Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [171]
MEGAN JASPER Tom Frank, the editor of The Baffler, called me, laughing: “Do you know that all the publications are talking about this, because the Times is such a prestigious paper?” No one could believe it happened.
Once The Baffler got the word out, that created another shitstorm, which The New York Times caught wind of. So the editor of the Style section called and yelled at me. She’s like, “It caused a lot of problems here, and it’s irresponsible of you to lie to our reporter.” And then she asked me where she could buy the LAMESTAIN T-shirts from. She was obviously pissed off, but she wanted me to think that she was in on the joke.
SCOTT MCCAUGHEY (Young Fresh Fellows singer/bassist/guitarist; Popllama Records/Egg Studios employee) I’m working at Popllama, and Rolling Stone wants to come and interview me and shoot me for a story. So they come and I happen to be wearing a flannel shirt; it’s cool sometimes there in the basement when you’re packing records. But they’ve got this entire rack of other flannel shirts that they wheel in. And I’m like, “Why can’t I just wear the one I’m wearing?”
They put some other flannel shirt on me and they take pictures of me boxing records. The shirt wasn’t that different from what I was wearing. I think when they had the picture of me in the article, it said, “Wearing such-and-such shirt, $89” or whatever. Which is probably why they had me wear it, because otherwise it would’ve said, “Wearing his shitty old shirt that cost $1.”
BOB WHITTAKER Someone, I think it was Charles Peterson, jokingly attributed grunge clothing to my dad, because he was the first full-time employee and later the CEO of REI, Recreational Equipment Inc. At the old shows at the Metropolis, you’d see guys in ski jackets. Everyone was wearing their parents’ beat-up mountaineering clothing, their crappy down parkas, and flannel and stuff like that.
JEFF AMENT … I wore shorts year round. I rode bikes everywhere, didn’t have a car, and if I was going to practice I had to carry my bass on my bicycle, so I couldn’t wear jeans. I’m not sure what defined what grunge was or wasn’t. I never ever wore a flannel shirt. I had a few hats, for sure. That started off when I was in Green River and had a girlfriend who made hats. At the time, I don’t think I looked like a rocker, I looked like a dumbass. It was partly function and partly what was laying around.
ROB SKINNER As far as the grunge look, that was all Eric Johnson. Eric worked at the Espresso Roma on Broadway, and that’s when I met him. He was the first guy that I ever saw with cut-off shorts with long johns underneath, and I thought that was totally badass. Maybe he got it from Chris Cornell, or Chris got it from him, but once those guys started sporting it, it spread, because Eric was kinda high-profile—long hair, cool guy, smoking-hot girlfriend, working at the coffee shop on Broadway. And he worked for Soundgarden. And Soundgarden were the alpha dog, always.
ERIC JOHNSON I could never really say if I was the first to do it. I just know that I wore it. Where I went to school, in Ellensburg, you wore long johns. I think one day I ended up puttin’ a pair of shorts on over a pair of long johns and then wearing a pair of boots. I thought, This is pretty comfortable. The big thing when I was a little kid was you wore your shorts over your sweat pants; that look was huge. Also, I grew up skateboarding, and people into skateboarding would put their skate shorts on over jeans.
Do I take credit for the look? No. I’m sure people have been wearing shorts over anything for a million years.
TAD DOYLE People were wearing flannel here long before grunge came out. It’s cold here. It’s a cheap and effective clothing apparatus for living in the Northwest. I don’t even associate it with a fashion statement or the lack thereof. I thought Eddie Vedder did more for flannel than anybody.
KURT DANIELSON The loser ethic is an anti-ethic, and grunge fashion is an antifashion. It’s basically taking all things