Grunge is not a scene associated with clean-living and abstinence. As you can gather from some of the genre’s much-missed casualties, it was often a messy and drug-addled environment but you might be surprised about the title-holders when it comes to what has been touted as grunge’s most debauched tour: that honour would go to LA-formed Seattle invaders L7.
As recounted in Mark Yarm’s excellent oral history of grunge history Everybody Loves Our Town, they took some serious beating. In the book, Sub Pop veteran Megan Jasper remembers the quartet visiting the record label’s offices in Seattle. “We would rate bands on how much they smelled,” Jasper said. “It wasn’t an official list but our accountant would make jokes and write it down. L7 were on the list, but Babes In Toyland were the smelliest. Geoff actually followed them around one time with an air-freshener, spraying them.”
