Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [61]
Their house was unbelievable. Lots of stuff from the Hearst collection. Amazing shit—they had really great taste. And there was an Oscar sitting there. Shirley talked about her acting a lot. At one point they had her playing drums, and she had a recording of her playing drums when she was a kid, and she sounded like fucking Buddy Rich. And then she showed us how tap dancing is really just drumming. She tap-danced for us, and she was fucking amazing.
DALE CROVER Shirley was like, “Yeah, my mom made me give away my drum set because it wasn’t ladylike to play drums.” I was like, “Oh, you couldn’t spread your legs with a dress to play drums. I get it.” She was sad about it.
The family was kind of weird and straight and conservative. Proper. I remember we’d line up outside the dining room and all kind of walk in together for some reason. I didn’t really understand it. But they were nice to me.
BUZZ OSBORNE They probably thought that I was some leeching weirdo and that their daughter went out with me just to screw with them. Her dad was never nice to me. Shirley was nice to me to some degree, but they’re very guarded people. I’m sure they thought I was going to write some book or something. And believe me, without going into any graphic details, there are massive skeletons in that closet.
One thing that Shirley said to me was, “Working in the government, you can always get somebody audited.” I took that to heart. They never did anything to me personally, or even threatened me, but they didn’t need to. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. They were über-right-wing. Now, I’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about the people who make life-and-death decisions. And it’s not necessarily evil; it’s more realistic. Charles was ex-CIA. It’s weirder than you can possibly imagine. I certainly never got the truth.
Since then, everything that’s happened—from Nirvana going crazy and on and on and on—none of that holds a candle to how weird that situation was. That’s David Lynch weird.
DAWN ANDERSON I lived with three other girls in North Seattle, and we had this big housewarming party. The Melvins had just broken up, and Matt was just wanting to really get drunk. And he got really drunk. He kept spilling orange juice and licking it off my rug, down on all fours.
I had this huge stick of dynamite that someone had given me—I used to go out with a weird, demented nerd that liked to build explosives—and I remember this as if it was in slow-motion: Matt Lukin picking up the stick of dynamite, lighting a lighter, and moving it toward the thing. I remember, again in slow-motion, running across the room, grabbing it from him, and going, “N-o-o-o-o-o-o!!”
I got it away from him, and he looked at me completely innocently: “Oh, that was real?”
DAN BLOSSOM (Feast guitarist) It was really kind of strange—everyone split up the same month: Feast split up, Green River split up. The Melvins split up, sort of. And that’s when all the new bands started forming.
DAN PETERS Steve Turner came up to me at a party and said, “Do you want to get together with me and Ed Fotheringham and do something?” I totally liked Steve’s guitar playing in the Thrown Ups, even though that band was a complete train wreck. The three of us got together at this practice space called the Dutchman and Steve started playing the riff which would eventually be Mudhoney’s “You Got It,” which he and Ed had used for a Thrown Ups song called “Bucking Retards.” We mucked around for a while, and I think that was the one and only time that Ed was involved. After that, Mark came into the picture.
STEVE TURNER Ed didn’t wanna do a real band. He was like, “Practice? The