Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  MARK ARM: I first saw Malfunkshun in ’82, when they opened for Discharge at the Showbox. Andy tossed grapes in the air and caught them in his mouth between songs, when he wasn’t giving some bizarre high-speed rap about how they came down from Mount Olympus. You never knew what you were going to get at a Malfunkshun show. Sometimes, they didn’t seem like they could keep it together. And sometimes, they were the best band ever.

  Kevin Wood, pre-metallic makeover

  REGAN HAGAR: Having guitar solos in our music was totally taboo for punk rock. We were mixing styles, where other people weren’t. People were into the 666 stuff, and we were 333 — good fighting evil. We had this whole imaginary world going on — it was Andy who was really generating that.

  CHAD CHANNING: These guys were like glam rock, but their music wasn’t at all. They were playing this total noise. The first recordings I’d heard before I ever saw them — I did not picture them to look like what they played.

  BRUCE FAIRWEATHER: Andy would sometimes wear this hideous little quilted rabbit fur jacket, that would barely fit him — with his little cherub belly hanging out, and white makeup on his face.

  SCOTTY CRANE: In between songs, he would tell jokes like a stand-up comedian. Jack [Endino] has a story about him stopping in the middle of a set to make a sandwich.

  SUSAN SILVER: I put on a lot of shows at the Central Tavern. I would have him emcee as Landrew the Love Child, and he may sing a song or two, tell jokes, or be his effervescent, charming little self.

  TRACY MARANDER: I remember we went to one [Malfunkshun] show in Olympia, where Kurt was really tired. Got a chair, sat, and fell asleep during the show.

  STEVE TURNER: Malfunkshun — I’d seen them around at shows causing trouble and stuff. They were kind of a bad group of people [laughs]. They were always fucking things up at punk shows. They were part of the University Ave./Bopo Boys gang of punks that liked to wreck stuff. But they were really sarcastic and funny while they did it.

  SCOTT VANDERPOOL: The guy was just born to be a rock star. And of course, being “rock starlike” at that point was really uncool. It was very un-punk.

  MATT FOX: Andy was very quiet … and turned into Freddie Mercury onstage.

  KRISHA AUGEROT: He reminded me of John Belushi — constantly made everyone laugh, he was a total showman. He wanted to be as over-thetop as he possibly could. And I think in his real life, he was insecure, but in his stage performances, he was like from another planet, [where] he ruled the world. Unfortunately, like most of these kind of artists like that, they have that dark side, and he was an addict.

  SCOTTY CRANE: In probably ’86, Andy’s drug problem started to get bad. I had gone to Andy, to see if he knew where to get acid. He told me he could sell me a couple of hits. He said, “Come to the show tonight.” I went to the show, and had taken this acid with a friend. It was totally fake. The next day, I went to his house, and was like, “Dude, you fucking sold me paper!” And he broke down and started crying. This is one of the rare times you got to see the heart of Andy. He told me how he was a drug addict and that he needed the money for cocaine. He said he would pay me back, and he did.

  TRACY MARANDER: One time, we were at the Central Tavern. [Andy] was there, he was going to come into the girls’ bathroom, and they were like, “You’re a boy, you can’t come in!” He’s like, “But I’m so much prettier than you girls!”

  DAVE REES: Andy was a promotional genius — his ideas were big. He wanted to compete with Van Halen and Aerosmith, not the local bands. As people walked off the ferryboat from Bainbridge in Seattle, [there] was a cattle walk — large metal walls on either side. Andy wrote a story on each panel of the wall. In the end it paid off with “Rock ’n’ roll’s only chance, Malfunkshun.” Every person who rode the boat from Bainbridge to Seattle knew who Malfunkshun was — they couldn’t escape Andy’s marketing.

  BLAINE COOK: Total self-promotion. They made a lot tapes and did a lot of Xeroxing — flyers all over town.

  ROBIN TAYLOR: He was a DHL delivery kid during the day, rock star via night.

  LIBBY KNUDSON: He was “the punk rock David Lee Roth.”

  SCOTTY CRANE: You would go over to his house in the morning and he would offer you breakfast. You would ask him what he was going to make, and he would say, “Pancake surprise.” You’d ask him what the surprise was, and he would never tell you.

  KIM THAYIL: If you were to have a conversation with him, he’d usually end up singing part of the conversation.

  BLAINE COOK: We had gone to see those David Bowie movies, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and maybe one other one. I’m there with Regan and Andy, and this theater is just packed. His girlfriend at the time is completely, 100 percent sucking his dick [laughs].

  CHRIS HANZSEK: Every time he would show up and record vocals for the Deep Six compilation, he’d be in full costume. Some brand new pair of sunglasses, a funky hat, a giant scarf, and a funny coat. I remember thinking, “This is a studio, you don’t have to dress up.” But he did — I think that’s what got him into character.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO: [Andy] lived with Chris [Cornell] for a while. [Soundgarden] practiced in that place. Andy would be there a lot hanging out. The two juxtaposed against each other — just seemed like two complete opposites. Chris was this real quiet, introspective guy, who barely even said a word, and Andy was this guy with a huge flair. It just seemed really funny that they were roommates.

  REGAN HAGAR: That was a good time — we didn’t like Andy being alone. He had already announced to us that he was a little scared of drugs. We would go to his apartment prior to that and bang on the door — we’d know he was in there, and that kind of freaked us out. He wasn’t a junkie, but he was slipping around the recreational use that most of the people in town were doing. So when he moved in with Chris — and Chris is really straight — I was excited. I thought it was really good for both bands, because they pressured each other, and there was a writing frenzy between Chris and Andy. Andy got a girlfriend that started living there.

  XANA LA FUENTE: A vintage clothing store is where I worked with this girl, Chrissy. Now they call them Goths, but back then, we used to call the people that dressed like that Bat-Cavers. She was a Bat-Caver, but with a slick, vintage touch. She always drove vintage cars — she was a big influence on me fashion-wise. We always dressed in ’40s suits — every other girl in the ’80s was doing feathered hair and black short skirts. Fantasy was downstairs at the time, and this vintage store I worked at was upstairs. Andrew and Regan walked upstairs into this little antique mall; Andrew was looking at a guitar that he ended up buying. Regan walked into this store I was working at. I remember him staring at me, and he said, “Just a minute.” The story is that he went and told Andrew, “Your future wife is in the next room.” Andrew walked in, we talked for a while — he was totally goofy. Wearing light brown corduroys. Capricorn men have no taste, OK? Really tacky. He was living in Bainbridge, and he would come into town every single day on the ferry, and sit, and talk with me for about an hour or two — hang out with me at work. We would have dates where we would hold hands in the park. We didn’t sleep together until we were living together with Chris [Cornell]. I think that’s a really important thing in a relationship. There’s a lot of magic in that.

  KRISHA AUGEROT: She was the love of his life. They were great together — both like rock stars. She was over-the-top, and she commanded a lot of attention. And so did he. I think they were really happy together. I just think that becoming a star in real life — moving to the next level — was a lot of pressure. So he turned to drugs a little bit more than usual. And Xana was … she sought attention from other places, when she wasn’t getting it from him. That tore him up a lot. She had a lot of other male friends that she would hang out with — whether or not she had relationships with them, I can’t say. But it seemed that way. I think Andy was extremely jealous, and probably in the back of his mind thought he wasn’t worthy. That probably brought the dark side out of him more — the depress
ed side. That was a vicious cycle — that was the poison in the relationship. They got in physical fights a lot, but I think that he would go inward, and that would be a big problem for drug use.

  XANA LA FUENTE: Me and Andrew lived with Chris for a long time. Chris had heard that Andrew was looking for a room to rent, and invited him to move in. And then I came along, and he asked him, “Can she live here too?” I remember telling Chris, “You won’t ever have to wash any dishes or cook a single meal.” And the day I was moving out, I was washing some dishes, and I’m like, “You fucking asshole, you never washed a single dish!” And he said, “Well, you said you wanted to be Mom!”

  Regan Hagar, attempting his best Gene Simmons impersonation

  Next to the kitchen, there was this water heater room — no bigger than a closet. That was [Chris’s] studio. He recorded a lot of really great stuff in there — original stuff for Temple of the Dog like “Wooden Jesus.” I remember him throwing lyrics away — I used to take them out of the trash and un-crumble them. He’d be sitting on the couch drinking black coffee, looking at the ocean. He’d gotten laid off of Ray’s Boathouse, and was really down. I said, “Don’t worry — you’re going to be a huge rock star.”

  KEVIN WOOD: We were thinking if [Malfunkshun] kicked ass long enough, somebody would take notice and sign us. We did a couple of demos, but we didn’t do much about shopping it around. We had a manager, but it just fell apart. We recorded our demos in ’87, and then broke up a year after that. We didn’t really give ourselves a chance.

  REGAN HAGAR: We always felt like we were influencing everybody, and we weren’t getting what we deserved. For instance, we’d been a band for three or four years, and out comes Green River, and they were immediately drawing tons of people to their shows. They were doing really well — nothing ever went wrong for those guys. They were good friends of ours, but we were always confused how we got missed. The Rocket wasn’t writing about us — the Fartz were on the cover. We didn’t get a lot of the national acts spots — Green River or Soundgarden would. It was frustrating.

  KEVIN WOOD: The main reason why we didn’t get our just desserts is because the Mother Love Bone guys pulled Andy out of Malfunkshun. I mean, Andy of course decided to go along. His vision was clouded and he didn’t see the end result. We were a more powerful band and had a lot more potential, because Mother Love Bone was conforming to the Guns N’ Roses formula, and we were still a very unique, big-sounding band. We definitely could have gone a lot farther than Mother Love Bone, and Andy I think in the end would have been a lot happier. Malfunkshun was about freedom, and we had the formula down. We struggled for years — mainly with our own musical abilities — but finally fell into a groove towards the end. You could feel it was going to take off. And then all of the hype that came around with Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden — we were completely overshadowed.

  REGAN HAGAR: We never said, “The band is over.” We thought Andy was going to do Love Bone, and it was going to open doors for Malfunkshun — then we were going to be able to make Malfunkshun or Andy records, aside from Love Bone. But Love Bone — within months — had major labels looking at them. Within a year’s time, they were signed and off to California recording and touring.

  Now people respect Malfunkshun on a level that didn’t happen then. But our egos were full-blown — we thought we were the loudest band in the city, and we prided ourselves on that. Which sounds ridiculous now. But you know … teenagers. It was still when the dream was perfect in a sense. Where you would get into a band, take over the world, become incredibly wealthy, and live in a very decadent lifestyle. It sounds trite, but that’s really where we were at.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Godzilla knocking over buildings”: The Shemps, Soundgarden

  The roots of one of grunge’s most renowned bands, Soundgarden, lay in the Shemps, an obscure group that specialized in the exact style that local punkers/proto-grungers looked to eradicate — cover bar bands.

  KIM THAYIL: There’s some book that said, “In the mid ’80s, the only heavy bands going at the time [in Seattle] were Green River and the Shemps.” I’m like, “What?!” The Shemps had nothing to do with that scene. At all. This weird bar band experience that lasted a handful of months — that’s all it should be referred to.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO: A friend of ours was in a cover band. This guy, Matt Dentino, was from Park Forest like we were. When he was in high school, he was a great guitarist — he played better than any of us. He was playing rock ’n’ roll and put an ad in The Rocket looking for a singer.

  KIM THAYIL: When we moved out to Seattle, Hiro did not play bass — he played mandolin. He learned bass because I was showing him all the scales. Matt Dentino was a fan of The Three Stooges, and nobody else was a fucking Three Stooges fan, or gave a shit about it. But Matt called it the Shemps because he thought it was funny. Hiro had no interest in the music, other than it was a learning experience for him — he would learn how to play bass in a working situation. So he did that for a couple of months, got sick of it, and quit. When Hiro quit, Matt had his hands tied because he had booked a few gigs in advance. I never played bass in any situation other than jamming — I’m a guitarist. So he was crashing on our couch, and says, “Kim, if I get you a bass, would you learn these songs?” I was like, “Eh, I don’t know man.” As much as I love Hendrix, I just had no fucking interest in Hendrix, Stones, or Doors songs at that point in my life. But, he needed the help. Somehow, I ended up with a bass for a period of time.

  MATT DENTINO: We played eight or ten times.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO: Chris [Cornell] answered an ad as a singer, and he needed a place to stay. So he ended up moving into our house.

  MATT DENTINO: When I first met Chris, he was a punk and, like, eighteen. He had short hair and was a cook. When he came in that little apartment — I was living in Kim’s three by six closet for a year — he just knocked it out of the ballpark. I think the first tune we tried was “White Wedding,” and that was it. He also did a scary Jim Morrison — his timing and phrasing on everything was just powerful and raw, the way it’s supposed to be sung.

  KIM THAYIL: Chris had been a drummer in bands, and wanted to try singing. Chris at some point knew it was a waste of time, but he also knew it was an opportunity to not play drums and practice singing in front of twenty or thirty people. Chris had a really good voice — but I had no interest in doing anything musical with the guy, because it seemed to me that Chris really wanted to be in a fucking bar band. If I pictured my “dream Stooges or MC5 band,” none of these guys fit in this picture.

  MATT DENTINO: The first Shemps gig was inside the Morning Star Cafe on Eleventh Avenue Northeast, which literally was a ten by fifteen foot cement room, complete with tables for patrons to sit. Matt Cameron was there.

  MATT CAMERON: They were playing Morning Town Pizza — it was hippie pizza place in the University District of Seattle. I was playing with another band at the time — Feedback — that played before the Shemps. I remember Chris being a really strong presence — Chris’s singing back then was still incredible.

  KIM THAYIL: I was friends with Mark Arm, and I did talk Mark into coming to see us. It was pretty hilarious — a bunch of drunk blues-rock losers … and then Mark and me.

  MARK ARM: Kim is an old friend of mine. We took philosophy classes together at the University of Washington. I met him at a TSOL show at the Showbox. This also might have been the show I met Steve at, but I clearly remember Kim at that show. Kim would always show up to class ten minutes late and proceed to monopolize the conversation — which irritated the professor to no end [laughs]. Kim ended up getting a degree in philosophy from the same institution. This guy with long hair and a moustache came up to me and said, “Hey, aren’t you in my philosophy class?”

  MATT DENTINO: Like any musician, I had a dream to have this killer world-changing band, and worked every day of my life to do so — especially all of ’84. Right when it was just beginning to happen, I started to think that in
all these dreams of everything I wanted, that maybe [I] really should not be there. It wasn’t the best for me in a health kind of way — doing drugs, raising hell, and chasing women, mostly unsuccessfully, 24/7. I was raised with a patriotic moral basis, and I said, “Man, I’ve got to get out of here, because this sinning is really not good for me.” Then I had an experience with God and I became a Christian. I knew they were going to make it. It was very painful, but I left to become a Christian, and minister music in churches, or wherever I play.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO: Chris was living at my house and we started jamming. We used to go upstairs — I’d play bass, he’d play drums, and we’d just jam out for hours at a time. So that’s kind of how it started. Chris was younger than us — he was just a kid. He might have dropped out of high school. He was young and quiet — he really liked to keep to himself. Me and Kim would sit around, drink beer, and watch David Letterman. He was more private — he liked to disappear in his room and think. Kim didn’t live at that house; he lived in a different place. It was Eightieth and Roosevelt. That’s when Soundgarden started — in that house.

  KIM THAYIL: I was not their first thought. I was probably not even their second thought — I think I was their eighth or ninth [laughs]. The other guitarists either couldn’t play very well, or didn’t have the same interests or vision as Chris or Hiro. And that had gone on for a number of months, apparently. Hiro would bring me up, because Chris only knew me as the bass player in that band — he didn’t know I played guitar. So Hiro said, “Kim’s a good friend of mine. He’s a really good guitar player and he likes a lot of the same things I like. Maybe we should have him jam? But y’know, Kim has a girlfriend, he’s going to college, he’s got a job — he’s really busy.”