Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [192]
BARRETT MARTIN “Nearly Lost You” ended up being the hit single. I think it probably sold more copies of the Singles soundtrack than it sold of our album, Sweet Oblivion. Because Singles came out first and that soundtrack sold at least a million—I think it was one of those soundtracks that did better than the movie did. Sweet Oblivion came out later that year and pretty quickly sold about 300,000 copies.
KIM WHITE When I became the Trees’ manager, Susan Silver was pissed, and that was right when the Singles soundtrack was being made. Susan was kind of in charge of the soundtrack, and the Screaming Trees were not on the soundtrack. She’ll deny that she ever tried to prevent them from being on it. But we suspect it very strongly.
SUSAN SILVER Absolute bullshit. I don’t operate that way. Never did, never will. I didn’t have an issue with the Trees. Parting ways was sad for me, but it didn’t mean that I was out to change the trajectory of their career. Cameron Crowe and his music supervisors had their own vision that didn’t have anything to do with my choices. I made no comments about any of that.
KIM WHITE The Trees had gone into the studio with Don Fleming, and one of the first songs that they recorded was “Nearly Lost You.” We actually had to waive our sync fee—synchronization fee, what you get paid to be put on the soundtrack—for them to reedit the movie and put that song on the soundtrack. It involved lawyers. “Nearly Lost You” is playing quietly in the background as Kyra Sedgwick’s character reveals the results of her pregnancy test.
GARY LEE CONNER We got an offer to do a Budweiser ad. They wanted us to change “Nearly Lost You” to “Nearly Lost a Bud” or something like that. We turned it down, but it was hard, because we were like, “Well, we could use the money.” I think it was for $10,000, which actually isn’t very much to rewrite our damn song. Nowadays, nobody will even bat an eyelash at doing an ad. But back then, it had a stigma.
ROBERT ROTH Sub Pop was gonna give Truly an unprecedented amount of money to do a one-off record because we were on the Singles soundtrack. I heard that Cameron Crowe personally picked the song, “Heart and Lungs.” Then a few days before the masters were sent off to press for the Singles soundtrack album, a lot of political shenanigans went on with Epic Records, and even though “Nearly Lost You” wasn’t actually in the movie, that got put on the soundtrack, and we were bumped. Though our song is still in the actual movie. Basically, we were expendable—we were the only indie band on the album—and even though we were one of the director’s favorite songs on the album, it was off.
Oh, it was devastating. We were in the studio at the time that we got the news. That was a big deal. That would’ve affected our career tremendously. From what I heard, Mark Arm put the down payment on his house because of being on that album.
MARK ARM We had heard about this thing happening and realized there was no kind of Sub Pop representation at the time. Cameron Crowe was married to Nancy Wilson, who’d worked with Kelly Curtis, so that was probably Cameron Crowe’s connection to what was happening locally. Bruce and Steve and I marched over to Cameron Crowe’s office one time, and I was psyched to see there was a John Coltrane poster above his desk. You get these ideas that people are mono-dimensional or whatever. I was thinking, Maybe this guy doesn’t really know what’s happening. But it seemed like he was so psyched that we were there.
There wasn’t like an antagonistic fight, like the bands that were managed by Susan Silver and Kelly Curtis versus the Sub Pop bands. The line is blurry anyway, because Soundgarden was on Sub Pop, and members of Pearl Jam were in Green River. There is no actual line. There’s no distinct border. Though it was perceived at the time.
So Cameron Crowe put Mudhoney on the Singles soundtrack, and in typical wiseass fashion, we wrote “Overblown,” taking the piss out of the glorification and aggrandizement of the scene.
EDDIE VEDDER Mudhoney has