Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [32]
ART CHANTRY (The Rocket newspaper art director; Sub Pop Records freelancer; album/poster designer) There was one famous show at Gorilla Gardens—I think it was a Red Rockers show, some people say it was a Butthole Surfers show. The fire department came in and tried to close it down because they didn’t have enough fire exits. Everybody was getting really pissed off, so somebody took a chain saw and literally cut a hole in the wall to the alley outside, and the shit went back on. They had a fire exit now, didn’t they?
TOMIE O’NEIL There were a bunch of legendary shows there. Guns N’ Roses played in the small room. That night, we’re also havin’ a great Violent Femmes show—maybe 400 or 500 people in there. And my friends were like, “Dude, you gotta go in the other room, there’s this metal band that’s just fuckin’ outta hand—and Duff’s in it.” Duff had lived in Seattle and went, “Fuck you guys, I’m movin’ to L.A. and I’m gonna be the hugest fuckin’ rock star!” And I remember walking in the other room and goin’, “Man, these guys are fuckin’ great!”
DUFF MCKAGAN (bassist for Los Angeles’s Guns N’ Roses; played various instruments in Fastbacks, the Fartz, the Living, 10 Minute Warning, the Vains, many more) We were horrible. We had a car with a trailer, which broke down in Bakersfield—that’s a long way from Seattle. So we hitchhiked with our guitars and used the Fastbacks’ gear. But it was great for me coming back to Seattle. That was our first real gig. Well, I think we played a gig the night before we left, at Madame Wong’s East or something, to three people. In Seattle, we played to 12. There’s been thousands that said they were at that gig, but actually there were 12, and four of them were the Fastbacks.
TOM NIEMEYER When the Gorilla Gardens building was no more, Tony Chu opened another Gorilla Gardens, but it wasn’t the same—it was just one room, over in another spot across town. There were some famous clashes with police that happened there that were of note. The big snowy, midwinter Circle Jerks riot with the cops. The Accüsed were supposed to play that show. The cops showed up before anyone played because there was no permit to have a show there. There were a good amount of people who had literally walked through the snow for miles to get to this thing, so people were pissed off. Some skater-punk kids got the idea to hurl some nearby loose bricks at the cop cars. I left, and it got ugly—as I was walkin’ up the hill, I remember seein’ cop cars startin’ to catch fire and shit like that. (Laughs.) It was pretty epic.
Then parents started sayin’, “We don’t want our kids at these things.” I think that led to the Teen Dance Ordinance. It made all-ages shows impossible to get—you had to have like a million-dollar insurance bond to allow kids to see live music, period. Unbelievably fucked, you know? So we had to play bars and stuff just to fuckin’ survive here in town. It sucked.
KRISHA AUGEROT (Kelly Curtis’s assistant; Green Apple Quick Step comanager) When I was probably 14, I got into going to the Monastery downtown, which was a gay nightclub that ended up soliciting kids on the Ave and on Broadway and giving them free passes. I’d go there with Stone Gossard and Regan Hagar. We’d stay there all night long and then go hang out downtown in the morning and have coffee. Basically, it housed a lot of hardcore, homeless street kids. It was just a lot of crazy shit going on with minors and drugs. It was like the ultimate bad place for children to go if they were out. I think parents and the city decided that was not a good option for kids and created the Teen Dance Ordinance to shut it down.
MARK ARM Of course, I was totally against the Teen Dance Ordinance; it made it impossible for legit all-ages shows to happen. This may not be the most popular thing to say, but there was some good in it, because we had to go looking for different kind of venues, mostly bars. So we found places like the Ditto Tavern, which was a tiny place on Fifth Avenue, and we got the Vogue to let us play on Tuesday and