Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [7]
That show was with the Fastbacks and Aaiiee!! The Bopo Boys, who were a gang, using the term loosely, were there to see us play. They were omnipresent back then—drinkin’ beer, skateboarding, hustlin’ chicks, a street fight here and there. They were tight with us and the Fastbacks. Then all these locals started showing up. Back then we would call them jocks; I guess you still would. They started driving around the parking lot of the community center and burning rubber and yelling “Faggot!” A couple fights happened, people rode off and found phone booths, and all of a sudden a bunch of our brothers and sisters from the Ave—University Way, where all the panhandling punk rockers hung out—and elsewhere showed up and there was a turf war.
ROBIN BUCHAN The only thing I remember about our shows is getting shut down by the cops over and over and over again. We had the dubious honor of having 13 shows in a row shut down by the Seattle police. I was really amazingly good at disappearing when the cops came.
LARRY REID The U-Men were quite a bit younger than I was, but I went to a couple of their shows, which would just always go south for whatever reason. The P.A. would go out, the cops would show up. There was something about the energy and the atmosphere of a U-Men show that was right on the edge of complete chaos, which immediately appealed to me.
I saw them at the Funhole, probably about 1981. The P.A. had gone out, and it didn’t stop ’em a bit. The singer of course couldn’t sing, but the show went on, and Bigley is pantomiming and doing this crazy absurdist theater to this wall of dissonant noise, in front of about 20 people with their jaws all dropped. I thought he was some kind of bent genius.
I had just done a really successful record-release party for the Fastbacks at Roscoe Louie, the art gallery that my wife and I ran, and Bigley approached me and said, “We need some help.” And it was serendipitous, because at that particular point we had made the decision to close Roscoe Louie.
TOM PRICE Larry was maybe 25, which when you’re 18 is a massive difference. What was amazing about him is that he never cared about money. He’d get a thousand people crammed into some tiny space, and he never cared whether he made any money or not. He just likes creating a scene, I guess.
LARRY REID I became their formal manager, and at some point I started taking 10 percent of nothing. What we primarily did was save all the money for recording. Later, after Robin left, we got into a 16-track studio called Crow, with a guy named John Nelson, and we recorded some great stuff there and had a long relationship with them. The U-Men put out an EP in 1984 on Bombshelter, which was nominally Bruce Pavitt.
CLAUDIA GEHRKE (the Vogue club booker) Larry Reid? Larry Greed, as we always called him. I remember at one U-Men show he goes, “I’m going to sit across from you with a clicker and count how many people come in to make sure you don’t rip me off,” and I said, “You go right ahead.” We got to the end of it, and I’d taken in more money than he was expecting. He’d been drinking beers while clicking. I was like, “See? I don’t know why you had to play me like that.”
LARRY REID I would get away with murder. We pushed it to the limit, but their shows never got shut down. I remember one show counterfeiting an occupancy permit for the fire department. You know—this is before computers—photocopy it, use some Wite-Out, type in all manner of misinformation, photocopy it another three or four times. Wad it up and stuff it in an envelope, and when the fire department showed up, it’s like, “Here it is.” Well, they know it’s not right, but they can’t prove it.
We had a show at the Meatlockers—it was exactly what it sounds like—and had a complete bar setup in a freight elevator, so when the cops did show up, we just raised the freight elevator up, shut the doors, and, “What bar? There’s no bar here.”
In fairly short order, the U-Men built up an audience. I started ’em out opening on three-band bills and pretty soon they’re in the second slot and then they