Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [169]
BRUCE PAVITT Our philosophy was never to turn down an interview no matter what, so we were in everything from Maximumrocknroll to Fortune. Part of the game is that to become truly popular you have to infiltrate every nook and cranny of the popular system.
CONRAD UNO (Popllama Records founder; Egg Studios owner; producer/engineer) The media was everywhere, and it was sort of aggravating and weird. The light was bright and it was kinda gettin’ in your eyes. Kinda wanted to go back into the basement, where the studio is, and have fun. But honestly, it was exciting, too.
ART CHANTRY During the height of the mania, there was one crazy-ass day where we had five media crews come in to the Rocket offices to interview everything that walked. It was like The Christian Science Monitor, some Italian fashion magazine, somebody that spoke Japanese, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, all taking pictures. Now we look back on it as this real event that happened, but at the time we thought it was the funniest goddamn joke in the world.
JENNIE BODDY When Tabitha Soren from MTV News came to do this special report from Seattle, it was ridiculous. All the girls around her were kissing her ass and calling her Tabby. I took her for some Mudhoney interviews, and Mark Arm was trying to claim the origin of grunge was the sour curd in the bottom of the milk carton.
And then I took her to a Seaweed show—even though they’re not grunge, it didn’t matter. She liked the young boys at the Seaweed show. She’s like, “Where can we get more of that?” And I was saying, “Well, that doesn’t really capture it.” She was a little disgusted that the rock stars weren’t so cute. She wanted them to all be Chris Cornell or something. I took her to meet TAD, and she was just very rude. TAD was a huge part of what grunge was, but she didn’t want any of it. She just wanted the cute boys.
KURT DANIELSON When Tabitha Soren came to Seattle, they filmed us playing the song “Pansy,” which is about a serial killer that gives young girls candy, abducts them, and then murders them. I don’t think she found any redeeming qualities in our music. She interviewed us, they filmed us playing the song, and then they left. I think she spent most of the time out in the van, shocked and disgusted.
JENNIE BODDY After that, I took Tabitha to go see Earth, Dylan Carlson’s band. That was my last stop, because I couldn’t stand her anymore, and I knew the music was just so slowww. It looked like she was going to crawl out of her skin. I was so happy.
STEVE TURNER Ron Reagan Jr. interviewed us for some stupid TV show. Nice guy. We went bowling with him, gettin’ drunk, and I’m flipping him shit: “Do you realize how many hardcore bands write songs about your dad?” I started rattling them off. He wanted to shut down that conversation in a hurry.
But it was the bait-and-switch thing that pissed me off with some of that mainstream press. Ron Reagan Jr. wanted to talk to us about the music scene, but when it finally came on TV it was like, “Oh, the music scene in Seattle” and then immediately: “There is, however … A DARK SIDE.” And they paid some fuckin’ junkie to shoot up on camera. That had nothing to do with the music scene—just some Seattle junkie, some young kid. As if musicians doing drugs was a new story and somehow unique to the Seattle explosion that was happening.
JEFF GILBERT We always used to laugh, because the national media made such a big deal out of heroin in Seattle. We were looking around, going, “Really?” There’s like three or four high-profile people that did it, we lost a couple from it. There were a lot of dabblers—it seemed chic at the moment—but it was alcohol that was doing the most damage. God, the alcohol. It’s almost inhuman how