Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [19]
DAVE REES Dave Hunt lived in a trailer in the woods on Bainbridge and he had a home CB unit. Andy would get on that thing, and he had these handles, like Ratchet Jaw Penis Snatcher. And he had these truckers laughin’ their asses off to the point where one of them said, “Hey, tone it down or I’m gonna drive off the road.”
He made you laugh all the time, in any forum. I loved goin’ over to the Woods’ house. There was this crazy energy there—of music, of fun.
ROBERT SCOTT CRANE There was kind of a cold, dark feeling in that house. The story that I know is that Kevin would often get into physical conflicts with his father and his brother Brian, trying to protect Andy, the baby of the family. Andy couldn’t physically defend himself, so he tried to be the court jester. And I remember the final straw for their mom, Toni, leaving the house when they were my neighbors was that Brian came home drunk, and she told Brian that he either had to stop drinking or cut his hair. So he came back a few hours later drunk and bald. And she moved out. And disappeared for I think a couple of months.
DAVE REES There was tension. I was there when there was infighting amongst the Wood family that wasn’t pleasant. But, like I said, I loved goin’ over there. Mr. Wood’s stereo system was the loudest thing I’d ever heard; they’d crank Judas Priest and Kiss and Sabbath at concert volume.
And their parents supported and encouraged their music. His folks took Andy and my brother to meet Van Halen as they went into the radio station in town, KISW. My brother got Eddie Van Halen’s autograph, and Andy went right to David Lee Roth—David Lee Roth and Freddie Mercury were huge influences on him.
Everyone else was asking for autographs, and Andy said to David Lee Roth, “I just wanna shake your hand.” David Lee Roth shook his hand and said, “I’m on a schedule, son.” Andy loved it.
REGAN HAGAR During our high school years, the Woods probably switched houses just about every year, which was good for the band because we could move the noise around. Seems like both our houses were always just for us, because our parents were always working. Andy’s parents got separated around the time we were finishing high school. It started with a separation, followed by divorce. And that was a super-bummer for Andy.
DAVE REES Our first show was on a stage built on the side of a hill with strawberry fields around it. Andy named it the Strawberry Jam. When we were driving there, I had all the equipment loaded in my 1970 Buick Estate wagon, and there wasn’t enough room for the guys in the band. So Andy and Regan rode on the luggage rack up top. And when we get there, Andy’s long hair was gone. Regan had shaved Andy’s head on the way there. There always had to be something going on.
At that show, Andy wore a shirt with a swastika with a circle around it and the red line through it. It was more antihate; he hadn’t figured out Love Rock yet. But he was always thinking that way. Even then, his marketing ability was just amazing. When you walked off the ferry boat from Bainbridge into Seattle, there were these big metal panels overhead, and on every panel Andy wrote a saying. At the end, it came to the punch line: ROCK AND ROLL’S ONLY CHANCE: MALFUNKSHUN.
That was my one official show with Malfunkshun. I went to Seattle to go to college, and when I came back, Andy was playing my bass and he was quite a bit better than me. I ended up taking Dave Hunt and this other friend of ours and forming a band called Skindiver. So it was amicable. Skindiver played shows with Malfunkshun, but these guys did not compete with my band or with any other local band. They were going right after Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. They had these wild conceptual songs. And the characters