Love Battery, Truly, and Rusty Willoughby play the Columbia City Theater on Friday, November 23. $6 advance, $8 at the door. Show at 9pm.

Back in the 1990s, while the media was busy straitjacketing this town in frayed flannel and embracing the arena-ready yarl, a slew of great bands dwelt in the periphery. Not all of them fit neatly into the Grunge pigeonhole, but they accumulated loyal followings, bashing away in local clubs and in some cases even garnering major label attention before imploding or getting dumped by those same attention-deficient majors.

Friday sees three outfits from that era resurface at Columbia City Theater. For Seattleites in the right age bracket, it’ll provide a serious nostalgia trip. For everyone else, it’ll provide a window into how much great rock and roll fell through the cracks during those halcyon days.

The night’s headliners, Love Battery, stood near the top of the heap at Sub Pop during the label’s formative years. Lead singer/guitarist Ron Nine’s and guitarist Kevin Whitworth’s dueling string work favored delay, echo, and trippy flourishes as much as overdriven volume, and that psychedelic bent set them apart from their peers. But like a lot of great bands at the time, Love Battery wasn’t as easily-marketable to a fickle public as Pearl Jam (or Nirvana, for that matter), and in the pre-internet days that meant the kiss of death despite attention from a major label (in this case, PolyGram Records subsidiary Atlas).

History lessons and bad luck aside, though, at least the music still rules. To these ears, Love Battery’s sophomore full-length (1992’s Dayglo), stands as one of Seattle’s great rock records, the best amalgamation of psyllabicin-marinated psychedelic rock and Stooges-style punk this side of the mighty Swervedriver. That chemistry reputedly still courses through LB’s live shows, and with a tassel of reportedly-great new material stockpiled, their set should be pretty exciting.

Like Love Battery, power trio Truly cut their teeth at Sub Pop in the early 1990s before graduating to Capitol Records for their 1995 full-length, Fast Stories…from Kid Coma. And with a pedigree that included ex-Soundgarden bassist Hiro Yamamoto and former Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel, stardom seemed inevitable.

But Truly delivered a record that baffled their major label benefactors. The band gave the grunge era its closest equivalent to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, not so much in actual sound as in spirit: Kid Coma‘s dark, artful, and drug-hazed hard rock fearlessly let its audience, y’know, think between bong hits and headbanging.

Yamamoto and Pickerel formed a rhythm section of boundless force, and lead singer/guitarist Robert Roth knew his way around a seismic riff. But the album’s songs often stretched well past the five-minute mark, and Roth’s elliptical lyrics served up abstract poetry instead of shout-along anthems. Capitol, impatient for another “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Black Hole Sun,” dropped Truly like the proverbial hot potato. The band put out one more great album (the 1997 indie release, Feeling You Up) and a 2000 rarities compilation, Twilight Curtains, before folding. Yamamoto, holder of a Physical Chemistry Masters’ at WWU, dropped out of music while Roth and Pickerel embarked on solo musical careers.

You can still hunt down the Kid Coma CD on Amazon, but it’s hard to hear most of it, outside of actually buying one of those copies online: The record’s out-of-print status and  Capitol/EMI’s tight-fisted grip on it have turned it into the Grunge Era’s Great Lost Classic. You can’t hear audio samples on Amazon, Ebay, or AllMusic.com, most YouTube fan-uploads of the tracks have been squashed by EMI , and it’s unavailable on iTunes (just reissue it already, Greedheads). The notion of hearing some of those tracks at this rare Truly live gig makes for a great incentive to catch their middle slot Friday night.

And not to sound like a broken record (or a glitchy digital audio sample on repeat), but get there early: Black Friday at the CCT opens up with a set by Rusty Willoughby, one of this town’s great rock songwriters. I won’t fill up too much more air about Willoughby’s career (go to my 2010 interview with him for a more detailed picture), but his set should be unmissable. Willoughby’s equally at home with haunting acoustic folk, Beatles-influenced paisley rock, and sucker-punch power-pop, so it’s anybody’s guess as to which iteration will warm up the crowd. One thing’s certain, though: Like the acts he’s preceding, it’ll likely sound damned good.