Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [17]
REGAN HAGAR (Malfunkshun/Brad/Satchel drummer) When I was about 10 or 11—which seems crazy to me now—I saw Kiss. It was the same show Andy and Kevin were at, although we did not know each other at that point. I remember being totally blown away, and for some reason it clicked in my mind that these were people and that they were getting paid to do what I was watching.
KEVIN WOOD We were a pretty close-knit family because we moved around a lot. We moved to Bainbridge Island from San Antonio, Texas, around ’76, when I was about 14. Bainbridge is kind of a bedroom community for Seattle. Back then, it was rural and there were more eclectic-type people there—more alternative-lifestyle mentalities. My parents weren’t hippies, but my mom was more open-minded about vegetarianism and self-awareness and enjoying the country. My dad was in the military—he was a recruiter in Seattle—but he was a very open-minded guy. I’m the oldest. I’ve got a brother, Brian, who’s a year younger than me. And Andy, who’s four years younger than me.
ROBERT SCOTT CRANE (Soundhouse Recording Studio owner; Michelle Ahern’s ex-husband; son of Hogan’s Heroes cast member Sigrid Valdis and murdered Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane) My parents were well-known actors, and when my father passed away, there was a lot of media interest in our family, so we moved from L.A. to Bainbridge Island to go somewhere where nobody knew who we were. Of course, people found out really quickly who we were. It was a real gossip-fest on that island.
Very shortly after moving there, while riding the school bus, was when I met Andy. I was probably in eighth grade and he was maybe in ninth. I noticed him on the bus being a total class clown, commanding a lot of attention. We got off at the same bus stop, and it was, “Oh, you live here? I live here.” Somehow pot came up, and three seconds later, we were in the woods across the street from our house smoking.
KEVIN WOOD I think Andy was still in elementary school when he started smoking pot. I probably started drinking when I was about 10, but not like every day.
ROBERT SCOTT CRANE Andy and I really bonded in that when we smoked pot, we liked to obliterate ourselves with it. It was insane how much pot Andy could smoke. Looking back now, he was really just trying to block things out. Which is the same thing I was trying to do.
Bainbridge was a weird place because there were quite a few kids like this, in that they didn’t take a half a hit of acid or a hit of acid—they took eight hits of acid. It’s wasn’t like, “Let’s smoke a joint and sit on the beach,” it was, “Let’s make it so we literally don’t remember our own names.”
KEVIN WOOD In 1980, we were toying around with the idea of putting something together, and we had invited this kid Dave Hunt to come over and drum, without realizing it was Easter Sunday. We were supposed to go out to dinner with our grandparents for Easter, but we stayed home and formed a band instead.
The band was called Report Malfunction at first. I was working in a restaurant, and there was a sign above the dishwasher that said REPORT MALFUNCTION, and I thought that’d be a cool band name. I came up with the image of a guy on a phone with a mushroom-cloud explosion behind him, and he was reporting the malfunction. One thing me and my brothers always shared was a dark sense of humor. The name got trimmed down immediately to Malfunction, and then the different spelling came about.
DAVE REES I was best friends with Brian Wood, the middle Wood brother, in high school. So the Woods were starting a band, but they didn’t have a bass or a bass player. One of my buddies had a bass and a bass amp, so I brought it over to their house and they said, “Great, you’re our bass player.” I had never even played before.
REGAN HAGAR I grew up in Seattle in a neighborhood called Ravenna, and then in eighth grade we