Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [98]
MARK ARM To call it a riot is so out of proportion to what happened. It wasn’t like people were smashing chairs because they were affected adversely by the music. It wasn’t Stravinsky playing The Rite of Spring for the first time.
JAMES BURDYSHAW By ’89, things had reached critical mass, ’cause that’s when Lamefest happened—all of a sudden, Mudhoney and TAD and Nirvana played the Moore Theatre, and it was sold out. Over a thousand people were there. It was clear to me that the Seattle bands that my friends and acquaintances were in were getting really, really big. In my mind, a really big band had always been a band that would come in from out of town. The U-Men couldn’t headline the Moore Theatre, as big as they were.
BRUCE PAVITT The first Lamefest—that was the moment when grunge blew up. That was the defining moment. That was the record release party for Nirvana’s first record, which a lot of people don’t realize.
STEVE TURNER It was like, “Wow, who are these people, and where were they a year ago?”
CHAD CHANNING (Nirvana drummer) The one show of this tour that really sticks in my mind was the Lamefest at the Moore Theatre because Jason put on this Mickey Mouse outfit just because he wanted to. It was pretty comical, actually. There’s the band, and then there’s Jason as Mickey Mouse with all this long hair.
JASON EVERMAN I made the Mickey Mouse shorts I wore onstage. It was kind of absurd, the red pants with the big yellow buttons. I got the idea from this Calvin and Hobbes story, which I thought was really funny. In the comic, Hobbes is telling Calvin, “Check out my Mickey Mouse pants.” And Calvin is like, “I don’t know.”
BRUCE PAVITT The manager of the Moore Theatre had actually sent most of his security guys home because he was convinced that nobody was gonna show up. So when the local youth went off at the show, stage-diving and everything else, the security staff on hand was overwhelmed. Mark Arm very famously kicked a security guard and knocked him right off the stage.
That show ignited the city’s youth and put Seattle on the map.
JANET BILLIG (Hole manager via Gold Mountain Entertainment) I was working at Caroline and living in a 300-square-foot apartment on Seventh Street and Avenue C in New York. Tons of people crashed there on tour. Mudhoney and TAD were there a lot. Hole, Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Skin Yard. L7 once stayed at my house and called Alaska and ran up my phone bill; there was blood all over my sheets—I have no idea what they did up there.
I had a part-time job at a foot doctor’s office on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street. He was closed on weekends, so I had Mudhoney sleep there one night in the waiting room. I told them, “You have to be out by 9 on Monday morning. That’s when the appointments start.” Once Mudhoney had a box of merch stolen, and urban myth is that for months after that, all the homeless people in the neighborhood were wearing Mudhoney shirts.
The first time Nirvana came to New York, they drove from Chicago or something, and when they showed up, I was like, “My friend is moving from Queens to Manhattan, I need you guys to move her.” Kurt was like, “No way, I’m not moving your friend,” but Krist and Chad went and moved her. She worked for CMJ at the time, so I think they got a lot of extra coverage out of that.
JASON EVERMAN We were staying in Alphabet City. I confided in Chad that I was done, and Chad had in turn confided in Kurt and Krist. I was becoming frustrated because I came to the realization that my role in the band was essentially going to be the rhythm-guitar player. I had the desire and inclination to write, as well. Same thing with Chad. It became obvious that wasn’t going to happen. Also, we were broke and burned out from touring. I think in some ways it was a convenient excuse to go back to Washington.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY (Nirvana/TAD soundman) Jason was a nice kid. I don’t really know much about the dynamic between him and the rest of the band, but the main thing I noticed was that all the guitar sounds that sounded like Nirvana