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Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [138]

By Root 815 0
“Oh, I see what that’s about!” And I was like, “No, dude, it was just two words that came together!”


DAVE HILLIS Dave I just always loved. What’s weird is I never even knew he drank. I never saw him party once in my life.


DAVE KRUSEN I just wanted to party and get fucked up. When we did the photo shoot for the album, I got some beer, and halfway through the shoot, I started to fall asleep. Afterward, they were showing pictures and going, “You remember that?” “Hmmm, no. And I didn’t think I had sunglasses on.” They were like, “You didn’t. Your eyes were shut, so we had to put sunglasses on you.” I was sitting down, propped up against the wall.

The Singles wrap party was the last gig I played with them. At the time, I had a lot going on in my personal life. I wasn’t really dealing with anything, because I just drank all the time. I remember Mike going, “I’m not gonna drink until after the show.” And I said, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” Well, I didn’t hold out, and that ended up being the night that things got really bad.

By the time I got to the big party at the hotel—it was at Cameron Crowe’s room or whatever—I was just really bad off. I got into an argument with my kind-of girlfriend at the time. In a nutshell, I’d gotten together with this girl, she got pregnant, so I tried to do the right thing and stick around, but I was miserable. My son was born a day after we went in to record Ten, which only made things more intense in my life. It’s been written about that night that I beat up my girlfriend and put her in the hospital, but that is not true.

Some guy jumped in who didn’t know who I was, and I got in a fight with him. It turned into a huge melee, and the cops end up coming. Everybody talked them out of arresting me. I left and passed out for a couple of days. They couldn’t find me, and when I woke up and finally called them, they were like, “We gotta go to England to mix the album, and you can’t go because you need to get straightened out.”

I remember getting off the phone knowing I had to go to rehab, and I did. But it didn’t take, and it took me another two years to finally get to the point where I wanted to stop, and in ’94 I got sober.


MATT CHAMBERLAIN (Pearl Jam drummer) I was originally in a band with Edie Brickell, the New Bohemians. I was living in Dallas, and I had been in that band for three or four years. I’d met G.E. Smith, and he said, “Hey, if the New Bos ever break up, give me a call,” because he was doing the house band for Saturday Night Live. We broke up at the end of that tour, and I called G.E. up and said, “Man, I’m so into moving to New York City and doing this gig.”

Probably two weeks after I had gotten all that sorted out, I get a call from Tony Berg, who was the producer on the second New Bohemians record. He said, “Hey, my pal Michael Goldstone, who’s this A&R guy at Epic, has this new band called Pearl Jam. They are doing a tour, and they need a drummer. It’s a really short commitment.” It was for that last part of the summer before I started the SNL gig, and I thought, Perfect.

Everywhere we played, we were the opening band, but people were just flipping out. Eddie wore army shorts, white Doc Martens, and a Butthole Surfers Locust Abortion Technician T-shirt every fucking day for the whole tour. He washed his clothes in the hotel room sink. He had a hole in the ass of his shorts, which he gaffer-taped. After every gig, he was shell-shocked because he was giving it his all. The tour culminated with a gig at RKCNDY in Seattle, which is where they filmed the video for “Alive.”

All the industry people that I ran into were saying, “This is going to be huge.” I remember the guys in the band saying, “We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’d be really happy if this sold 100,000 copies, and we could just continue doing this.”

They were looking for someone to join and be on the road forever. They had offered the position to me, and it was an issue at one point: “Are you going to join the band or are you not going to join the band?” It felt like a prearranged marriage, like somebody saying,

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