by Greg Prato
ROBERT ROTH: The Storybook Krooks was my first and only band before Truly. And there was that brief time when I tried out for Nirvana. A month after I found out I wasn’t going to be in Nirvana, I found Mark. At that point, I was just going to go in and record a solo record, and Mark ended up quitting the Screaming Trees that week. The guy who was playing bass at the time, Chris Quinn, quit his band that day. So once we got to the studio, we realized, “Oh, we’re a band.” I already had a song called “Truly.” Chris said, “How about calling the band Truly?” Mark was at work, and Jonathan Poneman said, “Why don’t you call your band Truly?” Two different people came up with the same name — I figured that was fate. Chris and I didn’t really get along that well — I’m more of an intuitive type, he’s more a studied type. I wanted to be a “Northwest Television” — two guitars doing innovative, cool stuff. So we stayed a three-piece. I left out the part where Chris insisted on switching to guitar, which meant we needed a bass player — Mark calling Hiro.
HIRO YAMAMOTO: I was out of music for a while — I just didn’t want to play. I was pretty tired of it. Mark called me, and said, “I’m playing with this guy, and we’re looking for a bass player.” I was like, “OK, I’ll give it a shot.” I hadn’t played for a couple of years. I listened to their stuff, and was like, “This is kinda cool.” I always liked Mark’s drumming — it seemed like the right thing to do.
ROBERT ROTH: It evolved into something very effortless — there was not a lot of discussion when Truly was making records or songs. The first EP [1991’s Heart and Lungs] was made before we were officially on Sub Pop — most of it. That was recorded in the summer of ’90. When Jonathan heard the works in progress, he decided to sign us and put the thing out. I think that we were the first Sub Pop band up until that point to do a twenty-four-track recording in a real studio. We broke away from the mold of Jack Endino and eight-track — and we had a full color sleeve. The idea of Truly was to be “post-grunge,” even though a lot of the world hadn’t found out about grunge yet. That was our intention from day one — to take things elsewhere.
One of the songs [was planned for] the Singles soundtrack, although it wound up getting booted from the album a week before it got sent off to press. That was depressing. That’s how Mark Arm bought his house, was from that movie [laughs]. The next thing was start recording an album, and we had some budgetary problems with Sub Pop. They were going to give us a huge amount of money to make our record — for their standards — and allow us to do it without signing on for any more records. In other words, they were going to do a one-off, and then let us be free agents. They dumped “Heart and Lungs” off of the Singles album — they added another Alice in Chains song, a Paul Westerberg song, and a Heart song. Then Sub Pop reneged. They were like, “You’re not getting anywhere near this amount of money, or you’re giving us several records.” At that point, I was negotiating on the behalf of two guys that didn’t want to sign a several record deal with them. So essentially, Sub Pop pulled the plug on the album, but put out the EP. I felt confident enough about the EP that we could get picked up on another label. And we did — we got signed to Capitol.
STEVE MANNING: I saw the Melvins a lot. I think my favorite and most memorable experience with the Melvins was seeing them play at the International Underground Pop Convention in Olympia. All these bands came from all over the world for this four-day conference. They played in the afternoon in the park. All of their family had come out for it — two of their grandmas were there, and had “Grandmas for Melvins” shirts on!
MEGAN JASPER: The best Melvins moment in the world for me was a show they did in Olympia in summer of ’91 [at the International Pop Underground Convention]. I wanted to just get away from so many bodies at that time — I walked up around the Capitol building, and there was a wedding set up. They were about to get married outdoors, it was a beautiful day, and they had to postpone the wedding, because all you could hear was the Melvins. Their music was hovering over this wedding — it was fucking great! As sad as it may have been for the people in the wedding party — they were setting up speakers to play easy listening — there was no kibosh that would be put on the Melvins. They totally took over. It seemed like one of those moments where even though it was fucking up a few people’s lives, everything was right in the world.
STU HALLERMAN: Jesse Bernstein stood out. When Sub Pop 200 came out, there was a record release party that I think went on for three days — they had each of the bands that were on the vinyl discs. It was at this place called the Underground in the University District. And the emcee I think for all three nights was Jesse Bernstein. I went to a couple of these shows, and he’d read poetry, mock the crowd, and they would mock him back.
NILS BERNSTEIN: My dad was friends with Jesse Bernstein — but no relation. Jesse worked at the Different Drummer bookstore on Broadway, which was one of those sf-style freak-haven bookstores with homeless guys thumbing through couples-massage books. People hated it when Jesse started emceeing or performing at shows, but I liked it ’cause it was familiar — like a thread from the mid-’70s freaks that hung out at my dad’s theater, to the mid-’80s freaks at punk rock shows. There’s a line in one of his poems — “I am with Jackie O., we are eating oranges from the president” — that still goes through my mind about once a week.
ALICE WHEELER: Jesse was a really interesting guy. He seemed a lot older than he actually was. He was ten or fifteen years older than I was, and he was a real “street guy.” He used to tell stories about shooting smack back in the day, he told me he used to be a porn star — all kinds of things. I was never sure how much of it was true and how much of it was made up for the benefit of a young girl [laughs]. What was interesting about him was he knew so many different people from different backgrounds. Even if I wouldn’t run into him for six months, he’d sit down and have a great story to tell. He used to talk about how back in the day, he would drink too much, shoot his gun, and drive his car. He said he realized he wasn’t going to live long if he kept doing that, so he was on the wagon when I met him. He was really encouraging to me about my photography. One of those first photos I did, he was goofing around — he said, “I’m on medication now, so I drool,” and drooled for the picture. A couple of years later, when I gave him the photo, he wanted to give it to his new wife for their wedding present, so she would know what she was getting into [laughs]. With that wife, he lived on a houseboat on Lake Union. It wasn’t a real houseboat — it was a barge with a little tiny room on top. Over the years, he lived in a bunch of different hotel rooms.
SLIM MOON: I think he must have been on “crazy money” or something, because it seemed he had a fixed income that was very small. He lived in this tiny flophouse — one room, with a bathroom down the hall, all his neighbors being winos. It was like he was ensconced there. You’ve got this little room with shelves all the way to the ceiling, a million books, and your manual typewriter. This was like the epitome of “the bohemian lifestyle.” He was named the Poet Emeritus of Seattle, and was always reading somewhere — whether it was the Seattle Opera House and a thousand people seeing him, or an open mic with nobody seeing him but the other poets reading that night. Always doing something. His goal was to write a novel that you could print in any order and read in any order — it was irrelevant what sequence you read the pages. He was working on that right up to his death.
He was also a folk musician with sort of a bluesy influence, but he left that behind when he got heavy into the poetry thing. He was just an interesting guy. A cynical person could say he was a Burroughs wannabe, and it certainly was a big influence for him, but he was very much his own guy. He relapsed, and the last year of his life was really like a miserable disaster. The suicide part came as a surprise, but when somebody is as bad off as he was, they either end up in rehab or they end up dead — you don’t really go on that way for very long.
Producer Steve Fisk
STEVE FISK: It’s really sad — we only got a song and a half
finished before he died [for a Sub Pop/Bernstein album]. He also went into a very bad time in his life when I was working with him — his last big decline. He was just on all the time — telling me about himself and all this shit. Nice guy — real generous, real enthusiastic. I don’t think I knew him — this period wasn’t the best time to know him. There were other times when he was a little more focused, and wasn’t quite so tortured. Because of the record and everything, people think I’m his buddy or something like that. He’d been having good times and bad times for years. He was somebody that frankly, I was afraid of — because of shit he pulled on friends of mine. He’d done some crazy stuff — bomb threats and pulling out knives [laughs]. Things I don’t need in my life. But the work was good, and he’s a very talented person. He didn’t have to work hard to make interesting things. He more or less told me to finish [1992’s posthumously released Prison] — I think he knew what was coming up.
ALICE WHEELER: After he passed away [in October 1991], a friend of mine, Jim Jones, and I put out a book of his work [1996’s I Am Secretly an Important Man]. I have a lot of really nice photographs of him. In fact, some of the first photographs I took were of Jesse.
STU HALLERMAN: I brought Sub Pop 200 on the road with me, and played highlights of that as [Soundgarden’s] warm-up music. At some towns, when [Sub Pop 200] got to the Jesse Bernstein stuff, people would be throwing their drinks. “TURN THAT SHIT OFF!” I remember the Whiskey A-Go-Go — [Soundgarden] were filming the Louder Than Live video. That was the period I was playing that Sub Pop 200 CD every night, and the Bernstein piece would always get played — “Come out tonight … a picture shaped like my ass.” Maybe twenty seconds before it was going to start, I turned to some guy — “The next piece is spoken word, is the crowd going to hate it?” And he’s like, “Oh no, people like spoken word here in L.A.” By the time we had gone through this much of a conversation, the next piece was starting, and a hush came over the place. They listened to the whole thing, snickered, and laughed at the appropriate moments. And then, they let out this huge applause at the end.
CHAPTER 22
“Rebelling against the predominant macho grunge scene at the time”: Riot Grrrl
Although mostly male-dominated, the grunge era also included several allfemale/feminist bands — including Bikini Kill and Bratmobile — who called their style “Riot Grrrl,” and sought to break down barriers and stereotypes.
ALLISON WOLFE: I was born in Memphis, Tennessee — I’m an identical twin. When I was about three or four, my parents moved from Tennessee to Washington State, Mount Vernon. And then my parents had a divorce — my dad moved back to Tennessee. With my mom there was this huge transformation — she came out as a lesbian, and went totally hippie and vegetarian. Playing acoustic guitar and going camping. She got custody of me and my twin sister — I have a younger sister too. All of a sudden we were in this completely different environment. My mom was a nurse, and she went back to school to become a nurse practitioner — a hired nurse — and then we moved to Olympia in 1981. My mom was a huge influence on me. My mom was a feminist, a lesbian/gay rights activist, and also, she started the first women’s health clinic, that was for, by, and about women, in Thurston County. She was providing abortions, and also back then, would do rape exams — it was before hospitals did them routinely. She received death threats and people would come and harass us at our house, and harass the clinic all the time. We grew up surrounded by this controversy, feminism, and activism. She used to drive us to “No Nukes” rallies. Also, my mom was pretty broke. So we had to fend for ourselves a lot of the time.
KATHLEEN HANNA: I moved around a lot as a kid. I came to Olympia via Portland — I went to high school in Portland, and then I went to college at Evergreen State College in Olympia. I got into music in high school. Hardcore shows, speed metal was really big then, reggae shows at the Pine Street Theater.
ALLISON WOLFE: In high school, I had this incident. My freshman year, I was sort of preppie — mainstream. I was going out with this guy who was a real jock — had a letterman jacket and all that. He was two years older than me and really traditional/old-fashioned. When I went to his house, it was right out of Leave it to Beaver. Creepy. He was really controlling of me — I didn’t realize it at first, because I hadn’t really had boyfriends. It got to be more and more that he didn’t want me to go out with my sister and my friends on weekend nights when he couldn’t go, or if he wasn’t taking me on a specific date.
So he came over one weekend and I broke up with him. My sister and some of my friends were upstairs, hanging out. He got physical with me — he held me up by my collar against the wall and was yelling at me. He freaked out, took a pan off the stove when he was leaving, and threw it across the room — made a big hole in the wall. It was just crazy and freaked me out. It was also hard for me, because I grew up in a somewhat violent household when I was little — my parents would fight a lot. Something just clicked in me that day, where I was like, “That’s it. Something’s got to change — I’ve got to wake up.” The next Monday, I went to school, and I called up one of my friends that was alternative/new wave — she had been inviting me to hang out at dance clubs. I was like, “Alright, we’re hanging out.” I chopped off one side of my hair, and started wearing crosses, eyeliner, thrift store clothes. It was an instant transformation, and hung out with alternative people. I already was listening to Duran Duran, but I got really more into music. I’d go dancing at new wave dance clubs every weekend. And then I had this punk friend, who was inviting me to punk shows and parties.
LARRY REID: There would be readings by William Burroughs — these workshops by literary/performance artists. In fact, I remember Kathleen Hanna’s first live performance. Kathy Acker, a literary artist who’s very influential, did a workshop and a reading — a residence at coca [Center on Contemporary Art]. We didn’t have anybody to open, and I said, “Just pick somebody out of the workshop.” Kathleen Hanna was the person she picked. And Kathleen Hanna was better than Kathy Acker [laughs].
KATHLEEN HANNA: I remember seeing [Tobi Vail] around, and thinking she was really cool, and wanting to meet her. We met at a Fugazi show when I was in Seattle — I had just done a workshop with Kathy Acker at coca. So I had to stay in town for a night to open for her on a Saturday, and I think the show was on a Friday. I had never seen Fugazi before. My friend Mikey [Dees], who was in Fitz of Depression, was going to the show, so I was going to try and meet up with him.
I got there and I couldn’t find him, and Tobi saw me. I didn’t have tickets and it was sold out — I was so stupid. Tobi was already inside — she grabbed my arm and pulled me in. And then kinda disappeared. I watched Fugazi, and it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life. They played “Suggestion,” and I was just like, “Oh my God — boys talking about sexism. This is amazing!”
That weekend, Kathy Acker told me if I really wanted people to hear what I had to say, I should stop doing spoken word and poetry, and start a band. So I went home and started Viva Knievel. While we were on tour, I wrote Tobi a letter about her fanzine [Jigsaw], and I was like, “Can I write something for your fanzine?” And she said, “Yeah.” So I started interviewing all the women I met on tour — asking them what it was like being on tour and what was it like being a woman in a band. I would send the interviews to her, and she wrote me a letter, saying “Let’s start a band when you get home.”
TINUVIEL: I met Kathleen within a month of being in Olympia — at a party. She had just gotten back from a tour with Viva Knievel. I saw her as a very animated and activated girl, who seemed to really have an idea of what she wanted to do.
KATHLEEN HANNA: There was a place called North Shore Surf Club that later became Thekla. And before that there was a place that Donna Dresch ran, gescco. But a lot of things in Olympia happened at parties — at houses. You’d go see Some Velvet Sidewalk play at some party, Unwound — those kind of bands.
ALICE WHEELER: The idea behind gescco was it was a proje
ct for school — there were about fourteen of us on the committee that ran it. The people that were primarily involved in it were Beat Happening and a bunch of other people from Olympia. At that moment, there weren’t a lot of clubs in Olympia, and I think that’s why we wanted to start the club and have a place for music. We had art shows there. At that point, the kids from the college were more separated from the community — part of gescco’s mission was to bridge that gap.
GESCCO went out of business, and then there was another collective gallery run by people from Evergreen State College — Reko Muse. The Reko Muse meetings encouraged free ideas and creativity. A lot of the members went on to be in the original Riot Grrrl bands. I lived in Seattle at that point, so I only went to visit a few times. Kathleen Hanna was really into writing. She wrote a Riot Grrrl Manifesto, which was basically we can be in the bands, we can have our own voice, we’re tired of not seeing our voice reflected. There was a bunch of bands originally — I saw them play mostly in the backstage area of the Capitol Theater, and they would play in Seattle every so often. I envisioned it to be like being at the 100 Club in 1977 London.
KATHLEEN HANNA: It was a really exciting time in Olympia, because a lot of us were young and idealistic. We were sharing books and records — turning each other on to music. Tobi had the best record collection, and was making everyone mix tapes. We were really excited to be a feminist band. A big part of our mission was to go out and inspire other girls to play music, because selfishly, we wanted a scene. One of the things grunge did for us was it showed us that there could be this strong music scene in the place where we lived.
But we weren’t really a part of it — it was mostly guys. There was definitely a lot of sexism. Besides Kim from the Fastbacks, it was pretty few and far between. We just really wanted our own scene. I think that was a really big impetus of why we tried to get more women to come to shows — trying to get women to talk about sexism, to start bands. It was really a selfish intention. We wanted to have a music scene that we could relate to — the same way that Nirvana functioned within the music scene. But it was kind of scattered — Babes in Toyland, Scrawl, Calamity Jane.