exclaimed, delighted. “It is lying down,” I read another time, “in the warmth, in the gloom, that I best pierce the outer turmoil’s veil, discern my quarry, sense what course to follow, find peace in another’s ludicrous distress.” “That’s what you’re doing here,” he said, laughing. “Every word I write is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,” I intoned. “OK…that’s what you’re doing here.”
This inner darkness struck me as more or less typical of Northwesterners (certainly more typical than Gammill’s drive to succeed), but Gammill’s capacity for appreciating great artistic expression of it was unusual—particularly in someone whose reading tastes ran mostly to thrillers. (“ Tom Clancy,” he told me once, “is the only author who I’ve read all of his books.”) His sensibilities led him to spend his college/Microsoft years alternately sitting at his computer and taking in rock acts from local bands whose work during that time was rising to the level of literature, including Biblical literature. For years in the late 80s and early 90s, scarcely a weekend went by without a trip downtown to hear shows by Nirvana, Alice in Chains,[78] Mother Love Bone, Tad, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, and countless other local acts, many of whom would suddenly be launched into international fame and fortune after the overnight success in 1991 of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. Taking part in what came to be known against its will as the grunge scene before any of these bands had hit it big was among Gammill’s most treasured memories now. He listened to grunge records all day long in his office, on an entertainment system he had cobbled together with some cables, a computer terminal that served as his “$3,000 CD player,” and two gigantic speakers he had propped up in opposite corners of the room.
Gammill was highly amused by my backwardness in virtually all areas of modern life. When he saw how inept I was at using a computer, he derisively dubbed me a “Mac user”—his favorite insult. He disdained my old-fashioned reverence for the English language, which he deemed inconsistent because “it was all evolved over the years and all fucked up.” Far better was the language of mathematics and computer programming—straightforward, consistent, reliable. When I told him I didn’t own a CD player but instead still listened to music on a stereo turntable playing vinyl records, he snorted in disbelief, then decided to subject me constantly to the digitally stored music he had grown up with. “I just can’t believe you don’t own a CD player,” he said the first time he slipped a disc into his machine and hit the play button. It was the Alice in Chains Facelift album.
The room instantly was filled with a rich, mournful, energetic sound that I recognized immediately without ever having heard it before. It was the translation into music of the dimness-driven mood every Northwesterner contends with, every day—rage subsumed by exhausting gloom. (Years later, a young friend of mine, Patrick Duhon, who settled here in the mid-1990s after growing up in Cleveland, would say in amazement, “I never got Alice in Chains until I moved here.”) All the dubious dark charm of a heavy-lidded Northwest day, tempting you to luxuriate in despair, is encapsulated in Facelift, particularly in the opening thundering thumping instrumental lead-in to lead singer Layne Staley’s lamentations in “ Man in the Box.”
I spent the rest of the day (and, for that matter, the better part of the next two years) listening raptly to record after record— Nirvana’s Bleach and Nevermind, Soundgarden’s Superunknown and Badmotorfinger, Alice in Chains’ Facelift and Dirt, Screaming Trees’ Sweet Oblivion, and earlier records by Green River, Mother Love Bone/Pearl Jam…. I couldn’t believe that I had spent years condescendingly ignoring those kids upstairs from the Weekly while they were cranking out what sounded now like the best rock I’d ever heard.
This was in 1993, when grunge—a label indelibly tattooed on the Seattle music community by British rock critic Everett True in 1989—was at the apex of its fame outside of Seattle. The first known use of the term in connection with Seattle rock, according to Invisible Seattleite Clark Humphrey in his incomparable Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, was in a letter to the alternative rock ‘zine Desperate Times in 1982. The letter was written by Mark Arm, later of Mudhoney, generally regarded as the seminal Seattle grunge band, and it read in part: “I hate Mr. Epp and the Calculations! Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!” Arm was a member of the band at the time.
By 1992, grunge’s Seattle devotees had already declared it dead, killed by international acclaim. The shocking success of Nirvana’s Nevermind album was seen by everyone in the Seattle music community—particularly Nirvana lead singer/songwriter Kurt Cobain[79]—as a disaster. By the spring of ‘92, when Seattle bands were selling out arenas all over the world, appearing regularly on MTV, Saturday Night Live, and the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, longtime local fans of the music were walking around Seattle in “grunge is dead” T-shirts. A famous photograph of the time shows a girl at a Seattle rock show, staring coldly at the camera, wearing a tattered white T-shirt on which she has crudely hand-lettered the slogan, “You trendy grunge people SUCK.”
The best-known and most compelling figure of the grunge era was Cobain, who had come north to Seattle from Olympia with his band in 1988—by which time the Seattle scene was already well established. By 1993, he had withdrawn into physical and psychological seclusion, either hidden in a home he bought with his wife, singer Courtney Love, or lost in the relatively comforting fog of heroin addiction, which was complicating the band’s touring and recording efforts.
Having grown up in a hardscrabble town, Aberdeen, in southwestern Washington, Cobain lived in virtually unrelieved misery for most of his life. His parents divorced when he was nine, and he spent his teenage years drifting among friends’ homes, overstaying his welcome with family after family. He had seen the brother of a friend commit suicide by hanging himself outside Aberdeen’s elementary school, had an uncle who drank himself to death and a great-uncle who shot himself to death. He talked frequently of his own impending suicide from the time he was 14 years old, telling various friends that he had “suicide genes.” He was afflicted with chronic, often crippling stomach pain that reminded me of that stomach pain suffered by Hmong refugees, which eventually was diagnosed as a symptom of depression in them. Cobain spoke quite freely of his misery from the time he was first being interviewed by the press. In a 1989 interview with the University of Washington’s student paper, the Daily, he described Nirvana’s music as having “a gloomy, vengeful element based on hatred.” He was 21 years old. At about the same time, he wrote in his journal, “I mean to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork.”
Eventually, I would divine that the sound later to be called grunge began taking form in the late 1970s—the heyday of Red Dress, whose echoes could be heard clearly in the sound and the lyrics of these bands that hit it big years later. By 1979, there was enough of a Seattle music population to support the launching of The Rocket, a rock tabloid edited by an Invisible Seattleite named Charles Cross.[80] In the early 1980s more hardcore alternative publications like Desperate Times and Punk Lust were cropping up, their exuberantly inflammatory copy testament both to the scope of the emerging alternative-music community and the level of anger among its adepts. While older-generation Seattle (including its baby boomers, who now were entering middle age) was settling happily into traditional Northwest complacency, very much in tune with the in-thrall-to- Ronald- Reagan rest of the country, its children were forming bands with names like Danger Bunny, Popdefect, the Fartz, Cat Butt, and the Refuzors, and gathering after dark in tattered old downtown buildings to scream out their rage.
Like matter drawn toward a center to form a spectacular new galaxy, musicians from the suburbs and small towns throughout the Northwest began coalescing around Seattle clubs, principally the Gorilla Gardens, Metropolis, the Fabulous Rainbow Tavern, Squid Row, Ditto, and the Central Tavern. Their numbers were augmented by kids from around the country drifting Seattleward as the word spread that something “cool” was going on there. By the late ‘80s, hundreds of musicians were playing Seattle venues—a second generation, including the OK Hotel, Crocodile, RKNDY, and the Off Ramp, had sprung up—drawing kids in ever-greater numbers to music that offered a bracing alternative to the horrors of mainstream radio.
In the 1980s, the only thing in America worse than its politics was its radio. Having emerged from the horrifying disco years, commercial radio settled on bloat rather than redemption, playing nothing but oldies, heavy metal and bubble-gum reprise acts like New Kids on the Block. The present time excepted,[81] it is hard to remember or even imagine a less creative and vibrant period in the history of American popular music. The 80s are memorable now mostly for a dreary and deafening succession of male rock groups more noted for big hair, spandex and dick jokes than musicianship or song-writing. Kids interested in rock as an art form had nowhere in the mainstream to turn.
While Top-40 radio was playing Poison, Whitesnake[82] and Bon Jovi for legions of minds at rest, restless youngsters all over the country were turning to small, punk-descended “alternative” rock labels like SST in Los Angeles, Twin/Tone in Minneapolis, and—as of 1987— Sub Pop in Seattle. These labels had grown out of an underground movement called “ DIY” (“Do It Yourself”) rock, through which musicians turned off by the mainstream music industry made their own cassette tapes and circulated their work among likeminded audiences. Two DIY bands from elsewhere in the country who eventually were accorded mainstream stardom earlier in the 1980s were the B-52s, from Athens, Georgia, and R.E.M., from Austin, Texas, both of whom started out peddling homemade cassette tapes and self-financed seven-inch singles.
Demand for DIY recordings was considerable—testament to the degree to which American kids were turned off by the culture that claimed to have nurtured them. Eventually, I would track down my favorite of the grunge bands, Screaming Trees, and see from its experience how considerable that demand was, and what a powerful alternative it offered aspiring serious musicians in the 1980s.
The four original Trees (the band would change drummers in 1991) grew up in Ellensburg, 90 minutes east of Seattle, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, playing and listening voraciously to music from early grade-school on. Their high-school years consisted largely of “always, like, driving somewhere to buy records all the time,” in bass guitarist/songwriter Van Conner’s words, and fooling around with the idea of forming a band. When the youngest members—Conner and lead singer/songwriter Mark Lanegan—were high-school juniors, they contacted a local record producer, Steve Fisk, who had founded a studio, named Velvetone, after graduating from college in Ellensburg. After Fisk heard the Screaming Trees play once, he asked if he could make a recording of their music.
This proposition was greeted with some surprise by the band. “We never realized we could just put something out ourselves,” Conner told me later. “But then we started finding out about cassettes, how people would just put them out and distribute them themselves, and we had a couple hundred bucks, so we went in and recorded five or six songs, called it ‘ Other Worlds,’ and put it out.” After making that cassette, the band borrowed money from friends and parents and made a vinyl record entitled Clairvoyance. It promptly sold 2,500 copies, which struck both Fisk—who originally pressed only 1,000 discs—and the band members as astounding. Fisk put together a west coast “tour” in which the band members traveled by van to a succession of clubs, dives, and college-kid apartments along the west coast, culminating in a series of performances in Los Angeles, where they were heard by an SST Records executive who offered them a recording contract.
Similar stories were popping up everywhere around Seattle, where DIY had an important outlet in the form of the University of Washington’s student radio station, KCMU. The station was both a showcase for Seattle music and a nexus for many of grunge’s early leading lights. Mark Arm; Kim Thayil, later of Soundgarden; Charles Peterson, whose photographs now stand as the definitive record of grunge’s pre-discovery heyday in Seattle; Jack Endino, a legendary Seattle record producer; and Bruce Pavitt and