Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [3]
CHARLIE RYAN And John comes out, doing this insane tribal voodoo dance with a lit broom, menacing the crowd. And then he chucks it into the water.
MIKE TUCKER When John dipped his torch into the moat, it didn’t immediately ignite. It was like, “Oh, fuck, it didn’t work.” The second time he dipped it in, suddenly this wall of fire went up.
JOHN BIGLEY I throw the broom in and there was a giant fireball, 20 to 30 feet high, easy. It was gigantic and it made a sound, this whoosh of oxygen.
LARRY REID The pond fuckin’ exploded, man! I mean, it made the bathroom look like child’s play. It went up, oh, 10, 12, 15 feet.
JOE NEWTON (Gas Huffer drummer) My recollection was that it was over in the blink of an eye. It burned fast, it burned hugely high and bright, but it just lasted a second. I knew they were going to do it, and it was like, “That’s it?” Other people totally remember it being this huge wall of fire.
DENNIS R. WHITE (Pravda Productions partner; Desperate Times zine cofounder) In a lot of cases, people remember things being much bigger than they were. In this case, they don’t. It looked like the band was engulfed in flames.
JOHN BIGLEY And with the supercharged rock-and-roll music, that’s when the vast majority of the folks started jumping around and dancing. It was a crazy primal deal.
JAMES BURDYSHAW (Cat Butt guitarist; 64 Spiders guitarist/singer) The U-Men were into bones and skulls and black clothes and witch-doctor sort of imagery. The whole voodoo tribal thing became real ’cause the sun went down right when the flames happened. You felt like there was something dangerous going on but you couldn’t look away. The crowd was screaming, but it wasn’t out of fear. It was like, Yes! Yes! It was elation.
It was like, Fuck the Man, we’re the most dangerous voodoo band—and we’re gonna do a human sacrifice next. It felt like that was gonna happen.
LARRY REID It was perfect, except we’d failed to take into consideration that the stage was built out over the pond. There was creosote and tar underneath the stage, so there was just black smoke billowing long after the flames had died down. And the soundman freaked out, thinking the stage was on fire, and he’s running up, trying to get his sound equipment off the stage. The audience is now going apeshit crazy. Cops being cops, they started wading into the audience and beating people with their billy clubs!
CHARLES PETERSON (photographer) The thing I remember most is that we all just went fuckin’ bonkers, and started slam-dancing into each other. And there were these Seattle Center security guards who thought we were getting into fights and were trying to separate us. This 60-year-old security guard was just freaking out, and some of us were like, “Dude, they’re just dancing!” I recall somebody grabbed a security guard’s hat and danced around. It was mayhem.
JOHN BIGLEY We finished the song, definitely. Someone, it might have been Larry, grabbed me and threw me towards the drums: “Get the fuck out! Load the shit!” It was very chaotic—people running and screaming and kids holding their eyes and arrests and that whole thing.
TRACEY ROWLAND (co-owner of Roscoe Louie/Graven Image galleries; Larry Reid’s wife) Norman Langill, who was running Bumbershoot, was yelling and screaming and freaking out and jumping up and down. He was furious.
JIM TILLMAN I’d parked our tour bus—it was a 1960s Chevy city school bus that said TACOMA HILLBILLIES on the side, though I have absolutely no idea why—in this spot next to the stage.
JOHN BIGLEY “Load the shit, load the shit!” We got loaded up and drove off before the police had gotten their act together to approach us.
CHARLIE RYAN I’ll never forget driving our bus out of the Seattle Center grounds—all of these nice, normal people looking up at us, these freaks in a school bus who