Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [18]
BLAINE COOK (the Fartz/10 Minute Warning/the Accüsed singer) We did security, cleaned up, hung flyers, worked the door. We didn’t get paid, but you got to hang out and see the shows. Regan and I had a bit of a side business where we let people into sold-out shows, and the money would find its way into our pockets.
REGAN HAGAR I think all the Fartz worked there. Also, Kyle Nixon, who was the singer of the band Solger, worked there. Duff McKagan was just another kid around. John Bigley was at the Showbox with us at the beginning. Bigley goes all the way back.
JOHN BIGLEY I was 18 when I started working at the Showbox, before it became official—back then it was a rental place, the Talmud Torah, a Jewish bingo hall. The best job there, which I started getting quite a bit, was standing with a flashlight by the backstage area where the equipment would be set up, where you could just sit and watch everybody onstage. And back then it was such a treat. Paul Weller, Captain Beefheart, James Brown—they were doing shows like that.
I’d come home at five, six in the morning, go to sleep, and wake up two hours after class. Oops. Hence, crash and burn at school. I got a 0.00 my first two semesters at the University of Washington and stopped.
The area around the Showbox then was dipping into old Seattle. Extremely pre-Microsoft.
MARK ARM Seattle was a lot sleazier then, in all the best possible ways. You could go down to Third Avenue, and there’d be storefronts with women in lingerie in them. There was no actual prostitution going on there. They were kind of skirting the law, suckering people in—drunk sailors and whatnot—trying to separate them from their money.
JOHN BIGLEY There were a lot of sailors coming in from Bremerton, with the white bell bottoms. And there were long-haired street-guy hustler drug-dealer types dukin’ it out with the sailors. And then the punk-rock weirdos dukin’ it out with the bikers at the Indian bar—they were called Indian bars, open at six in the morning. Right there was probably as rough as Seattle was. I was a lover not a fighter, but you’d have to learn techniques like the throw-the-garbage-can-in-the-person’s-face trick.
REGAN HAGAR Most of the fights I remember were between punks and what we called Donut Holers. Only a parking lot separated the Showbox and this donut store that stayed open late, where all the homeless kids who were prostitutes and thieves would be.
DAWN ANDERSON (journalist; Backlash zine publisher; Jack Endino’s ex-wife) I spent a lot of time at the Showbox. I was a suburban girl with Farrah Fawcett hair. To me, it was this place where you could go and check out all the freaks and weirdos. There was a pornographic bookstore next door, and the guy who owned it used to go outside and glower at these punk rockers that were lining up and ruining his neighborhood.
REGAN HAGAR I sort of met Andy at the Showbox. He and Kevin were in line for Devo, I think. We acknowledged each other, like, You look familiar to me from the halls of our eighth-grade school, Commodore.
Andy approached me at school the following day and said, “I have a band. Are you interested in playing?” And I said, “Sure, let’s do it.” This guy Dave Hunt was quitting. We would practice in Andy’s parents’ basement or my mother’s garage. We would get pushed from house to house. I remember getting letters in my mother’s mailbox asking us to make it stop because we sucked. I’ve kept the letters—they’re pretty great.
KEVIN WOOD Andy and Regan were like Laurel and Hardy. It was always lots of smiles, lots of joking. Regan was more of a straight man; Andy was the funny guy.
JONATHAN EVISON The