Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [150]
ERIC JOHNSON At that point I was working for Pearl Jam. I drove out there with Jeff Ament to see them in Las Vegas, I think. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t the Soundgarden I knew. They looked bored and unhappy. They were playing to a mostly empty house. I remember Kim did a beard solo that lasted about two minutes. You shoulda seen it: He played with his beard, and then he hung up his guitar and left it making feedback. Then he kind of moseyed off stage. That was kind of sad.
SLASH (guitarist for Los Angeles’s Guns N’ Roses) February 1, 1992, was our last show with Soundgarden, at Compton Terrace, Arizona, and we decided to commemorate it with a little prank. We got ourselves a few inflatable sex dolls, and Matt and Duff and I took our clothes off and went onstage with them. Come to think of it, I was the only one of us completely naked. In any case, Soundgarden was touring the Badmotorfinger album, and they came from a place where there was no fun to be had while rocking, so they were mortified. They looked around and there we were screwing blow-up dolls all around them; I was drunk and I fell. I got separated from my doll, and at that point I was totally naked—it was a scene.
SUSAN SILVER It was Soundgarden’s nature to never be enthusiastic about anything, to the point where the Guns N’ Roses crew referred to them as Frowngarden.
BEN SHEPHERD Why’d we get called Frowngarden? Because we weren’t party monsters. We weren’t motherfucking rock stars. We were not like that. We were there to play music. We weren’t there for the models and the cocaine. We were there to blow your doors off.
JACK ENDINO After Daniel bowed out of Skin Yard, we got our friend Pat Pederson to play bass. We all had a pretty good year in ’91, because we were all getting along at that point. Our fourth album, 1000 Smiling Knuckles, which was Barrett Martin’s debut as our drummer, came out around that time. It sold 14,000 copies or something, which was really good for an indie record then.
During our September tour in the U.S. was when we started hearing Nevermind. I was amazed. We thought, This is really slick sounding, but at the same time, the vocals are really raw, which is good. It was difficult to recognize that this was the same band that I had worked with on the Bleach record two years before, until you heard the singing. And also, the very pop direction they had gone, with “In Bloom” and some of the other tunes. The Melvins’ influence on Nirvana was definitely on the wane. They had found their own voice.
We went to Europe in October ’91. We ended up being added to a show in Vienna opening for Nirvana, of all people. Prior to that gig, Nirvana had always opened for us. We knew what was going on. We would call our friends back home in Seattle, and they’d say, “Yeah, it’s climbing the album charts. It just sold another hundred thousand copies.” We were getting these sales numbers from people back home, because they were following them like it was a sports team.
GREG DULLI (singer/guitarist for Cincinnati’s the Afghan Whigs) When it came time for us to make the Afghan Whigs’ second record, Congregation, Sub Pop gave us the then-unheard-of bloated advance of $15,000. We started making the record in Seattle and then moved down to L.A. to continue working on it.
Everybody else in the band finished their parts and flew back home, but I stayed to sing and overdub and mix, and then Sub Pop ran out of money. And that was about the time that they had those T-shirts that said WHAT PART OF “WE HAVE NO MONEY” DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? Which I’m sure was pretty funny, but I got stranded in L.A. and had to get a job. (Laughs.)
The record got delayed; the studio wasn’t gonna let me keep working when no one was paying the bills. Sub Pop eventually paid them, but I didn’t know if Congregation was gonna come out because I didn’t know if the record company had the money to put out records anymore. They went fucking broke, dude.
Then Nevermind