Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [118]
The story of “Jack P——” is kind of funny because it has a couple different layers to it. When we were in the studio with Steve Albini doing Salt Lick, Tad was asking Steve for songwriting advice. Steve said, “Well, just write about some real things that have happened to you.” And then Tad told him this story about Tad and a buddy borrowing the buddy’s father’s brand-new pickup, driving it out onto Lake Lowell, this frozen lake outside Boise, Idaho, doing 360s and 180s all over, and then hitting a weak spot on the ice. The truck fell through, sinking to the bottom, and those guys barely got out alive. Steve said, “Shit, man, write about that one! I’m surprised you haven’t already.” And so, subsequently, Tad did write about it.
How the song got its title and how that fits in is a different story. When we were on tour with Nirvana in San Francisco, I had a bottle of P—— and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. It was just Krist, Kurt, and myself. Kurt back in those days hardly ever drank, but on this particular night he decided he wanted to get drunk. Krist always liked to drink, so he was all for it. So we started mixing up drinks and I came up with this idea of this character Jack P——. I put a stupid hat on and I started talking with an accent: “I’m Jack P——. I do this, I do that, blah blah blah.”
Tad walks into the room, thinks that’s hilarious, and later on we say, “Let’s incorporate that into this song that we’re writing, and we can say that Jack P—— is this deity that we pray to save us when we’re about to drown.” The refrain is, “Help me Jack P——!/Help me Jack P——!”
A lot of times, either I would write the body of a song or Tad would, but we’d need something else to make it really work, and then the other guy would come to the rescue. I still miss working with Tad.
STEVE WIEDERHOLD I quit right after we recorded 8-Way Santa. I wasn’t getting enough say. On one particular song, “Stumblin’ Man,” we had a really big problem, because I had a whole different kind of drum thing for one part going, and that wasn’t gonna fly. Tad was like, “You have to play it this way, or else.” So we had a big problem with that, and I decided then that I’m quitting.
BUTCH VIG Jonathan called me up and said, “Butch, I really like what you did with TAD. I got this band Nirvana, they’re amazing. They could be as big as the Beatles.” I sort of laughed when he said that, because I never heard anybody say something that sort of pretentious. He said, “They’re gonna be doing a tour.” He wanted to bring them out here to do an album; it wasn’t going to be demos at the time.
Nirvana show up maybe two or three weeks later at Smart. They definitely seemed a little bit like misfits. Krist was super-nice. Kurt walked in and sat down in the back of the control room and didn’t say anything. Kurt would go sit in the lounge and the second time he did that, Krist said to me, “Kurt gets like that. He’s fine. He’ll come out of it.” Chad was a nice guy, but while we were setting up, Kurt was critical of where Chad was putting the drums or something—there was a little bit of friction going on.
They had booked like five or six days, and they played a show in Madison on like the fourth day. There’s this club called Bunky’s, and downstairs there was this Italian restaurant, where they played in the back corner, which held maybe 75 people. It’s the first time I got a sense that there was a buzz about the band, because it was jammed in there and people were freaking out when they started playing.
Kurt was singing so fuckin’ loud, probably ’cause there were no monitors, he kind of lost his voice about 10 songs into the set. It fell apart at the end, and he threw his guitar and walked off the stage. He came in to sing the next day, and he couldn’t. At that point, we’d recorded like six or seven songs. I think we recorded one more basic track, and then they had to take off.
Jonathan called me and said, “Maybe you could come out