Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [167]
I didn’t want two Seattle bands on the bill. But Don was a hundred million percent right, and I realized it quickly. I remember going to the first show, and Don’s standing next to me as Pearl Jam’s playing. Eddie’s climbing up on the scaffolding, people are going fucking bananas. Don’s like, “In your face, bitch!”
KELLY CURTIS Around Lollapalooza, it was just starting to blow up for us and there were a lot of arguments about placement on the bill or how big our backdrop was. And the band decided collectively that we should go on as early as possible. Because at the top it was so heavy with Soundgarden and Ice Cube and the Chili Peppers, we just thought, Let’s not even worry about our position, let’s just make it early. And it paid off really well for us.
MARC GEIGER Lollapalooza was the tour that catapulted Pearl Jam, because it showcased them in a way that they could just kill everybody else. They were sandwiched between Lush and the Jesus and Mary Chain, so it wasn’t exactly a fair fight, from a rock standpoint.
BEN SHEPHERD After their MTV hit, the fans were just—whoosh—storming the stadium once the gates opened to see Pearl Jam.
MARK PELLINGTON (video director) The “Jeremy” video just became this monster. As a viewer, you were saying, “Fuck, it’s on all the time.”
I had maybe an hour-long phone call with Eddie about what the real story was behind it, about him reading this article about a kid in Texas who shot himself in front of his class. The vision tapped into my own childhood pain and my parents arguing, and an eight-page treatment came pouring out of me.
Eddie wanted this to be a story. “Okay, but let’s have Eddie sing.” Embedded still in my skull is the memory of walking behind the camera with a little handheld monitor. Eddie was sitting, we were moving around him, so I’m keeping an eye on him and an eye on the monitor. And I still can feel the chill when we come around and Eddie’s head was down, but his eyes were up. Just watching his catharsis, his performance, gave me shivers.
In the original version, the kid comes in, tosses the apple, puts the gun in his mouth, shoots, it flashes to three, taking it back to the beginning—the time, the weather, and the place—and the whole last shot is just his blood on the kids’ frozen faces. But MTV wouldn’t show the gun in the mouth.
RICK KRIM Pearl Jam didn’t want to edit the video. I don’t remember what the final straw was that made them relent, maybe it was label pressure, but I recall many a conversation back and forth with management and the label. Having the shot where the kid sticks the gun in his mouth was just too graphic. You saw the aftermath anyway, so that it wasn’t necessary to have that little extra shock value.
MARK PELLINGTON People misinterpreted the edited video and thought, because of the blood on his classmates, that he killed the kids in the classroom. He didn’t point the gun at them. You’d have to be kind of stupid to misinterpret this, especially if you read the lyrics.
SAMUEL BAYER I think Mark Pellington is a really talented guy; Pearl Jam’s an amazing band. I just thought my Nirvana video was more interesting. I never liked seeing lyrics brought to life literally. I don’t wanna see children frozen, covered in blood. I don’t wanna picture who Jeremy is. I was too much of an ambitious, jealous, competitive guy to see any merit in that video.
AMY FINNERTY When grunge was in full swing, I went to one of my bosses in the programming department, Rick Krim, and said, “Hey, Rick, I don’t know if you know about this Temple of the Dog record—it’s about a year old or so—but two of the guys in this band are Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder. I think we should revisit this.” And he fell in love with it and called the record company and basically said, “Let’s make this happen.” They rereleased the record and resubmitted the video, which we put