by Mark Yarm
ROBERT ROTH The flannel and the long hair and the Doc Martens, that kinda was passé in Seattle when all of a sudden it hit in late ’91, early ’92. It was like watching it happen all over again.
JONATHAN PONEMAN I got a call from an editor at Vogue magazine who wanted me to write a piece about grunge fashion, which I did. Some people said, “Why are you doing that?” And I said, “Are you kidding me?” It was like performance art—just the idea that I, who is as much of a fashion spaz as anybody that I’ve ever known, would be writing something for Vogue magazine.
Plus it was a couple thousand bucks, and it was a kick. I wrote it hours before my final deadline, and they threw it in there practically unedited, just to fill space. It was a really poorly written piece of tripe. But it was, “Hey, look, Mom, I’m writing for Vogue.”
LINDA DERSCHANG (Linda’s Tavern/Basic clothing store owner) Jonathan called me up and told me he was writing an article about grunge fashion for Vogue. He asked me for a quote. “Are you kidding me? Really?” I owned a store, Basic, that carried the stuff that people wanted to wear—the purple hair dye and Doc Martens.
Sometimes 16-year-old boys might be trying on a pair of Doc Martens, and one of our salespeople, Tammy Watson, would say, “Yeah, Chris Cornell from Soundgarden, do you know who he is?” The boys’ eyes would light up, and they’d say, “Yeah?”
“Well, he was in here last week and bought that exact same pair of cherry-red Doc Martens.” “Really?” “Oh, yeah.”
I’d just roll my eyes going, “Oh, God. He was not!”
Kurt Cobain did used to buy hair dye there. Some kid would come in and ask, “Do you know what color Kurt bought recently?” And if we had a lot of, say, cherry red, we’d go, “Cherry red!” It was probably a bit awful, but they didn’t know the difference!
ALICE IN CHAINS in Belltown, Seattle, December 1989. Clockwise from left: Mike Starr, Sean Kinney, Layne Staley, and Jerry Cantrell. © PAUL HERNANDEZ
MOTHER LOVE BONE play the Vogue in Seattle, January 1990. From left: Jeff Ament and Andrew Wood. © PAUL HERNANDEZ
PEARL JAM, first publicity shoot, Seattle, 1991. From left: Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Mike McCready, Eddie Vedder, and Dave Krusen. © LANCE MERCER
THE GITS at Venice Beach, January 1993. From left: Andy Kessler, Steve Moriarty, Mia Zapata, and Matt Dresdner. © MICHAEL GALEN NICHOLS
7 YEAR BITCH play the Satyricon in Portland, Oregon, 1992. From left: Elizabeth Davis-Simpson, Valerie Agnew (obscured), Selene Vigil-Wilk, and Stefanie Sargent. © DAVID C. ACKERMAN
THE MELVINS AND L7 on tour together, October 1994. From left: Buzz Osborne, Jennifer Finch, Suzi Gardner, Dee Plakas, Dale Crover, Donita Sparks, and Mark Deutrom. © 1994 JENNIFER FINCH
NIRVANA at the U.K.’s Reading Festival, August 23, 1991. From left: Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl. © ED SIRRS
BABES IN TOYLAND at the Waterloo Village, New Jersey, Lollapalooza stop, July 1993. From left: Lori Barbero, Kat Bjelland, and Maureen Herman. © DANNY CLINCH
HOLE in Seattle, early 1994. From left: Kristen Pfaff, Eric Erlandson, Courtney Love, and Patty Schemel. © KAREN MOSKOWITZ
SINGLES STAR MATT DILLON (left) and director Cameron Crowe on set, 1991. © 1991 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ALICE IN CHAINS in Capitol Hill, Seattle, late 1993 or early 1994. From left: Sean Kinney, Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell, and Mike Inez. © KAREN MOSKOWITZ
SCREAMING TREES at Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle, 1996. From left: Mark Lanegan, Gary Lee Conner, Barrett Martin, and Van Conner. © ALICE WHEELER
GRUNTRUCK at the Georgetown Steam Plant, Seattle, 1990. Clockwise from bottom left: Scott McCollum, Tom Niemeyer, Ben McMillan, and Tim Paul. © LORI GARNES
PEARL JAM AND PRESIDENT CLINTON meet at the White House, April 9, 1994. From left: Jeff Ament, Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, President Clinton, and Eddie Vedder. WILLIAM J. CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY
SOUNDGARDEN in Seattle, January 1994. From left: Matt Cameron, Kim Thayil, Ben Shepherd, and Chris Cornell. © ED SIRRS
CANDLEBOX impersonating Courtney Love in a 1995 Rocket cover shoot outtake. From left: Peter Klett, Kevin Martin, Scott Mercado, and Bardi Martin. © KAREN MOSKOWITZ
KIM THAYIL The height of absurdity? Gosh, one of the first things that comes to mind is the Vogue spread about grunge fashion. Having models walking the runways in Milan in some kind of flannel skirts—I embraced it, on some level, because there’s an element of parody in it.
ROBERT SCOTT CRANE I dated some models back then. It was really kind of a tragic thing—girls in their young twenties were suddenly doing heroin because that’s what was cool to do. All of a sudden, at the Crocodile you saw all of these really pretty girls, instead of just the grunge girls, and they were all fucking high. These people are here because this music is on MTV, and Kate Moss is on the cover of the magazine looking like she’s from Auschwitz.
PETER BAGGE (Hate cartoonist) I’m so out of it, I didn’t even realize how prevalent heroin use was in the grunge scene. I drew the band the character Stinky managed, and I was trying to think of the most absurd lyrics I could think of, so I had the singer scream, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for heroin!” I picked heroin to be “out there”—you know, freak out the parents. Then I was informed that heroin was a scourge. (Laughs.) A lot of people in the music scene were very upset. But then I found out there were people I knew who were heroin addicts and who thought it was hilarious! Like Mark Arm. He thought it was a riot.
Pavitt and Poneman also thought it was hilarious, and a couple of times they asked me to do variations on that for them for T-shirts or posters or ads. They had me do “I scream, you scream, we all scream for a fashion spread in Vogue!”
KELLY CURTIS Marc Jacobs approached me about Eddie, probably for a fashion layout or something. A bunch of people did. There’s so many crazy offers that have come our way over the last 20 years. You name it—every corporation or advertisement or reality-TV show or starring vehicle or pajama company. Ninety-nine percent of it, I just say no.
LINDA DERSCHANG In a way, “grunge fashion” was a nonfashion. That’s why it was so funny that it turned into a Marc Jacobs line for Perry Ellis. Marc Jacobs was fired from Perry Ellis after that line came out. Which was, in a way, also pretty funny.
MARC JACOBS (fashion designer) We were fired from Perry Ellis. I think there were a lot of reasons. People love to attribute it to the fact that this grunge collection was so controversial and outrageous and whatever, but … very often the designer collection isn’t really the moneymaking thing, it’s really the icing on the cake, and it’s something that promotes the image of the company. But that part was financed by Perry Ellis, the company itself, whereas all the other things, like Perry Ellis shirts, the menswear, the jeans, those were all licensed, so the expenses were taken care of outside. So, of course we did this grunge collection, and it was very controversial. Anyway, somewhere just after that, they decided they didn’t want to continue with the whole idea of a woman’s collection on that level or on that scale.
COURTNEY LOVE Marc sent me and Kurt his Perry Ellis grunge collection. Do you know what we did with it? We burned it. We were punkers—we didn’t like that kind of thing.
NEAL KARLEN (journalist; Babes in Toyland biographer) “Kinderwhore” fashion was personified by the babydoll dress, clothes that would look very Lolita-ish on 25-year-old women. Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland took that fashion on as this sort of symbol of her music and who she was. And it became a big deal when Courtney became so big and claimed this look as her own. She ripped off Kat’s act.
For a short time, Courtney Love was in the band that evolved into Babes in Toyland; there’s debate between her and Kat about whether it was even called Babes in Toyland at that point. And Kat, who was the leader, kicked Courtney out of the band. I think that word frenemy was invented for those two.
MICHELLE LEON (bassist for Minneapolis’s Babes in Toyland) It got blown totally out of
proportion by making this big rivalry. I’m not saying that there wasn’t tension and that they didn’t have falling-outs, but even I don’t know all the details, and I was there.
MAUREEN HERMAN (later Babes in Toyland bassist) We’re getting interviewed every fucking week and somebody’s asking us which Hole songs inspired us and, “Why did Kat copy Courtney’s look?”
KAT BJELLAND The media did that, and it was really hurtful to me for a long time. They’d say it’s some kind of battle. Which it wasn’t. We were friends. And then someone started believing the press. But if you really do the research of when I started my band and got onstage looking how I look, they would see who the originator is.
COURTNEY LOVE It’s not about a dress thing. I’m about to hang up on you! Go read some old copies of Ms. Magazine, and Backlash, and get back to me. Seriously, like, dresses? What? No, it was about a Rickenbacker, if you really want to know the truth. The fuckin’ Rickenbacker I bought at Captain Whizeagle’s. And she stole my gear, and I was really pissed about it. The dress thing was kind of part and parcel of it, but obviously that was way, way, way back in the day.
LORI BARBERO Who won? I think Courtney won because she sold more records, she was the richer person, and she had a longer career. But who cares? In all of the hundreds and thousands of hours that we were in vans and airports and everywhere, we never talked about our attire.
Except once, in Providence, Rhode Island, or somewhere up that way, Kat was walking on the street in her big, black clunky shoes that went with her knee-highs and her little dress with the big collar. Someone yelled out to Kat, “Nice polio shoes!” She screamed back, “They’re not polio shoes!” She never wore those shoes ever again, and I was so glad because I thought they were so ugly. Oh, and one time Michelle had to leave a really important meeting to go buy some cow-print pants she wanted before the secondhand store closed, and we still laugh about how ugly those fuckin’ things were.
I think those are the only two times we really talked about clothes: the polio shoes and the cow pants.
KEVIN MARTIN (Candlebox singer) The Seattle scene? We were the redheaded stepchild. We were in the right place at the right time. Fortunately, our music had its own voice. Unfortunately, everybody believed that we had moved there to steal the sound.
Does talking about it stir up bad feelings? Not at all. It’s easy to talk about. It was a scene that was fuckin’ groundbreaking.
I moved to Seattle when I was 14, in 1984, after my father took a job up there. We lived on Mercer Island, where I stood out like a sore thumb. I was a skateboarder, with white, short spiky hair and Converse and ripped-up jeans. I got beat up by jocks the first week of school.
San Antonio, Texas, where I moved from, was worlds apart, musically. San Antonio was predominantly punk rock. My first concert was Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Butthole Surfers, the Big Boys, so when I moved to Seattle, it was a culture shock. I come from this warm-weather punk-rock attitude. In Seattle, it’s rain, there’s not a lot of punk rock, there’s what I call dirgy rock—slow, down-tuned, heavy—which is what everybody named grunge.
Susan Silver was the manager of the John Fluevog shoe store I worked at, around ’87. It was cool working for her, man. I was underage, and she was getting me into all these great shows, and I was meeting incredibly talented musicians. I was playing drums in a couple of punk bands; I wasn’t singing yet. I became friendly with Chris Cornell and Andy Wood. They’d come into the store: “Hey, Kevin, what’s goin’ on? How’s the band?” Shit like that.
I was 17, they were 21, 22. So it’s not like we were going and having beers together at the Vogue or Linda’s Tavern. I was just standing on the side watching this great shit happen and enjoying it.
SCOTT MERCADO (Candlebox/Sky Cries Mary drummer) I’m a little bit older than the other guys in Candlebox. I was born in San Francisco and at the age of one I moved to Kirkland, which is a suburb about five miles outside Seattle. Even thought I was ingrained a bit in the Seattle scene, I never thought it would be anything. My thoughts, having studied jazz and having gone to school for music in L.A., were, This is cool, it’s interesting, but it will never go anywhere.
Susan Silver managed a band I was in, First Thought, which was a Simple Minds wannabe kind of band. I was also in Sky Cries Mary, who were kind of a grunge band—very alternative, some electronica involved, too. I knew Stone, and I was also jamming here and there with Shawn Smith. I met Tad. In fact, I auditioned for his band, but I just wasn’t really into it at that time.
I was also friends with Jonathan Poneman. I never met anybody so enthusiastic about the music scene here. Like, “Scott, you’d like this drummer. His name is Matt Cameron, he plays for a band called Soundgarden.” “Oh, come on, Jonathan, you talked about that band last week.” So I did go and see them, and sure enough, that was probably the first band that I saw and I said to myself, This band’s gonna go somewhere. There were only a couple other bands that I thought were equal to Candlebox, if not better, music-wise, and one of those was Soundgarden.
BARDI MARTIN (Candlebox bassist) I was born in Olympia, Washington, and moved to Seattle when I was a few weeks old. I went to Mercer Island High School with Kevin. He had a different haircut every week. I can vaguely remember him having one-inch-long bleached dreads. He was trying pretty hard at it. He was always kind of a fast talker, but a good guy.
PETER KLETT (Candlebox guitarist) I grew up outside of Seattle, in what they call Bellevue. People considered it Bellevue, which was very rich and yuppie, but it was actually more the Eastgate area, which was a little less pretentious.
I got out of high school and joined some goofy band called Toxxl’rae. The singer was real into fucking Def Leppard and Aerosmith. The poser-type shit. I did some shows around town, and the ’90s thing hit. I saw Mookie Blaylock. I saw Soundgarden at the Off Ramp and Alice in Chains at the Central. Just before it really exploded. Me and the drummer of Toxxl’rae really liked that kind of music, so the group basically disbanded.
SCOTT MERCADO I knew Kevin because I crashed his 16th birthday party with the lead singer of First Thought, Joshua Pierce. His 16th birthday party—how funny is that? I was probably 20. Yeah, it was a little weird—it was my friend Joshua’s idea. I think he was 19. Even though I was a little older, you hear about these huge parties that you need to go to. We all got drinking and there were lots of girls there, lots of people hanging out. But it wasn’t like a high school party.
I hung out with one of Kevin’s future girlfriends, Angie, who came up to me after I left Sky Cries Mary and said, “Remember Kevin Martin? He wants to start a band; he’s thinking about calling you.”
I’m like, “He plays drums. We’re not going to have two drummers in the band.”
She said, “No, he’s singing now.” He wasn’t a great drummer, but he had a lot of charisma and was very outgoing, so being a singer is definitely more his personality.
KELLY GRAY (producer; Queensrÿche/Myth guitarist) I’ve known Scott Mercado, geez, since I was 16. He was in a band called Realms, who had played with Myth and Shadow. Then the guitar player, Peter, I knew from a band he was in with another buddy of mine, which was called Toxxl’rae—it was the ’80s, you know. And the way that Candlebox came together is that Kevin Martin and Scott Mercado had a project called Uncle Duke. And I’m at the Vogue, I’m hanging out with Pete, and Scott Mercado came over and told me they didn’t have a guitar player.
PETER KLETT Kelly introduced me to Scott, and I was like, “Cool. Let’s do it.” As I was walking out of the Vogue, I met Kevin. So that was my introduction to what was Uncle Duke.
BARDI MARTIN I had been in a string of shitty bands, and I was over at a friend of mine’s, Adam, who was the singer for Sweet Water, and Sarah his girlfriend, venting about just how frustrated I was. I hadn’t seen Kevin since high school, and they mentioned that Kevin is looking for a bass player.
I was the last person to join. What ended up being “You,” which was one of the songs that di
d really well, happened when we were improvising, the first hour we were together. I had a rough song idea that became “Far Behind,” and I think we worked on that that night, too. It felt pretty magical early on.
At one point, I left town for a few days, and when I came back the band was called Candlebox. I always thought it was a shitty name.
KELLY GRAY I get a call about needing to get some demos for these guys, so we go in to Robert Lang and record basically a full-length demo. When Kevin was singing “Far Behind” at the studio, I looked at their then-manager and I said, “These guys are gonna make us rich.” It was obvious.
And then things started really changing. They were playing the Weathered Wall, which was basically the next club down from the Crocodile Café. It probably held about 600 people stuffed. They want me to run sound on this show, and I walk into this club—and it’s literally like their fourth gig—and there are so many people in this thing, and outside the door people can’t get in. I’m just like, “What the fuck is this?”
KEVIN MARTIN Spring of ’92 is when we did our demo tape and changed the name to Candlebox. We hadn’t been thinking, We’re gonna get rich doing this, until Nevermind went through the fuckin’ roof.
Candlebox took the most heat as a young band. Because nobody knew who we were, and we had kind of come out of obscurity.
BARDI MARTIN Things happened really fast for us. There were a lot of people that were really happy for things going well, but at the same time, musicians are some of the shittiest, most insecure people on the planet. There were people that were trying to make it that thought of us as unworthy. It seemed a lot like high school.
