by Mark Yarm
EVERETT TRUE Reading ’92 was a very big deal. Sunday was Grunge Day. It was one of grunge’s high points for sure. It probably started to spiral downhill after that, when MTV took over. Nirvana picked all the bands to play with them. It was a great lineup; Mudhoney were playing, L7, Teenage Fanclub, Björn Again.
DAN PETERS The cool thing was that this day in a major festival in the United Kingdom is taken over by the equivalent of a bunch of friends: Melvins, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney.
BARRETT MARTIN I wouldn’t say it was like, “We’ve arrived,” because we’d already kind of arrived. It was like, “Wow, we’re all from Seattle, we all used to play these grimy little club shows together, and now here we are, playing essentially to a world audience.”
JEFF SMITH I was there, filming the Melvins and Mudhoney playing. The whole weekend was just nuts. It was like Apocalypse Now. It was so cold and wet, even though it was August. There was so much mud.
MARK DEUTROM I was doing sound for the Melvins. There were some issues with Lori that tour, so they got Joe Preston in to play bass. It was one of those deals where I think the Melvins were … resentful would be too strong a word, but it was like pulling back the curtain when they finally get to Oz. Your big rock-star buddies invite you to play on this day of the festival, which they get to pick the lineup for, and then you get to start playing at 10:30 in the morning. You get to play below Teenage Fanclub and a bunch of other crappy bands. People get to wake up with terrible hangovers and hate you. Stand in the mud and the rain and the wind and just flip you off.
BUZZ OSBORNE We opened for an ABBA cover band, so there you have it.
MARK DEUTROM People were standing next to me going, “What is this shit?” in the sound booth. And the Melvins are playing their hearts out, with 400 people standing there, maybe 75 people liking them. The booking agency relayed the message, from whoever was in charge of talent at the festival, that “You’re the worst band that ever played this festival.”
DAN PETERS When your name is Mudhoney, you tend to get things like mud thrown at you when it’s raining out. Onstage, Mark was pelted in the face with a big mud ball by somebody who he had taunted and teased: “You guys don’t play baseball—you throw like a bunch of pussies.” Got hit squarely in the face. Good times.
JENNIFER FINCH People were throwing mud at us when we were playing. Donita was like, “Fuck this!” and went behind her amp and pulled out her tampon and threw it into the audience. It was hysterical. That’s something we used to do, growing up: drive around and pull our tampons out and throw them at people that made comments. It’s the ultimate kind of “fuck you.” I always thought Donita was a bit of a reactionary, but thank God, she just expressed how angry and upset she was at that moment.
DONITA SPARKS (singer/guitarist for Los Angeles’s L7) What I wanted to do was drop my pants and pull it out, so everyone could see what I was doing. I had on these baggy shorts and didn’t have a belt so I used duct tape, double-knotted, so I’m like, shit, I can’t get these pants down. I turn around, and I look at Dee, and she sees my hands go down in there while I try to pull out this tampon. I swung it around my head, threw it out into the audience, and all these kids are yelling—they think I’m throwing out a lighter or something—and someone caught it, realized what it was and threw it back up onstage.
JEFF SMITH When L7 threw the tampon into the crowd, people ran away. Tough English people seemed to be pretty scared of a little pussy blood.
VAN CONNER At Reading, I went to walk down the stairs, which were all wet and muddy, and I had a beer in one hand and a mixed drink in the other. Dan Peters and I think Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl were down at the bottom of what was probably a 12-foot stairway. I go, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m comin’.” And somehow my feet went out from under me, and I landed on my back at the bottom of the stairs. It was a crazy fall. I almost blacked out. I couldn’t feel my back, and I thought, Okay, I’m dead. Everything is over.
And all of a sudden the feeling starts to come back and I look up at Dan Peters standing over me, and he says, “Hey, man, you saved your drinks.” And I looked down, and I hadn’t spilled either drink. I guess that was the most important thing to me at the time.
EVERETT TRUE It was just around the time Frances Bean was born. Everybody’s saying the kid’s been born a freak, it was deformed. Also, there’s all these rumors that Nirvana weren’t gonna show and Kurt had OD’d. I was slumped against one of the walls of Nirvana’s trailer with a bottle of vodka, and then, all of a sudden it must be getting close to the time, and somebody was yelling, “Where’s the wheelchair?”
Kurt came over to me, and he’s like, “It’s gonna be a burn on all those people who say I’m in the hospital and I’ve OD’d. I’m gonna wheel myself on in a wheelchair and pretend I’ve just come from the hospital, and we got this smock here.” I’m like, “That’s a great idea! Why don’t you get me to push you on the stage? That will be even funnier.”
I can remember pushing him on the stage, and it was around 9 o’clock at night. You can just hear this massive roar and feel all this steam and sweat coming from the front and the lights blinding you. I was trying to walk in a straight line, and so I start pushing Kurt towards the mic, and he reaches up and grabs me. I thought, Oh cool, he wants to have a mock fight onstage like we always used to have. So I start kind of punching him, and he’s saying, “No, you asshole, you’re pushing me to the wrong microphone.”
CRAIG MONTGOMERY More so in the early days than in the very late days, but a Nirvana show was the most hilarious thing you ever saw. They went onstage thinking, What could we do that would be funny? When talking about Nirvana, it pretty quickly devolved into, “Oh, how was Kurt feeling? What were his drug problems like?” But when Nirvana was onstage, that was not what it was about. It was not about drugs and depression and angst and death. It was about rock and roll as a great big joke.
JEFF SMITH It sounds hokey, but you could tell you were witnessing some epic moment. It’s 60,000 people, it’s 10 o’clock at night, everyone had been standing there for three days in the mud, and people are singing along almost louder than the band. Nirvana were firing on all 12 cylinders that night. The best time I ever saw them.
DAVE GROHL [Reading] was a pretty strange experience. Kurt had been in and out of rehab, communication in the band was beginning to be strained. Kurt was living in L.A., Krist and I were in Seattle. People weren’t even sure if we were going to show up. We rehearsed once, the night before, and it wasn’t good. I really thought, This will be a disaster, this will be the end of our career for sure. And then it turned out to be a wonderful show, and it healed us for a little while.
AMY FINNERTY Nirvana was booked to play at the MTV Video Music Awards. They were booked on like a Monday or something, and coincidentally I went to Reading with them the following weekend. I remember telling them, “Hey, we booked you on this Video Music Awards,” and they didn’t even know about it. I felt a little bit uncomfortable about that. I was so young, and I was just getting my feet wet in terms of how all this business got done, yet here I was, involved with the biggest band on the planet.
DANNY GOLDBERG MTV was very pushy. The award shows were big ratings things for them. They were in the business of selling advertising and not worrying about the feelings of rock stars, selling records, or anything else. They had a virtual monopoly on the music video world at that time and said, “We’ll really be upset if you don’t do it,” and I felt obligated to tell Kurt this. I believe they knew he was in rehab then. It was near the end of his time there, and so he left a day or two early to do the show.
Ethically, I couldn’t have kept it from him; I had to tell him, and it was his choice. He was an incredibly strong-minded, strong-willed guy that didn’t do things just because I told him to do them or not to do them. He wasn’t a child. Nonetheless, I feel creepy about it in retrospect.
AMY FINNERTY Somebody told the band that if they didn’t play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that I was gonna lose my job. It actu
ally took me a couple of years to get any sort of answer out of Dave Grohl about who it was, and I don’t really want to say—it was someone within their world, but outside of MTV. The band wanted to play a new song, “Rape Me,” and at that point at MTV, no artist had ever come out on the Video Music Awards and played anything except for the hits.
I went with Courtney and saw Kurt at Exodus, and Kurt and I sat in the backyard and had a conversation about it. It was intense because my bosses kind of sent me over there. I was like, “Look, I’m the VP of Post-it Notes, remember? If I lose my job, you can take me on the road and I’ll sell T-shirts. I want you guys to do what you want to do. Don’t worry about my job.”
In the end, the executives made an agreement that the band could play “Lithium” instead of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” At the last rehearsal, when we were walking from the dressing room out to the stage, Kurt grabs my hand and walked with me all the way up the stage, to make a point to the executives, like, Fuck you. I’m gonna do what I want, but you can’t mess with her.
RICK KRIM Pearl Jam really wanted not to perform “Jeremy” on the VMAs; they wanted to perform “Sonic Reducer” by the Dead Boys. Interestingly, there was a simultaneous conversation going on with the Nirvana camp about them wanting to perform “Rape Me.”
How’d we convince Pearl Jam otherwise? It was probably a bunch of us explaining, “This is our Super Bowl. ‘Jeremy’ has got all these nominations, there’s all these expectations, it’s a very mainstream TV show, and to come out and do a song that no one in our audience is going to know is not what we intended when we booked the band.” They got it. I don’t recall it being too contentious.
AMY FINNERTY During the show, I was standing right next to Judy McGrath, the president of the network and my mentor and idol. She really was behind me, and she was behind Nirvana. The agreement was that if they played the wrong song, then they were gonna go to a commercial break. We were standing next to the guy who’d potentially push the button, and they started playing “Rape Me.”
We’re all lookin’ at each other like, Are we gonna press this button or not? And Judy said, “No, let them play,” and then after 30 seconds they went into “Lithium,” and we just got big huge smiles on our faces and cracked up, and everything was great from then on.
KRIST NOVOSELIC Nirvana gets introduced, and we start playing our prank, then switch into “Lithium.” I’m plugged into some awful bass rig that’s distorting terribly. I can barely hear what I’m playing, and the tone deteriorates into an inaudible mess. Fuck it—time for the bass-toss shtick. Up it goes!!!!! I always try to get good air—I bet I hit over 25 feet, easy! But … I was not on my game—the only time I’ve ever dropped it was then in front of 300 million people. Ouch! I was fine [when it hit my forehead], but I faked like I was knocked out …
RICK KRIM “Jeremy” went on to become Video of the Year and blew the band up, and made them not want to make videos anymore. I have a Pearl Jam “Choices” poster in my office with a little girl, that was actually Kelly Curtis’s daughter when she was two years old, kneeling with a gun and a bunch of crayons in front of her. Choices. The band signed the poster back then, and Eddie wrote right underneath the gun, “This is the gun we couldn’t show in the video, but we ended up showing too much anyway.” Meaning exposure-wise, I think.
MIKE MCCREADY It was at that time that Eddie took it over. Benevolent dictatorship: That’s kind of the theory. Jeff and Stone running things from one angle, but with Eddie, it was all about pulling back.
ROSS HALFIN (photographer) When I first shot Pearl Jam, they were easy. They were quite fun to hang out with and shoot, and Eddie Vedder I always got along great with because I shot the Who a lot and I could tell him about it. In the early ’90s, a magazine called RIP did a special issue and called it Grunge and stuck a group shot of mine of Pearl Jam on the cover. Pearl Jam went mental, and that’s when they literally, seriously overnight banned everyone from shooting them, because they ended up on the cover of a magazine that they didn’t want to be on. By the second album they became fairly impossible to deal with.
I was with the Who a couple of years ago in Seattle and I ended up getting really drunk and I ran into Eddie in the Who’s hotel bar and I said, “You’re the people’s band, right?” He goes, “Kind of.” I said, “Then why do you have more rules than the fuckin’ Army? It would be easier to get into the Pentagon than take pictures of your band.”
EDDIE VEDDER I felt that with any more popularity we were going to be crushed, or our heads were going to pop like grapes. I went through this fucking yearlong period where I wore helmets all the time.… It was this kind of analogy, like I need a helmet …
KELLY CURTIS As Eddie puts it, he was sick of seeing his face everywhere. That’s when everything stopped. It wasn’t like we called up Epic and said, “We’re never doing a video again,” it was more like, Let’s just stop everything now: interviews, photo shoots, videos. There were some great people at the label that were really supportive, and then there were people that didn’t understand. Tommy Mottola, the CEO of Sony Music, told me at Sony’s MTV Awards after-party that if we didn’t release “Black” as the next single, it would be the single hugest mistake I’ve ever made in my life and my career. But the band was done. They just said it was too big: “We’re not gonna go out with some freakin’ power ballad.”
AMY FINNERTY Earlier that day at the VMAs, we were sitting in a greenroom tent outside. Kurt was sitting next to me, Janet, Courtney, and Jackie Farry, my best friend and Frances’s nanny. Axl Rose was walking through the tent, and Courtney yelled out to him as a total joke, “Hey, Axl, do you want to be the godfather of our child?” Everyone cracked up.
JANET BILLIG Axl Rose was with Stephanie Seymour. He turned to Kurt and said, “You tell your bitch to shut up!” And Kurt looked at Courtney and said, completely deadpan, “Shut up, bitch.” Hilarious. Then Stephanie said to Courtney, “Are you a model?” I think she was trying to be mean. Courtney was like, “Are you a brain surgeon?” We laughed and laughed and laughed for days.
AMY FINNERTY Kurt looked at me, and he was like, “I feel scared, like seventh-grade-getting-beat-up-on-the-playground scared.”
BRYN BRIDENTHAL Courtney and Axl spent so much time thinking about each other. Years later, when Axl was starting work on the album that would become Chinese Democracy, Jim Barber was A&Ring the project. And Axl at one point told me that Jim came to the studio and Axl felt Courtney Love energy coming off of him and made Jim leave. He couldn’t work with that energy in the room.
What I found out later, and Axl didn’t know then, either, is that Barber had taken up with Courtney. They kept it a secret from me and the company. So for Axl to feel Courtney Love energy coming off Jim Barber’s forehead, not knowing that they had a relationship, was sort of like, Whooooo! It was just amazing.
Axl would do those kinds of things all the time. This is going to sound ridiculous, but it’s true: He’s a very spiritual person. Jim’s work on the album ended shortly after the Courtney energy came off his forehead. Because Axl thought that Courtney was evil and that her evilness would impact on his record.
AMY FINNERTY When Eric Clapton was singing “Tears in Heaven” at the VMAs, we were on the side of the stage. It was Courtney, me, Kurt, Eddie. Janet was right there, and Jackie. We were all slow-dancing with each other. I was dancing with Jackie, then I was dancing with Kurt, and then I was dancing with Eddie, and then I was dancing with Courtney, and we were all switching partners. There was a moment where we looked at each other and realized that we were all from the same group, we were all from the same movement. I remember Courtney coming up and saying, “We gotta get them”—Eddie and Kurt—“to dance together.”
COURTNEY LOVE My memory can be really addled, but I remember for some reason Eric Clapton is onstage, he is playing “Tears in Heaven” about his little son that has fallen out of a window, and I shoved Kurt into Eddie and I shoved Eddie into Kurt, and then I laughed, just chuckled
, because it was genius. I loved it. They slow-danced. It was cute.
EDDIE VEDDER We were slow-dancing on a gym floor as though it was a seventh-grade dance.… Who led? That’s a good question. That’s the thing, no one led.
AMY FINNERTY It was such a sweet, sweet, sweet moment because it signified the end of this feud. I remember Janet and I actually jumping up and down and going, “YAY! They made up!” Everything was fine after that.
DAVE GROHL Yeah, some kind of fucking summit. It was so ridiculous; it had blown so out of proportion. I remember the two of them smiling and hugging each other—(sarcastically) and then, all of a sudden, Seattle was okay!
DAVE JERDEN The first Alice in Chains record was like a party, and the second record was just all work. We started the record the day the L.A. riots started. It was crazy; we had to shut down production for a week because they had a curfew on the whole city.
JERRY CANTRELL I was actually in a store buying some beer when some guys came in and started looting the place. I also got stuck in traffic and saw people pulling other people out of their cars and beating the crap out of them. That was some pretty scary shit to have to go through, and it definitely affected the overall feel of the album.
DAVE JERDEN Layne was living down in the marina, and during the curfew he was driving from the marina downtown to score is what I heard.
DAVID DUET Before I left Seattle, Alice in Chains was having their big Bumbershoot show and Facelift was out. I would stay with Layne and Demri sometimes, and I had laid on their floor kicking for a couple of days. They were freaked out by it all and didn’t understand it. Then I went back to Houston, where I was working at a nightclub, and the phone rang in the office. This was probably ’91. It was Layne and Demri and they had to find me to tell me they started doing dope and how wonderful it was, and right then I knew they were goners. You can just tell when you talk to certain people, especially females. You can tell when they’re lifers. Very seldom been wrong.
