Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [148]
I said, “Because you represent everything that they’re against. You’re a big, successful, corporate million-dollar rock band. That’s the antithesis of Nirvana.” But Axl didn’t think of Guns in that way.
RIKI RACHTMAN (host of MTV’s Headbangers Ball) I was bummed when Nirvana came on Headbangers Ball because I liked Nirvana a lot. I was listening to Bleach all the time, and I knew this band had a buzz. I was all excited, I couldn’t wait to meet them, and then here comes Kurt Cobain, and he’s in the greenroom, facedown, passed out. It was dope. Unless he was suffering what everyone else seems to suffer from: “exhaustion.”
When he comes onto the set, he’s got this big yellow gown on, with a huge collar on it. If he was like, “Hey, check it out!” there’d be a way to have fun with it. The whole joke was that he wore a ball gown because it was the Headbangers Ball. It took me years before I even got that joke. So when he did it and was like, “Uhhh,” and wasn’t answering any of the questions very well—maybe he didn’t want to be on Headbangers Ball. Then stand by your own rules and don’t be on Headbangers Ball. Don’t go on and act like you don’t want to do the show. Just don’t do it.
BUTCH VIG After Nevermind came out, I got solicited with tons of projects, and most of them were not appropriate. Like they’d be sending me, say, a woman blues singer and going, “Can you make her sound like Nirvana? Can you give it that ‘grunge sound’?” Like I invented the sound of Nirvana. Also, some of the hair-metal bands’ managers were contacting me. I got a sense of desperation from them, like, Wow, we need to change our sound a little bit to be hip with the kids.
When we started Garbage, all of our crew guys had come out of that metal scene, working with bands like Skid Row or White Lion. They’d be like, “Butch Vig, fuck that guy, man. He ruined the career of the band I was with.” They’d joke about it with me over a beer. But then they ended up working with us for a long time.
JEFF GILBERT With Nirvana’s success, all of the sudden, heavy-metal chicks who’d been dressing in spandex and fishnets and stiletto boots, now they started showing up to shows and they had washed all the Aqua Net out of their hair and they started to look as ratty as some of the guys. I thought, Oh no, the beginning of the end.
BRET MICHAELS (singer of Los Angeles’s Poison) Most of the bands of our genre changed a little. When I started in my career, I would buy my spandex pants at the Sunoco gas station on Route 83 in fucking York, Pennsylvania, just ’cause I thought that was cool. When grunge hit, it definitely affected the look of bands. I never set out to stay in spandex my whole career. I thought it was great for the day.
RIKI RACHTMAN What happened is, fashion and times change. If there was no Nirvana or no Soundgarden or no grunge era, those hair bands still would have died. We still wouldn’t be listening to Slaughter and Warrant today.
BLAG DAHLIA The glam guys’ lyrics tended to be more obvious and more prosaic and not as allegorical. With something like Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” everything’s right on the surface. I think Nirvana wrote abstract lyrics well; then you get to somebody like Pearl Jam and the allegorical shit is so horrible it looks like a 15-year-old’s notebook. And it’s like, Wow, these lyrics are really terrible, but they’re abstract, therefore people can feel that they’re intelligent.
BRET MICHAELS When I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” I’m goin’, “Well, goddamn, what a great song.” Someone forgot to send me the memo that I’m supposed to be hating this or threatened by it. My career didn’t end with grunge. My career with the media ended with grunge.