Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  JAMES BURDYSHAW Tom Price was lecturing us the next day, in a fatherly way: “Now what was it that made you think it would be cool to take acid right before the show?”

  TOM PRICE We’d wanted Hiro to play bass for the U-Men, but at that point he couldn’t do it. So we got Tom Hazelmyer, a friend of ours stationed out here in the Marines.

  TOM HAZELMYER I think there was one other guy on the same base who was into punk-rock stuff. It was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I started Amphetamine Reptile in the barracks—the whole label fit in an ammo crate that I put under the bed. By the time I took up with the U-Men, they had honed it down to just rock action, gettin’ away from the post-punk kind of theatric thing they had been doin’. I played three awesome shows with those guys, but figured out pretty quickly that me bein’ in the service was pretty restrictive as far as practicing or hitting the road.

  TOM PRICE And then we got Tony Ransom on bass. Like our first bass player, he was a refugee from Alaska. He was younger than the rest of us and sort of a Sid Vicious kind of guy.

  TONY RANSOM (a.k.a. Tone Deaf; U-Men bassist) I was 18 when I joined the band in July of ’87; the rest of the U-Men were a good seven or eight years older than me. Unfortunately, they were already on their downward trajectory.

  CHARLIE RYAN Tom wanted to play faster stuff. Sometimes I wish I had more patience and let Tom do what he wanted at that point, and let the band evolve more. John and I had different ideas of what we wanted to do musically; we went on to do the Crows, which was slower, boozy, bluesy, creepy kind of stuff.

  TONY RANSOM The last time the band performed live was Halloween 1988, at somebody’s loft in Pioneer Square. John’s girlfriend, Val, had made these superhero costumes for us. We got through the first three songs fine, but somebody’s guitar string broke and in the time it took to replace the string and get back in tune and start the next song, the MD 20/20 we’d been drinking really started to have an effect. It really hit John, because at some point during the break, he fell backwards into the drums. And he just laid there.

  JOHN BIGLEY The U-Men got together and did it and it happened and it was over and then you start getting told you’re a “bridge builder” and a “gate opener.” It’s great. I’d seen press stuff saying that here and there, and back in the day, I’d be out getting tea and: “Hey, all right, Mr. Grunge Blueprint!” That’s better than a lot of aspects of the music deal that other people experienced. I’m happy with that.

  DAN PETERS Mudhoney’s first show was at the Vogue, opening for Das Damen. The scene was pretty small back then, so when the dudes from Green River and Melvins are forming a new band, people are going to come and check it out. I remember it being a sloppy, drunk affair.

  STEVE MANNING (later Sub Pop Records publicist) I went specifically to see Das Damen, who were from New Jersey. I didn’t know who Mudhoney was; I didn’t know who Mark Arm was. But when I saw Mudhoney, everything shifted for me. There was something about them that made me feel, This is the band that I’ve always wanted to see or hear. All three—Steve, Mark, and Matt—were really flying, launching themselves around the stage. They were unhinged.

  I had a man crush on Mark Arm. He was the coolest rock guy and had a gorgeous girlfriend at the time. I wanted to be friends with him so bad. I would see him play and afterwards tell him, “Good show,” and I’d be sweating, my heart would be racing.

  BOB WHITTAKER (Mudhoney manager) Steve Turner gave me their first single downtown one night. When I got home, it was late and my girlfriend was asleep and I put my headphones on and put it on the turntable, and I just sat there on my knees listening to “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” over and over again. It just blew my socks off. It had so much texture to it and felt kind of tossed off, but beautiful. The other song, “Touch Me I’m Sick,” was neat, too, but it didn’t really strike me. Maybe “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” was too dark, because it was “Touch Me I’m Sick” that struck the chord nationally and internationally.

  MARK ARM I have no idea where the phrase “Touch me I’m sick” came from. I know I thought it was funny. It was like, “I came up with a phrase; now I gotta build a song around it.” When we recorded that first single, in my mind “Sweet Young Thing” was the A-side, though we didn’t put A or B on either side.

  BRUCE PAVITT When “Touch Me I’m Sick” came out and got such an incredible response, that was a magic moment where Jack Endino really established himself as a producer. The song was funny and timely. I think there was a lot of energy around the AIDS epidemic, and in a way that song kind of touched on that, but over and above that it sounded very Stooges-inspired. It was punk without sounding like punk rock from that era. It didn’t sound like Black Flag.

  MARK ARM If it was a song about AIDS, I think I would have said something about AIDS in there. It’s about a creepy character, a jerk. It’s summed up in the first two lines of the song.

  KURT BLOCH “Touch Me I’m Sick” is a perfect single. Great song, it’s super-funny, you can play it over and over and over again. That, along with Nirvana’s “Love Buzz” single, pretty much encapsulated what grunge was all about.

  KURT DANIELSON Bundle of Hiss and Mudhoney coexisted for about six months or a year. Then Bundle of Hiss fell apart. Our guitarist, Jamie, made this announcement out of the blue one night: He’d decided to get married and go to grad school back at Syracuse. Then Dan said, “Well, I’m playing in Mudhoney already, so why don’t we break up the band?” And then he suggested, “Why don’t you and Tad just play together, Kurt?” Because Tad had already started recording the first single for Sub Pop anyway. And so TAD became sort of a partnership between me and Tad.

  Sub Pop was gonna put out a Bundle of Hiss record, but when we broke up they scrapped that idea and just put it all behind TAD. Pavitt, being the impresario that he is, felt that he could market the guy very easily. He could see that Tad was a born ham and loved the limelight.

  BRUCE FAIRWEATHER My favorite Tad story that I love telling is when Mudhoney was playing a show at the Motor Sports Garage. My wife and I were sitting on top of Mudhoney’s cooler onstage, behind the P.A. Mudhoney are playing, and all of the sudden, I see this shadow go by me, and I look up, and it was Tad. And this is when he was in top form, man—he was probably 400-and-something pounds. He was just running, and he dives into the audience. He took out 20 people. Everyone gets up, and they’re just going, “Holy crap!” It was amazing that nobody got killed.

  KURT DANIELSON Jonathan said, “You guys need to get a drummer and another guitar player so you can record and hit the road.” So I got hold of Gary Thorstensen, who used to play guitar in a band with Jonathan called the Treeclimbers. Tad knew Steve Wied, because H-Hour had played some shows with Steve’s former band, Death and Taxes. Both these guys came down to practice, and it clicked, so we said, “We’re going into the studio in two weeks. And then we got a whole bunch of shows coming up, so we gotta get ready for those, too.” And they just looked at us like, What? Because in those days, usually it took forever to get your first gig and then forever to get the record out, and even then nothing ever happened. But here everything was set up and ready to go, and boom boom boom, it went.

  GARRETT SHAVLIK (drummer for Denver’s the Fluid; Lilly Milic’s husband) We were from Denver, and our first shows in Seattle were probably fall of ’88. We get into town and we visit the Sub Pop office, and Bruce and Jonathan and Daniel House and Charles Peterson were the only guys who were hanging out. We get an offer immediately. They felt like kindred spirits.

  So we play the Vogue—I think we played with TAD that night—and we didn’t know what to expect. “We’re here, we got a label, but do you think anybody will be at the show?” We walk in, and the guy that owns the Vogue, his name is Monny. He was a badass. Monny dressed like a dominatrix, but sexier—not so hardcore-leather-prostitute—and he’s burlier than shit, like he could snap your fuckin’ neck. So we’re loading in, and he’s wearing this outfit and says in this gruff voi
ce, “Yeah, boys, just put the stuff in the back.” We’re thinkin’, This is one of the coolest fuckin’ transsexuals we’ve ever met, and then his girlfriend shows up and she’s dressed to the nines, too, with the platforms and dominatrix look. They’re just totally cool-lookin’ together.

  BENJAMIN REW (musician; TAD roadie) Monny, the cross-dressing bartender that ran and owned the place, and his wife were always super-sweet to me. I remember when I first got in the Vogue, it was like, Man, you have arrived. All the people I knew had kinda moved up a level from hanging out on Broadway to having an actual place that was our own.

  All the cool, older people were there: Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Green River, guys from Love Battery, Gruntruck, the metal bands like Forced Entry and Sanctuary. Andy Wood was always at the Vogue; he had his seat there. Everyone smoked pot in the back room, behind where the stage was. I met Tad in the back room of the Vogue in probably ’89. There were tons of hot girls, and they were mostly all strippers. It was heaven.

  GARRET SHAVLIK During that trip, we met all of our new friends—the new family. Seattle was so cool in the fact that the bands cared about each other and they hung out, where Denver was very self-defeatist. When other Denver bands that we loved and respected would find out that we had been on the road and are putting out records with a legitimate label, they got pissed off and thought we were rock stars.

  DANNY BLAND (Cat Butt guitarist; Best Kissers in the World/Dwarves bassist; Sub Pop Records booking agent) In Arizona, I was in a punk-rock band called the Nova Boys and in ’85 or ’86, we did a West Coast tour. We went to Seattle, and I remember it was August first and I could wear my leather jacket. So I decided I was going to move there. It was the complete and total opposite of Phoenix, which is what I was looking for. It took a couple of years, but I eventually moved there with my band, the Best Kissers in the World, in ’88. Once we got there, a lot of people followed us up. A lot of friends who would go on to form bands, like Kelly Canary, who became the singer of Dickless, and Kerry Green, who was in Dickless, too. And Supersuckers came up from Tucson.

  EDDIE SPAGHETTI (Supersuckers singer/bassist) We didn’t want to be cliché and go to L.A., and Danny, who was a friend of ours, was saying, “You guys should come up here. There’s like three bars to play at here and there’s only one to play at in Tucson, and you can wear your leather jacket well into May.” And we were thinking that sounded pretty dynamite because it’s so hot that it kills cattle in Tucson.

  RON HEATHMAN (Supersuckers guitarist) Everything was stronger up there, too: the booze, the pot, the dope. You get enough of anything in you, and it all seems pretty glorious.

  EDDIE SPAGHETTI We thought we were totally awesome and that we were going to be the best band that Seattle had ever seen. How wrong we were. This whole Sub Pop scene was just starting up, and we were super-stoked to see the aggressive music that we liked was popular in Seattle.

  KURT DANIELSON Tad had read somewhere about the “brown note,” this frequency that supposedly could induce spontaneous voiding of the bowels of anybody standing within close range. So at live shows and in interviews, Tad would refer to this frequency, and claim that one of the goals of the band was to achieve it so that all the audience members would spontaneously shit their pants.

  JACK ENDINO TAD were a pretty scary band—I say that as a compliment. TAD went into the studio with me in late ’88, and we started recording the God’s Balls album.

  KURT DANIELSON God’s Balls is a cry from the heart. It’s primal, it’s primitive. There’s a lot of screaming. We wanted to manufacture a kind of demented white-trash vision of America. Tad and I were fascinated with Ed Gein. There was the song “Nipple Belt” that was directly inspired by him.

  There was also a song “Behemoth” that was about being attacked and beat up. Tad and I and a few other friends had taken acid, and we were walking down a street in the U District in Seattle, and we got jumped and attacked by a bunch of guys. These guys were Samoan, some of them were black, and they were all wearing these weightlifting belts, walking on the street looking for frat boys to beat up. But what they found was just a bunch of drunk punk-rock-type dudes with long hair. They took Dan Peters and threw him through a glass door.

  DAN PETERS We were out celebrating my 21st birthday. One of the Samoan guys pulled off his weightlifting belt and hit Tad with it, and I just remember Tad goin’ down. We all ran in different directions, and I ran to the door of Kurt’s apartment building, which was kind of an enclosed area. And the next thing you know, there’s about three of them standing in front of me.

  I woke up on the sidewalk with a bunch of paramedics around me asking me my name. Apparently the guys were goin’ to town on me, and a couple cops across the street eating at IHOP came over and pulled these guys off me and arrested them all. It didn’t sound like they were gonna stop beating me. I had a concussion and a separated shoulder. I got my clock cleaned.

  KURT DANIELSON The album title? At a bachelor party that was being given for Jamie from Bundle of Hiss, we had some porn films. I think Tad was there, too. In this one particular film, there was a priest. He was wearing his priestly robes and he was getting a blow job. And he kept screaming, “God’s balls, that feels good! God’s balls!” And that phrase stuck with me.

  TAD DOYLE I remember my mom, when I showed her the record … She saw the picture and she saw me smiling, and she goes, “Oh, you look so good.” And then she saw the title, and she says, “Oh, Tad, how could you? Why? Why did you name the record that?” It was disappointing for her. But then she’d go back and, “Well, you’re smiling. That looks good. That’s nice. Nice boy.”

  REGAN HAGAR I saw Xana working in this used-clothing store on the same block as the Showbox. She looked like Cher: big nose, kind of Greek features, long dark hair. And Andy loved Cher. So I brought him to the store, and he was crazy about Xana. She was getting off work, so we followed her for a couple blocks to the bus stop. She stopped and said, “Why are you following me?” I remained silent, and Andy went and talked to her and they exchanged numbers. And, I mean, within days they were living together.

  XANA LA FUENTE (Andrew Wood’s fiancée) I’d never even been with a blond. I wasn’t really attracted to Andrew at first. I’m six feet tall—I used to carry him around on my back—but it was his personality. I mean, he had me laughing constantly. He would do Joe Cocker imitations onstage, he wasn’t afraid to make a fool out of himself. He had tattoos, he had his ears pierced, he wore a Cowboys baseball hat and his hair up in a bun, and he would wear my skirts around the house.

  JACK ENDINO Andrew was the only heavy-metal stand-up comic in Seattle grunge history. Always had me rolling on the floor, laughing the whole time.

  MATT LUKIN I remember one time the Melvins were playing with Malfunkshun in Olympia. They were setting up the sound check and Andy didn’t have a cord to plug his bass in. I lent him one and said, “You came all the way down here, you got your amp and your guitar, but you didn’t have a cord?” He goes, “We used to be musicians dabbling in drugs. Now we’re druggies dabbling in music.”

  XANA LA FUENTE At the time I met him, he had been in rehab, he was clean. I know he had hepatitis, he had gotten yellow. I was 16 when I met him. I had no idea about addiction. It was not a concern at all. I was so naive.

  REGAN HAGAR Chris Cornell opened the door to Andy, and let him in as a roommate when he needed to find a place away from the drugs. Chris was straight at that time, so it was thought of as a good thing.

  CHRIS CORNELL He was going to live on the island with his parents, where he grew up. I thought that would be harder for him. Most of the time it was me watching him struggle not to shoot up, not to drink. It wasn’t like observing Andy’s high; it was more like experiencing him squirming.

  XANA LA FUENTE I moved in about a week later. I told Chris, “I’ll be Mom.” I remember the day I moved out, I told Chris, “You never washed a single dish.” And he’s like, “Well, you said you wanted to be Mom.”

  Ar
ound the time I moved in, Chris had just got laid off from being a fish cook at Ray’s Boathouse, and he was going through a depressed time. He would sit there and drink Jack Daniel’s and black coffee and stare out this picture window—you could see all downtown. Then he started writing music on his own, doing his solo stuff, and he would lock himself in this little boiler room off of the kitchen.

  LANCE MERCER (photographer) When I was leaving high school, I finally got a photo shoot with Malfunkshun. Unfortunately, Kevin didn’t show up. So we used Xana for Kevin, which, looking back, was not a good idea. Kevin was pissed. But at the same time, I just wanted to photograph Andy. I was so used to taking pictures of musicians that pretended not to want to have their photo taken. Bands like Skin Yard, where it was four guys against a brick wall. Andy would come into this character of Landrew, and he was all about getting his photo taken.

  Later, I shot just Andy and Xana together. It was more subdued. He was with this woman that he loved, and it was definitely a lot more emotional because he wasn’t being Landrew. Andy loved Xana; he was totally infatuated with her. There’s a shot I took where she’s sitting on a stool behind him, and he’s on the floor and her legs kind of tower over him, kind of spider-legged around him. That photo, for me, embodies what their relationship was like. She was definitely the stronger one of the two. I think he looked to her to take care of him.

  REGAN HAGAR Andy and Xana always fought, and there was blood. It was just part of how he liked his women. The fighting was always behind closed doors. But I’d see the aftermath. He would be physically beaten. Like black eyes, bloody noses. Now, in my older wisdom, I would say, “There’s a problem, and I should be getting involved.”