Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [28]
CHRIS CORNELL (Soundgarden singer/guitarist; Temple of the Dog singer; solo artist; Susan Silver’s ex-husband) At the time I was growing up, it was the tail end of the baby boom, so there were tons of kids in the neighborhood. Tons of boys, young and old. So there was tons of drugs. The definitive Seattle neighborhood.… I never went to high school. I never really finished eighth grade.… From the time that I started playing drums at 16, I was already out of school.
HIRO YAMAMOTO The first time I left Park Forest was after high school, when I moved with my friend Stuart Hallerman to Olympia. I had a job, but I got laid off and moved back home.
KIM THAYIL I was best friends throughout high school with Bruce Pavitt’s middle brother, and his youngest brother was in a band with me called Identity Crisis. In 1981, Hiro and I were both in bands, both had girlfriends, but then our bands broke up, the relationships with our girlfriends ended, and there was no real reason for us to stay. We came out to Seattle for an adventure. Bruce was out here, Stuart was out here. Bruce is sending us records and tapes from bands in Seattle and Olympia that we were really into—the Blackouts, the Beakers.
MATT DENTINO (the Shemps guitarist) I’ve known Kim Thayil since ’72. We went to an alternative high school in Park Forest together. It was an alternative to the traditional high school, which I got kicked out of because I was too alternative—all I did was play guitar and study Jimi Hendrix.
In 1980, Reagan got elected and I was more of a left-wing Democrat back then. I said, “I’m outta here, because I’m 20 and this guy’s gonna shave my head and put me in the Marines, and I gotta go fight a war.” The day Reagan was elected, I went to Seattle on a Greyhound bus, ’cause my brother was out there goin’ to med school, to play rock and roll and party, and chase chicks—which I wasn’t very good at, by the way.
When Kim and Hiro came to Seattle, we eventually hooked up and started hanging out a little bit. All of ’84, I spent building the Shemps. Kim would play bass, and sometimes Hiro would play bass. Sometimes I was the lead guitarist, and I think a few gigs Kim played guitar with us, too. And what we were doin’ was lots of classic rock. And the reason that we did lots of classic rock was, number one, it was easy to learn. And there was lots of old hippie gigs that we could play right away, and I needed to work. I was starving; I was living in Kim’s closet.
STUART HALLERMAN (Soundgarden soundman; Avast! Recording studio owner/operator) I get a call from Hiro saying, “Guess what? I joined a butt-rock band!” That was the Shemps. I was kinda surprised, because this had nothing to do with his tastes prior to that. In school his nickname was Bean because he was the brains of the school; he played viola and listened to bluegrass music, classical music, some jazz. His entire rock collection consisted of one Grateful Dead record and one ELP record.
MATT DENTINO I put an ad in The Rocket, saying the Shemps were forming and we’re a “combination of the Three Stooges and Jimi Hendrix.” Chris Cornell answered the ad, and everything changed.
SCOTT MCCULLUM (a.k.a. Norman Scott; Skin Yard/Gruntruck/64 Spiders drummer) My dad and I moved to West Seattle when I was nine. In high school, a friend of mine, Eric Garcia, and his buddy you might’ve heard of, Chris Cornell, we’d just get together and jam. At that time Chris was playing drums and I was playing guitar, just doing covers and messing around. He wasn’t singing yet. Chris was pretty quiet, reserved. People took that as some sort of aloof rock star thing later on, but it wasn’t that. He just didn’t really have attitude or ego back then.
CHRIS CORNELL I went from being a daily drug user at 13 to having bad drug experiences and quitting drugs by the time I was 14 and