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That’s why it was hard to take anything in Seattle really seriously.

SUSAN SILVER (Soundgarden/Alice in Chains/Screaming Trees/U-Men manager; Chris Cornell’s ex-wife) Alex Shumway and Mark Arm were, far and away, the two people who caught my attention at the Metropolis. They just spun with the most incredible, youthful, vibrant energy I had ever seen. Them stage-diving was the most beautiful dance to watch. They were so graceful and fearless. It was mesmerizing.

ALEX SHUMWAY Okay, here it is—this is the embarrassing part: I was a ballet dancer. This was when I lived in Sacramento, when I was 14, 15.

The best part of being a ballet dancer was that as a straight guy, you get the pick of the litter. I went out with two or three of the girls. After shows there would be a huge party, and everybody would get totally shitfaced; people would be smoking up and maybe do a little coke. It’s like you have to be really prim, proper, and prissy, and then it’s like, Oh, Jesus Christ, you have to let go some other way. I would give it a shot, and I would end up puking or just being like, “This isn’t good. I don’t like this.” So I went straight edge pretty early on.

Once I got into punk more and more, I got tired of ballet. I got involved in the music scene in Seattle pretty soon after I moved there with my mother and my sister in ’82.

STEVE TURNER (Mudhoney/Green River/Mr. Epp and the Calculations/the Thrown Ups guitarist) I started going to a private school in Seattle called Northwest School of the Arts, Humanities and Environment for my senior year. Both Alex Shumway and Stone Gossard went there. They were both a year younger than me. Alex, we befriended each other right off the bat ’cause when he first started going there he had a dyed-black mohawk and wore a kilt over his jeans—he was the Circle Jerks skanking guy come to life—and I was a skate punk and we both loved Minor Threat.

ALEX SHUMWAY I met Mark Arm at a show—I think it was the U-Men—at the Metropolis. We were both on the floor and I saw the back of his shirt, which said STRAIGHT EDGE. I was probably one of three people at that time who I knew in town was straight edge. So I was like, “Hey, dude, that’s cool!” But I think the shirt was ironic. I could be remembering incorrectly, but I recall him telling me long, long after that, “Dude, I was on acid that night!”

MARK ARM Wow, his memory is off. I never had a STRAIGHT EDGE T-shirt. I was kinda into it in my own way, I suppose. At the time, I thought weed and alcohol dulled the senses, and psychedelics enhanced them. I wasn’t on acid that night, but I was into Minor Threat.

STEVE MACK (singer for the U.K.’s That Petrol Emotion) I remember in particular one night at the Metropolis. I was always right in the middle of the pit, because I loved slam-dancing, and that night I felt this tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and there’s this skinny, wiry kid and he’s telling me, “Link your fingers together. Give me a boost.” So I lock my fingers together, and he plants one foot firmly on my hand and leaps over me onto the stage.

He jumps back out in the crowd, and I went over to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Okay, my turn. You link your fingers together.” So he did that and threw me onstage. And that was the first time I ever met Mark Arm.

MARK ARM I was born on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. I was too young to really remember living there, but I do remember living in Germany after that. My dad was in the Air Force in World War Two. Met my mom after the war; she was German. They were engaged for like 10 years while he was in the Pacific and she remained in Germany. And then they got married and had me in the early ’60s. We came to the States and ended up in Seattle in ’66.

My mom was an opera singer. Her career got interrupted by World War Two. She tried to get it going again after the war, and she apparently got some good reviews, but she was by this point a little too old. She was strictly into classical, and any other kind of music was a lesser