LET THERE BE… GRUNGE?

“Right after that hatchet job of a film came out, we were doing a festival in Seattle and we’d taken our skull up there. For one reason or another, the promoter refused to send it back down to Los Angeles, and with Ian Faith managing our finances, we didn’t have the dosh to send the skull back ourselves. To cut a long story into two longer stories, we just left the skull at the venue. Now it’s seven years later, we’re playing the Fox Theatre in Seattle on the Break Like The Wind tour, and this woman comes backstage – a manager of the grunge bands of the era. They had all kind of congregated around this bloke who, in his backyard, had the skull. He’d seen it at the Seattle Center and nobody had claimed it, so he trucked it over to his backyard. These bands – Pearl Jam was one of them, I think – they met in his backyard in the shadow of the original Spinal Tap skull, and I just thought, ‘Well, that is… We should maybe be getting royalties from those bands.’ But nobody really brought that up. Whatever message they got from our skull is embedded in grunge. It was like the torch had been passed. But they remembered, they said, ‘We really learned a lot about what not to do on stage from you guys.’”