by Mark Yarm
JIM TILLMAN I was still friendly with Kim, and she had suggested to Tom that they talk to me. I had been playing guitar for a band called the Horrible Truth, and we kinda petered out. When I practiced with the U-Men it was the first time I picked up a bass. The band was really cool. One song might be kind of swampy, another one would be full-on rockabilly with a twist, and something else would be really moody and dark.
TOM PRICE Jim was a great musician, which was a huge turning point. It encouraged the rest of us to get it together and start playing more real music.
We forced Jim to do a makeover. He had long hair and glasses, and we made him get contacts and cut his hair. At that point, our look was kind of a Cramps rip-off: big, scraggly hair, just all kinds of garbage tied around your neck, vests, no shirts, studded belts, steel-toed boots. Really cracks me up when I look at pictures of myself back in those days because, oh man, I looked almost too skinny to support all that hair.
LARRY REID We opened the Graven Image Gallery about eight months after Roscoe Louie closed. Roscoe Louie was a visual-art space that had some music and performance elements, while Graven Image was exactly the opposite—it was more to provide a rehearsal space for the U-Men.
TOM PRICE Upstairs, Larry was trying to pass the Graven Image off as a for-real art gallery. It was all clean and brightly lit up there, and then you’d go down the stairs at the back to the basement, and it was pretty much a dungeon. Yeah, total firetrap.
TRACEY ROWLAND Did Larry tell you about the time he got arrested for posing a “significant menace to human life” or something? About nine months after we opened, the fire department showed up and took note of the fact that there were way too many people in the basement. We were a block and a half away from the fire department—it surprises me that it took ’em that long to figure it out.
LARRY REID One time, the Butthole Surfers ended up getting stuck in Seattle. I let them rehearse in the basement, but after a while I said, “Man, you guys gotta get outta here.” I mean, nice enough guys, but they were just underfoot and they were dusted. And on Christmas Day of 1983, I put on a show with them at Graven Image and the deal was, “I’ll give you all the money, but you have to leave.”
JIM TILLMAN The Butthole Surfers were playing so loud that one of the speaker columns actually caught fire. Everybody came, and we got them like $250 at the door so they could make their way back home to Texas.
MARK ARM The first time the Butthole Surfers came to Seattle, Gibby Haynes came out with clothespins in his hair. Later on during the set, he shook his head and they just went flying. Everyone’s like, “That was weird.” Bands were always trying to think up crazy stunts.
TOM HANSEN (the Refuzors/the Fartz guitarist; heroin dealer) There was a lot of gimmickry in the scene, but it was mostly improv because we couldn’t afford flame pots and sparklers and bombs.
On the way to a show at Danceland in ’81, the Refuzors stopped at Benson’s Grocery on the corner of Pike and Bellevue to get some beer, and there it was: There was this cat that had just been run over on the street. Its head was twisted around a little bit; its tongue was hanging out. We had this song called “Splat Goes the Cat,” so when we saw the cat, the lightbulb goes off. We put it in a cardboard box and brought it to the show.
We had this friend of ours, Jeff House, a notorious troublemaker, bring out the cat during that song and just frickin’ swing it around his head by the tail and throw it into the crowd. And it ended up getting thrown back up onstage and thrown back out and thrown over here and there. Eventually, it ended up back behind the equipment somewhere. (Laughs.) It didn’t look too messy to me, but of course it got exaggerated in the paper. They interviewed some girl who said, “I got totally splattered with blood, ehhh.”
The Humane Society was looking for us, because they thought we had killed the cat in some satanic ritual.
CHARLIE RYAN A couple of times we played at the Meatlockers, and we would not have an opening band. This is something I learned from a Refuzors show: We’d put on the poster SHOW STARTS AT 9:00. We would have kegs of beer and for a $2 or $3 admission, you could drink yourself silly. We’d have a DJ, and we would not play until midnight. We would push it until we thought that if we waited any longer, the crowd would actually be passed out on the ground. At this point, people thought they saw God that night.
DAVE DEDERER (the Presidents of the United States of America “guitbassist”/singer) I’ll never forget seeing the U-Men at the Meatlockers, a sweaty, hundred-capacity former meat locker in the industrial part of town.
Tom and Jim are plugging in, and Charlie takes three or four minutes to get ready. He takes off his vintage blazer, very deliberately, and neatly folds it up so that it doesn’t get creased, and not in a “watch me” kind of way. This was just his thing. Puts the jacket down next to him on a milk crate, takes off his hat, snaps the brim up so it doesn’t get creased, places it gently on top of his blazer, and lights a cigarette.
And then they proceed to just rip the shit out of the place.
CHARLIE RYAN We weren’t stylish from the outset. Then John and I thought, We’re goin’ onstage; we might as well look like something. The lime-green tuxes were my doing. An old family friend owned a formalwear shop, Brocklind’s, on Capitol Hill. I discovered them there, and I said, “Would you outfit four of us in these tuxes?” They were a sight. A sight. We wore those when we opened for the Cramps at the Golden Crown.
We started thinking about more and more outlandish things to do—and themes. Night of the Living U-Men was good. We handed out barf bags that said, “A registered nurse will be on hand at all times in case you’re overcome by the sheer terror of this.”
LARRY REID We also did wrestling at U-Men shows. I was the Assassin, a Mexican wrestler with a mask and body leotard. I wrestled a local punk-rock guy named Slam Hate.
CHAD BLAKE (a.k.a. Slam Hate; concertgoer; posterer) Larry was a scrawny little guy, and I was a beefy kind of guy, so he was a little scared at times. I would get a little out of control, basically.
LARRY REID He’d smash a breakaway bottle over my head. And then he’d go off script and start jabbing me with it. Yeah, it cut me. Was I bleeding? Hell, yes!
TOM PRICE Some of the stuff John would do—you know, he’d show up wearing hip waders and a Speedo. Sometimes he’d wind up underneath the stage curled up in a ball just screaming. I think that was part of our appeal.
LARRY REID They were strapping, handsome young men, and there were lots of girls. As the result of all the girls coming, the boys would come. Later, I experienced that same phenomenon myself with Nirvana. Like, “Let’s go see Nirvana and look at the girls!”
NILS BERNSTEIN (Sub Pop Records publicist) The U-Men were all good-looking, in very different ways: Jim was young, very beautiful, perfect skin. Tom’s just a very handsome man, very cool. Charlie’s kinda mod, and girls love mods, especially then. And then John was just larger-than-life, kinda mysterious. It’s funny, because people probably look at a picture of the U-Men now and they’re like, “They were the hot guys at the time?” But no question, anybody who was around then is like, “God, of course those guys were.”
CHARLIE RYAN I felt that we were really too weird to attract any kind of women. But everybody has a different experience. Tom was quite the ladies’ man—that’s what I heard for a while. John was with the same gal, Valerie, through most of it. But girls liked John because he was out there, putting it out.
KERRI HARROP As a teenage girl, it was like, Oh, my God, how can I make out with John Bigley? He has got a swagger about him that is unparalleled. One thing about Bigley is, especially after enough beers, he almost has this kind of cigar-store-Indian demeanor about him, where he’ll just size up the situation and then weigh in with, “Uh-huh. Yep. Uh-huh.” He always seemed like such a mystery.
JIM TILLMAN John was a bit cryptic and a bit brooding. There was always a sense that he was tolerating talking to you, whether it was me or somebody else. But I remember a time when we
were doing acid at Charlie’s apartment. And at one point, John and I were like, “We gotta get out of here.” And so we walked downstairs, and I remember this clear as day, it’s just bizarre—we’re in the hallway, walking toward the foyer of the apartment, and we’re just laughing hysterically. I don’t know what the hell we were talking about. I just said, “Times these days,” and he started laughing at that phrase, and he picked me up and gave me a huge bear hug. He’s a big guy. And we stumbled out on the street and started repeating, “Times these days! Times these days!” And we’re laughing. That particular phrase became lyrics in one of our songs.
So if he didn’t feel like he had to cultivate that sense of cool, I think John was a warm and caring person. My sense is that he’s a decent person who decided years ago that he had to have a big wall up. The reasoning for that I’d never be able to say, but I might hazard a guess that it’s because, I think, he was adopted.
JOHN BIGLEY I grew up knowing. I’m sure it did affect me, not knowing your dad or knowing you never will. You know, Do I look like him? I’m so used to it, I don’t really think about it too terribly much. That could have fueled my trip a little differently than someone else.
DANIEL HOUSE (Skin Yard/10 Minute Warning bassist; C/Z Records owner) There was just something about John Bigley, like you never knew what was gonna happen. Even if nothing happened, there was just that slight glimmer of insanity. Something I loved was that he went to the DMV to get his license one year and had makeup lines around his eyes and at the ends of his mouth. They actually took his picture that way! So for many years he looked like a demented, evil clown on his driver’s license.
JOHN BIGLEY I had a lot of personal issues that would have probably fueled some of my attitudes and behaviors. No deep, dark secrets—just big, corny, Reagan era, state-of-the-world, teen angst, existential stuff. The band was a big deal. It wasn’t a yahoo-let’s-have-fun-TGIF-rock-and-roll experience for me. I was really uncomfortable in front of people, so it was move around or break shit or lash out. It was very intense.
Every show, that was the real me.
BUZZ OSBORNE (a.k.a. King Buzzo; Melvins singer/guitarist) I never hipped my parents that much to what I was doing musically. But that’s okay—they had their own shit going on. They dealt with being parents with the tools that their parents had given them, which was none. My father was born in a West Virginia hovel with no power or running water, and his father was a coal miner. My grandfather left home when he was 12 years old because his father couldn’t feed him anymore. He was a hobo. My mom was 15 years old when she had me. My parents never would have fucking gotten married if it wasn’t for that.
My parents did exceptionally well with what they had, which was nothing, and their parents had nothing, they came from nowhere. That’s the way that lots of families are: death and destruction and every bad thing that you can imagine.
I have a distrust of humanity. I lost my faith in all those kinds of things a long time ago, probably as a teenager. But that’s okay. I understand I’m not normal. I’m just a weirdo walking around like Bozo the Clown.
MATT LUKIN (Melvins/Mudhoney bassist) I was born in Aberdeen, but I grew up in Montesano. It was pretty redneckish and just simpleminded.
BUZZ OSBORNE I was born in a town called Morton, Washington, which is approximately an hour and a half from Aberdeen and Montesano. Middle of nowhere. My parents were poor people, lower-middle-class at best. My dad worked in the timber industry.
When I was about 12, we moved to Montesano. Around then, I started buying Creem magazine. This was about ’76, ’77. I got interested in the Sex Pistols solely because of the way they looked in those magazines. At the same time, I was getting into David Bowie.
MIKE DILLARD (Melvins drummer) I was a sophomore when I met Buzz. He was a year ahead of me in school. I can distinctly remember being in his bedroom. He had this big console stereo system that his mom and dad had given him, and he put the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks on the turntable. At that time, he’d already completely worn the record out—it was all scratched and staticky and popping. I was going, “Oh, my God, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard!”
MATT LUKIN I met Buzz in high school. He was just this freaky guy that played guitar. He was different from everybody else as far as his attitude—and his hair. He had a big Afro. Another good friend of mine that I knew since first or third grade, this guy Mike Dillard, just happened to be friends with Buzz, and they’d get together and jam. Mike had a drum set, Buzz had a guitar, and then Dillard’s cousin had a bass. They tried to recruit me as a second guitar player ’cause I had a Les Paul and a guitar amp. But Dillard’s cousin didn’t show up very often, so they let me play bass.
BUZZ OSBORNE Matt Lukin had a guitar at school, which was an oddity. He was from certainly more of the jock element. And more established. I was an outsider, because I moved there when I was in seventh grade. You gotta understand, you’re going to school with kids whose parents went to school together, who dated each other, who give each other jobs. You can just forget it, you know? I might as well have been from fucking Mars.
MIKE DILLARD Buzz and I both worked at the Thriftway. We bagged groceries and brought ’em out to the cars for the old ladies. We’d always close up the store at night, and we’d have to take these big boxes of garbage out back. So we’d toss a couple cases of beer in the boxes, cover them up with garbage, and throw them in the dumpster. When we got off, we’d drive around back, grab the beer out of the dumpster, and take off.
When we started out, we were playing some Who covers and some Hendrix covers and Cream, a bunch of classic-rock stuff. I remember Lukin coming to Buzz and me about two weeks after he started jamming with us. He goes, “Holy shit, you guys are insane! I’ve smoked more pot and drank more booze in the last two weeks than I have my entire life!” We were probably responsible for him going down the road of drugs and alcohol.
BUZZ OSBORNE Alcohol was really amazing. In a hopeless situation, it makes you feel like you’ve got something to live for. If I’d have been left there and hadn’t discovered music, I’d have blown my brains out. No doubt. I would have killed somebody or killed myself. But I stopped drinking in the ’80s. I thought it was better for me and everybody around me if I didn’t do it. When I drank, I’d break out in felonies or break out in bandages, one of the two.
TIM HAYES (Fallout Records store owner) I was working at a chain record store called DJ Sound City back in Aberdeen, at the Wishkah Mall. I was about as fringy as you could get—I had a pompadour at the time. Cats would come in and buy their Doobie Brothers or Styx or Rush or Skynyrd. A lot of bad music. Buzz and Matt would come in and hang out, and I’d turn ’em on: “Hey, man, you gotta check out this Cramps record or this Black Flag record.” One day they came in and said they’d started a band.
BUZZ OSBORNE We named the band after this guy who worked at the Thriftway. Melvin was a fucking asshole. He was an adult and was in a position to give you orders. He was the kind of guy who would yell at you in front of somebody else to try to impress them. Horseshit. We wanted to call ourselves that because it sounded stupid. We liked the inside joke.
MIKE DILLARD Right behind the Thriftway, there was a park-and-ride place where you could park your car and catch the bus. We found this outdoor plug from a building next to the parking lot. We just drug a big extension cord over there and plugged all the amps and stuff in and set up at about seven o’clock on a Saturday night.
KURT COBAIN (late Nirvana singer/guitarist; Courtney Love’s husband; Frances Bean Cobain’s father; from his journals) I remember hanging out at Montesano, Washington’s Thriftway, when this short-haired employee box-boy who kinda looked like the guy in Air Supply handed me a flyer that read: “The Them Festival. Tomorrow night in the parking lot behind Thriftway. Free live rock music.”
Montesano, Washington, a place not accustomed to having live rock acts in their little village. A population of a few thousand loggers and their subservient wiv
es. I showed up with stoner friends in a van.… There stood the Air Supply box-boy holding a Les Paul with a picture from a magazine of Kool Cigarettes laminated on it, a mechanic redheaded biker boy, and that tall Lukin guy …
They played faster than I ever imagined music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden records could provide. This was what I was looking for.
BUZZ OSBORNE We did a bunch of stuff like that; it wasn’t really a show. What I consider our first show was in Olympia, Washington. That was in ’84 at a place called the Tropicana. We practiced our heads off for a long time, and we played all original material. A few weeks later, we played a show there with the Fastbacks, and all the kids who came up to see us play the first show came up to see us play again. So at that moment was when I knew, Okay, we did it. We pulled it off.
KURT BLOCH The Melvins were unlike any other band. They had this absurd sound, which was just pummeling, but at the same time it wasn’t like hardcore where you’re telling everyone how much you hate your parents and school and stuff like that. The lyrics didn’t make any literal sort of sense, but they’re yelling them like they mean them. They were very pretentious but without any pretense. They didn’t have that whole antigovernment and “kill rock stars” attitude.
DONNA DRESCH (Screaming Trees bassist; Team Dresch guitarist/bassist; Chainsaw Records founder) The Melvins were the guys that would come to our parties in Olympia and be crazy obnoxious and kick holes in the walls. I totally remember that sinking feeling you got when they came into your house. Still, you’d go to every one of their shows and know every single weird word that they made up and just mosh your head off.
