by Mark Yarm
MIKE DILLARD It was a big step to actually leave town and go play somewhere. We start hanging out with this band March of Crimes. We’d go up there and stay overnight at their place. Ben Shepherd, who was in Soundgarden later, was the guitarist. And this kid named Munkeyseeker was the singer. They lived on Bainbridge Island; they were closer to the scene, so they were hooking shows up for us.
JONATHAN EVISON (a.k.a. Munkeyseeker; March of Crimes singer) We quickly befriended the Melvins and stopped by to stay with them in Montesano. Just got totally baked in their practice space. They played for us and we were like, “Unhh!” It took the air out of us, they were so fast and so tight. We were rolling on the floor, stoned out of our wits, just like, “Oh, my God!” I told somebody about them at the Grey Door, where they used to pay us in pot—we got an eighth of weed for a show—and that was the first place they played in Seattle.
BUZZ OSBORNE We did a lot of fun shows there. We were the last band to play the Grey Door when the lease was up. When we were done playing, the owner handed out half a dozen sledgehammers, and we just fucking destroyed the place.
MATT LUKIN Dillard got kicked out a year or two after we were out of high school. He had a girlfriend that was your typical bitch of a girlfriend: “You don’t spend enough time with me, blah blah blah.” He was like, “I can’t practice. I’m with my girlfriend. I gotta go to a movie.” What the fuck is that?
Buzz had me tell Dillard, “Buzz is quitting the band. He’s going to start another band with Krist Novoselic and somebody else, this guy Crover. He might call one of us if that doesn’t work.” Well, apparently, Novoselic didn’t work out on bass, so he calls me back. And he didn’t call Dillard back. That was his spineless way of kicking people out of the band so he didn’t have to face them. He made me do the dirty work.
BUZZ OSBORNE We went and found another drummer and just never talked about it. That might have been a mistake on my part, but when you’re passionately involved in what you’re doing, you don’t always make the right decisions.
MIKE DILLARD I had a girlfriend, and I’m sure my lack of interest in the band was showing. If I remember right, it was Buzz goin’, “I’m not gonna do this anymore. I’m done.” And I remember thinking, Fine with me, I didn’t really want to do it anymore, anyway. I think at that point they’d already gotten things squared away with Crover. It was no big deal. And they couldn’t have found anybody better than Crover. He’s the bee’s knees, man.
BUZZ OSBORNE I met Krist Novoselic through a friend of mine who was thrown out of the Aberdeen public school system for lighting up a pipe bomb in the school, this guy named Bill Hull. At the time he was known as the Aberdeen Bomber. And I became friends with him when he came to my school. I thought Bill was exceptionally intelligent, an underachiever with a high degree of ability. Unrecognized genius, certainly. He was working at a Taco Bell in Aberdeen with Krist. Bill had told me that Krist played guitar.
MATT LUKIN Me and Buzz stopped by the Taco Bell. And as we’re saying hi to Bill, there’s this tall freaky guy in the back, singing along to Muzak Christmas carols—it was right around Christmastime. We’re like, “What’s up with the freak back there?” “Oh, that’s my friend, Krist.”
BUZZ OSBORNE I played Krist some music, and he was one of the few people who actually got it.
KRIST NOVOSELIC (Nirvana bassist; Shelli Novoselic’s ex-husband) It was like a revelation. It changed my whole approach to life. Buzz was the preacher, and his gospel was punk rock.
MATT LUKIN After a while, we were like, “We need to find another drummer. Do you know anybody?” So Krist took us around and introduced us to a couple of friends of his who played drums.
Actually, the first guy he introduced us to was Aaron Burckhard—later he played drums for Nirvana—and within two minutes of meeting him, we realized, That guy isn’t going to work out. It was just his personality. And what was going on in the back house—there were a bunch of “Hey, dude!”s partying: “Hey, dude!” Plus, he had a mustache. Having a big, bushy Tom Selleck mustache just meant you were trying to be something you weren’t.
BUZZ OSBORNE What I wanted was a heavy-metal drummer. I wanted somebody who was going to push the band beyond belief. Like a freight train, a combination of Keith Moon and the guy from Iron Maiden.
MATT LUKIN Then Krist took us over to meet Dale. He was just some freaky high school kid who was a great drummer. He looked like a long-haired metal dude.
DALE CROVER (Melvins/Nirvana drummer) Before the Melvins, I played in a band called Rampage. Even though they liked other rock stuff that I liked, it was kind of like, “Oh, we have to play this Eddie Money song. We have to play ballads.”
Rampage got this opportunity to play on a Christmas benefit radio program for this group of mentally handicapped adults called the Sunshine Kids. So we go down there, at the Elks Hall in downtown Aberdeen, and this band’s already playing. They were the Melvins. The other guys in my band were going, “What the fuck is this shit?” And I was like, “I don’t know, it’s kind of cool. And they’re playing their own songs.” They played super-fast, they’re loud as shit, and they just blasted one song into another.
BUZZ OSBORNE I had seen Crover play in a cover band—Loverboy stuff, crap, garbage—and I thought that he was a good drummer. When Krist mentioned him, I went, “Oh, yeah,” so we went to talk to him. When Crover joined the band, he was a do-nothing stiff. I think he quit high school after doing 11th grade for the second time.
DALE CROVER The guidance counselor said, “It looks like you know what you want to do already.” Basically I’d started touring with the Melvins—we’d been doing shows on weekends. He was like, “My advice is to drop out, because you’re gone all the time, so you’re just going to fail anyway.”
DAN PETERS (Mudhoney/Nirvana/Screaming Trees/Feast/Bundle of Hiss drummer) Dale was this kid with a furry-lined Levi’s jacket and long scraggly hair. His drum sets were always cobbled together with these odd-shaped and -sized drums. Everything was a different make and model, held together with baling wire. He’d just pound the shit out of the skins.
MATT LUKIN Dale was really into speed metal at the time. Which was kind of funny, in the sense that the Melvins were slowing down: “Everyone’s playing a hundred miles an hour, let’s slow things down. Freak people out.”
DALE CROVER The idea to slow down came pretty much from Black Flag’s My War, side two. Side two of that record is all of these slow songs, which their fanbase didn’t like because they wanted faster stuff to mosh to.
BUZZ OSBORNE We certainly liked My War, but I don’t know if it’s the one that made us decide to slow down. I actually saw Black Flag on that same tour with this band Saccharine Trust, and they were every bit as slow, and weirder. They were hugely influential as far as atmosphere.
We slowed down, but I always thought that was just another thing that we were doing. We always played fast—always. People get hung up on us playing slow. Whenever I see journalists writing “sludgecore … Melvins”—yeah, that’s true, if you listen to about 20 percent of our stuff. That means that they don’t have any concept of what we’re really doing.
DALE CROVER I’d also played with this guitar player named Larry Kallenbach in a band called Special Forces. He had an influence on the Melvins for sure, because he taught Buzz how to tune down to D. That was the Black Sabbath trick. “Into the Void” was tuned down to D.
JEFF GILBERT (journalist; KZOK DJ; concert organizer) Seattle isn’t a glamorous town at all. It was pretty pathetic. Very depressing. That’s where this music came out of. I’ve made this comment before: Grunge isn’t a music style. It’s complaining set to a drop D tuning.
DAN RAYMOND (Melvins “hanger-on”) Buzz and I went to junior high and high school together. I went off to college, and when I came back on break, he was playing really slowed down. Before I actually heard it, I asked him, “What are you doing now that’s different?” He said, “I call it ‘twisted Sabbath.’ ”
TRACY SIM
MONS (a.k.a. T-Man; Blood Circus bassist) I went and saw the Melvins at this little warehouse in the Fremont area in Seattle and was totally blown away. I was like, Oh, my God, that’s the heaviest music I’ve ever heard. I gotta tell you, that really influenced Blood Circus a lot. Melvins were the band that inspired the grunge sound more than anybody.
MATT LUKIN Dale was dealing weed for a while in $5 grams. It got to the point where we had to lock the door to the practice room, because every five minutes someone would show up to buy weed from Dale.
DALE CROVER Dealing pot? I will not confirm or deny that. No, I did not sell anybody pot from my parents’ house—I’ll put it that way. But there probably was some kind of pot smoking going on on my back porch at some point. We were kids.
Whoever says we called the people who hung out with us the “Cling-Ons” is completely full of shit, because I never heard anybody described as Cling-Ons.
BUZZ OSBORNE I had nothing to do with those people, other than the fact that they were hanging out at Crover’s parents’ house, in Aberdeen. Aberdeen is a shithole. I didn’t like any of these people. They were just a bunch of redneck fucking dumbass kids with this white-trash arrogance. Have you seen that Larry Clark photo book Tulsa? That’s a good example of it. They were pot-smoking, alcoholic, thieving little bastards.
We were actually friends with Krist and Kurt. They understood what we were doing, liked what we were doing. We trusted Krist right away, went on all kinds of adventures with Krist. Went into Seattle and freaked out. It wasn’t so much making trouble as discovering the world, like Mickey Mantle showing up in New York City for the first time.
MATT LUKIN I knew Cobain from junior high. When we were 14, 15 we were on the same baseball team in Babe Ruth. Sat on the bench. He was a quiet, skinny guy. We talked about our favorite rock bands. Didn’t pay attention to baseball. At the time, we were both really into Cheap Trick.
BUZZ OSBORNE I was about 12 when I met Kurt. I really started to know him when we were in an art class together in school. He was a really good artist, so he would do things like draw a picture of the teacher with his head cut off, and it looked exactly like the teacher, or draw a picture of some girl getting raped, and it was a girl from the class. Eighth-grade bullshit. Lynchings, dark humor. I still like that stuff.
MATT LUKIN I remember not seeing Kurt for a few years, and one day he showed up at a Melvins practice with a guy who lived next door. They were both really drunk at the time. We were just playing Clash covers and stuff upstairs in Dillard’s garage. I remember him going off: “Whoa, you guys were great!” He just started hanging around, and we started seeing more of him.
BUZZ OSBORNE One time, Kurt got popped by the cops, but the rest of us got away, luckily. Me, him, and Lukin and I don’t know who else were walking around, spray-painting stupid shit, my favorite being FUCK YOU in big letters. I think I spray-painted GOD IS GAY or something. We were always getting rousted by the cops one way or another. But that was the only time that one of us actually went to jail. Who bailed Kurt out? Not me. If I went down there, I would have been put in the same jail as him. Fuck that, he was on his own.
DALE CROVER Is the story that Kurt slept on my porch in a cardboard box true? My mom gets all bent out of shape about that for some reason: “He slept on my porch, and I didn’t even know about it?!” You know what, he probably slept on the porch when he was drunk once, and that was it.
All that stuff has just been so overstated, but nobody ever wants to know the truth. Like the stories that are written about Kurt sleeping under the bridge. It’s just not true! I know that he did once, but it’s not like he said, that he spent hours and days down there, becoming this tortured artist. That’s the biggest myth, right there: Kurt Cobain, the tortured artist. People don’t realize that guy was a funny motherfucker.
MATT LUKIN Yeah, Kurt did try out for the Melvins, and it fuckin’ sounded great! And a couple of days later, I was asking Buzz, “Hey, what’s up? That sounded great when Cobain was playing with us.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to work.”
DALE CROVER We thought about having Kurt in the band, but he didn’t have any gear. It was like, “How’s he going to play if he doesn’t have an amp?” It’s not like he passed or failed, it was just that he didn’t have any money and didn’t have his shit together.
BUZZ OSBORNE As far as Kurt trying out for us, that’s not true, absolutely not. We jammed with him on numerous occasions, same with Krist. We never tried anyone out for the band, ever. I’ve always just thought of somebody who we wanted to play with and made that decision long before we tried it.
SLIM MOON (Earth guitarist; solo artist; Kill Rock Stars label founder) Krist Novoselic had a zebra-striped van that he drove the Melvins to their shows in. He was really tall and always really drunk. There was one party where he set off the fire extinguisher and another where he started dancing on top of a table and the entire table collapsed. Yeah, that was Krist in those days. He reminded me of Shaggy from Scooby Doo.
MATT LUKIN I don’t know if I’d say Krist was a roadie, but we started using his van, and he’d drive with us to Seattle and help load our equipment. So, yeah, I guess he was a roadie. Cobain took that role after a while.
BUZZ OSBORNE We never had any roadies—that’s bullshit. They were just friends. Sometimes Krist would drive us places. I always laugh at that: Kurt Cobain was our roadie. Look at him—he could barely lift himself out of bed. A roadie? For what, a flea circus?
BEN SHEPHERD (March of Crimes guitarist; Soundgarden bassist; Hater singer/guitarist) The first time I met Andy Wood? It was on the way to the first March of Crimes house-party gig, in Bainbridge. There was a car wreck right in front of me and our bass player. We pulled over, and these kids we knew in one car had come down the hill and nailed this other car. Everyone involved was headed to the same party.
Everybody was fine. We’re all outside talking, and I look over at the other car, and I go, “Who’s in there? What’s going on?” They’re like, “Oh, that’s Landrew.”
All of the sudden, Landrew piles out of the back of the car wearing this really long kimono-type thing, and his hair is all wild. Total character.
He’d been sleeping in the car. He’s like, “Whoa. Hey, Shepherd, how are you doing?” We’d never met, but I stuck out like a motherfucker, man. He knew who I was.
“Hey, Landrew, how’s it going? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I was having the weirdest dream.”
DAVE REES (Malfunkshun bassist) When he was in sixth grade, Andy won a listener contest on KZOK. He got to host the radio show—it was a program called Your Mother Won’t Like It, from six to nine on a Sunday night—and he was brilliant. I remember him playing a lot of Kiss. He told stories, and he did little comedy bits. He had one Mister Rogers bit, I remember. You know, a “Can you say that?” type of thing. His brother Kevin was the show’s engineer or producer.
It was great, but I remember talking to Andy after that and he seemed a little disappointed. Because he had wanted to be a DJ, but he realized that there was no immediate feedback. There was no audience there. And that really bummed him out. He actually told me, “Well, now I’m gonna have to be a rock star.”
KEVIN WOOD (Malfunkshun guitarist; brother of Andrew and Brian Wood) I was still in high school and Andy was probably in middle school when we went to see Cheap Trick opening for Kiss. It’s at that show, after Cheap Trick played, that Andy told me he wanted to be a rock star.
REGAN HAGAR (Malfunkshun/Brad/Satchel drummer) When I was about 10 or 11—which seems crazy to me now—I saw Kiss. It was the same show Andy and Kevin were at, although we did not know each other at that point. I remember being totally blown away, and for some reason it clicked in my mind that these were people and that they were getting paid to do what I was watching.
KEVIN WOOD We were a pretty close-knit family because we moved around a lot. We moved to Bainbridge Island from San Antonio, Texas, around ’76, when I was about 14. Bain
bridge is kind of a bedroom community for Seattle. Back then, it was rural and there were more eclectic-type people there—more alternative-lifestyle mentalities. My parents weren’t hippies, but my mom was more open-minded about vegetarianism and self-awareness and enjoying the country. My dad was in the military—he was a recruiter in Seattle—but he was a very open-minded guy. I’m the oldest. I’ve got a brother, Brian, who’s a year younger than me. And Andy, who’s four years younger than me.
ROBERT SCOTT CRANE (Soundhouse Recording Studio owner; Michelle Ahern’s ex-husband; son of Hogan’s Heroes cast member Sigrid Valdis and murdered Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane) My parents were well-known actors, and when my father passed away, there was a lot of media interest in our family, so we moved from L.A. to Bainbridge Island to go somewhere where nobody knew who we were. Of course, people found out really quickly who we were. It was a real gossip-fest on that island.
Very shortly after moving there, while riding the school bus, was when I met Andy. I was probably in eighth grade and he was maybe in ninth. I noticed him on the bus being a total class clown, commanding a lot of attention. We got off at the same bus stop, and it was, “Oh, you live here? I live here.” Somehow pot came up, and three seconds later, we were in the woods across the street from our house smoking.
KEVIN WOOD I think Andy was still in elementary school when he started smoking pot. I probably started drinking when I was about 10, but not like every day.
ROBERT SCOTT CRANE Andy and I really bonded in that when we smoked pot, we liked to obliterate ourselves with it. It was insane how much pot Andy could smoke. Looking back now, he was really just trying to block things out. Which is the same thing I was trying to do.
