Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [174]
MICHELLE LEON (bassist for Minneapolis’s Babes in Toyland) It got blown totally out of proportion by making this big rivalry. I’m not saying that there wasn’t tension and that they didn’t have falling-outs, but even I don’t know all the details, and I was there.
MAUREEN HERMAN (later Babes in Toyland bassist) We’re getting interviewed every fucking week and somebody’s asking us which Hole songs inspired us and, “Why did Kat copy Courtney’s look?”
KAT BJELLAND The media did that, and it was really hurtful to me for a long time. They’d say it’s some kind of battle. Which it wasn’t. We were friends. And then someone started believing the press. But if you really do the research of when I started my band and got onstage looking how I look, they would see who the originator is.
COURTNEY LOVE It’s not about a dress thing. I’m about to hang up on you! Go read some old copies of Ms. Magazine, and Backlash, and get back to me. Seriously, like, dresses? What? No, it was about a Rickenbacker, if you really want to know the truth. The fuckin’ Rickenbacker I bought at Captain Whizeagle’s. And she stole my gear, and I was really pissed about it. The dress thing was kind of part and parcel of it, but obviously that was way, way, way back in the day.
LORI BARBERO Who won? I think Courtney won because she sold more records, she was the richer person, and she had a longer career. But who cares? In all of the hundreds and thousands of hours that we were in vans and airports and everywhere, we never talked about our attire.
Except once, in Providence, Rhode Island, or somewhere up that way, Kat was walking on the street in her big, black clunky shoes that went with her knee-highs and her little dress with the big collar. Someone yelled out to Kat, “Nice polio shoes!” She screamed back, “They’re not polio shoes!” She never wore those shoes ever again, and I was so glad because I thought they were so ugly. Oh, and one time Michelle had to leave a really important meeting to go buy some cow-print pants she wanted before the secondhand store closed, and we still laugh about how ugly those fuckin’ things were.
I think those are the only two times we really talked about clothes: the polio shoes and the cow pants.
KEVIN MARTIN (Candlebox singer) The Seattle scene? We were the redheaded stepchild. We were in the right place at the right time. Fortunately, our music had its own voice. Unfortunately, everybody believed that we had moved there to steal the sound.
Does talking about it stir up bad feelings? Not at all. It’s easy to talk about. It was a scene that was fuckin’ groundbreaking.
I moved to Seattle when I was 14, in 1984, after my father took a job up there. We lived on Mercer Island, where I stood out like a sore thumb. I was a skateboarder, with white, short spiky hair and Converse and ripped-up jeans. I got beat up by jocks the first week of school.
San Antonio, Texas, where I moved from, was worlds apart, musically. San Antonio was predominantly punk rock. My first concert was Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Butthole Surfers, the Big Boys, so when I moved to Seattle, it was a culture shock. I come from this warm-weather punk-rock attitude. In Seattle, it’s rain, there’s not a lot of punk rock, there’s what I call dirgy rock—slow, down-tuned, heavy—which is what everybody named grunge.
Susan Silver was the manager of the John Fluevog shoe store I worked at, around ’87. It was cool working for her, man. I was underage, and she was getting me into all these great shows, and I was meeting incredibly talented musicians. I was playing drums in a couple of punk bands; I wasn’t singing yet. I became friendly with Chris Cornell and Andy Wood. They’d come into the store: “Hey, Kevin, what’s goin’ on? How’s the band?” Shit like that.
I was 17, they were 21, 22. So it’s not like we were going and having beers together at the Vogue or Linda’s Tavern. I was just standing on the side watching