How can I explain how shocking it was to come back to Seattle again? I had been to the frontier at Microsoft, the edge of the Universe, my spaceship the frantic manic madcap nonstop whirling center of the Silicon Rush. I’d been surrounded by unfolding tales of wealth and high drama and insanity. I’d seen Microsoft discoveries under way that were going to change the world! Work and life and art would never be the same again because of what I’d witnessed out on the cutting edge. By the time I came back to earthbound Seattle in 1994, struggling to ratchet back to its normal sleepy pace, the world’s media had glommed onto the Microsoft story and were madly speculating about the miracles to be wrought by the coming release of Windows 95—the operating system that would take us all where no man had gone before. And I’d been there! I’d felt the excitement, drunk in the glamour! I’d lived in Bill Gates’ mining camp—the land of lore and lucre! All you had to do was dip your fingers into the stream of bits there and you’d come up with a fistful of gold…. Hell, a man could get rich at Microsoft, be set for life, after working for only a year!

Settling in again at the Weekly, all I could think about was what it would have been like for Doc Maynard to go back to Ohio after taking in the splendor and potential of the Pacific Northwest. Everything at the Weekly looked faded, tired, outdated, out of touch. The alphanumeric interface on my computer made me feel like I was wearing green eyeshades and sleeve garters, working for a bank that forced its employees to use adding machines while all the gleaming new banks in town had installed calculators. We didn’t even have e-mail^[83]! And the paper was still mulling over Seattle’s identity, values, traditions, downtown conditions, and the same old lackluster prospects for the Seahawks and Mariners. I’d been gone for two years, watching a revolution unfold, and came back home to find not only that nothing had changed but that everyone around me was oblivious to the world-changing events exploding just outside the door. I would sit, stunned, in my cubicle, feeling like the only person in all of Rome who sees the Visigoths massing on the hills outside the city.

I found myself fixating against my will on the notion that the massive flow of money into the software industry was somehow legitimizing—a blessing conferred on it and its participants because of the revolution’s inherent goodness. Money, which I had always affected to disdain, now looked like a measure of moral worth, and my lifelong indifference to it looked to me like the emptiest of pretensions—the principled rejection of the unattainable.

Now when I thought of software’s nouveau riche, I didn’t picture programmers and other exotic fauna so much as I pictured people like me—English majors—who had gravitated to the right place at the right time while I was indulging in my poorer-than-thou hauteur, my Seattleite’s affected purity of heart. I thought again of Jan Allister, whose 1600 Microsoft shares, by my increasingly frenzied calculations, must have ballooned in worth to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million—assuming, as I tended to assume in mid-fantasy, that she hadn’t blown it all on a new house or something back when the windfall was small enough to spend.

I was brooding about all this when it was announced that Adobe Systems was buying Aldus in a transaction that would convert all Aldus shares of stock into Adobe shares and make early Aldus shareholders—particularly, to my ever-more-envious mind, Ann Senechal—rich in the process. Press accounts of the merger were filled with expansive visions of a digital future. Phrases like “$2 billion desktop publishing industry” and “the breadth of new market opportunities offered by the digital revolution” littered the local papers when the deal was announced in mid-1994, as did visions of a near future when everyone would be wired up to a digital grid. “A driving force behind the deal,” reported the Seattle Times, “is expected to result in a new software product, called an ‘authoring tool’ in industry lingo, that will help people create an electronic document out of video, sound and data received over fiber-optic cables expected to be fed into many homes and offices in the not-too-distant future.”

I sat in my grimy cubicle the afternoon of the announcement and wondered how far the software wealth, no longer confined to Microsoft, was destined to spread.

Would the last person clinging to Seattle’s past please get with the program?

When I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, mourning the financial opportunities I’d missed, the security I could have bought for my family with very little effort, and regarding the infusion of software wealth into Seattle as something benevolent, I was lamenting the money-driven material progress and moral regress I saw threatening the city at every turn. It was as if my mind saw marvelous progress and prosperity on the horizon while my heart saw only software-wealth-driven danger. Was Seattle being redeemed or destroyed? For every Jan Allister, Ann Senechal and Kevin Gammill I saw out there, I decided there were thousands of less admirable good-fortune cases.

There was, for example, Paul Allen, who seemed intent on razing and rebuilding the city as a monument to himself. While he came across largely as a harmless, shy, awkward but well-intentioned kid who ended up with $13 billion in the bank, he also appeared to have a profound Edifice Complex. Allen had retired from Microsoft in 1983 (although he remained a board member), when he was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, and settled into a life far less frantic than Gates’s. He started a modest new venture, Asymetrix, to make software authoring tools; he founded another company, Vulcan Ventures, in 1986, to invest in new businesses; and in 1987 he bought the Portland Trailblazers. In 1992, he established Interval Research in Palo Alto with the mandate that it do the kind of pure research-and-development that Xerox PARC had done, and that had largely faded away as American corporations both in and out of the personal-computer industry focused increasingly on research promising short-term returns. Only in a pure research environment, Allen reasoned, free of the pressure to placate shareholders, could the next Alto be discovered.

All of this was relatively harmless—some of it even admirable. But Allen also started buying up land all over the Pacific Northwest, particularly in Seattle, and spinning out grotesquely grand visions for it. Two of his most noticeable and controversial initiatives were the Jimi Hendrix Museum, a high-tech rock-and-roll entertainment venue he wanted to build on the hallowed Seattle Center grounds, and the Seattle Commons, a planned transformation of the south shore of Lake Union into a Utopian mixed-use neighborhood centered on a park. To that end, Allen “loaned” $20 million in 1992 to the group seeking to build the Commons, with the understanding that if Seattle citizens did not vote to levy $50 million in property taxes to fund the vision, Allen would take 11.5 acres of south Lake Union land—bought by the Commons with his loan—in exchange for the money.

The debate over the Commons highlighted the shift in Seattle’s self-image and dreams for itself. Now, there was no longer any question at all that we lived in, and defined ourselves as, a technology town. Just as more and more employees and tradespeople had been flowing toward technology companies and out of resource-based and traditional manufacturing industries, so too now were more and more of the city’s politics and urban development flowing techward. City Hall under Mayor Norm Rice was solidly behind the Commons project, which amounted to a massive urban-renewal tax plan, seed-funded with tech-sector money, for turning one of the most symbolic sections of the city into a high-tech business park. Seattle Commons was promoted as the wave of the future, an inspired means of accommodating rapid population growth and making way for the “clean” industries of the post-industrial age—software, biotechnology, and other nonpolluting industries whose primary factory assets were the brains of their employees.

From 1992 into 1995 the debate raged, with battle lines being drawn not only between those in thrall to technology’s money and those who held to a more traditional and less greedy view of Seattle, but also along socioeconomic lines: Polls conducted by research firms found that enthusiasm for the Commons came largely from Seattleites with incomes higher than $60,000 per year. But Commons promoters tried to define the divide differently—as one between forward-thinking people with a clear vision of the future and backward people clinging to outmoded views, jobs and traditions.

Lost in the overarching philosophical debate was the reality that 95 businesses would be displaced by the Commons. I went over one day and walked through the south Lake Union neighborhood, noting the distinctive lack of glamour there. It was the Seattle Jonathan Raban—who I heard had returned here to settle down—had invoked so fondly in 1989. I walked past a scrap-iron yard, antique and second-hand furniture warehouses, a bike shop, used-car lots, an appliance store, a sewing-machine shop, a trophy shop, and various other small enterprises, all in rundown buildings, many with anti-Commons signs in their windows, and none destined to take over the world or the city or even the neighborhood. No one here was intent on defining the future. These were just little family operations trying to get by as I had with my typesetting business so long ago. Walking these streets now, newly back from my frenzied sojourn at Microsoft, I waded through the same emotional slough I’d traversed years before during that depressing walk around Lake Union. Why, I wondered, is this city constantly turning against itself?

Ultimately, the Weekly wrote extensively against the plan—an editorial position that Seattle Commons promoters, who tended toward righteousness, viewed as outright betrayal. Project director Joel Horn^[84] repeatedly called Brewster, me, and anyone else who questioned the Commons project and excoriated us for our shortsightedness. He always sounded baffled and hurt, it being a given in his mind that the Weekly, with its moneyed, baby-boom readership and love of “progressive” initiatives, would line up along with the rest of nouveau-genteel Seattle behind a project with such a clear vision and glamorous demographic. The Weekly all but owned the new-restaurant and high-culture franchises, after all, and nothing seemed to fit more into that Seattle dimension than the moderne, civilized Commons, with its Harvard Yard-esque name, its carefully planned gentility, and its embrace of the city’s tech-industry future.

But Seattle had always grudgingly allowed rather than enthusiastically embraced progress, permitting industrialists and other overly ambitious people to locate on the fringes here and use the region’s charms as a recruiting tool. When an industrialist’s visions of grandeur spilled over into the city itself, Seattle tended to react in horror, wanting the jobs and money that ambition brought without having to take on any of the airs that came with it. It was one thing to have professional aspirations—it was another to take on the look and feel of people who had them, and far worse to take on the look and feel of people who had achieved them.

When the Commons came up for vote in 1995, with the full support of City Hall, the downtown establishment, the Seattle Times, and Paul Schell—who always was connected in one way or another with grand Seattle development visions—it was narrowly voted down. Commons boosters reacted in stunned disbelief, turning around and putting it on the ballot again, this time spending more than $500,000 promoting it. The campaign backfired—news stories about the budget disparities between promoters and opponents, who were able to raise only $91,000 in opposition, highlighted the elitist nature of the Commons campaign, and many voters were outraged that their No votes were condescendingly ignored. In May 1996, the Commons went down to defeat again, and this time Allen accepted the results, taking control of the 11.5 acres of prime real estate he had secured with his $20 million, and settling down to wait for more ambition-friendly times.

A different battle between the same forces was taking place on the other side of downtown, where the Seattle Mariners ownership was once again threatening to sell the team to owners who would move it elsewhere unless the city built them a new stadium. By 1994, the vaunted 1992 salvation of the Mariners franchise by local high-tech millionaires and billionaires had turned into the same shakedown Seattle politicians and taxpayers had been enduring since 1977. The Mariners had persistently failed to field competitive major-league teams and just as persistently blamed city and county politicians for not investing enough taxpayer money in the franchise to enable it to compete for talent. The argument from Mariner owners had always been that they could not afford to field a competitive team at a financial loss, and that only heavily taxpayer-subsidized teams had a chance to compete for the World Series championship; the rejoinder from skeptical Seattleites held that baseball owners always recouped their “losses” and more when they resold their franchises. No major-league owner anywhere—including Seattle—had ever sold a franchise at a loss. Why, sensible Seattleites reasoned, should taxpayers subsidize a business owned by obscenely wealthy men when the subsidy only helps make them even more obscenely wealthy?

Whatever cachet the Nintendo-led owners had gained by being local was lost in the intense feelings of betrayal among Seattleites when they saw their local saviors behaving exactly as their out-of-town predecessors had. But then in July 1994, tiles from the interior of the Kingdome roof fell onto some seats before the start of a Mariners game, with the result that the rest of the season had to be played on the road. Roof repairs originally estimated at $4 million ended up costing $50 million, and the Mariners had a powerful argument for replacing the Kingdome: Not only are its revenue streams inadequate for us, the team argued, but they can’t even cover the repair and maintenance costs of the building.

There still remained the argument over who would pay for the new stadium. Mariner owners insisted both that it be “state of the art”—that is, that it be an outdoor stadium evocative of old-time baseball but packed with modern amenities, particularly luxury suites, high-priced box seats that would appeal to moneyed fans, and a retractable roof. In today’s entertainment market, the team argued, ballparks had to offer a “fan experience” that amounted to far more than the simple enjoyment of a baseball game. Team executives promised that such a stadium could be built for between $200 million and $250 million, the bulk of which could be raised through a modest tax increase.

Politicians in Washington and its cities and counties had long been loath to raise taxes for anything, however, because doing so was politically suicidal. I spent a lot of time in late 1994 and early 1995 in King County Councilman Ron Sims’s office, listening to him lament the insidious blackmail Seattle businesspeople were visiting on him. A Democrat, Sims knew that supporters of baseball subsidies, being largely conservative, Republican, tax-loathing businesspeople, would be nowhere in sight when he needed support for reelection. And he knew that the same people who were clamoring at his door insisting that he raise taxes to build a baseball stadium would be calling for his head in the next election because he had raised their taxes. He’d been through that drill before, when he ran for a United States Senate seat against Slade Gorton, an indefatigable supporter of baseball and a rabid anti-tax campaigner. The Gorton ad that had done Sims in had the tagline, “Ron Sims voted to raise your taxes 19 times.” Left unsaid was that 17 of those votes had been for tax packages already approved by voters.

There followed a quasi-comedic round of buckpassing as state and local politicians looked for ways to “save” Seattle baseball without having to take on the tax-hike taint. In its 1995 session, the state legislature declined the opportunity to pass a stadium-construction funding package, but bravely voted to authorize the King County Council to raise the county sales tax for that purpose. The county council, crying foul, decided instead to put the issue directly to the voters, asking them to vote in September 1995 on a one-tenth of one cent increase in the county sales tax to fund debt service on new stadium construction. In May 1995, the Mariners unveiled plans for the stadium they would build if given the money. Now pegged at $278 million, the ballpark was to combine nostalgia with cutting-edge technology, including a retractable roof that would bring open-air baseball to Seattle while ensuring that no Mariners game would ever be rained out.

The campaign proved to be a referendum less on the tax itself than on Seattle’s self-image. The Kingdome’s lack of pretension had always been seen by many citizens as its primary virtue—symbolic proof that Seattleites were not like the dimwitted citizens of Cleveland, Baltimore, Anaheim, and other typical American cities with the kind of misguided priorities that lead to taxpayer money being lavished on luxury boxes and caterers for wealthy people while more pressing needs like schools, highways and medical care for the poor go unfunded. The Kingdome proved that Seattleites choose to spend their money on more important, less status-symbolic things than pleasure palaces, that Northwest citizens reluctantly allow pro sports to trade in their hallowed land rather than pay them astronomically for the privilege, and that in any event Northwesterners prefer not to call attention to Seattle’s arrival among the major cities of the nation. The less attention Seattle calls to itself, the better. Lesser and Invisible Seattleites in particular saw the stadium vote as a vote on whether Seattle would remain Seattle or would turn into just another Houston,^[85] Tampa Bay or Anaheim. To these citizens, nothing could be a more alarming signal of the decline of Seattle than the erection of one of these monstrosities.

The pro-stadium forces, realizing that an opportunity of this magnitude would never come again, played up the fear that Seattle would lose its baseball team forever this time if voters didn’t approve a new stadium, and as the election neared, polls showed that the large lead held by anti-stadium-tax forces was shrinking fast. But when the September election day came round at last, and the Mariners were in their customary place in the standings, a full 13 games behind the division-leading Anaheim Angels, the measure went down in defeat by a microprocessor-thin 1,082-vote margin.

It felt at first like the forces of pretension had finally been vanquished—that Seattle could jettison its major-league franchise and settle back into the disgruntled tranquility that sustained it through all its recorded and unrecorded history. Nothing would have been more true to the Seattle of Doc Maynard and Ivar Haglund than to declare the citizenry’s happy condition off limits to baseball and all its shams. But when team owners said they would put the franchise up for sale on October 30 unless plans for a stadium subsidy had been approved by someone, somewhere, Washington Governor Mike Lowry called the state legislature into special session to come up with a funding package. Lowry’s idea was to cobble together a combination of state and county funding that would call on the legislature to approve the state’s portion of the funding and the King County Council to approve county-only taxes that would cover its “responsibility.” The central element of the strategy was to invoke the Mariners’ deadline as an excuse to bypass the voters; the deadline created a “crisis” that called for bold, determined action by the region’s political leadership.

In a stunning—and, ultimately, critical—development, the Mariners suddenly woke up and started winning game after game after game in September. From 13 games behind American League West division leader Anaheim at the end of August, they roared through September virtually undefeated while the obliging Angels went into a free-fall. The two teams finishing the season tied for first place in the American League West, and Seattle won the one-game playoff between the two, held the day after the last day of the season. It was one of the biggest and least likely comebacks in major-league baseball history. The Mariners would go on that year to beat the New York Yankees in a thrilling five-game division championship series before losing the American League pennant to the Cleveland Indians, who would go on to lose the World Series to the National League’s Atlanta Braves.

What was most galling about the sudden Mariners winning streak was that theirs was a battle not for a championship but for a fourth-place finish in the 14-team American League. Major League Baseball, desperate to revive interest in a sport suffering rapidly declining popularity, had divided its two-division National and American Leagues into three-division leagues in 1994. The idea was to involve more teams in a race for a post-season playoff spot, thus fostering the illusion in more cities for more weeks that their teams had a chance at a World Series championship. For Seattle, the month-long sprint to catch Anaheim was a quest to finish first in a division race involving only four mediocre teams who would have finished out of the running in a traditional American League. Had the stadium vote been held two years earlier, the Mariners would have been mathematically eliminated from division title contention by September 1, and their September winning streak would have been essentially meaningless.

But Major League Baseball and Mariner ownership were playing Seattle for rubes, and Seattle happily played along. As win after win mounted up for the Mariners, and as they crept ever-closer to the suddenly collapsing Angels and what local papers were now calling a “pennant” (a word formerly reserved for championship of the entire American or National League), local passion for the team was aroused for the first time in franchise history. Now, every home game was a sellout, and the Mariners began advertising their plan for playoff ticket sales (given the team’s sad-sack history, this was like hearing they were selling the Holy Grail). The politically dead tax package was suddenly inevitable. I was visiting with Sims again near the end of the Mariners’ amazing run, and he was glumly running through the scenarios that he knew would lead to the county council vote in favor of the new taxes. He was about to witness the 20-year mortgaging of King County in a fervid playoff atmosphere that made reasoned debate impossible. “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation,” he said at one point, more dispirited than I’d ever seen him, “if the Mariners weren’t winning like this.”

Two weeks later, on October 14, the legislature approved a joint state/county fee and tax package to raise money for what now was to be a $320 million stadium. On October 23, the county council approved the measure, passing new taxes on restaurant and tavern meals and auto rentals. Although councilmembers voting in favor of the measure insisted that this was a “different funding package” than that rejected by their constituents, the vote was seen by many—myself included—as an act that should have been impossible in the world’s leading democracy: the overturning by elected officials of a popular vote.

While adult Seattle was assiduously pursuing big-league status and attention, its children were collapsing under the weight of national attention. Grunge musicians, having been thrown without warning onto the world’s center stage, almost immediately fled to the wings, or to the deeper, more reliable darkness beyond.

By far the most dramatic collapse was that of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, who was grunge’s most celebrated and most tormented figure. Almost from the day Nevermind made him famous, Cobain withdrew into heroin addiction, where he remained in what one of his doctors told him was a slow suicidal spiral until finally he committed suicide with a shotgun in April 1994. Cobain had nearly died of a heroin overdose a year before, attempted suicide with drugs and alcohol earlier in ‘94 while on tour in Italy, and barricaded himself, threatening suicide, in a room with several guns during another 1994 incident in which the police were called to his home and confiscated his firearms. Each time, his wife intervened to save his life.

This last time he made sure no one could intervene. Just before he was to leave for Los Angeles to enter a drug rehabilitation facility, Cobain took his friend Dylan Carlson to a sporting goods store and had him buy a shotgun and some shells for him. Cobain took the gun and stashed it in a compartment behind one of his bedroom walls. He flew to Los Angeles and signed into Exodus Recovery Center, and three days later left undetected and flew back to Seattle. For five days, while Love^[86] sent friends and private detectives all over Seattle trying to find him, Cobain spent his last days on earth determinedly alone, preparing his successful suicide. Sometime during the night of April 7, he climbed into the upstairs of a caretaker’s cottage on his property, injected himself with black tar heroin, and shot himself in the head with the shotgun Carlson had purchased.

While it seemed that the whole city stopped dead in its tracks as the news spread on April 8, it also is true that Cobain’s travails were so well known that no one in Seattle was surprised by his death. For the previous year, at least, Nirvana observers had been on a death-watch. Almost from the time the band first became famous, Cobain’s loved ones, friends and fans had been watching him decline and expected him to die.

It would be another seven years, with the publication of Charles R. Cross’s Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, before the full story of Cobain’s suicide and genetic predisposition to it became known. In the days following his death, the most moving excerpt released from Cobain’s suicide letter cited the dead and empty feeling that overcame him when he walked onstage to the frenzied adulation of thousands. “For example,” he wrote, heroin-addled, in his suicide letter, “when we’re backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowd begins it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd. Which is something I totally admire and envy…. Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch in time clock before I walk out on stage.” It struck me at the time as a classic Northwest reaction: an overwhelming distaste for fame, celebrity, attention. Having arrived at what he had taken for his Nirvana, Cobain was no better off than he had ever been, and now had nowhere else to go. He was still loathsome, still alone, still irredeemably miserable.

It also is hard not to consider Cobain’s suicide as artistic composition, particularly when you recall the refrain from his “In Bloom,” first performed in 1990, that describes a devoted, gun-obsessed fan who sings along when listening to Nirvana songs and “knows not what it means.” The refrain describes Dylan Carlson, whom Cobain befriended in 1986. An avid gun enthusiast, Carlson taught Cobain how to load and shoot firearms. Four years after “In Bloom,” during the days when Cobain’s suicidal intentions were on the minds of everyone who knew him, Carlson would purchase Cobain’s suicide weapon at the singer’s request, and later say to Cross, “If Kurt was suicidal, he sure hid it from me.”

Of all the Seattle bands to hit it big during the heyday of grunge, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were by far the most popular, and Pearl Jam wasted little time in imploding—albeit less spectacularly than Nirvana—in the face of its outsized success. Lead singer Eddie Vedder was given more and more to growling sarcastically in public about his band’s celebrity, and growing more surly and more drunk at performances, until finally the band picked a hopeless fight with TicketMaster^[87] and dropped out of sight almost entirely after deciding not to tour at all in 1994. One day I called the band’s manager, Kelly Curtis, to ask what had happened, and caught him in the mood for conversation. “You called me at a good time,” he said. “I was just sitting here feeling bummed about it.”

I walked over to the office of Curtis Management, which was located in a picturesquely seedy second-floor walkup above the Puppy Club at Fifth and Denny, near a fountain built around a bust of Chief Seattle. The headquarters looked like a private detective’s office in an old B movie. Its floors were slanted, its doors crooked, its walls grimy. It was furnished mostly with second-hand stuff—old desks, overstuffed chairs, a tattered couch—and was littered with magazines, piles of paper, discarded food containers and a crowd of young hangers-on with assorted piercings, tattoos, and a tremendous amount of free time.

Curtis was sitting glumly alone in his office, smoking cigarette after cigarette, at a desk facing a wall on which was hung a guitar that Cobain had smashed at the end of a Nirvana show. He looked like he was supposed to look about 30 but had been aged prematurely by chain-smoking and the stresses of his job.

Before I could sit down, he launched into his tale.

During its salad days, Pearl Jam’s members resolved to keep their concert ticket prices low no matter how popular they became. Now the most popular band in the world, they were in a position where they could more or less name their price. And rock-music prices were high: The Eagles, for example, sold out two performances in the Tacoma Dome, the Seattle area’s most popular large concert venue, with ticket prices of $45, $60, and $85 that year. But Pearl Jam wanted its shows to be affordable to kids, and accordingly decided to set an $18 maximum ticket price. They first ran afoul of TicketMaster when they decided to stage some free Seattle-area