Memories of Seattle’s ’90s & ’00s musical underground

In September 1991, Nirvana released their second, breakout album Nevermind. It was their major label debut, turning the mopped-haired, scrappy, DIY grunge band from Aberdeen, Washington into household names while hitting number one in the US charts, and provided a soundtrack for youth angst everywhere. That same year, Pearl Jam, hailing from up the road in Seattle, released their hugely successful debut album, Ten, and grunge – once a subcultural niche in the Rainy City’s subterranean – was cemented as a global phenomenon.

In 1992, the year following that musical explosion, a young Bootsy Holler relocated to Seattle from upstate town Bellingham, where she had studied textiles and design at college, and found much of grunge’s original ethos was still very much alive. Her boyfriend at the time lived in a shared house, and she ended up moving in too. ​“He lived with his band, which was his brother, his brother’s girlfriend, and the keyboard guy lived in the basement,” she recalls. ​“It was a big old 1970s ranch house up north by Lake Washington and took us half an hour to get downtown. We’d have parties there and made fanzines – Xeroxing and Kinko’s were in back then.”

But the music had already evolved. By ​’92, many of Seattle’s newer, younger bands were experimenting outside of the sound typically associated with the city, railing against a grunge sound that had become too ​“commercial” and radio friendly. ​“There were these new, funky little bands – just people doing their own weird thing,” she says. ​“It was less about the vocals, and more about sound, reverb and doing weird things.” 

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Holler quickly became a regular at local shows, and having bought a Rolleiflex camera after being inspired by a teacher at art school and began taking photographs at them. It was her way into the scene as she pulled together pennies to make ends meet, even fashioning her own DIY darkroom to develop prints. ​“We were dirt poor at the time,” Holler explains. ​“I didn’t pay money to go and see a band – I don’t know if I even had a job at the time.”

Over the course of the next 16 years, Holler became integral part of the small community and often the first port of call for artist portraits, going from fan to chronicler. Now, decades later, she is releasing her debut photobook MAKiNG iT: An Intimate Documentary of the Seattle Indie, Rock & Punk Scene, 1992 – 2008, which reflects on the city’s post-grunge era, while charting the rise of indie alternative rock, emo and other genres that emerged around the turn of the millennium.

Inadvertently, Holler captured the second wave of artists who came out of the city and took on the world. A fresh-faced Fleet Foxes are captured in a grassy clearing, while live shots are taken at early Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse and The Presidents of the United States of America shows. Out of towners also feature, from Beth Ditto’s Gossip, to Deftones and Yeah Yeah Yeahs taking on some of Seattle’s music venues, which included The Off Ramp, which sold $0.50 ​“Hash After the Bash”, and The Crocodile Café – an idiosyncratic space with a restaurant at the front and a banquet hall in the back. These venues had found a workaround for Washington State’s antiquated liquor laws that had until its opening kneecapped the potential of the scene.

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“Bands didn’t actually have anywhere to play – you had to play in a tavern that served beer and wine, which were these long, skinny rooms with a stage at the end that were not rooms to watch a band,” Holler explains. ​“What some people figured out is you have to have a banquet license – but to get one you have to serve food if you’re going sell liquor.”

Ultimately, MAKiNG iT is a portrait of one of the USA’s most storied music cities, which for decades punched well above its weight. But perhaps what makes the book so compelling lies in between the standout sets and musical moments. Interspersed between the backstage portraits and riotous moments in the crowd, are self-portraits of Holler and moments of vulnerability as she reflects on a different era of her life. Over the course of its pages, she goes from a young art school graduate who was occasionally shooting up with her boyfriend’s band to a heralded music photographer, before ultimately leaving Seattle behind, starting a family and moving off in different directions with her art.

“I don’t want to make something that’s been made over and over. I love experimenting, playing, making mistakes and learning from it. So, making this book, much of it was just being myself,” Holler says. ​“It’s a little bit of history, a little bit of memoir and a little bit of fun. I was in these fucking dumps shooting – it was dark, grungy and fun.”

MAKiNG iT: An Intimate Documentary of the Seattle Indie, Rock & Punk Scene, 1992 – 2008 by Bootsy Holler is published by Damiani Books.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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