Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [69]
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER My favorite Tad story that I love telling is when Mudhoney was playing a show at the Motor Sports Garage. My wife and I were sitting on top of Mudhoney’s cooler onstage, behind the P.A. Mudhoney are playing, and all of the sudden, I see this shadow go by me, and I look up, and it was Tad. And this is when he was in top form, man—he was probably 400-and-something pounds. He was just running, and he dives into the audience. He took out 20 people. Everyone gets up, and they’re just going, “Holy crap!” It was amazing that nobody got killed.
KURT DANIELSON Jonathan said, “You guys need to get a drummer and another guitar player so you can record and hit the road.” So I got hold of Gary Thorstensen, who used to play guitar in a band with Jonathan called the Treeclimbers. Tad knew Steve Wied, because H-Hour had played some shows with Steve’s former band, Death and Taxes. Both these guys came down to practice, and it clicked, so we said, “We’re going into the studio in two weeks. And then we got a whole bunch of shows coming up, so we gotta get ready for those, too.” And they just looked at us like, What? Because in those days, usually it took forever to get your first gig and then forever to get the record out, and even then nothing ever happened. But here everything was set up and ready to go, and boom boom boom, it went.
GARRETT SHAVLIK (drummer for Denver’s the Fluid; Lilly Milic’s husband) We were from Denver, and our first shows in Seattle were probably fall of ’88. We get into town and we visit the Sub Pop office, and Bruce and Jonathan and Daniel House and Charles Peterson were the only guys who were hanging out. We get an offer immediately. They felt like kindred spirits.
So we play the Vogue—I think we played with TAD that night—and we didn’t know what to expect. “We’re here, we got a label, but do you think anybody will be at the show?” We walk in, and the guy that owns the Vogue, his name is Monny. He was a badass. Monny dressed like a dominatrix, but sexier—not so hardcore-leather-prostitute—and he’s burlier than shit, like he could snap your fuckin’ neck. So we’re loading in, and he’s wearing this outfit and says in this gruff voice, “Yeah, boys, just put the stuff in the back.” We’re thinkin’, This is one of the coolest fuckin’ transsexuals we’ve ever met, and then his girlfriend shows up and she’s dressed to the nines, too, with the platforms and dominatrix look. They’re just totally cool-lookin’ together.
BENJAMIN REW (musician; TAD roadie) Monny, the cross-dressing bartender that ran and owned the place, and his wife were always super-sweet to me. I remember when I first got in the Vogue, it was like, Man, you have arrived. All the people I knew had kinda moved up a level from hanging out on Broadway to having an actual place that was our own.
All the cool, older people were there: Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Green River, guys from Love Battery, Gruntruck, the metal bands like Forced Entry and Sanctuary. Andy Wood was always at the Vogue; he had his seat there. Everyone smoked pot in the back room, behind where the stage was. I met Tad in the back room of the Vogue in probably ’89. There were tons of hot girls, and they were mostly all strippers. It was heaven.
GARRET SHAVLIK During that trip, we met all of our new friends—the new family. Seattle was so cool in the fact that the bands cared about each other and they hung out, where Denver was very self-defeatist. When other Denver bands that we loved and respected would find out that we had been on the road and are putting out records with a legitimate label, they got pissed off and thought we were rock stars.
DANNY BLAND (Cat Butt guitarist; Best Kissers in the World/Dwarves bassist; Sub Pop Records booking agent) In Arizona, I was in a punk-rock band called the Nova Boys and in ’85 or