by Mark Yarm
AARON JACOVES I’ll tell you what kicked Soundgarden into gear. It was when Axl, at the height of Guns N’ Roses’ career, started speaking about the group in interviews.
SUSAN SILVER After I got the call about the Guns N’ Roses tour, I went to where they were, at Stuart Hallerman’s studio, Avast! I remember walking in, I had a box of T-shirts, some new designs. And I was so excited. Oh, my God, I was so excited: “Hey, guys! I have something to tell you! We got an offer today … to go … on tour … WITH GUNS N’ ROSES!”
They didn’t say a word. After about 30 seconds—it felt like an eternity—one of them said, “What’s in the box?”
BEN SHEPHERD Our tour with Guns N’ Roses? Yeah, not my fault. I don’t like that kind of music—and don’t fuckin’ make something out of nothing by me saying that. They’re all really nice guys, don’t get me wrong. But still, let me finish. I’m a punk rocker, man. I like Black Flag and way more hardcore stuff. That kind of butt rock, I don’t like. I want nothing to do with that kind of world. I’m not a rock star, I don’t like rock stars, and I don’t want to be around them. That word rock star is really derogatory to me. There seems to be a malicious factor in calling someone that. It’s a put-down.
The Guns N’ Roses tour was a full-on metal-circus extravaganza. It was insane. I never wanted to play stadiums. It’s so far removed from your fans and the feeling, and the sound is like crap. So there we are, getting exposed to all these butt rockers, the same kind of people who would try to beat me up when I was a punk rocker. So I had a massive animosity towards those fans.
MATT CAMERON We were metal. We definitely had a metal edge. I’m proud of that fact. I always thought it was funny that all the P.C. punkers were completely dismissing us because we did one tour with Guns N’ Roses.
The Guns N’ Roses tour was kind of a nightmare backstage, but it was sort of fun to be a part of it. It was an eye-opening lesson as far as how not to tour if you become successful. Like each guy had a bodyguard, and they were just completely wasted all the time. Axl would make the band wait an hour or two before they went on, so they always had to pay out these exorbitant late fees at the venues. One gig I remember, Axl was threatening to go out and actually break up the band onstage. There were a couple of occasions like that where we had to clear the fuck out because people were predicting a riot was going to happen.
CHRIS CORNELL [Axl] was always hidden somewhere having a personal crisis—always. One time I was in the room when he was talking to his manager, Doug Goldstein, about wanting the Goodyear blimp for the show. I said this as a joke—even though it was true—that the Fuji blimp was the largest blimp in the world. Axl was like, “That’s it! It’s gonna be the Fuji blimp!”
ERIC JOHNSON At that point I was working for Pearl Jam. I drove out there with Jeff Ament to see them in Las Vegas, I think. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t the Soundgarden I knew. They looked bored and unhappy. They were playing to a mostly empty house. I remember Kim did a beard solo that lasted about two minutes. You shoulda seen it: He played with his beard, and then he hung up his guitar and left it making feedback. Then he kind of moseyed off stage. That was kind of sad.
SLASH (guitarist for Los Angeles’s Guns N’ Roses) February 1, 1992, was our last show with Soundgarden, at Compton Terrace, Arizona, and we decided to commemorate it with a little prank. We got ourselves a few inflatable sex dolls, and Matt and Duff and I took our clothes off and went onstage with them. Come to think of it, I was the only one of us completely naked. In any case, Soundgarden was touring the Badmotorfinger album, and they came from a place where there was no fun to be had while rocking, so they were mortified. They looked around and there we were screwing blow-up dolls all around them; I was drunk and I fell. I got separated from my doll, and at that point I was totally naked—it was a scene.
SUSAN SILVER It was Soundgarden’s nature to never be enthusiastic about anything, to the point where the Guns N’ Roses crew referred to them as Frowngarden.
BEN SHEPHERD Why’d we get called Frowngarden? Because we weren’t party monsters. We weren’t motherfucking rock stars. We were not like that. We were there to play music. We weren’t there for the models and the cocaine. We were there to blow your doors off.
JACK ENDINO After Daniel bowed out of Skin Yard, we got our friend Pat Pederson to play bass. We all had a pretty good year in ’91, because we were all getting along at that point. Our fourth album, 1000 Smiling Knuckles, which was Barrett Martin’s debut as our drummer, came out around that time. It sold 14,000 copies or something, which was really good for an indie record then.
During our September tour in the U.S. was when we started hearing Nevermind. I was amazed. We thought, This is really slick sounding, but at the same time, the vocals are really raw, which is good. It was difficult to recognize that this was the same band that I had worked with on the Bleach record two years before, until you heard the singing. And also, the very pop direction they had gone, with “In Bloom” and some of the other tunes. The Melvins’ influence on Nirvana was definitely on the wane. They had found their own voice.
We went to Europe in October ’91. We ended up being added to a show in Vienna opening for Nirvana, of all people. Prior to that gig, Nirvana had always opened for us. We knew what was going on. We would call our friends back home in Seattle, and they’d say, “Yeah, it’s climbing the album charts. It just sold another hundred thousand copies.” We were getting these sales numbers from people back home, because they were following them like it was a sports team.
GREG DULLI (singer/guitarist for Cincinnati’s the Afghan Whigs) When it came time for us to make the Afghan Whigs’ second record, Congregation, Sub Pop gave us the then-unheard-of bloated advance of $15,000. We started making the record in Seattle and then moved down to L.A. to continue working on it.
Everybody else in the band finished their parts and flew back home, but I stayed to sing and overdub and mix, and then Sub Pop ran out of money. And that was about the time that they had those T-shirts that said WHAT PART OF “WE HAVE NO MONEY” DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? Which I’m sure was pretty funny, but I got stranded in L.A. and had to get a job. (Laughs.)
The record got delayed; the studio wasn’t gonna let me keep working when no one was paying the bills. Sub Pop eventually paid them, but I didn’t know if Congregation was gonna come out because I didn’t know if the record company had the money to put out records anymore. They went fucking broke, dude.
Then Nevermind came out, and Nirvana saved the whole fuckin’ label, man.
BRUCE PAVITT The success of Nevermind was miraculous, to say the least. By Christmas of ’91, Nevermind had sold two million.
JONATHAN PONEMAN We had a participation in the Nevermind sales, plus we were getting a lot of money from Bleach sales, when people wanted to find out about Nirvana’s first record.
BRUCE PAVITT I was in a state of disbelief that we went from not being able to pay our phone bill to getting a check for half a million bucks. Of course, after that, we were so happy they went to Geffen.
GREG DULLI If every Sub Pop band did not send a fruit basket to Kurt Cobain, then I certainly did. Well, I figuratively sent him one. I went to Nirvana’s show at the Palace in L.A. and hugged Kurt and said, “Good one, bro. Congratulations. And thank you—now I can go home.”
STEVE WIEDERHOLD Everywhere you go people are cranking up fuckin’ Nevermind, everywhere. That really fucked with my head. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t think this would happen. I was always like, “Nobody cares.” People were actually interested, I guess. It was on TV, on the radio. I’m out of TAD, I’m working at Sears, Roebuck and Co. doing shipping and receiving, and I don’t want anybody to know that I know Nirvana. I just want to concentrate on my work, you know.
BILLBOARD (“Nirvana Achieves Chart Perfection,” by Paul Grein, January 11, 1992) Nirvana pulls off an astonishing palace coup by dethroning King of Pop Michael Jackson from the top spot on the Billboard 200 Top Albums chart. The Seattle-area alternat
ive band’s “Nevermind” surges from No. 6 to No. 1; Jackson’s “Dangerous” drops from No. 1 to No. 5.
MARK KATES By the time the Michael Jackson thing happened, we were ready for it. He represented the old business, which involved the ability to pay for chart positions. The Billboard chart, prior to the [May 1991] introduction of SoundScan, was comprised of store reports. Theoretically, the stores reported what they sold. However, that wasn’t always the case. There were companies that you could hire whose job it was to get the best possible store reports. This might not be fair to Michael Jackson or Epic Records, but it really was seen as a changing of the guard. We knew that what we had going on couldn’t be bought.
AARON STAUFFER (Seaweed singer) I was working at Sub Pop when they found out that the Nirvana record went to the top of the charts. Pavitt did some insane Elvis-looking maneuver in elation. He swung his arm in a circle, got down on one knee—with one fist in the air, head down—and went, “Yesss!”
MARCO COLLINS One of the landmark moments for me was going over to Nils Bernstein’s house for a party when Nirvana first played Saturday Night Live. There were 15 or 20 people over there; I think Rusty Willoughby, Kurt Bloch, and maybe Dan Peters from Mudhoney were there. Everybody is drinking a shitload of beer, and there’s just an obnoxious, fun attitude in the room.
When Nirvana launched into their song, the room just got quiet, and when they were done and Saturday Night Live cut away to commercials, the room was still dead silent. It was like everybody in that roomful of drunk people realized at that moment how big it actually was. I’m getting chills even talking about it right now.
AMY FINNERTY I remember that when Nirvana played Saturday Night Live, I was in the greenroom. Somebody, I’m guessing Janet, told Kurt that I was the person that had gotten their video played, and he pulled me aside and was like, “I just wanted to say thank you,” and then he said, “I never knew what you did over there. We always thought you were like the VP of Post-it Notes”—I don’t know what that meant. “We just liked you and thought you were cool to hang around with.”
BRUCE PAVITT I spent some time with Kurt backstage after Nirvana’s Saturday Night Live show. That was a real good heart-to-heart rap session. He talked about signing autographs for some young kids, and I think that made him feel really good. He was a sensitive guy who really liked kids and animals. I remember the first time I visited his apartment, he had like three different cages of gerbils. I got the impression he liked animals more than a lot of people.
He talked about maybe starting a petting zoo. He was just kind of musing. The energy I was getting was kind of magical: I can pretty much do anything I want. I’d like to start a petting zoo.
That week, Nirvana had knocked Michael Jackson off the charts. In a lot of ways, Kurt reminded me of Michael Jackson. Think about it: Neverland … having a passion for kids and animals. I found it somewhat ironic. If I’d heard those same words coming out of Michael Jackson, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
Later, I read that Kurt OD’d that night.
DANNY GOLDBERG That time when they were in New York, it was clear that Kurt and Courtney were doing drugs and probably heroin. They looked so stoned, and she wanted thousands of dollars in cash to quote-unquote go shopping. Kurt is so amazing that on camera he was fine, but afterwards he just looked really wasted and you had to really be blind or totally inexperienced with seeing people on drugs to not see that.
DAVE GROHL I remember walking into their hotel room and, for the first time, really realizing that these two are fucked up. They were just nodding out in bed, just wasted. It was disgusting and gross.
DANNY GOLDBERG Right after that, there was an article published in Bay Area Music; this guy had been with them a couple of weeks earlier and said that Kurt was on drugs. That’s probably true, but it wasn’t yet in my head until Saturday Night Live. But with the combination of Saturday Night Live and the article coming out, we just knew we had a huge problem on our hands and that we had to do something.
JANET BILLIG Right when it started coming out that Kurt was doing drugs, I remember Steven Tyler called and wanted to help. I told Kurt, “Holy shit, Steven Tyler called my office and he wants to help you. Can I give him your number?” And he was like, “Steven Tyler got to be a junkie for 18 fuckin’ years. I’ve only been doing drugs for an hour.” Lots of stars called. Kirstie Alley called a lot for Courtney to try and make her become a Scientologist.
DANNY GOLDBERG So within a day or two of them getting back to Los Angeles, which is where they were now living, we did an intervention. I’d never done an intervention before, and I think I called David Geffen and he put me in touch with somebody that had been involved with Aerosmith. And that also was around the time that Courtney found out she was pregnant. The two of them, for the rest of their lives—certainly for the rest of Kurt’s life—were in and out of rehab, in and out of treatment.
JANET BILLIG The biggest misconception about them as a couple? That Courtney was the puppet master. That she stuck a needle in his arm and made him do drugs. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Kurt had done drugs well before he met her. They weren’t good for each other habit-wise, but I do think she kept him alive. I think he would have killed himself way before he did, otherwise.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY Then we went to Australia and Japan. I know that Krist and Dave enjoyed that a lot. We went out to beaches and went boogie boarding and stuff together. Kurt and Courtney did not. They stayed in Sydney and tried to get drugs and were sick, and so Alex MacLeod, our poor tour manager, had to stay behind and deal with them while the rest of us had fun. There was definitely tension within the band for various reasons, drugs being one of them and royalties being another one. The royalties thing really started coming to a head on the European leg after that.
During the Australian trip, the whole band was pretty fractured. There was Kurt and Courtney, and then there was everybody else. And I was always very studious about staying neutral and not getting in the middle of anything. ’Cause if you start taking one side over the other, then you’re probably gonna get fired by the side that you didn’t take.
BARRETT JONES We went to Australia and New Zealand and Hawaii and Japan. The Australia thing was so much fun, but Kurt was pretty frail for those shows. He was in pain; he had a stomach problem. Then when Courtney came around about two weeks into the tour, it started to get worse. She doesn’t like me at all. I never kissed her ass, is what it was. I never really understood the allure; she just seemed like a total snake to me. She used to try to get me fired. We were out somewhere, and she was like, “Kurt, fire him!” I don’t even remember what it was about.
It all really came down to me telling Courtney—I told her to her face—that I thought it was not a good idea to be doing drugs while you’re pregnant. And she didn’t appreciate that. I didn’t expect to go to their wedding in Hawaii anyway—it wasn’t a big deal. Krist’s wife at the time, Shelli, and my girlfriend had been talking about Courtney apparently—and I didn’t even know that—so she disinvited them. And that was really hurtful, because Shelli and Kurt had been friends since they were kids. So then Krist didn’t go, and Dave was really the only one that went.
MIKE MCCREADY I remember after the New Year’s Eve 1991 show, somebody running onto the bus and saying Nirvana had just hit number one. I remember thinking, Wow; it’s on now. It changed something. We had something to prove—that our band was as good as I thought it was.
EDDIE VEDDER In San Diego we were playing with Nirvana and the Chili Peppers. I had climbed an I-beam that you could kind of wrap your hand around. So I got to the top, and I thought, Well, how do I get down? I either just give it up and look like an idiot, or I go for it. So I decided to try it, and it was really ridiculously high, like 100 feet, something mortal. I was thinking that my mother was there, and I didn’t want her to see me die. So somehow I finally got back onstage, finished the song, and went to the side and threw up. I knew that was really stupid, beyond ridiculous. B
ut to be honest, we were playing before Nirvana. You had to do something. Our first record was good, but their first record was better.
KELLY CURTIS Our record came out almost the same time as Nirvana’s, and all the hype was around Nirvana. Nirvana happened immediately, and it took us like six months. The record label didn’t know what format we were—if we were rock or alternative, they didn’t know what the fuck it was—so it was just having a hard time.
Nirvana probably opened the door for us at radio, for sure, but once that happened, it was kind of all over. It was within a few months of the release of the record that you could sense that something major was happening.
MARK KATES At least among those of us who were professionally involved, it was pretty safe to say there was a rivalry between Nirvana and Pearl Jam. And from our standpoint, it was based on a record that we didn’t really believe was musically related, even though they were from the same city and the same scene. To be fair, those guys in Pearl Jam were at it before the guys in Nirvana were on a significant level, because they were in Green River and Mother Love Bone. But we were frustrated that this other career was launched off the back of our band.
Alternative rock had a lot of rules. The biggest accomplishment of this era, and Pearl Jam deserves as much credit as Nirvana does, was breaking the rules those of us who were alt-rock lifers had. Pearl Jam broke them musically, and Jeff Ament’s haircut kind of broke the rules, too. All that band did was prove how stupid all those rules were. You can sing any way you want to. You want strings in your record, go ahead.
JEFF AMENT Kurt was talking shit about us, and we talked a little shit back. In retrospect, I think it was that when we got interviewed, the second or third question was about Nirvana. And I’m sure they were getting the same questions about us. After about a hundred of those interviews you’re like, You know what? Fuck those guys.