Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [233]
COLLEEN COMBS As soon as we started asking questions, we started having problems with booking our tours. Promoters or people we considered friends in business suddenly couldn’t help us or wouldn’t take a phone call. There were definitely strange things happening in the office. Honestly—and this is going to sound like a bad conspiracy movie—but I swear there was clicking on the phone line. It seemed like the phones were tapped.
KEN DEANS I can tell you what I told Kelly. I go, “You know, you’re fighting the wrong battle.” The battle was not with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster wasn’t setting those fees. The promoters are. So the reason why the convenience charge went from a dollar to $3 was because a dollar and a half was going to the promoters. That whole thing was a valiant but misguided effort.
JOHN HOYT Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard testified in front of a House subcommitee about unfair ticket practices, and that became the big national story in all the papers. That elevated it to a completely different level. It was a bit of a circus. There was a fair amount of media, and an awful lot of congressional interns and people wanting to be present for this. There were softball questions and only a couple harder questions, because Ticketmaster had a lot of money and a pretty strong lobby and they put some pressure on members of Congress.
REP. LYNN C. WOOLSEY (Democratic congresswoman from California; during questioning at Pearl Jam’s antitrust complaint hearing before the House Subcommittee on Information, Justice, Transportation and Agriculture, June 30, 1994) I have to ask another question that has nothing to do with monopolies. What does Pearl Jam mean or does it have a meaning?
STONE GOSSARD (June 30, 1994, testimony) I am not going to answer that question.
JEFF AMENT That whole thing was a joke. The Department of Justice used us to look hip. Stone and I spent a week with this guy John Hoyt; he was drilling us with serious questions that we were [supposedly] going to get asked, and then it didn’t feel like we got to utilize any of it. It made me a lot more cynical about what goes on with the government.
DAVE ABBRUZZESE When those guys were testifying in front of Congress, I was in Indonesia just enjoying being alive. The more I read about the Ticketmaster situation, it’s like, It all sounds good and nice, but there are way more important, flagrant injustices we could have latched onto.
JEFF AMENT Dave was a different egg for sure. There were a lot of things, personality-wise, where I didn’t see eye to eye with him. He was more comfortable being a rock star than the rest of us. Partying, girls, cars. I don’t know if anyone was in the same space. Also, with Dave, musically, when you’d say, “I want this to sound more like the Buzzcocks,” I don’t think he related to that at all. He was a technical guy, and we all played by feeling, or by seeing bands.
DAVE ABBRUZZESE That statement from him is incredibly disrespectful, and untrue, as well. It’s such a crock of shit. I was the only one in the band who had the same girlfriend for eight years. I had bought a car that was used, and I kept it. But he makes it sound like I was the odd man out; it paints a picture of me as being pretentious. Shit, we worked our asses off to be successful. We were rock stars. Who cares? Jesus Christ. (Laughs.) Doing articles where you’re on the cover, and the article is how you don’t wanna be on the cover. That’s pretentious hypocrisy.
Forgive me for not giving a fuck about the Buzzcocks. (Laughs.) If anyone would’ve mentioned something like that to me, I certainly would’ve went and listened to what the fuck they were talking about. There was never an “It should have this or that kind of feel.”
STONE GOSSARD It was the nature of how the politics worked in our band: It was up to me to say, “Hey, we tried, it’s not working; time to move on.” On a superficial level, it was a political struggle: For whatever reason his ability to communicate with Ed and Jeff was very stifled. I certainly don’t think it was all Dave Abbruzzese