Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [27]
BRUCE PAVITT (Sub Pop Records cofounder) I was working at Fallout Records, and I got a phone call from Gerard Cosloy at Homestead, and he asked, “What are the happening bands in Seattle?” I said, “You want to check out the U-Men and Green River.”
MARK ARM Green River had three offers, believe it or not. We’d played with Fang in Seattle, and Tom Flynn, the guitar player, had a record label called Boner. And we’d also gotten an offer from Enigma somehow, which is kind of baffling to me. I remember the contract from Homestead was like seven pages and the contract from Enigma was like 60. And we were like, “Well, this one is smaller and easier to understand.” And at that time Homestead seemed like the coolest record label on the planet, next to SST. They put out Foetus and Nick Cave and Sonic Youth and Volcano Suns.
STEVE TURNER My tastes were changing. I was discovering more of the ’60s garage punk. My hair was gettin’ longer and then I shaved my head, got a buzz cut, as an act of rebellion against the Green River thing—right before Jeff wanted to get some band photos taken. So I was kinda being a dick.
MARK ARM Steve stopped playing with any kind of distortion, and during at least one show, he played sitting down on a chair in passive-aggressive protest.
STEVE TURNER I didn’t want to go on tour when they wanted to, and I felt like I was kind of holdin’ them back. As soon as I quit, they got Bruce Fairweather in on guitar and they got so much better so quick.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER (Green River/Mother Love Bone/Deranged Diction guitarist; Love Battery bassist) I was born in Hawaii and lived there until I was 18. I was interested in going to forestry school, and the University of Montana had a good forestry program. And the catalog they sent me had this area in the quad that looked totally skateable. So I decided, I’m going there!
The first thing I did when my parents dropped me off at college was find that spot. And that’s when I met Jeff Ament, who was skateboarding there. He had on these shorts with 999 and Sex Pistols and the Germs and Black Flag and stuff, and I was like, Whoa! Who’s that guy? So I started talking to him, and we became really good friends and started Deranged Diction five months later.
SLIM MOON I saw the first show after Steve Turner quit, and it was much more of a hard-rock set. They did a bunch of Led Zeppelin covers, which Mark Arm kept joking about. I think Steve was the advocate of a sort of punk simplicity, which was against what the other guys in the band wanted, which was bombast. When he left, it was just bombast. The glam influence really came in.
There were a lot of different moments where you could say, “It’s the birth of grunge,” but I like to mark it as that moment: when Steve Turner left Green River.
KIM THAYIL (Soundgarden guitarist) In 1981, I cashed out my bank account in Chicago—I had very little money—and Hiro and I loaded up the Datsun B210 with suitcases and threw in our guitars, mandolins, portable amps. I played guitar. Hiro played mandolin; he didn’t play bass yet. And we drove the 2,000 miles to Seattle.
The people our age in Seattle seemed to be easily five years—in some ways, 10 years—behind Chicago in terms of fashion. A lot of people with mullets and ’70s-style stuff. Those big combs they shove in their rear pockets. People weren’t wearing Levi’s, they were wearing Jessie Jeans or Britannia. We thought, Wait a minute, we’re in America still, and nobody looks the way they do in Chicago or New York or Minnesota. This is weird.
HIRO YAMAMOTO (Soundgarden/Truly bassist) Seattle was a cowboy town back then. When we got there, people still wore cowboy hats and cowboy boots.
I was born in Park Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. It was a planned community, with winding streets and a lot of parks. I met Kim when I was a senior in high school; he had already graduated. We both went to this place called