Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [57]
ALEX SHUMWAY A couple of months before Green River broke up, Jeff, Stone, and Bruce were playing in Lords of the Wasteland, a cover band with Andy and Regan. I later learned that their side project was actually the beginning of Mother Love Bone. I didn’t really pay attention to it. I had blinders on.
STEVE TURNER Mark did a one-night joke cover band with some friends from work called the Wasted Landlords. I thought that was hilarious, ’cause if they were thinking about using Lords of the Wasteland for real, they couldn’t anymore. That’s the way I looked at it: They just shut down that name.
MIKE LARSON I quit right before Green River broke up. Partly because I got a real job in San Francisco. I remember thinking, This is such a waste of time. How can this ever turn into something bigger than what it is now?
MARK ARM A night or two before our last show, we played in San Francisco at the Chatterbox. It was a great show, and we finished our set and people wanted more and we just kept playing and playing and—here’s where singing lessons might have helped out—at the end of the night, I’d just totally blown out my voice.
Our last show was in L.A., playing with Junkyard and Jane’s Addiction. I was not a fan of Jane’s Addiction. At the time, I was really opposed to high-pitched vocals—to me that was just like fingernails on a chalkboard. Junkyard were this AC/DC-ish, Southern rock–ish, L.A. glam-metal band, but they had Brian Baker from Minor Threat and Chris Gates from the Big Boys and Poison 13. I thought, I don’t want to just be another ex-punk who plays in some shitty glam band.
And there was the guest list issue. Jeff had put a bunch of A&R people on the list. He’s trying to make something happen, while my point at the time was, “Why can’t we get our friends in?” We ran into Anna Statman, who at the time worked at Slash, and I think she was the only A&R person on the list that showed up.
We sucked. I sucked, in particular. I couldn’t hit half the notes. The rest of the band was probably glad the A&R people didn’t show.
JEFF AMENT Stone and I were on the side of the stage when Jane’s was playing, totally mesmerized by the interaction between the band and the crowd.… It was the first time I had seen an alternative-music show where it was like the most reverential hard-rock crowd. That night Jane’s Addiction showed us that you could do something totally different and make it work, which basically caused Green River to break up since the other guys didn’t dig it as much as Stone and I did. Our drummer hated them. When we got back to Seattle we just knew we wanted to do something else, something with less limitations, something that had endless possibilities …
ALEX SHUMWAY On Halloween of 1987, me and Mark were there waiting for practice. Jeff, Stone, and Bruce walked into the practice space and said, “We don’t want to do this anymore.” And Mark was like, “Okay.”
I was a bit devastated. Stoney said something that I wanted to punch him in the nose for at the time. He said he felt that I didn’t want to practice. Stone’s like, “I’m practicing at home.” I’ve got a fucking drum set. What, am I gonna lug this back to my apartment? I think they were trying to make as clean a break as possible. And that was his way of doing it.
JEFF AMENT Sub Pop was right upstairs from the coffee shop I worked at. Stone and I had decided we were gonna quit, and I remember Jonathan coming down and saying, “Yeah, we’re gonna buy a van for Sub Pop. You guys can tour on this record in the van.” And for me that was all I ever wanted, to tour and see the world playing music. It was tough at that point to say, “No, we’re not that psyched creatively, and we want to do something else.”
MARK ARM I felt relief. I was tired of fighting to be heard.