Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [193]
STEVE TURNER “Overblown” is about rock-star bullshit. There’s a lyric about standing onstage with your shirt off, which is a pretty apparent Cornell reference. But it all was in good fun.
CHRIS CORNELL I remember hearing about that song and listening to it, but it didn’t make any difference to me. We toured together after they wrote that song. It was nothing I really paid much attention to.
MARK ARM We recorded it for like $164, and we got paid $20,000, so we kept the rest of it.
BOB WHITTAKER We got a pretty good chunk of change up front for that song, and the attorney said, “Don’t let anyone know how much you recorded this song for.” I think the attorney thought it would upset the producers.
ROBERT ROTH So in the next meeting with Sub Pop, after we find out that we’re no longer on the soundtrack, Jonathan and Bruce are like, “Okay, now you have to give us more than one record, or there’s no way we’re giving you this amount of money.” Mark and Hiro weren’t anxious to be involved in a long contract again, so that fell out.
Singles was a good film. It was kinda more about people like my brother, who works at Microsoft, than it was about musicians. There were a few of those characters in that movie, like Matt Dillon, but it was kind of a sideline to the love story.
JASON FINN Singles was seen as funny by everyone I know. The whole intrusion theory—where it’s this special thing we don’t want anyone to know about—that doesn’t even make any sense. Everybody wants recognition for what they’re doing. They came in, they made a silly movie, and worked in some shameless plugs for their friends the bands. Big deal. I enjoyed the Pearl Jam scenes when I finally saw it. I was like, “Yeah, there’s Eddie Vedder the drummer. Awesome.”
DANIEL HOUSE People here thought Singles was a good movie, kinda cheesy. It definitely was an idealized version of the scene. But at least it was fictional. Hype! was intended to be an accurate account, and in fact, it ended up being an incredibly accurate account.
DOUG PRAY Singles came out when we were building momentum to try to film my movie. Cameron Crowe actually called me and tried to talk me out of making Hype! for 45 minutes: “What can you possibly hope to achieve? The scene has already reached its apex. It’s everywhere. People are tired of it. Please don’t do a movie about this.”
For him to make a movie that was basically set in the Seattle music scene and tell me not to make a movie about the Seattle music scene, it was like a non sequitur. And I respected him, and it was an honor to be able to talk to him—I’d just graduated from film school and here I am talking to Cameron Crowe! But he was a part of the world of the really big bands who had just made it, who were represented by megamanagement. And I was a part of the world that was defined by the small label Popllama, which had nothing to do with them. To me, the smaller bands were as important to the Seattle music scene as Alice in Chains.
MARK ARM Our recording budgets for the Warners records were about $125,000 to $175,000 each, and we recorded Piece of Cake for $30,000 and My Brother the Cow for $20,000. That’s a fair amount of money left over, and we made a good amount of money touring; we never had to take tour support.
For a while, we were swimming in it. That probably helped me be an ethical junkie. I didn’t have to steal anything; in fact, sometimes I would buy drugs for my friends. Of course, there were some times when I didn’t have the money, and my second junkie girlfriend was a stripper, so she would go to work. Otherwise, she was living off me. A friend of mine once described her as having “spent a year on the couch.” Talk about atrophy, man.
That’s the fucking worst of it to me, that I became such a cliché: I was a junkie rock dude with a stripper girlfriend.