I Found My Friends

by Nick Soulsby

  Of course, the mainstream believed that unwashed natural “grunge” hair was just a reaction to hair metal’s bouffant hairdos; most people missed entirely that it was also a reaction to the dominant hairstyles of the punk scene too.

  TIM KERR, Bad Mutha Goose: You have to realize that up until the early ’90s, the majority of the rest of the US looked at all of this like we were from Mars. It was this little uprising that they had no idea what was going on … You would have the random knuckleheads come in to “fuck with the weirdo faggots.” Same thing happened with skating. In Austin it was the frats, kickers, or jocks that came in to shows looking to fight.

  The “Seattle look” was so prominent that as early as 1989 it was worth parodying.

  SHAMBIE SINGER, Lonely Moans: All those dudes—all the Sub Pop bands—had longer hair than us, which shook around a lot more than our shorter hair. That made an impression … we did a photo shoot for Sub Pop promo stuff at one point. A woman named Paula Huston took the photos. And we borrowed long-hair wigs from the Hampshire College Theatre Department for the photo shoot. I think Paula got the wigs for us through a friend. I recall we thought it was kinda funny to do that. Sorta mocking all the long-haired head wagging that was going on in Seattle at the time. But also sorta interested to fit in aesthetically.

  The Northwest accepted both punk and the hard rock their precursors had lashed out at.

  DANIEL RIDDLE, Hitting Birth: When the same kids that spat on us in school yelling, “Whip it good, Devo” and “Fucking punk faggot” were now showing up to our little punk-rock shows, slam dancing with the same violence and disrespect shown to us punks in the schoolyards and on the streets, with no respect for the culture [or] the etiquette of the punk-rock dance, no respect for women, the venues, or the musicians … we all knew it was over. Punk bands were now fucking weightlifters, Nazis, military strategists, and preachers. Kids like us needed to go deeper underground. The total un-coolness of ’70s rock and long hair was perfect camouflage … Coopting the discarded, dismissed sounds and styles of the ’70s that had already been trashed and labeled worthless was one of many suitable social responses for our desire to continue our rebellion.

  DAVID WHITING: We tended to be perceived as “has-beens” and “old-schools” when we perhaps perceived these newer rock hybrids as even more so the “has-beens,” emulating styles, fashion, and sounds from an even earlier bygone time.

  JOE KEITHLEY: Punk rock really weakened after about 1986—it wasn’t the same movement it had been, although there were still a lot of good people and good bands, but it didn’t have the same impact it had had on society between 1977 and 1983. It started to wane, it got tougher to go to shows, there was more violence with skinheads … Things need to move along, or we’d still be dressing in greaser jackets and singing doo-wop songs.

  This generation had an issue with the ’80s manifestation of hard rock, not the ’70s originals.

  SLIM MOON: The Pacific Northwest was a weird place where a rock influence was always there in the punk and indie music … At a time when, in most of the country, punk bands were very against hard rock, Seattle punk bands still loved AC/DC and Kiss and Aerosmith. All over the country, punk was giving way to all kinds of indie sounds—the rise of college radio had a lot to do with this—but the Northwest particularly contributed with “heavy” sounds, partially because the Northwest underground had never fully rejected hard rock the way much of the underground had.

  While straddling the generational lines, Nirvana simultaneously stood with their feet on either side of a geographic divide.

  SLIM MOON: In the period from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, the Seattle scene and the Olympia scene wasn’t really very friendly; there was a lot of competition, and if you were in Seattle you heard a lot of jokes at Olympia’s expense, and if you were in Olympia, we told jokes about Seattle bands. Seattle thought Oly bands couldn’t play our instruments and were naïve. Olympia thought Seattle bands were drunks and heroin addicts without any convictions or creativity.

  It was only when Nirvana had sponsors within the Seattle scene—Jack Endino and Sub Pop—that they made it there.

  DUKE HARNER, Black Ice: Krist, I first met him in high school. He’s a really nice guy, intelligent, quirky sense of humor and of course tall! We used to have a couple of classes together and were usually goofing off in them … he worked at Sears during the same time my girlfriend worked there. I’d go to have lunch with her and would run into him while I waited for her to take her break. He and I would talk about what we was doing musically and at that time, he would usually be headed to Seattle to see if he and Kurt could find somewhere to play. He said they would drive around during the day, trying to convince bars to let them play there and then sleep in their van and do it all over again. I told him it sounded exhausting, but he thought it sounded like fun!

  GEORGE SMITH: Tacoma and Olympia definitely had more of a connection than those two and Seattle—distances though may play a part in that, Seattle is fifty miles north from Olympia, twenty-five miles north from Tacoma … for an Olympia band it definitely felt tougher to break into Seattle. It was more competitive; there’s five times as many people as Tacoma. Olympia’s a lot smaller than that. There was more drive to get to a status level there—and more opportunity. Most of our shows we got were through bands ahead of us in the pecking order, benefactors, who would help us out …

  Even firmly established Northwest bands could encounter difficulty trying to break into Seattle; friendly connections would be vital to Nirvana.

  DAVID WHITING: Trying to get a Seattle show was much more laborious, as there always seemed to be an attitude against the smaller cities and the bands that came from them. The big-city/little-city syndrome has continued to this day … it became much easier to skip Seattle than to try and line up a show which involved multiple contacts, sending them a cassette of our music (even though they knew who we were), “waiting for the call,” and then getting placed low on the bill and making squat for playing.

  DAMON ROMERO: Booking agents for venues, especially in Seattle, they just wanted four bands who all sounded the same to play a Wednesday night, while in Olympia and [in] the earlier punk-rock scene even in Seattle, there was more variety. That was what I liked when I first started going, was you’d go, see four bands, all completely different. I think that the music industry in Seattle quickly jumped on the bandwagon and every bar wanted to be “that club” that had the grunge bands.

  While trying to break into Seattle, Olympia became Nirvana’s home by virtue of Cobain’s presence and the warm acceptance the band received there.

  GILLY ANN HANNER, Sister Skelter/Calamity Jane: I first saw Nirvana when they played my house for my birthday party. [Author’s note: I’m still in awe of this.] The guy I was dating at the time was playing bass in Sister Skelter, Chris Quinn; he knew Kurt. I decided that I wanted to play for my twenty-first birthday, that we should play at my house and he said he knew this guy and his band—that they were really great. So we decided to go find them, drove around town over to his apartment. Chris went in and asked, “Hey, want to play a party?” They said, “Sure, we’ll play.” That’s it. I worked at the library at the school where they had a Media Department, and you could use the media equipment for school-related projects, so I checked out a PA, microphone, speakers, and everything—we got that from school, brought it home, set that up, and then played the show. My house was completely destroyed in the morning—my front window was broken out by someone slam-dancing and falling through it—it was great! I thought these guys were real rock ’n’ roll—a real band. My band opened up, Kurt sang a song with us … my boyfriend told Kurt, “Hey, we’re going to play ‘Greatest Gift,’ want to sing with us?” He said, “Yeah, totally, I’ll sing that with you!” So we did that song and he sang with the other two singers in Sister Skelter.

  The power of love clearly played a big role in Olympia’s musical matchups.

  PAUL KIMBALL: I was seeing a girl
… and she was playing with Gilly in a group called Sister Skelter … I sang “Drunk in My Past” that night with her band, which was really fun. Pretty sure that’s how Lansdat Blister wound up playing that one. When Nirvana was playing that night, the room was so packed I took one look in and walked right back out to the yard.

  ALEX KOSTELNIK: Everyone in Oly knew who they were and respected them. I was upstairs throwing hastily made Molotov cocktails at a car on cement blocks down below … I heard this throbbing, thundering sound coming from downstairs and was compelled to run down and see. The long-greasy-haired blond guy who looked like a roadie for the band—turned out he sang! He played guitar! I was immediately attracted to Krist—he was tall like me and had a beautiful scrolled black bass. He played it so low his wrists looked like they were going to fold in half. Bob Whittaker, later to manage Mudhoney, fell through the living-room window. So many people were in the kitchen jumping up and down that they snapped the water pipe running in the floor below them. Bob came the next morning on his bike and responsibly fixed the window.

  Beyond the happy revels, Nirvana’s niche in Olympia was very clear; there was a vacancy at one end of the sound spectrum.

  SCOTT HARBINE, Beezus and Ramona: The Olympia scene was pretty mellow. Nirvana was definitely the heaviest band on the bill. One of the bands before Nirvana was playing sort of a hippie jam rock and Hendrix covers. Nirvana was a definite surprise to what I was expecting … I remember telling Cobain that they reminded me of a punk AC/DC. He told me that my band reminded him of Echo and the Bunnymen which at the time felt like a compliment. We had a good conversation about bands like Green River and the U-Men, but my AC/DC comparison seemed to bum him out.

  ALEX KOSTELNIK: They were the undisputed heavyweight kings. There is a sound in every region/town—there’s a little microclimate where everyone is huffing each other’s pheromones. Nirvana sounded like we all wanted to sound, like we were all trying to sound. But they did it like it was effortless (later I learned it was just the opposite) like a 747 doing a ballerina dance just for the hell of it because they could …

  GILLY ANN HANNER: They all looked like dudes, basically—they didn’t look like an Olympia band at all, which was great! There was K Records, Calvin, playing that stripped-down poppy do-it-yourself vibe, the childlike quality to the scene and to the music. Then these guys—they were rock ’n’ roll; heavy, loud, and good. They were really rocking.

  PAUL KIMBALL: The first clear memory I have of them was at that show in the field outside of K dorm. They were definitely “rockers”: leather jackets, long hair, that kind of thing. But other than Dave sporting a redneck-style mustache, they didn’t stand out as hicks … They were cool: I remember them being very sloppy and sounding like crap, but that pretty much described all of us …

  For all the talk of Nirvana’s pop side, they were rock first, and in 1988 Washington, good pop kids played Olympia, but super-bad rock ’n’ rollers hit Seattle. Similarly, for all the positives of Olympia or Tacoma, if a band wanted some degree of commercial success, Seattle was where it was at.

  BRUCE PURKEY: All the big touring acts still went through Seattle. All the money and studios were in Seattle. Pretty much, if you wanted to make it, you were eventually going to Seattle.

  JUSTIN TROSPER, Unwound/Giant Henry: Olympia has a long history of weird sociopolitical dynamics … this weird antisuccess mentality. If you take notice, most of the people that came out of Olympia succeeded after they left … It’s this place where people develop and test ideas like a lab. Honestly, there’s only so far you can take it there, and I recommend going somewhere else to be successful. People here don’t necessarily support artists that want to expand their horizons outside of a small, like-minded culture. In a way, it is really conservative and closed-minded, even though it is a really welcoming place for people who may not fit into mainstream society. There is so much collective community-oriented social behavior that it can become stifling to be an individual that deviates from that collective … It is this place that attracts outsiders, like the Island of Misfit Toys. It is the outsider town to Seattle.

  5.0

  Sub Pop and Bleach

  June 1988 to January 1989

  Nirvana’s support in Olympia meant top billing at house parties, but their focus on Seattle meant trying to stir interest in a new and far more competitive stomping ground. Their first Seattle show was to half a dozen people; the band canceled a show in May when no one showed up; a July show drew only twelve spectators. Nirvana was a bunch of out-of-towners with zero pull.

  CHRIS QUINN: I can understand though they got a lukewarm reception in Seattle early on. Melvins did the same thing, making the transition to bars. They played the Vogue—that’s the only time they were lackluster; it wasn’t their environment, they weren’t used to it. For Nirvana, it meant transitioning from the kind of excitement of playing at parties to a more snobby Seattle thing where they were out of their element at first. I can tell you that Nirvana, from my perspective, compared to the other bands in Seattle, were an underdog for a while—and with everything moving so fast, even if it was just six months, it felt like a while.

  KEVIN WHITWORTH, Love Battery: Nirvana were from out of town, so they obviously weren’t part of the scene. There really wasn’t a “scene”—there were forty or so people who traded members of bands on a monthly basis. It was like musical chairs for a while, until it stopped … There was exactly one crowd, and they (we) went to all the shows. We all knew each other, slept on each other’s couches, borrowed equipment, and traded band members.

  GEOFF ROBINSON, Blood Circus: Many did not take them seriously. We (my band-mates and I) all knew just based on their songs that they were a force to be watched … They were confident and polished, but their equipment and possibly their drummer, held them back—in my opinion.

  SCOTT VANDERPOOL: I do vaguely remember Jon [Poneman] and Bruce [Pavitt] sitting at the edge of the stage on opposite sides like bookends, Bruce rocking back and forth autistically while this rather average but noisy bunch of hair farmers played.

  JOSH HAYDEN, Treacherous Jaywalkers: I’m not even sure it was Nirvana that opened for us … When we got to the club, we were told that the singer of Nirvana was sick and that Nirvana canceled. I was told the name of a different band that was opening … I’ve read online that Nirvana did indeed play the show. Kurt alluded to this gig in some early Nirvana promo material … I vaguely remember watching some of the band that did open the set. I think they were loud. I don’t think I stayed for the whole set. I don’t think many people were in the audience, I’d say maybe ten people … I never met the opening band, but we did kind of acknowledge each other from across the room. I remember they seemed kind of nerdy and shy, or maybe that’s because I was nerdy and shy.

  Money was crucial throughout this period and Nirvana’s sound would suffer because of the compromises made due to simple poverty.

  JACK ENDINO: There was a terrible-sounding guitar amp that Kurt brought to the studio …

  GEOFF ROBINSON: They were from a Podunk logging town and their equipment was more cheeseball than ours—which we felt was next to impossible … I just remember our first gig with them and Kurt playing through a Silvertone [Sears Roebuck] amp. I remember thinking, I thought I had it bad.

  CHRIS QUINN: I was at a party at this little house called the Caddyshack … The whole house was the size of an apartment—it was this shacky thing. That’s the first time I saw Nirvana play and I was blown away … They seemed very driven and they had their own PA. They had seemingly ramshackle equipment, but they were really good! I’d seen a lot of music by then, a lot of good bands, a lot of bad bands—they were good.

  TOM DARK, Knife Dance: You did not have the same technology/exposure thirty years ago, you had to really go out and do it yourself. Back then it was about playing out, fliers, word of mouth, fanzines, college radio, and putting out your own record. With each new band, you get to know more people of all aspects of the scene
; that helped out [in] going, putting on shows, what clubs to play, information on where to record, press your records, what zines to send to in order to get your product reviewed … the whole networking thing. It was such a big mystery yet exciting … Audiences were great back then, always up for something live. The media picked up on things from time to time, but nothing huge. That’s why people did zines instead, as we did not count on bigger press to get the word out.

  Having a demo tape was the first step for most bands, but Nirvana had neither the budget to pay for pressings nor the inclination to make and sell records themselves.

  GEORGE SMITH: There were a lot of cassettes getting passed around—that’s what bands could afford to do, so getting a cassette release was no big deal. That didn’t feel the same; you could just do it in your house. Vinyl, though—that took real support.

  RONNA MYLES-ERA: Olympia was a safe place to be a band, because you could just release your own stuff. You didn’t need someone else to release it. We tried to get on K, but Calvin would say to me over and over, “Why don’t you just release your own stuff?” We did have some cassettes that we would sell at shows and also give away.

  If inclined, and with a little more in the way of resources, Nirvana could have followed the DIY route; the underground was full of penniless labels started by musicians.

  ED FARNSWORTH, Napalm Sunday: We started our own label because we had to. We didn’t fit with any of the existing hardcore labels … Shark Sandwich wasn’t much of a label; we released two singles on it, both our own. In those ancient times before the Internet and digital recording programs, you needed to record and release something physically tangible to be legitimate, and singles were the most affordable way to do that. And let’s face it, they’re also pretty cool, particularly for guys like us who had grown up buying singles. We didn’t have the money to record an album’s worth of material … So we saved our gig money to pay for recording and pressing the forty-five.