Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [25]
GORDON DOUCETTE Susan’s involvement in Metropolis was just monumental. She had a great business savvy. She’s a woman with a huge heart. There’s a lot of clubs where the owners are never present—they’re shrewd businessmen counting cash in the office—but Susan, Hugo, and myself were always out there; we were part of the crowd and directly involved. So 95 percent of the people who walked through the doors of Metropolis knew us by name.
SUSAN SILVER We had the Replacements there, and the three of us went through a lot of effort to make the place look nice. We had a group of young people who really cared about it. And after the Replacements left, we went into the dressing room and they had just trashed it. They pissed in there and graffitied all over the walls—they drew a caricature of Fred Flintstone with somebody shitting in his mouth. It was juvenile, it was imbecilic, but beyond all that, it was disrespectful. I was gutted.
Later, knowing what that felt like, that sort of thing was a “no discussion” issue between me and my clients. I had to walk Mike Starr from Alice in Chains out of a couple of places by his ear. We were at a pub in England and he was peeing on the wall and I said, “You know what, dude, somebody just like your mom or your grandma is going to have to get down there and clean that up. So stop now.”
MAIRE MASCO Susan and Gordon did some bookings. I did some booking. Hugo did booking. It was kind of a communal effort. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but Gordon really was kind of Susan’s arm candy. Susan was gorgeous; she didn’t need arm candy. One time Gordon would show up with like a poofy shirt, and then next week it was something else.
LARRY REID She had bad taste in men, that’s what I remember about Susan. Oh, man, she went out with Gordon Doucette from Red Masque. He had a wandering eye, to say the very least.
SUSAN SILVER I learned that much later, after the third year. It was infidelity. He was a general scallywag.
GORDON DOUCETTE Believe me, I’ve given her many apologies over the years. It was a horrible ending between us. That’s pretty much when I took my exit from Metropolis.
STEVE TURNER Some hardcore friends of mine, Alex Shumway included, started a band called Spluii Numa and I rehearsed with them a few times. It wasn’t my scene, so that’s when Mark said, “Quit them and join Mr. Epp on second guitar instead.” So I did, and we played two shows and broke up.
JEFF SMITH Mr. Epp’s last show was at the Metropolis. Darren and I got all the hair and dirt that we cleaned out of his dad’s hair salon, and then we threw it on the audience. People ran away. The club was super-pissed. They were like, “You’ll never be able to play here again!” And we were like, “Well, we’re done with the band.… And we’ll sweep up.”
HUGO PIOTTIN The life of the Metropolis was about a year and a half. They let us have the place on the condition that we’d pay month to month. Next door was a building that was being turned into a fancy condo. And they didn’t want to have that kind of crowd on the weekend—people sitting on the sidewalk, drinking, making noise.
GORDON DOUCETTE The people who I know who remember Metropolis remember it like they do a family member. They tell me, “I can’t say this about any other club, but I really, really miss Metropolis.”
MARK ARM After Mr. Epp, Steve and I decided that we wanted to keep playing. We got Alex Shumway, who’d already been drumming with Spluii Numa, to start a band with us.
ALEX SHUMWAY The origin of Spluii Numa’s name? Somebody at our school wrote on the wall JOHN LENNON LIVES! And somebody else had marked out LIVES and wrote WENT SPLUII NUMA! Meaning got his head blown off, blood splattered all over the place. We thought it was hilarious.
MARK ARM We just needed a bass player. We thought Jeff Ament would be a good guy to get in the band; in Deranged Diction, he jumped really