Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [223]
JOHN HOYT We went into his outer room and hung out for a little bit, and then Clinton came out in his Arkansas sweats. We all went into the Oval Office and did a group photo, and he said that Chelsea really wanted to go to the Pearl Jam concert, but Hillary thought better of it—Chelsea was still pretty young. At the end of it, they asked us to get people out of the room and everyone left so Ed and the president could talk. When Ed left, he turned, and I remember him saying, “See ya, Bill.”
KELLY CURTIS We got summoned into the Oval Office, and Clinton asked Eddie if he should address the nation. Eddie said, “I don’t think you should address the nation.” They didn’t know if there were gonna be a bunch of copycat suicides. Eddie thought it was a mistake, and it would draw attention to it.
KERRI HARROP That morning I’d gotten to the Sub Pop office early to finish up this fanzine I was making as our sixth-anniversary party favor. It was six or eight pages, photocopied, and supposed to be this fun little activity book. And the center spread was this cartoon caricature of Kurt, with these starry, dreamy eyes. I purchased these ratty old blond wigs from some thrift store, and was taping locks into the pages of this thing: “Your very own lucky lock of Kurt Cobain’s hair!”
We were going to give out fortune cookies, and Nils and I had come up with all these smart-ass fortunes. Twenty different fortunes, and they all related to bands on the label. But there were two that pertained to Kurt. One specifically was P.U. SMELLS LIKE KURT FARTED. Obviously we have no way of knowing which cookies contained the fortune, so we couldn’t use them, either. We had like 10 pounds of fortune cookies, which is a hell of a lot! So we had fortune cookies for weeks after. To this day, I can’t eat a fortune cookie and not think of that time.
NILS BERNSTEIN Then we had our Sub Pop sixth anniversary at the Crocodile. It basically turned into a wake and was just really horrible. Velocity Girl played, and they just felt like assholes playing cheery music, and the singer got really drunk and ran offstage and disappeared outside somewhere.
SARAH SHANNON (singer for Washington, D.C., area’s Velocity Girl) It was just a really bad night for me. I didn’t know Kurt Cobain, but I felt pretty sad about it and got a little too drunk and kind of couldn’t perform.
MEGAN JASPER I remember walking in and there were cameras everywhere outside. The people inside were just in shock. Everyone was fucked up, fucked up beyond—like really fucked up. People were numbing themselves.
JEFF GILBERT There was kind of an unspoken thing around town that when national media came through here, nobody says anything.
Geraldo Rivera and his camera crew of douche bags showed up at RKCNDY one night after Kurt killed himself. The clubs were still full ’cause everybody was hurting; people just needed to be around each other. So here comes Geraldo and his camera crew. Guy at the door tried to charge him cover, he said, “No, we’re with the media,” and he just busted through. Geraldo was trying to get some interviews from people, and he comes up to Marty Chandler from Panic, a thrash-metal band, and Marty goes, “Hey, Geraldo, pull my finger!” Everybody basically turned around and walked away from Geraldo. He got out of there really quick.
NILS BERNSTEIN Obviously Kurt’s death was a big deal to every young person in Seattle. Which really bothered me. I only wanted to see people that knew him. I didn’t want to know what the newscaster had to say, what a kid down the street had to say, what display some record store was putting up about him. And within a couple days, I did a total turnaround. The feelings of everyone who knew Kurt are tied up with their experiences with him or their feelings about Courtney, whatever. It felt like people that didn’t know him had a purer appreciation for his life and his music.
SUSAN SILVER I was driving when I got the news about Kurt, and I remember the first feeling that I had was the same feeling that I had when Lennon was shot, where it was