Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  TIM HAYES: I remember seeing a show with a wrestling match in a loft. They had a ring set up and before the U-Men played, they had a group of local amateurs wrestling.

  TRACY MARANDER: They had a gal come out in a bikini between songs, and she would hold up a card with a number. Like between boxing rounds.

  SUSAN SILVER: One show at the Rainbow, they wrapped themselves in sheets and dusted themselves in ashes.

  JOHN BIGLEY: Then the reputation grew — slaughtering of animals [laughs]. If you were cool, you’d make it to the show. Maybe we’d actually play, and you’d have something to talk about.

  TOM PRICE: Sometimes, we wouldn’t really even play — we’d do some weird sketch or something.

  DAVE DEDERER: The only band that I care about from that era was the U-Men, who in my opinion, were maybe the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of all time — anywhere, period. I’ll never forget the first song of the first show at the Grey Door. Their first five-song EP [1984’s The U-Men] is one of the greatest records ever, and it opens with this song, “Shoot ’Em Down,” which starts with this guitar, and that “WOW WOW WOW” scream that John Bigley does. They come to that part where he yells, and the songs kicks in — I remember literally feeling as if I’d been lifted off my feet and slammed against the back wall. It was one of the greatest live music moments I’ve ever experienced.

  JOHN BIGLEY: Another one of the bands rented the Laurelhurst Community Center — Laurelhurst is an affluent suburb out by the University of Washington. We loaded our gear in, and word got out that “the weirdos had taken over the community center!” A “vigilante group” of teenagers from the neighborhood got together, and started breaking out car windows and beating people up in the parking lot. Somehow, got the Bat-Signal out, and some of our toughest, craziest, doing-that-punk-rock-thing-’cause-they-hadto people showed up, and equalized the whole thing. Lots of people running around bleeding, screaming, and crying. The police showed up, and started throwing our shit into the parking lot — just chaos.

  CHARLES PETERSON: Every year, Seattle has this festival at the Seattle Center called Bumbershoot. [The U-Men] played at the Mural Amphitheater, which is outdoors — there used to be a little water moat around the stage. I think it was a Friday afternoon at four. Back then, for someone like the U-Men to play was pretty daring. Unbeknownst to anybody, Larry decided to set the moat on fire during their show! [Laughs.] So he dumps bottles of gasoline or kerosene into this moat, and set it on fire. The whole audience went fucking ballistic — in the middle of this field, there were about 100 people slam dancing madly. And all the other people — the families with strollers — [their] jaws dropped! A couple of lame security guards thinking that we were all fighting or something, and trying to pull us all apart. They just got trampled. Of course, the U-Men were banned from ever playing the Seattle Center again.

  TOM PRICE: It was cool being onstage and having this solid twenty-foot wall of flame right in front of you.

  DAWN ANDERSON: I saw an acoustic U-Men show that was incredible. I remember being mostly impressed by Bigley’s voice — he was this great blues singer.

  LARRY REID: When the U-Men got on Homestead, that really kicked open a lot of doors, and opened a floodgate of creativity in the Northwest. The U-Men’s sound didn’t have much in common with grunge, but their attitude did. A lot of the bands that became well-known opened for the U-Men. Other venues would begin to book some of these edgy bands, because the U-Men proved that they could make money.

  JIM TILLMAN: We were one of the first underground/weirdo bands to go on tour. This was in 1984, and it wasn’t a nationwide network of venues that you just hop from night to night and play. We would rely on friends and network the people we knew. I saved up a bunch of money, and bought a school bus, and we drove around the country at fifty miles per hour. Going from Los Angeles to Texas to Minneapolis. Played some amazing shows with amazing bands — the Butthole Surfers, Tex and the Horseheads, Scratch Acid, Tales of Terror. One of the destinations for those tours was “Woodshock,” which was taking place in Austin at this crazy ranch, with a river running through it. It was a two or three day festival. I heard this story once I got there — a couple of guys were driving along in their pickup truck on their way to Woodshock, and they saw a lone cow close to the road. They shot and killed it, stuck it in the back of their pickup truck, brought it to the show, skinned it, made fajitas out of it, and sold them [laughs]. A little entrepreneurial spirit.

  MARK ARM: The U-Men went to Texas and stayed in Austin for a month, and basically just starved. Tom Price will tell you he was eating raw potatoes because he didn’t have any money.

  JIM TILLMAN: I found one of our notebooks, and we had [tour cost] breakdowns. It was really hilarious — at one point it says, “$60. Beer: $20. Net: $40. Alternator: $60. Net: negative $20.” I was very skinny — I had a gallon of peanut butter I had brought from home and lived off of that. And I discovered when you’re really hungry, if you drink a couple of root beers really fast and jump up and down, it’ll fill you up.

  JOHN BIGLEY: Lots of trouble with the law — we got messed with a lot. There was a very low level of respect back then for us and what we did.

  TOM PRICE: To describe what the U-Men did as “touring” is kind of a misnomer. I think our first tour we were gone for three months and we did maybe five or six shows. It was more like we’d migrate down to L.A. for a month, then we’d migrate over to Texas. Eventually over the years, it got to be a little more like a regular tour.

  JOHN BIGLEY: This fellow [producer John Nelson] mainly did bluegrass, children’s music, and gospel. We wound up sticking with him for the majority of the recordings we did. Another standout was he was booked, and we needed to get this single recorded. We got recommended to this studio — kind of heavy metal, north end, up in the suburbs. None of us had a car, so we had five cabs full of stuff. A fellow answers the door with [a] crazy ass metal black T-shirt, big beard, and long hair — Rick Rubin–looking guy, without the cool part [laughs]. He’s pretty nervous. Just the way we looked, and we used old equipment — old Fenders and beat-up amps. We get set up, we did this instrumental — I was looking in the glass, and the guy is rolling his head around. The guy is speechless — staring at the console. Tom goes, “Is there something wrong?” And that guy looks up, and goes, “Nothing’s wrong, unless you consider the fact that you go against every musical recording principle. This is the most asinine garbage I’ve ever heard. We’re done.” Takes off his headphones, turns off the light, goes out in the hallway, and gets on the phone. The next morning — we actually recorded in the daylight, in the a.m. — at Crow, where we had gone all the time before. Banged out this seven-inch — “Dig It a Hole” and “Solid Action.”

  LARRY REID: In 1985, I left and turned the band over to Susan [Silver].

  JIM TILLMAN: Susan was great — a true music fan. Susan stepped in and tried to help us get some gigs — but it was all sort of informal. Her interest in music led her to start managing other bands, and eventually, managing Soundgarden. She helped us as much as she could — she did wire us some money for [an] alternator. We probably still owe her that.

  TOM PRICE: Eventually, the band fell apart — around ’88. One day, we were all kind of drunk, and I went on about, “Man, we’ve got to get going, we’ve got to start touring — it’s time to shit or get off the pot.” And everybody kind of nodded, “OK, OK.” The next time I went to band practice, nobody else showed up [laughs]. I hadn’t quite realized that I presented an ultimatum. Even after that, it took a while to get it through my thick skull that everybody quit the band.

  DAVE DEDERER: They drove so many things — even though they didn’t sound like what grunge became. The U-Men’s level of musicianship was fantastic. They had a real rhythm section that swung. “The grunge guitar” became a Fender Mustang with the racing stripe on it — as played by Steve Turner, and copied by Kurt Cobain. That was Tom Price in 1983 or ’84 — he had a red Fender Mustang, which nobody in the
world played at that time. Seriously — it was like a junk guitar.

  NILS BERNSTEIN: John Bigley was way sexier than Chris Cornell.

  LARRY REID: The success of the U-Men really started to make a lot of these younger musicians consider punk rock as almost a viable vocation. I would see them at almost all the gigs — Stoney Gossard, [Steve] Turner, Mark Arm.

  MARK ARM: A couple of the kids I hung out with in high school had this imaginary band named after a math teacher, Mr. Epp. We would find whatever was at hand, and just record it. We’d record stuff into a cassette player, mess with it, scream into another cassette player, and turn on a vacuum cleaner, and stuff like that. We didn’t have any idea what we were doing — just entertaining ourselves. This am radio station started up, KZAM — it was the only radio station that embraced new wave. One DJ there, Stephen Rabow, at one point decided, “If you’re in a band, send in your tape, and I’ll play it.” He devoted two of his whole shows, which I think were three hours apiece, to playing whatever came in. We sent in something, and he dubbed it “By far the worst, and hence, the best thing that came in” [laughs]. We were super jazzed. We went on a flyering campaign around Seattle — it was all about Mr. Epp. We didn’t have instruments, but we would stick up posters around downtown Seattle. After [Mr. Epp’s drummer] Darren’s sixteen-year-old brother joined on bass, he would take a bus downtown to the Free Zone. Most of the buses in King County would come through the Free Zone downtown. And he would go from bus to bus and write “Mr. Epp” on the back of the seats. It got to the point where if you got on almost any bus, there would be Mr. Epp graffiti on it.

  EMILY RIEMAN: I was walking down University Avenue with Satz around ’82 — there was a poster for Mr. Epp stapled up. I said to Satz, “Who the hell is that?” And he said, “Eh, some geeks from the east side” [laughs].

  MARK ARM: We figured out that we could rent halls and put on shows ourselves. We would ask other local punk bands to play, many of whom had no idea who we were. They probably thought we were geeks, and that we were bullshit. We opened for Savage Republic at Ground Zero Art Gallery. Darren wanted to cover that Velvet Underground song “The Gift.” We switched instruments, and Darren pulled out this reading lamp, and read the story. That really pissed off some of the punks. This idiot Walter and some of the Bopos created havoc, and broke windows at that show because neither Mr. Epp or Savage Republic were “punk” enough. In the process of playing in this band, we picked up a few principles about playing music, or at least rock ’n’ roll. Like, we learned about the barre chord and how to tune a guitar [laughs]. We never made any money — we’d lose the damage deposit because the toilets got trashed. One time we lost our damage deposit at the Polish Hall, because the Bopos stole meat from the freezer.

  DAVE DEDERER: They were coming down the Pere Ubu spectrum to me — or Flipper, early Butthole Surfers. Openly trying to be aggravatingly, annoyingly weird.

  STEVE TURNER: [Mark] wanted to make the band more “rock ’n’ roll,” and he convinced them to let me join on second guitar. That lasted six months — we practiced a lot, played two shows, the other guys didn’t like the more rock ’n’ roll leanings, and broke up the band [laughs].

  MARK ARM: I first met Steve … I think it was at a TSOL show. He had just started playing guitar shortly before [joining Mr. Epp]. We worked on new stuff for six months before playing another show. Then Darren and Smitty decided that they didn’t want to do it anymore. So we played a farewell show at the Metropolis. Darren and Todd’s dad ran a hair salon. One of them filled up a garbage bag with hair clippings swept off the floor. We threw that out over the audience during our last song — nearly choking the crowd and ourselves.

  JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER: I was going to school in California, and would read Maximumrocknroll to see what was going on back in Seattle. And nothing sounded interesting at all except for Mr. Epp — “Mohawk Man” was a great track.

  SUSAN SILVER: It was a real sense of community and enthusiasm. You’d have to ask yourself, “Has Mark Arm cloned himself? Because he’s everywhere!”

  JOE TOUTONGHI: [Duff McKagan] was part of the punk scene. That was before he hocked everything and moved to L.A.

  DUFF McKAGAN: I was in a lot of bands, man. I’m the last of eight kids — a lot of my brothers, sisters, and kids in the neighborhood were hippies. So around my house there were a lot of acoustic guitars, drums. Hendrix and the Stones playing on the stereo. But it seemed like it was too old for me … although I dug it. I started seeing punk rock flyers for gigs at the Bird, with the Lewd, the Mentors, the Enemy, DOA, Subhumans. It was scary and exciting at the same time. And I was already playing guitar at this point — one of my older brothers had taught me a few chords.

  Duff McKagan goes the way of the beret

  This guy came walking down our street — he would walk home from school — and he had a pink Mohawk. I was like, “That’s one of those dudes! ” One day I went out there, and was like, “Hey man, what’s going on?” His name was Chris Utting. He said he was starting a band, and Andy — this kid I came up with — and I had been playing at our junior high school, up in this sort of “jam room” at Eckstein Middle School, where they had some amps. Chris Utting was starting a band, with this guy from the Refuzors — one of these band’s names I’d seen on these flyers. This is like ’78 — I was fourteen. We’d take three buses down, and we started writing songs with Mike Refuzor. It was the first incarnation of this band that became the Vains.

  DAVE DEDERER: The first time I met [Duff ] was at a friend’s house at a party in seventh grade. He had a silk shirt on opened to his navel, stood next to the stereo, and played DJ and air guitar the whole night. He was already known to be a talented musician in seventh and eighth grade.

  DUFF McKAGAN: Playing with Mike Refuzor was fucking cool — that guy is awesome. There were junkies down at his apartment — very eye-opening for me. There was a girl down there — she was dying from cancer and she was strung out on dope. It was so real. I was still living with my mom, but they welcomed me and Andy into this really punk rock, hard environment. They took us for what we were — a couple of kids. You were accepted for whatever you were, which was cool, because I didn’t really know where I was accepted at school. I got kicked out of school, and got expelled a couple of times. So it was a place for me to fit in. Then Mike Refuzor went back to the Refuzors, so we kept going.

  JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER: He was so freaking cool. He was the baby in this family of older brothers who had all perfected the art of being cool ahead of him, and handed it down. He was a leather jacket punk rocker in ’79 — I definitely studied him. I remember running into him later. He said, “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a while. What are you listening to?” And I listed three bands — Motörhead, Agent Orange, and something else. He looks down at his jacket, and he’s wearing three pins — Motörhead, Agent Orange, and … I’m like, “He must think I’m the biggest idiot!”

  JOE TOUTONGHI: Duff and I were really good friends. I met him playing pinball at a used record store on University Avenue — Cellophane Square — that had pinball machines in the back. Drink beer and playing pinball for hours — they were open ’til midnight. They’d always have punk rock playing.

  DUFF McKAGAN: I was asked to join the Fastbacks — they wanted me to play drums. Kim Warnick was really important to me — she had a car and all the coolest music on cassette. She had everything. She’d come pick me up — I was already listening to the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash — but she turned me onto the Sweet, Slade, and T. Rex.

  KIM WARNICK: He was so young — like fifteen. We were in Vancouver, Canada — we did some radio interview up there. They asked us, “What do you hope to get out of playing music?” And Duff said, “I just want someone to move my equipment for me!” You have to be careful for what you wish for.

  KURT BLOCH: He played with us until late 1980, after we recorded our first single [“It’s Your Birthday”/“You Can’t Be Happy”]. We probably argued too much fo
r him — sat there fighting and throwing shit at each other, instead of getting anything done.

  DUFF McKAGAN: I was always playing in at least two bands. I started playing drums in the Fartz — right around when I turned seventeen. That was pretty kick-ass.

  BLAINE COOK: He was a member of the Fartz for a short period of time. We did the single, “Because This Fuckin’ World Stinks,” and then Jello Biafra wanted to do something with us. This buddy gave us $500 to record [1982’s] World Full of Hate twelve-inch EP. Back then, you didn’t have gear — you just had whatever you could cobble together. We were all stuffed in Tommy Hanson’s VW Beetle, making our way to the studio. You had to rent tapes, because tapes were $200. We were able to get all the recording and mixing in one evening. And there was enough money afterwards to get beer and burgers at Dick’s.

  MARK ARM: The Fartz were the fastest band that I’d seen — I saw them open for the Dead Kennedys. I decided that as long as the drummer keeps a beat, it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the band is playing. Of course, listening back to their seven-inch a few months later, I realized they were actually playing riffs.

  JOE TOUTONGHI: I painted his mom’s deck and front porch with him. We brewed our own beer, Duff ’s Brewskies — that was long before The Simpsons had Duff Beer. Ed Huletz — the Silly Killers’ singer — his mom bought an investment house, and Duff, Ed, and I lived there. Had insane parties every night — pretty much went crazy at that house.

  BLAINE COOK: I called him “Duff ski” at that point in time.

  JOHN CONTE: We’re both Catholics. Catholics have a tendency to notice one another — just by our mannerisms, habits, or how we speak. As a musician, he reminds me of the stories of Brian Jones — being able to lock him into a room with an instrument that he had never played, and come out fifteen minutes later, having learned how to play it. Good Lord, you’d go to a party, and the girls were all over him within fifteen seconds.