Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [190]
He used the cane on the wrong side, though. He walked with a limp, but he was favoring the wrong knee because that was the side he wanted it on. He was a funny, funny guy.
MATT VAUGHAN I left the tour in the middle of the night, five weeks into it. I was disgusted by what was happening. There was a lot of violence among Gruntruck, and there was a lot of hostility and maybe bitterness in that they wanted more than they were getting as a band. Gruntruck went from being beer-drinking guys to drug addicts; I don’t know that for sure, but they came back different.
TIM PAUL I didn’t party as much as a lot of other folks on the road. After we got back, Ben was not the same Ben from the early days. He was not that working-out-six-times-a-week guy with all the musical gear, making everything happen. I used to tease Ben that he was slowly turning into Jim Morrison; in fact, I called him the Lizard King in later years.
SCOTT MCCULLUM We were supposed to go on the European tour with Screaming Trees and Alice in Chains, but there’s conjecture that Layne got so freaked out by Ben, that’s why it didn’t happen.
BARRETT MARTIN They had to cancel our Paris show because Layne overdosed. And the people were already inside the theater, we’d already sound-checked, the gear was onstage, and Lane overdosed—I think at his hotel, but I’m not sure. He never came to the venue. We escaped out the back of the venue, and they put us in cabs because they thought the audience was gonna tear the place apart. The stage crew were throwing all this swag—the CDs and T-shirts they were going to sell—into the audience, to quell the crowd.
SCOTT MCCULLUM We toured with Pantera after that. Dimebag bought me my first hooker, in Hamburg. But it wasn’t that same bond we had with Alice in Chains. Alice in Chains were always like, “You guys are equal.” Pantera, there was always that “They’re definitely the headliners” kind of thing.
BARRETT MARTIN I remember that Alice in Chains’ road crew and the people that produced their show, they were not cool. I mean sometimes we didn’t even have any place to go because Alice in Chains had the whole backstage area. Alice in Chains were friendly to us backstage—they were never rude or anything—but they definitely let it be known that they were the big rock stars, and we were the openers. So I actually lost a great deal of respect for them. I did not think that they really got the Seattle thing, which was all independent, DIY, and take-care-of-your-musical-community. And it’s because they were on the periphery at the beginning of it.
MATT VAUGHAN That was a nice jacket Lanegan tossed me during the fight. It was a long tweed with a furry collar; a little long in the sleeves, but I wore it all the time. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know Lanegan’s number; no one ever knew how to get ahold of Mark. Two years go by, and I was at a show with my girlfriend at the time. Lanegan comes right up behind me and says, “Give me my jacket.” (Laughs.)
I was like, “Here you go.”
My girlfriend was like, “What was that all about?”
And I’m like, “Well, this hasn’t been my jacket, I gotta tell you.”
DANNY BRAMSON When we first screened Singles to Warner, during the parts when Alice and Soundgarden came on, these three corporate heads in front of us all turned to each other, registering either distaste, scorn, or disappointment, or we didn’t know what the fuck. Afterward, in the lobby, we found out they were thinking, Holy fuck! This is a concert movie. This is Rattle and Hum. Which was a huge disappointment