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After the band played, Chris came up to me and recognized me, which he got huge points for because I was in full drag-queen regalia. He said the band were trying to get a show in Vancouver, so I told him that I was going up there to a show in the next week, and if he wanted to meet, I would take a tape for them.

So we met, and he gave me that tape, and we saw each other a week later at the Vogue. After that, we went to a 24-hour diner. We tried to go back to my house, but I’d lost my keys. We made out for a while, and then he took me to my mom’s in West Seattle, and it was just on from there. At the time, it was healing for me.

SCOTT SUNDQUIST (Soundgarden drummer) I worked as a carpenter at a seafood restaurant in Ballard called Ray’s Boathouse, building tables for them and repairing things. That’s where I met Chris Cornell. He was a line cook, a teenager—maybe 19. When I met him, I was about 31. Chris and I hit it off because we’re both sort of loners.

Before I joined, I saw Soundgarden open for Hüsker Dü at an all-ages place called Gorilla Gardens. Because Chris was playing drums and singing, his energy was really confined. That had something to do with them pushing him forward to become more of a front man and to have a drummer, which became me.

CHRIS CORNELL The beginning of me thinking maybe I should get out there in front of the drums was seeing Matt [Cameron] play in the band Feedback. They were at a club where the back of the stage was actually the venue’s storefront, and I was standing outside on the sidewalk, watching Matt play. I’d never met Matt, but I knew who he was. Other than seeing Elvin Jones on film, this hadn’t happened to me before, where I’m watching what he’s doing and I’m hearing what it sounds like and I couldn’t really make the connection. And I thought, Oh, that’s what a good drummer is supposed to play like. Maybe my talent lies elsewhere.

TOMIE O’NEIL (soundman; RKCNDY club co-owner/comanager) There were two rooms in the Gorilla Gardens, and I did sound in both. I was there the night Cornell came out from behind the drums and said, “I’m the singer now.” That was amazing.

KERRI HARROP Gorilla Gardens was this shitty old all-ages place down in Chinatown, so it always seemed really sketchy to go there. And you would just see these insane bills of bands—I saw Hüsker Dü there, I saw the Melvins there. Gorilla Gardens is also the first place I ever saw people having sex in public. It was that kind of place.

MICHELLE AHERN (concertgoer; Robert Scott Crane’s ex-wife) Andy Wood took me to my first punk-rock show, at the Gorilla Gardens. My girlfriends and I went with Andy and Regan and this guy Chewy from the Accüsed. It was Andy’s 18th birthday. I sort of ended up being his date. I don’t know what started it, but at the show a huge fight broke out between the rockers and skinheads. Somebody picked Andy up by his white fur coat and flung him into a chain-link fence. We jumped into a cab and sped off into the night. I ended up spending the night with Andy at his house. I guess you could say I was his 18th-birthday present. (Laughs.)

TOM NIEMEYER I think the mix of punk and metal was single-handedly because of Gorilla Gardens. It was an old theater that had two stages, a metal side and a punk or alternative side. So in the lobby, these people listening to very metal stuff had to be mixed in with people being very punk rock. And they had to use the same bathrooms. That’s what made the crossover happen. Right, at the urinals! Exactly!

SLIM MOON It would be lovely to make a big, dramatic punks versus rockers thing out of it, but it was a punk club. It always had some hard-rock shows because the guy who ran Gorilla Gardens, Tony Chu, wanted to make money any way he could.

TOM NIEMEYER Sometimes we would get paid at the Gorilla Gardens, sometimes we wouldn’t. “There’s a shitload of people here, Tony, where’d the money go?”

“Oh, you know, blah blah blah … the electric bill.”

“For the night? Three hundred dollars for the night? For electricity? Jesus! I know we