Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [67]
DAVID DUET We’re waiting to play a skateboard contest, and eventually John Michael shows up, and he’s wearing his Zorro hat and his leather overcoat and he’s got a brand-new cast on each leg. He played the show sitting in a chair. We were kind of wasted and I was in a long blond wig and black leather miniskirt and fishnet hose. On the first song, I split my knuckle open on my tambourine and blood squirts all over these little kids in the front row. (Laughs.) It was a Sunday afternoon and there were a lot of parents there that were just appalled at what they saw, ’cause we were the biggest freak show on earth.
JAMES BURDYSHAW Cat Butt played the Vogue and most of the band took LSD a half-hour before we played. The opening band was this supergroup that Mark Arm, Ron Rudzitis, Tad, and Chris Pugh were in called the Wasted Landlords, as a joke on Lords of the Wasteland.
RON RUDZITIS I was playing bass, and Tad had an inflatable doll, which he bought for the show. The doll was wrapped around his waist, and he pulled out a can of whipped cream and shot it out—like come, basically. I think he emptied the whole damn can. I felt really bad for Cat Butt, ’cause the stage was covered in whipped cream after we were done.
JAMES BURDYSHAW I was so high that I just saw a big swirl on stage. Dean Gunderson, my friend who we got in the band, was wearing a toga, walkin’ around barefoot. We would just giggle and giggle and giggle until it would become like this comedy routine. Onstage, Dean steps on some broken glass with bare feet and he’s bleeding and he comes over to me in the middle of a song and stops playing and says, “Hey, James, my foot’s bloody, ha ha ha ha.”
DEAN GUNDERSON (Cat Butt bassist) I remember looking down and there was a broken pint glass there and a big pool of blood. I remember everybody looking at each other confused and forgetting what song we’re on, and the distance between my frets and the strings looked like it was a quarter-mile long. The next day, we were just like, “Oh, God, what the fuck did we just do?” But a lot of people say it was the favorite show they ever saw.
JAMES BURDYSHAW Tom Price was lecturing us the next day, in a fatherly way: “Now what was it that made you think it would be cool to take acid right before the show?”
TOM PRICE We’d wanted Hiro to play bass for the U-Men, but at that point he couldn’t do it. So we got Tom Hazelmyer, a friend of ours stationed out here in the Marines.
TOM HAZELMYER I think there was one other guy on the same base who was into punk-rock stuff. It was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I started Amphetamine Reptile in the barracks—the whole label fit in an ammo crate that I put under the bed. By the time I took up with the U-Men, they had honed it down to just rock action, gettin’ away from the post-punk kind of theatric thing they had been doin’. I played three awesome shows with those guys, but figured out pretty quickly that me bein’ in the service was pretty restrictive as far as practicing or hitting the road.
TOM PRICE And then we got Tony Ransom on bass. Like our first bass player, he was a refugee from Alaska. He was younger than the rest of us and sort of a Sid Vicious kind of guy.
TONY RANSOM (a.k.a. Tone Deaf; U-Men bassist) I was 18 when I joined the band in July of ’87; the rest of the U-Men were a good seven or eight years older than me. Unfortunately, they were already on their downward trajectory.
CHARLIE RYAN Tom wanted to play faster stuff. Sometimes I wish I had more patience and let Tom do what he wanted at that point, and let the band evolve more. John and I had different ideas of what we wanted to do musically; we went on to do the Crows, which was slower, boozy, bluesy, creepy kind of stuff.
TONY RANSOM The last time the band performed live was Halloween 1988, at somebody’s loft in Pioneer Square. John’s girlfriend, Val, had made these superhero costumes for us. We got through the first three songs fine, but somebody’s guitar