Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [8]
MARK ARM In the ’70s to mid-’80s, people didn’t stick around Seattle if they were tryin’ to get somewhere. Duff McKagan went to L.A. The Blackouts moved to Boston. The guys in the Tupperwares moved to L.A. and formed the Screamers.
A lot of touring bands totally skipped Portland and Seattle because it was 14 hours north of San Francisco and 32 hours west of Minneapolis. People in the Northwest had to make up their own entertainment.
JACK ENDINO (producer; Skin Yard guitarist; Dawn Anderson’s ex-husband) Nobody thought there was any chance of having any success, so no decisions were made with that in mind. People made records entirely to please themselves because there was nobody else to please, there was no one paying attention to Seattle. It was like a little, isolated germ culture.
ROBIN BUCHAN The first time I broke up with Tom, I was struggling with a lot of emotional issues and I wasn’t experienced enough to realize that there wasn’t a problem with the relationship, there was a problem with me. The second time, we were starting to grow apart musically. I didn’t really like the nascent grunge scene very much. It’s just not my style. I was getting more into Siouxsie and the Banshees and Magazine.
Also, I was really tired of being so fuckin’ poor. Tom and I were sharing this moldy, leaky basement apartment on frat row, which was a horrible place to live if you’re a punk rocker. So I broke up with him and left the band at the same time. I sold everything and disappeared to Europe.
TOM PRICE Robbie was still in the band after she and I broke up; I think she left more because she wanted a lifestyle change. She wanted to go back and graduate high school and go to college. It took a while to find our new bass player, Jim Tillman, who was actually the ex-boyfriend of my girlfriend at the time, Kim Stratton.
JIM TILLMAN I was still friendly with Kim, and she had suggested to Tom that they talk to me. I had been playing guitar for a band called the Horrible Truth, and we kinda petered out. When I practiced with the U-Men it was the first time I picked up a bass. The band was really cool. One song might be kind of swampy, another one would be full-on rockabilly with a twist, and something else would be really moody and dark.
TOM PRICE Jim was a great musician, which was a huge turning point. It encouraged the rest of us to get it together and start playing more real music.
We forced Jim to do a makeover. He had long hair and glasses, and we made him get contacts and cut his hair. At that point, our look was kind of a Cramps rip-off: big, scraggly hair, just all kinds of garbage tied around your neck, vests, no shirts, studded belts, steel-toed boots. Really cracks me up when I look at pictures of myself back in those days because, oh man, I looked almost too skinny to support all that hair.
LARRY REID We opened the Graven Image Gallery about eight months after Roscoe Louie closed. Roscoe Louie was a visual-art space that had some music and performance elements, while Graven Image was exactly the opposite—it was more to provide a rehearsal space for the U-Men.
TOM PRICE Upstairs, Larry was trying to pass the Graven Image off as a for-real art gallery. It was all clean and brightly lit up there, and then you’d go down the stairs at the back to the basement, and it was pretty much a dungeon. Yeah, total firetrap.
TRACEY ROWLAND Did Larry tell you about the time he got arrested for posing a “significant menace to human life” or something? About nine months after we opened, the fire department showed up and