Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [123]
SLIM MOON Me and Dylan Carlson moved to Seattle in ’90, and we moved in with these two guys from Ellensburg—Nate Hill, who was in a band called King Krab, and Lanegan, from Screaming Trees. While I was living with Lanegan, he was recording his first solo album. I think Dylan and Kurt were using drugs together at that point, though Dylan wasn’t deep into drugs yet. But I started to feel unsafe around Dylan, because he was so into guns.
There was this one scary time when Krist Novoselic came to our house. The front door was locked, which was unusual, and it was late at night, and he needed a place to crash because he was wasted. So he crawled up onto the roof in the back and was trying to open the upstairs back window. He finally widgets the window open, looks up, and he’s staring at a double-barreled shotgun right in his face.
It turned out that Dylan had not heard him knocking on the front door, and had woken up to hear somebody trying to break in, so he had gotten the gun from under his bed. Dylan, despite all his bravado about how quick he’d be to shoot an intruder, waited long enough to figure out who it was. The world very narrowly escaped Dylan blowing Krist’s brains out, years before Nirvana got famous.
It scared the crap out of me, but Krist and Dylan just thought it was hilarious. It was just another good story. It was one of the events that led to me quitting Earth and moving back to Olympia.
DAVE GROHL (Nirvana drummer; drummer for Washington, D.C., area’s Scream; Foo Fighters singer/guitarist) The first phone call that I had with Kurt was really funny, ’cause we had played Olympia, Washington, where he lived, maybe like four weeks beforehand.…
SLIM MOON The next time Scream went on tour, they had a show in Olympia, but I didn’t go because I had already planned a party and plus, they had sucked before. But after the show, somebody told them, “There’s a party going on,” so they showed up in my apartment and walked in while Tobi Vail—who Kurt was with at some point after Tracy—was playing solo on electric guitar.
DAVE GROHL This girl sits down and she plays the most saddest, depressing fuckin’ [song]. And there’s all these people who look like they’re fuckin’ Scooby Doo, with the glasses, and they’re just sad, and hot chocolate party shit and all of that crap. And we’re there with our beers like, “What the fuck is going on? This place is screwed, man. This is horrible.”
So the first phone call I had with Kurt … I’m like, “Man, afterwards we fuckin’ went to this party at someone’s apartment, and it was kinda fucked, man, ’cause we showed up and we had all our beer and shit. And then this fuckin’ girl starts playing this shitty fuckin’ depressing fuckin’ bullshit.”
He’s like, “Yeah, that’s my girlfriend.” (Laughs.) I’m like, “Ohhh … Whoops. Whoopsie daisy.”
COURTNEY LOVE Dave performed a really great service for Kurt. He made him make hot dogs and get over chicks that were pounding on pots and pans singing about their vaginas. “We’re goin’ to a strip club, motherfucker!” That’s good. I don’t know if that’s in the history books. They didn’t have a lot of money for strip clubs, but Dave was very much a heterosexual red-blooded young man who did not understand why Kurt was mooning over some pudgy girl.
DANNY GOLDBERG I think there were six labels that were interested in Nirvana, and my partner, John Silva, was excited about meeting the labels. But I thought it was pretty obvious that Geffen would be the best place. They had staffed up in the alternative world in a way that the other labels hadn’t. They had Ray Farrell, who had come out of SST and who really knew the retail scene, and Mark Kates, who was very much