Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [220]
KIM THAYIL We were onstage. I go to the side of the stage, grab a beer or whatever, change my guitar, sit down for a bit, towel off—maybe it’s a drum solo—and Gary from TAD goes, “Hey, they found a body at Kurt’s house. It hasn’t been identified yet, but the rumor is that they think it could be Kurt.” I thought, It’s okay, it’s not Kurt. It sounds terrible, but it must have been some weird drug incident, somebody else maybe OD’d at Kurt’s house. I told myself that.
So I’m playing the next song, and all of sudden I just felt that chill, I just felt the blood and warmth go out of me. It’s an empty feeling that I’m talking about. It was entirely a visceral experience. For some reason, at that point I knew, in spite of my hopefulness, that he was dead.
BEN SHEPHERD And we were all playing the encore, we’re all rocking out—me and Chris were particularly having fun together that show. Looked around at the crew, everyone around’s kind of dour and worried-looking. And they make this corridor for us to walk through to go to the dressing room, and it’s like, instantaneously, they shut the door behind us and everyone was there. The guys from TAD and the rest of the crew and stuff. Kurt Danielson told us. Chris turned to me and said, “I’m sorry,” and then he started crying and held me. I was just in shock.
JOSH SINDER We’d just got done doing an interview for a TV show. We were laughing and having a really good time, and then we went back to the club. Tad had his own camera rolling when we found out backstage. The camera is on Kurt Danielson’s face and he says, “They just found Kurt’s body …” On the tape, the camera just points to the ground. And everyone’s real silent for a second.
KIM THAYIL I’ve never seen so many big, hairy, usually rowdy guys in tears and crumbling.
BEN SHEPHERD The thing for Soundgarden was every time there was some personal gain, it was always balanced out by something really dark. We were in Europe when we found out that Superunknown was number one in America. Then Kurt dies.
SUSAN SILVER I wasn’t with Soundgarden. The guys found out after they got offstage. And the tour manager said they were beside themselves: “They’re freaking out, they’re destroying the dressing room!” And I said, “Just let ’em go, man.”
KURT DANIELSON No, no. I told everybody before the show, because we all knew about it when we were onstage. I felt it was necessary that these guys find out from the right person at the right time. And actually, it made for a better show, because we were able to dedicate it to Kurt, and I thought that was important.
I’ve got severe back problems—I’ve crushed two vertebrae just thrashing around so much onstage—and my back had gone out on me that day. I remember being onstage in Paris, in all this pain, and I knew that Kurt had killed himself, and I felt like somehow that all this pain I was experiencing was putting me in a place where I could understand him somehow. Of course, I was drinking a lot, just to try to kill the pain, which didn’t work at all.
I remember being in a trance and feeling like I was totally detached, like having an astral-projection experience. I suddenly found myself above the stage, watching myself onstage, being above the crowd and kind of floating around up there. And somehow I felt a unity with Kurt. It’s really hard to describe—I’ve never really tried to describe it before. I felt like Kurt was there somehow.
JASON EVERMAN I was in basic training, and one of my drill sergeants came into the barracks at 6 in the morning, standard basic-training bullshit: get down, do push-ups. So everyone in the bay is doing push-ups, the drill sergeant is walking around yelling at everybody. Then he goes, “Yesterday, the