Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  [1993’s Houdini] was done in so many pieces. We didn’t have any new songs when we signed. So we’d write a few songs, record, mix them, write a few more songs. And then we had to depend on other people’s schedules. Cobain was getting busy with Nirvana again — he ended up not finishing his producing duties with us. I was against having him do it at first. It was Danny Goldberg’s suggestion — “Why don’t you get him to produce? Definitely it’s good for some records sales.” And I was like, “That seems cheesy, like, this guy is famous now, so we’re going to have him produce our record.” Buzz is like, “Well, we’ve done how many records now — five or six — and we’ve never done something like that. We’ve never had a producer — that might be cool.” And they offered to give us more money to do it.

  It worked out pretty good — Kurt did some good things. But mostly, he didn’t want to do much to change what we were doing. And we were looking for something a little bit more. But y’know, he’d never produced a record before, so it’s understandable. He tried to do some things with the drums — they had just worked with Albini, he tried to steal some tricks from him. One thing that stands out about him producing is him nodding out on the couch while playing guitar, and waking up again with his hand playing. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that on tape.

  REGAN HAGAR: I had befriended Shawn Smith from working at Tower Records. Shawn had played me a tape — he was fresh up here from Bakersfield, California. This tape was him and a four-track — drum machines and cheap synthesizers. I was really into Prince, and he was really into Prince. It sounded funky, and I said, “Man, you’ve got a great voice — we should make a funk band.” We tried for months, and we played with a lot of different people in town.

  SHAWN SMITH: Me, Stoney, and Regan jammed one day. Regan and I had already started this band Satchel. We came up with the basis for a song — Stoney said, “Let me book a couple of weeks at a studio, and when I’m done with Lollapalooza, let’s make a record.”

  REGAN HAGAR: Pearl Jam had just taken off. I think [Stone] may have gotten his first check. So he’s having this success, and he’s like, “Do you guys want to go to the studio? I’ve got some money — I’ll pay for it.” He flipped the bill for seven days at Avast! We didn’t want to use Cory Kane, Satchel’s bass player, because then that would basically be Satchel with Stone. So [Stone’s] then-roommate — he was from L.A. — said, “My old roommate from L.A. in college was an excellent bass player, Jeremy Toback.” The first time we’re meeting him really is in the studio. He was an excellent bass player — a true musician. So we do seven days and create everything in the studio as we’re there. Stone really likes it when we’re finished, and plays it for Sony, who want to put it out. We get flown to New York, we have meetings with Sony, they put us in nice hotels. It’s everything you’ve ever dreamt as a kid. Then they find out Shawn and I are in Satchel. Boom — Satchel gets signed. It’s like a dream come true. Sony puts it out [1993’s Shame after the band is named Brad] and it’s a big thrill. By the time Brad’s record is officially on the shelf, Satchel is already signed, and now we’re plotting our record [1994’s EDC]. There was some serious tension with Pearl Jam and Brad initially, because some members of [Pearl Jam] were like, “You guys are coattail riding.” Which made Shawn and I furious. First of all, I’d been in Seattle trying to make it happen longer than anybody.

  Brad (L-R: Stone Gossard, Regan Hagar, Shawn Smith)

  SHAWN SMITH: There was some resistance about the record coming out — because it was right at the same time they were doing Vs. — in terms of how it got promoted. Which I remember being thankful for. I started to panic, because they were so huge at the time. I thought, “Oh crap, I’m fucked. I’m going to be ‘the guy in the band with the guy from Pearl Jam.’” Sony held back on the promotion, which I am glad happened.

  REGAN HAGAR: We just spent whatever tens of thousands of dollars making videos — why are we not putting them out? I just got the runaround. Then Satchel started being managed by Tony Dimitriades. He happened to be in a room in a Sony office, where this stuff was being discussed. He unraveled a lot of information for me. I guess there was an internal memo at Sony saying, “Don’t promote Brad.” They put the kibosh on it officially. We talked to Stone about it. Stone was embarrassed I think — asked us not to relay this information in interviews. “Please don’t lash back at Pearl Jam — times have changed, we all grow and learn.” That’s easy to say when you’re on top, but I think we basically never tell this story. That’s just a little bit of it. Now enough time has passed — I think it’s fine to say the reason Brad never did anything was because Pearl Jam didn’t want Stone to do it. Now they feel differently. But now, it’s kind of too late.

  CHAPTER 27

  “If you were there, you were part of it”: Riot Grrrl

  The Riot Grrrl movement suffered two severe blows, as 7 Year Bitch and the Gits experienced tragic deaths of a member of each band. Bikini Kill and Bratmobile soldiered on, before eventually breaking up, marking the end of the Riot Grrrl movement.

  KATHLEEN HANNA: [7 Year Bitch] were “Seattle,” so I knew them from when they would play the North Shore Surf Club, and when we would see them in Seattle. I think we played with them a couple of times. They were super hard partiers, well read, articulate women — kind of amazing. I remember really respecting them, and when [Stefanie Sargent] died, being really confused about why that happened.

  DANIEL HOUSE: One thing that is not accurate — I remember Spin reported, and I was really pissed off about it — they said that she OD’d on heroin. Which is not the case. It was drug-related, but it was actually asphyxiation on her vomit. She had issues on and off with heroin — she was also a pretty heavy drinker. She had been off dope for quite a while, and one night she was drinking a lot — mostly beer.

  She was in West Seattle at this friend’s house — somebody pulled out heroin. She talked them into a little taste — not by any means enough to OD, but certainly enough to get high, especially when you haven’t been doing it for months. She drove from West Seattle all the way back to her apartment on Capitol Hill. If it had been an OD, she would have od’d by now. She got out of the car, let herself into her apartment, and lay down on her bed — on her back.

  7 Year Bitch (Stefanie Sargent second from right)

  She passed out more from the alcohol, on her back. I think the heroin was enough of a sedative to keep her from waking up, but it also was what caused her to throw up the contents of her stomach, and she choked on that. Terribly awful and sad for a lot of people — she was beloved. 7 Year Bitch was essentially in the studio at that time — had just about finished their record and suddenly, their guitar player is dead. So [Sick ’Em] ended up having to be postponed — finally got released in October of ’92, when they found their new guitarist, Roisin Dunne. Then they went on and great things happened. By the time the second record [1994’s ¡Viva Zapata!] came out, they were pretty much touring as a headline act.

  BEN LONDON: Slowly, the Gits took off first — anybody who saw them was converted into a fan. They got asked early on to open a show for Nirvana and Tad at the HUB Ballroom. That was probably one of their first big shows out of town. Mia was a cook at the Frontier Room — a bar/restaurant. At that point, you couldn’t get hard alcohol in clubs, so people would go down there to get shots when they were at the Vogue — she met a lot of people from the scene that way.

  STEVE FISK: [Mia] was a really amazing talent — really delivered in the studio. I’d put her in the top five people I’ve worked with. They were punk rockers, and that’s what they were about. In some ways, we had more records in our collection in common then maybe I had with Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, or Nirvana. They weren’t pretending to be influenced by Ted Nugent.

  SCOTTY CRANE: [Mia] didn’t really talk — she was quiet and reclusive. What I remember of Mia — sitting on the stoop [of Soundhouse Recording Studio], trying to write lyrics. Like two days before she was murdered.

  DANIEL HOUS
E: The night Mia was killed — it was almost a year to the day from when Stefanie died. Actually, Mia and a bunch of girlfriends got together that night specifically in memory of Stefanie. What happened to her that night was so awful and horrible, there’s just such an irony about it.

  ALLISON WOLFE: It was really devastating and scary. There’s so few women in music — especially strong, awesome women doing cool things. I mean, every person is valuable, but I just felt like, we can’t afford to lose anyone. She meant so much to so many people, and to punk rock music and Seattle. It’s so scary to think ultimately, all of us girls could just get raped, killed, and end up in a gutter, which is what we see on the TV all the time. It seems to be accepted that that is what is going to happen to women — no one talks about it as an epidemic. This rarely happens to men. Why does this always happen to women? It was just really horrible.

  KATHLEEN HANNA: I was really scared during that time, because I always got a lot of hate mail — but I had gotten some really specifically awful hate mail around that time. And nobody knew if she had been killed because she was in a band — if she had been targeted, or if it had been random. It turns out that it was random. But at the time, both of my parents separately heard about her death and called me, and said, “Get out of town.” Because they were worried that somebody was targeting … she was an outspoken woman in a band, and I was an outspoken woman in a band. I remember a lot of fear around that time in general — it felt like a really scary, violent time. Our shows had gotten really violent. We were getting so much press, and we didn’t have any protection or anything — we still lived in group houses. We never locked the door. That happening was really a wake up call, like, “Oh, we’re not immortal.”

  BEN LONDON: They thought it was somebody that she knew — when they were trying to solve the murder case. It was such amazing vindication when they found that guy in Florida and convicted him [in 2004]. In some ways, it was ground zero for some of the political awareness and the grassroots organizing that has happened here and continued to go on. So if you have to say that something positive came out of something like that, I’d say that was the case.

  DANIEL HOUSE: She was really sweet, really funny. She was probably the most trusting of them, but still somewhat mistrustful. But once she did, she was warm, genuine, and open. Also very forthright and straight up. She was definitely one of these people that I would refer to as a “no bullshit” kind of person. She’d say what was on her mind — what she thought, what she believed.

  SLIM MOON: Bikini Kill did this interview with Option, and they hated the way Option misrepresented and quoted them. So they burned a copy of Option magazine onstage, and swore off doing interviews. Never did interviews again for the next five years as a band. In a way, the more those bands said, “No, we won’t do interviews,” it made them get more attention.

  KATHLEEN HANNA: I was working a full-time job in addition to doing Bikini Kill and activism — I was super-exhausted, and didn’t have the time to deal with the onslaught of press. A lot of groups declared “media blackouts.” We’d seen what happened to Nirvana — they had gotten really huge, and it was alienating. We didn’t want that to happen, either to Riot Grrrls as a group, or Bikini Kill as a band. They wanted to turn it into this weird, sexy thing. Like, “All these young girls wearing short schoolgirl skirts — plaid skirts. We’re all strippers who had sexual abuse histories, and that’s why we hated men so much.”

  It was really not complicated or interesting, and a lot of us were very young. We might have sucked sometimes [live], but we were never boring. People were coming up to us every night, saying, “You changed my life — you made me want to start a band,” or “You made me get into feminism.” We weren’t making much money, and we didn’t have a tour bus, manager, publicist, or any of that. We did everything ourselves, and we felt really successful. We didn’t really want to grow as a band and be on a major label — we didn’t want to get bigger and people to recognize us on the street. We felt like we were doing this activist thing, and that’s what was important.

  ALICE WHEELER: Olympia was an underground parallel scene to what was happening in Seattle. So, I could go see a giant arena concert of Nirvana, but I could still go see Bikini Kill with fifty people backstage at the Capitol Theater. In Olympia, I could stand two feet in front in the band and shoot photos. If you were there, you were part of it — as opposed to what was happening in Seattle, with the “You’re the fans, we’re the stars” distinction.

  KATHLEEN HANNA: People were really freaked out by us. People either really liked us, or really hated us. Our shows were confrontational — I didn’t see them that way, because I was the person doing it [laughs]. We were into engaging the audience, and that was disturbing to people. We played at the Paramount, which was our biggest show to date, opening for Nirvana. They didn’t even turn the lights on for us — we played in the dark. I don’t even know if we had monitors. The people who worked there wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t help us. A really awful experience.

  TINUVIEL: [Bikini Kill was] a really great live band. I was always taken off guard by what a negative reaction they would solicit from guys in the audience. It just reinforced how important they were as a band — to speak out for women’s rights. I was at a show in Boston, and just as the show was starting, this guy punched out their roadie, who was a girl. Knocked her down right in front of me. I was like, “Why is it that strong, vocal women are still soliciting this response from guys?” This is the ’90s.

  ALLISON WOLFE: We played our second show with the Melvins — the same place that we played our first show, the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia. Calvin again had set up that show and asked us to open for the Melvins. I remember the day of that show — there was all this excitement because the Melvins were legendary in Olympia. So there we were, hanging around Olympia with Kathleen and all them. There were metalheads everywhere — so much testosterone on the streets. I swear, it felt scary. There were guys everywhere leering, being gross, scary, and harassing us. We went in to play the show, we played, we did fine, and afterwards, Kathleen came up to us, and was like, “Are you guys alright?” Apparently, people were yelling death threats at us the whole time. Luckily, I’m hard of hearing, so I didn’t hear any of it, but she said that she kept hearing guys say they wanted to kill us [laughs].

  The funny thing is that after we played, Buzz from the Melvins came up to me. He had this really soft, sweet voice, and he was like, “Thank you so much for playing with us, that was so great! I just love having a band like you open for us. Every time we play shows, they try to put us with these really macho metal or punk boy bands. They don’t understand — we don’t like that kind of music. I mean look at me, I like the Cure! ”

  KATHLEEN HANNA: The most memorable [Bikini Kill release] was the one we did with Joan Jett and Kenny Laguna [the 1993 single, “New Radio”/“Rebel Girl”]. We borrowed some band’s drums — Soundgarden or one of those bands. We did it in Seattle — we did almost all our records in Seattle — with Stuart Hallerman and John Goodmanson. I think we did it in one or two days — probably one day. For us, that was a total luxury. Because usually, we would do all the vocals for the whole album in one day — so there would only be three songs in a day. [It] was really exciting for us — we felt like we were huge rock stars, lounging around the studio. I remember smoking pot near the end of it and goofing around with Joan. And Kenny comes from the Brill Building era of songwriting and recording, so he’s used to doing things really professional — but really fast. He made me work on every single vocal line. Being in a punk band, nobody had ever spent that time with me, or given me that attention.

  ALLISON WOLFE: Our first album, [1993’s] Pottymouth, we recorded in Washington, D.C. We recorded with Tim Green from Nation of Ulysses — he had this four-track in his basement — in one or two days. It cost us forty dollars for the tapes, pizza, and a box of hair dye — that’s all Tim asked for [laughs]. After that, maybe a year later, we recorded [1994’s] Real
Janelle, an EP. We had just finished touring for a week in California, and I at that time didn’t really do vocal warm-ups, so my voice was shot. I sounded like a big smoker — hacking my way through those songs.

  KATHLEEN HANNA: For me, it was just time to do something different. It got to be a burden. On any band, there’s a lot of expectations. But if you’re a feminist activist band, you’re set up for failure. ’Cause half of the people say, “You’re man haters,” and the other people say, “You’re not political enough.” You’re not left enough, not feminist enough, not militant enough. It just always felt like we could never do anything right. Also, I needed to get out of Olympia because heroin was taking over, and I couldn’t watch anybody else die. It felt like all areas were pointing towards leaving and starting over for me.

  ALLISON WOLFE: It was in 1994 — I think right before Mother’s Day. We had had a lot of infighting — there was a lot of strain and tension in the band. A lot of it was a result of pressure — all this media pressure that was coming in from the outside on Riot Grrrls and the Northwest music scene. None of us had a clue how to handle it or how to deal with it. Everybody had a different idea of, “Should you talk to the press, should you not, what can you say, what can’t you say?” Everybody was turning against each other and fighting about all these issues. And we had never actually all lived in the same city — we were starting to pull apart. We hadn’t performed, or been together, in six months. Sassy magazine, I believe, had wanted us to play a showcase for them in New York City, at the Thread Waxing Space. They had agreed to fly us out.