Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [6]
We wanted him to be the singer for the U-Men, but we were too scared to approach him. So we asked Robbie, the girl, to do it. She laughed and called us wimps, and then the next chance she got, she went and talked to John.
JOHN BIGLEY I was at a Johnny Thunders show at the Mountaineers club. Robbie came up to me and talked for a while; she was definitely acting funny. And finally: “Do—do you. Want to. Be in. A band—our band? Try out. For it?”
ROBIN BUCHAN Really? I don’t remember that at all. When we met John, he was so outrageous. One time we got drunk and went swimming in the middle of the night, just him and me in the canal under the Fremont Bridge, which was dangerous because it’s a shipping lane. He would do anything. He would take any drug. He was a wild man.
JOHN BIGLEY I said, “I’m not sure. I never sang, never really thought about it much.” Finally, I said, “You know, sure.”
I remember the first practice. The third Clash album had just come out, so we did “Brand New Cadillac.” We were in a laundry room and there was a shelf full of paint and paint thinner and all this stuff. So they’d run through songs they’d been writing and I’d just rant off of the backs of found objects—hyphenated chemical-compound names and silly brand names.
CHARLIE RYAN John showed up to our first rehearsal, and he was wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt and had a leather bag over his shoulder. He was just so bohemian. We’re all excited and nervous. He pulls out a bottle of wine. “Anybody want a glass of wine?” “Yeah, I’d love some wine!” We’d drank nothing but beer our whole lives, and here comes John with a bottle of wine.
Yeah, he sang directions on how to bleach your laundry. His voice was ferocious. It was unpolished. It sounded like an animal. He was just wailing away, and we were thrilled: “This is it! This is it!”
TOM PRICE John went to the University of Washington, and he was in a frat house of all things, but it was this real low-rent frat house that everybody hated. John had a good baritone voice, but at the early shows he was almost more like a performance artist than a singer. A lot of the time he would just stand there and glare at the audience. It took him a while before he started really singing and getting comfortable with that. He was really into the Birthday Party, the Gun Club, the Cramps, and the Germs. Public Image Ltd. and Captain Beefheart were huge influences on me. Me and Charlie in particular were getting into rockabilly and surf music, and the Sonics and the Wailers, all that great Northwest ’60s garage rock.
Our first show? That’s pretty much impossible to say. Sometime in 1981 or ’82. Somewhere in there we started doing some shows at parties and basements and garages. There were no clubs happening. There was nowhere to play. There were a couple taverns, but none of us was 21. Sometimes you’d get a bunch of people together and rent a hall yourself and hope the cops wouldn’t shut it down.
JOHN BIGLEY Someone gave this to me—it’s the Laurelhurst Community Club newsletter from January 1982. Laurelhurst is a quite wealthy enclave down on Lake Washington. The headline is VANDALISM AT THE RECREATION CENTER:
What were all the police cars doing at the recreation center early last month? Well … it was rented out to a group called the U-MEN for a youth dance with certain restrictions (no liquor or Punk Rock) that got violated. The evening (Nov. 6th) turned into a mild ruckus involving fists, broken windows, and beer bottles. The police were called twice; the last time it was out you go with much resistance. Fortunately someone turned on all the lights which proved the turning point for all the varied night creatures, who snuck away muttering. Later that evening and on two successive weekends the building sustained broken windows, a smashed door, broken bottles, and sprayed on graffiti … pure coincidence??