Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [157]
CLAUDIA GEHRKE What I found the most annoying was people all of the sudden flocking to Seattle thinking they were going to get a gig. They’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Seattle.” And it’s like, “No, you’re not. You’re from L.A.”
DANIEL HOUSE Suddenly there were all these bands that you had never heard of, out of nowhere, that embraced that sound. At C/Z, we used to get demos all the time, and we used to say, “Oh, it’s a Pearl Jam demo,” “Oh, it’s a Soundgarden demo,” “Oh, it’s a Nirvana demo.” Those were the templates.
RAY FARRELL At Geffen, whenever we were trying to go to do any Nirvana business, you couldn’t get a flight from L.A. to Seattle because every flight was filled with major-label guys looking for the next big thing after Nirvana. I’m serious. If you crashed every one of those planes you could’ve killed the record business singlehandedly.
DANIEL HOUSE I was angry at what the major-label music industry was doing to our scene, because it changed a lot of people’s motivations for why they were in bands. Some of the bands on C/Z actually yelled at me because they blamed me for them not getting signed to a major label.
TOM HAZELMYER Every band thought they could be Nirvana, and that was insufferable. The attitude was “Why aren’t I big yet?” It’s like, “Have you listened to your own fuckin’ record? It’s just like fuckin’ frog noises with a distorted guitar being smashed up. Are you kidding me?”
TOM NIEMEYER People wanting to be the next Nirvana, I saw it every fuckin’ day, dude. It was disgusting! I will rattle off names if I can remember them. But they’re all gone now. They had demos out, maybe got signed to EMI for a record or whatever.
And the record-label people moving here, having offices here, it poisoned the clear waters of Puget Sound. All of a sudden, there was this weird oil slick over all this shit. You didn’t wanna be from Seattle.
CHARLIE RYAN Early on, when you went to a club, there were no drinks, there were no snacks, there were no televisions, there was no paint on the walls. You took the bus for an hour to go to a club and stand there for three hours and watch a band. It was solely people wanting to see people play music. I was constantly reminded of that years later, when I was in the Crows. We played at the Crocodile, and nobody even cared what was onstage.
RUSTY WILLOUGHBY All of the sudden, Seattle was becoming this thing that was kind of gross. Around mid-’93, Drew Barrymore started hanging around in town a lot; she was going out with Eric from Hole. Oh, no, I think Drew Barrymore’s great. It was just that people would go to the Crocodile just to see if Drew Barrymore was there.
CHARLIE RYAN I had a theory that on any Friday or Saturday night, you could take the lids off of all these clubs and you could snatch the bands out and swap ’em and nobody would give a shit. They were there to chase girls and to dress up and have cocktails and get drunk and catch up with friends. And that’s fine. But it was just such a complete turnaround from early on.
BEN LONDON (Alcohol Funnycar singer/guitarist) I went to a little liberal arts college in central Ohio called Antioch College that’s historically been a very left-leaning school. My roommate in my first quarter was a guy named Steve Moriarty, who ended up being the drummer in the Gits, and the room next to us was Matt Dresdner, who ended up being the bass player in the Gits, and a guy named Adrian Garver, who went on to be in a band called the D.C. Beggars out here in Seattle.
We formed this band with Steve, myself, Adrian Garver, and this guy Roger Garufi that was called Brothers Voodoo, and that morphed into what became Big Brown House. The Gits started the second year. Andy Kessler, or Joe Spleen as he’s known in the Gits, was a year ahead of us. Part of Antioch’s thing was cooperative