Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  NICK TERZO At the Music Bank, I went and saw a band play called Diamond Lie. The room was so small that the musicians had to stay in one room and their lead singer had to sing in the hallway because there just wasn’t room. It was a rough, crude situation, but I was pretty impressed with the lead singer. Just his voice. And he had a wicked sense of humor.

  MIKE STARR We had a show at Kent Skate King, and we decided we needed a new name because we were getting pretty popular. Layne was like, “Well, I made up the name Alice N’ Chains for my old band.” I’m the one who came up with the idea to put the i in Alice in Chains, so it wasn’t like Guns N’ Roses.

  NICK POLLOCK I remember James and I were at a show they played at Skate King. He was like, “Layne called me today, and he said they’re gonna change their name, and he was wondering if I minded that.” I think at the time, both James and I were thinkin’, That’s shitty. That was our band. Come up with your own name. But ultimately, Layne was our pal, our brother, so we were like, “Okay, whatever you wanna do.”

  MIKE STARR For the show, we put a white sheet up in front of the stage and our manager came up and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Diamond Lie won’t be here tonight, but we have for you … Alice in Chains!” You could just see our silhouettes through the sheet, and by the first quarter of the song, the sheet dropped and it was us. And we had a backdrop that said ALICE IN CHAINS.

  It was Halloween, and we were all dressed in these bad ’70s dresses. Layne had a brown dress on, I had a flowery dress on. It was a killer show. I had a threesome that night with two girls.

  ROB SKINNER (Coffin Break bassist/singer) Coffin Break shared a room in the Music Bank with Alice in Chains for about a year. Every room there was a party. The girls loved the Alice in Chains guys, so the band would always have these South End or Eastside girls show up with their friends and hang out. They definitely rehearsed and did their thing, but the suburban metal background is a lot different than the punk-rock background. There are no girls watching you practice when you’re a punk-rock band, let’s put it that way.

  DAVID DUET Cat Butt rehearsed at the Music Bank. Alice in Chains had a giant rehearsal room, one of the biggest there, that had mirrors all the way around. We’d walk by, and they were doing high kicks. One time when I went by they had flash pots, another time they had a whole P.A. system set up in the hallway.

  ROB SKINNER They were working on stagecraft, which we thought was kind of strange because nobody else did that. Everyone else was drinking beer and playing and honing the set. Being more concerned with the music than the look.

  The Alice guys took me to a strip club for the first time, and that was a lot of fun. I think I was the first person to take them to the Vogue, because they were more from the metal scene from the suburbs. They loved it, and actually they played their first club show there at the Vogue.

  SOUNDGARDEN’S CHRIS CORNELL at the Apocalypse Club, Toronto, November 4, 1989. © DEREK VON ESSEN

  THE U-MEN in front of their tour bus in Seattle, 1985. Clockwise from left: Jim Tillman, Tom Price, roadie Mike Tucker, John Bigley, and Charlie Ryan. © MEGAN SULLIVAN

  THE MELVINS on the road, circa 1986. From left: Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover, and Matt Lukin. © MATT LUKIN

  GREEN RIVER at SCUD Studio, Seattle, July 1986. From left: Bruce Fairweather, Mark Arm, Jeff Ament, Alex Shumway, and Stone Gossard. © CAM GARRETT

  MALFUNKSHUN play the Serbian Hall, Seattle, 1982. From left: Regan Hagar and Andrew Wood. BESTROCKPHOTOS.COM

  SOUNDGARDEN at Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle, June 1987. Clockwise from left: Matt Cameron, Kim Thayil, Hiro Yamamoto, and Chris Cornell. © CAM GARRETT

  SKIN YARD play Gorilla Gardens, Seattle, July 1985. From left: Jack Endino, Matt Cameron, Ben McMillan, and Daniel House. © CAM GARRETT

  SUB POP cofounders Jonathan Poneman (left) and Bruce Pavitt at the label’s Seattle office, 1988. © JIM BERRY

  THE FLUID play the Garage at 23 Parish, in their hometown of Denver, circa 1990. From left: Ricky Kulwicki, John Robinson, and Matt Bischoff. © 1990 JOEL W. DALLENBACH

  SCREAMING TREES in their hometown of Ellensburg, Washington, May 1988. From left: Mark Lanegan, Mark Pickerel, Van Conner, and Gary Lee Conner. © JAMES BUSH

  MUDHONEY on a European ferry (after a few drinks), August 1990. Clockwise from left: Steve Turner, Mark Arm, Matt Lukin, and Dan Peters. © BOB WHITTAKER

  CAT BUTT in Ballard, Seattle, fall 1988. From left: Erik “Erok” Peterson, David Duet, James Burdyshaw, and Dean Gunderson. © JAMES BUSH

  NIRVANA, Bleach photo shoot in Belltown, Seattle, February 25, 1989. From left: Krist Novoselic, Jason Everman, Kurt Cobain, and Chad Channing. © ALICE WHEELER

  TAD in New York, summer 1989. Clockwise from lower left: Tad Doyle, Gary Thorstensen, Kurt Danielson, and Steve Wiederhold. © IAN TILTON

  JAMES BURDYSHAW At first we thought their band, which was Diamond Lie at that point, was awful. They sounded like Poison. For us, that was disgusting. We even made fun of them, but Layne was such a sweetheart that he won us over. He’d come up to us, like, “You guys need anything, just let me know. You want pot, you want beer, whatever you need, I can do it. You want me to square you some coke? No problem.” We’re all like, “Whoa, this guy is pretty cool.” And him and David started to get close.

  DAVID DUET Alice in Chains didn’t know what to think of Cat Butt; no one did at that time. We’d practice with the lights off, with black lights and strobe lights. We’d bring smoke machines in our practice room. We had crazy papier-mâché artwork hanging everywhere that we used to have onstage with us—a big, psychedelic biker voodoo trip. So they’d always walk by and look in our door. At one point, one of the managers of the place said, “Look, I know this is ridiculous, but Alice in Chains is telling us that they walked in the bathroom here and all of Cat Butt is shooting up and sucking each other off at the time same.” (Laughs.) Which, actually, I loved. I thought that was great! They probably did walk in on Michael in the bathroom, and it got exaggerated.

  Layne’s girlfriend, Demri [Parrott], was the one who made the connection between our bands. Demri, who was the cutest, most beautiful thing in the world, came up to me one night and lifted up her shirt. She showed me her belly button, and she goes, “Look, I can make a cat’s butt!”

  REED HUTCHINSON (Feast guitarist) Before Layne was going out with Demri, I got to know her through my girlfriend Angela. Demri was super-funny and very forward. I was probably 18 and super-shy and I remember her asking me super-direct questions like, “So, how’s the sex between you and Angela?” And I was like, “Oh, my God, you can’t talk about this!”

  XANA LA FUENTE “Innocent yet provocative.” That’s how Andrew described Demri when he first saw her. She kind of reminded me of Brooke Shields in the movie Pretty Baby. Young, but very sexy. She was really frisky; she was all over everybody. But not in a slutty way.

  PONY MAURICE (Feast singer) I kind of fell in love with Xana and Demri for a while. Yes, I like both men and women. We would all just hang out and go to shows and play around. They were both so beautiful in their own weird way. Demri was five feet tall and tiny, and Xana was six feet tall and, like, Amazon. I just was smitten with Xana. She had this really cool, big Roman nose. I knew Andy before her, but I started getting a lot closer to Xana than I ever had with him. He knew that I liked her, and I think she would sometimes use me to make him jealous.

  DAVID DUET At our next rehearsal, Demri and Layne walked in together, and within a month I was doing guest appearances with Alice in Chains, singin’ Bowie songs and stuff. And then shortly after that, their whole sound changed ’cause they got introduced to the scene and Susan Silver. They changed into this dark, brooding, heavy thing.

  ROB SKINNER There was this huge pot operation that nobody knew about next door to the Music Bank. Came home from a show to load our gear back in and there was cops everywhere, and one guy who lived there had a gun pointed at his head by the cops. Now, had we known that all that pot was next door, we w
ould’ve tunneled into it. ’Cause we spent a lot of time trying to find what was just six inches away from us without even knowing. The Music Bank ended up shutting down, we went our way, and the Alice in Chains guys went their way.

  SOOZY BRIDGES (intern for Kelly Curtis/Ken Deans; club booker) The band all lived together in a house a little south of Seattle. I’d keep their gig money and make them buy groceries because they had no food. They’d eat Grape-Nuts with water in it, or crackers and ketchup.

  MIKE STARR There were girls there all the time. I’d wake up, and there’d be girls sitting on the couch just waiting for us to get up so they could hang out. One time, for Layne’s birthday, there was this girl and I handcuffed her to my chin-up bar—she let me—and I go, “Layne, happy birthday!” and I pushed him in my room. It was funny.

  KEN DEANS I’m talking to Atlantic and Island, and Nick is still at ASCAP. So as it starts to heat up, Kelly goes, “I’m going to shop the band.” Then it’s decided that Nick’s going to go to Columbia, and the band’s going to go with Nick. At this time, Kelly and I are separating; I did some things that probably weren’t smart, and Kelly did some things that I didn’t agree with. Around then, we had extra space in our office, and we offered Susan Silver a place to work out of.

  The band was problematical from the start. And whether it was drug use, whether it was alcohol abuse—it was really all of the above—it just seemed like a time bomb waiting to happen. So Kelly had trepidation going forward with it. At that point, I approached Susan and said, “Kelly and I are done, but he’s going to fuck this thing up—he’s going to walk away from it—so you need to partner on this band with Kelly. They’ve got a chance and, yes, they’ve got their problems.”

  SUSAN SILVER Ken gave me a cassette tape of some of the songs that Alice had done, and they were so catchy and so wonderful. I went to see them live and thought they were great fun and very energetic and entertaining and spent a little time with them and they were hilarious. In a matter of time, the fellow that they called their manager, who was a hairstylist-slash–coke dealer, took a second vacation to prison. Ken asked Kelly and I if we both wanted to work on the project together, so we said we’d give that a try.

  MIKE STARR We had a manager, and one day Kelly and Susan sat us down and said, “Your manager is gonna get busted by the cops for selling coke.” I don’t know how they knew that, but they did. They said, “We’d like to manage you,” and so we thought about it, and we said yeah. Went over to our old manager’s house one night, and he opened up his safe and he had this acid from the ’60s. He gave it to us, and right when we were peaking we said, “Yeah, we’re gonna go with new management,” and we walked out. It must have been a bad trip for him.

  KEN DEANS Overall, the guys were terrific human beings. The biggest problem was Mike Starr, who did anything he could for himself. This is a guy who would sell spots on the guest list, and get people to buy him drugs and beer because he was Mike Starr from Alice in Chains. You never knew what problem Mike was going to cause next. You knew what was up with Sean; if he got drunk, there was a chance that he might end up in jail. Jerry, you just had to keep him pacified because he would get frustrated with it all. Layne was doing his job and was one of the nicest guys you could ever deal with.

  MIKE STARR And when we went with that management company, with Susan, Kelly, and Ken Deans, we started playing with Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden.

  TIM BRANOM Alice in Chains played with Mother Love Bone August 1988 at the Central, and that was a really odd pairing because they weren’t the same type of bands. Yet they were growing together as friends. I think that started people meshing styles together.

  MIKE STARR When I saw Jeff Ament in Mother Love Bone, I was like, Wow. They just looked different, man, wearing shorts over their long johns, with combat boots. I remember we started dressing like that. We started wearing Value Village clothes and not showering for a while. We were trying to have our big hair and everything at the beginning, and then Layne got dreadlocks. We just kind of molded into whatever they call grunge now.

  KIM THAYIL When they were Alice N’ Chains, their first demo probably owed a little bit more to Poison than the huge monster they became. That really changed when they heard us. (Laughs.) Jerry Cantrell and I were at some show, I think it was DOA playing at a venue called the Hall of Fame in the U District. Jerry asked me how to play songs like “Nothing to Say” and “Beyond the Wheel” and was there some kind of weird tuning thing? And I said, “Hey, there’s this thing called drop D tuning.” And a short time later, they recorded a demo that contained many of the songs that you hear on Facelift and they had drop D tuning on them.

  NICK TERZO On that same visit to Seattle, I’d also met Susan Silver and Chris Cornell. I stayed in touch with everyone, and actually when Mother Love Bone did their demo, I helped shop it. Alice would send me a demo when they did a demo. I had committed to ASCAP for one year. I stayed there for one year and two weeks and got a job as director of A&R on the West Coast at Columbia Records in spring 1989. I signed Alice in Chains that summer.

  BOB WHITTAKER My father, Jim Whittaker, is a bit of a Pacific Northwest icon in that he and his twin brother became famous mountaineers, and he was the first American to summit Mount Everest. My father was really good friends with the Kennedy family and with Bobby Kennedy. In fact, I’m named after Bobby. After Bobby was shot, my father was a pallbearer at his funeral. I was never allowed to have squirt guns or toy guns as a kid because of that.

  When I was in high school in the ’80s, I’ll never forget my dad walking into my room, where I’m listening to Wasted Youth or whatever, and there on top of the stack was the Dead Kennedys record. I felt horrible. Here I am—Bobby Kennedy is my namesake—and I have this sacrilegious record. That was a tough one to explain away.

  Stone Gossard and I hung out as very young kids. We were from the same neighborhood. My mother, Blanche, didn’t tell me about this until much later, but apparently Stone’s dad had been keen on her. She was working at the concession stand at Paradise, the lodge at Mount Rainier National Park. Stone’s dad either had taken her on a ski trip or invited her on one. He drove up there at one point with flowers and champagne, and she said, “I can’t see you anymore. I’m seeing Jim Whittaker.” And then she ended up marrying my dad. I told Stone that story, and he and I got a big yuck out of it.

  MEGAN JASPER My first New Year’s Eve in Seattle, I went with J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. to a party at Bob’s house. J had a Jim Whittaker–brand jacket and thought Jim was cool, but we didn’t know he was Bob’s dad. So we walk into Bob’s house and see pictures of Bob and his dad on the refrigerator. J looked at me and goes, “No fuckin’ way.” That was kind of a trip, but then an extra trip was that it looked like someone had OD’d on the floor, and people are just walking over this person. I just had this moment, like, Welcome to Seattle: mountain climbers and heroin addicts.

  JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER Bob Whittaker had this skin condition—I think it was a combination of growing up in a sunny climate and acne, so he had pits—which is not the kind of thing I would ordinarily mention. But when we were recording Melancholy Girl Hole, Ed told Bob, “I’m going to record the new Thrown Ups.” And Bob goes, “Well, do a song about me.” So Ed did a song about Bob’s skin condition. And just to make it clear he’s singing about Bob, at the very end, he goes, “Bob Whittaker!”

  BOB WHITTAKER And thus was born “Hairy Crater Man.” He basically just slanders me in the song, wonders why girls like me.

  JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER It did cross a line for me. I thought, That needs to just go to the bottom of the ocean. But I was overruled by everybody else in the band. Three or four months later, Bob comes up to me. “Hey, I hear you didn’t want to put out that song. How come?”

  I was like, “Well, gee, Bob, I don’t know, I thought it really was cruel to you.” I mean, I’m the only guy that had enough decency to say, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” and now he’s trying to embarrass me, putting me
on the spot: “What’s your problem? This is my song!” And that’s why Bob was the ideal guy for Mudhoney. They were incredibly cruel to Bob, but he could take it, so he belonged in that club.

  MARK ARM On our first tour, we just brought Bob along. I’m not even sure why. He didn’t know how to run sound. He’s much more outgoing than any of us, so his job was essentially to find us a place to crash every night. At first, he was just kind of a mascot.

  STEVE TURNER Bob didn’t give a rat’s ass about equipment or any of that stuff. He was like, “It’s your own damn amp—you carry it!”

  MARK ARM That first tour we went from Seattle to the East Coast and back. Then we played with Sonic Youth and the Screaming Trees in Seattle, and just went down the West Coast and over to Texas with Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth had played with Green River almost every time they came here. We ended up becoming pretty good friends on that level. Like, “Hey, you guys again.” It was a great opportunity. Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers were the biggest underground bands at the time, at least in my mind.

  JAMES BURDYSHAW We were watchin’ Mudhoney just skyrocket past us, and then TAD. These are both bands that started after Cat Butt had been together for more than a year. Mudhoney went from playin’ a sloppy show in Pioneer Square with Blood Circus to like three or four months later goin’ on tour with Sonic Youth. It was like, What the fuck? Even with Mark’s cachet, to just instantly have this big push, it seemed like, Whoa, wait a minute. Besides being jealous, we felt like we were gonna be left out if we didn’t do something, so we went out on a tour and then got Sub Pop to green-light doing our record.