Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [5]
TOM PRICE We’d have one pair of drumsticks, and if Charlie broke a drumstick, that’s it, we’d have to rummage around and see if we could find some wooden soup spoons or something. We played in the basement of this house and had cymbals hanging from the ceiling, since we didn’t have enough cymbal stands, just playing through these crappy little amps on crappy little guitars.
CHARLIE RYAN Tom says, “There’s this girl I know from Alaska, and she’s going to run away from home. I’m going to pick her up at the airport, and she’s going to be our bass player.”
ROBIN BUCHAN (U-Men bassist) I went to Roosevelt High School. My home life was not good, and as a 13- and 14-year-old, I was really withdrawn and depressed. My one outlet was music, ’cause I played the string bass in our school’s chamber orchestra and the youth symphony. I got into the punk scene, which was my chance to bust out completely. My parents were scandalized by the change and were worried that I was drinking and doing drugs, which I was.
When I was 15, things in my life kind of blew up. My mom overreacted, and she asked my dad to take me away. They were divorced and my dad was remarried. He was in the Air Force and he was on his way up to Elmendorf Air Force Base outside of Anchorage. They knew I didn’t want to go, so they tricked me into it: “Oh, you’re just gonna go for the summer.” Once I got up there they were like, “Nope. You’re staying here.”
I’d met Tom Price in Seattle, but I didn’t know him very well. We wrote letters back and forth when I was in Alaska, and somehow it was determined that I was going to play bass for the U-Men. I had a friend in Seattle whose mom worked for Alaska Airlines, so we told her mom this crazy story—actually, it was only a small stretch of the truth—that my dad had kidnapped me and I just wanted to come home and be with my mom, which was completely not true. And her mom went for that; I sent them my money, and they sent me a plane ticket. I got really, really drunk at a party in Alaska, then got on a plane and threw up and passed out. I woke up, and I was in Seattle.
CHARLIE RYAN Oh, Robbie was gorgeous. Gorgeous woman. She had a classic Marilyn Monroe figure. She never talked about much; she was a very private person. All I ever heard was some muttering about parents, having to get away. It was always mysterious.
TOM PRICE Robbie would play super-loud and way too many notes, but she seemed weird enough that it was cool.
ROBIN BUCHAN Tom became my boyfriend shortly thereafter; he was my first real boyfriend. Tom was like this island of sweetness. And being a teenage runaway, there wasn’t much sweetness in the world for me in those days.
CHARLIE RYAN When Robbie played onstage, she used a bass whose strings were not where they should’ve been—they were much too high. She was so tough, she could just hammer those strings down. She would drink a ton of gin before going onstage, and she had boobs out to here. Guys would come up to her, and they’d try to get a little bit too close, and she would just bat people in the face with the end of the guitar. Just like, Stay back, man. She was ferocious. Just ferocious.
TOM PRICE One of the first times I ever met John was when I was at a party at some punk-rock crash house. I don’t know what happened—he basically fell through a window and landed on the yard outside and got up with a stunned look on his face, like, Who pushed me? I think he was just drunk and high and fell down some stairs and went through the window.
He’s a big guy, like six-three. Charlie and I had seen him around and saw him fall through the window and thought, Man, what a weird dude, we should get him to be our singer. We had no idea if he could actually sing or not, but of course, in those days that was just a complete nonissue.
CHARLIE RYAN We were intrigued by and also quite scared of John. He had a Jim Morrison kind of thing. He was gorgeous: