IF YOU'VE EVER WONDERED what Kurt Cobain's longtime girlfriend Tracy Marander and/or Chris Cornell's ex-wife Susan Silver are like, or how Layne Staley's mom felt about his slow-motion suicide, or what future Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan's early days were like in the Seattle punk scene, then we have a read for you.

Greg Prato's new book, "Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music," is an accomplishment that will find fans as long as the music does. The book is remarkably comprehensive, nearly 500 pages long, and filled with rarely seen photographs, astute analyses of popular culture, insider gossip and interesting, funny and painful stories.

Prato keeps the editorializing to a minimum, letting the players (Eddie Vedder, Slim Moon, Kim Thayil, Jerry Cantrell, Kathleen Hanna, Allison Wolfe, Blag Dahlia, Charles Petterson, Riki Rachtman, Chad Channing, et al) speak for themselves. The scene they were part of was one of the most artistically fertile and commercially viable in the history of rock music, with four different bands hitting the tops of the charts and staying there for years. But, as the author shows, the grunge explosion was the product of the years of effort and slow, steady growth of the record labels and musicians who forged an intense and heavy, yet melodic and gloomy, take on alternative rock.

Casual fans of hard rock will find the ridiculous stories of Alice in Chains, the redemption of Pearl Jam and the characteristically somber, intellectual reflections of Soundgarden a joy to leaf through, but serious students of the Seattle sound will appreciate the lengthy sections devoted to the other excellent area bands of that time (and Mudhoney, Tad, the Melvins, the Fastbacks, the Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone, Temple of the Dog and Green River are just the tip of the iceberg).

The most powerful sections of the book are the long passages devoted to quoting Layne Staley's mother, Nancy Layne McCallum. The members of her son's band, Alice in Chains, were perhaps the most debauched, sleaziest segment of a hard-living community and Staley's slow decline and eventual death due to heroin addiction is something McCallum speaks articulately about with palpable pain and rage. With the last years of Staley's life shrouded in mystery to even the most ardent Alice in Chains fans, Prato offers a wealth of new information about a supremely talented man who seems to have simply given up.

Most of the other stories in "Grunge" have happier outcomes. And Prato, an enthusiastic fan who cites the U-Men and Truly ("they were a combination of Nirvana and Radiohead") as his favorite lesser-known Seattle bands, believes that his wide cast of characters has a great deal to be proud of - even those who never went platinum.

"You could compare a band like Mudhoney to the Ramones - they've never sold millions and millions of albums, but they've influenced so many bands and they can be respected for sticking to their guns and never selling out or following trends. They didn't go platinum, but they're still touring to this day, and they're still putting on great shows," Prato said.

"Those bands, if I had to make a prediction, may be comparable to the Stooges - a band that didn't have great commercial success when they were together, but through the years, people will look back to and discover. And maybe inspire future bands to form."

Grunge, in other words, will never die.

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Images courtesy ECW Press