Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [108]
Donita was very down-to-earth and really interested in me as a friend. I would have liked it to be more, but that’s not what ended up happening. She and Dean had a relationship for a while that started from that mini-tour. I was really bummed. Dean always got the girls. He was very confident, he’s tall as fuck, and he had a mane of flowing red hair. I mean, I was a redhead, but you couldn’t even notice that I was, being in a band with him.
DEAN GUNDERSON Donita was a pretty amazing character. Real excitable, really intuitive. We liked each other a lot.
JENNIFER FINCH There were lots of fluids being swapped. A few members of L7 were dating a few members of Cat Butt. There was a lot of alcohol. There was a lot of vomiting. James had terrible intestinal trauma on that tour.
JAMES BURDYSHAW I ended up having stomach flu really bad. I kept shitting my pants. The first show of the tour was in Kansas City, and Donita took me to a drugstore, and we bought some fuckin’ Depends. I was humiliated. The show where I was wearing the Depends, everything seemed fine until right at the end, literally the last fuckin’ chord. That’s when I said, “Oh, shit,” which is hilarious because I just shit. Nobody knew except for David, and he was laughin’.
DANNY BLAND I remember thinking, I’ll probably never be on a tour that’s this fucking crazy ever again. Because it was not only the regular disasters that go along with a tour on that level, like the van breaking down. Cat Butt were a roving gang, and anybody who fuckin’ looked sideways at the girls fuckin’ risked a pummeling.
JAMES BURDYSHAW We go to this place called the Bar of Soap, a laundromat and bar in Dallas. Some Chuck Norris–lookin’ fucker was talkin’ to our friend Kathy Kowgirl from Houston, and he must’ve said something that was really rude ’cause she threw her drink at him, and the next thing I know, this drunken dumbass with blond feathered hair and a mustache punched her right in the face. I just jumped on him, grabbed him around the neck, and he flew to the ground, then everybody else ran up on him and started punching him and kicking him. David grabbed him and threw him outside. Danny and David were just fuckin’ him up. Fuckin’ bashed his face in. The guy was so drunk he didn’t even know what hit him.
DAVID DUET When we were in New York, L7 were walking up ahead of us, and all of a sudden the girls were being harassed by a group of Puerto Rican teenagers, all carrying backpacks. So Danny and I step up to be the gentlemen and the protectors, and the kids whip hatchets out of their backpacks! One of the kids swings at Danny and breaks the bottom of his beer off. We were tripping on psychedelics, and at that point all the Cat Butt guys just started dying laughing. And then the girls started laughing. And then the guys with the hatchets started laughing. They put away their hatchets and walked away, laughing their heads off.
DANNY BLAND Where does someone all of the sudden pull out a hatchet in New York? We were magnets for trouble, and we liked it that way.
JENNIFER FINCH Donita got stabbed in New York, where we were staying at Janet Billig’s house. Donita was in the bus and some gal from that neighborhood who didn’t really want a big bus with people like us in it—weird rockers or junkies or white people, I’m not even sure—just reached into the van and stabbed her through the window and then came into the van to continue trying to assault her.
DAVID DUET That same night with the kids with the hatchets, I get back to the bus and I see a Latin couple, very tough and streetwise, walking past our bus, and one of the windows was slit open. Donita had been climbing into her bunk in her leopard-skin underwear and the girl starts screaming at Donita, “You bitch! You bitch!” Accusing Donita of trying to seduce her man. Erik, Dean, and our roadie are on the bus, and the guy comes onto the bus first, screaming. They jump up and start wrestling with the guy. Donita runs up behind them to see what’s going on and the woman whips out a straight razor, goes in