Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [130]
After our guitarist, Hillel Slovak, died of a heroin overdose in June of ’88, I was really struggling with my mental health. I was having a nervous breakdown, and that went on for a long time. Eventually that was diagnosed as bipolar disorder and I was hospitalized. It became a lifelong commitment to treat it and live with it.
When I met Eddie, I was on tour with Joe Strummer. It was a very significant tour for me, because prior to meeting Joe Strummer, I was not going to do music anymore. I’d been traumatized, and I just couldn’t see that life again. But Joe offered me a gig and got me out again, because I love Joe, and I love the Clash. During that tour, I met my wife-to-be, and the next night, I met Eddie.
I remember the club, the Bacchanal in San Diego. Eddie was backstage—he may have been there to help out. He knew the people at the club, and he wanted to meet Joe and he wanted to meet me, because he knew that I had been in the Chili Peppers. As I recall, all the power went out in the building, and we were just sitting there in the dark. Eddie had the lighter, so he kept the room lit.
After that, we kept in touch and started to hang out and play basketball together. Like every weekend he would drive up from San Diego to where I was living in L.A. He and my wife were probably the two main people in my life at the time, and then, of course, my band Eleven.
MARCO COLLINS (KNDD DJ) My first major radio job was at a station called 91X in San Diego. I was doing a local music show, and I was relegated to Sunday nights after 10. Eddie Vedder was in a band called Bad Radio that I used to play. We never met in San Diego, we just knew each other on the phone, because he would call my show all the time and request that I play his band. He was the guy doing all the work in the band, in terms of promoting it.
He wrote that song “Better Man” in ’88. It took a different shape when Pearl Jam recorded it. Bad Radio were a little bit more funky; they had that Chili Peppers thing going on a little.
JACK IRONS In August of 1990, Stone and Jeff were rebuilding from Mother Love Bone and they were looking for a drummer and a singer. They were familiar with my work from the Chili Peppers, and they wanted me to check out what they were doing. I met them at a hotel where they were staying in L.A., and they said, “We’d like you to come play with us.”
At the time, my wife was pregnant, I didn’t have any money, and the requirement was that I would have to move to Seattle. I had committed to touring with Redd Kross as their drummer for three months and I needed to work. With my son coming at the time, I told them that I wasn’t ready to move to Seattle and that I was going on this tour. They were like, “Well, if you know any singers …”
EDDIE VEDDER (Pearl Jam/Temple of the Dog singer; Hovercraft drummer) Jack sent me three of their songs. I had them in my head from the night before at work, and I went surfing and had this amazing day. The whole time I was out there surfing, I had this stuff going through my head—the music—and the words going at the same time. I put them down on tape and sent it off.
BENJAMIN REW I was at a bookstore/coffee shop down in Pioneer Square right after Andy died. And Kelly Curtis was having a meeting with Jeff and Stone about what they were gonna do. I overheard them talking about all their options for getting another singer. I wanted to try out for them, and then I talked to a mutual friend, and she said I looked too much like Andy, they wanted to go with a different look.
DAN BLOSSOM I was in a band called Hippie Big Buckle, and our singer disappeared. This was right after Andy died. We put ads up, and there’d be all these Andrew Wood wannabes coming to the audition. There was one person in particular, you’d try to have a conversation with him and he’d be doing Andy’s stage shtick, acting like an arena rocker from another world where