Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [153]
It all really came down to me telling Courtney—I told her to her face—that I thought it was not a good idea to be doing drugs while you’re pregnant. And she didn’t appreciate that. I didn’t expect to go to their wedding in Hawaii anyway—it wasn’t a big deal. Krist’s wife at the time, Shelli, and my girlfriend had been talking about Courtney apparently—and I didn’t even know that—so she disinvited them. And that was really hurtful, because Shelli and Kurt had been friends since they were kids. So then Krist didn’t go, and Dave was really the only one that went.
MIKE MCCREADY I remember after the New Year’s Eve 1991 show, somebody running onto the bus and saying Nirvana had just hit number one. I remember thinking, Wow; it’s on now. It changed something. We had something to prove—that our band was as good as I thought it was.
EDDIE VEDDER In San Diego we were playing with Nirvana and the Chili Peppers. I had climbed an I-beam that you could kind of wrap your hand around. So I got to the top, and I thought, Well, how do I get down? I either just give it up and look like an idiot, or I go for it. So I decided to try it, and it was really ridiculously high, like 100 feet, something mortal. I was thinking that my mother was there, and I didn’t want her to see me die. So somehow I finally got back onstage, finished the song, and went to the side and threw up. I knew that was really stupid, beyond ridiculous. But to be honest, we were playing before Nirvana. You had to do something. Our first record was good, but their first record was better.
KELLY CURTIS Our record came out almost the same time as Nirvana’s, and all the hype was around Nirvana. Nirvana happened immediately, and it took us like six months. The record label didn’t know what format we were—if we were rock or alternative, they didn’t know what the fuck it was—so it was just having a hard time.
Nirvana probably opened the door for us at radio, for sure, but once that happened, it was kind of all over. It was within a few months of the release of the record that you could sense that something major was happening.
MARK KATES At least among those of us who were professionally involved, it was pretty safe to say there was a rivalry between Nirvana and Pearl Jam. And from our standpoint, it was based on a record that we didn’t really believe was musically related, even though they were from the same city and the same scene. To be fair, those guys in Pearl Jam were at it before the guys in Nirvana were on a significant level, because they were in Green River and Mother Love Bone. But we were frustrated that this other career was launched off the back of our band.
Alternative rock had a lot of rules. The biggest accomplishment of this era, and Pearl Jam deserves as much credit as Nirvana does, was breaking the rules those of us who were alt-rock lifers had. Pearl Jam broke them musically, and Jeff Ament’s haircut kind of broke the rules, too. All that band did was prove how stupid all those rules were. You can sing any way you want to. You want strings in your record, go ahead.
JEFF AMENT Kurt was talking shit about us, and we talked a little shit back. In retrospect, I think it was that when we got interviewed, the second or third question was about Nirvana. And I’m sure they were getting the same questions about us. After about a hundred of those interviews you’re like, You know what? Fuck those guys.
Michael Azerrad was the guy who wound the whole thing up by printing some stuff that Kurt said and stuff that I said in Rolling Stone. My point was: Fuck, man, we were putting out records on Homestead Records while Kurt