Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [73]
We waited for them to stop, then it was our turn to play. So we got up and did our set, but I don’t really remember much more about it.
GREG GILMORE I had no idea what was going on because I did not know that they had been playing with Regan. Yes, it was awkward.
BRUCE FAIRWEATHER It was around Christmas, and I was gone. When I came back, Jeff and Stone were like, “Hey, we practiced with Greg Gilmore.” I was like, “Really. Did you talk to Regan?” They were like, “Well, he walked in when we were practicing.” I guess it didn’t go down real well.
REGAN HAGAR I went home and within an hour or two the phone rang, and it was Stone. He was apologizing: “This isn’t how I wanted this to happen, but we’re gonna start playing with Greg now.” At that point, Stone and I were always together. Andy and I used to be that way, but by then Andy had a live-in girlfriend and I didn’t see him as much. Stone was very good with me on the phone. He’s a Spock-type personality. He helped you remove emotion from your decisions and really think logically about what’s going on. He let me know that I was loved, and this was probably the best thing for this group of guys.
KEVIN WOOD When what turned into Mother Love Bone became real, people were coming up to me, “Hey man, sorry to hear about your band breaking up.” And that was news to me.
REGAN HAGAR I didn’t believe that Malfunkshun was ending, so it wasn’t a huge thing. I honestly thought, and I still carry with me, this feeling that we were the greatest band ever. We were the loudest, best band Seattle had to offer.
At the last Malfunkshun show, which we didn’t necessarily know to be our last, Kurt Cobain approached Kevin and asked him to join Nirvana, which Kevin laughed off: “Who are these kids?”
KEVIN WOOD Kurt was at Malfunkshun’s last show, in Tacoma. Chad Channing was a buddy of mine, and Chad asked if I wanted to jam with Nirvana. It wasn’t an invitation to join the band, just to jam, because Kurt was looking for other guitar players to join and make it easier for him. I said I wasn’t really interested because I was planning some different things, a different direction. Nirvana at the time was playing an old-school punk kind of thing that I felt like I had grown out of already.
KELLY CURTIS (Mother Love Bone/Pearl Jam manager; Heart tour manager; Ken Deans’s business partner) I saw the Beatles in Seattle on my 10th birthday. I met Nancy Wilson shortly after that. I wanted to get guitar lessons after seeing the Beatles; our parents went to the same church, and they hooked me up with her to get lessons. She was like 12. I’d never met a girl that could sing and play guitar and was cool. We became fast friends.
When I was 17, Nancy asked me to go with her as a roadie for Heart. So I dropped out of high school and went with her. I started off driving a truck for them and hauling gear around. I was with them for eight or nine years, and I worked my way up to being their tour manager. I quit Heart in ’84, then tour-managed a Japanese heavy-metal band called Loudness and lived in L.A. for a bit before coming back to Seattle in 1987.
KEN DEANS (production manager; Kelly Curtis’s business partner) Kelly and I started a production company with the explicit purpose of not managing bands. After Kelly left Heart, we managed a New Wave band called Maurice and the Clichés and spent stupid amounts of money trying to get them signed, to no avail.
We set up an office in Pioneer Square, and we would eat lunch oftentimes across the street at the Grand Central Bakery, where Stone Gossard worked. One day, Stone handed me a tape. It was a very poorly recorded tape, but I took it back and I listened to it and went, “Wow, there’s some really great songs.” So I played it for Kelly, and he goes, “You know what, I don’t hear it. It sounds like