Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [99]
JANET BILLIG They kicked Jason out literally at my house. It was awful. They talked about leaving him there. I was like, “You gotta take him back home.”
CHAD CHANNING We just decided to drive straight home and bag the rest of the shows.… There wasn’t any discussion about it. We did not say anything about it the entire trip home. We got home, dropped him off, said, “All right man, we’ll see you later.” And we parted there …
JASON EVERMAN That’s the last time I spoke to Kurt. I quit Nirvana, though I guess it’s a matter of perspective. You can believe what you want to believe.
ROBERT ROTH (Truly singer/guitarist) I met Kurt in summer of ’89. My band Storybook Krooks had just released our cassette. But we broke up, and I remember being on a bus going downtown from Queen Anne and seeing Jonathan Poneman. He liked the Storybook Krooks, and I told him, “We just broke up last week.” And he goes, “Keep this under your hat, but Nirvana’s looking for a second guitar player. And they want somebody who can write.” So I gave a cassette to Justin Williams, who was a friend of Lanegan’s, and Lanegan passed it to Kurt.
A week or two later, I went down to the Vogue to a TAD show and ran into Kurt, and was like, “Hey, I’m the guy with the tape.” He was like, “Oh, yeah, Lanegan said he really liked it. I haven’t checked it out yet, and we’re gonna go on tour in about two weeks and we’re not gonna try anybody out until we get back. We’re gonna see how it goes as a three-piece.” And I told Kurt, “I’m gonna be busy by the time you get back, so if you want to play with me, now is the time.”
Kurt and I really hit it off. I learned some of Nirvana’s songs, and they dragged all their gear up to my rehearsal space. We probably played about four, four and a half hours. When Krist took Chad back to Bainbridge, Kurt and I just hung out and shared the last couple of cigarettes we had between us and talked about drummers. No offense to Chad, but it was just kind of obvious to me and Kurt that if we were gonna do this band thing, that we might need to think about another drummer, and he was describing the type of drummer that he would want to have ideally, and it was a John Bonham-esque type drummer.
They apparently got back to Justin and told him that it was looking pretty good with me, but they just wanted to hang out one more time. But after their tour, Kurt just said, “Yeah, we decided to stay a three-piece.” And then a week later, I met up with Mark Pickerel, and then our band Truly got rolling.
It was kind of an odd summer, because Jason is half quitting, half getting kicked out of Nirvana; meanwhile, Hiro is leaving Soundgarden, and then Jason tries out for Soundgarden; and I’m trying out for Nirvana. And at the same time, Pickerel and Lanegan and Kurt and Krist had a band doing all Leadbelly covers. So there was a weird musical chairs thing going on.
JASON EVERMAN After Nirvana, it’s not like I had a Plan B; it’s not even like being in a rock band was a Plan A. It just kind of happened. I had money in the bank from fishing at the time, so I was planning on traveling. Then Kim Thayil called me and told me, “Hiro’s quitting. We’re auditioning people. Do you want to audition?”
SUSAN SILVER It’s not an easy life, sleeping on strangers’ floors. And Hiro just didn’t like it, and he really appreciated the indie scene, it seemed like. He wasn’t as interested in growing when the band signed to a major label.
I know it was very inconvenient when he left in the middle of touring Europe. I was on the tour with them, and I remember having to cancel the rest of the tour, get everybody home, and figure out how we were going to pay for it, which was usually on my mom’s credit card. Sorry, Mom, ruined your credit there for a while.
HIRO YAMAMOTO We’re getting bigger and the pressures