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I went over to Charlie’s apartment that night, and I wanted to totally surprise them, so I basically broke into the building by climbing up the fire escape. I went up to his door and knocked on it. Charlie answered, and I think he was pretty drunk at the time. He said, “Oh, is this the blond we’re supposed to fuck?”

And I said, “Well, evidently you already are.” And I walked into the room, and John and Larry Reid were there, and Susan was there, as well, I think. Tom was out getting beer. I said, “What the hell is going on?”

Charlie said, “Well, uh, uh, uh … What are you talking about?”

And I said, “Fine. Fuck you, I quit.”

LARRY REID I just remember it being really tense. I was there to support the band. I don’t remember too much about the specifics, except Jim protesting. I was against firing him, because I thought there was a pretty good musical chemistry. But the decision was personality-driven. Jim was the most genteel member of the band. These other guys at the time were almost like Ave rats, not real far removed from street-urchin punks.

JAMES BURDYSHAW Jim Tillman was out of the band, so the U-Men all of a sudden had some free time. David Duet had gone out on that last tour with them, and he did a good job of getting Charlie interested in doing a kind of Stones garage rock-and-roll band. And Tom agreed to play bass. They needed somebody to play guitar, and David got his friend, this guy named Mike Hutchins, who went by John Michael Amerika and was like 12 years older than him.

CHARLIE RYAN Tom and I accepted our friend David Duet’s invitation to be rhythm section in his band Cat Butt until he got something more permanent. One of the guitar players was John Michael Amerika. He was a real fringe guy. As fringe as we were, I still felt like I had a foot based in reality at all times. I could always go to the old man if I ever needed to get bailed out. I could always get back into working in a restaurant. But man, a lot of the guys that you met would never be going back and entering normal society.

DAVID DUET My girlfriend and I used to do this thing where we’d braid our hair and then rub black dye in it, and then rebraid it and rub bleach in it, and rebraid it and rub different colors in it, and then cut the braids off. We called them calico cat–butt hairdos, ’cause it looked like a calico cat’s butt. That’s where the initial spark for the band name came from. But in radio interviews, I always told a half-true story about my great-grandparents, who at one time were wealthy and had a maid named Sally. She was an old black woman with two fake legs who had a lot of cats and grew her own vegetables and sustained herself very modestly. Somehow in my mind what transpired was that she would shave a thin layer of meat off each cat’s ass—allowing the other cats time to heal—and then cook it like bacon.

JAMES BURDYSHAW I was playing in 64 Spiders, and Tom was workin’ at Fallout Records, and when I saw him there, he nonchalantly brought up Cat Butt. He’s like, “Hey, we’re lookin’ for another guitar player. Are you interested?” I was like, “Yeah!” The notoriety of having two guys from the U-Men, plus David’s charisma, meant all of our shows were crowded, and girls were comin’ up to me like they’d never come up to me before.

TOM PRICE Cat Butt was the kind of band that something always went wrong. David would either break a bone, or an amp would blow up. Almost every show I did with them, and every show I saw them do afterwards, there would be at least one member of the band that was totally out of it and didn’t even seem to know which song the rest of the band was playing. That was a good part of their charm.

JAMES BURDYSHAW Tom and Charlie did seven shows with us. The last show we played with them before they finally left to concentrate on the U-Men again, Michael’s leg was in a cast, and he made up this story about falling down the stairs at his apartment trying to catch the cat or some nonsense. The truth of the matter is, he broke his foot jumping out of a second-story