Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  SUSAN SILVER: We were in this crappy apartment-hotel place that we stayed at, because it was eighty bucks a night and had a kitchen. A bunch of people lived in it — you always smelled liver cooking and heard people practicing instruments. It was by the Beacon Theater. I got a call, and it was Kelly, and he said that Andy was in a coma, and they weren’t sure if he was going to make it. We were all in a daze. It was scary — everybody was in shock. I remember after sound check, sitting at this table and there was a TV playing — waiting for the doors to open. It was during that period that Sinead O’Connor had done “Nothing Compares 2 U.” For some reason it seems like that was playing over and over — that stark video with her face taking up the whole screen.

  REGAN HAGAR: A lot people overdosed that particular weekend — there was bad heroin in Seattle at that time. So I think it was a huge mistake. I think he had been clean for a number of days. He was with this guy from Bainbridge, who had the drugs, and had given them to him. I think he just didn’t say no. I remember being really frustrated at the hospital. He did not die immediately. They ended up saying he had an aneurysm — the aneurysm was apparently moved forward by the drugs. It was kind of hard to figure out what the hospital was saying. But he was on a life-support system for a couple of days.

  I remember going to the hospital and getting really angry, because there was “a scene” there. People that to me were his new friends, because he was successful — which bothered me. I had no right to be bothered by that — that’s fine, everybody has the right to be there that cared about him. But I was being selfish at the time. I remember going into the room, and his hair was all fucked-up — just really messy. I remember being in there with my now-wife, venting to her, and she had a brush. We tried to clean him up a little bit, because he looked really bad. In a way, I wish I had not seen him in there — he looked all pale, sick, and bloated. It’s a terrible memory for me.

  SUSAN SILVER: We came back the next day, dropped our bags at home, and went right to the hospital. All the band was around, and his girlfriend. They told us when we got there that they were going to take him off life-support. His family was there — his parents, his brothers, and his little two-year-old nephew. I remember holding his hand, giving him a kiss on the forehead, and saying that he was an angel. None of us will ever meet another human being that looks more like an angel — a cherub. Gorgeous, cherub, porcelain skinned face, with long blond hair. A really surreal moment. I said, “Goodbye angel,” stepped outside the curtain, and they turned off the machines.

  JERRY CANTRELL: When Andy died, that was a serious reality check. We all had our fun, but it was pretty young and innocent at that time. It was a real slap in the face. I didn’t even realize he was struggling as much as he had.

  SUSAN SILVER: Somewhere in the days ensuing, there was a memorial service at the Paramount Theater, which we thought was a fitting place for such a theatrical guy. One friend put together an amazing video tribute. It was the beginning of a lot of “rites of passage” that we’ve all been through since then. So many more. More than most communities could ever endure.

  REGAN HAGAR: Then there was a memorial service that further fueled my fire — there were these people talking all this smack about him onstage. I got up, went to the mic, and started venting. Me and another friend couldn’t take the guy who was hired to deliver some service, or something — I don’t know what the hell he was doing. But he obviously didn’t know Andy, and was talking a bunch of shit. Talking about Andy being a junkie, and that really made me mad. Because I knew lots of junkies. There were junkies in the scene, but he wasn’t one of them. It seemed so derogatory. So I went up to defend Andy at his own memorial service, and say some good words about him. Even his father referred to Andy as a junkie at the service, which bums me out. Maybe he was. That’s a term that … I just can’t accept that.

  SCOTTY CRANE: I remember Andy’s memorial at the Paramount, everybody was being really serious. And of course it was — Andy had just died. But I remember Chad [aka Slam] holding up the Mother Love Bone EP Shine and a lighter, at one point during this service. And yelling something — I don’t know what — like, “Andy, we miss you!” Someone told him to sit down. And I got pissed. I was like, “He’s the only guy here who even gets it.” Andy would have wanted him on the podium talking about Andy instead of what really happened. Because that was the spirit of Andy. Fuck yeah — hold up a lighter and an album of his. Do you know how much Andy would have loved to see that?

  SHAWN SMITH: I’ll never feel a death like I felt that one I don’t think, personally.

  XANA LA FUENTE: He told me when I met him that he’d been in rehab. But I really didn’t understand addiction at that time — I was really naive about it. Whenever he would use, he would tell me. It wasn’t like the typical junkie boyfriend that was, “Do you want to try some?” He never, ever used with me. The one time I was like, “Screw it — bring some over here, I want to see what it’s like,” he was almost going to, and then he didn’t. He would tell me every time he did it — it’s not like he was strung out and I just put up with it. I had an idea he was doing it, and then he would say, “I used again last night.” I would freak out, and then he would start crying. He must have had some idea that he was going to die, because he would start crying — literally, every single time. It was really weird — I’ve seen a lot of junkies since then, and I’ve never seen someone use, run and tell their girlfriend, and then cry. Usually when you use, you’re like, “I’m not going to do it again,” or you try to keep it hidden, because you get busted, and then you still lie about it. I really believe that he had a sense that something was going to happen to him.

  JERRY CANTRELL: Jesus, what a terrible thing to happen — especially losing Andy, and then the ones that remain. All your dreams and everything in one mix — friend, buddy, partner, band member — down the tubes from top to bottom.

  KURT DANIELSON: One of the saddest stories, because it’s one of the shortest.

  KIM WARNICK: He was just such a sweet guy. It’s a shame when anybody dies, but God, that guy — if anybody wanted the whole rock ’n’ roll fantasy thing, he wanted it as much as anybody I’ve ever known. His whole wall in his bedroom was a collage of Paul Stanley and KISS.

  DUFF McKAGAN: He was really on his way to becoming a superstar. Nobody will ever know. But I would have had money on it — those guys would have been huge.

  SHAWN SMITH: Andy had that spark, y’know? That “David Lee Roth thing.”

  TERRY DATE: He was one of the great losses. That’s one of the ones that just hurts really bad for me — still to this day — and I didn’t even know him as well as the other guys did. I just saw a little sliver of his life. But that was a personality that was really, really sad to see go.

  JACK ENDINO: He was such a ray of sunshine — a supremely talented and very funny person. I called him “the Heavy Metal Standup Comic of Seattle.” He was like a standup comedian onstage between the songs — he would say stuff that was so off-the-wall that you would just crack up. Even off stage he was funny.

  XANA LA FUENTE: I was twenty-one when he died. Those guys never remember how young I was. I thought he was extremely talented — I loved his music right away. I’ve only met one or two people since then that I can sit down and say I love their music immediately. My uncles were all musicians in New Mexico, but they were rockabilly musicians. This was totally different — dreamy Zeppelin-type stuff. And he was hilarious. He was so fun to live with — a total comedian.

  JEFF AMENT: We lost our friend in a horrible way, and the two years working to get to that point was gone. I really miss him.

  REGAN HAGAR: Incredible loss — I don’t think in my lifetime I’ll have a best friend of the caliber that Andy was. I think you have best friends when you’re kids. When you become an adult, you have relationships with people, but you can never have the chance to have that intimacy with someone again. I could be completely wrong — life is always changing — but Andy was a guy that h
e and I could hug each other in a loving way, and I didn’t know any other guys like that. There was no weirdness there. We knew who we were, we knew that we loved each other, and that we were very close. I think that’s a rarity that you find between heterosexual men. We were very close. I think of him still.

  SCOTTY CRANE: For years it felt like I would see him in Seattle, out of the corner of my eye. I’d turn, think I’d see him, and it wouldn’t be him. It felt like the Seattle music scene died when Andy died. It just got ugly after that — it got to be about money and fame.

  1990–1991

  CHAPTER 17

  “OK, this thing is going to happen”: 1990–1991

  Due to the breakthrough success of several bands 1991 was the year that “grunge” became a household word. But as scene goers recount, the prior year was just as important to its growth.

  PETE DROGE: I remember the first Rolling Stone feature about “the Seattle Sound.” It was like a one page thing, and I think the big picture was of the Posies. At the time, a lot of people were banking on that band to break big. I can’t remember who the inset little pictures were, but I want to say Alice in Chains and Love Bone. That was one of the first things where you go, “Wow, Rolling Stone. This isn’t some fanzine in the U.K.”

  BEN SHEPHERD: I always saw it as all of America. When I went on that tour with Nirvana [as a roadie], you could see everybody was “on music” at that point. Music was suddenly alive again and doing something. Sometimes it’s film and writing that does that culturally. That time, it was music.

  GRANT ALDEN: I remember going to CMJ in New York — I have distinct memories of Screaming Trees following Galaxie 500 at CBGB’s, and they absolutely destroyed the band. The same year, I saw Soundgarden at the student union building at NYU. They had a really low ceiling over the stage, and Cornell got in a trance — he took the mic stand and tore up the ceiling a little bit. People from campus freaked out, and there were cops ready to arrest. Susan said, “Look, it’s just sheet rock, we can get it fixed. We’ll pay the bill. Life goes on, don’t freak out about it.”

  The day after CMJ ended, Mudhoney played a show at a converted church — they opened for Gwar on Halloween. There were all these kids there who weren’t there for CMJ, weren’t from the Northwest — just screaming along with the songs. I came back from that trip, and I was like, “OK, this thing is going to happen. These acts are compelling outside of their own market. They’re really good — when I forget they’re from my hometown.” That meant [The Rocket] covered local music — virtually to the exclusion of everything else — to the best of our ability.

  JIM BLANCHARD: I remember going to the first Lollapalooza — I had no clue that this “alternative nation” had been building up. There were all these people with crazy hair and tattoos — young people — and it blew my mind. I’d been into this music for so long, and now, everybody’s into it — everybody knows about it.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN: Bruce and I kind of made fun of the whole idea. There were a couple of instances — we did a “grunge fashion show,” like, nine months before I wrote an article in earnest for Vogue magazine about grunge fashion. We were always sending stuff up like, “Once we’re rich and we’ve retired, and we’ve got our Gulf Streams and swimming pools … ” All this seemed ridiculous. But on a certain level, it happened.

  ART CHANTRY: I’m still trying to figure out a lot of the interactions and players, and how they crossed paths and created new things. It was [like] the narrow point in an hourglass — Seattle for a brief period was that narrow point. Everybody passed through here, and bumped into everyone else. Very few cities get to experience that. San Francisco obviously had it in the late ’60s, Swinging London was like that, New York being such a powerful and big city has it happening on a constant basis. Fucking Seattle? Why did it happen here?

  COLLEEN COMBS: Not only was there a huge scene change, but Microsoft got huge, and then Amazon came in. That changed the skyline — it changed the way the city was. When I first moved to Seattle, you could call a bar and page someone. You could write a check for your bar tab. I mean, Los Angeles is such “I want that, I want it yesterday, and of course I can pay for it.” You try to get something done in Seattle with that attitude, and you’ll be blocked. The scene was the same way. Seattle also had this scene where people in the audience would talk to the band, and the bands would talk back to them. Where in L.A., people are trying so hard to be professional; you didn’t really get that sort of thing.

  BRAD SINSEL: I think a pivotal thing that happened is Seattle stopped taking its cue from outward. We stopped drawing on other people’s ideas for a moment, but we also created a hell in the process. It was a great revolution, but in the end, what did we do? Kim [Thayil] — who’s a really nice guy — but in his arrogance of being early in the game of success, said to the world, “We put the final nail in the coffin of butt rock.” And my thought was, “How dare you. You borrowed heavily vocally from Dio, and musically from early Sabbath.” As you follow their stuff further down the road, it’s like, “OK, now it’s starting to sound like Foreigner — what happened to all this musical revolution?”

  When “the great revolution” occurred, I was signed to Columbia at the time under War Babies — that was the last deal I did before I left the business. I remember the a&r guy, Nick Turzo — who was Alice’s a&r guy — had set up a radio thing in Seattle, where we were going to go out with the Columbia or Sony radio guy. He said, “Warrant is in town. I know we’re doing dinner — would you mind them coming?” I went, “Sure, why not.” We go to Benihana’s, and the guys from Warrant show up — their hair is big. “How’s it going?” “Oh, great!” I start pouring a little sake, and all of a sudden, “ Y’know … things aren’t so great.” The guy fucking fell apart on me!

  JEFF GILBERT: You know what else really connected the dots between the metal crowd and the grunge crowd? Kirk Hammett from Metallica. Huge Nirvana and Melvins fan. Would talk about them in the Metallica fan club newsletters — collected everything Sub Pop put out. He might as well have just opened the floodgates — the metal guys go, “Well, if Kirk Hammett likes it, of course we do.” Kirk was a great sales tool for Sub Pop, without even knowing it. Huge Mudhoney fan. In fact, when Metallica played at the Key Arena here in town, they had that “Snake Pit,” where you could go in and be onstage with Metallica. Kirk got all the guys from Mudhoney and Nirvana in there. Kirk would keep coming over, and handing beers down to Matt Lukin. Matt would start slugging them, and Kirk yelled over, “Share it!”

  DYLAN CARLSON: All of this weird focus on Seattle. Suddenly, there was press, and people moving to Seattle to start bands. People that you knew were gone more and more, because they were on tour. MTV showed up at all different shows with cameras. Even [Earth] got interviewed by Tabitha Soren.

  LIBBY KNUDSON: [MTV] interviewed Mark and Steve, and I think Mark is like, “Isn’t grunge the stuff in your kitchen sink?”

  MEGAN JASPER: “Grunge” became a normal word, which grossed everybody out.

  ART CHANTRY: I hate that word — that’s a marketing term, not a descriptive.

  Middle-aged/bespeckled businessmen really dug the Melvins and Nirvana

  JACK ENDINO: “Grunge” is just another term for a certain kind of classic hard rock. I don’t really see a discontinuity; I see a continuation of styles that began in the ’70s, continuing as a thread really, that was interrupted by new wave in the early ’80s. But to younger people who didn’t live through the ’70s, they would see this thing happening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and think, “This is a whole new phase of rock ’n’ roll, we’ll call it something new … we’ll call it ‘grunge.’” And it really wasn’t. It was a resurgence of classic rock — with classic rock song structures, chord sequences, melodies. All the ingredients of classic ’70s rock, with maybe a little bit of ’80s punk rock attitude thrown into the recipe. Nobody dressed funny, and nobody had funny haircuts … nobody had any haircuts [laughs].

  But I
feel a little strange about the “grunge” thing, because nobody’s quite sure who was the first person in Seattle to be using the term. I’ve discovered belatedly, years later, there’s some circumstantial evidence that it might have been me. I’ve also seen evidence that it may have been some other people. Lester Bangs used the term as early as 1972. I could show you an article he wrote about the Groundhogs in 1972 where he used the term grunge. And the Groundhogs fucking sounded like Mudhoney — just by coincidence. I don’t know where it came from, I just think it was a term — my mom would use it to describe the stuff in the drain in the kitchen. What’s that stuff in your bellybutton, y’know? It was not an unknown word, it’s not like someone made up the word, it was just a descriptive word for something really dirty and nasty. “Get the grunge out of that pan, scrub the grunge out of the bathtub.” You think of the first couple of Stooges records in a lot of ways as being protogrunge.

  LIBBY KNUDSON: To this day, I still go, “Huh? Those stinky boys … what?” I don’t know if I’m the only person — I still shake my head in shock. Who would have thought?

  EMILY RIEMAN: I moved back in ’91, and it actually really sucked. I came home, didn’t even recognize the skyline, traffic had doubled — I think the whole Microsoft thing was happening. Everybody was moving here for all kinds of reasons. I had this notion that I would go back and hang out with my old friends. It just wasn’t like that anymore. You couldn’t even get on the guest list. You couldn’t even get a fucking ticket to a Mudhoney show, unless you were “in the know” or brownnosing somebody.

  I’ve got this distinct memory — my roommate when I lived in Seattle was Jim Tillman, and he was in Love Battery. Love Battery was playing at the Off Ramp. He said, “I’ll put you on the guest list.” I go down to the show, and he forgot to put me on the list. And it was totally no big deal, it slipped his mind. I still thought, “Maybe if I stick my head in, I can see somebody I know who can go find Jim for me, and get me in.” But it was crazy — this show turned out to be sold out. I remember old friends of mine walking past me, and they wouldn’t even give me the fucking time of day. They were just whipping past me, because it was so important to get in that show, be vip, be who’s who, and where it’s at. I was just appalled. I remember that night going, “GET ME OUT OF SEATTLE AGAIN! I HATE IT HERE!”