Route 666 On the Road to Nirvana Author:Gina Arnold Defiant, unkempt, original, screaming, clawing Nirvana shocked the record company corporate ogres in the early nineties by reviving the I-Don't-Care ethos of the Sex Pistols from over a decade earlier. Suddenly being yourself and rejecting the gray specter of music-by-numbers was no longer regarded as a blood-letting process, but the norm. The r... more »evolution, the trumpets' blare of industrialized youth across the nation.
But to author Gina Arnold, who confesses that rock 'n roll saved her life from suburban complacency, this was nothing new--the underground has simple surfaced momentarily. This process, this passing of the revolutionary baton from band to band, had been going on since its genesis at Winterland in 1978 when Johnny Rotten asked, "Do you get the feeling you've been cheated?"
Route 666 is the camp-following story of the punk rock era and its crash and burn players, Jello Biafra, and his censored Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, The Replacements, Black Flag, Sonic Youth, The Butthole Surfers, R.E.M., The Pixies, and on and on and on, until, yes, the golden moment when the underground reached the end of the electric rainbow and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hit the charts and stayed there screaming its ski-capped head off.« less