Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [117]
ART CHANTRY I remember when Kurt Danielson called me and said, “We want to use this photo on a record cover. We found it at a thrift store, and we bought the entire album of photos, therefore we own it and we can do whatever we want.” I said, “No, don’t fuckin’ do that.” They went and did it anyway, and then the guy who was on the cover had a friend who worked in a record store and saw the photo and said, “Hey, Bob, your photo is on this record cover, isn’t that cool?” And he went and showed it to his ex-wife, the woman on the cover, who had become a Christian singer. And she got pretty pissed off.
JEFF GILBERT I was working for KZOK, which is Seattle’s still-reigning classic-rock station. 8-Way Santa came in, and I had the album sitting there in the station. One of the station managers comes over and says, “Oh, my God! That’s my buddy!” So he brings in the guy who had his hand on the chick’s tit in the picture, and I said, “Dude, check it out, you’re famous!” And he goes, “Aw, where the hell did they get that?” I said, “I think somebody found it at a garage sale.”
And here it goes, the fateful move: I said, “Man, can I get you to autograph this for me?” He loved it, and he goes, “Sure, man!” And he signed it. The woman in the picture had turned into some religious freak and wanted to sue, and I said, “Wait just a second there,” when I heard that. “The guy who’s in the picture, he liked it so much, he autographed it!” And there’s your evidence right there.
KURT DANIELSON That really damaged their case. Between us and Sub Pop, we had to pay a certain amount of money, but I don’t think it was more than what they had to spend on legal fees. So if they got anything out of it it was more of a moral victory, in that they were able to get this thing yanked off the shelves. But it destroyed the momentum we’d built up the couple of years before. We never really recovered from that.
ART CHANTRY So they had to pull the cover and replace it with a generic band shot. TAD was a monstrously talented band and that was the record everybody thought was gonna be the next big one. Then they put it back out there, and Bruce thought, in his marketing genius (laughs), that this record really needed a kick in the ass. He wanted to try and get free publicity, because they had no money. There was a song on the record that was called “Jack Pepsi,” which was about getting drunk drinking Jack Daniel’s and Pepsi-Cola and wrecking your monster truck in a swamp or something like that. Bruce decided that what he was gonna do was put this on a CD single and do the Pepsi logo on the front with the word TAD inserted where Pepsi was, then send it to Pepsi-Cola corporate headquarters with the hopes of actually getting sued, as I understand it.
GRANT ALDEN I remember the guys at Sub Pop had really planned to lose a battle with Pepsi over “Jack Pepsi.” I can remember being at their office and seeing the artwork or the album and having Bruce or Jonathan say, “We’re probably gonna have to reprint this.” My memory is that they had budgeted a certain amount of money: “We’re gonna lose some legal fees on this, but we’ll make it up on the backside with publicity.”
BRUCE PAVITT We didn’t have a lot of money to pay for advertising, so you try to stir up some controversy. Did I think we were gonna get sued? No. I thought that we were under the radar enough, but it’s the kind of thing that I felt people could look at and think, Oh, fuck, these guys are gonna get sued. Geez, maybe I should buy this thing. That was more my intention. There was a disgruntled ex-employee who notified Pepsi.
TAD DOYLE The name [Pepsi] I haven’t spoken in many years. It’s not a sore subject; it’s just financially prudent for me to leave it alone.
KURT DANIELSON Bruce wasn’t afraid to court controversy, but I don’t think he notified P——. Because that record was intended to break the band, and I don’t think Bruce would have