by Mark Yarm
He used the cane on the wrong side, though. He walked with a limp, but he was favoring the wrong knee because that was the side he wanted it on. He was a funny, funny guy.
MATT VAUGHAN I left the tour in the middle of the night, five weeks into it. I was disgusted by what was happening. There was a lot of violence among Gruntruck, and there was a lot of hostility and maybe bitterness in that they wanted more than they were getting as a band. Gruntruck went from being beer-drinking guys to drug addicts; I don’t know that for sure, but they came back different.
TIM PAUL I didn’t party as much as a lot of other folks on the road. After we got back, Ben was not the same Ben from the early days. He was not that working-out-six-times-a-week guy with all the musical gear, making everything happen. I used to tease Ben that he was slowly turning into Jim Morrison; in fact, I called him the Lizard King in later years.
SCOTT MCCULLUM We were supposed to go on the European tour with Screaming Trees and Alice in Chains, but there’s conjecture that Layne got so freaked out by Ben, that’s why it didn’t happen.
BARRETT MARTIN They had to cancel our Paris show because Layne overdosed. And the people were already inside the theater, we’d already sound-checked, the gear was onstage, and Lane overdosed—I think at his hotel, but I’m not sure. He never came to the venue. We escaped out the back of the venue, and they put us in cabs because they thought the audience was gonna tear the place apart. The stage crew were throwing all this swag—the CDs and T-shirts they were going to sell—into the audience, to quell the crowd.
SCOTT MCCULLUM We toured with Pantera after that. Dimebag bought me my first hooker, in Hamburg. But it wasn’t that same bond we had with Alice in Chains. Alice in Chains were always like, “You guys are equal.” Pantera, there was always that “They’re definitely the headliners” kind of thing.
BARRETT MARTIN I remember that Alice in Chains’ road crew and the people that produced their show, they were not cool. I mean sometimes we didn’t even have any place to go because Alice in Chains had the whole backstage area. Alice in Chains were friendly to us backstage—they were never rude or anything—but they definitely let it be known that they were the big rock stars, and we were the openers. So I actually lost a great deal of respect for them. I did not think that they really got the Seattle thing, which was all independent, DIY, and take-care-of-your-musical-community. And it’s because they were on the periphery at the beginning of it.
MATT VAUGHAN That was a nice jacket Lanegan tossed me during the fight. It was a long tweed with a furry collar; a little long in the sleeves, but I wore it all the time. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know Lanegan’s number; no one ever knew how to get ahold of Mark. Two years go by, and I was at a show with my girlfriend at the time. Lanegan comes right up behind me and says, “Give me my jacket.” (Laughs.)
I was like, “Here you go.”
My girlfriend was like, “What was that all about?”
And I’m like, “Well, this hasn’t been my jacket, I gotta tell you.”
DANNY BRAMSON When we first screened Singles to Warner, during the parts when Alice and Soundgarden came on, these three corporate heads in front of us all turned to each other, registering either distaste, scorn, or disappointment, or we didn’t know what the fuck. Afterward, in the lobby, we found out they were thinking, Holy fuck! This is a concert movie. This is Rattle and Hum. Which was a huge disappointment for Paramount the year before. And it was right then and there that we were brushed aside as “that music concert movie.”
I remember the marketing guru of Warner, Rob Friedman, saying, “Look, we’ll release your movie, open it in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.” During that time, Cameron and I got wind of ridiculous things. With Nirvana becoming the iconic band of the moment, these marketing shills at Warner had come up with the new title Come as You Are, and unbeknownst to us, had gone and tried to secure a license, I believe, for both the title and song. We got wind of it when John Silva requested that Nirvana be able to screen the movie in Europe. We chose not to send the movie—which we had done organically and naturally, years before the scene ever made it onto the cover of Time—to be screened out of context. Digging in our heels led to a continued delay. Suddenly, Pearl Jam was exploding, and Michele Anthony and Donnie Ienner at Sony said, “Danny, Cameron, we can’t wait on releasing this soundtrack.” They just knew what they had. So we released the soundtrack in the summer of ’92, and the album exploded.
CAMERON CROWE Singles was in the can for a year before it came out. But the success of the so-called Seattle sound got it released. Warner Bros. said, “If you can get Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam to play the MTV party that we can use to publicize the movie, we’ll put it out.” So I painfully had to try and talk the bands into doing it. Pearl Jam said that they’d do it as a favor to me. So the taping happened, and it was … a disaster. It was populated mostly by studio executives and their children, who wanted to see the Seattle sound.
ALEX COLETTI (MTV Unplugged producer) The morning of the Singles event, we taped a Smells Like Grunge video countdown in the hotel in L.A. where the event was taking place. Already everyone kinda hated the term grunge, so of course we couldn’t have picked a more alienating title for the artists. Dave Abbruzzese and Mike Starr and a few other people did the video countdown. Dave really took to being on camera to the point where it didn’t help his relationship with the band. The other guys in Pearl Jam were very reluctant to do anything.
RICK KRIM The party was the day after the VMAs. It was amazing to see the contrast between the night before, where they had to be prim and proper, and the next night, just letting it fly. Ed had some drinks beforehand, and I remember him backstage, wearing an army helmet and kicking beer bottles like he was a field-goal kicker.
DANNY BRAMSON The show started, and Vedder goes out onstage begrudgingly. He’s got a bottle in one hand, and he grabs the mic and his opening words are “FUCK HOLLYWOOD!” That set the tone for the entire evening.
RICK KRIM It got a little sloppy onstage. The fire marshals were being difficult, and Ed was calling them out onstage, causing a little ruckus. Eventually it completely broke down and someone had to carry him off the stage and out of the building. I remember taking him to a car and getting him out of there.
DAVE ABBRUZZESE Eddie was actually drunk. I think it was the first time our illustrious leader failed to show up, and it just felt like a joke.
CAMERON CROWE They were playing covers, and somebody got into a fight, and Chris Cornell got into it, and I think Kim Thayil got into it. I remember Eddie yelling, “Fuuuck! What the fuck is this?” and studio executives grabbing their kids and streaming out. I was seeing this whole thing to get the movie released going down the tubes. But Singles came out, and the show aired twice, heavily edited. To anybody who taped it off the air, it’s a real collectible. Later, we made up T-shirts to commemorate the party and they said on the front SINGLES PREMIERE PARTY and on the back it said NOBODY DIED.
DANNY BRAMSON The soundtrack went from the Top 30 to the Top 20 to the Top 10. It was heartening to read both The New York Times and MTV saying that Singles was the soundtrack of the ’90s and was a really inspiring force for all quote-unquote alternative programming and playlists.
BARRETT MARTIN “Nearly Lost You” ended up being the hit single. I think it probably sold more copies of the Singles soundtrack than it sold of our album, Sweet Oblivion. Because Singles came out first and that soundtrack sold at least a million—I think it was one of those soundtracks that did better than the movie did. Sweet Oblivion came out later that year and pretty quickly sold about 300,000 copies.
KIM WHITE When I became the Trees’ manager, Susan Silver was pissed, and that was right when the Singles soundtrack was being made. Susan was kind of in charge of the soundtrack, and the Screaming Trees were not on the soundtrack. She’ll deny that she ever tried to prevent them from being on it. But we suspect it very strongly.
SUSAN SILVER Ab
solute bullshit. I don’t operate that way. Never did, never will. I didn’t have an issue with the Trees. Parting ways was sad for me, but it didn’t mean that I was out to change the trajectory of their career. Cameron Crowe and his music supervisors had their own vision that didn’t have anything to do with my choices. I made no comments about any of that.
KIM WHITE The Trees had gone into the studio with Don Fleming, and one of the first songs that they recorded was “Nearly Lost You.” We actually had to waive our sync fee—synchronization fee, what you get paid to be put on the soundtrack—for them to reedit the movie and put that song on the soundtrack. It involved lawyers. “Nearly Lost You” is playing quietly in the background as Kyra Sedgwick’s character reveals the results of her pregnancy test.
GARY LEE CONNER We got an offer to do a Budweiser ad. They wanted us to change “Nearly Lost You” to “Nearly Lost a Bud” or something like that. We turned it down, but it was hard, because we were like, “Well, we could use the money.” I think it was for $10,000, which actually isn’t very much to rewrite our damn song. Nowadays, nobody will even bat an eyelash at doing an ad. But back then, it had a stigma.
ROBERT ROTH Sub Pop was gonna give Truly an unprecedented amount of money to do a one-off record because we were on the Singles soundtrack. I heard that Cameron Crowe personally picked the song, “Heart and Lungs.” Then a few days before the masters were sent off to press for the Singles soundtrack album, a lot of political shenanigans went on with Epic Records, and even though “Nearly Lost You” wasn’t actually in the movie, that got put on the soundtrack, and we were bumped. Though our song is still in the actual movie. Basically, we were expendable—we were the only indie band on the album—and even though we were one of the director’s favorite songs on the album, it was off.
Oh, it was devastating. We were in the studio at the time that we got the news. That was a big deal. That would’ve affected our career tremendously. From what I heard, Mark Arm put the down payment on his house because of being on that album.
MARK ARM We had heard about this thing happening and realized there was no kind of Sub Pop representation at the time. Cameron Crowe was married to Nancy Wilson, who’d worked with Kelly Curtis, so that was probably Cameron Crowe’s connection to what was happening locally. Bruce and Steve and I marched over to Cameron Crowe’s office one time, and I was psyched to see there was a John Coltrane poster above his desk. You get these ideas that people are mono-dimensional or whatever. I was thinking, Maybe this guy doesn’t really know what’s happening. But it seemed like he was so psyched that we were there.
There wasn’t like an antagonistic fight, like the bands that were managed by Susan Silver and Kelly Curtis versus the Sub Pop bands. The line is blurry anyway, because Soundgarden was on Sub Pop, and members of Pearl Jam were in Green River. There is no actual line. There’s no distinct border. Though it was perceived at the time.
So Cameron Crowe put Mudhoney on the Singles soundtrack, and in typical wiseass fashion, we wrote “Overblown,” taking the piss out of the glorification and aggrandizement of the scene.
EDDIE VEDDER Mudhoney has an amazing song on the soundtrack that is a disclaimer for the whole thing. It’s called “Overblown.” God, the last verse is just so perfect: “Everybody loves us/we’re getting pretty old/can’t hold a regular job/long live rock and roll!” Classic! (Laughs.)
STEVE TURNER “Overblown” is about rock-star bullshit. There’s a lyric about standing onstage with your shirt off, which is a pretty apparent Cornell reference. But it all was in good fun.
CHRIS CORNELL I remember hearing about that song and listening to it, but it didn’t make any difference to me. We toured together after they wrote that song. It was nothing I really paid much attention to.
MARK ARM We recorded it for like $164, and we got paid $20,000, so we kept the rest of it.
BOB WHITTAKER We got a pretty good chunk of change up front for that song, and the attorney said, “Don’t let anyone know how much you recorded this song for.” I think the attorney thought it would upset the producers.
ROBERT ROTH So in the next meeting with Sub Pop, after we find out that we’re no longer on the soundtrack, Jonathan and Bruce are like, “Okay, now you have to give us more than one record, or there’s no way we’re giving you this amount of money.” Mark and Hiro weren’t anxious to be involved in a long contract again, so that fell out.
Singles was a good film. It was kinda more about people like my brother, who works at Microsoft, than it was about musicians. There were a few of those characters in that movie, like Matt Dillon, but it was kind of a sideline to the love story.
JASON FINN Singles was seen as funny by everyone I know. The whole intrusion theory—where it’s this special thing we don’t want anyone to know about—that doesn’t even make any sense. Everybody wants recognition for what they’re doing. They came in, they made a silly movie, and worked in some shameless plugs for their friends the bands. Big deal. I enjoyed the Pearl Jam scenes when I finally saw it. I was like, “Yeah, there’s Eddie Vedder the drummer. Awesome.”
DANIEL HOUSE People here thought Singles was a good movie, kinda cheesy. It definitely was an idealized version of the scene. But at least it was fictional. Hype! was intended to be an accurate account, and in fact, it ended up being an incredibly accurate account.
DOUG PRAY Singles came out when we were building momentum to try to film my movie. Cameron Crowe actually called me and tried to talk me out of making Hype! for 45 minutes: “What can you possibly hope to achieve? The scene has already reached its apex. It’s everywhere. People are tired of it. Please don’t do a movie about this.”
For him to make a movie that was basically set in the Seattle music scene and tell me not to make a movie about the Seattle music scene, it was like a non sequitur. And I respected him, and it was an honor to be able to talk to him—I’d just graduated from film school and here I am talking to Cameron Crowe! But he was a part of the world of the really big bands who had just made it, who were represented by megamanagement. And I was a part of the world that was defined by the small label Popllama, which had nothing to do with them. To me, the smaller bands were as important to the Seattle music scene as Alice in Chains.
MARK ARM Our recording budgets for the Warners records were about $125,000 to $175,000 each, and we recorded Piece of Cake for $30,000 and My Brother the Cow for $20,000. That’s a fair amount of money left over, and we made a good amount of money touring; we never had to take tour support.
For a while, we were swimming in it. That probably helped me be an ethical junkie. I didn’t have to steal anything; in fact, sometimes I would buy drugs for my friends. Of course, there were some times when I didn’t have the money, and my second junkie girlfriend was a stripper, so she would go to work. Otherwise, she was living off me. A friend of mine once described her as having “spent a year on the couch.” Talk about atrophy, man.
That’s the fucking worst of it to me, that I became such a cliché: I was a junkie rock dude with a stripper girlfriend.
COURTNEY LOVE We had this video camera but we could never figure out how to make the battery work, so it’s like three years of a marriage over three hours of footage, going over and over and over each other. I’ve seen four to seven frames of something on there that I’m like, Oh, geez, if that got slowed down and released it would be the biggest—YouTube would break.
But most of it is just Frances on a bed with two extremely stoned parents, and you see Mark Arm walking by for one second. It’s at the Four Seasons, and you don’t think when you’re a parent, particularly a stoned parent—a good parent but a stoned parent—that your daughter is gonna grow up and be a teenage girl and she’s not gonna want fucking footage of her two stoned parents while she’s naked with no diaper. All we’re saying is, “Naked baby, naked baby, naked baby,” for like two hours.
That’s one thing I have control of is that three to four hours. I’ve let out some footage, like 30 seconds of Frances and
Kurt in the bathroom. There’s this really poignant part, when Kurt’s in the bathroom with Frances and he’s swinging her around and he’s being a really good dad, and then you look at where the toothbrushes are, and there’s a syringe. But it’s the truth, so I’m okay with it.
MARK ARM I was obviously pretty reckless. I was hospitalized a couple of times. I actually saw the keyboard player from Gorilla, this local band—except Curtis the guitar player, they were all like doctors or med students—in the emergency room at Harborview hospital twice. He told me that the second time, a friend of his working with him said, “Man, your friend has a problem with weights and measures.”
I OD’d probably five times. If I was alone, I would have been dead for sure. Here’s my advice to the kids: Don’t do drugs alone. And don’t do drugs around people who are afraid to call 911.
On New Year’s Eve ’92 going into ’93, I was at a party. Kurt and Courtney were there and were like, “Hey, we’re going to go back to our room, maybe get some dope.” This was after I had come back from that tour, and I was just chippin’ at that point. My tolerance was pretty low and I had been drinking and went back to their hotel room with Ron Heathman, the Supersuckers guitar player.
RON HEATHMAN We played on New Year’s at RKCNDY. Kurt and Courtney showed up. I didn’t know them that well. I had seen them a few times because I used to get drugs from Tommy Hansen, too. But after the show, Mark was like, “Do you want to go over to where they’re staying?” They were at the Inn at the Market.