Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [9]
LARRY REID One time, the Butthole Surfers ended up getting stuck in Seattle. I let them rehearse in the basement, but after a while I said, “Man, you guys gotta get outta here.” I mean, nice enough guys, but they were just underfoot and they were dusted. And on Christmas Day of 1983, I put on a show with them at Graven Image and the deal was, “I’ll give you all the money, but you have to leave.”
JIM TILLMAN The Butthole Surfers were playing so loud that one of the speaker columns actually caught fire. Everybody came, and we got them like $250 at the door so they could make their way back home to Texas.
MARK ARM The first time the Butthole Surfers came to Seattle, Gibby Haynes came out with clothespins in his hair. Later on during the set, he shook his head and they just went flying. Everyone’s like, “That was weird.” Bands were always trying to think up crazy stunts.
TOM HANSEN (the Refuzors/the Fartz guitarist; heroin dealer) There was a lot of gimmickry in the scene, but it was mostly improv because we couldn’t afford flame pots and sparklers and bombs.
On the way to a show at Danceland in ’81, the Refuzors stopped at Benson’s Grocery on the corner of Pike and Bellevue to get some beer, and there it was: There was this cat that had just been run over on the street. Its head was twisted around a little bit; its tongue was hanging out. We had this song called “Splat Goes the Cat,” so when we saw the cat, the lightbulb goes off. We put it in a cardboard box and brought it to the show.
We had this friend of ours, Jeff House, a notorious troublemaker, bring out the cat during that song and just frickin’ swing it around his head by the tail and throw it into the crowd. And it ended up getting thrown back up onstage and thrown back out and thrown over here and there. Eventually, it ended up back behind the equipment somewhere. (Laughs.) It didn’t look too messy to me, but of course it got exaggerated in the paper. They interviewed some girl who said, “I got totally splattered with blood, ehhh.”
The Humane Society was looking for us, because they thought we had killed the cat in some satanic ritual.
CHARLIE RYAN A couple of times we played at the Meatlockers, and we would not have an opening band. This is something I learned from a Refuzors show: We’d put on the poster SHOW STARTS AT 9:00. We would have kegs of beer and for a $2 or $3 admission, you could drink yourself silly. We’d have a DJ, and we would not play until midnight. We would push it until we thought that if we waited any longer, the crowd would actually be passed out on the ground. At this point, people thought they saw God that night.
DAVE DEDERER (the Presidents of the United States of America “guitbassist”/singer) I’ll never forget seeing the U-Men at the Meatlockers, a sweaty, hundred-capacity former meat locker in the industrial part of town.
Tom and Jim are plugging in, and Charlie takes three or four minutes to get ready. He takes off his vintage blazer, very deliberately, and neatly folds it up so that it doesn’t get creased, and not in a “watch me” kind of way. This was just his thing. Puts the jacket down next to him on a milk crate, takes off his hat, snaps the brim up so it doesn’t get creased, places it gently on top of his blazer, and lights a cigarette.
And then they proceed to just rip the shit out of the place.
CHARLIE RYAN We weren’t stylish from the outset. Then John and I thought, We’re goin’ onstage; we might as well look like something. The lime-green tuxes were my doing. An old family friend owned a formalwear shop, Brocklind’s, on Capitol Hill. I discovered them there, and I said, “Would you outfit four of us in these tuxes?” They were a sight. A sight. We wore those when we opened for the Cramps at the Golden Crown.
We started thinking about more and more outlandish things to do—and themes. Night of the Living U-Men was good. We