Screaming Life: A Chronicle of the Seattle Music Scene
Charles Peterson's photographs capture being at a Seattle grunge show better than any verbal description. The thrashing energy, the chaotic sweat, the sense of an imminent explosion of the room and of the entire scene are all seen in these black-and-white photos that are somehow sharpest when blurriest. And apparently, the photo on the cover is not upside down. That's Kurt Cobain supposedly doing a nonchalant flip in mid-strum in mid-show: aplomb in chaos, the hallmark of the music. A great companion volume to Clark Humphrey'sLoser, a definitive history of the Seattle music scene from the '60s to the present.