PUGET SOUND : Mecca to the Cynical Post-Watergate Generation, Seattle Has a New Icon. It Isn’t Coffee, It Isn’t Rain, It’s Not Even the Space Needle. It’s Rock and Roll.

Seattle, Friday, 11 p.m. The downtown of America’s Most Livable City, home to the spiffy new Robert Venturi-designed art museum and other cultural magnets, is looking, well, it’s looking pretty dead. The famous rain is doing a splendid job keeping the streets clear of the prosperous-looking citizens who by day scurry in and out of white-collar redoubts. At this hour, Baby-Booming, Volvo-driving, politically correct Seattle has clearly called it a night.

Meanwhile, at the Off Ramp, a club on a nondescript road by the I-5 freeway, about 200 of Seattle’s post-Watergate generation gather to usher in the weekend and, in their way, further the biggest (and loudest) phenomenon to roar out of their burg since the 747. While mainstream Seattle slumbers, the city’s thriving home-grown rock scene--which over the past few years has loosed an ungodly salvo of hard-rocking bands out of Puget Sound and into the world--is just taxiing into position. On the Off Ramp stage, a band pounds out deafening, guitar-driven riffs while the audience, some sporting sawed-off-above-the-knee jeans, clunky Doc Marten engineer boots and, on males, extravagant Ted Nugent manes, writhes to the music.

Over gales of amplified guitar, one fan does his best to explain why Seattle has lately emerged as the launching pad for some of the ‘90s’ most promising, and popular, bands. “I guess it’s a decade thing,” he screams. “It has an attitude thing. Attitude and outfits. Everybody has a uniform. Everybody in Seattle owns a black leather jacket.”

Innumerable theories--most about as cogent as that explanation--have been floated in recent months to explain what, for lack of a better cliche, has become known as the Seattle Scene. One thing is certain: Not since San Francisco popped the cork on its incredible musical elixir in the late ‘60s has an American city been so identified as a cradle for cutting-edge rock. Led by surely-you’ve-heard-of-them-by-now Nirvana, whose acerbic anthem, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and multi-platinum album, “Nevermind,” burned a trail up the charts late last year, a herd of Seattle bands, among them Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Alice in Chains, the Posies, War Babies and legendary local heroes Mudhoney, have thundered onto major labels.

On the heels of “Nevermind,” which in January blasted Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” out of the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s weekly album sales survey, no fewer than six Seattle bands have muscled their way onto the pop charts. (“Nevermind” is also a hit in Germany, Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands and Canada.)

Meanwhile, the city’s vast crop of unharvested talent continues to fill clubs and release records on increasingly influential Seattle-based independent record labels Sub Pop, PopLlama, C/Z and others. Seattle is bracing for another onslaught of rubbernecking with the release this summer of journalist-filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s “Singles,” shot on location here. The movie stars Matt Dillon as the singer in a fictitious Seattle band called Citizen Dick, which includes slumming members from Pearl Jam.

If the bands and fans share a bond, it is the aforementioned “attitude thing”: no-frills and self-deprecating, with a heavy dose of the post-punk generation’s fetish for relentless absurdism. When Sub Pop, which signed Nirvana to its first contract, wishes to showcase developing young talent, the event is dubbed not “New Faces” but “Lamefest.” With its twin postmodern icons--the Jetsons-esque Space Needle and an actual working monorail--Seattle serves as the perfect hilarious backdrop for a worldview dense with ironic cross-reference, where the question “What does your band sound like?” elicits a torrent of multiple adjectives calculated to betray a way-cool, pop-culture awareness. “Sex With Sarah,” reads a typical ad in the musicians-wanted section of the Rocket, a Seattle music paper, “are looking for a cyber-genetic, industrial, techno-cowboy, severed from society, emotion seething, ogre-like vocalist-lyricist.”

Seattle is the belated coming-out party not only for one city’s defiantly self-made bands but also for an entire alternative-music movement that has been bestirring itself for the past decade. Its audience is the disenfranchised progeny of the mighty Baby Boom generation. Largely ignored by the media, force-fed a diet of retro-culture, formulaic dance music and the recycled greatest hits of ‘60s warhorses, they spent the ‘80s building their own cultural sandbox in the Baby Boomers’ back yard. Unable to find rock ‘n’ roll to call their own, they invented it. Shunned by major record companies, they turned to tiny independent labels to record it. Locked out of the media, they started a network of local fanzines to promote it. Fed up with the 3-zillionth spin of “Stairway to Heaven” on format-driven radio, they turned to free-form college stations to hear it.

“We’re the guys who read about bands in books,” says the Posies’ Jon Auer. “When ‘Tommy’ came out by the Who, I wasn’t even born. My mom saw Hendrix when she was pregnant with me.”

Following the example of the British punk movement, these bands, from across America, took cryptic, provocative names calculated to discomfit their elders: Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Husker Du, R.E.M., Violent Femmes, Our Daughter’s Wedding, Jane’s Addiction. Some eventually signed with major labels, and a handful even achieved widespread success (notably R.E.M. and the B-52s), though invariably only after their maverick streak had been tamed. But despite false dawns in Athens, Ga., Minneapolis and other cities, the movement never found its locus or the one band to push it, uncompromised, into the mainstream until it relocated to Seattle in the mid-’80s and formed the gene pool that spawned Nirvana. “What happened to Nirvana is essentially unprecedented,” says Daniel House, founder of C/Z Records. “You’ve never had an indie band put out a record on a major and hit so big. I think almost in terms of when the Beatles first hit.” In both cases, he says, “there was suddenly this very different, uncompromising, exciting band.”

Conrad Uno, owner of the PopLlama label, also invokes the B-word. “It is Beatle-ish,” he says. “These kids needed rock ‘n’ roll that they could grab onto. It’s definitely different enough from the status quo to supply that. It’s this era’s ‘Yeah! That’s what I’ve been waiting for.’ ”

In any event, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that in the sound and fury of Nirvana an entire stratum of American and international youth, smirkingly dubbed the New Lost Generation by their parents, finally found its champion. “Thank you, Nirvana,” a student from Everett wrote in the letters column of the Rocket, “for giving a voice to what it means to be a white boy with gonads that work, no job future and unsafe sex and bad drugs everywhere.”

SEATTLE HAS A LONG HISTORY OF spawning world-class rock--from Jimi Hendrix to, more recently, arena rockers Heart and Queensryche. But where Hendrix hit his stride only after hitting the road, the latest bands have found their voice by sticking to their roots. They back each other at multi-band shows at Off Ramp and RKCNDY, the city’s current preeminent clubs, play on each other’s records and interbreed with an abandon that would give an anthropologist nightmares. The isolationism and incestuousness have given Seattle’s bands a glimmer of originality amid a national rock scene choked with MTV-aping clones. “They’re not really influenced by anything other than themselves,” says Jeff Gilbert, a programmer at Seattle radio station KCMU.

The question of why these bands, particularly Nirvana, have struck such a resounding chord has provoked an orgy of entrail-reading in the national press, much to the amusement of local musicians. “Let me tell ya, it’s the rain and the coffee,” snorts Jon Auer, citing a well-traveled factoid that Seattle’s damp climate compels the musicians to practice in sodden basements while scarfing oceans of Starbucks coffee.

Likewise ridiculed is the media-perpetuated myth of a “Seattle Sound” which, when it existed, was nominally typified by the garage-rocking, heavy-metalish “grunge” promulgated by Soundgarden, Tad, defunct legends Green River, and much of the early Sub Pop roster. “The original Seattle sound is pretty well gone,” says Jack Endino, a Seattle-based producer and musician who almost single-handedly minted grunge in the late-’80s.

The grunge outfits have made room for a schizophrenic collection of bands ranging from the shimmering pop harmonies of the Posies to the more conventional hard-rock leanings of Pearl Jam. “Collectively, it’s a combination of roots-oriented pop, punk and metal--very street and very honest,” says Gilbert. Even what constitutes a native Seattle band is blurring as out-of-town hopefuls, lured by the buzz in fanzines and the phenomenal success of Nirvana, relocate to the city in droves. “There’s a faction from Kentucky, Tennessee, Arizona, Montana, a big faction from Denver,” Endino points out. “Even before Nirvana, this place was getting tons of underground hype.”

Even in hindsight, few expected this ad-hoc collection of underachievers to ever make a dent outside the hometown. “One of the treats was that nobody thought anyone would be interested,” says Dawn Anderson, founder of the Seattle music paper Backlash, which folded last year. But the limelight has raised expectations. “Now, moments after you pick the name for your band, you talk about getting signed.”

Adds Daniel House: “It’s going to become more contrived as more and more bands try to outthink public opinion. You’re going to start having more clones, more pretense.” As a sort of perfect fillip to the brouhaha, the Northwest Area Musicians Assn. sponsored a seminar called “How and Why to Prepare a Press Kit.”

Inevitably, the unrelenting hype may be sowing the seeds of the scene’s self-destruction. “There was always a level of self-parody to it,” says one insider. “Now, a lot of people are taking it more seriously than it deserves to be taken.” (Indeed, insufferable song parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic has already weighed in with a spoof of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”)

National record labels, which have rained A & R men on the city for the past two years, are divided on the significance of the scene. “There’s a lot of people in the industry who think that Nirvana is one song,” says Mark Kates, director of alternative music at DGC records, Nirvana’s label. “It’s definitely a phenomenon. I hope it’s a career.”

There’s also concern that the labels, in their frenzy to snag any group with a Seattle return address, will sign marginal bands and expect them to generate Nirvana-level sales. “That’s what will cause the decay,” says Susan Silver, a key figure in the scene’s development who manages Soundgarden and is married to the band’s singer, Chris Cornell. “When bands that are far from ready have an expectation formed around them, it will cave in on itself.”

But not even Nirvana, arguably the most gifted of the Seattle stable, could have prepared for the freight train of fame that slammed into them earlier this year. The band finds itself in the awkward position of being embraced by the mainstream it built its reputation rejecting. After landing on the covers of magazines ranging from Sassy to Rolling Stone (for the latter, singer Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt that read: CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK), the band members have called a halt to interviews. Now, 3 million albums later, Washington Gov. Booth Gardner shamelessly invokes Nirvana’s name in his State of the State address, the organist at the Kingdome plays “Teen Spirit” during halftime and MTV airs a lyrically annotated version of the “Teen Spirit” video, followed by a live telephone Q-and-A with a Valley Girlish viewer named Elisa:

MTV: So you’re a Nirvana fan?

Elisa: Yeah.

MTV: What did you think the lyrics said?

Elisa: OK. Where he says “a mosquito?” Like, we all thought he was saying, I’m a “skato.”

MTV: A skato? What is that?

Elisa: I don’t know.

MTV: He says albino, mosquito, my libido. You know what a libido is, right?

Elisa: No.

MTV: Well . . . you should find out, OK?

Elisa: OK.

It’s an old problem, this wrecks-to-riches cycle, and Nirvana isn’t any closer to solving it than Metallica. “I remember the day they played the Sex Pistols on AM radio in Seattle,” says PopLlama’s Conrad Uno. “That was the end of it. I realized if they play it on the radio, that means they think they can sell it. Ultimately the music business sells it out. What are you going to do if you’re Nirvana? I mean, sorry guys, but what are you gonna do after a couple more records and your life has totally changed because of this? Everyone is slightly altered because it happened so big. And gradually that moves it away from the inspiration for the music and from the 18- and 19-year-olds. And that ends it eventually.”

FOR ALL THE POP-PHENOMENON trappings, Seattle’s bands did not simply gush geyser-like from the Great Northwest to a CD player near you. Even the music of the disenfranchised needs a franchise to get a leg up. And of the dozen or so entrepreneurs of Seattle rock, few have hyped it as resolutely, or effectively, as the partners at Sub Pop.

Much of Seattle’s notoriety can be traced to a story on Mudhoney and the Seattle scene in the March 11, 1989, issue of England’s influential music paper, Melody Maker. “That was the beginning of the hype machine,” says Bruce Pavitt, who runs Sub Pop with Jonathan Poneman. “Melody Maker had this huge spread that said Seattle had the hottest rock scene in the world, basically.”

“What happened,” Poneman explains, “was our European agent had a distributor whose publicist said, ‘If you’re willing to fly this guy over, he’ll do a big spread on you.’ ”

“It was a legitimate story,” Pavitt says, “but there was enough payola in there to make it good and sleazy.”

“Something we respect,” Poneman adds.

Poneman and Pavitt are ensconced in a bar across from their chaotic offices on Seattle’s First Avenue, speculating for the umpteenth time on the phenomenon they helped create. Sub Pop began in the ‘80s as an outgrowth of Pavitt’s fanzine of the same name. Poneman, who had worked as a local disc jockey and promoter, joined the fold in 1987. Sub Pop soon was releasing--and, more important, promoting--record- ings by important local bands such as Mudhoney. Once financially strapped, Sub Pop was dramatically resuscitated by the breakthrough of Nirvana. The terms of releasing the band from its contract with Sub Pop to record for DGC gave the label points on each copy of “Nevermind” sold, a cash payout in the neighborhood of $100,000 and the right to exploit Nirvana songs already recorded. The latter has been a boom for the label: “Bleach,” Nirvana’s first album for Sub Pop, has now sold several hundred thousand copies. In the hand-sewn independent-label milieu, where it’s possible to turn a profit by selling only 30,000 copies of a record, the windfall has fueled a local impression that the partners now have more money than they can count.

“Here’s the thing,” says Poneman. “If Bruce and I were to shut down Sub Pop and just do a pressing-and-distribution deal, lay off our employees, not put out any more records and simply receive our royalty checks every quarter, yes, we would be rich men. But because we have an ongoing capital-intensive operation, we’re plowing a lot of money back in there. We’re doing OK, but rich? Not by any stretch.”

Nevertheless, the first royalty payout from DGC, says Poneman, will “probably be in the high six figures. That’s reasonable for no work.”

For all their lip, Poneman and Pavitt appear to believe sincerely in the alternative music movement, to which they’ve given the sheen of financial legitimacy. “The door should always be open for younger musicians to play, and in the ‘80s that did not exist,” says Pavitt. “As things become more decentralized and there’s more indie labels, there are more opportunities for young people to play in front of their peers.”

“We want our company and our bands to reflect our values,” says Poneman. “I’m not saying they’re all going to do benefits for the rain forest. Some have crude and cruel notions of what life is about. But, dammit, they have the right to say it. That’s what we want to provide.

“There’s this band we’re about to put the second album out on called Seaweed. The members are 19 and 20. And they look at us and go, “No offense guys, but you’re 32 years old. You have no idea what our friends think and feel.’ ”

Idealism, on the other hand, doesn’t sell itself. Says Poneman: “I can hustle pretty good. To be blunt, that’s what it came down to. It was a lot of jawboning. We’ve always been hype masters and stood pretty resolutely behind what we released, knowing in our hearts that some of it was not as good as the other stuff. We got a lot of guff stuff into the marketplace and passed it off as something really new and fashionable. Now I think we have a lot more genuine quality on our label.”

With middle age and financial security encroaching, Poneman is ambivalent about his future on the scene. “I think I only have a couple of more good years left in me, frankly. I’m getting on and my values are changing. Right now, I can walk into a club and pass for being in my 20s and blend into the scenario. But being able to go to clubs night after night and hang out with musicians and understand the Zeitgeist is a passing ability. For the time being I’m enjoying myself.”

WHILE NIRVANA CONQUERS THE world, a corps of up-and-coming rock foot soldiers is doing its best to keep things rumbling on the home front. Nobody knows how many bands Seattle is harboring these days, but with only a handful of clubs and intense competition, most local musicians are clearly paying the rent with something other than art.

Matthew Fox takes telephone orders for concert tickets and books hotel rooms for the Seattle visitors bureau. In an urbane voice he can delineate the finer points of the city’s four-star inns like a born concierge.

It’s thus a bit alarming to watch Fox torch his Chamber of Commerce persona late one night at the Far Side, a club on Seattle’s northeast side. Fox plays guitar in two Seattle bands--Dr. Unknown and Bitter End. Tonight he is bare-chested, sweat sluicing down his back, a black Les Paul riding his hip as he stalks the front of the stage with a malevolent gleam in his eye.

“I sold my own show once,” Fox says proudly of his telephone gig. “I said, ‘Yeah, come on down, I’m playing.’ ” All things considered, Fox has it pretty good. Some musicians spend their days dubbing tape cartridges at--yes, it’s almost too good to be true--Muzak Corp., which has its headquarters in Seattle’s Fremont district. “That’s a job I’d sooner chew off my leg than take,” sniffs Fox.

John Davis, assistant music director at ultra-hip radio station KCMU, supplements the income from his band, the Florist, with a “retail job.” What does he sell? “Kitchenware.” He pauses. “Actually, wearing a necktie and selling kitchenware.” Davis chalks it up to the club grind. “You basically have to play one of the smaller clubs on the north side. You start there and work your way up. You hound the booking agents until they finally put you on.”

Rick Hyde, a 26-year-old bassist, moved to Seattle from Colorado a year ago because “all the music we were getting turned on to in Colorado was out of Seattle.” When not performing as a member of Pillory, the band he formed with a college chum, Hyde sheepishly admits he is “a deli slave--I work in a deli.” Before that, he made T-shirts for Nirvana. “But we couldn’t make as many as they needed,” he says.

Decked out in a black leather jacket emblazoned with his band’s name on the left sleeve, Hyde is holding forth between sets at the Off Ramp one Friday night. Pillory, he shouts over the cheerful strains of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” is “hard-core, more like punk, more like, ah, I don’t know, Jesus Lizard-Halo of Flies kind of stuff.” He shrugs. “It’s hard to describe our music, I guess.”

Hyde says Seattle agrees with him so far. “It’s a cool city. Just the general attitude--you can do whatever you want and find an audience.”

Some longtime fans lately find themselves yearning for the days before the clubs crawled with record company A & R reps and out-of-town bands--back in the mid-’80s, when the “Deep Six” and “Sub Pop 200” compilation records documenting the early Soundgarden and other Seattle legends were released locally. Now, “there’s a certain amount of jealousy,” admits Dawn Anderson, who remembers nights when she was “one of 20 people watching Nirvana.” Says Jeff Gilbert: “A lot of these first fans are getting annoyed: What are you doing coming to see my band? We’re starting to see kids who used to listen to Vanilla Ice. I went to a Pearl Jam concert here, and the crowd was unlike any I’d seen before.”

But for the newly arrived bands, having a ready-made scene to plug into is a far sight better than what many of them came from--no scene at all. And while it’s practically a matter of local pride not to invoke Nirvana’s stupendous success as a reason for carrying on, it is a siren song of sorts.

“Nirvana used to open for our drummer’s band back in ‘87,” reflects Hyde. “It gives you a lot of hope.”

SEATTLE’S LIQUOR LAWS DIVIDE venues for live music into “over 21” and “all ages” clubs. Of the latter, the OK Hotel, tucked next to a freeway overpass on the city’s waterfront, reigns supreme. From Tad to Nirvana, virtually every Seattle band of note has played there. Tonight it is mobbed with a mostly teen-age crowd out to see Treepeople. At the end of the block, a cruiser from the city’s ever-vigilant vice squad monitors the crush outside the door for signs of over-exuberance. Tiny Freeman, the OK’s walrus-mustached doorman--who hands out business cards printed with a photo of his huge, nearly nude likeness and the slogan I’M FUN YOU’RE NOT--is watching, too. Freeman’s job is to discourage the passage of patrons obviously under the influence of over-21 refreshments. “I tell them, ‘You can leave, or you can speak to that nice gentleman in the police car,’ ” he says.

There’s a rumor going around that the OK will be shuttered permanently if tonight’s festivities get out of hand. Before the band takes the stage, the crowd in the “mosh pit”--the stage-front area reserved for the human demolition derby that passes for dancing in alternative-music clubs--is admonished to not push their luck. Specifically, they are to refrain from the custom of passing one of their own to the stage, there to flail randomly while the band plays on, oblivious. Stage diving, it is called, and several hand-lettered signs forbidding it flutter from the proscenium.

Most of which goes out the window when Treepeople tear into “(I’m Gonna) Miss You (When You’re Dead).” The band sounds horribly ragged. Their amplifiers are barely adequate to cover the sellout crowd of 300 or so kids, the singing is off-key, the lyrics are indecipherable mush and the guitars sound out of tune. No matter. The crowd in the mosh pit, where the temperature is pushing 100 degrees, immediately go berserk, alternately pummeling each other and staring hungrily at the band. No one smiles.

To the uninitiated, the mosh pit looks appallingly like the stage front at Altamont just before the Hell’s Angels lost their heads. The moshers whirl and carom off one another, regroup, then bash into each other again. It is a violent, yet curiously passive-aggressive ballet.

The rest of the audience passes the show in various states of attention. Some sit on the floor on the fringes, conducting what appear to be deep conversations, as the music roars around them. A few who apparently slipped through Tiny Freeman’s dragnet slump against the wall, their heads buried in their arms. One fresh-faced girl of 16 or so dances through every song tirelessly, by herself, on the edge of the pit. Near the end, she unself-consciously peels off her T-shirt, revealing a purple brassiere and a tattoo on her right shoulder. One of her girlfriends materializes and pours a glass of water over her.

An hour or so later, Treepeople announce their last song, “Ad Campaign,” play it and start packing. There is no call an for encore.

As the bitter-enders slouch out the door, a smiling young man sidles up and introduces himself. He is Anthony Allen, a 23-year-old transplant from New England who came to Seattle to find his niche in the scene. Allen has worked at a used-record store and “pseudo managed” a local band since hitting town. He says he was drawn to the area by the buzz about the Seattle music scene. “It’s a very talked-about city in the East.”

The nearly deserted club has the inimitable gloom of a barroom after last call. Allen, still grinning, seems not to notice. Perhaps he recognizes he’s in the right place at the right time--just as his counterpart a generation ago discovered late one night, in the Haight, on Rush Street or on King’s Road, the empowering knowledge that you have finally found the place where you and your peers matter.

“It’s the vitality of youth,” says Allen, grinning that indefatigable grin before he heads into the Seattle night. “The party goes on.”