by Steve Miller
John Speck: Blondie’s was an eye opener, because fairly soon after starting to go there I realized that there were kids my age drunk at the shows, and I was underage. How was this happening? So I watched this one kid one day, like, barely peek over the bar, walk up and buy a pitcher, and I was like, “Where’s this at? Did his dad send him there?” So then it became one of those deals: walk up, and Roosevelt’s at the door, and he’s like, “Five bucks, kid. ID.” I’d be like, “Oh, I left my ID at home.”
“Ten bucks.” He wouldn’t stamp you with the underage, and you’d walk over to the bar. “I want a pitcher of beer, please.” It was $6 for a little minipitcher. They were making a killing off of suburban punk kids getting shit-hammered and then driving drunk home with the first alcohol of their lives in their systems. I drove me and my buddies home when I was old enough to borrow my mom’s car. I came to at the rumble strips while going into the center of 75 like bumpbumpbumpbump. I’m like, “UGH! Ugh!” and all my other buddies are all passed out in the car, and everyone’s like, “Oh! Fuck.”
Rusvelt: Guns ‘n’ Roses came to town early on, opening up for the Cult somewhere in Detroit. I’m working the door at Blondie’s, and this guy comes in on crutches. I had Diamond Rexx in from Chicago, and this guy on crutches moved the chair onto the stage and gave hell to the band. He’s yelling, “You guys suck! Get off the stage!” So I went up to him and said, “Listen motherfucker, you got one leg broken, and I’m gonna break the other fucking leg! Shut your fucking mouth!” It was Axl Rose. Someone had to tell me, because I had no idea. He was a pain in the ass.
John Speck: GG Allin show at Blondie’s. My friends were all like, “Dude, this guy throws shit and shoves the microphone up his ass, and so you gotta go.” Everyone was waiting for him to go on and waiting for him to go on. I was standing kind of back because I didn’t want to get shit thrown at me, and he comes out, and he comes out all “Grrraaah.” Getting all aggro with poop, and everybody starts trying to get the fuck out of the way. But there’s nowhere to go because it’s fairly packed. And people start trying to get where you are, and you’re like, “Get the fuck away from me, motherfucker!”
Steve Nawara (Electric Six, Detroit Cobras, bassist, guitarist): I was in eighth grade, and I went to see GG Allin at Blondie’s. He came on, and he shit, and he started running after everyone.
He started running up everywhere. The whole place broke out into a riot. This skinhead came and hit me in the face. He was too big for me to fight back, so I looked around and there was a smaller skinhead, so I started hitting him in the face. And then, like, I’m sitting there and just didn’t know what the hell was going on, and GG Allin seemed like he dropped out of the sky and landed about five feet away from me, threw his cowboy boots up on the table, and I was just like, “What the fuck?” I was terrified.
Bill Kozy: I ran out the door, and Rusvelt was cowering with a trash can lid, saying, “GG, what are you doing?” The barkeep, Skin, after the show, I remember him with his mop bucket just going, “Just another night.”
Rusvelt: Oh man, when GG Allin played, it stunk. Two fucking days, the place stunk, and you could not get that smell out. I could not open the club. I threw the shit in the pitcher, and every time somebody bought a pitcher of beer I said, “Hey, you know what? That was GG Allin’s pitcher.” I’d just fuck with them. GG, he comes up to me, he tried to shake my hand, and I goes, “I’m not shaking your hand,” and he goes, “How about giving me a twenty and I can go lick your toilet seats?”
Greg Schmitt (photographer): Everyone had run out the front door, and Rusvelt was running around telling everyone the show was canceled. He thought everyone had left, but they were just in the parking lot. They wanted to see the show, but they were scared. So someone goes up to Rusvelt and tells him, “You have three hundred people out there in the parking lot, and they are going to be a lot harder to deal with than GG Allin.” Rusvelt had gotten married a couple weeks before that show, and she was working the bar. After the show she went home and locked him out of the house. She told him, “You let the devil play.”
Steve Nawara: While GG was doing all this, a band called Cum Dumpster that was playing behind him, just playing the most awful shit. It was the most, like, depressing music I had ever heard in my life. I have actually never heard anything that depressing since then either. In was sludgy and dark. In a way I wanna hear it again.
David B. Livingstone (God Bullies, guitarist; producer): Cum Dumpster was the later project of Bob Madigan, who was the guy behind Slaughterhouse. I recorded Slaughterhouse, and it was like a week-long abortion. It was like the blind leading the dead. Nobody really knew what was going on. It was like, “How much noise could we possibly make if everything else was turned up?” Then it was, “Let’s play this three different ways and keep all three tracks, and we’ll bounce. We’ll do some more tracks of the same thing.” My most vivid memory of that is when we were mixing, and it’s like, “More this. More treble in that. More treble in that. More treble in that. More bass in this.” It was like, “Okay fine. Whatever the fuck you want, you know? You’re paying.” Then they came with, “It all sounds really good, but, ahhh, can you make it more clear?” Oh, yeah. I’ll just press the fucking clarity button. Then every time Bob sang, he had to throw up first. So he just starts throwing up on the carpet. It was like, “No. You’re not throwing up on my carpet. Go get a tarp and come back. Put your tarp down. Then you clean up after yourself.”
Charlie Wallace: The guitarist from Slaughterhouse had ten delays, and I saved all my money to buy one. They must have had jobs or something. He turned it on, and it was like whaaaaa. We went to Bob’s house one time and watched GG Allin videos. Then Bob says, “Ever wonder what a pig’s dick looks like? Well, check it out.” And he puts on a video of a girl fucking a pig.” And he’s got beer, but it’s warm, and he says, “Warm beer and bestiality go together.”
I’m Hell
John Brannon: Me and Larissa had a Sonny-and-Cher show going on for a couple years, only it revolved around drugs or lack of drugs. We would play New York a lot and always called ahead and had little girls pick some dope up for us. You know that record cover for Paul’s Boutique? We stayed on the second floor. It was by this bar where we used to hang out with the Dust Devils, over by Max Fish. The Puerto Ricans were all out there, so dope was easy. We had money and we stayed close.
Kevin Monroe: When we first landed in Amsterdam on our first European tour, I told Larissa, “Listen, if you need to get something, please do not do it on your own. Just let me do it, okay? Do not do anything by yourself.” We got picked up at the airport and were taken to the hotel in Amsterdam, and five minutes later our guitars were being thrown down the stairs because she asked the owner of the hotel where she could get off. Killdozer was with us and were like, “What in the hell is going on?” Nirvana got kicked out of the same hotel for the same reason.
Jon Howard: The Hyenas, except for Kimball, were longtime, hard-working junkies.
Peter Davis: I started booking them around the time You Can’t Pray a Lie came out. Their stuff was going pretty good; they were getting dates with Sonic Youth, and they were well on their way at that point. But they were using, and people on the business side got a whiff of what was going on.
John Brannon: Nirvana came and played Ann Arbor and stayed at our house. Kurt crashed on my floor and he was sick. Me and Larissa didn’t know. At that point we had just met him. But we had shitloads of heroin on us, and we could have gotten straight. Kurt pulled out all my blues records, and of course he’s playing my Lead Belly records. I kinda felt like he was, like, in the bathroom getting sick or some shit, but I didn’t put it together.
Rachel Nagy: Kurt’s not a girl, so he couldn’t have fucked John. John would never give up his dope to anybody that wouldn’t suck his dick. I like John and I think he’s a great musician, but he is a user.
Kevin Monroe: Before that, Dave Grohl and Scream played a show with us in Detroit and stayed at the
house in Ann Arbor, about forty-five minutes away. One of the guys in Scream sat their gig money in one of those rubberish sort of zipper bags on top of the gas pump in Detroit. They left it, drove to Ann Arbor, and they couldn’t find it. Then they remembered. It was three in the morning, and they drove back to get it and it was still sitting there.
Rachel Nagy: I used to sell weed to Nirvana and Soundgarden because I knew all those guys at St. Andrews and I was always hanging out in back. “Hey, Rae, you got some weed? ’cause there’s these guys that need some.” Of course, it was, “Oh, I love those guys. Sure, here.” My good girlfriend, Jenny Youngblood, married Dave Grohl. She was kind of a bougie northern suburb girl, and Dad was all telling Dave, “You need to grow up and be a man.” And Dave’s like, “Ah, nah. I think I’ll go on tour. See ya!” It was like, “You know what, sweetheart? Your daughter is walking around in pink rollers, so shut the fuck up.”
John Brannon: We toured all the time and always hooked up with all these crazy people, especially crazy chicks. We’d stay at some place; it would turn out to be a meth lab or some shit. One of the chicks from this one meth lab we picked up, and she ended up going out with Kevin. And then when he dumped her, she later ended up with the bass player we got to replace Kevin, whose name was Kevin Reis. She must have liked Hyenas’ bass players named Kevin. Kevin Reis ended up ODing.
Peter Davis: I never got any complaints about the Hyenas getting there, playing well, or anything. Just complaints from promoters about not being able to get into the bathroom after the show because things were occupied.
John Brannon: We always attracted the nuts, for sure, then they’d end up on tour with us. We’d be in LA, someone would say, “Could you drive me to, like, wherever?” We’d do it. What the fuck? We were bored and we never had roadies, so we figured, “You got some gas money? You got some weed? Yeah, you can roll with us.” Or it would be like some kind of kid who was some young cool kid. They’d always freak out, like, hanging out with us or, like, you know, we were kind of shady.
Grace Kennelly (LA scenester): The Hyenas came to LA and took it over. I got to know the Hyenas through my ex-boyfriend, who was in Lubricated Goat, and I would put up bands. John stayed with me. I saw right away that John likes to tell stories, and half the time they aren’t true. He put on this badass front, but he was one of the sweetest guys I ever slept with.
Peter Davis: They were getting the reverence on the street and they were drawing, but the money was just okay; it wasn’t barnstormers as it should have been.
Charlie Wallace: We played with the Hyenas in Montreal at the Foufones Electriques. I was big L-Seven fan, but Larissa was junked out of her mind. I wanted to talk to her about L-Seven. First she disappeared for two hours, then I tried to talk to her when she got back, and all she could say was, “yeah yeah yeah.” Kevin Monroe was weird too. He used to go out with this girl Xiola in Ann Arbor. She inspired the Jane’s Addiction song “Three Days.” I met Xiola at a Detroit show, and she invited me to come to Ann Arbor and visit—she paid for my bus ticket. It turned out that she was a bad junkie; I was only eighteen and had no real idea what that meant. But Kevin was there at the house in Ann Arbor sometimes when she wasn’t living in LA, and I’d see him. Xiola went back and forth to LA, and she finally died of a heroin overdose.
That night in Montreal we were talking, and Kevin remembered who I was. It was one of those conversations about a girl we both knew. We talked and he says, “Yeah, she passed away last year.” Which I didn’t know. Sort of out of nowhere, he says, “If I ever find you had anything to do with that, I’ll find you.” I said, “Dude, I don’t even do heroin,” and he said, “Okay, you say that to me now.”
Preston Long: Wig played on a bill with the Hyenas at CBGBs, which was one of the first times I played with the Hyenas. We did “Public Animal #9,” which we later recorded for the Alice Cooper covers thing on Sub Pop. But that night I went up there and it was abysmal. Larissa was a half step off the whole song, playing an E flat while we were playing an A. Wig toured with the Hyenas for a while, and Larissa would book the shows, so we’d play one and then have nine days off. We’d get kicked out of wherever we’d be staying, and no one was taking care of shit, and we’d just kind of be out there. That’s when Kevin and I sort of thought about putting something else together.
John Brannon: It just got to a point that we had never stopped touring. We didn’t live anywhere; nothing else is going on in our lives. I was staying with whatever chick I was with when we were home.
Preston Long: I had a guitar with four strings on it, and so I learned this stuff and was playing more country stuff, old-time stuff. Kevin was around, and we were talking about doing something. It kind of evolved that we wanted to play country music really hard.
Kevin Monroe: Preston and I had already started working together just as a side project before Jim and I decided to leave. John wasn’t real happy about it. We told John, and Bill Metner was there, a longtime friend of John’s, who is dead now. We were picking up some equipment, and John was trying to strong arm me. Bill found me in, like, some closet trying to hide from John.
John Brannon: The Hard Times tour lasted five weeks, and I was off drugs at the start, but I broke down by the time we got to fucking LA. Some fucker gave me a bunch of black tar dope. Of course I shot it all up and fucking ODed in the van. They’re carrying me out to do the gig. Eric Erlandson from Hole was there with this, like, little girl. He’s like, “John, I want you to meet my girlfriend, Drew Barry-more.” I looked at her, said, “What’s up?” and threw up all over. She was terrified. That tour was the whole quitting/stopping, quitting/stopping. Over the years I went through every methadone clinic in this fucking town. We got off the Hard Times tour, and I went right into rehab. I had enough; I was tired of being like this. After twenty-seven days Larissa came by and broke me out. We went and scored. Rehab doesn’t work. I had to do it myself.
Anthony DeLuca (drummer for Boston bands Swirlies, Blake Babies): There was a show my friend hooked up at his loft in, like, the south end of Boston with the Laughing Hyenas at like 2 a.m. And it was a big deal—everybody who was into music in Boston went to this show. So it was like two, now it’s like two-thirty, and it’s like quarter of three, and everyone’s kind of late. There’s, like, a lot of people there, like two hundred people, maybe more, and everyone’s like, “What the fuck?” You know, “Where are the Laughing Hyenas?” Finally Larissa and Todd Swalla, the drummer, walked in, and they were kind of like, “Oh, yeah, alright, yeah, cool. We’re ready to play, whatever.” And they went in the bathroom for awhile and came out a little bit later together, looking really antsy. I was talking to a friend of mine a little bit further away from where everybody walked in, and there was this commotion, and I remember, like, looking up, and the next thing you knew, like, what had happened was they stole the cash box, and they just split, you know, like they just split. There were probably, like, you know, a thousand dollars in there. They never played the show. But that was kind of what they were; that was what they were known for. And John was the leader of this pack of criminals, right?
Harold Richardson: John was already a local legend in Ann Arbor. I was working at a pizza place and doing a delivery one night and saw John having sex with a chick; he had her bent over a car by the Blind Pig downtown. I went back and told the guys at work I just saw John Brannon fucking some chick, and we all jumped in my car and went back, and he was still fucking her. Of course we yelled at him. Heroin was everywhere around Detroit and Ann Arbor in those years. I started driving a cab, and I’d always have people jumping in the cab looking to score, and I always knew where to take them. Most of the cabdrivers I worked with were junkies and crackheads. Right before they put her away, I would take Eminem’s wife, Kim, from Ann Arbor to Detroit so she could cop. Usually it would be a round trip, and I would wait around and she would call me. She was a pretty tough lady, and she would complain to me that white guys were never into her.
Pres
ton Long: Kevin, me, and Jim formed Mule and toured on a demo tape, with flyers that said Ex Hyenas. That was a time when you could play anywhere and people would come out. One of our first shows was in East Lansing with Urge Overkill somewhere on campus, and we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing. We had borrowed amps, and I probably had a borrowed guitar, and by then Jim and Kevin were a pretty respected, established rhythm section, and there I was out front with this borrowed gear, and I sucked. I knew I wasn’t a front man and I wasn’t a guitar player. I heard about that shit for years, how bad I sucked. So I came back to Detroit and went down in the basement by myself and practiced the songs over and over and did all the stuff I couldn’t do, like standing up and singing and playing. We had no ethics before that MSU show; I was like, “Fuck this. I am not showing up like that again.” When we worked on our first album with Steve Albini, Kurt Cobain had died about that time, and Albini had mostly good things to say about Kurt. He has a lot of bad shit to say about people, but he was smart enough to rein it in about Kurt.