by Mark Yarm
KERRI HARROP I was blown away by the audacity of it. I’m sure if there was a panoramic shot of the crowd, virtually everyone who ended up in a band or who was in a band at the time was at that show. I think that if you were in a band and you saw that, it made you step up your game.
MARK ARM (né Mark McLaughlin; Mudhoney singer/guitarist; Green River singer; Mr. Epp and the Calculations guitarist/singer; the Thrown Ups drummer) I don’t know if it was necessarily the best U-Men show I ever saw, but that was the coolest event at a U-Men show. They really made something happen.
LARRY REID The U-Men were banned from Bumbershoot, and I wasn’t the most popular guy around there for a while. The year after that, they started draining the pond. And now they’ve filled it in with cement.
The day after the show, I met the Everly Brothers at the hotel and brought them to the venue—I was working at Bumbershoot, operating as an informal chaperone for the bigger acts—and the first person I ran into was Norm Langill, the producer of the festival. He just came unglued. He said, “What are you trying to do to me?!”
Phil Everly was really kinda sweet and came to my defense. He told this great anecdote, which was possibly apocryphal, about a show they had played with Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee was squirting lighter fluid on the 88s and pounding out “Great Balls of Fire.” And the next thing you know … accidents happen. Apparently Jerry Lee was dancing on the piano, which was an impromptu addition to his normal routine, and caught his pants on fire.
That story got me off the hook. That calmed everything down, because Norm held the Everly Brothers in real high regard. Phil told him, “Leave the kid alone. That’s rock and roll.”
TOM PRICE The U-Men started in late ’81. My family had moved to Seattle in 1965. I started playing music, believe it or not, mostly through the church. They called it “guitar mass”—it was the acoustic-guitar-strumming, long-haired Christians. Very Jesus Christ Superstar. In my early teens, my older brother was turning me on to all this weird music, like Captain Beefheart and Lou Reed. And so when punk came along, that was a natural jump. The U-Men was probably my first band that made any records.
Me and Charlie had both dropped out of high school together and moved into a crash pad in the University District. Charlie was a really funny character. He’s an Irishman, his dad was a bookie, and he had his own apartment downtown, just this whole weird style that was pretty unfamiliar to kids like me from tree-lined residential neighborhoods.
CHARLIE RYAN I was born and raised in Seattle, and grew up pretty much downtown. Bookmaking was the family business. My father was a bartender for years, and he was given this little business by someone who was retiring. Which afforded him a lifestyle of going out and dining and drinking on a nightly basis. Later on, in the ’80s, I started taking bets over the phone for him so he didn’t have to do anything except go collect the money.
I met Tom at Roosevelt High School. We were all standing outside smoking pot all the time. Nobody went to class. It was a little hotbed of soon-to-become-punk activity: The Mentors went to school there, Duff McKagan was there, Chris Utting. I moved into this house in the U District with Tom Price and Rob Morgan. Rob had a lot of weird, punky bands—the Pudz, the Fishsticks—that he put together over the years. He was older and had this huge record collection. He was very influential on us.
The entire idea of the band was Tom’s. We stole our name right off of this Pere Ubu bootleg called The U-Men. We weren’t working—we were playing records and drinking a lot and coming up with funny ideas. Tom said, “I think we should start a band, Charlie.” And I said, “Okay.”
And he said, “You’ll be the drummer.”
And I said, “But we don’t know how to play.”
He goes, “That’s okay, we’ll learn.”
I go, “Okay. We don’t have any equipment.”
He goes, “Don’t worry about that.”
Tom was very resourceful, and he would obtain things that we needed all the time. I’m not trying to imply that anything against the law happened, but things just got done, things appeared. I don’t know how he did it.
TOM PRICE We’d have one pair of drumsticks, and if Charlie broke a drumstick, that’s it, we’d have to rummage around and see if we could find some wooden soup spoons or something. We played in the basement of this house and had cymbals hanging from the ceiling, since we didn’t have enough cymbal stands, just playing through these crappy little amps on crappy little guitars.
CHARLIE RYAN Tom says, “There’s this girl I know from Alaska, and she’s going to run away from home. I’m going to pick her up at the airport, and she’s going to be our bass player.”
ROBIN BUCHAN (U-Men bassist) I went to Roosevelt High School. My home life was not good, and as a 13- and 14-year-old, I was really withdrawn and depressed. My one outlet was music, ’cause I played the string bass in our school’s chamber orchestra and the youth symphony. I got into the punk scene, which was my chance to bust out completely. My parents were scandalized by the change and were worried that I was drinking and doing drugs, which I was.
When I was 15, things in my life kind of blew up. My mom overreacted, and she asked my dad to take me away. They were divorced and my dad was remarried. He was in the Air Force and he was on his way up to Elmendorf Air Force Base outside of Anchorage. They knew I didn’t want to go, so they tricked me into it: “Oh, you’re just gonna go for the summer.” Once I got up there they were like, “Nope. You’re staying here.”
I’d met Tom Price in Seattle, but I didn’t know him very well. We wrote letters back and forth when I was in Alaska, and somehow it was determined that I was going to play bass for the U-Men. I had a friend in Seattle whose mom worked for Alaska Airlines, so we told her mom this crazy story—actually, it was only a small stretch of the truth—that my dad had kidnapped me and I just wanted to come home and be with my mom, which was completely not true. And her mom went for that; I sent them my money, and they sent me a plane ticket. I got really, really drunk at a party in Alaska, then got on a plane and threw up and passed out. I woke up, and I was in Seattle.
CHARLIE RYAN Oh, Robbie was gorgeous. Gorgeous woman. She had a classic Marilyn Monroe figure. She never talked about much; she was a very private person. All I ever heard was some muttering about parents, having to get away. It was always mysterious.
TOM PRICE Robbie would play super-loud and way too many notes, but she seemed weird enough that it was cool.
ROBIN BUCHAN Tom became my boyfriend shortly thereafter; he was my first real boyfriend. Tom was like this island of sweetness. And being a teenage runaway, there wasn’t much sweetness in the world for me in those days.
CHARLIE RYAN When Robbie played onstage, she used a bass whose strings were not where they should’ve been—they were much too high. She was so tough, she could just hammer those strings down. She would drink a ton of gin before going onstage, and she had boobs out to here. Guys would come up to her, and they’d try to get a little bit too close, and she would just bat people in the face with the end of the guitar. Just like, Stay back, man. She was ferocious. Just ferocious.
TOM PRICE One of the first times I ever met John was when I was at a party at some punk-rock crash house. I don’t know what happened—he basically fell through a window and landed on the yard outside and got up with a stunned look on his face, like, Who pushed me? I think he was just drunk and high and fell down some stairs and went through the window.
He’s a big guy, like six-three. Charlie and I had seen him around and saw him fall through the window and thought, Man, what a weird dude, we should get him to be our singer. We had no idea if he could actually sing or not, but of course, in those days that was just a complete nonissue.
CHARLIE RYAN We were intrigued by and also quite scared of John. He had a Jim Morrison kind of thing. He was gorgeous: short hair, Beatle boots, tight black jeans, a crazy look in his eye, like he was ready for anything. You didn’t know if he was going to kiss you, kill you, fuck ya. We�
��d seen him get into a fight or two at parties.
We wanted him to be the singer for the U-Men, but we were too scared to approach him. So we asked Robbie, the girl, to do it. She laughed and called us wimps, and then the next chance she got, she went and talked to John.
JOHN BIGLEY I was at a Johnny Thunders show at the Mountaineers club. Robbie came up to me and talked for a while; she was definitely acting funny. And finally: “Do—do you. Want to. Be in. A band—our band? Try out. For it?”
ROBIN BUCHAN Really? I don’t remember that at all. When we met John, he was so outrageous. One time we got drunk and went swimming in the middle of the night, just him and me in the canal under the Fremont Bridge, which was dangerous because it’s a shipping lane. He would do anything. He would take any drug. He was a wild man.
JOHN BIGLEY I said, “I’m not sure. I never sang, never really thought about it much.” Finally, I said, “You know, sure.”
I remember the first practice. The third Clash album had just come out, so we did “Brand New Cadillac.” We were in a laundry room and there was a shelf full of paint and paint thinner and all this stuff. So they’d run through songs they’d been writing and I’d just rant off of the backs of found objects—hyphenated chemical-compound names and silly brand names.
CHARLIE RYAN John showed up to our first rehearsal, and he was wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt and had a leather bag over his shoulder. He was just so bohemian. We’re all excited and nervous. He pulls out a bottle of wine. “Anybody want a glass of wine?” “Yeah, I’d love some wine!” We’d drank nothing but beer our whole lives, and here comes John with a bottle of wine.
Yeah, he sang directions on how to bleach your laundry. His voice was ferocious. It was unpolished. It sounded like an animal. He was just wailing away, and we were thrilled: “This is it! This is it!”
TOM PRICE John went to the University of Washington, and he was in a frat house of all things, but it was this real low-rent frat house that everybody hated. John had a good baritone voice, but at the early shows he was almost more like a performance artist than a singer. A lot of the time he would just stand there and glare at the audience. It took him a while before he started really singing and getting comfortable with that. He was really into the Birthday Party, the Gun Club, the Cramps, and the Germs. Public Image Ltd. and Captain Beefheart were huge influences on me. Me and Charlie in particular were getting into rockabilly and surf music, and the Sonics and the Wailers, all that great Northwest ’60s garage rock.
Our first show? That’s pretty much impossible to say. Sometime in 1981 or ’82. Somewhere in there we started doing some shows at parties and basements and garages. There were no clubs happening. There was nowhere to play. There were a couple taverns, but none of us was 21. Sometimes you’d get a bunch of people together and rent a hall yourself and hope the cops wouldn’t shut it down.
JOHN BIGLEY Someone gave this to me—it’s the Laurelhurst Community Club newsletter from January 1982. Laurelhurst is a quite wealthy enclave down on Lake Washington. The headline is VANDALISM AT THE RECREATION CENTER:
What were all the police cars doing at the recreation center early last month? Well … it was rented out to a group called the U-MEN for a youth dance with certain restrictions (no liquor or Punk Rock) that got violated. The evening (Nov. 6th) turned into a mild ruckus involving fists, broken windows, and beer bottles. The police were called twice; the last time it was out you go with much resistance. Fortunately someone turned on all the lights which proved the turning point for all the varied night creatures, who snuck away muttering. Later that evening and on two successive weekends the building sustained broken windows, a smashed door, broken bottles, and sprayed on graffiti … pure coincidence??
That show was with the Fastbacks and Aaiiee!! The Bopo Boys, who were a gang, using the term loosely, were there to see us play. They were omnipresent back then—drinkin’ beer, skateboarding, hustlin’ chicks, a street fight here and there. They were tight with us and the Fastbacks. Then all these locals started showing up. Back then we would call them jocks; I guess you still would. They started driving around the parking lot of the community center and burning rubber and yelling “Faggot!” A couple fights happened, people rode off and found phone booths, and all of a sudden a bunch of our brothers and sisters from the Ave—University Way, where all the panhandling punk rockers hung out—and elsewhere showed up and there was a turf war.
ROBIN BUCHAN The only thing I remember about our shows is getting shut down by the cops over and over and over again. We had the dubious honor of having 13 shows in a row shut down by the Seattle police. I was really amazingly good at disappearing when the cops came.
LARRY REID The U-Men were quite a bit younger than I was, but I went to a couple of their shows, which would just always go south for whatever reason. The P.A. would go out, the cops would show up. There was something about the energy and the atmosphere of a U-Men show that was right on the edge of complete chaos, which immediately appealed to me.
I saw them at the Funhole, probably about 1981. The P.A. had gone out, and it didn’t stop ’em a bit. The singer of course couldn’t sing, but the show went on, and Bigley is pantomiming and doing this crazy absurdist theater to this wall of dissonant noise, in front of about 20 people with their jaws all dropped. I thought he was some kind of bent genius.
I had just done a really successful record-release party for the Fastbacks at Roscoe Louie, the art gallery that my wife and I ran, and Bigley approached me and said, “We need some help.” And it was serendipitous, because at that particular point we had made the decision to close Roscoe Louie.
TOM PRICE Larry was maybe 25, which when you’re 18 is a massive difference. What was amazing about him is that he never cared about money. He’d get a thousand people crammed into some tiny space, and he never cared whether he made any money or not. He just likes creating a scene, I guess.
LARRY REID I became their formal manager, and at some point I started taking 10 percent of nothing. What we primarily did was save all the money for recording. Later, after Robin left, we got into a 16-track studio called Crow, with a guy named John Nelson, and we recorded some great stuff there and had a long relationship with them. The U-Men put out an EP in 1984 on Bombshelter, which was nominally Bruce Pavitt.
CLAUDIA GEHRKE (the Vogue club booker) Larry Reid? Larry Greed, as we always called him. I remember at one U-Men show he goes, “I’m going to sit across from you with a clicker and count how many people come in to make sure you don’t rip me off,” and I said, “You go right ahead.” We got to the end of it, and I’d taken in more money than he was expecting. He’d been drinking beers while clicking. I was like, “See? I don’t know why you had to play me like that.”
LARRY REID I would get away with murder. We pushed it to the limit, but their shows never got shut down. I remember one show counterfeiting an occupancy permit for the fire department. You know—this is before computers—photocopy it, use some Wite-Out, type in all manner of misinformation, photocopy it another three or four times. Wad it up and stuff it in an envelope, and when the fire department showed up, it’s like, “Here it is.” Well, they know it’s not right, but they can’t prove it.
We had a show at the Meatlockers—it was exactly what it sounds like—and had a complete bar setup in a freight elevator, so when the cops did show up, we just raised the freight elevator up, shut the doors, and, “What bar? There’s no bar here.”
In fairly short order, the U-Men built up an audience. I started ’em out opening on three-band bills and pretty soon they’re in the second slot and then they’re headlining. Probably the turning point was the last show that the Blackouts played here before they moved to Boston; the U-Men were the second on that bill. And it was a big show. The Blackouts were the band at that time—they opened for all the touring bands. They were really rhythm-heavy; they had a sax. You can’t write the history of grunge without kudos to the Blackouts. The U-Men get a lot of credit as being the proto-
grunge band, but the Blackouts leaving put the U-Men on the top of a very small heap.
MARK ARM In the ’70s to mid-’80s, people didn’t stick around Seattle if they were tryin’ to get somewhere. Duff McKagan went to L.A. The Blackouts moved to Boston. The guys in the Tupperwares moved to L.A. and formed the Screamers.
A lot of touring bands totally skipped Portland and Seattle because it was 14 hours north of San Francisco and 32 hours west of Minneapolis. People in the Northwest had to make up their own entertainment.
JACK ENDINO (producer; Skin Yard guitarist; Dawn Anderson’s ex-husband) Nobody thought there was any chance of having any success, so no decisions were made with that in mind. People made records entirely to please themselves because there was nobody else to please, there was no one paying attention to Seattle. It was like a little, isolated germ culture.
ROBIN BUCHAN The first time I broke up with Tom, I was struggling with a lot of emotional issues and I wasn’t experienced enough to realize that there wasn’t a problem with the relationship, there was a problem with me. The second time, we were starting to grow apart musically. I didn’t really like the nascent grunge scene very much. It’s just not my style. I was getting more into Siouxsie and the Banshees and Magazine.
Also, I was really tired of being so fuckin’ poor. Tom and I were sharing this moldy, leaky basement apartment on frat row, which was a horrible place to live if you’re a punk rocker. So I broke up with him and left the band at the same time. I sold everything and disappeared to Europe.
TOM PRICE Robbie was still in the band after she and I broke up; I think she left more because she wanted a lifestyle change. She wanted to go back and graduate high school and go to college. It took a while to find our new bass player, Jim Tillman, who was actually the ex-boyfriend of my girlfriend at the time, Kim Stratton.
