Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [87]
TAD in New York, summer 1989. Clockwise from lower left: Tad Doyle, Gary Thorstensen, Kurt Danielson, and Steve Wiederhold. © IAN TILTON
JAMES BURDYSHAW At first we thought their band, which was Diamond Lie at that point, was awful. They sounded like Poison. For us, that was disgusting. We even made fun of them, but Layne was such a sweetheart that he won us over. He’d come up to us, like, “You guys need anything, just let me know. You want pot, you want beer, whatever you need, I can do it. You want me to square you some coke? No problem.” We’re all like, “Whoa, this guy is pretty cool.” And him and David started to get close.
DAVID DUET Alice in Chains didn’t know what to think of Cat Butt; no one did at that time. We’d practice with the lights off, with black lights and strobe lights. We’d bring smoke machines in our practice room. We had crazy papier-mâché artwork hanging everywhere that we used to have onstage with us—a big, psychedelic biker voodoo trip. So they’d always walk by and look in our door. At one point, one of the managers of the place said, “Look, I know this is ridiculous, but Alice in Chains is telling us that they walked in the bathroom here and all of Cat Butt is shooting up and sucking each other off at the time same.” (Laughs.) Which, actually, I loved. I thought that was great! They probably did walk in on Michael in the bathroom, and it got exaggerated.
Layne’s girlfriend, Demri [Parrott], was the one who made the connection between our bands. Demri, who was the cutest, most beautiful thing in the world, came up to me one night and lifted up her shirt. She showed me her belly button, and she goes, “Look, I can make a cat’s butt!”
REED HUTCHINSON (Feast guitarist) Before Layne was going out with Demri, I got to know her through my girlfriend Angela. Demri was super-funny and very forward. I was probably 18 and super-shy and I remember her asking me super-direct questions like, “So, how’s the sex between you and Angela?” And I was like, “Oh, my God, you can’t talk about this!”
XANA LA FUENTE “Innocent yet provocative.” That’s how Andrew described Demri when he first saw her. She kind of reminded me of Brooke Shields in the movie Pretty Baby. Young, but very sexy. She was really frisky; she was all over everybody. But not in a slutty way.
PONY MAURICE (Feast singer) I kind of fell in love with Xana and Demri for a while. Yes, I like both men and women. We would all just hang out and go to shows and play around. They were both so beautiful in their own weird way. Demri was five feet tall and tiny, and Xana was six feet tall and, like, Amazon. I just was smitten with Xana. She had this really cool, big Roman nose. I knew Andy before her, but I started getting a lot closer to Xana than I ever had with him. He knew that I liked her, and I think she would sometimes use me to make him jealous.
DAVID DUET At our next rehearsal, Demri and Layne walked in together, and within a month I was doing guest appearances with Alice in Chains, singin’ Bowie songs and stuff. And then shortly after that, their whole sound changed ’cause they got introduced to the scene and Susan Silver. They changed into this dark, brooding, heavy thing.
ROB SKINNER There was this huge pot operation that nobody knew about next door to the Music Bank. Came home from a show to load our gear back in and there was cops everywhere, and one guy who lived there had a gun pointed at his head by the cops. Now, had we known that all that pot was next door, we would’ve tunneled into it. ’Cause we spent a lot of time trying to find what was just six inches away from us without even knowing. The Music Bank ended up shutting down, we went our way, and the Alice in Chains guys went their way.
SOOZY BRIDGES (intern for Kelly Curtis/Ken Deans; club booker) The band all lived together in a house a little south of Seattle. I’d keep their gig money and make them buy groceries because they had no food. They’d eat Grape-Nuts with water in it, or crackers and ketchup.
MIKE STARR There were girls there all the time. I’d wake up, and there