Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  ART CHANTRY So they had to pull the cover and replace it with a generic band shot. TAD was a monstrously talented band and that was the record everybody thought was gonna be the next big one. Then they put it back out there, and Bruce thought, in his marketing genius (laughs), that this record really needed a kick in the ass. He wanted to try and get free publicity, because they had no money. There was a song on the record that was called “Jack Pepsi,” which was about getting drunk drinking Jack Daniel’s and Pepsi-Cola and wrecking your monster truck in a swamp or something like that. Bruce decided that what he was gonna do was put this on a CD single and do the Pepsi logo on the front with the word TAD inserted where Pepsi was, then send it to Pepsi-Cola corporate headquarters with the hopes of actually getting sued, as I understand it.

  GRANT ALDEN I remember the guys at Sub Pop had really planned to lose a battle with Pepsi over “Jack Pepsi.” I can remember being at their office and seeing the artwork or the album and having Bruce or Jonathan say, “We’re probably gonna have to reprint this.” My memory is that they had budgeted a certain amount of money: “We’re gonna lose some legal fees on this, but we’ll make it up on the backside with publicity.”

  BRUCE PAVITT We didn’t have a lot of money to pay for advertising, so you try to stir up some controversy. Did I think we were gonna get sued? No. I thought that we were under the radar enough, but it’s the kind of thing that I felt people could look at and think, Oh, fuck, these guys are gonna get sued. Geez, maybe I should buy this thing. That was more my intention. There was a disgruntled ex-employee who notified Pepsi.

  TAD DOYLE The name [Pepsi] I haven’t spoken in many years. It’s not a sore subject; it’s just financially prudent for me to leave it alone.

  KURT DANIELSON Bruce wasn’t afraid to court controversy, but I don’t think he notified P——. Because that record was intended to break the band, and I don’t think Bruce would have deliberately fucked with it in that way. I know for a fact that there was such a disgruntled ex-employee, who I believe is responsible for it.

  The story of “Jack P——” is kind of funny because it has a couple different layers to it. When we were in the studio with Steve Albini doing Salt Lick, Tad was asking Steve for songwriting advice. Steve said, “Well, just write about some real things that have happened to you.” And then Tad told him this story about Tad and a buddy borrowing the buddy’s father’s brand-new pickup, driving it out onto Lake Lowell, this frozen lake outside Boise, Idaho, doing 360s and 180s all over, and then hitting a weak spot on the ice. The truck fell through, sinking to the bottom, and those guys barely got out alive. Steve said, “Shit, man, write about that one! I’m surprised you haven’t already.” And so, subsequently, Tad did write about it.

  How the song got its title and how that fits in is a different story. When we were on tour with Nirvana in San Francisco, I had a bottle of P—— and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. It was just Krist, Kurt, and myself. Kurt back in those days hardly ever drank, but on this particular night he decided he wanted to get drunk. Krist always liked to drink, so he was all for it. So we started mixing up drinks and I came up with this idea of this character Jack P——. I put a stupid hat on and I started talking with an accent: “I’m Jack P——. I do this, I do that, blah blah blah.”

  Tad walks into the room, thinks that’s hilarious, and later on we say, “Let’s incorporate that into this song that we’re writing, and we can say that Jack P—— is this deity that we pray to save us when we’re about to drown.” The refrain is, “Help me Jack P——!/Help me Jack P——!”

  A lot of times, either I would write the body of a song or Tad would, but we’d need something else to make it really work, and then the other guy would come to the rescue. I still miss working with Tad.

  STEVE WIEDERHOLD I quit right after we recorded 8-Way Santa. I wasn’t getting enough say. On one particular song, “Stumblin’ Man,” we had a really big problem, because I had a whole different kind of drum thing for one part going, and that wasn’t gonna fly. Tad was like, “You have to play it this way, or else.” So we had a big problem with that, and I decided then that I’m quitting.

  BUTCH VIG Jonathan called me up and said, “Butch, I really like what you did with TAD. I got this band Nirvana, they’re amazing. They could be as big as the Beatles.” I sort of laughed when he said that, because I never heard anybody say something that sort of pretentious. He said, “They’re gonna be doing a tour.” He wanted to bring them out here to do an album; it wasn’t going to be demos at the time.

  Nirvana show up maybe two or three weeks later at Smart. They definitely seemed a little bit like misfits. Krist was super-nice. Kurt walked in and sat down in the back of the control room and didn’t say anything. Kurt would go sit in the lounge and the second time he did that, Krist said to me, “Kurt gets like that. He’s fine. He’ll come out of it.” Chad was a nice guy, but while we were setting up, Kurt was critical of where Chad was putting the drums or something—there was a little bit of friction going on.

  They had booked like five or six days, and they played a show in Madison on like the fourth day. There’s this club called Bunky’s, and downstairs there was this Italian restaurant, where they played in the back corner, which held maybe 75 people. It’s the first time I got a sense that there was a buzz about the band, because it was jammed in there and people were freaking out when they started playing.

  Kurt was singing so fuckin’ loud, probably ’cause there were no monitors, he kind of lost his voice about 10 songs into the set. It fell apart at the end, and he threw his guitar and walked off the stage. He came in to sing the next day, and he couldn’t. At that point, we’d recorded like six or seven songs. I think we recorded one more basic track, and then they had to take off.

  Jonathan called me and said, “Maybe you could come out to Seattle for a week to finish the songs or maybe we could get them back out for another week in a month or two.” Until I heard otherwise, I thought it was going to be a Sub Pop album.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN Kurt got frustrated, came home, and soon after they started shopping for a new label. He said many times with regard to Bleach, “This record should be selling millions of copies.” And I’m explaining to him what, in retrospect, seems foolish and condescending on my part, that the idea of a band like Nirvana selling between 30,000 and 50,000 records then was amazing.

  BUZZ OSBORNE When Nirvana started doing better, we played a show with them in Portland, and that was when the worm had turned. That was before Dave Grohl was ever in the band. We just assumed that we were going to play last, and they said that they thought that they should headline, because things were really taking off for them, and then they were really weird about splitting up the money. That was when I knew that things were not the same with these guys. They had become exactly what I had always tried to avoid.

  This was way before they got popular—that’s what people don’t get. They lined up for this shit. They put themselves in line to be aligned with horrible people. I blamed them for the whole thing. They got in line to be involved with horrible management, horrible booking agents, horrible everything. They didn’t need to do it, but they did it.

  CHAD CHANNING I was looking forward to being able to write some stuff for the band, and when Kurt said that he’d appreciate some input and help, that was one thing I was looking forward to. And after a while I realized that that really wasn’t going to happen.… I started feeling more like a drum machine than anything else. Somewhere along the line I started losing my inspiration, and of course, when you do that, it’s gonna show.

  Krist and Kurt made the long drive up and came up to my place. That was a weird drive for them. I remember talking about it with Krist years down the road. He was like, “Yeah, that was a really horrible drive. Me and Kurt were not looking forward to that at all.” ’Cause the thing was, we were always good friends. So to say it was for “musical differences” would be exact, because it really was.

  JEFF GILBERT Jason Everman
was a nice guy, but not the right guy for Soundgarden. Painfully obvious. I went to New York with them for my second Soundgarden cover story for The Rocket, and Jason never hung with the band. Onstage, he played well, thrashed his hair around, did what he was supposed to. But he was always very moody. It was like putting on wet shoes: They fit, but they’re just not comfortable.

  KIM THAYIL What we ended up learning on the road with Jason was that losing Hiro caused a huge wound to the band. This was a very fragile time for us, and Jason was new, he was spending less time trying to establish and maintain these relationships with us, especially with Chris and Matt. He was just trying to get his footing. And Jason’s presence wasn’t helping to remedy these fragile and wounded relationships between us all.

  CHRIS CORNELL When we were auditioning [Jason], he was really shy, withdrawn, and really intimidated by the whole thing. I figured that, given a few months, he was gonna roar. It never worked out. Things never gelled, and rather than let them fester, we fired him.

  JASON EVERMAN I guess I was fired because I wasn’t getting along with Chris. No fights; it was just tension. We’re on tour in Europe, and Matt got sick in Italy. He went to a hospital, but I think it turned out to be a G.I. problem, food poisoning. It wasn’t anything serious. We went back to Washington, home for a couple of days, had a band meeting at Matt’s house. The meeting was like two minutes long. Chris did the talking. It went something along the lines of, “We’ve been talking. We don’t think you’re working out, so we want to try some other people out.”

  KIM THAYIL Something else that was influential in this decision was Andy Wood’s death. I think during that period of time, Chris wasn’t fucking around anymore. He became more prolific—he ended up writing Temple of the Dog—and I got the sense that he felt he needed to honor Andy and champion that kind of unique personality.

  So after we parted ways with Jason, Chris said, “You know, I keep thinking about Ben. He’s from Bainbridge, like Andy. They knew each other. There’s nobody like Ben.” Ben’s not a regular guy; he’s an intense, creative person. I thought Chris’s reasons were fantastic.

  JASON EVERMAN Oh, I was destroyed. I stayed in my room for three days, brooding. It was like being dumped by this woman that you’re totally in love with. It was probably one of the defining experiences of my life, for sure. It put me into a definite sink-or-swim situation, existentially. Was I going to stay in Seattle and start my revenge band, or was I going to travel? The decision I came to was to move to New York. I joined some other bands.

  BEN SHEPHERD The phone rings, and it’s Kim: “Hey, Ben, we’re back in town from tour. You want to hang out and get a beer or something?” By then I’d turned 21. We went and hung out, and the next day we all went over Chris and Susan’s house to meet Chris’s new Pomeranian. And that’s when they asked me to join.

  I spat on the ground and said, “Fuck, yeah!”

  KIM THAYIL The fit with Ben was immediately a little bit better. He was certainly more outgoing and willing to contribute creatively. Now, I’m not going to say that Ben healed the wound that was left when Hiro left the band. But the band regained some of the spirit that it had in the good days of Hiro, as well as transformed the band into what it became on Badmotorfinger.

  BEN SHEPHERD The first tour I did with them was in Europe. Played Roskilde Festival as my first show. I remember going on stage to the chants of “Hiro! Hiro!” I don’t think they knew that Hiro left the band. It’s probably the only performance where I ever stood still. When I joined Soundgarden, I was thinking, I gotta do this exactly like Hiro. I gotta do this exactly right. Had no fun the first show. That’s bullshit. So I decided to change that and the next day, go for it.

  JEFF GILBERT Ben is a punk rocker. When he played his bass, he looked like he was trying to murder it. He has a very aggressive spirit, which is what I think Soundgarden really needed after Jason Everman.

  JANET BILLIG I understood why Jason couldn’t be in Nirvana. He just didn’t quite fit in. He really fit in way more with Soundgarden. I was surprised that didn’t work out. I got him a plane ticket to come out to stay at my place in New York so he could recover from the madness of it. He was a buddy. I had a lot of love for Jason Everman. He’s an intense dude. He was a guy who was like, “I want to know what it feels like to kill people,” and he went and joined the Army and has been in Iraq.

  JASON EVERMAN After I quit the band Mindfunk in ’93, I did two periods of service, starting in 1994. Joining the military was one of the most punk-rock things I’ve ever done, this “Fuck everyone, this is what I’m going to do” type of ethos. Becoming a warrior is huge.

  Did I join the Army to find out “what it feels like to kill people”? No. There’s nothing cool about being in a gunfight. This notion that it’s some kind of sociopathic desire to kill people is absurd. I don’t know where that came from. People project whatever they want to project, you know? I have no problem with the notion of destroying the enemy, but … no. I would like to think I’m a gentle soul, and for the most part, I am.

  JENNIE BODDY (Sub Pop Records publicist) Steve Turner was always going back to college, supposedly. Mudhoney was really on the road to breakup, because Steve was so nervous going back to college, and at a certain point, even as their publicist, sometimes I didn’t know what was true and not true. Was he going back to college, or did they just keep saying that because it became so funny?

  STEVE TURNER I went back to school a lot. (Laughs.) I didn’t see a straight line through college, but I told my parents I was hoping to be done with college when I was 30. When I hit 30, I was like, Fuck, man. I gave myself 12 years, and I failed.

  Was going back to school a reaction to our success? Probably. I don’t know what I was afraid of. I didn’t think I was meant to be a rock star, so I was fighting it.

  MATT LUKIN Steve’s like, “I’m taking the year off, I’m going to school.” And I’m like, “Well, fuck it, then. I gotta go back to work. I can’t sit around for a year and do nothing.” So I went back to work as a carpenter, and it kind of took the wind out of my sails as far as being in the band.

  DAN PETERS I ran into Kurt’s and Krist’s girlfriends, Tracy and Shelli, at the Vogue one night, and they told me that Nirvana was looking for another drummer. Steve was back in school, so I’m like, “I got some time. Let ’em know that I’m interested.” Next thing I knew, I get a call from Kurt, and I start jamming with those guys. But the practices weren’t fun, like in Mudhoney, where we were drinking beer and having a good time. But I was glad I was able to record that one song, “Sliver,” with them.

  The one show I played with them was at the Motor Sports International Garage. You could tell there was a lot of momentum building for those guys. They were already planning on leaving Sub Pop at the time.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN That was a huge show, with the Melvins and the Dwarves and the Derelicts on the bill. I was on the side of the stage, and I remember Kurt looking at me from the stage and saying in front of probably fifteen hundred people in the audience, “Jon, we’re not signing to Capitol.” That was the rumor that had spread around.

  JULIANNE ANDERSEN The Motor Sports show? That was the moment. That’s when I knew. This little kid from Aberdeen that’s obviously a little bit shy, a little bit overwhelmed by everything that’s happened, and there’s so many cameras in his face.

  I remember watching Charles Peterson have to jostle for space; that was his deal, and that guy had to fight for physical space on that stage. It just wasn’t right. I had photo passes, but I walked off that stage, because I knew right then and there that quiet kid from Aberdeen was in for a long and rough ride, and at the time, I felt like the best thing anyone could do for him was back the fuck off.

  SALTPETER (bassist for San Francisco’s Dwarves) That was an all right show, until some little cunt in the audience threw a 7-Up bottle and split my forehead open during “Let’s Fuck.” I did finish the song before I went to the emergency room and got my head sewn up. The other t
hing I remember was that the Dwarves had like a $100 guarantee. And I think Nirvana had like $1,000. And I remember Blag haggling with Krist over money before the show, like, “Could you kick us another hundred bucks for gas money?” And Krist was not having any of it, until I went to the emergency room. When the Dwarves came to pick me up after the show, they said, “Hey, we got another hundred bucks out of Nirvana because you got hit with a bottle.” I guess that was worth it.

  DAN PETERS The day after that show, they had an interview and BBQ scheduled at Krist’s place in Tacoma. And I was like, “Let me see if I can borrow my wife’s car.” And they were like, “Nah, don’t worry about it.” And I’m like, “I’ll make it.” And they didn’t say anything.

  I go down to Tacoma the next day and do the interview and the photo shoot. And this guy Dave, he’s the drummer for Scream, is hanging in the background, having hamburgers and whatnot, and nobody says anything.

  Kurt and Krist were going off to L.A. to talk to labels, and there was talk of the band going off and doing a U.K. tour after that.

  BRUCE PAVITT There were rumors that Nirvana were shopping themselves around. Jon had asked me to go down to Olympia to talk to Kurt to try to convince him to stay with the label, to have a heart-to-heart. It was more of an act of diplomacy. I brought down a couple of records that I thought he would really appreciate, Philosophy of the World by the Shaggs and Hi, How Are You by Daniel Johnston, two of the freakiest, most obscure records I had in my collection. My intention was to essentially communicate to him that at the end of the day, Sub Pop was going to support unusual points of view. To this day, I take great pride in turning Kurt on to Daniel Johnston; I saw Kurt wearing his T-shirt in Rolling Stone. It was about six hours of just getting to know each other and talking philosophy.