by Greg Prato
BEN REW: The pits started to get really violent here. The pits used to be really fun — you could jump in, there would be 150, 200 people, and you would know most of the people.
NILS BERNSTEIN: Everything started to break right when I started at Sub Pop. As media outlets were covering Nirvana and Pearl Jam, they wanted to get Sub Pop’s take on it — or access our bands, or get a statement from us. It was this long period where, especially as publicist, every day would be the BBC and 60 Minutes calling.
One time, a Make A Wish Foundation type of thing called, and they had a kid who was dying of leukemia. He was a big grunge fan, and his wish was to meet Pearl Jam or something — to come to Seattle. Our receptionist, Debby, took it upon herself to make it happen, and ended up scheduling this thing on the roof of Sub Pop, and got people from Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Mudhoney, and other bands. People gave signed guitars. And the kid and his friend came — he was just like a high school grunge kid — really cool. Came and had a day of hanging out with all the Seattle rock star people. It was pretty amazing, seeing the kind of impact our bands were having, and also that it was still tight, and egoless enough that Debby could line it up with some phone calls. Ron Reagan Jr. coming to be the correspondent for a 60 Minutes type show on a piece on the Seattle music scene. So we had to facilitate Ron Reagan Jr.’s trip to Seattle. And going to shows and literally, there being ten people in suits.
A meeting of the minds: Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Lollapalooza ’92
JONATHAN PONEMAN: There were some things that were exciting, but it was numbing. The sheer intensity of all these things that were happening — after a while, it was kind of like, “Oh, there’s a movie being filmed about the Seattle scene that is going to star Matt Dillon and Kyra Sedgwick? It’s going to be loosely based on the lives of people our age living in Seattle at this time? Sure, why not! Chris Cornell and the Pearl Jam guys are going to star in it? Sure, why not! Nirvana’s gone to number one? Sure, why not!” Everything was so bizarre that the bizarre became commonplace. Yet life went on. And that’s the lesson — no matter what is happening in showbiz at any point in time, you still go home, listen to your music, make dinner, and hang out with your family. Life just goes on…
JEFF GILBERT: It’s almost like a cruel joke — Seattle wasn’t supposed to be successful. We were really just supposed to have this cool regionalized music scene, and that was it. That was all anybody wanted to do — the guys in those bands figured they’d do it for a few years, and then go get a job hanging sheet rock, or being an art director somewhere. But it changed a lot of people. People that you would hang out with before, and talk and drink beer with, now were too good to talk to you.
I counted how many people I knew personally [that not only] became millionaires, but multimillionaires during that time frame. I counted fifty-three people. You know, Chris Cornell showing up with Susan at a Metal Church gig out in the suburb of Seattle, wearing a burlap sack thing that looked like a shirt, hitting me up for beer money. That’s the Chris I know and miss, but after everybody got rich, [it’s] like, “Wow, you guys sure changed.” Kim stayed the same — he doesn’t really care about money. You used to be able to talk to Jonathan and Bruce at Sub Pop — now you had to make an appointment. Wait a second, what the fuck is this? Alice in Chains, I mean, it was all laid out for them. They were touring constantly, their records were selling, they were all over the place — money rolling in. Well, anything you did before, now you did ten times that amount. That could be drugs, alcohol, or your indiscretions of the opposite sex.
DAVID MEINERT: Major labels were looking for similar bands, so there ended up being all these bands that were mimicking. You ended up having Candlebox and this really horrible second, third generation of soundalike bands trying to get record deals and be huge. That was a dark force on the Seattle music scene.
PETER BAGGE: In light of my low opinion of the whole Seattle “grunge” dress code, I was flabbergasted when fashion magazines began marketing it as a specific look that they would deliberately want to copy. It was the height of irony — this antifashion statement become the exact opposite. I still can’t fathom who the driving force was behind all this nonsense either, though the Sub Pop guys seemed to be both laughing at it and vigorously fueling it at the same time.
DAVID MEINERT: It seemed dumb when there were runway shows of “grunge wear.” I would buy $.99 seven-layer burritos and thrift store clothes — not for a style thing, but because I had no money.
MIKE INEZ: The cool thing about Seattle bands — they were playing these shit clubs and garages for years before they got signed. Which is completely different than the L.A. vibe back then. People would play two or three gigs, and a record company would give them a bunch of money that they would waste in the studio making a shit record. [Seattle bands] really deserved everything that came their way. They were bands scratching and struggling to make it — it was so cool to hear these masterpiece records come out of those guys.
KIM THAYIL: I think there are obvious repercussions that are pretty well-known. I think Pearl Jam handled it … they had their situations as well — they lost and gained band members. We thought we were handling it pretty well. And then of course, after a few years, it does catch up with you — the pressure got to be a bit much. But we thought we were handling it much better than the other bands. We thought the reason why we were handling it better was because everything happened so suddenly for Nirvana and Pearl Jam. But Pearl Jam — Jeff and Stone knew what to expect from their experiences from Love Bone. They were working in that direction. It might have hit quickly for Eddie and the others.
EDDIE VEDDER: It’s a shame, because I never really remember going, “Wow, this is really great. This is everything you’ve ever worked for, this is like a dream come true.” ’Cause in a way, it was. But the whole thing felt like a big wave. The best waves are the fastest, the most memorable. If you can negotiate a big wave — ten foot or bigger — it’s something you’ll never forget. If that big wave lands on you, it’s also something that you’ll never forget. I felt like we were riding a big wave, but the analogy works because I kind of knew that it’ll break on you. It’ll hold you down and some people don’t come up. It really felt like you were negotiating this big wave, and you didn’t want to take your eyes off it, relax, pop champagne, and celebrate. I guaranteed that never happened [laughs]. It probably kept us from getting swallowed up. I wasn’t even drinking at that point — not really at all. It took me a while for my throat to get used to singing five nights a week, so I wasn’t smoking. I was kind of a prick about not wanting to be around smoke and blah blah blah. I remember having my wits about me, and living through the experience soberly. And it was a sobering experience. I just felt like we’re going to lose some loved ones … something. You’re not going to get all this stuff and not have something be taken away — friendships, relationships, whatever it is. In the end, we were absolutely right to be terrified of it all.
BEN LONDON: Any time you’d go into a town, there’d be big letters on the flyer, “FROM SEATTLE.” I remember once, we were playing Emo’s in Austin, Texas. We’re getting ready, and some guy comes up and says, “Are you guys from Seattle? Fucking play some Chains — I’ll come up and sing with you!” He just assumed that we all knew each other’s songs. There was a club in Iowa called Hairy Mary, and literally, the entire inside of the club was covered with flyers from Seattle. Literally, somebody must have been from Seattle and sent them flyers. There were tons of Alcohol Funnycar, the Gits, and 7 Year Bitch — flyers that I made were on the wall of this place!
EDDIE VEDDER: In Germany, they put stickers on the Ten record that we still laugh about. Big stickers that said, “The Seattle sound” [laughs]. You tried to keep your finger on as much stuff as that as you could.
TOM NIEMEYER: The place was getting gross, in a sleazy, “biz” way. Any innocence and sincerity the music community had was flushed by ’92. So was that term “community” — there was no turning back now. Hold
on to those memories, loyal Rocket readers, ’cause that’s all you got.
ED FOTHERINGHAM: I made a choice at about ’94, when OK Cola came out and all that, and it was obvious this thing was going to become an MTV sort of monstrosity. I went for the mainstream, as fast as I could. I started working for Neiman Marcus for God’s sake, which was like the most punk thing I could do — to me.
ART CHANTRY: In the end, as soon as money entered the picture, everybody grabbed their handful and split — and left everybody else with their thumbs up their ass, wondering what hit them. Here they were supporting this community and doing everything to help the community. And it turned out there was no community. There were just a handful of people that were sucking up the money.
Now, to be honest, there were a few people who got rich that were really good about it — Bruce Pavitt was a fine example. He came back and still firmly believed in community. He took his nut, and actually helped a lot of the people from the scene that were struggling to get their foot up and start businesses. He’d finance them, and bankroll them privately and quietly. He helped a lot of people from the brink of disaster. So I really have to take my hat off to that guy, because he really did believe in community. You can’t say that for most of the people in Seattle. Community was like something they could buy and sell.
BRUCE PAVITT: I was really impressed that the scene was able to sustain itself for as long as it did.
BLAG DAHLIA: Most of the stories about the Dwarves — they all end up saying it was me. So if someone fucked some ugly girl or shot up somewhere, they say that it was me. I think it’s funny — but not always accurate. When we were in Europe with the Supersuckers and [Reverend] Horton Heat [in 1993], Jon and Bruce came out to a show in Spain, remarking how lucky we were to have all fifteen of us crammed onto a bus. It was a lot like those drawings of slave ships from the sixteenth century where everyone is piled on top of each other.
We said we had a funny idea, about putting out the story that He Who [Cannot Be Named — the Dwarves’ masked/oft-naked guitarist] had been killed in a bar fight. They loved it and thought it was funny — many periodicals reported the story. Once it began to get questioned, their publicist, Nils, quickly cracked. He was afraid that the magazines wouldn’t like him anymore, and the label was afraid it might hurt people’s feelings. So they issued a press release saying that we had hoodwinked them and that they were dropping us. At the same time, they were parting ways with Caroline distribution and moving to Warner, so our record, [1993’s] Sugarfix, was effectively unavailable and unpromoted.
Sub Pop has since gone on to claim that it was a trick they pulled on us, but that was a bit of revisionist history to make themselves seem cutting edge and clever. In reality, they were just frightened and panicked. Why would a label screw themselves out of record sales intentionally? For the record, we only had a one record deal at that point — we were not dropped. And despite their attempts to follow up on the success of Nirvana, Bruce and Jon became bitter enemies, fired most of the chubbies, and didn’t score another hit until the Postal Service some ten years later.
MEGAN JASPER: I remember feeling like something needed to give. It needed to fizzle out — it was sort of like an old dog that needed to be brought into the backyard and shot [laughs].
CHAPTER 24
“It was on the radio, people were talking about them, people had shirts on and their posters up”: Pearl Jam
Nearly a year after its release, Ten became one of the top selling albums worldwide, and like Nirvana, Pearl Jam was one of the biggest bands on the planet. The group returned to the studio to record a followup, Vs. — which was nearly as big a hit as its predecessor — but the band also had to deal with a supposed “Nirvana versus Pearl Jam feud” in the press.
SCOTTY CRANE: My memory of Pearl Jam was what a slow boiler they were at first. That album basically took a year to take off, whereas [Nevermind] was a hit before it was released. And they came out about the same time.
JIM SORENSON: It must have been the beginning of 1992, when the “Alive” video [hit] — my friend Kevin was out doing their merchandise. We’d been selling a couple dozen shirts a night — they were opening for the Chili Peppers. So Kevin calls me one day and says, “We’re out of shirts.” It turns out the “Alive” video had come out [shortly] before. All of a sudden, they were big. It ended up being the rest of the tour was like that. I was working twenty hours a day, seven days a week. My best friends were the Delta Air Freight guys. Everybody that worked for me hated Pearl Jam — “We have to do these things again?”
EDDIE VEDDER: We went to Europe, came back, and things had quickly changed. Everyone had heard and seen the song. People were buying the record.
JEFF AMENT: We did our own tour in the States, and we’d gone from playing 200-seaters to 600-, 1,000-seaters. I think the second or third show was in Columbus or Cincinnati. We played a club that was like 1,000 or 1,200 capacity, and it was packed — sold out. I went to walk out the back of the club to get in our bus, and the parking lot was full of people. It took me an hour to get to the bus because I was signing autographs — I’d never done anything like that before in my life.
JONATHAN PLUM: About six months after Ten came out, they came back — they redid “Even Flow.” I think we did a couple of songs then — we mixed and worked on some stuff for the Singles soundtrack. I would connect with the mellow guys, like Mike McCready. Hanging out with Eddie Vedder was just impossible for me — he couldn’t have a normal conversation with me. He was so caught up in what was happening, and the type of person he wanted to be and project. I think that Stone and Jeff were in control of how the band was being marketed, and they were serious about being big. I think Eddie was really wanting to be more nose-to-the-ground punk. He was worried about people thinking that they were selling out — so that seemed like a constant debate in the band. Just having a conversation with him — he was thinking twice about everything he was saying. I remember sitting down at the table, going, “How’s it going?” And he’d give me this big long story about politics or something. It’s like, “Man, I just was saying hi!” It felt like everything coming out of his mouth was for an interview. And it was just annoying — it was really tiring for me. I just wanted to relax, and I felt really uptight around him. But it was the opposite with Mike McCready — he was a mellow dude, he’d come in, talking about real stuff. He’d be a real person. In a way, I felt bad for Eddie, because I understood what was happening. It must have been complicated.
REGAN HAGAR: I respect Pearl Jam, and love Stone as a dear friend, but they’re just not for me. I also don’t buy into the Eddie Vedder thing — “Woe is me.” I mean, come on — didn’t you grow up wanting to be a rock star? Embrace it.
COLLEEN COMBS: At the time it blew up, it was done on the road, and me in a little office by myself — being unfamiliar with Seattle, not having any friends, not having very much fun, not being very settled. And Pearl Jam was everywhere — it was on the radio, people were talking about them, people had shirts on and their posters up. I always felt like I just wanted to get away from it. It was like my whole life alone in an office, and I couldn’t listen to the radio. I wanted to listen to just speed metal — I was tired of it.
SCOTT VANDERPOOL: I remember being at that show at the Moore Theatre when they filmed that video where Eddie Vedder was climbing all around [“Even Flow”]. He was a mountain climber — he used to hang out with Chris Cornell a lot. I remember him asking me not to talk about that on the radio — “Don’t say that I’m hanging out with Chris Cornell, I don’t want people to think that we’re poser rock stars.” You don’t get the sense on that video how dangerous that was — climbing in the Moore Theatre. I thought he was risking his life.
KRISHA AUGEROT: I remember everyone constantly panicking about Eddie’s antics onstage. The show at the Moore was one of the times where it was like, “Oh my God, what is he going to do? Is he going to hurt himself or someone else?”
MATT VAUGHAN: Sti
ll to this day, it’s maybe one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. They were ready. I recall Eddie coming into our dressing room — we didn’t know him — and hands Gruntruck a couple of cases of beer from Pearl Jam’s dressing room. Introduced himself — real mild-mannered and quiet. I think he was even thanking everybody in the room for allowing him to be in Seattle and that whole thing. Real modest and nice. He turned away, and we all thought he was going to get eaten alive.
JONATHAN PLUM: Kurt Cobain was saying, “Pearl Jam wasn’t legit” and “All the kids beware, they’re just another corporate whatever.” I remember Jeff Ament got on the mic, and said something like, “Look, just for the record, we love Nirvana. If it wasn’t for Green River to make that money to pay for the Nirvana record, Nirvana wouldn’t have existed.”
JEFF AMENT: The guy that did that interview [the April 1992 Rolling Stone Nirvana cover story], Michael Azerrad, called and buttered me up, and then got me to say some things. I’m sure he turned that back around and said something to Kurt. Michael is who I think about every time we play “Blood.” Fucker. If I would have seen him on the street at any point over that next ten years, I would have kicked his ass. At that point, every interview that we did over the course of that year, we got asked at least one Nirvana question. So I’m sure on their end, they were getting asked a Pearl Jam question. After ten or twenty questions about a band that really, neither one of us knew much about … I mean, I know I’d seen them play a handful of times, but I doubt those guys have ever seen us play. I’m sure they felt like they were protecting some part of their scene, but I felt totally justified in whatever we were doing, because I was making punk rock music when Kurt was still going to Sammy Hagar shows. It bummed me out, because I knew Krist at that point, and I felt like there was some sort of connection. But after all that went down, there was a real separation at that point. They were still part of that split when Green River broke up — there was two camps, and those guys were part of the Sub Pop scene, and were good friends of Mark’s. I’m sure there was still some bitterness left from that whole deal. We’ll never know.