Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [56]
MARK ARM (from the stage at the Paramount Theatre, June 28, 1986) Hey, if you ever wanna know what it’s like to become what you hated, ask the next band.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER Four or five songs into the set, Mike comes out on my side of the stage, starts saying something in my ear, like, “Bruce, you know, you guys have to quit playing.” I’m like, “Get the fuck offstage.” And then they shut the power down on us. Apparently, John Lydon was running around backstage saying, “I want them out of the building right now!”
MIKE LARSON After about the eighth song, I remember the promoter coming to me and saying, “You gotta tell your band that this is the last song.” I remember those guys looking at me going, “What the fuck? We’re not stopping.” They did about four or five songs after that, and the promoter just went mad. We were able to get them off just in time, so they didn’t have to cut the power.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER The fish incident? I remember it being Mike’s idea to do the fish. We were opening for Agent Orange at the Washington Performance Hall. Mike tells Mark, “I think for this show, you should put a fish down your pants.” Mark used to wear these silver lamé Iggy Pop tight trousers. And so Mike went down to the Pike Place Market, and found this horrible, stinky trout.
MARK ARM The only problem was the fins were really spiny. It was worth it for the art, though.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER About halfway through, Mark pulls the fish out of his pants and throws it out into the crowd. Sure enough, it comes back in pieces on stage. Alex had borrowed the Agent Orange drummer’s drum carpet, and it got all over the drum carpet. The Agent Orange guys were furious.
ALEX SHUMWAY The smell was just terrible. I’m almost positive that we got banned from there. We were banned from almost every place that we played at least once. And then they would ask us to come back ’cause we made them money.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER Years later, when I was in Love Battery, we played with Agent Orange, and I reminded the singer about the fish. I was like, “It was great, right?” He didn’t say anything. He just shook his head and walked away.
DAWN ANDERSON After a while, the Green River fans knew when to step back, because there might be green Jell-O coming at you.
JULIANNE ANDERSEN That was at the Central. I looked at my friends and all of a sudden they were taking six, seven, eight steps back. I didn’t know what the hell was happening, and I got the worst of it. My hair was bleached blond at the time, so I had green hair for a week. I still fuckin’ hate Mark Arm for that.
ALEX SHUMWAY Mark wanted to keep the band more down to earth, and the other guys wanted it to become something bigger. There was even talk at one point, “Hey, let’s move down to L.A. and make it down there.” That was Jeff and Stone’s idea. It was more something that was thrown against the wall to see if it would stick. Mark was like, “Hell, no,” but I was a whore—I’d have gone anywhere.
JEFF AMENT There was some shit-talking afterward, some things about me and Stone being careerists—which is basically what Cobain adopted later. I was the only guy in the band who didn’t have a trust fund. I guess if not wanting to work in a restaurant for the rest of my life made me a careerist, then that was probably true.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER Trust fund? God, no. I had girlfriends whose places I’d be crashing at.
MARK ARM To be truthful, I would have been perfectly happy being in a successful band.
The idea that I should get singing lessons was in the mix. I’m not the greatest singer. My reaction was, “I don’t want to learn the ‘right way’ to do something. I want to try to figure out something that’s uniquely mine.”
It’s kind of unfair to characterize it as me against Jeff and Stone. By that point, it was probably me against the rest of the band. Also, to be fair, I wasn’t hanging out with those guys so much at this point.