Grunge Had a Godmother. Rock History Forgot to Write Her Down.
Tina Bell was fronting a Seattle band a year before Green River cut a record. Her story, and what Black rock musicians still run into, from Lenny Kravitz to an Atlanta band that just topped the alternative chart.
In 1984, a band called Bam Bam walked into Reciprocal Recording in Seattle, the small studio where Chris Hanzsek and Jack Endino would soon record half the city, and made an EP called "Villains (Also Wear White)." The singer was Tina Bell. She'd started the band the year before with her husband, guitarist Tommy Martin, and named it after the two of them, Bell And Martin. Their first drummer was Matt Cameron, who would go on to Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. The record came out a year before Green River's debut EP, the one most histories treat as grunge's opening chord.
You've probably never heard of her. That's the story.
Bell was a Black woman with a voice that could flatten a room, singing heavy, sludgy punk in a scene that was almost entirely white and male. Bam Bam's bassist, Scotty Ledgerwood, has recalled that a young Kurt Cobain hauled gear for them for a while, and that he yelled at the kid for dropping a guitar. Other accounts say Cobain was carrying the Melvins' gear the night the Melvins opened for Bam Bam, so treat that one as a bandmate's memory, not a footnote you'd stake a bet on. What isn't in doubt is how the scene treated her.
A Room That Wasn't Ready
There was a fight with skinheads at a club called The Metropolis. There were crowds who didn't know what to do with a Black woman at the front of a punk band, and Ledgerwood has said the racism didn't stop at the crowd. It went up the ladder, to the people who decided who got signed. Bam Bam never got the deal, and by 1990 Bell had left music.
Then the history got written, and she wasn't in it. A 2011 retrospective of the Seattle scene described Bam Bam as a three-piece and didn't mention her at all. Her son, TJ Martin, has a word for it: "proper erasure." Martin grew up to be an Oscar-winning documentary director, and in one of rock's crueler ironies he co-directed "Tina" (2021), a film about a different Black woman the music business tried to write out, Tina Turner.
Tina Bell died in Las Vegas around Oct. 10, 2012, at 55, of cirrhosis of the liver. Her body wasn't found for about two weeks. The tributes came later: a Seattle concert in her honor in 2021, a reissue of "Villains (Also Wear White)" in 2022, and a nickname, "the Godmother of Grunge," that the press gave her after she was gone. Whether she started grunge is an argument, not a settled fact. That she was there first, and loud, is on tape.
Too Rock for One Room, Too Black for the Other
Thirty years later and a lot more famous, Lenny Kravitz was still describing the same trap. In a 2023 Esquire cover story, he said Black award shows had never made room for him: "I have not been invited to a BET thing," he said, adding that he'd been left out of The Source Awards too and that Vibe took years to put him on a cover. He later clarified that he meant the award shows, not the Black community. He also said the rock establishment, mostly older white men, wasn't going to hand him that position either. Too rock for one room, too Black for the other.
Living Colour knew the feeling. When their singer, Corey Glover, backed Kravitz up that December, he said Black outlets told his band the same thing for years: "we did not fit in their format." That's a band whose "Cult of Personality" won a Grammy in 1990. Format, it turns out, can beat a Grammy.
Rock Was Black First
The strangest part of the "rock is white" idea is how recent it is. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was playing distorted electric guitar on gospel records in the 1940s, and her 1944 recording "Strange Things Happening Every Day" has a fair claim to being the first rock and roll record; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her in 2018. Big Mama Thornton cut "Hound Dog" in 1952, and it sat at No. 1 on the R&B chart for seven weeks in 1953, three years before Elvis Presley made it a pop hit.
Musicians have been correcting the record ever since. In 1985, Vernon Reid of Living Colour, the critic Greg Tate, Konda Mason and DK Dyson founded the Black Rock Coalition in New York to fight what they called musical apartheid. In 2003, James Spooner's documentary "Afro-Punk" followed four Black punks through scenes that mostly didn't see them, and the film grew into a festival in Brooklyn two years later. The point was never that Black musicians needed permission to play rock. It was that they'd been there since the first chord, and someone kept leaving them out of the photo.
The cost of that assumption is quiet and specific: the deal that goes to someone else, the radio format that has no slot, the kid who loves Green Day and gets asked why she isn't making hip-hop. Kravitz has said record executives in his early years kept steering him toward what a Black artist was supposed to do to get on the radio. Plenty of kids heard the same thing and put the guitar down.
Five Bands to Put On Tonight
- Death (Detroit, formed in the early 1970s). Three brothers, David, Bobby and Dannis Hackney, playing furious proto-punk before punk had a name. They reportedly turned down a record deal rather than change the band's name, and their recordings from the mid-1970s didn't come out until 2009, when Drag City released "...For the Whole World to See." Punk had a head start, and it sat in a closet.
- Bad Brains (Washington, D.C., 1977). They started as a jazz fusion band and turned into the fastest, tightest hardcore band in America, then threw reggae into the set to keep everyone off balance. Their 1982 debut came out on cassette. Half the hardcore bands you know learned to play from it.
- Living Colour (New York, 1984). Vernon Reid's band, and the proof that a Black rock band could go platinum and still get told it didn't fit. Start with "Vivid" (1988). Stay for the guitar solos.
- Nova Twins (London). Amy Love and Georgia South make a sound so heavy it rattles your fillings, and their 2022 album "Supernova" made the Mercury Prize shortlist. Fitting detail: they've toured with Lenny Kravitz.
- The Paradox (Atlanta, 2024). Four young musicians, Eric Dangerfield, Christopher "Xelan" Bernard, Donald Bryant and Percy "PC3" Crews, who blew up on TikTok and covered Green Day's "Basket Case" well enough that Billie Joe Armstrong invited them to open a Green Day stadium show. In January, "Get the Message" went to No. 1 on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart, the first time an all-Black band had done it. They're on their first headlining tour right now, and it ends in Atlanta on Nov. 18.
If this list sends you looking for rooms to hear them in, our rock clubs worth the plane ticket is a start, and the Rock Hall's newest class, including Joy Division and New Order, shows how long the canon takes to catch up.
Tina Bell walked into a Seattle studio in 1984 and left with a record nobody bothered to file. The tape survived. Play it loud enough that somebody has to write it down.
Keep it loud
