by Mark Yarm
In the original version, the kid comes in, tosses the apple, puts the gun in his mouth, shoots, it flashes to three, taking it back to the beginning—the time, the weather, and the place—and the whole last shot is just his blood on the kids’ frozen faces. But MTV wouldn’t show the gun in the mouth.
RICK KRIM Pearl Jam didn’t want to edit the video. I don’t remember what the final straw was that made them relent, maybe it was label pressure, but I recall many a conversation back and forth with management and the label. Having the shot where the kid sticks the gun in his mouth was just too graphic. You saw the aftermath anyway, so that it wasn’t necessary to have that little extra shock value.
MARK PELLINGTON People misinterpreted the edited video and thought, because of the blood on his classmates, that he killed the kids in the classroom. He didn’t point the gun at them. You’d have to be kind of stupid to misinterpret this, especially if you read the lyrics.
SAMUEL BAYER I think Mark Pellington is a really talented guy; Pearl Jam’s an amazing band. I just thought my Nirvana video was more interesting. I never liked seeing lyrics brought to life literally. I don’t wanna see children frozen, covered in blood. I don’t wanna picture who Jeremy is. I was too much of an ambitious, jealous, competitive guy to see any merit in that video.
AMY FINNERTY When grunge was in full swing, I went to one of my bosses in the programming department, Rick Krim, and said, “Hey, Rick, I don’t know if you know about this Temple of the Dog record—it’s about a year old or so—but two of the guys in this band are Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder. I think we should revisit this.” And he fell in love with it and called the record company and basically said, “Let’s make this happen.” They rereleased the record and resubmitted the video, which we put into heavy rotation.
KIM THAYIL When Pearl Jam started going through the roof, the record company, in a very cynical move, decided to rerelease Temple of the Dog to capture and hang on to the success of Pearl Jam. They released “Hunger Strike,” which featured Eddie’s vocals prominently. Of course, as a record company guy, you should do that.
Chris doing Temple of the Dog ultimately helped Soundgarden, in that it got him to exercise some of his creativity muscles and bring that back to Soundgarden. It was bad in that at some point, I think Temple of the Dog was outselling Badmotorfinger.
HIRO YAMAMOTO I didn’t play for like two years after I left Soundgarden, and then Pickerel called me up and I joined Truly. Truly ended up playing this Lollapalooza over on Bainbridge Island. We were playing on a side stage at 12 noon, and Kim was like, “You should come over.” We went over there, and Scott Sundquist, our first drummer, was there, too, and they were saying, “You guys are gonna come up onstage and we’re gonna do ‘Circle of Power’ and ‘Tears to Forget’ together.”
We’re standing on the side of the stage, and I couldn’t believe how many people were out in the audience. There were like 60,000 people, and the stage is so huge. I’m like, “Wow, we’re supposed to go out there?” We got to that point where we were supposed to go out—and Chris kept on singing, and they kept on going. I think he didn’t want us to do it. That’s Chris. I was kind of pissed, but I was actually relieved. I hadn’t played those songs in three years.
At the same time, I was lookin’ at those guys, and I was watching the way Ben was spittin’ on the crowd, and I was like, I am so glad I’m not that. What an ass. Ben is definitely a different personality than I am. He has a more metal attitude. I like Ben and all, but he likes bein’ a jerk to people.
JIM ROSE I went from being unknown to literally needing security within a 48-hour period. MTV punched it hard, and USA Today said the sideshow was the “word of mouth” act of Lollapalooza. I offered the audience a chance to come up and drink a sideshow member’s vomit—bile is what we called it to soften it up. You’d take a big clear cylinder pump, with a long, clear tube attached to it, thread the tube into your nose down into your stomach, pull out the contents from your stomach, and then shoot it into a glass.
One day, Eddie Vedder drinks it and the crowd went nuts and it was all over MTV. Then Al Jourgensen from Ministry started coming up, and Al and Eddie got into a battle of who could drink the most of it, and MTV followed it every day. Finally, at the end of the tour, Eddie was slightly ahead. But Al said, “I’m gonna win because I’ll just make my own vomit.”
EDDIE VEDDER Just looking for attention, I guess. Every city there’d be some old friend or my wife’s parents, and I’d get to gross everyone out.
JEFF GILBERT Around that time, I went to a live taping of Jim Rose’s show at the Crocodile Café that was being shown live in England. Jim came up to me earlier and said, “Look, we’re gonna do the ‘drink the bile’ shtick, and I want to make sure that, since we’re on live TV, when we ask for a volunteer, somebody jumps up there right away.” And I said, “I’ll do it.”
During the show they do the “drink the bile” shtick with Matt “The Tube,” and Jim goes, “Who gets to drink the bile?” And at that point, the crowd normally goes, “Oh, no way!” So I jumped up there. Well, Eddie was in the crowd, too, and he jumped up, edged me out of the way, took the glass right out of my hand, just slugged it right down.
In the footage, you can see me wrapping myself around him from behind—I was gonna squeeze him and make it come right out his nose—and I’m whispering in his ear, “You bile hog!”
JENNIE BODDY Every local paper would call up like they had some unique idea: “Oh, I want to do a story on this hot topic: the Seattle scene.” I’d tell them not to, that it’s been done too much already. What a great publicist! Nobody wanted to talk about it anymore. That was before Pearl Jam hit, and it was already tiresome.
It was a sorry day when Bruce and Jonathan had to get their publicity shots taken. Because you shouldn’t have the owners of the label doing publicity shots. You really want to read a story on Eminem and see Jimmy Iovine pictures? This is about music. It was just ridiculous. But they were so quotable and funny and irreverent that it worked.
BRUCE PAVITT Our philosophy was never to turn down an interview no matter what, so we were in everything from Maximumrocknroll to Fortune. Part of the game is that to become truly popular you have to infiltrate every nook and cranny of the popular system.
CONRAD UNO (Popllama Records founder; Egg Studios owner; producer/engineer) The media was everywhere, and it was sort of aggravating and weird. The light was bright and it was kinda gettin’ in your eyes. Kinda wanted to go back into the basement, where the studio is, and have fun. But honestly, it was exciting, too.
ART CHANTRY During the height of the mania, there was one crazy-ass day where we had five media crews come in to the Rocket offices to interview everything that walked. It was like The Christian Science Monitor, some Italian fashion magazine, somebody that spoke Japanese, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, all taking pictures. Now we look back on it as this real event that happened, but at the time we thought it was the funniest goddamn joke in the world.
JENNIE BODDY When Tabitha Soren from MTV News came to do this special report from Seattle, it was ridiculous. All the girls around her were kissing her ass and calling her Tabby. I took her for some Mudhoney interviews, and Mark Arm was trying to claim the origin of grunge was the sour curd in the bottom of the milk carton.
And then I took her to a Seaweed show—even though they’re not grunge, it didn’t matter. She liked the young boys at the Seaweed show. She’s like, “Where can we get more of that?” And I was saying, “Well, that doesn’t really capture it.” She was a little disgusted that the rock stars weren’t so cute. She wanted them to all be Chris Cornell or something. I took her to meet TAD, and she was just very rude. TAD was a huge part of what grunge was, but she didn’t want any of it. She just wanted the cute boys.
KURT DANIELSON When Tabitha Soren came to Seattle, they filmed us playing the song “Pansy,” which is about a serial killer that gives young girls candy, abducts them, and then murders them. I don’t think sh
e found any redeeming qualities in our music. She interviewed us, they filmed us playing the song, and then they left. I think she spent most of the time out in the van, shocked and disgusted.
JENNIE BODDY After that, I took Tabitha to go see Earth, Dylan Carlson’s band. That was my last stop, because I couldn’t stand her anymore, and I knew the music was just so slowww. It looked like she was going to crawl out of her skin. I was so happy.
STEVE TURNER Ron Reagan Jr. interviewed us for some stupid TV show. Nice guy. We went bowling with him, gettin’ drunk, and I’m flipping him shit: “Do you realize how many hardcore bands write songs about your dad?” I started rattling them off. He wanted to shut down that conversation in a hurry.
But it was the bait-and-switch thing that pissed me off with some of that mainstream press. Ron Reagan Jr. wanted to talk to us about the music scene, but when it finally came on TV it was like, “Oh, the music scene in Seattle” and then immediately: “There is, however … A DARK SIDE.” And they paid some fuckin’ junkie to shoot up on camera. That had nothing to do with the music scene—just some Seattle junkie, some young kid. As if musicians doing drugs was a new story and somehow unique to the Seattle explosion that was happening.
JEFF GILBERT We always used to laugh, because the national media made such a big deal out of heroin in Seattle. We were looking around, going, “Really?” There’s like three or four high-profile people that did it, we lost a couple from it. There were a lot of dabblers—it seemed chic at the moment—but it was alcohol that was doing the most damage. God, the alcohol. It’s almost inhuman how much beer was gone through. But that’s not a glamorous rock-and-roll tale. That’s the standard.
DOUG PRAY (Hype! documentary director) When I started the movie Hype!, it seemed like the worst idea in the world because I was just late. I had just come out of UCLA film school, and I had done music videos for the Young Fresh Fellows and Flop, who had nothing to do with grunge but were pretty respected Seattle bands. A producer from the UCLA Producers Program, Steve Helvey, came to me in 1992 and was like, “Look, we have to do a documentary film about the Seattle music scene.” And I was like, “It’s just too late.”
It was just embarrassing starting out. You could not have possibly put together a more cynical and media-wary—not just wary, but willing to fuck with the media—group of people than that group of bands and musicians and publicists. For example, Steve called Charles Peterson, and Charles was so incensed that a movie was gonna be made about the Seattle music scene at this point, when there had been so many journalists overrunning the town, that Steve’s response was, “These people are so fucking pissed off, we have to do this movie.”
MEGAN JASPER Shortly after I got laid off from Sub Pop, there was a U.K. magazine called Sky that called up saying, “Maybe you can give us some words people in Seattle use?” So I threw out some lies to them, and they published this lexicon that they thought was real. The Mudhoney guys got their hands on that publication while they were over there touring and started using those words as jokes in interviews.
Somehow someone at The New York Times heard there was a lexicon that existed. So they called Sub Pop. Jonathan knew I’d have fun with it, so he redirected them to me, and the reporter called. At that point, I was working out of my apartment for Caroline Records. I’d had three pots of coffee and I was flying out of my fucking skin. I was thrilled I had a distraction I could have fun with. I said, “Why don’t you give me words, and I’ll just give you the grunge translation?”
The reporter, Rick Marin, was super-sweet on the phone. I kept escalating the craziness of the translations because anyone in their right mind would go, “Oh, come on, this is bullshit.” I thought we would have a hearty laugh, and he would have to write it off as 15 minutes wasted, but it never happened, because he was concentrating so hard on getting the information right. My favorite was “swingin’ on the flippity-flop,” which meant “hanging out.” That came from a crazy guy from Northampton, Massachusetts, who used to work at the Red Lion Diner and wore a T-shirt that said CATCH YOU ON THE FLIPPY-FLOP or something.
When I hung up, I was like, Oh, it will be edited out in the end. And a few days later, it was a huge thing on the front page of the Style section.
THE NEW YORK TIMES (“Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code,” by Rick Marin, November 15, 1992) All subcultures speak in code; grunge is no exception. Megan Jasper, a 25-year-old sales representative at Caroline Records in Seattle, provided this lexicon of grunge speak, coming soon to a high school or mall near you:
WACK SLACKS: Old ripped jeans
FUZZ: Heavy wool sweaters
PLATS: Platform shoes
KICKERS: Heavy boots
SWINGIN’ ON THE FLIPPITY-FLOP: Hanging out
BOUND-AND-HAGGED: Staying home on Friday or Saturday night
SCORE: Great
HARSH REALM: Bummer
COB NOBBLER: Loser
DISH: Desirable guy
BLOATED, BIG BAG OF BLOATATION: Drunk
LAMESTAIN: Uncool person
TOM-TOM CLUB: Uncool outsiders
ROCK ON: A happy goodbye
DANIEL HOUSE Oh, people were in hysterics. It just showed how desperate everybody had gotten to do a piece on Seattle, that they’d print anything and wouldn’t even bother to see if it was true. So C/Z printed up two different T-shirts with the “Lexicon of Grunge” on the back, both with a different word on the front, one being HARSH REALM, the other being LAMESTAIN.
The shirts sold pretty well. Not as good as BRUCE PAVITT GAVE ME HEAD, though. That was the single most popular C/Z shirt. It came out while I was still working at Sub Pop. What did he think of it? If Bruce didn’t like it, I never would’ve known it.
MEGAN JASPER Tom Frank, the editor of The Baffler, called me, laughing: “Do you know that all the publications are talking about this, because the Times is such a prestigious paper?” No one could believe it happened.
Once The Baffler got the word out, that created another shitstorm, which The New York Times caught wind of. So the editor of the Style section called and yelled at me. She’s like, “It caused a lot of problems here, and it’s irresponsible of you to lie to our reporter.” And then she asked me where she could buy the LAMESTAIN T-shirts from. She was obviously pissed off, but she wanted me to think that she was in on the joke.
SCOTT MCCAUGHEY (Young Fresh Fellows singer/bassist/guitarist; Popllama Records/Egg Studios employee) I’m working at Popllama, and Rolling Stone wants to come and interview me and shoot me for a story. So they come and I happen to be wearing a flannel shirt; it’s cool sometimes there in the basement when you’re packing records. But they’ve got this entire rack of other flannel shirts that they wheel in. And I’m like, “Why can’t I just wear the one I’m wearing?”
They put some other flannel shirt on me and they take pictures of me boxing records. The shirt wasn’t that different from what I was wearing. I think when they had the picture of me in the article, it said, “Wearing such-and-such shirt, $89” or whatever. Which is probably why they had me wear it, because otherwise it would’ve said, “Wearing his shitty old shirt that cost $1.”
BOB WHITTAKER Someone, I think it was Charles Peterson, jokingly attributed grunge clothing to my dad, because he was the first full-time employee and later the CEO of REI, Recreational Equipment Inc. At the old shows at the Metropolis, you’d see guys in ski jackets. Everyone was wearing their parents’ beat-up mountaineering clothing, their crappy down parkas, and flannel and stuff like that.
JEFF AMENT … I wore shorts year round. I rode bikes everywhere, didn’t have a car, and if I was going to practice I had to carry my bass on my bicycle, so I couldn’t wear jeans. I’m not sure what defined what grunge was or wasn’t. I never ever wore a flannel shirt. I had a few hats, for sure. That started off when I was in Green River and had a girlfriend who made hats. At the time, I don’t think I looked like a rocker, I looked like a dumbass. It was partly function and partly what was laying around.
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br /> ROB SKINNER As far as the grunge look, that was all Eric Johnson. Eric worked at the Espresso Roma on Broadway, and that’s when I met him. He was the first guy that I ever saw with cut-off shorts with long johns underneath, and I thought that was totally badass. Maybe he got it from Chris Cornell, or Chris got it from him, but once those guys started sporting it, it spread, because Eric was kinda high-profile—long hair, cool guy, smoking-hot girlfriend, working at the coffee shop on Broadway. And he worked for Soundgarden. And Soundgarden were the alpha dog, always.
ERIC JOHNSON I could never really say if I was the first to do it. I just know that I wore it. Where I went to school, in Ellensburg, you wore long johns. I think one day I ended up puttin’ a pair of shorts on over a pair of long johns and then wearing a pair of boots. I thought, This is pretty comfortable. The big thing when I was a little kid was you wore your shorts over your sweat pants; that look was huge. Also, I grew up skateboarding, and people into skateboarding would put their skate shorts on over jeans.
Do I take credit for the look? No. I’m sure people have been wearing shorts over anything for a million years.
TAD DOYLE People were wearing flannel here long before grunge came out. It’s cold here. It’s a cheap and effective clothing apparatus for living in the Northwest. I don’t even associate it with a fashion statement or the lack thereof. I thought Eddie Vedder did more for flannel than anybody.
KURT DANIELSON The loser ethic is an anti-ethic, and grunge fashion is an antifashion. It’s basically taking all things and putting them on their heads and pretending they’re cool, like the emperor’s wearing no clothes. In this case, we’re saying that the emperor is wearing a flannel shirt.