Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [40]
TINA CASALE Many years later, I heard that Stoney Gossard said that I was kinda controlling. Well, maybe to a point I was, because I can be a little bit overpowering.
CHRIS HANZSEK Part of any conflict that arose with Green River or anybody else was they were suddenly in a relationship with Tina, and they hadn’t learned yet to appreciate her matter-of-factness and East Coast directness. She was kind of like a pit bull for a girlfriend.
I just remember there was yelling and there were tears. And Stone wasn’t the one who was crying. Tina had another side to her, too.
KIM THAYIL Our mix might’ve ended up suffering the most because Chris and Tina were arguing during our mix session. They had a certain mix of “Tears to Forget” that sounded muddy, and I was trying to get it brighter. This argument started between Tina and Chris about how they should mix, and then some personal stuff started coming out.
CHRIS HANZSEK Tina and I split up during the mixing stage. Yeah, the breakup was my present for doing Deep Six. Let’s say you’re already having a hard time getting along with your tough-as-nails girlfriend you’ve been with for about five years. And then some giant pressure-cooker struggle of “Let’s make six bands happy and put out a record” thing comes along.
TINA CASALE No, it didn’t have anything to do with the record. We were together for seven years and by that time we were just separating. I ended up moving back to Pittsburgh, back to where I grew up.
CHRIS HANZSEK The record came out around late February of ’86. We pressed 2,000. This is the part that for years made me a not-so-happy camper: I quickly picked up on the buzz that I wasn’t promoting the record enough. I felt dumped on. And I also heard some feedback that the record wasn’t well produced. A lot of that democratic process—all those conversations and having the artists there for mix-downs—showed up on the record itself in terms of its sound.
KURT BLOCH I remember being excited for Soundgarden, but their songs on that sound pretty crappy. It could’ve been a really exciting introduction to those sort of bands, but it just sounded like it was recorded on a cassette recorder.
CHRIS HANZSEK There are all sorts of rookie issues going on with the recording. Let’s just call it “muddled.” But I think Deep Six did its job in the sense that it was a signal flare that there was something afoot, that there was life on this planet here in Seattle.
DANIEL HOUSE It didn’t sell for shit. Nobody cared about Seattle or the music coming from Seattle. And at the time there weren’t really bands playing music like this. What was big was synth-based New Wave. Everything that the bands on Deep Six were doing was basically a “fuck you” to the popular music of the time.
But locally, it was a big deal. After that record came out, we had no problem getting shows at all. Deep Six got a lot of play on KCMU and acted as a beacon for more people to begin starting bands, ones that were a lot more guitar-heavy and maybe dark or angry.
JACK ENDINO My then–future wife, Dawn, actually wrote the review in The Rocket. She called attention to the fact that we needed a name for this music: “What do we call this? It’s not metal, and it’s not punk.”
DAWN ANDERSON (reviewing Deep Six in The Rocket, June 1986) The fact that none of these bands could open for Metallica or the Exploited without suffering abuse merely proves how thoroughly the underground’s absorbed certain influences, resulting in music that isn’t punk-metal but a third sound distinct from either.
Some of these influences are apparent visually; blatant posing on stage is acceptable again. I’ve seen all but one of these bands live at least once and a few of the musicians, along with many of their fans, could pass for members of Ratt. Some people find this distracting, as it seems to have little to do with the style of their