Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [209]
CATHY FAULKNER (KISW assistant program director/music director) Eddie and Jeff appeared on Rockline, a national radio show, to coincide with the release of Vs. It was being recorded in Seattle, and I was there as an assistant to help make it comfortable for them. After Rockline, they came to KISW, and we gave them the airwaves to play whatever songs they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted. I remember how troubled Eddie was about being on the cover of Time magazine. He had the issue with him, and a bottle of wine, and he drank the bottle of wine and talked about how stupid it was that for all the things going on in the world they put a musician on the cover of Time.
EDDIE VEDDER Maybe I wasn’t ready for attention to be placed on me, you know? Also I think it was the practical things that I wasn’t ready for, or the legal things that I wasn’t ready for. I never knew that someone could put you on the cover of a magazine without asking you, that they could sell magazines and make money and you didn’t have a copyright on your face or something.
COURTNEY LOVE Eddie did something insanely manipulative. Well, I don’t know if he did it on purpose or not, but I suspect he did. It was gonna be Kurt on the cover of Time, only Kurt wasn’t going to talk to them. So Eddie said he would talk to them, and then he put it off, put it off, put it off, and at the last minute, when it was going to print, he didn’t show up. Eddie pulled the same thing as Kurt, except he was smarter about it. I was so pissed. Kurt was so pissed. It should have been Kurt’s Time cover.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY (Time magazine staff writer) I just knew that the next album coming out by Pearl Jam was gonna sell trillions of copies, but at first it was like, “We should probably put Nirvana on the cover,” because Kurt Cobain is more of an artiste, the stuff was more thoughtful. So I had many conversations with Walter Isaacson, Time’s managing editor at the time, about who would be better, Pearl Jam or Nirvana? The thing is, Nirvana wouldn’t talk to me. They kept putting it off, putting it off, and I realized that we were gonna miss the boat. So I said, “Screw it, we’ll do Pearl Jam.” It wasn’t a second-choice kind of thing, because all the time we’re thinking, Should we put them both on the cover? Should we put Vedder? Can we get them to pose together? That wasn’t gonna happen.
I kept hearing things about how Eddie felt Time magazine would be overexposure. Maybe it was too mainstream for him. Wasn’t the album a Sony release? They promised Eddie would give me a call to talk about things. So I was up all night waiting by the phone, waiting for this guy to call, waiting for Godot. And he never did call. So we did the classic “write-around.”
JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER That cover of Time had Eddie Vedder’s face screaming into the microphone, and down below it says ALL THE RAGE. Well, okay, that’s kind of a pun—yes, it’s a fad, so it’s “all the rage,” but also, he’s full of rage. It’s like, No, he’s not. Well, maybe he is, but that’s the guy from San Diego. You can listen to the music all by itself and get the impression that it was angst-ridden, but part of the humor was that we were a bunch of dorks and we would make noises like that. The humor was easy to miss.
NILS BERNSTEIN Hype! was cool because you get a sense of everyone’s humor, which you don’t necessarily get in the music or the media portrayals of it. Like Van Conner is the funniest fucking guy. It still surprises me that people have a sense of grunge being really dark or the result of living in the rain, because to me it seemed to be the most lively, funny, upbeat group of people.
RIKI RACHTMAN When Pearl Jam were on Headbangers Ball, they really weren’t into the whole thing. Complete opposite was Alice in Chains. They always wanted it to be a theme. They went to a mansion in Beverly Hills, where they all had robes on, smoking cigars, with facial masks—I think Jerry Cantrell had cucumbers on his eyelids. Then we went to