by Mark Yarm
Michael Azerrad was the guy who wound the whole thing up by printing some stuff that Kurt said and stuff that I said in Rolling Stone. My point was: Fuck, man, we were putting out records on Homestead Records while Kurt was going to Sammy Hagar concerts. At that point I was like, If you want to talk punk-rock credibility, I can back it up. I was there when it was going down.
A couple of times I went up and introduced myself to Kurt and tried to have a conversation with him, but he didn’t want to have any part of it. I had conversations with Krist about it, and Krist, who I always got along with, just rolled his eyes and was like, “Whatever. It’s just a bunch of crap.”
DAVE ABBRUZZESE When Nirvana were going on stage at Cow Palace, I said “Have a good night” to Kurt and he growled at me. I was just not in the mood, so I reacted by saying, “Hey, fuck you,” and I grabbed him, got into his face, and our tour manager, Eric, said, “Hey, hey, hey.” I wasn’t about to take that from the little guy.
STEVE ISAACS (MTV VJ) When I was hired at MTV, in August of ’91, I was “musician guy.” I had long hair, and I was a singer-songwriter. And then the next month, Nevermind hit. It was the most perfect time to have an experience like this. I became the silly MTV grunge poster boy. I was wearing flannel a lot. I loved Nirvana, I loved Pearl Jam, I loved Alice in Chains, I loved Soundgarden, I loved Screaming Trees. When I talked about Whitney Houston on-air you could see me die in my eyes a little bit.
Kurt went off in the press about Pearl Jam, about how they were false and they were jumping on this bandwagon that Nirvana wasn’t trying to start. Pick on the shitty bands, don’t pick on each other! I guess when Pearl Jam came out, they felt a little underdoggy. So I wrote a letter to Rolling Stone after their first Nirvana cover story, the one where Kurt was wearing the CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK T-shirt. The letter in essence said it was pretentious to call anything false. My 22-year-old self was like, “Come on, don’t fight. Just back off those guys.”
Apparently Kurt got pissed off by my letter, which I don’t blame him for. When I went to Madrid to film some stuff for MTV, I was supposed to interview Nirvana. And then we get a fax from them, and it said, “Anybody but Steve can interview us.”
STEVE TURNER We knew Jeff, and for Kurt to say anything about Pearl Jam not having roots in punk rock—are you fuckin’ stupid? (Laughs.) Hello? Jeff was there from day one of the Seattle thing.
STONE GOSSARD It was painful at times. All those words that were used to describe Pearl Jam—as posers, as somebody who’s getting a hand up from the label, as someone who is more manipulative than talented, not the real thing compared to Nirvana—all it did was raise the bar for Pearl Jam. I think we took them as challenges, and we had to discover whether we were being real to the situation, or am I a jerk?
TOM NIEMEYER Gruntruck opened that show at the Moore where Pearl Jam filmed the “Even Flow” video. I really wanted to thank Jeff, because I thought he had something to do with Gruntruck opening. After our set, I saw him in the hall and it was a weird exchange—there was almost no exchange. Maybe he was just focused, I don’t know. But I saw him a couple times after that, too, and it was like we didn’t even know each other. I was bummed because we slept on the guy’s floor in Montana and we went skateboardin’ and shit together. I thought we were buds!
JOSH TAFT The night I was shooting the “Even Flow” video, Eddie told me to make sure we could see the crowd in the video. The only way to do that is to turn up the venue lights. When he saw how bright they were, he yelled at me to turn them down. Then the dimmer board malfunctioned and we couldn’t turn them off. So I physically smashed the board, and the hall went black. Long story short, I ended up turning in the cut of the video to MTV with that bit—him screaming at me—in there. And I wasn’t looking to call him out. It was just like, That wasn’t my fucking fault. I needed to turn all the lights up.
And then I called him out about it on a personal level, and I said, “Listen, that wasn’t cool.” We were friends at that point, and I said, “I’m not turning into your employee, and if that’s the case, I’m not cool with it.” That was the moment his personality changed. Ever since then, he’s been a different guy, in my opinion. He was feeling his own power and his own potential, and was willing to do anything to maintain it.
JONATHAN PLUM (producer/engineer; now London Bridge Studio co-owner) I started working at London Bridge after Ten came out. Pearl Jam came back a few times—they came back to do some soundtrack work on Singles and to rerecord “Even Flow” for the video.
I was 19 or 20 and nervous and excited. Mike McCready was a very friendly guy and he was able to say, “Hey, dude, what’s going on?” and be normal. I had conversations with Eddie Vedder and thought he was very weird and complicated. We’d sit and have breakfast together, and I’d ask how his day was going and his answers sounded like he was getting interviewed for a magazine. He was very careful about what he was saying, and he was always making these big, blanket political statements. Where I just was like, “Hey, man, how are the waffles?”
I sensed that he was not comfortable being himself. It’s like he needed to project something, rather than just relax and have a normal conversation. I remember Jeff and Stone talking about wanting to do certain PR things and Eddie being kind of pissed off and uncomfortable because he was pushing for more of this punk, Fugazi approach. It seemed like every argument the band was having, he would always ask, “Well, what would Fugazi do?”
MARK ARM You want to hear a little bit about our label search? Sub Pop at the time was distributed by Caroline, and we thought that we would cut out the middleman and go straight to Caroline. So the president of Caroline, Keith Wood, met with us. At our little business lunch, he said, “We’d love to work with you guys but there’s just a couple things. You’re gonna have to tour for nine months out of the year.” We’d just done a nine-week tour of Europe, which drove us fucking crazy. And then he was like, “You gotta sweeten up your guitar sound.” It’s like, “Fuck, if we sweeten up our guitar sound, what do we have?” And then he says, “You can’t do any side projects.” Steve and I had just done the Monkeywrench record.
And we’re like, “If this is the kind of shit we’re gonna get from an independent label, we might as well start talking to the majors.”
BOB WHITTAKER When they were leaving Sub Pop, I told the band, “Listen, I know we’re not really fans of management companies and managers and big powerful lawyers.” But we had a couple of good, relatively connected lawyers who weren’t too obnoxious, and I said, “With those two lawyers, I could easily step in and be the hub of communication and help you guys, be your manager and see to it that you are all very involved in the decisions.”
DON BLACKSTONE (Gas Huffer bassist) Gas Huffer toured with Mudhoney in ’91. Certainly Bob was the type of guy who would put a couple of holes in a can of tuna fish and hide it under the seat of your van—or worse. I thought he was a hilarious guy, but I gained some respect for Bob on that tour when I saw what he actually did.
GARRETT SHAVLIK Bob taught me how to road manage. I remember at the 9:30 Club, me and Lukin and Bob and Peters are wrestling all over the place, doing body slams, and the promoter walks up and says, “Hey, you guys wanna get paid?” And Bob just snapped out of his whacked-out Warner Bros. cartoon persona and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and went right into full-on business mode.
BOB WHITTAKER The guys agreed to it, and then we shopped independent. Then we went to majors and did the obligatory fly to New York and L.A. and meet with people, to varying degrees of disgust.
MARK ARM We had this meeting with John Silva about potentially signing to Geffen through Sonic Youth. We were in this restaurant, and he positioned himself so that he could see this TV screen showing MTV. He’s telling us that by signing to Geffen through Sonic Youth, he would essentially be our A&R man. Our backs were to the TV, and he kept his eyes up there—he wouldn’t even look at us and focus—and then, all of a sudden, the “Smells Like Teen Spirit�
� video comes on and he just starts laughing maniacally and is like, “Look at that!” You could see the dollar signs rolling in his eyes. That’s why we didn’t want to be on Geffen. Get us as far away from this guy as possible.
DAVID KATZNELSON (Warner Bros. Records A&R vice president) When I found out Mudhoney were looking for another label, I immediately flew up to Seattle. I was this little schmo 21-year-old kid who is the biggest fan ever. I got thrown into the real chaos of the Mudhoney world that night. The first person I see is this raggedy, crazy-looking guy named Bob Whittaker who has hair everywhere and is wearing this big, thick green sweater. He told me, “The guys will see you soon. Come with me.” He takes me to his house in West Seattle where he has these crazy roommates—the kind of guys who’d shoot holes in walls with guns—and they start plying me with alcohol and throwing on single after single of all the Seattle bands.
Then I met the band. The only one who was kind of off-putting to me was Steve, and I think that’s because of his sarcastic, cynical wit. He’d be like, “Hey, where’s your American Express card? Aren’t you gonna buy us dinner?” And, “Are you gonna make us wear the prune suit?”—like the Electric Prunes, who the label forced to wear purple suits at one point in time.
GARRETT SHAVLIK The Fluid left Sub Pop about the same time Mudhoney left. We were getting hustled by Virgin and by Warner Bros., and then we went with Hollywood Records. We went on the road with Love Battery and toured for fuckin’ 14 weeks straight. Somewhere on the road coming back, some Hollywood execs flew in. They’re like, “What we’d love you to do is rent a house down in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, because that’s where Nevermind totally broke open on the radio. Go down there and just work that club circuit for a while, three or four months.” I went, “Fuck you, man. We’ve been fuckin’ touring since fuckin’ ’86.” They thought Dallas/Fort Worth was the pocket, man.
The Hollywood Records guys didn’t know about rock and roll. They knew about soundtracks for fuckin’ cartoons, Disney. Hollywood Records was in the Disney complex studio area, and all the boulevards are named after characters. They were on the corner of Dopey and Goofy boulevards. Really. Could this be a fuckin’ sign?
JACK ENDINO Major labels didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I was not the one who did the record that broke Nirvana. I was the guy who did the Nirvana record that said it was done for $600. That probably did not help my career. Most people didn’t even listen to the record because it said “made for $600.” They’d go, “Ha ha, next!”
PETER BUCK (guitarist of Athens, Georgia’s R.E.M.; Stephanie Dorgan’s ex-husband) I did an R.E.M. record in Seattle in ’92, Automatic for the People, and moved there in ’93. As an outsider, it seemed like things got really intense really quickly. Except for the B-52s and R.E.M., nobody from Athens got hugely successful, and there weren’t really bidding wars. It wasn’t seen that any band from Athens was gonna make a million dollars, but Seattle was like a gold rush.
RUSTY WILLOUGHBY (Flop/Pure Joy singer/guitarist) I’m sure if Flop were from Birmingham, Sony wouldn’t have touched us with a 10-foot pole. We were from Seattle, and we were doing relatively well on Frontier, an indie label. I think they thought we were grunge, and us being from Seattle is why they pulled the trigger. We would tell them that we weren’t grunge: “Don’t expect us to be Mudhoney.” But as much as they said, “Oh, yeah, sure,” they saw dollar signs. Even if they knew in their hearts that we weren’t grunge, they were going to market us like we were. It was always “Flop from Seattle.” Once they realized we weren’t grunge, they were more than happy to get rid of us, after just one record.
PETER BUCK Everyone was kind of conscious that the world was looking at them. Everyone felt embattled. The one thing I remember with a lot of pleasure is seeing that impromptu Nirvana show at the Crocodile, where they opened for Mudhoney. Everyone seemed really clearheaded, and it was really loose and fun. It was the last great experience I had of that era. Everything after that seemed kind of dark. It seemed like everyone stayed home, except for the people who’d just moved to town.
CLAUDIA GEHRKE What I found the most annoying was people all of the sudden flocking to Seattle thinking they were going to get a gig. They’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Seattle.” And it’s like, “No, you’re not. You’re from L.A.”
DANIEL HOUSE Suddenly there were all these bands that you had never heard of, out of nowhere, that embraced that sound. At C/Z, we used to get demos all the time, and we used to say, “Oh, it’s a Pearl Jam demo,” “Oh, it’s a Soundgarden demo,” “Oh, it’s a Nirvana demo.” Those were the templates.
RAY FARRELL At Geffen, whenever we were trying to go to do any Nirvana business, you couldn’t get a flight from L.A. to Seattle because every flight was filled with major-label guys looking for the next big thing after Nirvana. I’m serious. If you crashed every one of those planes you could’ve killed the record business singlehandedly.
DANIEL HOUSE I was angry at what the major-label music industry was doing to our scene, because it changed a lot of people’s motivations for why they were in bands. Some of the bands on C/Z actually yelled at me because they blamed me for them not getting signed to a major label.
TOM HAZELMYER Every band thought they could be Nirvana, and that was insufferable. The attitude was “Why aren’t I big yet?” It’s like, “Have you listened to your own fuckin’ record? It’s just like fuckin’ frog noises with a distorted guitar being smashed up. Are you kidding me?”
TOM NIEMEYER People wanting to be the next Nirvana, I saw it every fuckin’ day, dude. It was disgusting! I will rattle off names if I can remember them. But they’re all gone now. They had demos out, maybe got signed to EMI for a record or whatever.
And the record-label people moving here, having offices here, it poisoned the clear waters of Puget Sound. All of a sudden, there was this weird oil slick over all this shit. You didn’t wanna be from Seattle.
CHARLIE RYAN Early on, when you went to a club, there were no drinks, there were no snacks, there were no televisions, there was no paint on the walls. You took the bus for an hour to go to a club and stand there for three hours and watch a band. It was solely people wanting to see people play music. I was constantly reminded of that years later, when I was in the Crows. We played at the Crocodile, and nobody even cared what was onstage.
RUSTY WILLOUGHBY All of the sudden, Seattle was becoming this thing that was kind of gross. Around mid-’93, Drew Barrymore started hanging around in town a lot; she was going out with Eric from Hole. Oh, no, I think Drew Barrymore’s great. It was just that people would go to the Crocodile just to see if Drew Barrymore was there.
CHARLIE RYAN I had a theory that on any Friday or Saturday night, you could take the lids off of all these clubs and you could snatch the bands out and swap ’em and nobody would give a shit. They were there to chase girls and to dress up and have cocktails and get drunk and catch up with friends. And that’s fine. But it was just such a complete turnaround from early on.
BEN LONDON (Alcohol Funnycar singer/guitarist) I went to a little liberal arts college in central Ohio called Antioch College that’s historically been a very left-leaning school. My roommate in my first quarter was a guy named Steve Moriarty, who ended up being the drummer in the Gits, and the room next to us was Matt Dresdner, who ended up being the bass player in the Gits, and a guy named Adrian Garver, who went on to be in a band called the D.C. Beggars out here in Seattle.
We formed this band with Steve, myself, Adrian Garver, and this guy Roger Garufi that was called Brothers Voodoo, and that morphed into what became Big Brown House. The Gits started the second year. Andy Kessler, or Joe Spleen as he’s known in the Gits, was a year ahead of us. Part of Antioch’s thing was cooperative education, so you worked for six months and studied for six months out of every year, and at one point, Andy and Matt and Mia Zapata ended up doing a co-op in San Francisco at a place called the Farm—which was some sort of urban farm that did a bunch of punk-rock shows—where they
formed an early version of the Gits. When they came back, the Gits and Big Brown House coexisted, sharing a drummer, Steve.
As we got closer to graduation, we were all like, “We want to keep playing music.” When we discussed where we wanted to go, four cities came up. The general discussion in this group—it became more of a collective later—was that New York and San Francisco were too expensive, Chicago was too close to where we already were, and Seattle just seemed like this great place. I was mildly aware of Soundgarden, but we didn’t really know that it was going to be a good place for music at all.
We arrived as an army of people, in August of 1989. It was not only the core members of the Gits and Big Brown House, but others, including Valerie Agnew, who ended up being the drummer in 7 Year Bitch.
MATT DRESDNER (the Gits bassist) When we first moved out here, Valerie was dating Steve, our drummer. And I ended up dating Stefanie Sargent. They were interested in starting a band, and we helped them. They started in our practice space at the Rathouse on our equipment. We helped teach them, Stefanie and Valerie specifically, how to play their instruments.
BEN LONDON Rathouse was the name of our collective, which was a combination of Big Brown House and the Gits’ original name, the Sniveling Little Rat Faced Gits, which comes from a Monty Python skit. And that’s what we called the group house that the bulk of these people lived in, on 19th and Denny in Capitol Hill. Steve Moriarty and Valerie Agnew; Julian Gibson and Carla Sindle from D.C. Beggars; Andy Kessler and Mia Zapata were the primary people living there. That’s where we practiced in the basement. It was very much like the community center for our social scene.
