GREEN SHOOTS
Green River, the first ‘grunge’ band, remembered.
By DAVID FRICKE.
IF SEATTLE was the explosive heart of rock’n’roll in the 1990s, the city’s mutinous pulse in the previous decade was located at Raison d’Être, a coffee house in the Belltown area where the local underground gathered and schemed over espressos.
“It was the best place for me to land from Montana,” says Jeff Ament. He got a job there in 1983 and stayed seven years, working “five days a week” while meeting “all of the amazing characters” in the scene and making a pivotal racket, from 1984 to 1988, with Stone Gossard in pioneering lunatics Green River.