I discovered March Plaidness: The Tournament of Grunge & Its Adjacents in January of 2021 and promptly downloaded the Google Sheet intent on the simple joy of scribbling song selections above long black lines. I did not expect I’d end up punching snow covered frozen soil after listening to tunes that were supposed to be the music of my youth. I suppose that was dumb, since music is the boat upon which we traverse the river of time, but what can I say, sometimes water returns to carry a person home. The bracket songs were all released between 1988 and 1998, the decade during which I passed from eight to eighteen years of age. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, so the bracket’s music should have backgrounded that decade of my existence. It didn’t though because I chose not to listen to it, always switching the radio in the car from the popular songs to the oldies station. I did not want to hear anger spat into microphones, particularly by men, and I certainly didn’t need anyone telling me about isolation, alienation, or the aching desire for freedom. I was already living those things.
The year I turned eight Dead Moon, who are not in the bracket, released their first record. The band was composed of Fred Cole on guitar and vocals, Toody Cole on bass and vocals, and Andrew Loomis on drums. Toody is the sole member of the band still living. She was married to Fred, a frequent starter of bands, and when he complained about unreliable bass players and suggested she become one, she did. Dead Moon is described as a punk band, but I’d call it foundational grunge. Fred and Toody were essentially grunge’s parents, as evidenced by these two interviews. Eddie Vedder has frequently covered “It’s O.K.” in concert, a song off Dead Moon’s eighth album released in 1994, Crack in the System, and Weeden Cole, one of Fred and Toody’s children, reports Kurt Cobain was working on a cover of “Dagger Moon” before his death, a song originally on their third album released in 1990, Defiance.

I did not know of Dead Moon as an eight-year-old. Nor did I know of them as an eighteen-year-old. I didn’t learn about them until I was thirty-six, when I was working on what I’d hoped would be the last draft of my debut novel. It was about a murder, taken from my experience in law school arguing in favor of parole for a man who had been incarcerated for over three decades. Everyone else in the Prison Law Clinic I signed up for received assignments related to civil rights issues. I received a parole hearing for a man convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman. At the time, if you’d asked me whether a murder had ever impacted my own life, I would have said no and thought I was answering honestly.
I began writing the novel when my husband and I moved to New York City from San Francisco. Before we left the West Coast, I traveled back to Oregon with a mission to make a video recording of the route I traversed at seventeen, when I embarked on a solo run that turned into both a running and biking journey, with a two-person female back-up crew. I started the run in Oxbow, dipping my hand into the Snake River at Copperfield Campground in the Hells Canyon Area, the deepest river gorge in all of North America, and ended at the Pacific Ocean. Along the way I summitted the Blue Mountains in the Malheur National Forest (“Malheur” taken from the French word for “misfortune”), which proves irony is a real-life element.

As I drove the route at age thirty-three, a GoPro camera strapped to the roof of my pale blue 1994 Honda Accord, I realized I was homesick for the Pacific Northwest. I was abandoning my law career for some unknown path of the artist and my husband’s job was in New York City, so I couldn’t move back to the Pacific Northwest, but I could place my characters there.
Everybody talks about the Pacific Northwest’s incessant rain, which isn’t really rain, not thunderous downpours where one can’t see out a car windshield, more like a constant drizzle. My father, who grew up in Texas and seems to think he might melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if he gets wet, always carries an umbrella, but everyone else I knew growing up got a little damp, a lot of the time, and thought that was perfectly reasonable. Although I’ll argue whether the majority of the Pacific Northwest’s precipitation actually qualifies as rain, I acknowledge water is the area’s predominant feature. Even though part of Oregon is a desert, rivers traverse the landscape, and water is the land’s history. 
At the end of the last ice age, between 12,800 and 15,000 years ago, the Cordilleran ice sheet dipped from Canada into Washington, Idaho, and Montana. The biggest lobe, the Puget lobe, entirely covered the area where Seattle, grunge’s birthplace, is currently located. As the ice age came to a close, the ice dam in Montana’s Lake Missoula failed. Floods ensued. The water rose so high it overflowed the Columbia River Gorge, which is 4,000 feet at its deepest, and forms the boundary between Washington and Oregon. In Portland, the water was 400 feet deep.
There was not just a single flood, but many. And the water came fast. It flowed at a rate nearly 200 times the rate of the Mississippi River in its flood state, washing away over 50 cubic miles of sediment and silt and leaving exposed the basalt, the dark and dense rock from lava floods during the Miocene epoch. It’s been estimated that during the floods the waters thrashing through the Columbia River’s path carried ten times the flow of all the rivers in the world. When the water hit the ocean, freshwater ballooned up as far as Alaska. By the time the floods ceased, the land had been changed. Massive boulders weighing up to 200 tons had been displaced and along the Columbia Gorge and within the river were 50-foot-high water ripple marks, 400-foot-high gravel bars, and 600-foot-high dry falls.

My history was also permanently changed by long ago occurrences, although I didn’t come to realize this fact until I was thirty-seven-years old and flashbacks arrived like those great floods. This was 2017, the year Voodoo Donuts, what Portland may now be most famous for, if not Portlandia, released an album through Voodoo Donuts Recordings of Dead Moon from an August 16, 1994 show closing down the X-Ray Café. One of the owners of the X-Ray Café is now one of the owners of Voodoo Donuts, hence access to the recording.
By 1988, when Dead Moon dropped their first album, I’d experienced the following: my grandmother’s suicide; our family dog, a previously gentle creature, mauling a girl; and my other grandmother’s involuntary commitment due to a psychotic break. By 1998, the time by which Dead Moon had released ten albums, I’d also experienced the following: a random assault by a stranger where I was pinned against a wall; a near drowning in the ocean, saved by a stranger only after I’d blacked out; the killing of a friend by a teenage boy who was allegedly abused by his family; anorexia and depression, which melded into a track season where I passed out mid-stride at practice and was rewarded with an inhaler the next day by my coach, a former elite runner who was training someone for the Olympic Team Trials; a near suicide; a street fight instigated by strangers; and a near fatal car accident. It was a busy decade. Also, a silent one since I discussed none of these events with anyone.
My early trauma fractured my connection with my parents and so I did not tell them about the assault, or the near drowning. I did not tell them I knew the girl who was killed. I did not tell them how, hours before she was hit from behind by a car that drove away, we’d stood in a blue-carpeted hallway and she’d said after school she’d ask her mother if I could come over that weekend. I smiled, elated, but she never made it home to her mother.
It was the general loose style of grunge clothing predominating the time that allowed my body to be almost constantly covered in layers, so it wasn’t obvious when I lost a quarter of my body weight and, to my track coach, thinness was equated with success, which I suppose was partially true. I could run a sub-five mile. I understood I had an eating disorder, but not that I was depressed because the predominant pop culture depiction of depression in those days was of sadness and I didn’t feel sad, I felt nothing. My near suicide was by nearly jumping, so there was no evidence to indicate I’d ever stood on the ledge of a 26th-floor window and wavered, nothing except my own voice, which remained silent. The only people who knew about the street fight and the near fatal car accident were the people who were there and we didn’t discuss those events either. For over three decades of my life if anyone had asked me whether trauma ever touched my existence, I would have shaken my head in the negative.
It’s funny how people sometimes unconsciously make art about the things they don’t know how to say aloud. My novel was composed of the stories of four lives somehow touched by a murder. One of those lives was a teenage girl who loses her best friend after they move to Portland in the early 1990s. I wanted the characters to attend a concert and, in a search for the one small venue where I attended a concert in the 1990s, the Dandy Warhols courtesy of my high school boyfriend, I came across Satyricon, also known as the West Coast’s CBGB and famous as the place where Courtney met Kurt:

Then I found Dead Moon. That’s when I first heard “Somewhere Far Away”. It was April 2016.

By April 2017, I’d read The Body Keeps the Score, picked up randomly because it was on a recommended science books list, and seen perfect descriptions of how I’d felt my whole life in a book about people suffering from extreme trauma, things like growing up in a war zone or being sexually abused as a child. By April 2017, I’d had my first flashback and realized the dog mauling was traumatic and it had dramatically changed my life, but I thought that was my singular trauma. It took another six months for the flashbacks to return like those floods at the end of the ice age, non-stop and full force, for me to blurt out one evening after watching a squirrel get hit by a car and becoming irrationally upset, how it wasn’t right that people just disappeared, just boom, suicide, just boom, murder.
Nirvana’s Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, the same day as Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger. For me it was the beginning of sixth grade, the last year of elementary school. My homeroom teacher that year, a well-respected, wheat blonde, physically large, male teacher made the class stand and repeat the pledge of allegiance over and over and over until he felt we’d recited it with the enthusiasm and commitment it deserved. I did not like him after this.
I attended school in a wealthy, almost entirely white community, in Portland’s suburbs. In the late spring of that school year the police officers who beat Rodney King were not convicted of using excessive force and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising began. I’d watched the beating on the television in my parents’ living room and silently wondered what kind of a world we were living in where this kind of thing was allowed to happen. Shortly after the uprising the white mother of a boy whose skin did not match the other kids came into our class and started screaming about how her son was being treated differently. She threw a chair and was escorted into the hall. I remember watching her while teachers tried to get her to calm down. It seemed to me she was right. We should be throwing chairs.
Things devolved from there. A kid, someone who had or at least appeared to have less money than others and was often bullied, was accused of stealing from some workers who were around during recess. I walked an odd line with money during this time. My father came from money but he’d largely separated from his family over political issues, developing a vastly different outlook on the world during the civil rights movement. The flow of wealth after his mother’s suicide allowed us to live in a nice house decorated with expensive antiques, however, based on his income at the time I qualified for free lunch. This position meant when push came to shove, I’d side with the bullied kid, which I did, informing him when, after he was accused of stealing, some popular boys shoved a carton of milk deep into his desk hoping he wouldn’t notice and it would rot.
In the end, our classes were switched around, as though different faces in our homeroom would settle everyone down. It didn’t and the principal quit weeks before the school year’s end. For graduation, the mothers somehow decided following “Lean on Me” with the students’ choice of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”, sung in a round, was appropriate. Classic foreshadowing.
Seventh grade was the first year of our two-year middle school and I immediately developed my first crush. It was on a boy with white-blonde hair who looked a bit like Kurt Cobain and had the same first name as the producer of Nevermind. Then, on September 27, 1992, my twelfth birthday, Pearl Jam released “Jeremy” as their third single from Ten. Two days later, on September 29, 1992, Stone Temple Pilots released Core and Alice in Chains released Dirt. Three days after that, my friend was killed. She was stuck by a car driven by a teenage boy who’d fantasized about killing a girl.

I did not want to talk to boys after that. One of the popular boys who ended up leading the football team sat behind me in English that year and he wouldn’t stop touching my hair. I kept asking him to stop in all the ways I could until I blurted out, “I don’t like people like you.” I meant assholes, but five years later when we were on student council together senior year of high school he quietly asked if I was a lesbian and I stared at him in bafflement until he recalled the scene.
I am in fact queer, but I had no thoughts of sexuality during high school. All I wanted was to get out. I couldn’t name it at the time, and it would take me another two decades and a massive amount of therapeutic practices to understand, but what I was seeking was safety. I did have one high school boyfriend, but he was Mormon and thus not a threat. He treated me like a girl in a high school romance movie, filling my locker with flowers, asking me to Prom in an elaborate display of affection. He eventually broke up with me saying he’d fallen out of love and I was deeply confused about when love had ever entered the picture.
Before we broke up, I made him play The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshman” whenever we were in the car together. I thought it was the most beautiful love song, which is ridiculous because it’s a song about a girl who commits suicide sung from the perspective of the boyfriend who’s still alive. My boyfriend never asked why I liked the song, so I never had to articulate how it resonated with me, both as a girl who had almost committed suicide and as a person left standing after a girl I cared about had brutally ceased to exist. Back then I listened to songs of sorrow, mostly the Counting Crows on repeat. I never listened to songs of anger.

Perhaps I still could have woven my teenage way into grunge if “Jeremy” hadn’t played nonstop on the radio the year after my friend’s death. The video won Video of the Year and Best Group Video at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, a show that aired on September 2, 1993, exactly eleven months after my friend was killed. I still can’t get through more than ten seconds of the video. It opens with the words “an affluent suburb” followed by “3:30 in the afternoon” and the sound of a school bell ringing. I know in the video Jeremy kills himself, not someone else, but he’s depicted as haunted, same as the boy who killed my friend, a young man apparently harmed by his own family, a man who expressed his pain outward, the way so many men are trained by society to do, slapping it down on the bodies of women. At least the Plaidness bracket went with “Corduroy”.
I did alright while listening to the songs on the bracket’s left side. I was buoyed by four female-led bands and grunge adjacent songs like “Say It Ain’t So”, “Shine”, and “Loser”, not to mention three songs I love, “Self Esteem”, “Somebody to Shove”, and “I Alone”, all of which I think of as somehow twisting grunge’s tradition of male anger. It wasn’t until my husband and I hit the bracket’s right side that I fell off the boat and into the flood waters.
My husband knows even though I don’t listen to Dave Grohl’s bands I have a deep affection for him—his attitude is lovely, his drumming skills phenomenal, and he’s been a gay-rights activist since the early 1990s—so when I don’t select Foo Fighter’s “I’ll Stick Around” my husband asks why. Like with so many questions in my life over these past few years, years I’ve spent swimming around in PTSD, trying and failing like Humpty Dumpty to put myself back together again, it takes me days to answer. I’m not trying to be withholding, it’s just I’ve been so disconnected for so long that I’m only now catching up, only now discovering at forty my own history, my own identity.
I finally tell my husband it’s the refrain. I want to be owed something. I want to be owed a life equal in freedom, equal in the freedom from fear. I want to be owed a life equal to the one held by Dave Grohl and all the white men singing their grungy songs of anger.
Still, my tears don’t arrive until Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” pulses from our car stereo speakers. I’ve never heard the song before. My husband is driving our green Subaru down the freeway outside Nyack and he doesn’t see me begin to cry. I learned to cry silently, at night into my pillow, so as to not bother anyone, so I don’t make a sound. By the time he glances over, my face is covered with tears. It doesn’t matter that the song is a protest song, as my husband shortly informs me, indeed the kind of protest song I agree with, because the repeated chants falling from a man’s mouth scratch terror into the lining of my stomach. I am sobbing from fear. I am still so afraid of men’s anger, even after all these years, even through the radio.
For me, the songs by female singers aren’t a redemptive balm. It seems to me they don’t express the stronger words of anger, they don’t embody seething and vengeful, belligerent and enraged. They’re shunted into the minor words of anger, into irritation and frustration, forced into the patness of jealousy as opposed to fury. What’s allowed to be expressed in our society becomes gendered early. Men are permitted to carry forth their anger in its natural force, hissing and cursing into a microphone. Women are not allowed such wrath. We’re asked instead to hold down the earth while males rage upon its surface. Even when females take hold of the words, the thrashing of instruments doesn’t match, “Seether” as case in point. And the names of the female bands seem to have dismissive, dehumanizing vibes as well: 7 Year Bitch, Babes in Toyland, Hole. Are we not raging against a machine too? Then again, sometimes all one can do is talk about throwing chairs, because if you actually throw chairs you’ll be escorted from the building, and who can hear you then?
It is after hearing “Killing in the Name” for the first time in my life at the age of forty that I find myself outside in freezing weather, walking through a snow-covered forest. I’m listening to the song I call my foundational text, Counting Crows’ “Round Here”, the ten-minute live version recorded at Hammerstein Ballroom in 1997, released on the second disc of Across a Wire (Live in New York). I am walking up a hill when the rage hits. It’s not just about the girl who lost her life at age twelve or about the trauma I’ve finally recognized I’d endured in the wake of her killing, it’s about the smaller, deeper things I lost. I never made a friend again after she died. I have friends, people who’ve pulled me into their orbits and I’m truly grateful for them, but since I was twelve, for twenty-eight years, I have never once tried to make friends with someone who shared my same interests. I have never honestly talked about myself, my experiences, or my likes and dislikes.
To be fair, for much of that time I didn’t know what my likes and dislikes were. A loss of identity can be a hallmark of PTSD. People write about longing to return to who they were before trauma entered their life. But trauma entered my life early, significantly when I was four turning five and then again when I was eleven turning twelve, and the end result is I didn’t form much of an identity. I was too busy surviving.
When I was drowning in my flashbacks, unsure if I could actually survive the constant flooding, I thought about turning to heroin, grunge’s drug of choice. I’ve never done illegal drugs because I’m afraid of losing control, but I suddenly understood the impetus. Living inside my body felt untenable. I am an immensely privileged person, both from a monetary and familial support perspective, which means I didn’t turn to heroin. Instead, I bought a wooden musical statute I saw in a New York City window. It showed a male and a female standing together under an umbrella, two dogs at their feet. It looked like my husband and me and our dog. I placed it where I could see it frequently, a reminder of who I was and for what I was fighting. Eventually things improved, flashbacks and nightmares tapering, and I tried to envision a through-line. Who was this person who had survived, what was her identity? I alighted on two things that broke through the surface of time, things that showed themselves in my actual witnessable behaviors: my running and my queerness. But two legs aren’t enough to hold up a stool. A solid foundation requires at least three.
As “Round Here” rambled through my ears in a snow-covered forest, I was overcome with rage and dropped to my knees. I thrashed, wailing, screaming for all I’d lost. I punched through the snow, slamming my fingers against the frozen ground the same way I’d slammed them against a locker freshman year of high school during halftime of a basketball game where I kept getting fouled but couldn’t sink a single free throw. That evening I logged into a Zoom yoga class, then shut off the camera halfway through. I was shedding tears of anger I didn’t want others to see and besides, I’d stopped the yoga, gotten up off the mat to write down the manifesto streaming through my head, the one born of rage. Those three paragraphs are now a mission statement for my life going forward.

The fact of the matter is, I know grunge. I know anger that seethes so deeply it can’t be spoken, only expressed through a thrashing of the body timed to music. And I know rebellion, how it can be both large and small. My senior year of high school I was all-student body president and I often had to open school events by leading people in the pledge of allegiance. I was raised without God, in a home that taught the principles of Humanism, and so every time I stood on a stage in front of a crowd armed with a microphone, I did not move my mouth to the words “under God”. I don’t think anyone noticed, and if they did nobody said anything, but I knew. Sometimes the only form of rebellion is within one’s own body.
At the end of senior year, I was elected to prom court. I don’t fully understand how I was elected to things while also spending my lunch hour hiding in the bathroom, but that is what happened. Prom court involved an assembly where students sat on gym bleachers as members of the court promenaded forth, dressed in finery. During each student’s walk from the blue metal doors to the small stage erected in the buffed gym, a song selected by the student was played. All the women were to be accompanied by their fathers, just like at a wedding. I did not have my father as my escort. He has always been one of the most important people in my life, but I refused the system of patriarchy this practice represented. I am not the property of my father. My sister, seven years younger than me, walked me to the stage while the first minute of “Mr. Jones”, the version from the Across A Wire (Live in New York) album record at Chelsea Studios in New York, played over the speakers. Damn the man. Save the empire.
I have been trying, and failing, to damn the man and save the empire my whole life. After college I considered joining the New York City police department to try to force change from inside, to get them to stop killing Black people. Then I realized a bisexual woman would likely not rise to NYPD leadership ranks on a platform of reform. Instead, I went to law school intent on fighting for LGBTQ rights (although we didn’t have the Q back then). I guess people didn’t think much of the B either because I was told by several members of the queer law school community that I had to pick a side. Either in or out, they said, either lesbian or nothing. I internalized their words and figured I didn’t belong in the queer community, much less as any kind of leader fighting for their rights. My law career careened after that until I abandoned it completely.

Dead Moon isn’t in the Plaidness bracket, but I highly suggest everyone listen to their album Nervous Sooner Changes. To me it’s nearly perfect, somehow still timely today. The eighth song, “Somewhere Far Away”, is the one that burrowed into my heart in 2016 and the one that brought me fully back to grunge when I played the album again at the end of February 2021 while out for a run after emailing in my final bracket selections. The opening guitar swell reminds me of when I was literally drowning, stuck under the ocean water fighting upward with all my might in the summer before sixth grade. It sounds like how color changed as I got closer and closer to breaking the water’s surface before another wave crashed down over my head—dark brown to green to light purple. If someone hadn’t pulled me out of the water that day, I wouldn’t be alive now. I got lucky. And the truth is, only survivors get to keep making art.
It’s O.K. that Dead Moon didn’t make the bracket and it’s okay that nobody looking at me or my life would call me grunge. In the seventh-grade school pictures taken before my friend was killed, she embodies grunge with her sly smile and plaid shirt. I appear to be a future corporate leader of America in a blue button-down and glasses, which is what, for a while, I became. My mother picked out the shirt and I hated it, but I didn’t have the energy back then to fight over apparel.
Now, however, I can wear whatever I want and I’ve realized I want to wear ripped jeans because something torn and shredded, yet still functional, suits me perfectly. I like flannel shirts because they provide warmth and color. I enjoy lipstick the color of wine because it best compliments my skin tone, and I like jewelry that can double as a weapon, just in case. Of course, regardless of what Marc Jacobs says, grunge isn’t about the outfit. It’s about the fight. It’s about harnessing rage to bring down the systems of unwise humanity, to destroy that which creates unequal wounds in this world. And Dead Moon, a band formed by the parents of grunge, a band where both a male and a female voice scream out in anger, Dead Moon is my inspiration.
If I could do it all over again, I would have liked to have been in a band. Making music with friends, being part of a community, it all sounds so lovely. I don’t have much musical talent, but I did once record a folk album with my sister as a gift for our dad (shout out to All Folked Up) and I did once sing Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” at Arlene’s Grocery’s punk rock karaoke and was told I had “stage presence”. I can’t play guitar or drums and my stage presence is most certainly better than my voice. But I can write words and I can share them with people and I can use my voice to fight, in ways both large and small, against the systems still creating brutal alienation, dehumanization, and isolation today. And I will. Because I am grunge. Long live grunge.

Katherine Atlee Robb recently put together a playlist called "Don't Call it a Comeback" but let's be honest, this probably is one. You can find more of her writing at www.katherineatleerobb.com or follow her on Twitter @KRobb_AMP