Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [30]
“Well, don’t you want to come back and play?” “Dude, I got a test. I have to see my girlfriend this weekend. I’m DJing Thursday nights. I’m working Monday and Saturday.…” They were getting ready to think about other options, but I came back and played, and more material came out. It was just too jaw-dropping. Things went so easily.
MATT DENTINO About three months later, Chris called me: “Dude, we’re goin’ on. Come to our first show.” So I played hooky from church, and I went to their first gig. Lo and behold, Kim’s using distortion, playing lead, and sounds like Zeppelin. I’m like, Hey, wait a minute, stop that! I thought we weren’t supposed to be doin’ this. Yet that’s exactly what made them powerful.
KIM THAYIL The name Soundgarden was evocative, and it was among a list of names we were thinking of. A Sound Garden was a three-word name for a metal sound-sculpture on a beach here in Seattle. We derived the name from there, but we never were paying homage to the sculpture, never. Just liked the word garden as an element in a name. It’s visually evocative and it’s not overtly metal or punk or anything. It doesn’t type us. A year later, we thought maybe we should change Soundgarden to Sungarden or Stonegarden, but then Soundgarden just kind of stuck.
STUART HALLERMAN There weren’t too many other bands with a makeup like Soundgarden’s. Hiro’s a Japanese guy; Kim’s an Indian guy. The transition for the three of us, goin’ from a very mixed Chicago area to the very whitewashed Northwest, was kinda weird. It took me years to kinda deal with, Is this a real city? Where are the other people?
HIRO YAMAMOTO Race is very pivotal when you’re young and trying to figure out, Who am I? How do I fit into this world? Kim and I would talk about that a lot. The rock scene was pretty much all white. There were a couple of black guys who played, but they were few and far between.
KEVIN WHITWORTH (Love Battery guitarist) I consider myself African-American, but I’m just one of your first multiculti babies—now everyone’s got one. Basically black, but Peruvian and Cherokee Indian and a bit of German, I guess. I don’t really think in terms of race, mostly because I grew up in a middle- to upper-class black family and we had the biggest house in our town in New Hampshire. I’ve always been treated like a white person, basically.
But there was one night that made me feel a little bit weird; it might’ve been when Love Battery played one of those packaged shows—a “nine for the ’90s” show—at the Paramount. The Paramount’s pretty big, and out of all those people I was the only one, besides maybe some janitor in the back (laughs), who was somebody of color. It was something I never revisited again, because that’s just the way it is. I do recall that we did have a black fan who followed us to a couple of shows. I kept wondering, Is this for real? Does this guy really like us? Even I couldn’t believe it.
SUSAN SILVER I met Chris at the end of ’85 at a Halloween party, at an artist studio in Belltown, and I was out on the town that night with my dear friend Chuck, a.k.a. Upchuck from the Fags. And Chuck dressed me up as him in drag—he was in drag most of the time—so I had a long blond fright wig and a kimono and pancake makeup.
Soundgarden was playing the party, as a three-piece, with Chris on drums and vocals. They were amazing. I’d worked with Ben McMillan in a vintage clothing store in town called Tootsie’s. And Chris came in to talk to him, and the story that Chris told me is that I caught his eye. So he kept coming in and trying to get my attention, but I paid him no mind. Partly because I had just broken up with Gordon earlier that year, so I