Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [195]
MARK ARM I heard that Courtney might have first called Jon Poneman and went, “How do I deal with this?” Eventually they were like, “We got to do something.” Thank God. That seems like a weird thing that your first compulsion would be to call someone else. But I’m sure they probably felt pretty hounded by the press. That was around the time of the Vanity Fair story. They weren’t exactly under the radar.
RON HEATHMAN I pocketed some dope and got Mark out when the paramedics got there.
MARK ARM The next thing I know, I’ve got the medics working me over, and I went to Harborview.
RON HEATHMAN And it was never to be spoken of again, until almost 20 years later. The saddest part about the whole thing is that the whole time, Frances Bean was asleep on the hotel bed.
COURTNEY LOVE We only stayed at the Market that one time, and they still are weird about me. Mark Arm OD’ing? I don’t remember, honestly. Was he still with his Amazon girlfriend? She was cool. She wasn’t trying to mack on my husband, she wasn’t trying to mack on me, she just wanted all the drugs. Who’s this guy? Ron Heathman? No. No … Calling Jonathan Poneman? That could be possible. I always trusted Jonathan Poneman for some insane reason.
I remember me not wanting to do any media. That was the media blackout, but I said to Kurt, “You should at least do the gay media,” and so he did The Advocate. I know that Kurt was taking a lot of dope. He was really frustrated by things. Mark’s habit at that point, I don’t know.
MARK ARM It was stupid for me to go back for more when I had been drinking and had a low tolerance. It was after that I had decided it was probably better not to hang out with those folks anymore. They moved into that place in Magnolia, where Kurt ended up killing himself, but I never actually went there. I didn’t want to get in there. I didn’t want to be involved, and I was trying to take care of myself.
But I still fully didn’t learn my lesson: I continued to chip throughout the spring until midsummer.
MIKE INEZ The Ozzy band, we were holed up in Reno, Nevada, mixing the Live & Loud album, and I get a call from Sean Kinney out of the blue. We’d done an American tour with Alice, so I got to be really great friends with them. Sean says, “Hey, what’s goin’ on, Mike?” It was so funny, because Sean’s one of those people where you just know when something’s fishy. He says, “We need you to come down to Brazil, we’re doing Rock in Rio.” At this point, I thought Mike Starr was gonna be coming back; there was talk of him going to be with his family, or he was just getting burnt out from being on the road.
I thought it was a temporary thing, so I told Ozzy, “The Alice guys called, and I don’t want to leave you hanging without a bass player.” And I remember Ozzy’s words exactly. He said, “If you don’t go, we’re gonna have to go to the hospital.” I said, “Why?” He said, “It’s gonna take them about a week to get my foot out of your ass.”
SUSAN SILVER There were continual positions of jeopardy that Mike Starr had put the band in. He had a fantastic mom who did everything to help him, but he got in a lot of trouble. He was constantly putting the band in legal jeopardy, whether it was drugs or selling backstage passes outside the venue, things that he and his dad did together that could have created a lot of ill will for Alice.
There’s only so many times you could ask someone, tell someone, threaten someone, and then those guys had to make that decision, which they made on their own. They called me to tell me that they not only had made that decision, they had talked to Mike. This was before Brazil, in Hawaii. The Brazil shows would be his last.
MIKE STARR One time, Layne was so dope sick he goes to me, “Mike, take these