I recently had the privilige of interviewing Jacob McMurray  Senior Curator of the Experience Music Project  for a feature piece on music museums. Within the contect of describing his upcoming exhibition Nirvana in the Northwest Underground, 1982-1992 Jacob articulated a really interesting understanding about the development of music scenes:

“Nobody had looked, commercially, at the Northwest for a long time. What were the pieces of infrastructure in the creative underground that needed to be in place for their to be a scene in the first place? That’s one of the things that I’m really interested in exploring. In order to have a scene you have to have a sort of renewable source of music like a college. Olympia is a great example of this, Evergreen College there. You have to have a source of communication for your underground message. Like fanzines and radio, like the college radio, KAOS radio, or Op magazine. In Seattle the Rocket would serve that. You had to have venues. You had to have record stores to reinforce this underground message. And so trying to build step-by-step what it takes to develop the scene in the Northwest.”