Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [15]
JEFF GILBERT (journalist; KZOK DJ; concert organizer) Seattle isn’t a glamorous town at all. It was pretty pathetic. Very depressing. That’s where this music came out of. I’ve made this comment before: Grunge isn’t a music style. It’s complaining set to a drop D tuning.
DAN RAYMOND (Melvins “hanger-on”) Buzz and I went to junior high and high school together. I went off to college, and when I came back on break, he was playing really slowed down. Before I actually heard it, I asked him, “What are you doing now that’s different?” He said, “I call it ‘twisted Sabbath.’ ”
TRACY SIMMONS (a.k.a. T-Man; Blood Circus bassist) I went and saw the Melvins at this little warehouse in the Fremont area in Seattle and was totally blown away. I was like, Oh, my God, that’s the heaviest music I’ve ever heard. I gotta tell you, that really influenced Blood Circus a lot. Melvins were the band that inspired the grunge sound more than anybody.
MATT LUKIN Dale was dealing weed for a while in $5 grams. It got to the point where we had to lock the door to the practice room, because every five minutes someone would show up to buy weed from Dale.
DALE CROVER Dealing pot? I will not confirm or deny that. No, I did not sell anybody pot from my parents’ house—I’ll put it that way. But there probably was some kind of pot smoking going on on my back porch at some point. We were kids.
Whoever says we called the people who hung out with us the “Cling-Ons” is completely full of shit, because I never heard anybody described as Cling-Ons.
BUZZ OSBORNE I had nothing to do with those people, other than the fact that they were hanging out at Crover’s parents’ house, in Aberdeen. Aberdeen is a shithole. I didn’t like any of these people. They were just a bunch of redneck fucking dumbass kids with this white-trash arrogance. Have you seen that Larry Clark photo book Tulsa? That’s a good example of it. They were pot-smoking, alcoholic, thieving little bastards.
We were actually friends with Krist and Kurt. They understood what we were doing, liked what we were doing. We trusted Krist right away, went on all kinds of adventures with Krist. Went into Seattle and freaked out. It wasn’t so much making trouble as discovering the world, like Mickey Mantle showing up in New York City for the first time.
MATT LUKIN I knew Cobain from junior high. When we were 14, 15 we were on the same baseball team in Babe Ruth. Sat on the bench. He was a quiet, skinny guy. We talked about our favorite rock bands. Didn’t pay attention to baseball. At the time, we were both really into Cheap Trick.
BUZZ OSBORNE I was about 12 when I met Kurt. I really started to know him when we were in an art class together in school. He was a really good artist, so he would do things like draw a picture of the teacher with his head cut off, and it looked exactly like the teacher, or draw a picture of some girl getting raped, and it was a girl from the class. Eighth-grade bullshit. Lynchings, dark humor. I still like that stuff.
MATT LUKIN I remember not seeing Kurt for a few years, and one day he showed up at a Melvins practice with a guy who lived next door. They were both really drunk at the time. We were just playing Clash covers and stuff upstairs in Dillard’s garage. I remember him going off: “Whoa, you guys were great!” He just started hanging around, and we started seeing more of him.
BUZZ OSBORNE One time, Kurt got popped by the cops, but the rest of us got away, luckily. Me, him, and Lukin and I don’t know who else were walking around, spray-painting stupid shit, my favorite being FUCK YOU in big letters. I think I spray-painted GOD IS GAY or something. We were always getting rousted by the cops one way or another. But that was the only time that one of us actually went to jail. Who bailed Kurt out? Not me. If I went down there, I would have been put in the same jail as him. Fuck that, he was on his own.
DALE CROVER Is the story that Kurt slept on my porch in a cardboard box true? My mom gets all bent out of shape about that for some reason: “He slept on my porch, and