How Cameron Crowe’s Singles Captured Grunge Before America Noticed
The premiere posters went up in August 1992. The film opened September 18 with a soundtrack featuring Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Mudhoney — but six months earlier, when Cameron Crowe had finished editing, the studio sat on it because nobody in Hollywood was sure grunge would last. By the time Singles hit theaters, Nirvana’s Nevermind had already gone five times platinum. The movie meant to introduce America to Seattle showed up to find America already there.
Singles is the only mainstream film that documented grunge from inside the apartment instead of from the cheap seats. Cameron Crowe — who started writing for Rolling Stone at fifteen and would later direct Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire — moved his production to Seattle in 1991 and cast actual band members as themselves. The result is messier than a documentary and more honest than the Spin features that arrived the year after. If you want the complete guide to grunge — the music, the fashion, and the culture as it was actually lived — Singles still does the job better than anything written about it since.
Cameron Crowe Moved to Seattle Before Anyone Knew What Was Coming
Crowe had married Nancy Wilson of Heart in 1986. Through her, he had been making trips to Seattle for years — playing pool at the Crocodile Cafe, drinking at the OK Hotel, watching Mother Love Bone play to crowds that already knew every word. By 1990, Andrew Wood was dead and Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were starting the band that would become Pearl Jam. Crowe was paying attention.
He pitched Singles as a low-budget romantic comedy about twenty-somethings sharing an apartment building. Warner Bros. greenlit it for nine million dollars on the strength of his Say Anything credits — they were not buying a grunge movie. The script barely mentions music. The soundtrack was assembled separately, after Crowe convinced the bands he knew that the film would not embarrass them.
