• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

KERRI HARROP I was blown away by the audacity of it. I’m sure if there was a panoramic shot of the crowd, virtually everyone who ended up in a band or who was in a band at the time was at that show. I think that if you were in a band and you saw that, it made you step up your game.

MARK ARM (né Mark McLaughlin; Mudhoney singer/guitarist; Green River singer; Mr. Epp and the Calculations guitarist/singer; the Thrown Ups drummer) I don’t know if it was necessarily the best U-Men show I ever saw, but that was the coolest event at a U-Men show. They really made something happen.

LARRY REID The U-Men were banned from Bumbershoot, and I wasn’t the most popular guy around there for a while. The year after that, they started draining the pond. And now they’ve filled it in with cement.

The day after the show, I met the Everly Brothers at the hotel and brought them to the venue—I was working at Bumbershoot, operating as an informal chaperone for the bigger acts—and the first person I ran into was Norm Langill, the producer of the festival. He just came unglued. He said, “What are you trying to do to me?!”

Phil Everly was really kinda sweet and came to my defense. He told this great anecdote, which was possibly apocryphal, about a show they had played with Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee was squirting lighter fluid on the 88s and pounding out “Great Balls of Fire.” And the next thing you know … accidents happen. Apparently Jerry Lee was dancing on the piano, which was an impromptu addition to his normal routine, and caught his pants on fire.

That story got me off the hook. That calmed everything down, because Norm held the Everly Brothers in real high regard. Phil told him, “Leave the kid alone. That’s rock and roll.”

TOM PRICE The U-Men started in late ’81. My family had moved to Seattle in 1965. I started playing music, believe it or not, mostly through the church. They called it “guitar mass”—it was the acoustic-guitar-strumming, long-haired Christians. Very Jesus Christ Superstar. In my early teens, my older brother was turning me on to all this weird music, like Captain Beefheart and Lou Reed. And so when punk came along, that was a natural jump. The U-Men was probably my first band that made any records.

Me and Charlie had both dropped out of high school together and moved into a crash pad in the University District. Charlie was a really funny character. He’s an Irishman, his dad was a bookie, and he had his own apartment downtown, just this whole weird style that was pretty unfamiliar to kids like me from tree-lined residential neighborhoods.

CHARLIE RYAN I was born and raised in Seattle, and grew up pretty much downtown. Bookmaking was the family business. My father was a bartender for years, and he was given this little business by someone who was retiring. Which afforded him a lifestyle of going out and dining and drinking on a nightly basis. Later on, in the ’80s, I started taking bets over the phone for him so he didn’t have to do anything except go collect the money.

I met Tom at Roosevelt High School. We were all standing outside smoking pot all the time. Nobody went to class. It was a little hotbed of soon-to-become-punk activity: The Mentors went to school there, Duff McKagan was there, Chris Utting. I moved into this house in the U District with Tom Price and Rob Morgan. Rob had a lot of weird, punky bands—the Pudz, the Fishsticks—that he put together over the years. He was older and had this huge record collection. He was very influential on us.

The entire idea of the band was Tom’s. We stole our name right off of this Pere Ubu bootleg called The U-Men. We weren’t working—we were playing records and drinking a lot and coming up with funny ideas. Tom said, “I think we should start a band, Charlie.” And I said, “Okay.”

And he said, “You’ll be the drummer.”

And I said, “But we don’t know how to play.”

He goes, “That’s okay, we’ll learn.”

I go, “Okay. We don’t have any equipment.”

He goes, “Don’t worry about that.”

Tom was very resourceful, and he would obtain things that