Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  They wanted to use us to go, “See? We have C/Z,” to get other labels to come on board. All of a sudden our records weren’t getting into any of those mom-and-pop stores anymore. So our entire base of where we sold our records was not being served, and we were not allowed to sell directly to them anymore. And RED was loading 300 copies of a CD into one Sam Goody, the kind of store that people who were trying to get our kind of music never went to. In nine months, I went from being debt-free and in the black to laying everybody off, myself included.

  About a year later, I got this deal with Zoo Entertainment through BMG, where they gave us money that ultimately allowed me to pay down the rest of the debt that was outstanding. It was a pretty good deal, but unfortunately, it only lasted a year because Volcano did a hostile takeover of Zoo and basically shut Zoo down, and we stopped getting money.

  At this point, it just seemed like, This isn’t fun anymore, this is fucked, it’s too much of a fight. What’s the point? I said if I’m gonna do anything else, I’m gonna have it be a hobby, like how I started. And the last record I put out on C/Z was in 2001; it was the Skin Yard odds-and-sods record called Start at the Top. I figured Skin Yard was what got me into the whole thing, so that would be a good way to step away. I haven’t put out a record since.

  JACK ENDINO Mark Arm had gotten clean at some point before I started recording My Brother the Cow. He said, “This is the first record I’m going to do clean and sober, so I’m a little worried.” That record probably restored his confidence, because he was fine.

  Mark was never any problem to deal with in the studio at any point. I never had any idea that he was doing drugs, because Mark was a very functional person. There wasn’t any of this being late, not showing up, any of that bullshit you get with junkies. He wasn’t the typical junkie, as far as that goes.

  DAVID KATZNELSON My Brother the Cow is all about the movement itself. You could look at that album as marking the death of grunge. It talks a lot about not only Kurt’s death, but what happens to a scene when it is majorly marketed, when big business buys in, when a lot of the members of the scene buy into the idea of big business, when the music gets corrupted, when friends get famous and forget where they came from. It’s a very, very dark look at one band’s attempt to remain consistent with their beliefs while the world around them has changed.

  The song “Into Yer Shtik” caused a lot of problems. The CEO of Warner Bros. at the time was Danny Goldberg, who was the former manager at Gold Mountain, and Courtney Love called him one day and said, “I am so destroyed at the fact that there’s that one line in the song,” which was, “Why don’t you go blow your brains out, too?” That song wasn’t about Courtney. That song was actually more about the business side, the exploiters, and it was kind of ironic that Courtney assumed it was about her.

  COURTNEY LOVE I don’t think I ever listened to that song, but it just hurt my feelings. That’s really mean. Why would you do that? What are you doing? Unconsciously playing into some Byzantine notion of pre-Rome, where if someone committed suicide the widow has to get buried alive next to the fuckin’ husband? Thanks, assholes. It shocked me that someone of Mark’s intellect would do that, and even Matt Lukin and even Steve. When I toured with them, we had such a good time. I loved Dan Peters. Dan Peters and me fuckin’ broke fuckin’ Budweiser bottles over our heads together.

  DAN PETERS There’s a lot of references in that song. We played in Chicago one time, and Steve Albini was at the show, probably not there to see us. I’m like, “Hey, Steve, my name is Dan, I play for Mudhoney. I hear you just recorded my buddies in TAD. Just wanted to say hi.” He gave me some offhanded dismissal. I was pissed, and I told Mark about it. And Mark, sometime later, walked up to Steve and was like, “Hi, my name is Mark. I really dig your shtick.”

  STEVE ALBINI I don’t remember that incident, but I could totally imagine myself being dismissive to somebody else. I was kind of a prick back then.

  MARK ARM That’s what got the ball rolling in the back of my mind—the idea of people trying to live up to something that they think they are supposed to be, instead of trying to be a natural human being. Steve Albini’s not in that song necessarily. But it applies. It applies to all kinds of people, not just musicians.

  JACK ENDINO Everybody thought it was about Courtney. I remember asking, “Mark, is this what I think it is?” He said, “No, it’s not who you think it is, and I’m not going to tell you who it’s about.” And that was it. I never got anywhere asking Mark what his lyrics were about.

  MARK ARM The song has three little stories, and one is about Layne. I think Emily witnessed this—supposedly Layne was at the Mecca Café and his hands were all bandaged. He’d just come out of the hospital because he punched through a window or something. If you listen to the second Alice in Chains record, it’s all songs about being a junkie. He went from dabbling with this thing to having it become a major part of his persona. That’s the one who “Made his myth/Now he’s trapped.”

  DAVID KATZNELSON The hubbub started before the album came out. In fact, the way I found out about it was pretty surreal: Mudhoney was in the building at the time, and it was Mark Arm’s birthday. We were bringing the cake to him with the candles, and I got a call from Danny, and he was very upset because he had gotten this call from Courtney. He had no idea Mudhoney was even in the building.

  MARK ARM Another is about this woman Janet Billig. When we first met her, she was totally antidrugs, wouldn’t work with anyone who was a junkie. And when she started working for Gold Mountain, with Kurt and Courtney, all of a sudden she just let her ethics totally slip. Either she was starstruck or the job meant so much to her that she wanted to please her bosses.

  DAVID KATZNELSON Danny and I had a conversation that evening, which culminated in a conversation over lunch the next day. The end result was that he was fine with the release of the record. He understood that there were a lot of emotions going on in the community and also understood the song wasn’t about Courtney.

  MARK ARM The other one was Eric Erlandson, who was going out with the 19-year-old actress, which would be Drew Barrymore. I think it’s more about this 19-year-old girl, who thought this guy in Hole was all that. Because if he wasn’t in Hole, he wouldn’t have stood a chance with her.

  ERIC ERLANDSON Really? I’ll have to go look at the lyrics. I met Drew in L.A., we hooked up together in Seattle, and within six months or so we moved in together in L.A. Two people had just died—Kurt and Kristen—and I wanted to get the hell out of Seattle. She was bringing a little sunshine. I don’t care if people in Seattle didn’t think it was a “cool” move. When you love somebody, you love somebody.

  MATT LUKIN Danny Goldberg told our A&R guy, “I don’t want to meet those guys. I don’t ever want to shake their hands. I don’t want to have my picture taken with them.” And I’m like, “Oh, really? That’s all I’ve been dreaming about my whole life, is to have my picture taken with Danny Goldberg!”

  STEVE TURNER Obviously there’s some Courtney stuff in there, but there’s also the Stone Temple Pilots in there. ’Cause I think we were reading some fashion magazine article focusing on their stylist and the band’s singer demanding some outfit he wanted to wear or some such bullshit. I put out the “Into Yer Shtik” seven-inch on my label, Super Electro Sound Recordings, and remember cutting up parts of that magazine article to use on the back of the sleeve. Here it is: “Then her pager beeps. It is Polyester Pilot”—I changed the dude’s name—“the band’s moody singer, and he wants ‘something pink.’ And not just pink, he says. Pink, fuzzy, and still sort of masculine. ‘I’ll find it,’ she says.”

  I’m sure they’re lovely people, but at the time it was like, “Man, they can’t be serious.”

  JEFF SMITH I remember Mark saying he figured they hadn’t really made it because there was no fake Mudhoney song on the first Stone Temple Pilots album. Beavis and Butt-Head were like, “Hey, Eddie Vedder got a new haircut!” “What, this isn’t Pearl Jam?” It had a fa
ke Alice in Chains song, a fake Nirvana song. That record is almost like a best-of-Seattle.

  DAVID KATZNELSON My Brother the Cow sold crappily. There was a backlash against grunge. The backlash didn’t touch Soundgarden, it didn’t touch Pearl Jam, because they were no longer grunge bands, they were pop bands. They had been accepted by a whole other audience.

  MATT CAMERON With “Black Hole Sun,” we brought out the psychedelic elements of Soundgarden and that kind of ferocious element, as well. We had a huge hit with it. Superunknown was a huge, huge record for us, and getting on the radio for the first time with a pop hit just cemented the success. I felt like we had infiltrated the system with our sound. We didn’t compromise at all.

  STEVE TURNER The reviews for My Brother the Cow were just horrible. We made a big, grungy record, and I think we even used the word grunge in the press packet. We were just being funny because we knew it was probably gonna be savaged. Grunge had been in everybody’s face and there was a horrible tragedy that came out of it and there was also the new punk explosion—Epitaph bands, Offspring, Green Day—that was getting the younger kids.

  Because we were a grunge band and Kurt was dead and we hadn’t hit that kind of success anyway, not only was it an old thing, but we were failures, also-rans. It made total sense to me, but it was all bullshit game stuff. Some of the English press people that we thought were kind of friends with us, they wouldn’t even talk to us anymore—they did the cold-shoulder thing. It was like, They take that shit serious?

  Dave Grohl made his first Foo Fighters album and people were ecstatic about that. Because they were looking for something to rise from such a tragedy. It got crazy hype in Seattle at first.

  DAVE GROHL After Kurt’s death, I was about as confused as I’ve ever been. To continue almost seemed in vain. I was always going to be “that guy from Kurt Cobain’s band” and I knew that. I wasn’t even sure if I had the desire to make music anymore. I received a postcard from fellow Seattle band 7 Year Bitch, who had also lost a member.

  ELIZABETH DAVIS-SIMPSON When Kurt died, we wanted to reach out to Krist and Dave to share some things that we wished someone had told us, or things that we learned from our experience when Stefanie died. I remember everyone contributing a few paragraphs. The basic sentiment was, “We know that you might feel like, Fuck all of this, and just stop playing music, but you should not feel that way and you should keep on playing.”

  DAVE GROHL That fucking letter saved my life, because as much as I missed Kurt, and as much as I felt so lost, I knew that there was only one thing that I was truly cut out to do and that was music. I know that sounds so incredibly corny, but I honestly felt that.

  STEVE TURNER After that, more of the fun music from the area was getting attention: the Presidents of the United States of America, “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger. We’ve been around for a while—it’s okay for people not to be ecstatic for us anymore.

  JACK ENDINO The circus left town, and the town had a grunge hangover. Basically, the music scene kind of woke up groggy and went, “God, where’s the truck that hit us? What happened? Oh, guitars, I don’t even want to look at a guitar now.”

  The first sign of that? Probably Britpop. I don’t even remember the bands that were involved. One of them got popped for ripping off Wire. Elastica? Yes. They’re completely forgotten now. But, yeah, that became the next big thing, and in Seattle, the biggest band were the Presidents, who had nothing to do with grunge, even though they have an ex–Skin Yard drummer in the band. But they were huge!

  DAVE DEDERER The people at The Rocket and the scenesters hated us, but normal people just started to find out about us; it was truly word of mouth in the beginning. When Jason joined the band, Love Battery had just signed a major-label deal with A&M after three records for Sub Pop. The Presidents was just a joke side band for him. Everybody he knew was basically telling him that the Presidents was stupid and a waste of his time.

  KEVIN WHITWORTH It was obvious there was a strain between the two bands, and that Jason was gonna have to go with one or the other. And he really has always wanted to be famous, and good for him. He’s a character. He should be famous. When Love Battery worked on songs, he used to say, “We’re never gonna go anywhere!” “We’re not trying to go anywhere, we’re just trying to make this a decent song right now.” He was very impatient.

  DAVE DEDERER We were nominated for a Grammy two years in a row, and we lost to Nirvana and the Beatles. At the ’96 Grammys, I thought it was so funny that Pearl Jam won and they got up onstage and Vedder said it didn’t mean anything.

  EDDIE VEDDER (accepting the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance for Pearl Jam’s “Spin the Black Circle,” February 28, 1996) I’m gonna say something typically “me” on behalf of all of us. I don’t know what this means. I don’t think it means anything. That’s just how I feel.

  DAVE DEDERER I’m in the audience and Chris, Jason, and I just looked at each other and laughed. Because it was so absurd and self-conscious and silly. Nobody goes out and starts a band and goes through the nightmare of making records and promoting them and going on tour, which is hard fucking work, unless they want to sell records. That said, Pearl Jam managed to survive and thrive and work together, and that’s no mean feat—I have a lot of respect for what they’ve done.

  At the Grammys, Tupac and Snoop Dogg were sitting in front of me and my wife and they got up literally every 10 minutes to go blow dope in the lobby. Every 10 minutes, they’d look at each other and smile, leave, and come back five minutes later just reeking. I saw Ed Vedder up there sayin’ that shit and tryin’ to be cool. I’m like, Okay, that’s silly. And then you look at someone like Snoop Dogg and you think, Okay, that guy is actually a badass. That guy actually is cool.

  JACK ENDINO There was a period there in ’95, ’96 where I thought, Maybe I’m going to have to find another career here. There’s no more bands to record! The scene died! It’s gone, it’s over. Maybe that was just a flash in the pan back then, and I’m going to have to either start recording really bad bands or I’m going to have to find some other line of work. So I started recording people in other countries, because people wanted me as a producer there.

  TIM HAYES I moved away from Seattle in ’90 and came back in ’96. When I got back, the life had been sucked out of a lot of people I knew. They weren’t out looking for new bands. They were just relying on their old bands, like Mudhoney, to keep them going. I love Mudhoney, but they’re what people already knew. My friends were holding on to the past a little bit. With some people I would say it was a function of their age, but I think it was more because the industry had permeated the scene with so many shitty bands, like Candlebox and Alice in Chains.

  LANCE MERCER When the scene died down, the musicians and other people in the business who didn’t make it had to back up and reevaluate. I always say they had to either put on the orange apron, the green apron, or the blue apron: Home Depot, Starbucks, or Kinko’s.

  CHARLES PETERSON In some ways, with a lot of photo editors, my career died when Kurt did. So I needed to go and reinvent myself and validate myself as a photographer. I went and did some traveling to Southeast Asia. I just needed to put it away for a while.

  Then around 2001, when it was the 10th anniversary of the release of Nevermind, I started getting more requests, and I started pulling out the files and going through stuff, and just going, My God, there’s some good work in here that nobody’s ever seen. Or old work that nobody’s ever seen properly. That’s when I sat down with my friend Hank Trotter, and we designed my book Touch Me I’m Sick. And it keeps going. I keep selling Nirvana photos on a weekly basis. It’s a little bit weird, living with this dead guy.

  KURT DANIELSON We were dropped from Giant when we were in Europe with Soundgarden. What screwed things up with Giant wasn’t really the way it’s been told—as being because of the poster with Clinton on it. Have you seen that poster? I don’t know who did it; it was somebody in connection with the European tour. It wa
s a black-and-white photograph of Bill Clinton making a speech. And his hand gestures and facial gestures were perfect for the insertion of a fake joint, and there was a quote on the bottom saying “THIS IS HEAVY SHIT,” referring to TAD’s music, of course. It was hilarious.

  Unfortunately, somebody at Giant didn’t have a sense of humor and thought it was a politically damaging thing, even though not that many people saw it. Giant used that poster as their excuse to drop us. But more important than that was that we had a manager at the time who was less than trustworthy, let’s just put it that way. All we can surmise is that he must have caused more problems than solutions when he dealt with Giant. And we weren’t selling a lot of records.

  We got a new manager, Jonny Z, who originally was Metallica’s manager, and he got us onto Elektra/East West. Gary had left the band, and we were back on the road again, promoting Infrared Riding Hood, the last record, when they cleaned house at East West.

  JOSH SINDER Then TAD got dropped a final time. I left because I didn’t like other people’s attitudes. Everybody was getting fucked up too much. At the end, there was a lot of drugs, and things weren’t going good. I started playing with Gruntruck.