Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [211]
ERIC JOHNSON I got to go bail Eddie out of jail at 5 in the morning. By the time I got there, he’d already made friends with everybody. He was laughing and talking to the other guys in the holding cell. I remember the smell of alcohol when I got there. It almost fuckin’ burned my eyes. It was Eddie. He had been having a serious party.
EDDIE VEDDER But I never threw a punch. Thank goodness. Because—who knows?—I could really have hurt him.… So there’s this guy, a talented and well-respected friend of mine who’s lying on the ground unconscious because of this little dick who’s saying to me, “You’re not my Messiah, you’re not my Messiah …”
And I’m going, “That’s what I was trying to tell you, man. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I’m not your fuckin’ Messiah.”
BEN SHEPHERD I had just put my bags down in our hotel room in London and turned on MTV. I saw the video for “Heart-Shaped Box.” That was the first time I’d heard the song, too. I freaked out and was like, “I need to get ahold of Kurt right now.”
Yeah, I can feel Kurt. A million miles away, and in one song. One note, one little drain of his voice, that’s when I could feel it. It was a bad feeling. Like, It’s either him or me. Kurt, don’t. That’s what I felt like. So I tried to get ahold of Kurt for our entire European tour. But no one helped me get ahold of him from our camp. No one paid attention.
ANTON BROOKES I saw Kurt OD a couple of times. The worst one was in New York, when they played Roseland, in ’93. And Cali DeWitt, who used to look after Frances Bean, ran into the toilet and Courtney was screaming, and we went rushing into the room and Kurt was just laying in a heap on the floor, next to the toilet, with a syringe in his arm, blue, fuckin’ blue. Cali just smacked him in the solar plexus. He didn’t even think about it, he just did it. He just ran in and was in motion, and by the time he got to Kurt his fist was in his chest, and Kurt just came to. And then you’re trying to get him up and deal with the situation: get him walking, wash his face, get him conscious.
After that, me and Kurt almost came to blows. I had said to Courtney something along the lines of, “He’s fucking turning into Axl Rose. Who does he think he is?” And Courtney told Kurt that to get me into trouble. What would you say to someone who has just OD’d on a substance called Body Bag? That’s what the little sachets of heroin he was using at the time had stenciled on them. After he OD’d, he was getting a massage and the masseur was finding these sachets everywhere. I was going discreetly next door and flushing them down the toilet. There must have been about 10 bags of it. Body Bag, how sick is that?
I think I was within my right to accuse him of selling out a little bit, if you think about what Nirvana was supposed to be about and what they stood for; they did antirape benefits for Bosnia and stuff like that. Nirvana were supposedly right-on, weren’t they? They were the voice of a generation, the conscience of a generation. And for all intents and purposes, Kurt mutated into everything he was against. He became your attitudinal rock star, with the tantrums and the plush hotels and everything. And then, for all intents and purposes, Kurt was sucking corporation cock.
Kurt took what I told Courtney really personally, and me and him got into an argument in Central Park, with a photographer about 50 yards away who was just about to do a photo session with the band. I could see the photographer out of the corner of my eye, and he’s checking his light meter and taking Polaroids of locations to show the band. And meanwhile, me and Kurt are having an argument, literally nose to nose; I’m a good foot taller than him, so I think he stood on a rock or something. Just screaming at each other. Calling each other every name under the sun.
I told him, “You’ve become Axl Rose! You’ve become everything