Long ago in a distant place known as “Seattle,” there lived a young man named Kurt who once roadied for a band called “The Melvins.” They opened for an even bigger act with an extraordinary drummer named Matt whose talents eventually took him to “Pearl Jam” and “Soundgarden.” Both of those young men were celebrated throughout the land as pioneers of the sound labeled “grunge.”
This story isn’t about them. It’s about the one who was left out of the tale.
Tina Bell was the frontwoman for Bam Bam, a band that headlined Seattle music festivals, managed to gain coveted video airplay, and even inspired a whole new genre, before they vanished into obscurity.
The earliest account of her attention-grabbing presence is that of her son T.J. Martin, Oscar-winning director of the HBO documentary “Tina.” Yes, Turner.
“So as a kid, I’d literally see strangers hit on my mom and call her Tina Turner. Not because they actually knew who she was but because that was the only other Black woman in rock they could associate her with.”
Like two sides of the same coin, both Tinas were making music history in 1983. That was the year Tina Bell was the driving creative force behind Bam Bam’s style of off-kilter vocals, distorted power chords and sludgy rhythms that would later be known as “grunge,” 4 years before Nirvana was even formed.
So why didn’t this pioneering Black woman with the looks of Tina Turner and the sound that changed the world ever become famous? Her bandmate Scott Ledgerwood addresses the elephant in the room.
“America was certainly f**kin’ not ready for a Black girl up front in a hard band let alone as a media sweetheart, no matter how gorgeous she was. Race and gender clearly played a major role. The continued reluctance by Seattle to accept her is maddening.”
And Tina was mad too. One night, during Bam Bam’s regular gig at The Metropolis, a couple of spectators hurled a slur at her. “And all of a sudden, she grabs a microphone stand and she starts swirling it around her head like a lasso. She swung that f**kin’ thing around her head and about the fourth time, she smashed that son of a b**ch.”
It was punk rock AF.
But it was also a microcosm of what Tina knew she’d have to guard against every single night in this sea of white men’s faces, a steep exchange for performing her music.
Eventually, it was one she was no longer willing to make and Tina abruptly quit Bam Bam.
“She had just had enough,” Ledgerwood says. “For almost eight years she had almost literally eviscerated herself for the audience.”
In 2012, that evisceration took its final toll when Tina died alone in Las Vegas from cirrhosis of the liver and depression, at only 55. All that was left behind was a DVD player, a chair and a poster, a sad memorial to the Queen of Grunge that should have been.