Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [116]
We took pictures by the grave—typical Japanese tourist kind of thing. I posed for a couple pictures; we all took turns taking pictures of each other. They were just nice girls who were fans and who happened to jump in the right cab in the wrong town. We were all freaking out because it was just such a strange experience. I was probably as blown away by it as they were.
JOHN ROBINSON The Fluid were lumped into grunge. We were trying to do something that was a lot different than the bands in the Northwest that Jack Endino was working for were trying to do. What I always heard in the early days of Seattle was a Black Sabbath influence. There was a dirgelike sound that came creeping out of every band up there, with the exception of one or two. There wasn’t 10 ounces of that in what the Fluid were trying to do. We didn’t want a muddy guitar sound. We wanted a crisp, clean, chiming, super-loud Gibson guitar sound.
We made Roadmouth in ’89 with Jack Endino, and a lot of people who were into the Fluid really loved that record. But everybody in the Fluid can hardly even listen to it. It had such a muddy sound. Jack had many recording successes in that time period with various acts. That was not one of them.
BUTCH VIG (producer; drummer for Madison, Wisconsin’s Garbage) I had done a lot of local punk bands in the Midwest circuit, and I did a lot of records for Touch and Go. One of the bands was Killdozer; I did three or four records with them. I did their album Twelve Point Buck, which got a lot of press. After it had been out maybe a couple months, I got a call from Jonathan at Sub Pop.
JOHN ROBINSON When it came time for us to make another record, the Sub Pop guys suggested this producer out in the Midwest named Butch Vig. We said, “Never heard of him. Can you get us some music that he’s done?” So they sent us a cassette, and it had a lot of noise bands from that region, like Killdozer. We were like, “Okay, we don’t like any of this music specifically, but the sounds are really good.”
So we went to Madison, Wisconsin, and recorded with Butch, at his studio, Smart Studios. Came back to Seattle with the record, which had a bright, clear sound. Everybody heard it and said, “Holy shit, who is this guy?”
BUTCH VIG The first Sub Pop band I did was the Fluid, then TAD. One of the things Jonathan told me on the phone was, “Tad is this big guy, but also there’s a sensitive side to him. He pretty much bellows. See if you can get him to sing.” Tad tried it, and there’s a handful of songs on that record where he sings, and I think his voice is really cool.
They were super-cool guys. I remember Tad would get sort of withdrawn. It seemed like he was sort of depressed. An interesting thing is that, thinking about it now, it’s sort of a precursor to working with Kurt Cobain, because Kurt was like that times a hundred.
That was one of those records that got a lot of press. One of the reasons why is because of the cover art.
TAD DOYLE The first legal problem we had was with a release called 8-Way Santa. A friend found a photo of a couple in a photo album that they got at a thrift store or a garage sale. The photo was of a guy that looked like he was in Nazareth—with a big mustache and sideburns, long hair—and a woman. They both looked cooked, totally stoned and glassy-eyed and grinning ear to ear. Looked like they’d just had some good sex or something.
KURT DANIELSON And then he’s holding the girl’s breast with his hand in sort of an irreverent, shocking way. She is wearing just a bandanna on her breasts, which is totally white trash. Bruce Pavitt had the photograph color-enhanced, so all the colors look really phosphorescent. So you have this sort of white-trash snapshot taken from a delirious LSD vision, and that’s in keeping with the title of the record: 8-Way Santa is a kind of blotter acid that Tad had taken in Boise when he was growing up. And at the time it seemed like, Who cares