Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [154]
A couple of times I went up and introduced myself to Kurt and tried to have a conversation with him, but he didn’t want to have any part of it. I had conversations with Krist about it, and Krist, who I always got along with, just rolled his eyes and was like, “Whatever. It’s just a bunch of crap.”
DAVE ABBRUZZESE When Nirvana were going on stage at Cow Palace, I said “Have a good night” to Kurt and he growled at me. I was just not in the mood, so I reacted by saying, “Hey, fuck you,” and I grabbed him, got into his face, and our tour manager, Eric, said, “Hey, hey, hey.” I wasn’t about to take that from the little guy.
STEVE ISAACS (MTV VJ) When I was hired at MTV, in August of ’91, I was “musician guy.” I had long hair, and I was a singer-songwriter. And then the next month, Nevermind hit. It was the most perfect time to have an experience like this. I became the silly MTV grunge poster boy. I was wearing flannel a lot. I loved Nirvana, I loved Pearl Jam, I loved Alice in Chains, I loved Soundgarden, I loved Screaming Trees. When I talked about Whitney Houston on-air you could see me die in my eyes a little bit.
Kurt went off in the press about Pearl Jam, about how they were false and they were jumping on this bandwagon that Nirvana wasn’t trying to start. Pick on the shitty bands, don’t pick on each other! I guess when Pearl Jam came out, they felt a little underdoggy. So I wrote a letter to Rolling Stone after their first Nirvana cover story, the one where Kurt was wearing the CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK T-shirt. The letter in essence said it was pretentious to call anything false. My 22-year-old self was like, “Come on, don’t fight. Just back off those guys.”
Apparently Kurt got pissed off by my letter, which I don’t blame him for. When I went to Madrid to film some stuff for MTV, I was supposed to interview Nirvana. And then we get a fax from them, and it said, “Anybody but Steve can interview us.”
STEVE TURNER We knew Jeff, and for Kurt to say anything about Pearl Jam not having roots in punk rock—are you fuckin’ stupid? (Laughs.) Hello? Jeff was there from day one of the Seattle thing.
STONE GOSSARD It was painful at times. All those words that were used to describe Pearl Jam—as posers, as somebody who’s getting a hand up from the label, as someone who is more manipulative than talented, not the real thing compared to Nirvana—all it did was raise the bar for Pearl Jam. I think we took them as challenges, and we had to discover whether we were being real to the situation, or am I a jerk?
TOM NIEMEYER Gruntruck opened that show at the Moore where Pearl Jam filmed the “Even Flow” video. I really wanted to thank Jeff, because I thought he had something to do with Gruntruck opening. After our set, I saw him in the hall and it was a weird exchange—there was almost no exchange. Maybe he was just focused, I don’t know. But I saw him a couple times after that, too, and it was like we didn’t even know each other. I was bummed because we slept on the guy’s floor in Montana and we went skateboardin’ and shit together. I thought we were buds!
JOSH TAFT The night I was shooting the “Even Flow” video, Eddie told me to make sure we could see the crowd in the video. The only way to do that is to turn up the venue lights. When he saw how bright they were, he yelled at me to turn them down. Then the dimmer board malfunctioned and we couldn’t turn them off. So I physically smashed the board, and the hall went black. Long story short, I ended up turning in the cut of the video to MTV with that bit—him screaming at me—in there. And I wasn’t looking to call him out. It was just like, That wasn’t my fucking fault. I needed to turn all the lights up.
And then I called him out about it on a personal level, and I said, “Listen, that wasn’t cool.” We were friends at that point, and I said, “I’m not turning into your employee, and if that’s the case, I’m not cool with