by Mark Yarm
EVERETT TRUE Charles absolutely misses the entire point. The whole point about Sub Pop early on was it was a lot of fun; that’s why we made up all those stories. You might as well create your own myth, because if you don’t, somebody like Charles Cross is gonna come along and create his own myth, and it’s gonna be a lot more tedious. That book he did on Kurt, that’s way more about mythologizing than anything I’ve ever written in my life, anything Sub Pop ever did. What’s that whole chapter detailing what Kurt was thinking when he killed himself? What’s that if not mythologizing?
JONATHAN PONEMAN Kurt Cobain protested vigorously later on in his career, saying, “Those guys portrayed us as a bunch of dumb rednecks.” That we were turning them into cartoon characters. The Beatles literally became cartoons in their marketing. I’m putting way more thought into my explanation than we ever did back then, because it was all intuitive.
EVERETT TRUE There’s a quote of mine from the Sub Pop article that has been used more than anything else I’ve written, which is the earliest description of Nirvana in a British music paper—how “They’re four working-class guys from Aberdeen, blah blah blah.” What’s really kind of annoying about seeing that description everywhere is, although it’s attributed to me, they’re not my words. I was on serious deadline, and I wasn’t an experienced writer by any stretch of the imagination back then. So I was on the phone to Jonathan Poneman in Seattle and I was copying down word-for-word what he was telling me about these artists. That’s quite dreadful, really, but what the hell.
DANIEL HOUSE I was at Sub Pop during that time, and I understood what they were doing, but I was kind of appalled. Because they were basically providing Everett True the Sub Pop version of the scene, as if Sub Pop were the whole thing. They booked a whole bunch of shows with all the Sub Pop bands and promoted the hell out of them, so they made sure that his entire experience was like, “Wow! Look at the Seattle scene! I saw TAD this night, I saw Blood Circus that night, I saw Nirvana this night.” It wasn’t like all those bands would normally be playing during the same two-week period.
STEVE TURNER Seeing the article on us was like, Whoa! That was a big fucking article. Being in those magazines shifted things for us, and it made some of the straight press in Seattle pay attention. Patrick MacDonald, who was a clueless Seattle Times music critic, was dismissive of anything that was valid about Seattle music until people like Everett True and foreign magazines gave us the thumbs-up. Then he said, “Oh, great stuff here in town that I’ve been ignoring for years and saying was crap!”
AL LARSEN (Some Velvet Sidewalk singer/guitarist) I remember traveling in ’89 across the country with Mecca Normal and the Go Team and staying every night in some kid’s apartment. It’s March of ’89 and we’re in, I don’t know, Kansas. And the kid has the Sub Pop Flaming Lips seven-inch next to the stereo. And then we drive for 10 hours and we go to some other kid’s house, and he has the Sub Pop Flaming Lips seven-inch next to the stereo. We broke down in Pittsburgh, and we’re staying at some kid’s house, and their kind of hard-rock roommate lets us into his room and there he’s got the Melody Maker with the spread on Sub Pop. And I just remember being like, Whoa. We’re traveling around playing to no one and this other thing—grunge—has totally caught the world on fire.
BRUCE PAVITT Everett’s articles had a lot of impact. Also, John Peel was playing Sub Pop 200 right around the same time. And John Peel, in The Times of London, circulation two million, stated that Sub Pop had the most distinctive American regional sound since Tamla Motown. Now that’s a piece of hype.
EVERETT TRUE In my original articles, I’m supposed to have used the word grunge to describe the music. Lester Bangs certainly used to use the word. I used the word myself in the ’80s to describe the Happy Mondays. You know, “They got grungy guitars.” It was a description that was in the rock-journalist lexicon. I guess one of my subeditors at the Melody Maker picked up on the word and used it in a headline or something and all of a sudden the word started sticking.
JONATHAN PONEMAN I read the expression grunge many, many times in music journalism before Everett True used it. Everett took the word from the Sub Pop mail-order catalog description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone that Bruce wrote: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”
FAITH HENSCHEL-VENTRELLO I worked in radio promo at Sub Pop. I remember Jon and Bruce looking through the thesaurus and coming up with grunge. I believe Bruce was the one who took it out of the thesaurus, who said, “Grunge! That word.”
BRUCE PAVITT I believe that’s the first time the word was used more as a marketing description. As with any adjective, you can go back and say, “Well, this was used in such-and-such zine,” but that came to me intuitively when we opened the office and were piecing together our first catalog. We were trying to emphasize the grittiness of the music and the energy. I just remember thinking that it sounded right at the time. Like, “Nailed it. All right, let’s move on.”
EVERETT TRUE It’s kind of ironic that this music I absolutely despised and is anathema to everything I love about music, that is the one music I’m credited with inventing! To me, grunge is another crap musical form that MTV invented. The original grunge, the Sub Pop grunge, had nothing to do with the grunge that became popular, like Silverchair and Puddle of Mudd.
JACK ENDINO None of us is entirely sure about who used the word first. I saw it in a Lester Bangs record review in Rolling Stone in the ’70s. Mark Arm had used the word in the early ’80s.
MAIRE MASCO Desperate Times had letters to the editor, and Mark Arm wrote this letter complaining about his own band, Mr. Epp and the Calculations, being “pure grunge.” Before that, the word had been grungy, an adjective. Mark basically turned it into a noun.
MARK ARM (writing in to Desperate Times, July 22, 1981) I hate Mr. Epp & the Calculations! Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit! Everyone I know loves them, I don’t know why. They don’t even wear chains and mohawks! They all look different, yuk! And they have no sense of humor. In fact, they have no sense. They’re all pretentious, older than the Grateful Dead, and love Emerson Lake & Palmer (my mother’s fave).
I love Philip Glass! While my friends listen to Mr. Epp & the Calculations, I listen to Mr. Glass. His music is repetitious, redundant, and repetitive. Pure art! It’s sooooooo intellectual, like me. I love to listen to Philip Glass over and over and over and over again etc. ad infinitum.
Mark McLaughlin
Mark McLaughlin
Mark McLaughlin
Mark McLaughlin
(Ed. note: Mark McLaughlin does guitar & vocals in Mr. Epp and the Calculations.)
MAIRE MASCO I actually remember when we got his letter, I said to Daina Darzin, the editor, “I don’t think grunge is a word.” And she said, “It doesn’t matter, it sounds cool.”
MARK ARM Am I the person responsible for coining the word grunge? I don’t think so. In 1981, I wrote a fanzine a fake letter from the perspective of a disgruntled person who happened to stumble upon my shitty band at the time, Mr. Epp. It was fake hate mail. You know, this publicity stuff is very tricky!
The word grunge was tossed around a little bit here and there well before I ever used it. Steve Turner picked up this ’70s reissue of a Rock ’n’ Roll Trio album, and the liner notes talk about Paul Burlison’s “grungy guitar sound.” That was written in the ’70s about a ’50s guitar player.
Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.
RICKY KULWICKI (guitarist for Denver’s the Fluid) The first time I heard the word grunge? We had just started the Fluid, and we were opening for the Dead Kennedys at the Blue Note in Boulder, Colorado. Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys is from Boulder, and he knew us from when we were in punk-rock bands. Afterwards, while we were loading out, he comes up to me and he’s like,
“Hey, Ricky, it’s good to see you guys are continuing the legacy of Denver grunge.” I’d never heard that word before in association with music. But I knew that it was a compliment. I was like, “Thanks, man.” This was in 1985.
DAVID DUET People keep saying I was the first one to say grunge in that scene. I know we were definitely the first ones to use it in anything. I’ve gotten a lot of hell for that.
The first thing I came up with was grungedelic, which is from a lyric for our single “64 Funny Cars.” We wrote the song in ’86, ’87. It was just stuff that came out of my mind while we were playin’. After that, I came up with Moto Grunge, which appeared on one of the early Cat Butt flyers. I was fascinated by biker patches, like Moto Guzzi. I was tryin’ to come up with a Cat Butt logo and I started messing around with the Harley image, and I was tryin’ to think of words to go in there. I tend to talk to myself and that slipped out one day. And it fit in the logo: Moto on top, Cat Butt in the center, and Grunge on the bottom.
BEN SHEPHERD I hate that word grunge. It has nothing to do with anything. It’s fuckin’ concocted bullshit.
JACK ENDINO Sometime around ’87, ’88, the word grunge started getting thrown around. It might’ve been Everett. I hate to say it, but it might’ve been me. At one of my high school reunions, someone told me, “You used to use that word all the time!” I’m like, “What? Don’t tell me that!”
No one fucking knows, and frankly I don’t think anyone really wants to take credit for it. So let’s leave it at that, all right?
MARK ARM Everett’s article on us came out just before we went to the U.K. with Sonic Youth. Those shows were at the start of a nine-week European tour. We did a couple more shows with Sonic Youth in northern Europe, but most of the tour was us going around by ourselves before ending up back in the U.K. for a couple shows.
RON RUDZITIS I’ll never forget Mark’s last day of work at Muzak and just being so fucking jealous. He was leaving to go open for Sonic Youth in England. Fuck! That is my dream come true. It was a huge inspiration for me to work really hard. I got really focused, and I bugged the hell out of Bruce, and eventually not only got the Love Battery single out, but convinced Sub Pop to put out our albums.
DAN PETERS Toward the end of the tour, we played at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. We were being supported by Soundgarden then—my, how times changed. The show was in what appeared to be a cafeteria, so they got this haphazard stage set up. It was sold out, and there’s probably a thousand people there.
STEVE TURNER The stage was really rickety, and after the first few bars Mark headed into the crowd. I headed into the crowd. Everything became unplugged, the stage started falling over, everyone’s trying to hold up the stage and the speaker columns.
MARK ARM The kids had the fever. The band was totally apeshit wild. I made a joke, saying, “Okay, everybody get onstage,” thinking there’s no way everyone can get onstage. The crowd took that at face value, and they pushed us back all the way to the wall. And people who were normally observers—writers like Keith Cameron and Everett True and our publicist at the time, Anton—were rolling up their sleeves, pushing people back.
ANTON BROOKES The stage was built on loads of school desks, so it wasn’t the most stable setting. It felt like Zulu—it’s an old English film, with Michael Caine, where there’s a couple British soldiers against 10,000 Zulu warriors. They just keep coming and coming and coming and coming.
DAN PETERS I remember looking over, and the monitor guy starts unplugging stuff and taking equipment away. One of the English journalists gets up and screams into the microphone, “This is nonsensical! This is nonsensical! Everybody get off the stage!” The stage starts to fall apart, and I just go, “Well, that was interesting,” and walk to the backstage room where Matt Cameron’s sitting. He goes, “Jesus Christ, does this happen every night with you guys?”
I was thinking, The show’s over. There’s no way in hell it’s going to go on. That’s when people are like, “You guys got to go back out there and play or shit’s going to happen.”
STUART HALLERMAN I’m scoping out the exits, totally planning my escape. I was worried for my life.
MARK ARM We played a little more, and to illustrate how stupid that whole scenario was, I said, “Okay, let’s get everybody on top of the P.A.” I didn’t learn my lesson the first time. I turned around and the security guy was fuckin’ coming right at me. Anton and Keith had to hold him back.
STUART HALLERMAN Hours afterward, a guy got stabbed within a quarter mile of the place. It doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the show, but the newspaper blamed it on the mayhem: RIOT AT THE MUDHONEY SHOW! DEATH RESULTS!
MARK ARM To call it a riot is so out of proportion to what happened. It wasn’t like people were smashing chairs because they were affected adversely by the music. It wasn’t Stravinsky playing The Rite of Spring for the first time.
JAMES BURDYSHAW By ’89, things had reached critical mass, ’cause that’s when Lamefest happened—all of a sudden, Mudhoney and TAD and Nirvana played the Moore Theatre, and it was sold out. Over a thousand people were there. It was clear to me that the Seattle bands that my friends and acquaintances were in were getting really, really big. In my mind, a really big band had always been a band that would come in from out of town. The U-Men couldn’t headline the Moore Theatre, as big as they were.
BRUCE PAVITT The first Lamefest—that was the moment when grunge blew up. That was the defining moment. That was the record release party for Nirvana’s first record, which a lot of people don’t realize.
STEVE TURNER It was like, “Wow, who are these people, and where were they a year ago?”
CHAD CHANNING (Nirvana drummer) The one show of this tour that really sticks in my mind was the Lamefest at the Moore Theatre because Jason put on this Mickey Mouse outfit just because he wanted to. It was pretty comical, actually. There’s the band, and then there’s Jason as Mickey Mouse with all this long hair.
JASON EVERMAN I made the Mickey Mouse shorts I wore onstage. It was kind of absurd, the red pants with the big yellow buttons. I got the idea from this Calvin and Hobbes story, which I thought was really funny. In the comic, Hobbes is telling Calvin, “Check out my Mickey Mouse pants.” And Calvin is like, “I don’t know.”
BRUCE PAVITT The manager of the Moore Theatre had actually sent most of his security guys home because he was convinced that nobody was gonna show up. So when the local youth went off at the show, stage-diving and everything else, the security staff on hand was overwhelmed. Mark Arm very famously kicked a security guard and knocked him right off the stage.
That show ignited the city’s youth and put Seattle on the map.
JANET BILLIG (Hole manager via Gold Mountain Entertainment) I was working at Caroline and living in a 300-square-foot apartment on Seventh Street and Avenue C in New York. Tons of people crashed there on tour. Mudhoney and TAD were there a lot. Hole, Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Skin Yard. L7 once stayed at my house and called Alaska and ran up my phone bill; there was blood all over my sheets—I have no idea what they did up there.
I had a part-time job at a foot doctor’s office on Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street. He was closed on weekends, so I had Mudhoney sleep there one night in the waiting room. I told them, “You have to be out by 9 on Monday morning. That’s when the appointments start.” Once Mudhoney had a box of merch stolen, and urban myth is that for months after that, all the homeless people in the neighborhood were wearing Mudhoney shirts.
The first time Nirvana came to New York, they drove from Chicago or something, and when they showed up, I was like, “My friend is moving from Queens to Manhattan, I need you guys to move her.” Kurt was like, “No way, I’m not moving your friend,” but Krist and Chad went and moved her. She worked for CMJ at the time, so I think they got a lot of extra coverage out of that.
JASON EVERMAN We were staying in Alphabet City. I confided in Chad that I was done, and Chad had in turn confided in Kurt a
nd Krist. I was becoming frustrated because I came to the realization that my role in the band was essentially going to be the rhythm-guitar player. I had the desire and inclination to write, as well. Same thing with Chad. It became obvious that wasn’t going to happen. Also, we were broke and burned out from touring. I think in some ways it was a convenient excuse to go back to Washington.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY (Nirvana/TAD soundman) Jason was a nice kid. I don’t really know much about the dynamic between him and the rest of the band, but the main thing I noticed was that all the guitar sounds that sounded like Nirvana were coming from Kurt. Jason’s guitar sound just didn’t sound right to me, so I never used very much of it. It was just kinda tinny, white-noisy, buzzy, whereas Kurt, even then, had this big, beefy guitar tone that was musical. Having Jason seemed redundant to me.
JANET BILLIG They kicked Jason out literally at my house. It was awful. They talked about leaving him there. I was like, “You gotta take him back home.”
CHAD CHANNING We just decided to drive straight home and bag the rest of the shows.… There wasn’t any discussion about it. We did not say anything about it the entire trip home. We got home, dropped him off, said, “All right man, we’ll see you later.” And we parted there …
JASON EVERMAN That’s the last time I spoke to Kurt. I quit Nirvana, though I guess it’s a matter of perspective. You can believe what you want to believe.
ROBERT ROTH (Truly singer/guitarist) I met Kurt in summer of ’89. My band Storybook Krooks had just released our cassette. But we broke up, and I remember being on a bus going downtown from Queen Anne and seeing Jonathan Poneman. He liked the Storybook Krooks, and I told him, “We just broke up last week.” And he goes, “Keep this under your hat, but Nirvana’s looking for a second guitar player. And they want somebody who can write.” So I gave a cassette to Justin Williams, who was a friend of Lanegan’s, and Lanegan passed it to Kurt.
