Something I don’t mind telling you: I had an Everclear T-shirt. It had a big neon green star on the front and said “White Trash and Proud of It” on the back. I didn’t know that last bit till the guy came and took it off the wall, but I bought it anyway. I caught some snickers and hostile mutters when I’d sit on the number 7 bus crawling up Rainier or be standing in line at the old Rite-Aid downtown waiting to pay for a Snapple or whatever. Punk rock, baby: I was really fucking people’s heads up out here. “I can hear them talking in the real world, but they don’t understand.” Still, I knew better than to let Moms see it, so that usual waist-flannel would actually go on my back when I sported the shirt within her eyesight. There’s punk rock, and there’s self-preservation.
I’d gotten hip to the Portland trio via an acquaintance whom I’d read till then as having zero taste to speak of—but he suggested I borrow his copy of their debut, World of Noise, released on Portland’s Tim/Kerr. It was allegedly recorded for $400—an even smaller sum than it was said it cost to record Bleach—and sounded like it. The songs were precisely the kind of anxious, maudlin crap that spoke to my deep well of alienation and the life of star-crossed heartbreak that I imagined ahead of me…