Long Gone （Slight Return）
PETER MYERS: They booked Joe Morris into the clinic, right?
RAY DOYLE: They did. He’d never have done it himself.
He’d have kept on drinking and popping pills ’til he floated off into the clouds.
But they booked him into the clinic, and we told him—we said that if he didn’t go, this was all gonna fall apart.
I guess we got through to him, but he didn’t like it.
We had to pack his bags, bundle him into the car the label sent, all that crap.
I’ll be honest—and I haven’t said this before—but when they drove off, I kinda expected never to see him again.
It felt like that was it, they were gonna scrub him clean, and he’d either decide when he was sober that the whole thing was a dumb-ass idea, or it would turn out that Joe wasn’t there at all, that when you cleaned off all the scum, he was just a hollow space in the middle.
Credit to him, though. He did his time, and he came back.
The label put out Jesus Sweat , the tour got booked, and that whole big machine started rolling with us inside.
Even my parents thought it was great. Probably the first thing I’d done that they approved of.
MYERS: What about Joe? How did he seem?
DOYLE: Honestly? I kinda liked him more when he was high.
This new Joe…he was a downer, you know? He’d lost a lot of weight, and he looked leaner than before.
There was color in his cheeks, like they’d pumped him fulla life.
But his mind…his head wasn’t in a good place.
I’d known him, what, fifteen years? And I don’t think I’d ever seen him like that.
Like they’d burned away the rest and left us with this skinny…
miserable Joe. Paulie started calling him the Grinch when we were on tour.
He’d play the bassline from that song—y’know, “You’re a mean one…
”? Joe took it in good humor, but that in itself was wrong.
Old Joe would have been pissed. The new version of him just took it.
MYERS: It’s funny you should say that he seemed like a different person…I don’t want to suggest anything, but there were the ideas he had around that time, that strange interview with the NME in London.
DOYLE: Yeah. We were all…I didn’t know what to make of that.
Not any of it. I think…looking back, I think he got broken, maybe, before they even sent him to rehab.
Cracks that he plastered over with drink and pills.
And when they took all that away, he started to crumble.
Look—that interview? There’s been a lot made of it over the years, given what happened.
But that was just what he was like at the time.
It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, not for those of us who knew him.
It was all he’d talked about for months.
Man, he sounded crazy sometimes. It was worst when the rest of us were drinking or partying, and he’d be there in the corner, sober and picking at his nails like he was trying to peel them off.
That interview was just the first time the rest of the world saw what was happening.
It began as soon as he came outta rehab, I think, but we were too involved with the tour prep to notice.
He made a couple comments before we even caught our flights to Europe.
About how Paulie looked shorter than he used to, or Mark’s hair should be black.
At SeaTac he starts shouting that the terminal looks all wrong, that it’d been rebuilt after a bomb or some shit.
We were lucky they let us on the flight at all.
I think we all assumed it was part of the process, that he was still coming down—but it only got worse.
He was quiet and withdrawn most of the time, but when he wasn’t…
that’s when it got scary. He said it was like the world had changed while he was gone.
Like someone was pranking him and had changed it all, everything, in subtle ways.
I caught him looking in the mirror once, running his fingers over the glass.
Like he didn’t recognize the face he saw staring back at him.
Item #15. Audio cassette. Recorded interview between journalist Peter Myers and Paulie Schultz, bassist with Mutt (and later with Honeypot, Lucid). The label is written in black biro; this tape is marked (G), June 24, 1999.
MYERS: I think it’s important to get your view of what happened. There’s still a lot of speculation around Joe Morris’s last days. Why don’t you?—
PAULIE SCHULTZ: You’ve spoken with Ray, right? He was always the closest to Joe. I don’t imagine I’ll have much to say that he hasn’t said already.
MYERS: You all grew up together, though? And you were there on the tour, when Joe disappeared. I think people will want to hear your side of it.
SCHULTZ: My side? I’m not really one for taking sides. What happened, happened. Joe had his issues, like we all do. I’m not a fan of raking over it all.
MYERS: But don’t you?—
SCHULTZ: Okay, listen. I’m happy to talk about the band, the music, yeah?
I’m still proud of what we did. Maybe we only had the one album, but we had something, for a moment.
Jesus Sweat was a part of that whole grunge explosion in Seattle, and we have our own little piece of music history.
The fact people are still mentioning Mutt in the same breath as Mudhoney, or Nirvana—it means something.
But what happened at the end…that was just Joe’s demons catching up with him.
I don’t hold much truck with digging over a friend’s grave.
MYERS: There isn’t a grave, though, is there? [Pause.] Do you think he’s dead?
SCHULTZ: Do I think he’s dead? Yes. Completely.
There are some crazy-ass theories out there—trust me, I’ve heard them—but this ain’t The X-Files .
I had a friend with a problem, now I don’t.
It’s a sad loss, and it’s one I feel every day, but that’s all.
It’s life, man. We all lose in the end. Joe just cashed in earlier than most.
Item #40. Lyrics to “Off My Face,” written in green pencil on unlined paper. Lower half of the paper is torn off and missing. Edits marked by struck-through text.
slurry falls to a distant pool / let it drip its silent siren (spell??) call / drowned rats they climb the wall / die young and burn you all
I’m off my face / get off my face
I’m off my case / get off my case
I’m off my face / off my face / face
Item #9. Audio cassette. Recorded interview between journalist Peter Myers and Ray Doyle. The label is written in thick brown pen; this tape is marked (C), June 17, 1999.
MYERS: So, picking up from the other day…you said Joe was troubled even early on? Before rehab, and the tour to England?
DOYLE: Yeah. We were always friends, right back to high school.
All four of us. But Joe was the oddball even then, y’know?
He didn’t quite fit in, but you got the feeling it was because he didn’t want to.
I guess that’s why we all became close. We were the only kids who could stand Joe.
He was thrown out of school in tenth grade for bringing a Ouija board to recess—that was who Joe was.
He knew it’d mess with everyone, but he did it anyway.
[There’s a noise on the tape here, partially hidden in the static. Someone can be heard speaking in the background, but their voice is too muffled to distinguish what they’re saying.]
MYERS: So when did that change, and you decided to form a band? I know you’ve said this before in a bunch of interviews…
DOYLE: There wasn’t an actual point where we sat up and said, “Hey, shall we be a band?” It just happened over the course of a summer, while we were trying to keep our jobs, living in our parents’ basements.
Joe and I were in Tacoma, Paulie and Mark were in Puyallup, Federal Way…
we couldn’t always meet easily, but we’d practice some evenings if we could.
I think…you know about the Tales of Terror show, right?
Eighty-three? We all traveled into Seattle for that, at the Metropolis.
That was a starting point, if you wanna put a pin in it.
Maybe the Replacements that year, too. We were all there, but so were a bunch of others—Jeff Ament, Mark Arm, Stone Gossard, Johnny E.
That was the “oh crap” moment, when we realized all together that this was what we wanted to do.
Loud, punk-ass guitars, sludgy bass, heaps of attitude.
We started taking ourselves seriously after that, although it took a few years for us to pull it together.
MYERS: And how was Joe at this point?
DOYLE: He loved it. I mean, the scene, the music, the not-give-a-shit of it all.
It suited Joe down to the ground. He’d been living like that for years.
When we formed Mutt, it was like he’d finally given voice to all that screwed-up shit in his head.
I already knew guitar from school, and Mike and Paulie managed to scrounge enough cash for a cheap Ibanez and a second-hand kit.
Turns out Paulie was an undiscovered genius on the bass—but you know that, I’m sure. He’s still working the circuit.
[Another muffled noise in the background, still too buried in the static to make out clearly. It sounds like someone laughing.]
MYERS: You’ve said the Sub Pop 200 was the turning point for you, when you got your first contract, but also when the wheels started to come off. How did that happen?
DOYLE: Course it was. The 200 made all of us, from Kurt on down. You know they ran a full spread on it in some British music paper? We were like a footnote, but even that was enough. Signed the deal with a real label, given a European tour…the whole enchilada.
Item #23: A hand-drawn poster advertising a show at the Community World Theatre, Tacoma. The image is of a guitar smashed in two, some kind of ghost (devil?) rising from the crack.
Meanus Betweenus presents…
Jesters in Chaos
Mutt
Skin Yard
SaTURDay Apr. 9