Seattle's The Real Deal

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Despite all the prescribed attitude, the musicians are benign about their surroundings. The Seattle area, says Geoff Tate, lead singer of Queensryche, "is attractive to me because it's home. It's a very good place to live from the standpoint of reality." Says Layne Staley of A in C: "The bands support each other. Here it's a little more lighthearted." Tate also sees a link to an honorable British tradition. "There is a blue-collar element, and it's a very moody place due to the weather," he says. "It has the same sort of atmosphere as Birmingham, England."

It was, in fact, the ever trendy, famished-for-a-new-thing British music press that first started seriously boosting bands like Nirvana and the Seattle scene in general. "Sometimes having the English behind you is the most important thing," says Daniel House of Seattle-based C/Z Records. Says Damon Stewart, Sony Music's A.-and-R. man on the scene: "Through the British press, the whole pop scene really lit this fire."

The Seattle sound is neither quite as original nor as dynamic as its boosters like to claim. To anyone, for example, who watched the Who trash the stage or the Clash spit into the audience and split every eardrum within range, the sight of Nirvana bashing instruments on Saturday Night Live looks all too practiced, like a bunch of art-school wimps trying to act tough. Still, A in C's Staley insists, "it's not about who's the wildest. There are no gimmicks."

But -- the impression persists -- perhaps there is some secret. Says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's associate director of retail research: "What I'm hearing now is that bands from L.A. or the Midwest are moving to Seattle and telling record companies, 'Yeah, we grew up here, and this is where we make our music.' " But rockers around the country with the same idea should be prudent. Before tearing up roots, they should think about that shifting epicenter. It would be terrible to desert the rehearsal garage in some town that was about to become the next newest, neatest place.