Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [97]
BEN SHEPHERD I hate that word grunge. It has nothing to do with anything. It’s fuckin’ concocted bullshit.
JACK ENDINO Sometime around ’87, ’88, the word grunge started getting thrown around. It might’ve been Everett. I hate to say it, but it might’ve been me. At one of my high school reunions, someone told me, “You used to use that word all the time!” I’m like, “What? Don’t tell me that!”
No one fucking knows, and frankly I don’t think anyone really wants to take credit for it. So let’s leave it at that, all right?
MARK ARM Everett’s article on us came out just before we went to the U.K. with Sonic Youth. Those shows were at the start of a nine-week European tour. We did a couple more shows with Sonic Youth in northern Europe, but most of the tour was us going around by ourselves before ending up back in the U.K. for a couple shows.
RON RUDZITIS I’ll never forget Mark’s last day of work at Muzak and just being so fucking jealous. He was leaving to go open for Sonic Youth in England. Fuck! That is my dream come true. It was a huge inspiration for me to work really hard. I got really focused, and I bugged the hell out of Bruce, and eventually not only got the Love Battery single out, but convinced Sub Pop to put out our albums.
DAN PETERS Toward the end of the tour, we played at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. We were being supported by Soundgarden then—my, how times changed. The show was in what appeared to be a cafeteria, so they got this haphazard stage set up. It was sold out, and there’s probably a thousand people there.
STEVE TURNER The stage was really rickety, and after the first few bars Mark headed into the crowd. I headed into the crowd. Everything became unplugged, the stage started falling over, everyone’s trying to hold up the stage and the speaker columns.
MARK ARM The kids had the fever. The band was totally apeshit wild. I made a joke, saying, “Okay, everybody get onstage,” thinking there’s no way everyone can get onstage. The crowd took that at face value, and they pushed us back all the way to the wall. And people who were normally observers—writers like Keith Cameron and Everett True and our publicist at the time, Anton—were rolling up their sleeves, pushing people back.
ANTON BROOKES The stage was built on loads of school desks, so it wasn’t the most stable setting. It felt like Zulu—it’s an old English film, with Michael Caine, where there’s a couple British soldiers against 10,000 Zulu warriors. They just keep coming and coming and coming and coming.
DAN PETERS I remember looking over, and the monitor guy starts unplugging stuff and taking equipment away. One of the English journalists gets up and screams into the microphone, “This is nonsensical! This is nonsensical! Everybody get off the stage!” The stage starts to fall apart, and I just go, “Well, that was interesting,” and walk to the backstage room where Matt Cameron’s sitting. He goes, “Jesus Christ, does this happen every night with you guys?”
I was thinking, The show’s over. There’s no way in hell it’s going to go on. That’s when people are like, “You guys got to go back out there and play or shit’s going to happen.”
STUART HALLERMAN I’m scoping out the exits, totally planning my escape. I was worried for my life.
MARK ARM We played a little more, and to illustrate how stupid that whole scenario was, I said, “Okay, let’s get everybody on top of the P.A.” I didn’t learn my lesson the first time. I turned around and the security guy was fuckin’ coming right at me. Anton and Keith had to hold him back.
STUART HALLERMAN Hours afterward, a guy got stabbed within a quarter mile of the place. It doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the show, but the newspaper blamed it on the mayhem: RIOT AT THE MUDHONEY SHOW! DEATH