by Mark Yarm
Before I joined, I saw Soundgarden open for Hüsker Dü at an all-ages place called Gorilla Gardens. Because Chris was playing drums and singing, his energy was really confined. That had something to do with them pushing him forward to become more of a front man and to have a drummer, which became me.
CHRIS CORNELL The beginning of me thinking maybe I should get out there in front of the drums was seeing Matt [Cameron] play in the band Feedback. They were at a club where the back of the stage was actually the venue’s storefront, and I was standing outside on the sidewalk, watching Matt play. I’d never met Matt, but I knew who he was. Other than seeing Elvin Jones on film, this hadn’t happened to me before, where I’m watching what he’s doing and I’m hearing what it sounds like and I couldn’t really make the connection. And I thought, Oh, that’s what a good drummer is supposed to play like. Maybe my talent lies elsewhere.
TOMIE O’NEIL (soundman; RKCNDY club co-owner/comanager) There were two rooms in the Gorilla Gardens, and I did sound in both. I was there the night Cornell came out from behind the drums and said, “I’m the singer now.” That was amazing.
KERRI HARROP Gorilla Gardens was this shitty old all-ages place down in Chinatown, so it always seemed really sketchy to go there. And you would just see these insane bills of bands—I saw Hüsker Dü there, I saw the Melvins there. Gorilla Gardens is also the first place I ever saw people having sex in public. It was that kind of place.
MICHELLE AHERN (concertgoer; Robert Scott Crane’s ex-wife) Andy Wood took me to my first punk-rock show, at the Gorilla Gardens. My girlfriends and I went with Andy and Regan and this guy Chewy from the Accüsed. It was Andy’s 18th birthday. I sort of ended up being his date. I don’t know what started it, but at the show a huge fight broke out between the rockers and skinheads. Somebody picked Andy up by his white fur coat and flung him into a chain-link fence. We jumped into a cab and sped off into the night. I ended up spending the night with Andy at his house. I guess you could say I was his 18th-birthday present. (Laughs.)
TOM NIEMEYER I think the mix of punk and metal was single-handedly because of Gorilla Gardens. It was an old theater that had two stages, a metal side and a punk or alternative side. So in the lobby, these people listening to very metal stuff had to be mixed in with people being very punk rock. And they had to use the same bathrooms. That’s what made the crossover happen. Right, at the urinals! Exactly!
SLIM MOON It would be lovely to make a big, dramatic punks versus rockers thing out of it, but it was a punk club. It always had some hard-rock shows because the guy who ran Gorilla Gardens, Tony Chu, wanted to make money any way he could.
TOM NIEMEYER Sometimes we would get paid at the Gorilla Gardens, sometimes we wouldn’t. “There’s a shitload of people here, Tony, where’d the money go?”
“Oh, you know, blah blah blah … the electric bill.”
“For the night? Three hundred dollars for the night? For electricity? Jesus! I know we got big amps, but my God!”
ART CHANTRY (The Rocket newspaper art director; Sub Pop Records freelancer; album/poster designer) There was one famous show at Gorilla Gardens—I think it was a Red Rockers show, some people say it was a Butthole Surfers show. The fire department came in and tried to close it down because they didn’t have enough fire exits. Everybody was getting really pissed off, so somebody took a chain saw and literally cut a hole in the wall to the alley outside, and the shit went back on. They had a fire exit now, didn’t they?
TOMIE O’NEIL There were a bunch of legendary shows there. Guns N’ Roses played in the small room. That night, we’re also havin’ a great Violent Femmes show—maybe 400 or 500 people in there. And my friends were like, “Dude, you gotta go in the other room, there’s this metal band that’s just fuckin’ outta hand—and Duff’s in it.” Duff had lived in Seattle and went, “Fuck you guys, I’m movin’ to L.A. and I’m gonna be the hugest fuckin’ rock star!” And I remember walking in the other room and goin’, “Man, these guys are fuckin’ great!”
DUFF MCKAGAN (bassist for Los Angeles’s Guns N’ Roses; played various instruments in Fastbacks, the Fartz, the Living, 10 Minute Warning, the Vains, many more) We were horrible. We had a car with a trailer, which broke down in Bakersfield—that’s a long way from Seattle. So we hitchhiked with our guitars and used the Fastbacks’ gear. But it was great for me coming back to Seattle. That was our first real gig. Well, I think we played a gig the night before we left, at Madame Wong’s East or something, to three people. In Seattle, we played to 12. There’s been thousands that said they were at that gig, but actually there were 12, and four of them were the Fastbacks.
TOM NIEMEYER When the Gorilla Gardens building was no more, Tony Chu opened another Gorilla Gardens, but it wasn’t the same—it was just one room, over in another spot across town. There were some famous clashes with police that happened there that were of note. The big snowy, midwinter Circle Jerks riot with the cops. The Accüsed were supposed to play that show. The cops showed up before anyone played because there was no permit to have a show there. There were a good amount of people who had literally walked through the snow for miles to get to this thing, so people were pissed off. Some skater-punk kids got the idea to hurl some nearby loose bricks at the cop cars. I left, and it got ugly—as I was walkin’ up the hill, I remember seein’ cop cars startin’ to catch fire and shit like that. (Laughs.) It was pretty epic.
Then parents started sayin’, “We don’t want our kids at these things.” I think that led to the Teen Dance Ordinance. It made all-ages shows impossible to get—you had to have like a million-dollar insurance bond to allow kids to see live music, period. Unbelievably fucked, you know? So we had to play bars and stuff just to fuckin’ survive here in town. It sucked.
KRISHA AUGEROT (Kelly Curtis’s assistant; Green Apple Quick Step comanager) When I was probably 14, I got into going to the Monastery downtown, which was a gay nightclub that ended up soliciting kids on the Ave and on Broadway and giving them free passes. I’d go there with Stone Gossard and Regan Hagar. We’d stay there all night long and then go hang out downtown in the morning and have coffee. Basically, it housed a lot of hardcore, homeless street kids. It was just a lot of crazy shit going on with minors and drugs. It was like the ultimate bad place for children to go if they were out. I think parents and the city decided that was not a good option for kids and created the Teen Dance Ordinance to shut it down.
MARK ARM Of course, I was totally against the Teen Dance Ordinance; it made it impossible for legit all-ages shows to happen. This may not be the most popular thing to say, but there was some good in it, because we had to go looking for different kind of venues, mostly bars. So we found places like the Ditto Tavern, which was a tiny place on Fifth Avenue, and we got the Vogue to let us play on Tuesday and Wednesday nights—they wouldn’t even have bands on the weekends because they made more money off of DJs playing New Wave dance tunes.
It also drove things into more underground spaces, like house parties. And when Seattle promoters wanted to do bigger all-ages shows, they would have to go out of town. There was Natasha’s in Bremerton, and the Crescent Ballroom in Tacoma, where we played a great show with Redd Kross.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER Green River opened for Redd Kross in Tacoma, along with Soundgarden and Malfunkshun. And a label person was coming up to see us play. Soundgarden played first, and we found out after the show that Susan Silver had snuck them out of the building during our set, so whoever the A&R person was didn’t see us play. She did what a manager would do, and got them out of the building. Back then, they weren’t signing bands left and right. Jeff was furious with Susan for a long time about that.
It was a really awesome show, too, so we were totally bummed out. Mark had on his silver pants and the black negligee that he used to wear. He might’ve been on drugs that night.
MARK ARM I was out of my mind on MDA that show and thought it would be a really great idea to climb to the top of the P.A. and, from there, jump onto a fluorescent light
that was hanging by two chains from the ceiling and try to swing on it like it was a kid’s swing.
TOMIE O’NEIL Mark Arm, wantin’ to do something crazy there, climbs up on top of the P.A. It was a pretty tall building, and they had four-foot fluorescent lights hanging on chains down from the ceiling. With the mic in his hand, he jumps on top of that thing like a swing, and the minute he hit it, it pulled down about six to eight inches, and we thought, He’s done. It looked like that thing was gonna come down. He’s like 15 feet off the ground, and he fuckin’ sang a verse up there.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER Mark was up there. His head was 20 feet in the air. He was swinging and he was able to jump—he hit the stage and rolled with the microphone. It was pretty cool. I fell to my knees and split my pants open, and I didn’t have underwear on. I think I was more concerned about that. I was like, “Whoops!” That was a fun show.
JACK ENDINO I was born in Connecticut. Lived in a town called Salisbury. Moved to Bainbridge when I was 17, that was in the ’70s. I had two half-brothers who were much older than I am, because they were from my mother’s previous marriage. Effectively, I was an only child.
Ended up working at the naval shipyard in Bremerton for two and a half years. Civilian electrical engineer. It was a pretty soul-destroying job. Walked out of that job in 1983, and resolved that I was going to do something else with my life. Specifically, something with music. And that was the last day job I ever had.
I played the drums a little bit, I played a little bit of guitar. After I left the navy yard, I rented a single-wide mobile home at a place called Tiger Lake, which is out in Belfair, Washington—middle of nowhere. Set up my drums, my four-track recording machine, some amps and speakers, some guitars, and spent the winter of ’83 teaching myself how to record, using myself as the guinea pig.
The ensuing five years of my life played out just as I had imagined: moved to Seattle, joined a band, started working in a recording studio. It all came to pass. I visualized it quite strongly.
DANIEL HOUSE My first band was Death of Marat, which I affectionately refer to as the worst band in Seattle. Not too long after, there was a three-piece band called Bam Bam, and I remember being really impressed by their drummer, a guy named Matt Cameron.
MATT CAMERON (Skin Yard/Soundgarden/Temple of the Dog/Pearl Jam/Hater drummer) I grew up in San Diego, and I started drumming when I was about nine years old. I started playing in rock bands when I was about 13, 14, just with the neighborhood kids. When I was 14, my neighbor John De Bello did this low-budget film that became a cult classic, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and he had me sing the song “Puberty Love” that killed the tomatoes at the end of the movie—my voice was so horrible that it just vaporized them.
I moved to Seattle in 1983 with a friend of mine. I was 19 at the time and looking for a new adventure, and boy, did I ever find it.
DANIEL HOUSE Matt didn’t stay very long with Bam Bam, but somehow I managed to find him. The guitar player was a guy named Tom Herring, who went by the moniker Nerm—I have no idea why. Together we created Feedback, which was a very cerebral, very mannered prog-rock instrumental three-piece.
For a lot of that year I was actually in both Feedback and 10 Minute Warning, which is largely known as the band that Duff McKagan was in before he moved to L.A. When Duff quit, so did their bass player, so I joined playing bass.
JOHN CONTE (the Living/the Blunt Objects singer) Duff was the youngest of like eight in a Catholic family where every person is musical. He was the type of guy that you could shut in the room with a new instrument, and within 15 minutes he would’ve learned a song and come out and played it for you. Everywhere you went people would just come up to him because they knew his brothers and sisters, and he always had tons and tons of girls. I mean, just flocking to him, just to be around him.
DUFF MCKAGAN When I was 14, a friend of mine who was a drummer and I formed a band with Chris Utting called the Vains—it was my first punk-rock band. My first gig ever was opening up for Black Flag at the Washington Hall in ’79. Later, the Fastbacks asked me to play drums because Kurt Bloch was initially playing the drums and he’s really a guitar player; Kim Warnick became my musical mentor. By ’82, I was playing drums with the Fartz, which was a hardcore band. I was in a million bands and really having fun, starting to tour down the West Coast and play Vancouver all the time. I was writing music with Paul Solger of the Fartz, and these songs were really dirgy and slow and weird and long. We got Greg Gilmore to come in and play drums and we got a different singer, Steve Verwolf, and that was 10 Minute Warning.
BRUCE PAVITT When I first moved to Seattle, I got a job in a yuppie restaurant called the Lake Union Cafe, working as a prep cook, and Duff was working as a baker’s assistant. I’d be chopping carrots, and he’d be next to me putting pecans on cakes. I very distinctly remember him saying, “I’m gonna move to L.A. and try to have a career as a musician.” It was indicative of just how impossible it was to make music a career in Seattle.
RICK FRIEL (Shadow singer/bassist) Duff and Mike McCready were really good friends. Mike, my brother Chris, and I were hanging out at my parents’ house, and Duff came by with this guy named Chris Utting, who went by Criss Crass, and Duff had his SG guitar over his shoulder. He was like, “I’m moving to L.A., and I wanted to say good-bye to you.” And we’re like, “No way! That’s so cool.” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m gonna go for it. I’m gonna drive down there and live in my car if I have to.” We were speechless. Somebody’s actually doing something.
DUFF MCKAGAN I’ve heard people quote me as saying, “I’m gonna move to L.A. and become a rock star.” Then they add, “And he did.” Everybody says they knew me in 1984, when they actually didn’t. It wasn’t any of that. I wanted to be a musician, and the people I was playing with in Seattle, everybody was doing heroin, and I wasn’t. Heroin decimated 10 Minute Warning. A friend of mine who was strung out said, “Man, if you don’t get out now, it’s going to pass you by. You’re the guy, you’re our hope.”
JOHN CONTE Duff was a no-drug guy. Just beer and cigarettes or booze and cigarettes. And the Living even had an antidrug song called “No Thanks,” which he wrote. For a lot of us, when he gets introduced to the hardcore drug scene down in L.A., it was sort of like, Geez, Duff. Someone really worked on you. That was too bad.
DUFF MCKAGAN Becoming a famous rock guy was never really my intention; I wanted to be in a band that felt amazing and go tour, because that’s what I do. It was between going to New York and L.A., and I had this old piece-of-shit car, and I knew it wouldn’t make it to New York.
DANIEL HOUSE After 10 Minute Warning finally disintegrated, the drummer, Greg Gilmore, moved down to L.A. and moved in with Duff. And from what I understand, Greg actually had the opportunity to join Guns N’ Roses, but passed.
GREG GILMORE (Mother Love Bone/10 Minute Warning/the Living drummer) I had nothing else going on at that time, and Duff came to me one day and said, “We gotta get outta here.”
We lived right in the middle of Hollywood, right behind the Chinese Theatre, and we were real close to the Musicians Institute. You’d see these guys walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard on their way to and from school with their guitars on, just playing because they are so dedicated to making it. They are fully regaled, fully groomed hair dudes. You never know when you’re going to be discovered. It could be standing right here on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, so be ready.
KURT BLOCH One day I got a call from Duff in L.A. He’s like, “You should come down here and play with my new band. We need a guitar player, and there’s a Marshall stack here waiting for you.” The band was Guns N’ Roses, and they didn’t have a lead guitar player. I was like, “Ah, I don’t know if I want to go down to Los Angeles. I’d have to quit my job.” And he was like, “Come on, man, it’ll be great!” I could’ve gone down there and played with them. Whether I would’ve got the job or not, who knows?
GREG GILMORE We met Slash and Steven Adler through an ad in The R
ecycler. Slash and I, just the two of us, went and jammed one evening, and that was cool. But by that time I was not really digging it. Those guys all drank quite a bit, and I did not really. I couldn’t hang. But the Guns N’ Roses that we all came to know was two years later. All those wild tales of debauchery and excess weren’t happening yet.
I wasn’t asked to join Guns N’ Roses. Not explicitly, anyway. I remember being there when they were brainstorming about vocalists and Slash brings up his buddy Axl.
But that’s the same time that I was already winding down there. There was just a lot of emphasis on the business of making it. Not that I had a problem with that. I just didn’t really get it. I came back up to Seattle for the holidays, and I decided that was it for me.
JACK ENDINO As soon as I moved back to Seattle, there was my friend Tom Herring, jamming with Daniel and Matt. Their band was kind of falling apart. I played Daniel some solo recordings that I’d done out by the lake, and he liked those. He said to me, “Do you want to join Feedback?” But then he decided, “No, I think Feedback is over with, let’s just start a band with you.” So I ended up inheriting Tom’s rhythm section.
DANIEL HOUSE We knew we wanted a singer, and we had no idea who that singer was going to be. We didn’t have a name. And we started playing house parties and the basements of various places, instrumentally. We played two or three parties where we had people just grab a mic and wing it. And our stuff was not easy to sing to. It wasn’t three-chord rock, and we played a lot with time signatures and we did a lot of stuff with counterpoint. We were a little too arty to really fit in with the whole grunge scene, and yet way too heavy to really fit in comfortably with a lot of the art-rock bands.