Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [119]
JONATHAN PONEMAN Kurt got frustrated, came home, and soon after they started shopping for a new label. He said many times with regard to Bleach, “This record should be selling millions of copies.” And I’m explaining to him what, in retrospect, seems foolish and condescending on my part, that the idea of a band like Nirvana selling between 30,000 and 50,000 records then was amazing.
BUZZ OSBORNE When Nirvana started doing better, we played a show with them in Portland, and that was when the worm had turned. That was before Dave Grohl was ever in the band. We just assumed that we were going to play last, and they said that they thought that they should headline, because things were really taking off for them, and then they were really weird about splitting up the money. That was when I knew that things were not the same with these guys. They had become exactly what I had always tried to avoid.
This was way before they got popular—that’s what people don’t get. They lined up for this shit. They put themselves in line to be aligned with horrible people. I blamed them for the whole thing. They got in line to be involved with horrible management, horrible booking agents, horrible everything. They didn’t need to do it, but they did it.
CHAD CHANNING I was looking forward to being able to write some stuff for the band, and when Kurt said that he’d appreciate some input and help, that was one thing I was looking forward to. And after a while I realized that that really wasn’t going to happen.… I started feeling more like a drum machine than anything else. Somewhere along the line I started losing my inspiration, and of course, when you do that, it’s gonna show.
Krist and Kurt made the long drive up and came up to my place. That was a weird drive for them. I remember talking about it with Krist years down the road. He was like, “Yeah, that was a really horrible drive. Me and Kurt were not looking forward to that at all.” ’Cause the thing was, we were always good friends. So to say it was for “musical differences” would be exact, because it really was.
JEFF GILBERT Jason Everman was a nice guy, but not the right guy for Soundgarden. Painfully obvious. I went to New York with them for my second Soundgarden cover story for The Rocket, and Jason never hung with the band. Onstage, he played well, thrashed his hair around, did what he was supposed to. But he was always very moody. It was like putting on wet shoes: They fit, but they’re just not comfortable.
KIM THAYIL What we ended up learning on the road with Jason was that losing Hiro caused a huge wound to the band. This was a very fragile time for us, and Jason was new, he was spending less time trying to establish and maintain these relationships with us, especially with Chris and Matt. He was just trying to get his footing. And Jason’s presence wasn’t helping to remedy these fragile and wounded relationships between us all.
CHRIS CORNELL When we were auditioning [Jason], he was really shy, withdrawn, and really intimidated by the whole thing. I figured that, given a few months, he was gonna roar. It never worked out. Things never gelled, and rather than let them fester, we fired him.
JASON EVERMAN I guess I was fired because I wasn’t getting along with Chris. No fights; it was just tension. We’re on tour in Europe, and Matt got sick in Italy. He went to a hospital, but I think it turned out to be a G.I. problem, food poisoning. It wasn’t anything serious. We went back to Washington, home for a couple of days, had a band meeting at Matt’s house. The meeting was like two minutes long. Chris did the talking. It went something along the lines of, “We’ve been talking. We don’t think you’re working out, so we want to try some other people out.”
KIM THAYIL Something else that was influential in this decision was Andy Wood’s death. I think during that period of time, Chris wasn’t fucking