Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  DAVE KRUSEN (Pearl Jam/Hovercraft/Candlebox drummer) I’m originally from Gig Harbor, Washington, which is about 45 minutes outside of Seattle. I had just moved to Seattle, and I got a call from a guy that I played with in a band when I was 13—Tal Goettling. He said that Jeff and Stone were looking for drummers to play with. I called Jeff up and he said, “We’ll jam and see what happens.” And it kinda went from there.

  Because I just had such low self-esteem, I didn’t feel deserving. There was a lot of weird squirreliness with some people because they were like, “Who’s this guy? He came out of nowhere.” So many people wanted that gig. And I just happened into it.

  KELLY CURTIS Jeff played me the tape at my office one day and said, “I think we found our singer.” It was pretty apparent that there was something special going on. It was pretty immediate. We were all real excited, and then I met Eddie a few weeks later. He was super-shy, super-polite, and super-quiet.

  MIKE MCCREADY I’d never been in a situation where it clicks. It all happened in seven days. We had worked up all the music a month prior to that with Krusen. When Eddie came up he had “Footsteps,” “Alive,” and “Black.” And out of that week came so many other things. It was very punk rock. Eddie would stay there in the rehearsal studio, writing all night. We’d show up and there was another one. And then he had to get back. I remember giving him a ride back, at about 5 in the morning, to Sea-Tac Airport. I remember him saying “Don’t be late!” He had to get back to work.

  JEFF AMENT The minute we started rehearsing and Ed started singing—which was within an hour of him landing in Seattle—was the first time I was like, “Wow, this is a band that I’d play at home on my stereo.” What he was writing about was the space Stone and I were in. We’d just lost one of our friends to a dark and evil addiction, and he was putting that feeling to words. I saw him as a brother. That’s what pulled me back in [to making music]. It’s like when you read a book and there’s something describing something you’ve felt all your life.

  DAVE KRUSEN I could tell that Eddie was definitely the real deal, very artistic. He wasn’t trying to come across as deeper than he really was. He was a very interesting person and had been through a lot.

  EDDIE VEDDER I never knew my real dad. I had another father that I didn’t get along with, a guy I thought was my father. There were fights and bad, bad scenes. I was kind of on my own at a pretty young age. I never finished high school.

  [My mother] came out [to San Diego] with the specific purpose to tell me that this guy wasn’t my father.… At first I was pretty happy about it, then she told me who my real dad was. I had met the guy three or four times, he was a friend of the family, kind of a distant friend. He died of multiple sclerosis. So when I met him, he was in the hospital.…

  I had to deal with the fact that he was dead. My real father was not on this earth. I had to deal with the anger of not being told sooner, not being told while he was alive.

  DAVE KRUSEN A week later, we played a show. It was at a place called the Off Ramp, and we were called Mookie Blaylock. I didn’t know anything about basketball, so I did not know who Mookie Blaylock was. I remember somebody asking, “Why Mookie Blaylock?” And Jeff answered, “Michael Jordan is just not very cool-sounding.”

  NANCY WILSON I saw the first time they played, as Mookie Blaylock. Eddie was quite shy. He was kind of studying his boots onstage. He was a really amazing singer, but being in Seattle with this whole tight community of people that loved Andy Wood before him, he was probably a little bit nervous.

  LANCE MERCER I photographed them at their first show, at the Off Ramp. I had to walk out for a while. Because the last time I had seen Jeff and Stone play was with Andy. I just kept seeing Andy, and I got really sad.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM I remember Chris being really pissed at Andy, shortly after he died. I was really surprised by that, actually. He’d be, “Fuckin’ idiot! Fuckin’ motherfucker!” Really just mad, and upset, that he had done what he did. He was really hurt. Of course, obviously he came to terms with it; the Temple of the Dog thing happened, and he wrote some amazing songs and got a great album out of the whole thing.

  XANA LA FUENTE With Temple of the Dog, Chris handed me a cassette and said, “These are songs I wrote about Andrew for you. This is just for you.” Stoney and Jeff heard me playing that cassette at Kelly Curtis’s house, where I was living upstairs at the time. They flipped and were like, “What is that?” I said, “It’s Chris’s, songs that he made for me.” They rode his ass and they were like, “We gotta do that.”

  CHRIS CORNELL I had written “Say Hello to Heaven” and “Reach Down,” and I had recorded them by myself at home. My initial thought was I could record them with the ex-members of Mother Love Bone as a tribute single to Andy. And I got a phone call from Jeff, saying he just thought the songs were amazing and let’s make a whole record. When we started rehearsing the songs, I had pulled out “Hunger Strike” and I had this feeling it was just kind of gonna be filler, it didn’t feel like a real song. Eddie was sitting there kind of waiting for a [Mookie Blaylock] rehearsal and I was singing parts, and he kind of humbly—but with some balls—walked up to the mic and started singing the low parts for me because he saw it was kind of hard. We got through a couple choruses of him doing that and suddenly the lightbulb came on in my head, this guy’s voice is amazing for these low parts. History wrote itself after that, that became the single.…

  XANA LA FUENTE By the time Andy died, I was sick of crying. That’s why Chris wrote “poor stargazer/she’s got no tears in her eyes.” Everyone was just waiting for me to flip out because I never cried.

  KIM THAYIL The initial purpose of Temple of the Dog, to be a tribute to Andy Wood, was not the concluding purpose. I think to be a tribute to Andy Wood, there were a lot of people who were close to Andy, like his brothers, who probably should’ve been involved. It became something else; it became a Chris solo record, with some of his friends, the survivors of Mother Love Bone, playing with him.

  KEVIN WOOD I fully expected to be included in that project, although they never called me. I was pretty pissed off at the time that I didn’t get to play on that, or wasn’t even considered to be asked.

  GRANT ALDEN I happened to be in L.A., on the A&M lot. I was friends with a publicist at A&M named Rick Gershon. Rick came back to his office and the publicity photos for Temple of the Dog were sitting by his desk, and I remember Rick looking up, looking at me, and looking down at the photo and saying, “Who the fuck is Eddie Vedder, and why is he in my picture?”

  SCOTT VANDERPOOL (KXRX/KCMU DJ; Room Nine drummer) I did an on-air interview with Eddie Vedder at KXRX when he was pretty new to the area. The one thing that I remember about it was that when we were listening to songs and talking in between, he said he didn’t want me mentioning on the air that he’d been hanging out with Chris Cornell. He didn’t want to be seen as some kind of rock star.

  NANCY WILSON The next time I saw those guys, probably just a few months later at the Moore Theatre, Eddie was climbing off the P.A. speakers up the side of the wall and jumping headlong into the audience off the balcony. He had acquired his wings. The next show I saw him at, I waded through the people and found him and said, “Hey, Eddie, I hear you can fly!” He just got this big sunshine grin.

  KELLY CURTIS PolyGram had let everybody go from Mother Love Bone except for Jeff and Stone and said, “We retain the rights to you guys.” In the meantime, both Michael Goldstone and Michele Anthony, who was Alice in Chains’ lawyer, went to Sony. We kept trying to get money from PolyGram to make a demo, and they kept saying, “Fine,” but they didn’t do anything.

  We realized that we needed to get off PolyGram. We wanted to be on Sony, and they wanted us, so we figured out who the attorney was that had gotten Rick Dobbis, the new president of PolyGram, his gig and we hired him as our attorney. We asked the attorney, “Will you please help us get off PolyGram? Our singer died, we don’t have a future.” We didn’t tell him about our demos or anything. Th
e attorney goes, “If you meet him face-to-face, he’ll let you go.” So we went back to New York, and me, Jeff, and Stone went to PolyGram, and Rick Dobbis said, “I release you.”

  We had already set up a secret meeting downtown with Michele and Michael, and we get there to have dinner with them. We already knew we had Eddie. We had the demo. So we go to meet Michael and Michele for dinner, and Rick Dobbis just happens to walk in right before we’re gonna meet them. We’re going, “Oh, shit, if he sees Michele and Michael here, we’re gonna be screwed.” So Rick Dobbis asks us, “How was dinner?” He thought we had already eaten. We said, “Great,” and we got up and left and cut off Michael and Michele down the road a bit. If he would have seen us meeting with Michael and Michele, he might have known that we weren’t being truthful. Yeah, close call.

  JERRY CANTRELL Within our own community, there was always a little bit of nose snubbing. When we were coming up, it gave us more impetus. We were inspired by all of those bands, especially by Soundgarden, but we have our own voice. Seattle wasn’t like a lot of musical communities I’ve seen where everybody is doing what’s hot. We were all rocking, and it was hot, but nobody was trying to cop someone else’s thing. It was a respectful competition.

  GRANT ALDEN There were a series of bands who saw what was working and began to try to do that. I think Alice in Chains was one of them. It doesn’t mean they were without talent, but it meant in some ways that they were without heart or without soul.

  It’s indicative of my impotence as a rock critic that Alice in Chains had a career, because I did my level best not to do anything on them at The Rocket, to squash them. I’ve always said this as a joke—it is somewhat true, nevertheless—my mother’s name is Alice, so their band name always pissed me off. Beyond that, they were a suburban metal band and decided that they would be Soundgarden Jr. We called them Kindergarden.

  MARK ARM Everyone came from different backgrounds. There’s no kind of purity test. I think that’s retarded. Alice in Chains were definitely better than some of the punk bands that were happening in town.

  DAVE HILLIS I think Alice in Chains’ change in sound was natural. I don’t think they jumped on a bandwagon. I remember the first demo they did with Rick Parashar at London Bridge, before I worked there, sounded so good; it sounded like a record. They weren’t hair metal, and they weren’t quite the Alice you know.

  NICK TERZO As a singer, Layne just had power. Combine that with the unusual sweetness of Jerry’s voice laying down melody, and that was unusual at the time. Most of those vocal parts were contrasting each other—there was give-and-take between the two of them—while every other band at that point was just singing choruses together.

  DAVE HILLIS The most drastic change with Alice really came when they started using Dave Jerden as a producer. When they recorded with him at London Bridge, I was able to be there sometimes. What I noticed was that Dave Jerden slowed their tempos down, which made it sound heavier, and that’s what they’re most known for.

  DAVE JERDEN (producer) For Facelift, they got me a condo down by Puget Sound, and we did all the basic tracks at London Bridge. I was just amazed how great Jerry was and Layne was. Sean’s arm was broken, so I tried to use the drummer from Mother Love Bone, but he couldn’t play the backbeat parts, so Sean ended up playing the drums with a broken arm, and it came out good. Mike Starr was great; I liked Mike Starr a lot.

  SUSAN SILVER With Alice, it was just balls-to-the-wall enthusiasm. I had to bring it down a little bit because Alice didn’t have straight jobs and didn’t have a sense of budget, and Dave came along and said, “Just go buy what you need,” which is like telling a kid in a candy store that there’s no limit. So I said, “Look, Dave, we’ve got X amount of dollars to spend on this record. We don’t need to blow it on a bunch of equipment that they’re going to use once to get the sound that you want. Let’s capture the sound that they have and get only what we need.”

  Three of the guys understood that really well, and Mike Starr, he understood ultimately, it just took a little more conversation with him, because in his mind he was already a huge rock star.

  DAVE JERDEN Jerry and I just saw eye to eye about everything. He was in control of the band. I just spent all my time with Jerry up there. We’d go to the Vogue every night, and after the Vogue, the party would usually end up at my place and then we’d stay up all night and then go fishing for salmon in Puget Sound and then go to the studio.

  NICK TERZO I was vegetarian at the time, and I had this long discussion with the band at dinner once about how veal is actually produced, how these calves are put in the boxes. That was kind of the genesis for the song “Man in the Box.”

  Dave Jerden was my number-one pick to produce. I just thought the Jane’s Addiction record he did sounded amazing. I wanted it to sound like that. He had very good chemistry with the band. Dave’s a tough guy—he’s a bit of a taskmaster—but he’s got a very good sense of humor.

  DAVE JERDEN Then we went to Los Angeles, and they got an apartment at the Oakwood Apartments. They wanted to know where the local strip bar was. So they went to the Tropicana, and all the strippers ended up hanging out at their apartment. They had a calendar with all the Tropicana strippers on it, and they put X’s on the ones that they fucked. They had ’em all X’d out.

  ERIC JOHNSON Mookie Blaylock’s first tour was with Alice in Chains, down the West Coast. There was the Alice in Chains minivan and the Mookie Blaylock minivan, and my best friend Keith was driving the Alice in Chains minivan and being an all-around roadie/tech/lighting guy. I was in the van with Mookie Blaylock, and we would have food fights between the minivans at 80 miles an hour on I-5.

  Mookie Blaylock and Alice in Chains were different on every level. Why they would fit together I didn’t know, but they almost seemed like one big band then.

  DAVE KRUSEN One night on that tour, we went to see Ozzy, because Alice in Chains were playing his Children of the Night benefit show in Long Beach. They sent a limo for me and Mike to go to the show. We got all excited, and I brought my bong. The limo was fully stocked with booze, so we were pretty torn up by the time we got there.

  MIKE INEZ (Ozzy Osbourne band bassist; later Alice in Chains bassist) The first time I saw Alice in Chains play was when I was in the Ozzy band and we did a benefit concert at Long Beach Arena. Alice was the first band on, and as I’m walking in, they were playing to basically an empty arena. But I’m like, Wow, this band is really cool. I went and stood on the side of the stage and watched them play. I gotta tell ya, Layne was, and still to this day is, one of the most compelling front men I’ve ever seen. He was so cool and creepy and just a badass dude.

  DAVE KRUSEN By the time we left the show, everybody was in the limo with us, including Alice in Chains. We were sitting in the limo, and some girl came up and she said, “Who’s in the car?” and Sean Kinney goes, “It’s Ozzy,” and points to me. She’s looking right at me, and I looked like a little kid. She was like, “Oh, my God! Ozzy!” So Sean goes, “Let him sign your tits.” Someone gave me a Sharpie, and I wrote OZZY really big.

  At one point on that ride back, McCready was taking a leak out the window as we were going down the freeway and Kelly Curtis was holding him by his belt. That was entertaining. The bill for the limo, with all the burn marks and the trashing that happened, was huge. The whole tour was like that for me, Mike, Mike Starr, Sean Kinney, and Layne.

  ERIC JOHNSON Alice in Chains weren’t that decadent yet, but they were learning how to be. There was a lot of beer drunk and probably a lot of weed smoked, and a lot of laughing. It was still pretty pure.

  DAVE KRUSEN We played a show in Seattle, and the cast from Singles came—Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda, Kyra Sedgwick. I remember Jeff saying, “When we’re done playing, we’re gonna take pictures with Matt Dillon and some of the other people from the movie.”

  KELLY CURTIS I knew Cameron Crowe’s roommate, this photographer Neal Preston. When Cameron was working on Fast Times at Ridgemont High, we’d go
hang out on the set. And just knowing Nancy, I knew she and Cameron would be a perfect couple. I think Neal felt the same way. So we just brought them together, and it happened.

  How’d I become the associate producer of Singles? I think Cameron was really feeling sorry for me, plus he was making a movie about the Seattle scene, so he gave us a bunch of money. He gave me a flat fee for Singles. We got 30 grand or 50 grand. That money helped get the demo made.

  CAMERON CROWE I was trying out the camp counselor thing: “Let’s all go to the club and check out these bands.” … It was so packed and people were throwing beer bottles, and after a little bit, Kyra Sedgwick says, “I really get the wonderful scene going on here. I’m going to go home now.” Then the costume girl goes, “Great. This is great. Bye!” It ended up being Matt Dillon and Campbell Scott hanging until the very end, slam dancing.

  DAVE KRUSEN I had a lot of friends there, and when we got done playing, I took off with them and was partying and kinda forgot about it. McCready did the same thing with some of his friends. And the next day, Jeff was like, “It’s too bad you guys took off, because you could’ve been in the band that we’re playing in the movie.”

  We were like, “What?!”

  “Hey, I told you to stick around.”

  And we were like, “Awww.”

  Jeff would do things like that—be real subtle about things that would turn out to be something huge. I think he’d downplay things so people wouldn’t get wigged out and nervous.

  JOSH TAFT (video director) I shot the making-of-the-movie thing for Singles. The best moment was the day that Matt Dillon was trying on his Eddie Vedder wig. He was assuming the role of a hybrid Eddie Vedder/Chris Cornell. We all had to go and give our opinions on 120 wigs that they pulled. I remember Matt being very insecure. You know, Matt Dillon is Matt Dillon. He doesn’t wear a wig. If anything, the guy plays himself, so he seemed super-uneasy with it.