Grunge Began 40 Years Ago with Green River’s Come On Down, Featuring Future Members of Pearl Jam and Mudhoney

Well, yes and no. Yes—the past month marked 40 years since the first recorded grunge release, when Green River issued the 'Come On Down' EP in November 1985. Future Mudhoney singer Mark Arm, Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, and drummer Alex Vincent had recorded the album with producer Chris Hanzsek at Crow Studios in Seattle in 1984. After a long delay, it became the first grunge‑related EP or album ever released. But no—Green River weren’t necessarily the very first grunge band.

By 1985, several others were already playing live, including Melvins, Soundgarden, Malfunkshun, The Screaming Trees, The Fluid, Skin Yard, and more. Like their contemporaries, Green River played plenty of shows that year, but they were supporting a record that still hadn’t come out due to production delays. The six‑song EP ran 27 minutes and blended punk and heavy metal, with Arm writing all the lyrics and various combinations of bandmates composing the music. Ament designed the album artwork.

It was at the Northwest School of the Arts that Alex Vincent (then Shumway) met Steve Turner and Stone Gossard. Shumway had recently moved to Seattle after being a ballet dancer in Sacramento.

In Everybody Loves Our Town, Shumway explained, “Once I got into punk more and more, I got tired of ballet. I got involved in the music scene in Seattle pretty soon after I moved there with my mother and sister in 1982.” According to Turner, Shumway’s style alone made an impression.

Turner recalled, “When we first started going there, he had a dyed black mohawk and wore a kilt over his jeans. He was the Circle Jerks shanking guy come to life—and I was a skate punk, and we both loved Minor Threat.”

Shumway met Arm at a show—possibly the U-Men, he remembered. Turner met Arm during his senior year, saying, “He’d come back from one year at college in McMinnville, Oregon.”

Arm and Turner briefly played together in Mr. Epp and the Calculations before forming Green River with Shumway, Gossard, and Ament. Turner even took a job at the place where Ament—then in Deranged Diction—worked, just to get to know him before bringing him into the band. Once Green River became the “cool” band in Seattle, they decided to record with C/Z Records and Hanzsek.

Hanzsek reflected on his time with Green River in Mark Yarm’s Everybody Loves Our Town: “When Green River came into the studio to record, they were all pretty young. With those demos, they were able to get their deal with Homestead Records, and then they invited me to help produce their album, 'Come On Down'.”

No one knew at the time that this record would help spark a new musical movement that would later be labeled “grunge”—a term many fans still dislike or reject. But history settled on it, and “grunge” became the name for the punk‑meets‑metal sound that defined the Pacific Northwest. From there, the music spread far beyond Seattle, inspiring new bands and new fans for decades to come.