Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  REGAN HAGAR He was really trying to be good, and I was a dumbshit about it. He’d come out of rehab, and I’d ask him if he wanted to smoke pot. Talk about insensitive and stupid. I feel like an asshole because I didn’t get it.

  XANA LA FUENTE After a while, he said the pink cloud that he felt when he got out was gone. He was what you call “dry drunk,” when you’re still acting out these behaviors even though you’re not drinking. He refused to go to meetings. He was kind of being a little asshole. He was just different about it—he wasn’t all kind and apologetic anymore. He was like, “This is what I am.” Just being kind of mean about it. I was crying a lot.

  KIM THAYIL Mark Arm, myself, and Buzz Osborne were hanging out at Mark Arm’s apartment in the U District, listening to records and BS’ing about bands, around late ’86. Buzz mentioned that on a number of Black Sabbath songs, Tony Iommi used a tuning called drop D, where the low-E string was tuned down a whole step. It makes things a little bit lower, a little bit heavier. After that, I went ahead and wrote a number of songs in drop D tuning—the first song I wrote with it was “Nothing to Say”—and then we experimented with other drop tunings. People started comparing us to Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, but we weren’t listening to those bands then—we were listening to Bauhaus and Killing Joke.

  DAN PETERS I always thought it was ballsy and funny that Soundgarden put out that song “Incessant Mace” that was Led Zeppelin. It sounds just like “Dazed and Confused”!

  FAITH HENSCHEL-VENTRELLO (KCMU music director) I was the music director at KCMU, so I talked to people from all around the country and in Europe, and I keep trying to tell them that there was amazing stuff going on in Seattle, and people would be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” ’cause nobody visited. So I did the Bands That Will Make Money tape, which had a piggy bank on the cover, to send to A&R people. I didn’t know if they would make money or not; I was just trying to get the A&R guys’ attention. It was like Soundgarden, H-Hour, Chemistry Set, Skin Yard—because Jack Endino is the one who helped me put it together.

  I sent Brian Huttenhower, who was Aaron Jacoves’s assistant at A&M, the tape. They listened to it, and they wanted to come up and see H-Hour. H-Hour was about to implode, and so I said, “Oh, you’ve really gotta check out Soundgarden. They’re playing at the Vogue” on this day. So Brian came up and saw them, and he ended up going back to L.A., saying, “You gotta check this band out.”

  AARON JACOVES (A&M Records West Coast director of A&R) The band I showed interest in was Soundgarden. What struck me was the energy. The rawness. And Chris Cornell’s voice. I got hold of Chris and said, “Here’s 600 bucks, do more songs.” Later, Chris called me and told me about this label up in Seattle that I didn’t know about. He said, “They’re friends of ours. We wanna put out a record through them. Do you mind if we use these recordings?” And it was my thought at the time, Hey, anything we could do to build an underground swell would make it easier for me to get them signed. And that was the Sub Pop record.

  As far as what was used on the Sub Pop records, I can’t fully say for sure. I know Chris recalls it differently. I know others are gonna argue, but the truth is, we were the first onto the Seattle scene.

  KIM THAYIL Sub Pop did not have the money to make another record for us. They wanted us to stay with them, and we would’ve loved to stay with them, but we were ready to make another record. The Sub Pop single came out in ’87, and at that point there was some interest expressed by Bob Pfeifer at Epic. SST had the money and wanted to put us in the studio, so we recorded Ultramega OK for them. It was a one-record deal. And at that time, we were also getting interest from Geffen, Slash, Capitol, and A&M.

  AARON JACOVES Brian and I flew up to see Soundgarden. There was a show in Vancouver, at a club called Graceland. The show was like this acid trip. The club was dark, there was a lot of smoke. Chris was undressing onstage. Girls were lapping it up.

  When Susan was driving us back to the airport, she asked me about managers and I remember kinda biting my tongue and saying, “I would never recommend this to anybody, to have a girlfriend manage a group, but I think you’re doin’ a great job. You should do it.” And I think that was fully her intention anyhow.

  SUSAN SILVER I’d had some managerial experience with this band called the First Thought and with the U-Men, so it just sort of segued into managing Soundgarden. I wasn’t necessarily interested in being the real enactment of Spial Tap, but it just happened.

  CHRIS CORNELL It put the other three guys in the position where maybe when you want to call your manager and say, “Fuck you,” they don’t feel like they could do that. And there was often what felt to me like an assumption that I should know everything that’s going on in the business side of it ’cause I’m married to the manager. Most of the time I didn’t ’cause I didn’t have that kind of communication with her. It created a situation that was more difficult than what other bands might have had, but I always felt proud of the four of us individually and how we dealt with that.

  AARON JACOVES Later on, Susan came over to my parents’ house and said the band had reached a decision: “We wanna sign with A&M.” And the next thing I know, I hear that Bob Pfeifer from Epic was meeting with them, and it kinda ticked me off. There was a moment where I almost said, “Fuck it all.”

  BOB PFEIFER (Epic Records senior vice president A&R; Hollywood Records president) A bidding war ensued. It was very emotional and intense. At one point I felt like throwing my stereo out of the window! I was nuts about that band. I thought I saw God. That was very early in my career. I didn’t have a lot of hits, so I didn’t have a lot of power.

  KIM THAYIL Geffen already had a stable of what they considered hard-rock bands, many of which they weren’t working or promoting. We had no interest in being lost in that. Epic had a few hard-rock acts. We liked Bob Pfeifer, but they were also a very large label. A&M wasn’t quite as big and didn’t really have any bands at all that were comparable to us, so we figured we could get their undivided attention.

  MATT CAMERON We met Herb Alpert—he was the A in A&M—and he was painting oils in his office and drinking wine and there was a hint of pot smell around. It was kind of a cool boho vibe, and we decided to try to plug in with that.

  AARON JACOVES Between the Sub Pop record and the A&M record, there was the SST record, Ultramega OK. We had them signed by that time to A&M, and we licensed them to SST for that record. It was all part of the process. A fanbase is helpful, and I was tryin’ to build it. We don’t wanna fuck this up.

  STUART HALLERMAN Every summer, Slim Moon—who later had the Kill Rock Stars label going on—worked with the Olympia parks department and police department to put on a punk-rock show on an August afternoon in Capitol Park. The state capitol is above, the water’s right behind you, and they’d play on a flatbed truck. He’d hire me because I had my own P.A. system. My Name, Nirvana, and Soundgarden were the three bands in ’88. Soundgarden had just done the Fopp EP, so they played all the stuff that was on that.

  BEN SHEPHERD Soundgarden played a show in downtown Olympia, a signing party. I remember it was outside. I met Chris for the first time that day, right before they played. Kim introduced me to him. That was the first time I got to see Matt with them. It was like, Oh, now they have a real drummer, and it’s over the top. It was all golden, the sun was going down behind Matt’s blond hair, and all the hardcore kids, like our generation of musicians and fans of music, were there. And the cops were there, and they were allowing it to happen. Olympia cops used to be total fucking pricks. They were definitely scared of punk rockers. They tried to arrest March of Crimes a couple of times for playing there, just for being around: “What are you guys doing? Punker!” At this show, it was like, Wow, even the adults are all right with this. But they’re scared of us still.

  STUART HALLERMAN I stepped back from the mixing board to see what it sounded like there. And on the sides of me are these parks department and police sponsors, these uniformed cops. I said to ’em, “How do yo
u like the show?” And one of the cops goes, “You know, I just thought this was gonna be awful music, but this band in particular”—and he’d liked Nirvana—“but this band in particular I thought it was all gonna be dirty lyrics, but it’s really clean, and they’re talented guys!” And we look back at the stage with smiles on our faces, and at the end of “Fopp,” Chris—instead of singing “Fopp and rock!”—is going, “SUCK MY COCK! SUCK MY COCK!” So much for being clean.

  After that show, Chris is like, “You know, we’re going on our second tour in about a month. You wanna be our soundman on the road with us?” I’m thinking, Drive all over the country with these beer-soaked punk rockers? “Yeah, sure, I’ll go!”

  We get in a van, and in the first hour on the road I realize, These guys get along so great. They’re friends, they’re having fun! They’re not arguing, they’re not talking behind each other’s backs trying to get a new bass player or something like that. That’s part of their success. It made being on tour with them really fun. It was the second tour for their tour manager, this guy Eric Johnson. Gunny Junk. He had this whole L.A. rock-and-roll persona, Gunny Junk—junk being a heroin reference—with the cape and the screaming that went along with it.

  ERIC JOHNSON I met the Soundgarden guys when I booked them for a show in Ellensburg, in ’86 or ’87. I remember I took this class on George Orwell in college, and his world is all about the proletarian, the worker guy, and he just describes dirt and grime and these heavy working situations. Then these guys showed up and they’re kind of these strange Orwellian creatures. Matt had a red Volkswagen van and they were all working on the clutch or something, so all of them were under this car working. They all had work pants on and boots rolled up, and Chris looked like he just got done workin’ in a steel yard. I thought they looked so cool.

  The first tour I ever did with them was on the West Coast. Gunny Junk came about on a trip to L.A. It was when Guns N’ Roses was huge and we all made up our own little names as we were going to do a show at the Club Lingerie, I think it was. We were all laughing and making up names and the next thing I knew, I was answering to Gunny Junk.

  STUART HALLERMAN Kim would say, “We’re all about sex and drugs and rock and roll! Except minus the sex and drugs.” They were saints on the road. They each had their girlfriends at home, so there was no road head or bitches or anything like that.

  And they weren’t big partiers. Especially in those early years. I brought a little bag of weed on the road with me once, and nobody would smoke it. It should’ve been gone three days out, but I still had this little bud weeks later. And then I got busted for it in Louisiana. Got searched for hours on the side of the road, but didn’t get arrested. That’s why the Louisiana DEA appears in the credits of Louder Than Love.

  ART CHANTRY When Soundgarden were doing their first major-label record, we were all in my design studio. Susan and Chris were kind of mumbling among themselves ’cause they were like a unit that worked independently of the rest of the band. Whenever Chris spoke, he’d mumble into Susan’s ear, and then Susan would turn and talk to the band, and if the band ever wanted to talk to Chris, they’d talk to Susan and Susan would mumble in Chris’s ear.

  I said, “What’s the title of the record?” They said, “Well, we don’t even have one yet.” And I said, “Why don’t you call it Louder Than Shit?” I always wanted to see a band call its album that. Someone, maybe Kim, goes, “No, no, we’ll call it Louder Than Fuck!” The band thought that was great. And then Susan stepped up and said something to the effect of, “No band I’m involved with is gonna have fuck in the title of their record.” And so when the record came out it was Louder Than Love. It was such a huge-sounding band that when I saw that, I kinda groaned.

  MARK PICKEREL When I was in the Screaming Trees, it was really just Van and I that were experimenting with anything at all, and I kept it strictly to booze and pot. Lanegan was totally clean during that period, because after an accident with some farm equipment in ’86 or ’87—he almost lost his leg—the doctor was like, “With this injury, if you keep drinking, you’re not gonna make it.” So he had to go cold turkey when he was only about 22.

  MARK LANEGAN [The tractor] was coming right for my balls. The thing about the wheels is they’re so big, by the time one foot would get loose and I would roll over trying to get away, the other one would already be caught under the tire. Man, to this day it seems like it took a million years to get all the way over me, but it really must have just took a couple of seconds. It crushed my legs, fucked them up pretty good.

  MARK PICKEREL Van liked to tease and terrorize Lee, even though Lee was his older brother. Van would make up all these little songs that ended with Lee being sexually molested by a trucker or something like that. Lanegan would join in on the chorus and come up with his own lyrics to support this story, and next thing you know the whole band would be singing along and making up a verse. That would be the kind of thing that would continue on for an entire hour.

  VAN CONNER Around the time my son Ulysses was going to be born, we’d been touring a lot. To be honest, it was hard stinking work, and I thought maybe I could get out of it. Plus I didn’t want to be gone from home with a baby. I knew we had more touring coming up, so I quit.

  GARY LEE CONNER One of the people called us up at the time was Krist Novoselic. He was like, “Oh, I hear you need a bass player.” And this was when Nirvana was first starting out. To them, we were like “big band with records on SST.” Actually, if we hadn’t got Donna Dresch, we would’ve gotten him. I joked with Krist years later about that: “It’s probably a good thing you didn’t join the Screaming Trees.”

  DONNA DRESCH They called me, and I was like, “Yeah!” We went to L.A. and recorded a double album, and then we went on a tour of the States for two months. We started listening to Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff on tour, and they were like, “We want our record to sound like this.” So when we came back, they said, “We don’t want to put out this double album.”

  On tour, we’d get a hotel with two beds in it, and me and Mark Pickerel would always share the bed. It was never romantic, but we were always super-cuddly, which I think is hilarious now, because I’m a gold-star lesbian—never had a boyfriend or anything. I found out a couple of years ago that Lanegan has this druggy, crazy-guy reputation, but I don’t know that about him. I knew him as being really funny and caring and thoughtful.

  Lee would just go bananas onstage. At one show, he was rolling around in glass—I don’t know if he broke the bottle on purpose or if it was an accident or if someone threw it onstage—and when he stands up he’s all covered in blood. He rubs the blood on his face, sticks his tongue out, and goes “Aaayeahhhhhh!” and then continues on with his perfect guitar solo.

  VAN CONNER The guys said Lee acted even weirder without me there. I wasn’t there to control him, I guess. We hadn’t been apart for more than like two days our whole lives, probably. I don’t know if you ever saw that movie Strange Brew, but there’s that part where the brothers are separated for 10 minutes for the first time ever? Maybe he had a Bob and Doug McKenzie–type withdrawal. I spent more time with him until I was 30 years old than probably any human being has spent with another. That’s probably why we couldn’t stand each other by the end of the band.

  When they came back, they said, “We were wondering if you wanted to be back in the band again?” At the time, I was getting a divorce from my wife—we were super-young and didn’t know what the hell we were doing—so I was like, “Okay!”

  MARK LANEGAN We didn’t have a damn thing in common except insanity. So we fought a lot.… And when [Van] came back, the very first show back, I was walking off while the show was still going, like I usually did, and I heard a commotion that sounded not like your usual applause. I came back out and there he was beating the shit out of Lee Conner, onstage. (Sighs.) It was like prison. Without the sex.

  VAN CONNER When we on tour for our album Buzz Factory, SST told us it was going to come out ever
y day of the tour, and it didn’t come out until the last day. Finally, we all talked and we’re like, “Fuck this, we’re gonna get a fuckin’ manager to deal with the fuckin’ record label.” So we called Susan Silver and we said, “Hey, you want to do it?” She was like, “Yeah, sure.”

  We did a record on Sub Pop and then went on another European tour. When we got back, Soundgarden had just signed to A&M, so Susan was like, “Do you want to be on a bigger label?” We’d never even thought about it before Soundgarden got signed.

  MARK PICKEREL Susan took on a fairly motherly role in our lives. When we were working on Buzz Factory, it was so sweet, she came down to the studio with a bunch of groceries for us. If it hadn’t been for Susan, I don’t know that we would’ve ever been signed. A lot of labels turned us down before Epic signed us.

  VAN CONNER At Epic, we met this guy Bob Pfeifer, who had been in this band from Cleveland called Human Switchboard, so he was a musician who was working the system from the inside. He had a fuckin’ credit card and he was charging it up, buying us all drinks. So we kind of related to him, and he didn’t give us any bullshit.

  MARK PICKEREL There were labels that thought we were just too physically unattractive to sign. A friend who worked at A&M told me that was one of the reasons A&M passed on us. Back then, the music that was driving record sales was Warrant and Poison and White Lion and Guns N’ Roses, bands with a lot of sex appeal.

  BOB PFEIFER I recall getting an argument from a superior saying, “Look at the two fat guys in the group. How could that be successful?” So I actually turned that around into an argument: why they’re unique. It was that ludicrous at points.