Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [183]
I went with Courtney and saw Kurt at Exodus, and Kurt and I sat in the backyard and had a conversation about it. It was intense because my bosses kind of sent me over there. I was like, “Look, I’m the VP of Post-it Notes, remember? If I lose my job, you can take me on the road and I’ll sell T-shirts. I want you guys to do what you want to do. Don’t worry about my job.”
In the end, the executives made an agreement that the band could play “Lithium” instead of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” At the last rehearsal, when we were walking from the dressing room out to the stage, Kurt grabs my hand and walked with me all the way up the stage, to make a point to the executives, like, Fuck you. I’m gonna do what I want, but you can’t mess with her.
RICK KRIM Pearl Jam really wanted not to perform “Jeremy” on the VMAs; they wanted to perform “Sonic Reducer” by the Dead Boys. Interestingly, there was a simultaneous conversation going on with the Nirvana camp about them wanting to perform “Rape Me.”
How’d we convince Pearl Jam otherwise? It was probably a bunch of us explaining, “This is our Super Bowl. ‘Jeremy’ has got all these nominations, there’s all these expectations, it’s a very mainstream TV show, and to come out and do a song that no one in our audience is going to know is not what we intended when we booked the band.” They got it. I don’t recall it being too contentious.
AMY FINNERTY During the show, I was standing right next to Judy McGrath, the president of the network and my mentor and idol. She really was behind me, and she was behind Nirvana. The agreement was that if they played the wrong song, then they were gonna go to a commercial break. We were standing next to the guy who’d potentially push the button, and they started playing “Rape Me.”
We’re all lookin’ at each other like, Are we gonna press this button or not? And Judy said, “No, let them play,” and then after 30 seconds they went into “Lithium,” and we just got big huge smiles on our faces and cracked up, and everything was great from then on.
KRIST NOVOSELIC Nirvana gets introduced, and we start playing our prank, then switch into “Lithium.” I’m plugged into some awful bass rig that’s distorting terribly. I can barely hear what I’m playing, and the tone deteriorates into an inaudible mess. Fuck it—time for the bass-toss shtick. Up it goes!!!!! I always try to get good air—I bet I hit over 25 feet, easy! But … I was not on my game—the only time I’ve ever dropped it was then in front of 300 million people. Ouch! I was fine [when it hit my forehead], but I faked like I was knocked out …
RICK KRIM “Jeremy” went on to become Video of the Year and blew the band up, and made them not want to make videos anymore. I have a Pearl Jam “Choices” poster in my office with a little girl, that was actually Kelly Curtis’s daughter when she was two years old, kneeling with a gun and a bunch of crayons in front of her. Choices. The band signed the poster back then, and Eddie wrote right underneath the gun, “This is the gun we couldn’t show in the video, but we ended up showing too much anyway.” Meaning exposure-wise, I think.
MIKE MCCREADY It was at that time that Eddie took it over. Benevolent dictatorship: That’s kind of the theory. Jeff and Stone running things from one angle, but with Eddie, it was all about pulling back.
ROSS HALFIN (photographer) When I first shot Pearl Jam, they were easy. They were quite fun to hang out with and shoot, and Eddie Vedder I always got along great with because I shot the Who a lot and I could tell him about it. In the early ’90s, a magazine called RIP did a special issue and called it Grunge and stuck