Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  Stone Gossard had joined the band before that show, but he didn’t feel comfortable enough to play it. Stone got on board through Steve and Alex—they all went to high school together. Steve and Alex were the kids that went to punk-rock shows, and Stone hung out with kids that went to metal shows more. But somewhere in there, the scenes converged a little.

  MATT WRIGHT (Gas Huffer singer) One thing I remember about seeing Green River is a lot of times they’d take the stage and the percentage of females in the audience grew exponentially. It was like a bunch of models all of a sudden appeared, as if on cue. I’m exaggerating, but they had some tall, long-haired dudes in their band. They were also kind of the cool band for a lot of people.

  CHRIS HANZSEK (C/Z Records label/Reciprocal Recording studio cofounder; producer) When Green River came into the studio to record, they were all pretty young. I remember Stone Gossard wasn’t in the band initially, but they added him. And when they brought him over and introduced him, I was worried that he was skipping high school to be there. With those demos, they were able to get their deal with Homestead Records, and then they invited me to help produce their Come on Down record.

  BRUCE PAVITT (Sub Pop Records cofounder) I was working at Fallout Records, and I got a phone call from Gerard Cosloy at Homestead, and he asked, “What are the happening bands in Seattle?” I said, “You want to check out the U-Men and Green River.”

  MARK ARM Green River had three offers, believe it or not. We’d played with Fang in Seattle, and Tom Flynn, the guitar player, had a record label called Boner. And we’d also gotten an offer from Enigma somehow, which is kind of baffling to me. I remember the contract from Homestead was like seven pages and the contract from Enigma was like 60. And we were like, “Well, this one is smaller and easier to understand.” And at that time Homestead seemed like the coolest record label on the planet, next to SST. They put out Foetus and Nick Cave and Sonic Youth and Volcano Suns.

  STEVE TURNER My tastes were changing. I was discovering more of the ’60s garage punk. My hair was gettin’ longer and then I shaved my head, got a buzz cut, as an act of rebellion against the Green River thing—right before Jeff wanted to get some band photos taken. So I was kinda being a dick.

  MARK ARM Steve stopped playing with any kind of distortion, and during at least one show, he played sitting down on a chair in passive-aggressive protest.

  STEVE TURNER I didn’t want to go on tour when they wanted to, and I felt like I was kind of holdin’ them back. As soon as I quit, they got Bruce Fairweather in on guitar and they got so much better so quick.

  BRUCE FAIRWEATHER (Green River/Mother Love Bone/Deranged Diction guitarist; Love Battery bassist) I was born in Hawaii and lived there until I was 18. I was interested in going to forestry school, and the University of Montana had a good forestry program. And the catalog they sent me had this area in the quad that looked totally skateable. So I decided, I’m going there!

  The first thing I did when my parents dropped me off at college was find that spot. And that’s when I met Jeff Ament, who was skateboarding there. He had on these shorts with 999 and Sex Pistols and the Germs and Black Flag and stuff, and I was like, Whoa! Who’s that guy? So I started talking to him, and we became really good friends and started Deranged Diction five months later.

  SLIM MOON I saw the first show after Steve Turner quit, and it was much more of a hard-rock set. They did a bunch of Led Zeppelin covers, which Mark Arm kept joking about. I think Steve was the advocate of a sort of punk simplicity, which was against what the other guys in the band wanted, which was bombast. When he left, it was just bombast. The glam influence really came in.

  There were a lot of different moments where you could say, “It’s the birth of grunge,” but I like to mark it as that moment: when Steve Turner left Green River.

  KIM THAYIL (Soundgarden guitarist) In 1981, I cashed out my bank account in Chicago—I had very little money—and Hiro and I loaded up the Datsun B210 with suitcases and threw in our guitars, mandolins, portable amps. I played guitar. Hiro played mandolin; he didn’t play bass yet. And we drove the 2,000 miles to Seattle.

  The people our age in Seattle seemed to be easily five years—in some ways, 10 years—behind Chicago in terms of fashion. A lot of people with mullets and ’70s-style stuff. Those big combs they shove in their rear pockets. People weren’t wearing Levi’s, they were wearing Jessie Jeans or Britannia. We thought, Wait a minute, we’re in America still, and nobody looks the way they do in Chicago or New York or Minnesota. This is weird.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO (Soundgarden/Truly bassist) Seattle was a cowboy town back then. When we got there, people still wore cowboy hats and cowboy boots.

  I was born in Park Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. It was a planned community, with winding streets and a lot of parks. I met Kim when I was a senior in high school; he had already graduated. We both went to this place called Rich Township High School, but we were in a program called ALPS—Alternative Learning Process School. Bruce Pavitt had also gone there. At ALPS, you kind of didn’t have classrooms, you didn’t really get grades. We played a lot of Frisbee.

  CHRIS CORNELL (Soundgarden singer/guitarist; Temple of the Dog singer; solo artist; Susan Silver’s ex-husband) At the time I was growing up, it was the tail end of the baby boom, so there were tons of kids in the neighborhood. Tons of boys, young and old. So there was tons of drugs. The definitive Seattle neighborhood.… I never went to high school. I never really finished eighth grade.… From the time that I started playing drums at 16, I was already out of school.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO The first time I left Park Forest was after high school, when I moved with my friend Stuart Hallerman to Olympia. I had a job, but I got laid off and moved back home.

  KIM THAYIL I was best friends throughout high school with Bruce Pavitt’s middle brother, and his youngest brother was in a band with me called Identity Crisis. In 1981, Hiro and I were both in bands, both had girlfriends, but then our bands broke up, the relationships with our girlfriends ended, and there was no real reason for us to stay. We came out to Seattle for an adventure. Bruce was out here, Stuart was out here. Bruce is sending us records and tapes from bands in Seattle and Olympia that we were really into—the Blackouts, the Beakers.

  MATT DENTINO (the Shemps guitarist) I’ve known Kim Thayil since ’72. We went to an alternative high school in Park Forest together. It was an alternative to the traditional high school, which I got kicked out of because I was too alternative—all I did was play guitar and study Jimi Hendrix.

  In 1980, Reagan got elected and I was more of a left-wing Democrat back then. I said, “I’m outta here, because I’m 20 and this guy’s gonna shave my head and put me in the Marines, and I gotta go fight a war.” The day Reagan was elected, I went to Seattle on a Greyhound bus, ’cause my brother was out there goin’ to med school, to play rock and roll and party, and chase chicks—which I wasn’t very good at, by the way.

  When Kim and Hiro came to Seattle, we eventually hooked up and started hanging out a little bit. All of ’84, I spent building the Shemps. Kim would play bass, and sometimes Hiro would play bass. Sometimes I was the lead guitarist, and I think a few gigs Kim played guitar with us, too. And what we were doin’ was lots of classic rock. And the reason that we did lots of classic rock was, number one, it was easy to learn. And there was lots of old hippie gigs that we could play right away, and I needed to work. I was starving; I was living in Kim’s closet.

  STUART HALLERMAN (Soundgarden soundman; Avast! Recording studio owner/operator) I get a call from Hiro saying, “Guess what? I joined a butt-rock band!” That was the Shemps. I was kinda surprised, because this had nothing to do with his tastes prior to that. In school his nickname was Bean because he was the brains of the school; he played viola and listened to bluegrass music, classical music, some jazz. His entire rock collection consisted of one Grateful Dead record and one ELP record.

  MATT DENTINO I put an ad in The Rocket, saying the Shemps were forming and
we’re a “combination of the Three Stooges and Jimi Hendrix.” Chris Cornell answered the ad, and everything changed.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM (a.k.a. Norman Scott; Skin Yard/Gruntruck/64 Spiders drummer) My dad and I moved to West Seattle when I was nine. In high school, a friend of mine, Eric Garcia, and his buddy you might’ve heard of, Chris Cornell, we’d just get together and jam. At that time Chris was playing drums and I was playing guitar, just doing covers and messing around. He wasn’t singing yet. Chris was pretty quiet, reserved. People took that as some sort of aloof rock star thing later on, but it wasn’t that. He just didn’t really have attitude or ego back then.

  CHRIS CORNELL I went from being a daily drug user at 13 to having bad drug experiences and quitting drugs by the time I was 14 and then not having any friends until the time I was 16. There was about two years where I was more or less agoraphobic and didn’t deal with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, didn’t have any friends at all.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM I remember heading down to Bumbershoot with Eric Garcia and another friend to see George Thorogood play. We were in Chris’s car, and he’s driving, and he’s like, “Guys, you know what? I’m gonna try singing.” He starts singing “Bad to the Bone” at the top of his lungs, and we all just fuckin’ cracked up. Because we were just bullshitting with each other, and he was so serious about it. It sounded pretty good, but we were like, “Yeah, whatever.”

  MATT DENTINO He was 18 years old and he had very short hair, as I recall. He was a cook. And he just blew my backside away when he started singin’, you know? He just was a very mellow, deep-thinking dude all the time. I’m a mouth-runner. I just speak, speak, speak. But he was just kind of sitting there, collecting everything.

  Suddenly I had what I believed was one of the best singers on the planet. The first song I did with Chris was “White Wedding” by Billy Idol. And I was like, “Man! You know, dude, you’re hired.” And he could be Morrison-like, he could blow it out of the water.

  I’ve read stuff like the Shemps was a “cheesy cover band.” But we weren’t doin’, like, Foreigner hits. We were doin’ Jimi Hendrix and Doors and Allman Brothers and good blues.

  KIM THAYIL The Shemps was a bunch of nonsense. And I don’t mean nonsense in an endearing way, but nonsense, like nothing. It has nothing to do with the lineage of the Seattle scene. It was influenced by nothing in the Seattle scene and influenced nothing in the Seattle scene. The only claim it has to the Seattle scene was that I played in the band and Hiro played in the band. I never thought I was even in the band—I thought I was helping out my friend, who had some gigs lined up. And I forgot what might be Matt’s biggest claim to fame: He introduced Chris to me.

  MARK ARM Kim was in my philosophy class at the University of Washington. He would always come into class five or 10 minutes late, and then proceed to monopolize the class. He would just take the class on tangents. You could almost see the professor roll his eyes every time Kim came in. Kim came up to me at a TSOL show at the Showbox and was like, “Hey, I think you’re in my philosophy class,” and we struck up a friendship. He had long hair and a scrub mustache. He looked like a hesher—I wouldn’t have guessed for a minute that he was into punk rock.

  I saw them before they were Soundgarden. That cover band. I don’t even know exactly what songs they played, but my impression of it was that whatever they played, Chris sounded exactly like the singer of the original song. If they did a Doors song, he sounded exactly like Jim Morrison. It was like, “Wow, this kid can really sing.”

  MATT DENTINO Chris moved in with Hiro, and upstairs was an A-frame, and we’d jam up there. Hiro was also in a band called the Altered, where they did a lot of original stuff, and it was New Wavy and jangly. He wanted me to not play with distortion and not play lead—he saw what I was doing as old-school, dinosaur. Well, I might as well cut off my testicles!

  But being broke and not wanting to lose this thing, I complied. We played till the end of the year, and I was just hatin’ life, and doin’ a lot of drugs—almost died. And finally, I was so hurt I cried out to God. And his name is Jesus. I got touched by God and I’m like, I need to get out of here. And I told those guys, “I’ve gotta go. I’m leavin’ you for Jesus, so to speak.”

  HIRO YAMAMOTO Chris was living with me, so me and Chris would play together, just us two, bass and drums. That was right around the time Kim was in his senior year of college. Me and Kim, we would sit around and drink beer and talk all night. Chris would do it a little bit, but then he’d just head off into his room and disappear.

  KIM THAYIL So Hiro’s playing with Chris. They audition and jam with various guitarists. Hiro called me up and asked me to come by and jam. The first time we jammed, we wrote three songs. The very next day, we wrote two more songs. Everyone was just glowing, smiling ear to ear. We were like, “This is the coolest experience any of us has had.” It was so natural and spontaneous. Then Hiro kept calling me, “Dude, did you have fun jamming?” I was like, “Yes, that’s better than any band I’ve been in before! It was so natural.”

  “Well, don’t you want to come back and play?” “Dude, I got a test. I have to see my girlfriend this weekend. I’m DJing Thursday nights. I’m working Monday and Saturday.…” They were getting ready to think about other options, but I came back and played, and more material came out. It was just too jaw-dropping. Things went so easily.

  MATT DENTINO About three months later, Chris called me: “Dude, we’re goin’ on. Come to our first show.” So I played hooky from church, and I went to their first gig. Lo and behold, Kim’s using distortion, playing lead, and sounds like Zeppelin. I’m like, Hey, wait a minute, stop that! I thought we weren’t supposed to be doin’ this. Yet that’s exactly what made them powerful.

  KIM THAYIL The name Soundgarden was evocative, and it was among a list of names we were thinking of. A Sound Garden was a three-word name for a metal sound-sculpture on a beach here in Seattle. We derived the name from there, but we never were paying homage to the sculpture, never. Just liked the word garden as an element in a name. It’s visually evocative and it’s not overtly metal or punk or anything. It doesn’t type us. A year later, we thought maybe we should change Soundgarden to Sungarden or Stonegarden, but then Soundgarden just kind of stuck.

  STUART HALLERMAN There weren’t too many other bands with a makeup like Soundgarden’s. Hiro’s a Japanese guy; Kim’s an Indian guy. The transition for the three of us, goin’ from a very mixed Chicago area to the very whitewashed Northwest, was kinda weird. It took me years to kinda deal with, Is this a real city? Where are the other people?

  HIRO YAMAMOTO Race is very pivotal when you’re young and trying to figure out, Who am I? How do I fit into this world? Kim and I would talk about that a lot. The rock scene was pretty much all white. There were a couple of black guys who played, but they were few and far between.

  KEVIN WHITWORTH (Love Battery guitarist) I consider myself African-American, but I’m just one of your first multiculti babies—now everyone’s got one. Basically black, but Peruvian and Cherokee Indian and a bit of German, I guess. I don’t really think in terms of race, mostly because I grew up in a middle- to upper-class black family and we had the biggest house in our town in New Hampshire. I’ve always been treated like a white person, basically.

  But there was one night that made me feel a little bit weird; it might’ve been when Love Battery played one of those packaged shows—a “nine for the ’90s” show—at the Paramount. The Paramount’s pretty big, and out of all those people I was the only one, besides maybe some janitor in the back (laughs), who was somebody of color. It was something I never revisited again, because that’s just the way it is. I do recall that we did have a black fan who followed us to a couple of shows. I kept wondering, Is this for real? Does this guy really like us? Even I couldn’t believe it.

  SUSAN SILVER I met Chris at the end of ’85 at a Halloween party, at an artist studio in Belltown, and I was out on the town that night with my dear friend Chuck, a.k.a. Upchuck f
rom the Fags. And Chuck dressed me up as him in drag—he was in drag most of the time—so I had a long blond fright wig and a kimono and pancake makeup.

  Soundgarden was playing the party, as a three-piece, with Chris on drums and vocals. They were amazing. I’d worked with Ben McMillan in a vintage clothing store in town called Tootsie’s. And Chris came in to talk to him, and the story that Chris told me is that I caught his eye. So he kept coming in and trying to get my attention, but I paid him no mind. Partly because I had just broken up with Gordon earlier that year, so I was in a pretty dark space.

  After the band played, Chris came up to me and recognized me, which he got huge points for because I was in full drag-queen regalia. He said the band were trying to get a show in Vancouver, so I told him that I was going up there to a show in the next week, and if he wanted to meet, I would take a tape for them.

  So we met, and he gave me that tape, and we saw each other a week later at the Vogue. After that, we went to a 24-hour diner. We tried to go back to my house, but I’d lost my keys. We made out for a while, and then he took me to my mom’s in West Seattle, and it was just on from there. At the time, it was healing for me.

  SCOTT SUNDQUIST (Soundgarden drummer) I worked as a carpenter at a seafood restaurant in Ballard called Ray’s Boathouse, building tables for them and repairing things. That’s where I met Chris Cornell. He was a line cook, a teenager—maybe 19. When I met him, I was about 31. Chris and I hit it off because we’re both sort of loners.