Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [187]
MARK PELLINGTON When we shot the performance part, Layne was pretty high. I remember Layne wanted to wear this cowboy hat. I was like, “I don’t know about the hat.” It felt inappropriate for the song; we were shooting them in front of projections of this Vietnam stuff. His eyes were really fucked up, he was totally pinned. It was like, “Wow, guys, he’s really fucked-up looking. What do you want to do about this?” Oh, this sweet guy, I knew it wouldn’t have been very flattering for him.
So I just put him in sunglasses: “Instead of the hat, how about you wear these?” I said, “God, you look like a badass in these sunglasses. Let’s go with this.” And it was like, “All right, let’s go. Let’s get a couple of takes.” So it was not without its challenges.
TOM NIEMEYER We did the entire U.S. and Canada with Alice in Chains. The first time was what they called the “shitty cities” tour, when they were warming up for their Dirt album tour. Touring with them was absolutely over-the-top: part Spial Tap, part Disneyland for adults. Porno party at the fuckin’ Playboy Mansion. Jimi Hendrix, as big as Janis Joplin. All colors, all shapes, all sizes, all temperatures, all the time.
If you were with those guys on that tour, it could make the most mundane thing, like us walking from here to there, one of the most memorable experiences of your life. And the whole time there’s every chemical possible flying through the air, falling out of pockets, landing in your hand, accidentally going inside you somehow.
TIM PAUL (Gruntruck bassist) There were a lot of pranks. It was the Dirt tour, so we found a hardware store that was open late and bought these five-pound bags of potting soil and doused Alice in Chains with them right as they were going on. Looking back, it was maybe ill-advised because the poor guys had to play a show with dirt down their throats.
SCOTT MCCULLUM Oh, my God, Gruntruck and Alice in Chains were a perfect fit. We started off doing a “shitty cities” tour, basically all of these shitty little towns in the Northwest, in 1992. One time, we were up in Butte, Montana. Jerry’s a big outdoorsman, so we went fishing together and caught a bunch of brown trout. We took ’em back to the next show, probably at Missoula, and went to this frat-boy party afterward. Jerry and I walk in with this bag of fish, looking at all these frat boys and girls, and we’re like, “Where’s your kitchen?” We just went into the kitchen and started cooking up these fucking trout without even knowing whose house it was.
TOM NIEMEYER You think you’re invincible when you’re on a tour like that. And for the most part, you are; if you get caught at something, there seems to be somebody there to help get you out of it. I broke a sink completely apart in a club bathroom for some reason. Well, the reason was Jägermeister and coke. The sink had to be broken, and I shattered it into a million pieces.
SCOTT MCCULLUM Sean had a little bit of a destructive streak in him whenever he got to a certain point. I heard some stories about televisions going out of windows—very rock-and-roll stuff that got them kicked out of hotels.
TOM NIEMEYER Somewhere, probably outside Bozeman, Montana, there were about 30 people inside this hotel room having fun, watching TV, drinking beers, and the cops come to the door with the front-desk clerk saying, “It’s time to quiet things down.” Somebody had the door open this much, saying, “No, everything’s fine in here. Sorry, we’ll quiet it down.” And Sean’s trying to get the door open to yell at the cops, and three or four people had their hands over Sean’s mouth, holding him back from saying what he wanted to say.
Once the cops left, it was time for people to leave. I wanted to stay—it was my room—but Sean didn’t want me to, so he literally dragged me by the feet down the hall to his room, into the lair of the minotaur or whatever, and on the way there,