Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  ALEX SHUMWAY Okay, here it is—this is the embarrassing part: I was a ballet dancer. This was when I lived in Sacramento, when I was 14, 15.

  The best part of being a ballet dancer was that as a straight guy, you get the pick of the litter. I went out with two or three of the girls. After shows there would be a huge party, and everybody would get totally shitfaced; people would be smoking up and maybe do a little coke. It’s like you have to be really prim, proper, and prissy, and then it’s like, Oh, Jesus Christ, you have to let go some other way. I would give it a shot, and I would end up puking or just being like, “This isn’t good. I don’t like this.” So I went straight edge pretty early on.

  Once I got into punk more and more, I got tired of ballet. I got involved in the music scene in Seattle pretty soon after I moved there with my mother and my sister in ’82.

  STEVE TURNER (Mudhoney/Green River/Mr. Epp and the Calculations/the Thrown Ups guitarist) I started going to a private school in Seattle called Northwest School of the Arts, Humanities and Environment for my senior year. Both Alex Shumway and Stone Gossard went there. They were both a year younger than me. Alex, we befriended each other right off the bat ’cause when he first started going there he had a dyed-black mohawk and wore a kilt over his jeans—he was the Circle Jerks skanking guy come to life—and I was a skate punk and we both loved Minor Threat.

  ALEX SHUMWAY I met Mark Arm at a show—I think it was the U-Men—at the Metropolis. We were both on the floor and I saw the back of his shirt, which said STRAIGHT EDGE. I was probably one of three people at that time who I knew in town was straight edge. So I was like, “Hey, dude, that’s cool!” But I think the shirt was ironic. I could be remembering incorrectly, but I recall him telling me long, long after that, “Dude, I was on acid that night!”

  MARK ARM Wow, his memory is off. I never had a STRAIGHT EDGE T-shirt. I was kinda into it in my own way, I suppose. At the time, I thought weed and alcohol dulled the senses, and psychedelics enhanced them. I wasn’t on acid that night, but I was into Minor Threat.

  STEVE MACK (singer for the U.K.’s That Petrol Emotion) I remember in particular one night at the Metropolis. I was always right in the middle of the pit, because I loved slam-dancing, and that night I felt this tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and there’s this skinny, wiry kid and he’s telling me, “Link your fingers together. Give me a boost.” So I lock my fingers together, and he plants one foot firmly on my hand and leaps over me onto the stage.

  He jumps back out in the crowd, and I went over to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Okay, my turn. You link your fingers together.” So he did that and threw me onstage. And that was the first time I ever met Mark Arm.

  MARK ARM I was born on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. I was too young to really remember living there, but I do remember living in Germany after that. My dad was in the Air Force in World War Two. Met my mom after the war; she was German. They were engaged for like 10 years while he was in the Pacific and she remained in Germany. And then they got married and had me in the early ’60s. We came to the States and ended up in Seattle in ’66.

  My mom was an opera singer. Her career got interrupted by World War Two. She tried to get it going again after the war, and she apparently got some good reviews, but she was by this point a little too old. She was strictly into classical, and any other kind of music was a lesser form of music. Rock music was everywhere—except in my house.

  MAIRE MASCO (Pravda Productions partner; Desperate Times zine cofounder) It’s kind of hard to imagine now, but a lot of people in the scene didn’t even have telephones. In order to get a phone you had to put down a deposit of like $75 to $125. That was a lot of money! So the way you communicated with people was flyers, not only to promote bands and events, but sometimes to express political beliefs or public commentary.

  This band started putting up posters that were just hilarious. One was MR. EPP AND THE CALCULATIONS: GREATER, BIGGER, LOUDER THAN THE GRATEFUL DEAD. Some of their other great taglines were LOUSIER THAN BOB DYLAN and LESS CREATIVE THAN JOHN CAGE.

  Dennis White and I were watching these flyers go up and we’re like, “We gotta figure out who these guys are.” But there was no phone number on the flyers, no dates. And one day we were walking down First Avenue, and we saw some kids putting up a flyer, and we ran up to the flyer and realized it was for Mr. Epp and the Calculations. And we’re like, “Oh, my God, we found them!” They were a block or so ahead of us, so we ran down the street chasing them. They, of course, thought we were gonna beat them up or arrest them or something.

  Finally we caught up to them and we said, “So are you guys Mr. Epp and the Calculations?” And it was Mark Arm and Jeff Smitty, and they kinda looked at their feet and shuffled around and said, “Yeah, I guess,” like they were guilty of something. I said, “Well, I’m Maire Masco, this is Dennis White. We’re with Pravda Productions and we’d really like to book you.”

  They just started laughing, and I think it was Mark Arm who said, “Oh, my God, that means we have to get instruments!”

  MARK ARM Mr. Epp was a fake band for a number of years, as retarded as that sounds. It was named after a math teacher in our little private Christian high school. One of our friends, Darren Morey, was actually a good drummer, but the rest of us didn’t know how to play anything. I was forced to play piano as a kid, but I quit in seventh grade and did my best to forget about it. We made these weird tapes with shit that was at hand in the house, appliances and whatnot. We didn’t think we were being avant-garde; we were just a bunch of kids dicking around.

  After high school, we decided to make the band a little more real, and my friend Smitty and I went in on a guitar and an amp. At that time, Darren was still in high school. And Todd was like 16. He was Darren’s brother and the baby of the band.

  How’d I get the name Mark Arm? My friends and I were into non sequitur humor. One day, Smitty and I had this fake argument using non-offensive body parts in place of normal swear words, like “nose face” or “ear elbow.” It culminated in Smitty calling me “arm arm,” which made us all just double over in laughter.

  DENNIS R. WHITE They were snotty, self-important 16-year-olds. I may have been as old as 24 or 25 at the time, and they saw us as completely old and useless. There’s no doubt there was a certain sense of fun and novelty, but there was something else that we heard—they took it one step beyond the typical DIY ethic. There was such a sense of mission in what they were doing. And they would’ve just sneered at that: “What do you mean, ‘mission’?”

  STEVE TURNER I met Mark in October of ’82, right when my senior year started. He’d come back from one year at college in McMinnville, Oregon, when I met him—we could never really decide if it was the Public Image Ltd. show or the TSOL show where I met him in line. We had a lot in common: Snarky sense of humor, some amount of disdain for the punk rockers. One of Mr. Epp’s jobs was definitely to piss off the punks, ’cause they were so easy to rile up.

  JEFF SMITH (a.k.a. Jo Smitty; Mr. Epp and the Calculations singer/guitarist) The DJ Rodney Bingenheimer started playing our song “Mohawk Man” on the radio in L.A. and people liked it. We were always amazed that anyone liked what we did at all. A lot of people hated us, just because we didn’t have the right signifiers, like mohawks or songs about Reagan. Which is what “Mohawk Man” is making fun of.

  TOM NIEMEYER (the Accüsed/Gruntruck guitarist) The Metropolis kinda forced different social scenes into hanging with each other. Like Duff McKagan, all those cats. Duff was part of the leather-jacket-wearin’, spiky-haired real punks. And the Accüsed were “gosh, I wish we could be like real punks” from Whidbey Island, which is way outside of Seattle.

  ROISIN DUNNE (now Roisin Ross; 7 Year Bitch guitarist) I’m from the suburbs, in Edmonds. Live music typically meant high school dances or AC/DC at the Tacoma Dome. Discovering the Metropolis opened a whole world for me. The fact that there was no separation between the audience and the bands totally resonated w
ith me—you could always get up front or sit on the edge of the stage. I would go by myself and didn’t know anyone for a long time, but I didn’t care.

  The Fastbacks played there, and it was inspiring. Kim and Lulu from the Fastbacks seemed cool, and after a while we became friends. They definitely had an influence on me, but in many more ways than just wanting to play guitar. Through them, I met so many amazing women in that scene.

  MARK ARM It wasn’t an anomaly to have women in Seattle bands. There were the Fastbacks, who were around forever. There were plenty of local bands with women in them earlier, post-punk bands like Little Bears from Bangkok, which was three women and a guy singer. The Visible Targets were three sisters and a drummer; in the early ’80s, they were one of the bands that was on their way to making it—they got a record produced by Mick Ronson. There just didn’t happen to be women in the bands that got huge in the ’90s.

  TOM NIEMEYER And then there was Mark Arm and Mr. Epp—they were part of the University Avenue crowd of punks. They were fuckin’ smart-asses all the time. You never even tried to compete with being wittier or funnier.

  MARK ARM To the people of my generation, the Metropolis was immensely important. The bands that played there actually got paid. When Mr. Epp played there, it was the first time ever we made any money. “We got paid $100! That’s crazy!”

  HUGO PIOTTIN (now known as Poki Piottin; Metropolis club owner) I was born in Lyon, France. Came to the U.S. in ’78. I ended up in Seattle, where I connected right away with a group of young folks dabbling with video production. They were in their early twenties, so I was a little older. We thought, Okay, we need a studio to create these videos. I had about 50 grand in the bank from fishing in Alaska, so I was the one financing everything. We found this place in Pioneer Square that had been an old tavern, probably built in the ’20s or ’30s. It was a gay bar for a while and then for a while it was a place called the Love Canal. It may have been that the gay bar was called the Love Canal, but I’m not sure.

  GORDON DOUCETTE (Metropolis partner; Red Masque singer/guitarist) Hugo had the biggest heart in the world, and he also had a pretty short-fused temper, which made for an interesting combination. The big-hearted side of him recognized that there were all these kids on the street with absolutely nothing to do, and an all-ages live music club just wasn’t around at all; you could see pockets of kids gathered outside clubs to hear the music coming from the inside. So Metropolis was his dream. I just wanted to be a part of it.

  SUSAN SILVER I ran the juice bar, and next to me at the end of this beautiful bar was Bruce Pavitt spinning discs. Hugo’s idea was the Factory West Coast, a place for people to come and express themselves in any way: hear music, see films, and make art projects together. And then commercial needs took over, so it morphed into a showplace. There were lots of shows: You could have Jah Wobble one night and TSOL the next. GBH and the Violent Femmes.

  I met Gordon in Belltown, during an evening out. We were together a few years. He was quiet, mysterious, enigmatic, creative. Hugo and Gordon were polar opposites in terms of personalities, which made for a really well-rounded experience as far as what the place looked like, what the programming was like. One was outspoken and passionate and wanting to connect people, and Gordon was more reserved and protective.

  GORDON DOUCETTE Susan’s involvement in Metropolis was just monumental. She had a great business savvy. She’s a woman with a huge heart. There’s a lot of clubs where the owners are never present—they’re shrewd businessmen counting cash in the office—but Susan, Hugo, and myself were always out there; we were part of the crowd and directly involved. So 95 percent of the people who walked through the doors of Metropolis knew us by name.

  SUSAN SILVER We had the Replacements there, and the three of us went through a lot of effort to make the place look nice. We had a group of young people who really cared about it. And after the Replacements left, we went into the dressing room and they had just trashed it. They pissed in there and graffitied all over the walls—they drew a caricature of Fred Flintstone with somebody shitting in his mouth. It was juvenile, it was imbecilic, but beyond all that, it was disrespectful. I was gutted.

  Later, knowing what that felt like, that sort of thing was a “no discussion” issue between me and my clients. I had to walk Mike Starr from Alice in Chains out of a couple of places by his ear. We were at a pub in England and he was peeing on the wall and I said, “You know what, dude, somebody just like your mom or your grandma is going to have to get down there and clean that up. So stop now.”

  MAIRE MASCO Susan and Gordon did some bookings. I did some booking. Hugo did booking. It was kind of a communal effort. I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but Gordon really was kind of Susan’s arm candy. Susan was gorgeous; she didn’t need arm candy. One time Gordon would show up with like a poofy shirt, and then next week it was something else.

  LARRY REID She had bad taste in men, that’s what I remember about Susan. Oh, man, she went out with Gordon Doucette from Red Masque. He had a wandering eye, to say the very least.

  SUSAN SILVER I learned that much later, after the third year. It was infidelity. He was a general scallywag.

  GORDON DOUCETTE Believe me, I’ve given her many apologies over the years. It was a horrible ending between us. That’s pretty much when I took my exit from Metropolis.

  STEVE TURNER Some hardcore friends of mine, Alex Shumway included, started a band called Spluii Numa and I rehearsed with them a few times. It wasn’t my scene, so that’s when Mark said, “Quit them and join Mr. Epp on second guitar instead.” So I did, and we played two shows and broke up.

  JEFF SMITH Mr. Epp’s last show was at the Metropolis. Darren and I got all the hair and dirt that we cleaned out of his dad’s hair salon, and then we threw it on the audience. People ran away. The club was super-pissed. They were like, “You’ll never be able to play here again!” And we were like, “Well, we’re done with the band.… And we’ll sweep up.”

  HUGO PIOTTIN The life of the Metropolis was about a year and a half. They let us have the place on the condition that we’d pay month to month. Next door was a building that was being turned into a fancy condo. And they didn’t want to have that kind of crowd on the weekend—people sitting on the sidewalk, drinking, making noise.

  GORDON DOUCETTE The people who I know who remember Metropolis remember it like they do a family member. They tell me, “I can’t say this about any other club, but I really, really miss Metropolis.”

  MARK ARM After Mr. Epp, Steve and I decided that we wanted to keep playing. We got Alex Shumway, who’d already been drumming with Spluii Numa, to start a band with us.

  ALEX SHUMWAY The origin of Spluii Numa’s name? Somebody at our school wrote on the wall JOHN LENNON LIVES! And somebody else had marked out LIVES and wrote WENT SPLUII NUMA! Meaning got his head blown off, blood splattered all over the place. We thought it was hilarious.

  MARK ARM We just needed a bass player. We thought Jeff Ament would be a good guy to get in the band; in Deranged Diction, he jumped really high and played bass through a distortion box.

  JEFF AMENT (Pearl Jam/Temple of the Dog/Mother Love Bone/Green River/Deranged Diction bassist) There were fifty to a hundred kids that hung out at Metropolis, and that’s where I met Mark and Steve and Stone. I met Alex the year before at an X show. I met Mark when I was DJing there one night. I was playing Black Flag and Aerosmith and Minor Threat and SSD and Kiss. We both had a common interest in a lot of the same bands.

  MARK ARM But we didn’t know Jeff very well. He and his band had recently moved out to Seattle from Montana. Steve got a job at the same place that Jeff did, basically just to get to know the guy. That’s probably one of the weirder things we’ve ever done—stalking a bass player.

  STEVE TURNER I had Jeff help me get a job at the coffee shop Raison d’Être that he worked at as a dishwasher, so I worked there to kind of infiltrate and convince him that me and Mark could do a real band where we actually write songs and
practice.

  MARK ARM Jeff was not a fan of Mr. Epp, but apparently Deranged Diction was running out of momentum, so he was open to practicing with us. The first Green River practice was the four of us.

  It was a very auspicious day when I came up with the idea for that name and Steve came up with the idea for that name. We met up and were both excitedly going, “I think I got a name for the band!” We both thought of Green River. When does that happen?

  Steve was shopping at a thrift store and saw something for Green River Community College Track or something. I don’t remember exactly what my lightning bolt was—probably the Creedence song. The Green River Killer was in the headlines at that time. Kind of awesome and dark.

  ALICE WHEELER (photographer) There’s always been this sort of hovering darkness over the Northwest, and a lot of it was about the Green River Killer, ’cause that was going on when I first moved to town. One of my best friends, who has since passed away, his cousin was victim number 14. There’s always been this element of danger for women in the Northwest, and I think part of what influences grunge is that element and a sort of depressed somberness.

  ALEX SHUMWAY Some people I’d run into would ask, “What’s the name of your band?” “Green River.” “Oh, that’s just sick and wrong.”

  MARK ARM We opened for the Dead Kennedys and the Crucifucks. I didn’t see any evidence of it, but apparently there was a group outside picketing based on our name. Okay, it’s the Dead Kennedys and the Crucifucks, and you’re picketing Green River?

  The very first show we played was at a party in a storefront-slash-house that a friend of mine was living at with his band called PMA. Before the show, Jeff was joking around a little at practice like, “Maybe I’ll put on some whiteface.” Landrew from Malfunkshun was doing that regularly. I was like, “Yeah, that’d be funny,” and he showed up at the show with complete whiteface on. “Wow, okay, I guess he wasn’t kidding.” But that only happened once.