Paramount Theatre

This guide to the Paramount Theatre in Seattle returns to Halloween night, nineteen ninety-one, when two friends of a suddenly famous local singer walked onstage in plain white T-shirts marked Boy and Girl. The band was Nirvana, five weeks after Nevermind's release forced promoters to move the sold-out show here from the smaller Moore Theatre. A record-label crew spent about two hundred fifty thousand dollars filming the set on sixteen millimeter film, unsettling a photographer who had followed the band since its earliest days. It traces the Paramount itself back to nineteen twenty-eight, when it opened as a silent-film movie palace beneath the gilded ceiling still overhead.