Kurt really despised the mainstream," says Krist Novoselic. "That's what 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was all about: the mass mentality of conformity." On August 17th, 1991, Nirvana -- an underground trio from the Seattle area -- filmed the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the first single from their imminent major-label debut, Nevermind, at a soundstage in Culver City, California. The clip, hashed out by the band and first-time director Sam Bayer, was a seditious twist on standard MTV fare: Nirvana playing in a high school gym, with a cast of pretty cheerleaders and excited fans. Except the pompom girls had the symbol for "anarchy" scrawled on their sweaters, the kids were a seething mosh pit, and the band -- drummer Dave Grohl, bassist Novoselic and singer-guitarist-songwriter Kurt Cobain -- lip-synced with the authenticity of their demented real-life club gigs.

That video changed Nirvana's life overnight. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" went into nonstop rotation on MTV in October '91 while the band was on a North American tour to promote Nevermind. Suddenly, club gigs turned into sold-out riots; album sales blew up. By mid-January '92, Nevermind was the Number One album in the country. But the fuzzed-pop ferocity and sweaty visual detail of the "Teen Spirit" video was also a compact killer advertisement for something bigger: the punk-metal invention and indie-rock ideals of a young, historic generation of Seattle bands. With Nirvana at the edge of the wedge, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees and Mudhoney, among others, bum-rushed rock radio and the album charts, becoming the new pop mainstream for the next half-decade.

"It was a random group of misfits -- there wasn't big pressure like, 'Hey, you're not the right kind of punk,' " says Mudhoney singer Mark Arm of the glory days, before the A&R scouts descended like locusts, all looking for so-called grunge bands.

The Seattle scene was, in its late-Eighties infancy, a cozy revolt. "There was a core group of maybe fifty people you'd always see at the same shows," says Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters. There wasn't much money to go around, either. The local indie label of choice, Sub Pop, combined strict economics with impeccable musical taste, issuing legendary records by many important Seattle-area bands of the era, including Nirvana. Formed in 1987 by Cobain and Novoselic, high school friends from nearby Aberdeen, Washington, Nirvana recorded their 1989 Sub Pop album, Bleach, for a whopping $606.17.

The furor had its dark side. Heroin use was rampant among Seattle rockers. Unable to shake his own addiction, collapsing under self-doubt, Cobain took his own life on April 5th, 1994, effectively bringing the Seattle renaissance to a close. The most recent victim: singer Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, whose long descent into drug hell finally ended in a fatal overdose in 2002. "The hype of that time, of Seattle music -- it had tangible effects on everyone's lives," Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder said last year. "That was a lot to cope with."

But at the height of the city's fame, there was no greater rock & roll thrill than being in a Seattle band. "You had ten years of playing music and never having a crowd," Vedder remembered in 1999. "Then, all of a sudden, you had one, and you wanted to take advantage of that time."