Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [181]
DAN PETERS The cool thing was that this day in a major festival in the United Kingdom is taken over by the equivalent of a bunch of friends: Melvins, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney.
BARRETT MARTIN I wouldn’t say it was like, “We’ve arrived,” because we’d already kind of arrived. It was like, “Wow, we’re all from Seattle, we all used to play these grimy little club shows together, and now here we are, playing essentially to a world audience.”
JEFF SMITH I was there, filming the Melvins and Mudhoney playing. The whole weekend was just nuts. It was like Apocalypse Now. It was so cold and wet, even though it was August. There was so much mud.
MARK DEUTROM I was doing sound for the Melvins. There were some issues with Lori that tour, so they got Joe Preston in to play bass. It was one of those deals where I think the Melvins were … resentful would be too strong a word, but it was like pulling back the curtain when they finally get to Oz. Your big rock-star buddies invite you to play on this day of the festival, which they get to pick the lineup for, and then you get to start playing at 10:30 in the morning. You get to play below Teenage Fanclub and a bunch of other crappy bands. People get to wake up with terrible hangovers and hate you. Stand in the mud and the rain and the wind and just flip you off.
BUZZ OSBORNE We opened for an ABBA cover band, so there you have it.
MARK DEUTROM People were standing next to me going, “What is this shit?” in the sound booth. And the Melvins are playing their hearts out, with 400 people standing there, maybe 75 people liking them. The booking agency relayed the message, from whoever was in charge of talent at the festival, that “You’re the worst band that ever played this festival.”
DAN PETERS When your name is Mudhoney, you tend to get things like mud thrown at you when it’s raining out. Onstage, Mark was pelted in the face with a big mud ball by somebody who he had taunted and teased: “You guys don’t play baseball—you throw like a bunch of pussies.” Got hit squarely in the face. Good times.
JENNIFER FINCH People were throwing mud at us when we were playing. Donita was like, “Fuck this!” and went behind her amp and pulled out her tampon and threw it into the audience. It was hysterical. That’s something we used to do, growing up: drive around and pull our tampons out and throw them at people that made comments. It’s the ultimate kind of “fuck you.” I always thought Donita was a bit of a reactionary, but thank God, she just expressed how angry and upset she was at that moment.
DONITA SPARKS (singer/guitarist for Los Angeles’s L7) What I wanted to do was drop my pants and pull it out, so everyone could see what I was doing. I had on these baggy shorts and didn’t have a belt so I used duct tape, double-knotted, so I’m like, shit, I can’t get these pants down. I turn around, and I look at Dee, and she sees my hands go down in there while I try to pull out this tampon. I swung it around my head, threw it out into the audience, and all these kids are yelling—they think I’m throwing out a lighter or something—and someone caught it, realized what it was and threw it back up onstage.
JEFF SMITH When L7 threw the tampon into the crowd, people ran away. Tough English people seemed to be pretty scared of a little pussy blood.
VAN CONNER At Reading, I went to walk down the stairs, which were all wet and muddy, and I had a beer in one hand and a mixed drink in the other. Dan Peters and I think Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl were down at the bottom of what was probably a 12-foot stairway. I go, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m comin’.” And somehow my feet went out from under me, and I landed on my back at the bottom of the stairs. It was a crazy fall. I almost blacked out. I couldn’t feel my back, and I thought, Okay, I’m dead. Everything is over.
And all of a sudden the feeling starts to come back and I look up at Dan Peters standing over