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DANIEL HOUSE After 10 Minute Warning finally disintegrated, the drummer, Greg Gilmore, moved down to L.A. and moved in with Duff. And from what I understand, Greg actually had the opportunity to join Guns N’ Roses, but passed.

GREG GILMORE (Mother Love Bone/10 Minute Warning/the Living drummer) I had nothing else going on at that time, and Duff came to me one day and said, “We gotta get outta here.”

We lived right in the middle of Hollywood, right behind the Chinese Theatre, and we were real close to the Musicians Institute. You’d see these guys walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard on their way to and from school with their guitars on, just playing because they are so dedicated to making it. They are fully regaled, fully groomed hair dudes. You never know when you’re going to be discovered. It could be standing right here on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, so be ready.

KURT BLOCH One day I got a call from Duff in L.A. He’s like, “You should come down here and play with my new band. We need a guitar player, and there’s a Marshall stack here waiting for you.” The band was Guns N’ Roses, and they didn’t have a lead guitar player. I was like, “Ah, I don’t know if I want to go down to Los Angeles. I’d have to quit my job.” And he was like, “Come on, man, it’ll be great!” I could’ve gone down there and played with them. Whether I would’ve got the job or not, who knows?

GREG GILMORE We met Slash and Steven Adler through an ad in The Recycler. Slash and I, just the two of us, went and jammed one evening, and that was cool. But by that time I was not really digging it. Those guys all drank quite a bit, and I did not really. I couldn’t hang. But the Guns N’ Roses that we all came to know was two years later. All those wild tales of debauchery and excess weren’t happening yet.

I wasn’t asked to join Guns N’ Roses. Not explicitly, anyway. I remember being there when they were brainstorming about vocalists and Slash brings up his buddy Axl.

But that’s the same time that I was already winding down there. There was just a lot of emphasis on the business of making it. Not that I had a problem with that. I just didn’t really get it. I came back up to Seattle for the holidays, and I decided that was it for me.

JACK ENDINO As soon as I moved back to Seattle, there was my friend Tom Herring, jamming with Daniel and Matt. Their band was kind of falling apart. I played Daniel some solo recordings that I’d done out by the lake, and he liked those. He said to me, “Do you want to join Feedback?” But then he decided, “No, I think Feedback is over with, let’s just start a band with you.” So I ended up inheriting Tom’s rhythm section.

DANIEL HOUSE We knew we wanted a singer, and we had no idea who that singer was going to be. We didn’t have a name. And we started playing house parties and the basements of various places, instrumentally. We played two or three parties where we had people just grab a mic and wing it. And our stuff was not easy to sing to. It wasn’t three-chord rock, and we played a lot with time signatures and we did a lot of stuff with counterpoint. We were a little too arty to really fit in with the whole grunge scene, and yet way too heavy to really fit in comfortably with a lot of the art-rock bands.

Ben McMillan ended up being at one of those parties. It was at 14th and Spring, a block away from my house, and it was in the basement. He grabbed the mic, and he was the first one who seemed kind of comfortable and did something that resonated with us.

JACK ENDINO Matt made it very easy to write difficult music. You could throw anything at him, and he could play it. I rather enjoyed it, but Ben had a hard time singing on some of the quirkier stuff we were doing in the early days. It was a bit prog, actually.

Ben had no history with music whatsoever. He was just a guy with a rich baritone voice who wanted to give it a try. Completely unschooled, no natural sense of melody at all. I basically had to teach him how to sing.

We discovered quickly that Ben was good