Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  Bainbridge was a weird place because there were quite a few kids like this, in that they didn’t take a half a hit of acid or a hit of acid—they took eight hits of acid. It’s wasn’t like, “Let’s smoke a joint and sit on the beach,” it was, “Let’s make it so we literally don’t remember our own names.”

  KEVIN WOOD In 1980, we were toying around with the idea of putting something together, and we had invited this kid Dave Hunt to come over and drum, without realizing it was Easter Sunday. We were supposed to go out to dinner with our grandparents for Easter, but we stayed home and formed a band instead.

  The band was called Report Malfunction at first. I was working in a restaurant, and there was a sign above the dishwasher that said REPORT MALFUNCTION, and I thought that’d be a cool band name. I came up with the image of a guy on a phone with a mushroom-cloud explosion behind him, and he was reporting the malfunction. One thing me and my brothers always shared was a dark sense of humor. The name got trimmed down immediately to Malfunction, and then the different spelling came about.

  DAVE REES I was best friends with Brian Wood, the middle Wood brother, in high school. So the Woods were starting a band, but they didn’t have a bass or a bass player. One of my buddies had a bass and a bass amp, so I brought it over to their house and they said, “Great, you’re our bass player.” I had never even played before.

  REGAN HAGAR I grew up in Seattle in a neighborhood called Ravenna, and then in eighth grade we moved to Bainbridge. I was super-upset about leaving the city. So I’d save my lunch money Monday through Friday, and use it to take the ferry to Seattle. I got a job at the Showbox when I was probably 14. We didn’t get paid money, but we—there was a group of kids between 14 and 19—cleaned up and hung posters and tore tickets and behaved as security during the shows. Blaine Cook, who was in the band the Fartz, worked there.

  BLAINE COOK (the Fartz/10 Minute Warning/the Accüsed singer) We did security, cleaned up, hung flyers, worked the door. We didn’t get paid, but you got to hang out and see the shows. Regan and I had a bit of a side business where we let people into sold-out shows, and the money would find its way into our pockets.

  REGAN HAGAR I think all the Fartz worked there. Also, Kyle Nixon, who was the singer of the band Solger, worked there. Duff McKagan was just another kid around. John Bigley was at the Showbox with us at the beginning. Bigley goes all the way back.

  JOHN BIGLEY I was 18 when I started working at the Showbox, before it became official—back then it was a rental place, the Talmud Torah, a Jewish bingo hall. The best job there, which I started getting quite a bit, was standing with a flashlight by the backstage area where the equipment would be set up, where you could just sit and watch everybody onstage. And back then it was such a treat. Paul Weller, Captain Beefheart, James Brown—they were doing shows like that.

  I’d come home at five, six in the morning, go to sleep, and wake up two hours after class. Oops. Hence, crash and burn at school. I got a 0.00 my first two semesters at the University of Washington and stopped.

  The area around the Showbox then was dipping into old Seattle. Extremely pre-Microsoft.

  MARK ARM Seattle was a lot sleazier then, in all the best possible ways. You could go down to Third Avenue, and there’d be storefronts with women in lingerie in them. There was no actual prostitution going on there. They were kind of skirting the law, suckering people in—drunk sailors and whatnot—trying to separate them from their money.

  JOHN BIGLEY There were a lot of sailors coming in from Bremerton, with the white bell bottoms. And there were long-haired street-guy hustler drug-dealer types dukin’ it out with the sailors. And then the punk-rock weirdos dukin’ it out with the bikers at the Indian bar—they were called Indian bars, open at six in the morning. Right there was probably as rough as Seattle was. I was a lover not a fighter, but you’d have to learn techniques like the throw-the-garbage-can-in-the-person’s-face trick.

  REGAN HAGAR Most of the fights I remember were between punks and what we called Donut Holers. Only a parking lot separated the Showbox and this donut store that stayed open late, where all the homeless kids who were prostitutes and thieves would be.

  DAWN ANDERSON (journalist; Backlash zine publisher; Jack Endino’s ex-wife) I spent a lot of time at the Showbox. I was a suburban girl with Farrah Fawcett hair. To me, it was this place where you could go and check out all the freaks and weirdos. There was a pornographic bookstore next door, and the guy who owned it used to go outside and glower at these punk rockers that were lining up and ruining his neighborhood.

  REGAN HAGAR I sort of met Andy at the Showbox. He and Kevin were in line for Devo, I think. We acknowledged each other, like, You look familiar to me from the halls of our eighth-grade school, Commodore.

  Andy approached me at school the following day and said, “I have a band. Are you interested in playing?” And I said, “Sure, let’s do it.” This guy Dave Hunt was quitting. We would practice in Andy’s parents’ basement or my mother’s garage. We would get pushed from house to house. I remember getting letters in my mother’s mailbox asking us to make it stop because we sucked. I’ve kept the letters—they’re pretty great.

  KEVIN WOOD Andy and Regan were like Laurel and Hardy. It was always lots of smiles, lots of joking. Regan was more of a straight man; Andy was the funny guy.

  JONATHAN EVISON The Woods lived on Miller Road, which is two blocks from the road that I grew up on. Andy I knew before punk rock; we were kind of the resident Elton John freaks. Andy could tease, he could be a pain in people’s asses, but there was always a playful good nature under it. He just had genuine goodwill status wherever he went.

  DAVE REES Dave Hunt lived in a trailer in the woods on Bainbridge and he had a home CB unit. Andy would get on that thing, and he had these handles, like Ratchet Jaw Penis Snatcher. And he had these truckers laughin’ their asses off to the point where one of them said, “Hey, tone it down or I’m gonna drive off the road.”

  He made you laugh all the time, in any forum. I loved goin’ over to the Woods’ house. There was this crazy energy there—of music, of fun.

  ROBERT SCOTT CRANE There was kind of a cold, dark feeling in that house. The story that I know is that Kevin would often get into physical conflicts with his father and his brother Brian, trying to protect Andy, the baby of the family. Andy couldn’t physically defend himself, so he tried to be the court jester. And I remember the final straw for their mom, Toni, leaving the house when they were my neighbors was that Brian came home drunk, and she told Brian that he either had to stop drinking or cut his hair. So he came back a few hours later drunk and bald. And she moved out. And disappeared for I think a couple of months.

  DAVE REES There was tension. I was there when there was infighting amongst the Wood family that wasn’t pleasant. But, like I said, I loved goin’ over there. Mr. Wood’s stereo system was the loudest thing I’d ever heard; they’d crank Judas Priest and Kiss and Sabbath at concert volume.

  And their parents supported and encouraged their music. His folks took Andy and my brother to meet Van Halen as they went into the radio station in town, KISW. My brother got Eddie Van Halen’s autograph, and Andy went right to David Lee Roth—David Lee Roth and Freddie Mercury were huge influences on him.

  Everyone else was asking for autographs, and Andy said to David Lee Roth, “I just wanna shake your hand.” David Lee Roth shook his hand and said, “I’m on a schedule, son.” Andy loved it.

  REGAN HAGAR During our high school years, the Woods probably switched houses just about every year, which was good for the band because we could move the noise around. Seems like both our houses were always just for us, because our parents were always working. Andy’s parents got separated around the time we were finishing high school. It started with a separation, followed by divorce. And that was a super-bummer for Andy.

  DAVE REES Our first show was on a stage built on the side of a hill with strawberry fields around it. Andy named it the Strawberry Jam. When we were driving
there, I had all the equipment loaded in my 1970 Buick Estate wagon, and there wasn’t enough room for the guys in the band. So Andy and Regan rode on the luggage rack up top. And when we get there, Andy’s long hair was gone. Regan had shaved Andy’s head on the way there. There always had to be something going on.

  At that show, Andy wore a shirt with a swastika with a circle around it and the red line through it. It was more antihate; he hadn’t figured out Love Rock yet. But he was always thinking that way. Even then, his marketing ability was just amazing. When you walked off the ferry boat from Bainbridge into Seattle, there were these big metal panels overhead, and on every panel Andy wrote a saying. At the end, it came to the punch line: ROCK AND ROLL’S ONLY CHANCE: MALFUNKSHUN.

  That was my one official show with Malfunkshun. I went to Seattle to go to college, and when I came back, Andy was playing my bass and he was quite a bit better than me. I ended up taking Dave Hunt and this other friend of ours and forming a band called Skindiver. So it was amicable. Skindiver played shows with Malfunkshun, but these guys did not compete with my band or with any other local band. They were going right after Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. They had these wild conceptual songs. And the characters that they developed …

  REGAN HAGAR Andy had the band on paper. He had notebooks full of drawings, descriptions, histories, all made up. In the beginning, my character was Thundar. My last name’s Hagar, I’m Nordic. I have this love of Vikings, and I was thunderous. Andy got his name, Landrew the Love God, from an episode of Star Trek—there was a character who spread love and was this omnipresent love person. Kevin’s identity was a little built by Andy, as well: Kevin Stein, like he was this dead guy.

  KEVIN WOOD I originally was calling myself Ded Springsteen, as a protest against Bruce Springsteen, because he was so dorky and stupid. And then I changed into Kevin Stein. No, not like Frankenstein. I just wanted to have a different last name. Actually, the Stein thing came from a kid who was really popular in high school when we lived down in Texas. It was a 70 percent Chicano high school. This guy Stein drove a convertible; he always had a girlfriend. He was white and had blond hair, but he was bigger than most of the other kids—maybe he got set back a few grades—and so all these Mexicans just worshipped this guy. They always called him by his last name: “Stein! Hey, Stein!” He was the big man on campus. So that’s why I adopted that as my last name.

  But these nicknames I generated for myself didn’t last long. It was just easier to go with my real name, because it’s what everyone knew me as.

  REGAN HAGAR Around ’81, Andy would wear a big, long choir robe, with whiteface. Nobody else back then changed for the stage. It was uncool. But he went through the whole process, preshow. I only wore makeup for a short period of time—more Alice Coopery stuff, like black around my eyes with lines that came down. It was kind of a drag to deal with, and Andy was full-bore and up-front, so I didn’t need to do it later.

  Andy would have girls who would do his makeup. Girls were just all over him; they would love to come back and help him get ready.

  ROBERT SCOTT CRANE Women loved Andy. I mean, he was, fuck, maybe five-six and overweight, but he was so charming. I knew two or three of Andy’s girlfriends after he was with them. And since then, I’ve met one or two women who just randomly had a one-night stand with Andy, and they all have basically the same feeling: They’d love him. One-night stands in high school can be a bad thing, especially for the girl, but they all were like, “He was an angel. He treated me so sweet. He was so loving.”

  REGAN HAGAR When Andy was probably 15, he was rejected by a girl that he had gone out with for a while. End-of-the-world stuff for him at that time, I’m sure. I don’t know what he used to do it, but he carved her name across his chest. Not terribly deeply, but it never went away, which was a point of a little jeering 10 years later. Her name was Ruth, but when the scar settled in, it looked like it said RUSH. When you’d see it, the joke was, “Wow, you’re really into Rush.”

  DAVE REES Andy really became a character. Even in his picture in his senior annual, he’s in whiteface makeup and has a Malfunkshun quote. He was a star in his own mind already.

  REGAN HAGAR Back then, 666 was huge—black-metal stuff was going on. Andy came up with the opposite, 333: “This is going to represent our band, and we’re gonna call it Love Rock.” We had a roll of stickers that were black with a white 3 on them, and we put ’em on shit. It was a big spindle that lasted for years. It was just a Love Rock thing. Three is a magic number.

  DAMON STEWART (KISW DJ; Sony Music regional A&R scout) Andy had such a big-arena-rock-show presence. Even a little club like the Vogue, which seemed like it could barely hold a hundred people, he treated the crowd like it was a hundred thousand.

  REGAN HAGAR He’d regularly speak to the balcony—and there wouldn’t be a balcony. He’d do typical rock banter: “How you doin’ tonight?” “Let me hear ya in the balcony!” Lots of “Hello, Seattle!”s. It sounds almost too cheeky, but the way he delivered it was just great. He brought big rock to a small-punk ethic.

  KEVIN WOOD He’d mention that the band came down from Olympus to play the show. We were gods, right?

  ALEX SHUMWAY (a.k.a. Alex Vincent; Green River/Spluii Numa drummer) The first time I saw Malfunkshun was at the Metropolis. We were waiting for them to play. Regan’s behind his drum set, and Kevin’s up there with his guitar on. And all of a sudden, you hear this real heavy, grinding bass. We’re going, “Where the hell is that coming from?” We’re all looking around, and when we turned around, there was Andy walking across the bar, with a wireless on. He had on white makeup with purple eye shadow and really red lipstick, and he was wearing purple spandex pants. And he had this peacock stride. Everybody’s going, “Oh, this is fuckin’ awesome!”

  TOM PRICE The thing that always cracked me up about Malfunkshun—and the thing I loved about them—was that they would come to the end of the song and Andrew or Kevin would jump in the air to signal, Okay, the song ends here. Boom! But nobody would stop playing—the band would just keep going and going and going. Every show they did was one big, long song with a monster guitar solo all over it.

  REGAN HAGAR We would get heckled for doing guitar solos. I feel like—and of course, I probably romanticize things—Malfunkshun changed the sound of the city by putting metal into the punk, which was such a taboo for a band like the Fartz, who would never, ever have a guitar solo.

  MARK ARM I saw Malfunkshun open for Whitehouse, that neofascist industrial band, and Malfunkshun fuckin’ destroyed them. Whitehouse was a stale joke by that point: this guy in jackboots and a black leather trench coat coming through the crowd going, “I’m going to rape you!” I was like, “No, you’re not.” They weren’t the least bit threatening or real.

  It was posturing, whereas I just saw a really unhinged performance on the part of Kevin Wood, who was on his knees the whole time with his eyes rolling back in his head, just playing the craziest shit.

  JOHN BIGLEY One of the first things I remember about Andrew was him telling me, “If you’re ever on Bainbridge Island, let me know and I’ll show you my Kiss shrine.” I go, “Kiss shrine?” He was deadpan, not clowning around. “Oh, you’re not kidding.” And he starts describing this shrine: “There’s two red bongs and a signed Kiss Destroyer jacket”—and he just went on—“and I’d like you to see it.”

  No, I never saw it—they were still living at their mom’s.

  REGAN HAGAR When we moved out of our parents’ houses, Andy and I moved into a house together in West Seattle with Blaine Cook and two other guys from our circle. The place was a total shithole. There were parties, and all we ate was cereal. Because we were fresh out of our parents’ houses, and what does any kid want? Sweet cereal. We would cut the fronts off of all of the cereal boxes and cover the kitchen walls with them.

  Andy started dating these two girls called Tiger and Jane. They were kind of like a lesbian couple. They were strippers—they took their clothes off and did their bit toget
her in a club on the same street as the Showbox. I would get nervous when they were at our house because if you walked by Andy’s room and they heard you coming, they would literally come and try and grab you to bring you into their circus freak show.

  BLAINE COOK Andy was just a regular Joe around the house. If anything, he liked to spend his time playing that little handheld football game.

  REGAN HAGAR It was the Mattel Electronics football game. Our friend Paul and Andy and I had teams. Andy kept stats, and we had this thing called the World Bowl, which is like the Super Bowl, at the end of a season. My team, the Hawaiian Angels, beat his team, the Dallas Cowboys—he was always the Dallas Cowboys—and he cried.

  ERIC JOHNSON (Soundgarden/Pearl Jam tour manager) It was either during the Malfunkshun days or right after, and Stone Gossard was working at this little bakery in Pioneer Square. I was talking to Stone when Andy came in wearing a white fur coat, makeup, white gloves. His look was amazing—and this was just walking around. He came in looking like that and started talking about the Dallas Cowboys and football.

  That’s why it was hard to take anything in Seattle really seriously.

  SUSAN SILVER (Soundgarden/Alice in Chains/Screaming Trees/U-Men manager; Chris Cornell’s ex-wife) Alex Shumway and Mark Arm were, far and away, the two people who caught my attention at the Metropolis. They just spun with the most incredible, youthful, vibrant energy I had ever seen. Them stage-diving was the most beautiful dance to watch. They were so graceful and fearless. It was mesmerizing.