Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [139]
I recommended Dave, who was a pal of mine in Dallas who’d been playing around in some local bands. I think he was working at 7-Eleven. He was not doing so hot, but I always thought he was a great drummer, so I called him up.
DAVE ABBRUZZESE (Pearl Jam drummer) When Matt called, I was in a funk band in Dallas called Dr. Tongue, and I was working at a head shop. My expertise was in the grow department, so if people would come in saying that they wanted to grow lettuce hydroponically in their closet—wink, wink—I would help them get set up.
I had a show on community radio with a friend of mine called Chris and Dave’s “Music We Like” Show. People would call and request music; if we didn’t like it, we’d just play something else. I dug through the CDs and found Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam’s sampler CD. We put the Mother Love Bone stuff on-air and I was like, “Eek,” and turned it off and put on Pearl Jam, and I think I made it through about 25 seconds of the first couple of songs. They just didn’t hit me right.
I said, “What do you think, Chris?”
He said, “It’s a free trip to Seattle.”
KRISHA AUGEROT I was shocked to see Dave Abbruzzese in the lobby of Curtis Management when they were trying out drummers. Because he was such a rocker. Super-long hair, wearing a track suit. He’s from Texas, so it’s a totally different vibe. But a very skilled drummer, and I really liked him. Visually, it just was not what I was expecting. I could see him in Alice in Chains, not in Pearl Jam.
DAVE ABBRUZZESE The first day I got to Seattle, I actually met them all an hour before their first video shoot, for “Alive,” at RKCNDY. I just stood back and took it in. The show was cool. I was watching it thinking, I wish I was playing right now. Dallas was a place where people were standing back, with their arms folded, watching, whereas at that show, everyone was excited.
After we played our second show together, at the RKCNDY, I was in the Curtis office. That show just felt good and the music was great, and all of a sudden I felt like I was a part of that same energy that I experienced witnessing that show the first day I got there. I came across one of Jeff’s drawings, and one of the images was that stick-man figure; it’s tribal art of a man standing, arms outstretched, surrendering to the sky or whatever. That image really resonated with me, so the next day, I got it tattooed on my left shoulder. It wasn’t necessarily a statement of camaraderie; it was to document that personal feeling that I had then. The way I felt at the show that night, if I would have stopped playing right after that—if my car would’ve flipped over and I lost my arms or something—I would have felt gratified musically.
KATHLEEN HANNA (Bikini Kill singer) In August of 1990, I found myself laying on my stomach, in the woods, with a pair of binoculars, a bottle of Canadian Club, and my friend Kurt Cobain. The reason why I had the binoculars was because I was the lookout while he ran across the street to a teen pregnancy center that had just opened in our town. And it really wasn’t a teen pregnancy center. It was a right-wing con where they got teenage girls to go in there and then told them they were gonna go to hell if they had abortions. Since Kurt and I were angry young feminists in the ’90s, we decided that we were gonna do a little public service that night. We drank our Canadian Club, and he watched out while I went across the street and wrote FAKE ABORTION CLINIC, EVERYONE, ’cause I was kinda like the pragmatic one. And he was more creative, so he went over, and in six-foot-tall red letters he wrote GOD IS GAY. He was kinda cool like that.
So, after that, we polished off the Canadian Club. And we lived in Olympia, Washington; we walked down the hill, we went to the bar, we got some more Canadian Club. Then we went to my apartment, we got some 40-ouncers, we got a little more drunk. And apparently