Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [109]
At the same time this is going down, a couple of car spaces up, two guys gangland-assassinate another guy right on the street, in the back of the head. Bam!
DEAN GUNDERSON Donita waved down the ambulance that came by. They were like, “We’re looking for some guy that got shot in the head, but we’ll take you.” In the hospital waiting room, there was a woman who was not mentally completely there crying the entire time right next to me. She had some snot dripping from her nose, and it kept getting longer and longer and longer and longer. I was on LSD the entire time, but it wasn’t the drugs. It was actually happening. It got to like a foot and a half long, just dangling there. At that point, I was like hypnotized. It was swinging around and it hit her mouth and she sucked it up.
Donita had a limp the rest of the tour, but she had a pretty good sense of humor. She was always saying, “Wait up for the gimp!”
DANNY BLAND Several of us were indulging in hardcore narcotics. I remember walking around Detroit looking for heroin in a neighborhood where cars were literally on fire, and there were no firemen or police even thinking about coming into that neighborhood. The person we were staying with was an assistant to a veterinarian or something, so she had all of these needles, but they were these giant fucking horse needles or something. I don’t know if they were made for basting a turkey or what, but those needles were quite ineffective.
DAVID DUET There was an agreement amongst the L7 camp that there would be no hard-drug use, but not everybody participated in that. There was no agreement in Cat Butt about that. (Laughs.) Danny and I were dabblers. Jennifer was a little more ahead of the game. She was kind of an instigator. It really didn’t come into play until Detroit. Crazy night in Detroit. If I’m not mistaken, we saw a pimp shot that night. We saw a lot of gunplay. I’m not clear on the events of that night, but I know that was the beginning of the rest of L7 being not so happy with Jennifer.
JENNIFER FINCH I barely remember the tour. I was on so much heroin. Actually not when I was on the tour. I used maybe twice, when I was in larger cities, so you’d think I’d remember more.
DAVID DUET Actually, there wasn’t that much hard-drug use on the tour. When we were in the band, there was the image that we were doing all these drugs, but we actually weren’t. We put that image out in interviews and stuff and tried to seem like the craziest people alive, but we’re actually not. We were quite un-drug-involved then. Especially considering our peers at the time. Our peers just kept it on the down low.
JAMES BURDYSHAW I’d quit doin’ hard needle drugs in spring of ’88. I never was addicted ’cause I couldn’t shoot myself up—I’d have a friend do it for me—and I couldn’t afford it and it was scary to me. I liked the high, but I didn’t like the process. I was afraid of death and still am. I quit after my roommate shot me up with a speedball and I started hyperventilating. When I came down, I thought about John Michael and all the people he had ripped off and how brown his teeth were and how he used to scratch himself all the time, and I was like, I’m not gonna do this drug anymore.
DANNY BLAND One of the most amazing things is that Suzi Gardner from L7 was clean and sober that whole time. At the time, I had never heard of anybody being sober. I was like, “Explain this to me.” She kind of did, and it still didn’t compute. Goddamn, that girl really loves playing music, or else she would’ve ran screaming from that van.
DEAN GUNDERSON About two-thirds of the way through, Donita and I broke up. I was young and dumb and having someone like me that much freaked me out. I was pretty much a 20-year-old bimbo.
DANNY BLAND I always thought that Cat Butt should’ve been documented more on film than on record. Our M.O. was just to get as annihilated as possible and rock out. It was