Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  DAVID DUET On the record’s jacket spine, we thanked the girlfriends of Mudhoney, TAD, and Nirvana. I said it as a joke, and Bruce Pavitt insisted that we put it in there. It was very much based on reality, though, except for Nirvana. Kurt’s girlfriend came up to me at one of our shows and said, “Why did you guys put that on the record? None of you have ever done me.” (Laughs.) I said, “It was just to balance it out, honestly.” It sounded better with Nirvana in there.

  BOB WHITTAKER Mudhoney and myself would sheepishly sneak into Sonic Youth’s dressing room to make off with the beer on their rider because they were almost teetotalers. Sonic Youth would get to a city and want to go to a bookstore and the thrift store, and Mudhoney were like, “Where’s the grog?”

  THURSTON MOORE Mark used to try to mythologize Sonic Youth’s profile. I remember him being in my hotel room on tour and calling up different bands staying in the same hotel at 3 in the morning, saying he was me, asking people to come up and hang out. They’d be asleep, not very into it, and he’d be yelling into the phone, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Thurston Fucking Moore from Sonic Fucking Youth, and I demand that you come up here and hang out with me!” And then hang up the phone. I’d be like, “Mark, please don’t do that!”

  MATT LUKIN I got into all kinds of trouble that tour. A few running-around-naked nights. There’s nothing funnier than a drunk naked guy, if you’re the drunk guy. But it is kind of sad, thinking back. I do remember one night, playing in the L.A. area with Sonic Youth, and the Redd Kross guys were there. We all came out onstage and played “I Wanna Be Your Dog” with Sonic Youth, and I had my pants around my ankles while playing Kim Gordon’s bass.

  The next night, Kim’s doing sound check with that bass, and I pointed to it and said, “Hey, Kim, my penis was touching the back of that bass last night!” And she’s all, “Really?” She took it off, and I don’t think she ever played it again. I’m like, Damn, am I that repulsive?

  MARK ARM I can pinpoint when Matt became a cartoon character, like Yosemite Sam or something. It was when we were on this short West Coast tour in 1989. We played a show with Cat Butt in Davis, California, and afterward we all went to someone’s condo or apartment where everyone crashed. It seemed like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but with boozed-up punks instead of fairies and wood nymphs. There was lots of craziness and a complete lack of reason.

  DANNY BLAND It was kind of a funny, fundamental difference between the two bands: Mudhoney were all on the pull-out couch trying to get some sleep, and we were just raging and keeping them awake.

  Dean Gunderson, the bass player, was disgusted by this brand-new, white Camaro in the parking lot. He’s a giant, like six-seven, and he came crawling up on the hood of the car, dropped his pants, and actually laid a turd on the hood of this white Camaro. He’s a big man, it’s a big turd, and it was quite amazing.

  DEAN GUNDERSON That was another LSD night. The car offended me, I don’t know. The guy actually came out, and we watched him try and get it off: He backed the car up and slammed on his brakes so it would roll off the hood, but it ended up rolling back towards the windshield wipers. It got stuck in there, and he drove off.

  MARK ARM The next morning, everyone was in the place’s pool for a while. Matt stayed in the pool by himself, and he wouldn’t leave. He started hovering his hands above the water, and he’s totally mesmerized and focused, going, “It’s like glass. It’s like glass.” He was trapped in glass. (Laughs.) Some fuckin’ switch went off in his head, and it hasn’t flipped back yet.

  EDDIE SPAGHETTI Early on, I remember being at Sub Pop—I was stuffing some singles for them for some spare change—and they put in the cassette of Bleach, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is a local band? This is so fucking good.” I couldn’t believe all these bands were from the same town that we were now living in.

  JACK ENDINO Some of the biggest records I made on Sub Pop were when I’d only been an engineer for one or two years. Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, the first Soundgarden EP; Bleach was recorded in ’88.

  Nirvana came in for Bleach, and they weren’t sure they wanted to put it on Sub Pop, frankly. Sub Pop was such a new label that they were still thinking, Maybe we can get on Touch and Go or SST or some other label. Kurt was basically thinking, I’m gonna shop it to some other people, so we’re gonna have our friend Jason here pay for it. So Jason paid the $600 and change.

  JASON EVERMAN (Nirvana guitarist; Soundgarden bassist) I grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, which bisects the Puget Sound. I met Chad Channing in my homeroom class in sixth grade. To me and my friends, Chad was this mysterious guy. We perceived him as mature and sophisticated and exotic. His family moved twice a year. He had a mustache in sixth grade. And he had long hair. I didn’t have long hair, none of my friends really did. We ended up playing together in a thrash-metal band called Stone Crow.

  KERRY GREEN (Dickless guitarist) Chad Channing was this odd little pixie guy. He was always really lighthearted and sweet. I heard that once when Nirvana were out on tour, Krist woke up and saw Chad driving with his teeth, with his hands behind his back. Krist decided to take over driving at that point.

  JASON EVERMAN Around ’88, Chad was like, “You should check out this band that I’m playing with.” I don’t even know if they were called Nirvana at this point. I went to see them at the Community World Theater in Tacoma, I’m guessing, and they were great. Even then it was pretty evident.

  Through Chad, I started hanging out with Kurt and Krist socially. I liked Kurt. There was a point in time where I considered us friends. It was probably Kurt who asked me for the loan. I had money from working in Alaska as a commercial fisherman. No, they never repaid it, but I’m not going to go crazy over $500. I’ve lost more money than that to friends, so whatever.

  JACK ENDINO Bleach was just another album. I thought it was a very good other album, but I thought, Here’s another great record that nobody’s ever gonna hear.

  ALICE WHEELER My first band shoot was Nirvana in 1988. I usually got the jobs Charles Peterson didn’t want. Which is why I got Nirvana’s first single, because everybody in Seattle thought Mudhoney was gonna be the big band and they didn’t pay any attention to Nirvana.

  KIM THAYIL Nirvana’s influences were certainly the Melvins and us. I saw Kurt at a Melvins show and I told him how much I loved Bleach, and he said, “Well, you should consider yourselves our biggest influence.” When they got going, Nirvana were huge fans of Soundgarden ’cause we kind of came out of the punk scene, but were doing heavy rock without being idiots about it. We weren’t doing songs about cars and parties and chicks.

  RON RUDZITIS When they released Bleach, I heard “About a Girl” and I became a fan. All of the sudden, there was another side to Nirvana. It totally reminded me of the Beatles. I’m just going, “Holy shit, this guy can write a hell of a song!” “About a Girl” wasn’t on that first demo Bruce played for us at Muzak. If it had been, I know I would’ve freaked out, like, “Gee, sign these guys!”

  BRUCE PAVITT I was at a party next door to my house when I got this intuitive feeling, like, I really gotta go over to my house. Right as I did that, Krist Novoselic was walking up my stairway. He’s inebriated and he’s intimidating and he’s demanding a contract. It was very scary. He’s a very big guy. I called up Poneman and said, “Look, I know we don’t have contracts with any bands and I know we don’t have the money to hire an attorney to write a contract, but we need to get this guy one.”

  JONATHAN PONEMAN I said, “The contract’s coming.” Krist wasn’t in a friendly, jolly mood. He seemed like he could go off. He didn’t really know who we were, and stories about corrupt record-label people are legion. He wanted to be protected. I sat up for a couple nights and composed a contract, which was largely taken from various music-industry books. We later discovered that the contract was, as you might imagine, very much the product of somebody who didn’t really know what he was talking about.

  BRUCE PAVITT I didn’t really believe in contracts, a
nd indie labels didn’t really do contracts. You did handshake deals. So it was like, “What the fuck? Why are we signing this three-record contract?” It seemed ridiculous to me, but it’s that contract that ultimately allowed the label to stay in business. So Krist coming to my house to kick my ass was the biggest blessing of my life.

  JASON EVERMAN I can’t remember when Kurt suggested that I play with them, but the first time I did play with them was a party in K Dorm at Evergreen State College. After the party, Kurt was like, “Do you want to join the band?”

  ALICE WHEELER Oh, yeah, Jason fit in. He was the prettiest one of them all. He was a good-looking guy. Most of the punk kids were more nerdy. Kurt is extremely photogenic—and after he got to be a star, he learned how to play it up—but he was kind of slouchy, he was really skinny, his hair was kinda stringy.

  KELLY CANARY (Dickless singer) Dickless shared a practice space with Nirvana for a while. We were all starstruck by Kurt even before he was famous because you could tell that he was so gifted. Plus, you kind of just wanted to take him home and take care of him, he just looked so sad and lost at the same time.

  GARRETT SHAVLIK Kurt was very sweet and very young, and he would confide in me: “How do I deal with Jonathan and Bruce? Who do I need to believe?” After my meeting would be done with Jonathan and Bruce, I’d talk to Kurt at the Sub Pop offices. I’m like, “Go to Bruce. Jonathan will tell you you’re gonna ride the fame train and fuckin’ be beaten by 20 virgins. But Bruce is the real guy.”

  With Sub Pop, we’d talk about things like, “What should we do about Europe?” Bruce said, “I don’t think it’s pragmatic for you guys to go right now, and I don’t think we can afford it.” “That’s funny, because Poneman just said, ‘Yeah, it will be all good.’ ” Jonathan could bullshit you. It wasn’t intentional. It was just that he was a positive cat: “It’s gonna be great, man!” Well, sometimes it isn’t fuckin’ great.

  BRUCE PAVITT There is a story that is true, and it’s kind of embarrassing: I called Kurt up and said, “Can I borrow your money to put out your album?” Which sounds absolutely insane, but that’s where we were at financially. You have to be really shameless. He said no. We ended up borrowing $5,000 from a friend to put it out.

  DANNY BLAND I mostly dealt with Krist, and he was a bright guy. Ambitious for what we were dealing with at the time. Not the kind of ambitious that said, “We’re going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone someday.” But he definitely seemed to be sort of career-oriented, like he wanted to do this for his job.

  I had a semicircuit of clubs that was interested in Sub Pop bands and we would put Nirvana into all those places. At the Sun Club in Tempe, Arizona, they were supposed to get 50 bucks and a case of beer, and I don’t think they got either. But sure enough, when I walk into the club years later, the photo that someone took of Nirvana playing on the stage is proudly displayed over the cash register. So I went to the owner and gave him some shit: “Oh, are you ever going to pay us for that show?”

  ANTON BROOKES (U.K. music publicist) I was working for a British distribution company called SRD, and Sub Pop was just one of the new labels that we had taken on. I was trying to find some journalist to champion Mudhoney and the label, and already there was a little buzz about Sub Pop here because on the radio the DJ John Peel had been playing the hell out of Sub Pop 200 and any piece of Sub Pop vinyl.

  The legendary Stud Brothers at the Melody Maker—they weren’t actual brothers, just two friends who wrote together—wanted to write about Mudhoney. Over here, it’s usually the labels that have to pay for the journalists to travel. Obviously Sub Pop didn’t have a lot of money, so in the end Everett True got to go out because it was cheaper to send him and a photographer than two writers and a photographer.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN Anton said, “Would you guys consider flying over a journalist and a photographer from the Melody Maker, put them up, and introduce them to Mudhoney? In exchange, Mudhoney will get a cover and they’ll throw in a story about Sub Pop on top of it.”

  That was a paradigm: exporting American talent, letting the British hype it up, and then reimporting it back over here. It’s popular lore that Jimi Hendrix started off as a local musician in Seattle, went into the military, came out, went to England, and became a pop star there. And then the music was exported back here.

  BRUCE PAVITT There was a genuine chemistry between Everett True, Jonathan, and I. We supplied him with lots of alcohol, I remember that. Spin later listed flying Everett over as one of the Top 100 sleaziest moments in rock and roll. Whatever.

  EVERETT TRUE (Melody Maker newspaper writer; Nirvana biographer) The only purpose I had in my writing was to make people jealous of me. So I would talk myself up and talk up the people around me any way I could. And that’s why it was a stroke of genius getting me over, because I totally bought into the hype.

  Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman were some of the most charming, eloquent liars that I ever met. I just thought it was hilarious that everybody lied. Like Krist Novoselic, when you first met him, would say he was a competitive tree climber. And I printed it because that’s funny. If they wanted to portray Tad Doyle as some kind of chain saw–toting, dope-smoking, backwoods redneck who didn’t wash and used to be a butcher—I met him, and he was clearly an incredibly intelligent, witty fellow—that was cool by me, because why the hell not?

  TAD DOYLE I was a journeyman butcher for a number of years. It was fun to play on and effective, but at the same time the lumberjack, 300-pound ex-butcher image painted my band into a corner.

  KURT DANIELSON Here we are, trying to make music that we really believe in, and on the other hand, we’re being marketed as these redneck lumberjacks who live in the woods and eat raw meat and drink and do God knows what, emulate Ed Gein and other serial killers.

  At some point, people began to come see the band play for the freak-show factor—to see the fat man cavorting on stage, to see the crazed bearded rednecks—rather than to listen to the music. Now, who was responsible for this? It was all of us, really. We were trying to be as obnoxious as possible in flaunting the fact that we were not your average, everyday chicks with dicks, like in Poison. We heard that somebody at MTV had rejected our “Wood Goblins” video on the basis that the band was considered too ugly.

  KIM THAYIL Have you seen the first TAD single? It has a photo of Tad on it, and the text looks like he wrote it all with the wrong hand: “Hi, my name is Tad. I like make music.” It was ’tardo grammar and punctuation—and I’m not saying that to offend people of intellectual diminishment. Like this guy is musically a savant but had some kind of social or intellectual impairment that made him this brilliant folk artist. I was upset in that the way he was presented diminished the talents of a friend of mine.

  BRUCE PAVITT I found out that when Tad was a teenager he played jazz drums at the White House for President Nixon. We didn’t want people to think that maybe he was a refined intellectual and a jazz prodigy, so we tried to put a lid on that story.

  BOB WHITTAKER When the London press first got ahold of it, Mudhoney was presented as a blue-collar thing. When the press found out Mark and Steve went to college, it was a real letdown for them.

  MARK ARM The U.K. was so fuckin’ class-oriented. Like if rock is going to be authentic it’s gotta come from the lower class, which is crazy. I mean, Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics.

  BRUCE PAVITT It was my contention that people in Europe would get excited about American music if, from their perspective, the bands actually looked or felt more authentically “American.” And Europeans don’t see Americans as refined. They see them as spirited, but somewhat unmannered.

  When I told people I was going to the Seattle area to go to college, they were like, “Oh, my God, there’s still cowboys and Indians out there.” And it was seen as extremely backwoods. This is prior to Microsoft and Starbucks and everything else. In addition, Seattle had very little music history, so it essentially had a clean slate. It didn’t have the bagga
ge of San Francisco or New Orleans or Kansas City. So we got to create our own myth.

  JOHN ROBINSON (singer for Denver’s the Fluid) We came to Seattle for a show, and Sub Pop had posters made that said MEAN MOUNTAIN ROCK FROM DENVER. And we were just, “What the hell are you talking about? ‘Mountain rock’?” We actually got mad at Bruce and Jon for saying that. They just thought it was funny.

  LORI BARBERO (drummer for Minneapolis’s Babes in Toyland) In the late ’80s, we played at the OK Hotel with someone from Sub Pop, and I remember clearly the poster said BABES IN TOYLAND: PREMENSTRUAL GRUNGE FROM MINNEAPOLIS. I was like, “Holy shit!” I thought that was so fucking badass.

  CHARLES R. CROSS (The Rocket newspaper owner/editor in chief; Kurt Cobain biographer) Kurt Cobain hated that he was presented as an inbred logger. Though Kurt himself occasionally played into that; he wrote these mythical bios for Sub Pop that they circulated, claiming he met Novoselic at a woodworking class, so he did some of this stuff to himself. That’s not Sub Pop’s fault, but it certainly is true that the way they were marketed made them look like hicks.

  Then you have bozos like Everett True who play into that, and the press pumped that up. It almost doesn’t matter what the case was. It’s like that John Ford quote: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”