Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  A week or two later, I went down to the Vogue to a TAD show and ran into Kurt, and was like, “Hey, I’m the guy with the tape.” He was like, “Oh, yeah, Lanegan said he really liked it. I haven’t checked it out yet, and we’re gonna go on tour in about two weeks and we’re not gonna try anybody out until we get back. We’re gonna see how it goes as a three-piece.” And I told Kurt, “I’m gonna be busy by the time you get back, so if you want to play with me, now is the time.”

  Kurt and I really hit it off. I learned some of Nirvana’s songs, and they dragged all their gear up to my rehearsal space. We probably played about four, four and a half hours. When Krist took Chad back to Bainbridge, Kurt and I just hung out and shared the last couple of cigarettes we had between us and talked about drummers. No offense to Chad, but it was just kind of obvious to me and Kurt that if we were gonna do this band thing, that we might need to think about another drummer, and he was describing the type of drummer that he would want to have ideally, and it was a John Bonham-esque type drummer.

  They apparently got back to Justin and told him that it was looking pretty good with me, but they just wanted to hang out one more time. But after their tour, Kurt just said, “Yeah, we decided to stay a three-piece.” And then a week later, I met up with Mark Pickerel, and then our band Truly got rolling.

  It was kind of an odd summer, because Jason is half quitting, half getting kicked out of Nirvana; meanwhile, Hiro is leaving Soundgarden, and then Jason tries out for Soundgarden; and I’m trying out for Nirvana. And at the same time, Pickerel and Lanegan and Kurt and Krist had a band doing all Leadbelly covers. So there was a weird musical chairs thing going on.

  JASON EVERMAN After Nirvana, it’s not like I had a Plan B; it’s not even like being in a rock band was a Plan A. It just kind of happened. I had money in the bank from fishing at the time, so I was planning on traveling. Then Kim Thayil called me and told me, “Hiro’s quitting. We’re auditioning people. Do you want to audition?”

  SUSAN SILVER It’s not an easy life, sleeping on strangers’ floors. And Hiro just didn’t like it, and he really appreciated the indie scene, it seemed like. He wasn’t as interested in growing when the band signed to a major label.

  I know it was very inconvenient when he left in the middle of touring Europe. I was on the tour with them, and I remember having to cancel the rest of the tour, get everybody home, and figure out how we were going to pay for it, which was usually on my mom’s credit card. Sorry, Mom, ruined your credit there for a while.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO We’re getting bigger and the pressures were mounting. A&M is telling us, “We want you to tour like 10 months. You gotta go out and hit the road.” That was more than I wanted, but I told the guys, “Look, we got to where we are by making our own choices, and now we’re on this major label and they’re tellin’ us this stuff. We don’t have to do what they tell us.” I didn’t want to live on the road. But they wanted to do it.

  I liked Terry Date, who did Louder Than Love, but he was a metal producer. The label wanted to sell us to heavy-metal stations. I thought we were different than that. Sure, I’d like to sell a million records and live in a castle and not have to work, but at the same time, I want to be able to say, “This is me. I’m not just part of a mass-marketing machine.” Maybe I’m being naive, but when we got to that point where we’re on the major label, you’re a product. You might as well be Ivory Snow or Clorox bleach. We were just another product for the heavy-metal market. I like metal and all. It’s way more complex than “Hiro didn’t like metal.”

  It affected my friendships with everyone in the band a lot. It really hurt Kim that I would leave.

  KIM THAYIL His reasons for leaving would probably be different from what we saw. The band and friends of Hiro’s perceived that he was very heavily involved in this relationship with his girlfriend at the time, who he later married and had a couple of kids with. He really hated touring. That kind of discomfort with being with a bunch of beer-drinking, guitar-wielding guys in a van when he’d rather be with his girlfriend was sometimes expressed in an agitated manner, which caused friction with the band.

  I didn’t want him to quit. Chris didn’t, Matt didn’t. He had been threatening it enough: “I want to quit. I want to go home.” Eventually, Chris said, “Fine. You keep voicing your dissatisfaction. I’m tired of hearing it. Just leave.” But Chris didn’t want him to leave at all. Chris just wanted him to stop complaining. We didn’t take what Hiro was saying too seriously. Hiro liked to bitch. But Chris calling him on it forced his hand. I think everyone was bummed out, but I might’ve been the most bummed out, because I moved out to Seattle with the guy.

  DANIEL HOUSE Ben was definitely the resident alcoholic in Skin Yard, and that was a point of contention between he and I. Maybe for me, that tied back to the fact that my father had been an alcoholic, so I had limited capacity for that sort of thing. On any tour that we ever went on, the first order of business was stop by 7-Eleven and get a six-pack or a half case of beer. So within the first half hour of any trip, Ben was drinking. Initially we’d have to stop every 30 minutes so he could go piss. Eventually we said, “If you’re going to drink, you need to arrange something different.” So he’d pee in in a Big Gulp cup, and every couple hours, he’d either throw it or dump it out the window.

  One time we were in Chicago, after our last show on a tour, and we decided we were gonna make a straight-shot drive home. It was a 42-hour drive, and it was like 2 or 3 in the morning and I agreed to take the first shift of driving, and Ben had managed to get some meth. So I did a little line of crystal, and he did some crystal because he was gonna stay awake with me. And he was all excited because he got a half case of beer from the bar. It was like 35 degrees out or something and our heater didn’t work, so me and Ben are both wrapped in our sleeping bags as best we can.

  Maybe an hour into the drive, Ben unrolls the window to throw out his cup and this blast of cold, cold air comes rushing into the van and everyone’s like, “Roll up the fuckin’ window, Ben!” He throws the cup out and the next bit is basically one of those slow-motion moments where I remember looking over and seeing the cup do like two 360s out of the window. The top comes off, the entire contents of this Big Gulp cup come rushing in through the window, hitting Ben squarely in his face, completely drenching his hair and the top quarter of his sleeping bag. And there was nothing he could do because it was freezing so he couldn’t take his pee-soaked sleeping bag off, and now he’s wet in his own piss.

  And so everybody is howling with laughter because after dealing with an entire fucking tour or two of him peeing in cups and the inconvenience of it all, and the cup getting spilled every so often, it just felt like he finally got his due. Karma’s a bitch, motherfucker.

  JACK ENDINO Daniel will never let that story go. I remember it because Ben was reading one of my paperbacks at the time. My paperback had this yellow stain on it afterwards. I was like, “Uh, thanks.”

  DANIEL HOUSE Then there was the Tour from Hell. It was just one of those tours that I can’t imagine things possibly being worse. Our then-drummer, Scott McCullum … how to be polite about this? He was beyond difficult that tour. He was not playing very well, he was constantly missing cues and coming in at the wrong places. The main reason was he was drinking excessively.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM Oh, yeah, Ben and I were just fucking blotto on that tour all the time. I don’t remember it being that out of control, not like the way it was later on in Gruntruck—we used to call ourselves Drunktruck. No, I don’t think it affected my playing. I play rather well when I’m drunk.

  DANIEL HOUSE Scott and I had one physical altercation, but it was actually on another tour. As idiotic as it seems now, looking back, it was over a girl. There was this woman that I had hooked up with kind of on and off over the course of probably a couple years. And when I’d been with her, it had been before I was with my son’s mother, and I have to admit, also after I was with my son’s mother. And I had just gotten into a place where I
was like, I can’t keep doing this. This is wrong.

  So I was in San Francisco and this woman wanted to get together, and I just said, “I can’t.” And rather than just accept that, she started flirting really heavily with Scott right in front of me. I confronted them both and he totally fuckin’ blew up. He basically had me pinned against the wall, with his fist cocked back, on the verge of punching me in the face.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM I didn’t really know the history between Daniel and this woman other than that they knew each other. So I get there, and we end up hooking up, so to speak—you know, hanging out and stuff. I can’t remember what words I exchanged with Daniel, but I finally got so angry I pushed him into the street, and he almost got hit by a car. Not a smart move, but it was just in the moment.

  JACK ENDINO Scott lasted for two years. We did have one more album in the can at the time—it’s a very angry record, Fist Sized Chunks. Bruise Records put it out, and for about 14 months there were no Skin Yard shows.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM The tour definitely took its toll. But ultimately, it was the songwriting. It got to the point where I saw a different vision. I think Ben did, too. And this is when we started to collaborate on songs. Ben and I were staying down in Arizona, and we had written that song “Paint.” We meant it to be a Skin Yard song, but we thought, They’re going to fucking destroy this thing. It’s not going to come out how we want it. And that’s how Gruntruck started to form.

  JACK ENDINO During the 14 months when Skin Yard weren’t a band, I tried out for Soundgarden. I just pestered them about it: “Come on. I can play bass.” I went over to jam with ’em one night. It was pleasant, but it was like, “Thanks, but no thanks.” I come to find out later that Daniel had tried out, too. (Laughs.)

  BEN SHEPHERD What’s funny is that the Soundgarden guys asked me to try out the day after Nirvana had asked me. “Well, Nirvana asked me to try out before you did, so I have to try out for them first.”

  I had no way of learning Soundgarden’s songs, really. I had a cassette, but I didn’t have anywhere to play music. I even had to borrow a bass to play; I’d never really played bass before. We didn’t talk at the tryout. I just walked up and turned the amp up and we jammed for two hours instead of learning the songs from Louder Than Love, which we should’ve been doing. I came back again, more earnestly this time—tried to learn the songs with them—and then they chose Jason.

  I found out while walking to a show with my then-girlfriend. I see Stuart Hallerman, Soundgarden’s sound guy, and he told me. It was pretty logical. Jason looked the part—he had long, curly hair—and he somehow knew some of their songs. And he could drink. I was 20 and couldn’t, legally.

  “Yeah, that figures,” I go. “Watch, in six months they’ll come back and get me.” And almost six months to the day, they did. Why did I think he wouldn’t last? Because I knew Jason. I went through junior high and high school with him. He just didn’t seem to be cut out for touring and being part of a group. He’s more of an incompatible individual. Plus, when I said that, I was being a smart-ass. Because everyone always treated me like that. I was always the second choice.

  JASON EVERMAN All those guys were about five years older than me, which when you’re 19 and they’re 25 is a big difference. So I wasn’t hanging out with them socially then. I kind of had ’em on a pedestal, as well, because they were my favorite Seattle band. There was definitely a little bit of a feeling of being an outsider.

  The energy of the band? God, how do I put this? The band was being managed by Chris’s girlfriend or wife. Nice woman. So there’s Chris’s gig, and the rest of the band’s. There was definitely a two-tier system going. In retrospect, I understand it. Chris, he was the star. For me, there was a sense of inequity.

  BEN SHEPHERD Kurt and Krist had asked me to try out. Chad never told them I even played guitar. That’s why Kurt was like, “Man, we would’ve never messed around with Jason had we known you played guitar!” So I went on an American tour with them, but I never played with them, because they only performed Bleach and I’d only rehearsed the songs that were going to be on Nevermind. Why? Because that’s what they wanted to practice.

  Was it frustrating? Of course. I like playing music. But it was cool with me to be able to watch my friends knock people over. I was helping them load in and out, trying to sell shirts for them. I always thought they should be a three-piece anyway.

  TAD DOYLE When we were touring with Nirvana in Europe in ’89, we had a 48-day schedule, of which we played 45 days. We had three days off, and they were travel days. It was during the winter, and I wasn’t the only one that was having problems with barfing and other gastrointestinal difficulties. It was probably a combination of dehydration, too much smoking, drinking, poor health, and bad water.

  Kurt Cobain would hold a bucket or a garbage can for me to vomit in. We’d rate it, by chunk size and what the velocity was, what the color was, what the consistency was. “Oh, that was a good one.” He laughed a lot; he loved it. When your insides are just wrenching, it takes a lot out of you. But I was laughing my ass off, too, in between blowing chunks.

  CRAIG MONTGOMERY There were nine of us packed in this small van, so we’re sitting shoulder to shoulder, all cramped on these long drives. It was the band members and me and Edwin Heath, who was our tour manager from the Dutch agency Paperclip.

  The main thing about that tour was just laughing. It was always, “What could we do that would be funny?” Like somehow they got hold of some Arnold Schwarzenegger exercise video, and Kurt Cobain made a cassette tape of Arnold Schwarzenegger saying things like “Sexy, slim waist” over and over. During some of the shows, my instructions were that whenever there was a gap between songs, I would bring this cassette in, so between Nirvana songs you’d hear Arnold Schwarzenegger going, “Sexy, slim waist.”

  KURT DANIELSON I grew up in a small town, and my whole thing was to get away from there, not just the physical limits of the town but the psychological limits, the mind-set of the place. And so I went to school and got my degree. And then I turn around and find myself in a band projecting this image of precisely what I tried to escape. So this white-trash aesthetic was very ironic for me. Later, as I studied it from an intellectual standpoint, I began to be fascinated by certain aspects of it, especially all the characters that I knew in my hometown.

  The best conversation I had on the subject was in Europe with Kurt Cobain, because he had the very same experience in his small town. I would tell him about the freaks that I knew, and then he would tell me about the freaks he knew, and we’d go back and forth, talking for hours. For instance, there was this short, drunk guy I knew named Freaky Freddy who wore a purple-felt 10-gallon hat. One time when I was about 16, I was driving at night looking for him, because he would buy booze for you. I would’ve run over him had I not seen him passed out, spread-eagle, in the middle of the road. I pulled him into my car, revived him, brought him to the liquor store. He bought me booze, I let him go, and then he passed out again in the liquor store parking lot.

  STEVE WIEDERHOLD (a.k.a. Steve Wied; TAD drummer) I shared a room with Kurt Cobain, just the two of us, toward the end of the tour, and he didn’t talk to me. Seemed like he had a stomachache all the time, like he was suffering.

  I shared a lot of rooms with Chad Channing, laughing all night about the stupidest stuff we could think of. And I’ll tell you one thing: Me and Chad came up with this story about selling kids for food. We were joking about it: “We came up with this really funny story last night, and it was about selling kids for food!” And it’s probably because of us that line ended up in a Nirvana song.

  CRAIG MONTGOMERY The guy you didn’t want to room with was Tad because he snored really loud. So people were like, “Ohh, I roomed with Tad last night.”

  KURT DANIELSON When we took the ferry over from England, we used that opportunity to get blind drunk, at least Krist and I did. When we got to the hotel in Holland, Krist was just lying there on the floor of their lobby; he wouldn’t move.
He said something like, “Hey, you faggots!” to the proprietors. He didn’t mean it personally. Nobody knew the proprietors were gay, but they were, and they kicked us out.

  STEVE WIEDERHOLD Krist would drink a whole big bottle of wine every single night. But that night was the only time he was ever really out of control. Something snapped. He ran out of the van and got up on this rooftop right above one of those canals that’s only about a foot deep, and he was gonna jump. And we’re out there for like half an hour trying to talk him down. And he’s yelling at God and the world, and he’s pissed off at everything. I’m like, “This is getting to be a headache. This guy is a lot of work!”

  But by later that same night, Krist seemed to be normal again. That’s when I shared a room with Krist and Kurt. They said, “Wow, we wish we had a drummer like you.” Hinting. Hinting. It was already out that Chad wasn’t working out, you know. I said, “I can’t hear anything that Kurt Danielson’s playing on bass anyway.” That was kind of a way to say, “I wish I could play with a bass player like you.” But I didn’t say it right. They liked my drumming, so I don’t know. It could’ve happened.

  KURT DANIELSON The day the Berlin Wall went down, we drove into East Berlin. The line of Trabant cars leaving East Germany was 40 kilometers long, and most of them were broken down. And the West Germans were rewarding the East Germans with baskets of fruits and bottles of champagne.