Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [246]
MARK ARM Another is about this woman Janet Billig. When we first met her, she was totally antidrugs, wouldn’t work with anyone who was a junkie. And when she started working for Gold Mountain, with Kurt and Courtney, all of a sudden she just let her ethics totally slip. Either she was starstruck or the job meant so much to her that she wanted to please her bosses.
DAVID KATZNELSON Danny and I had a conversation that evening, which culminated in a conversation over lunch the next day. The end result was that he was fine with the release of the record. He understood that there were a lot of emotions going on in the community and also understood the song wasn’t about Courtney.
MARK ARM The other one was Eric Erlandson, who was going out with the 19-year-old actress, which would be Drew Barrymore. I think it’s more about this 19-year-old girl, who thought this guy in Hole was all that. Because if he wasn’t in Hole, he wouldn’t have stood a chance with her.
ERIC ERLANDSON Really? I’ll have to go look at the lyrics. I met Drew in L.A., we hooked up together in Seattle, and within six months or so we moved in together in L.A. Two people had just died—Kurt and Kristen—and I wanted to get the hell out of Seattle. She was bringing a little sunshine. I don’t care if people in Seattle didn’t think it was a “cool” move. When you love somebody, you love somebody.
MATT LUKIN Danny Goldberg told our A&R guy, “I don’t want to meet those guys. I don’t ever want to shake their hands. I don’t want to have my picture taken with them.” And I’m like, “Oh, really? That’s all I’ve been dreaming about my whole life, is to have my picture taken with Danny Goldberg!”
STEVE TURNER Obviously there’s some Courtney stuff in there, but there’s also the Stone Temple Pilots in there. ’Cause I think we were reading some fashion magazine article focusing on their stylist and the band’s singer demanding some outfit he wanted to wear or some such bullshit. I put out the “Into Yer Shtik” seven-inch on my label, Super Electro Sound Recordings, and remember cutting up parts of that magazine article to use on the back of the sleeve. Here it is: “Then her pager beeps. It is Polyester Pilot”—I changed the dude’s name—“the band’s moody singer, and he wants ‘something pink.’ And not just pink, he says. Pink, fuzzy, and still sort of masculine. ‘I’ll find it,’ she says.”
I’m sure they’re lovely people, but at the time it was like, “Man, they can’t be serious.”
JEFF SMITH I remember Mark saying he figured they hadn’t really made it because there was no fake Mudhoney song on the first Stone Temple Pilots album. Beavis and Butt-Head were like, “Hey, Eddie Vedder got a new haircut!” “What, this isn’t Pearl Jam?” It had a fake Alice in Chains song, a fake Nirvana song. That record is almost like a best-of-Seattle.
DAVID KATZNELSON My Brother the Cow sold crappily. There was a backlash against grunge. The backlash didn’t touch Soundgarden, it didn’t touch Pearl Jam, because they were no longer grunge bands, they were pop bands. They had been accepted by a whole other audience.
MATT CAMERON With “Black Hole Sun,” we brought out the psychedelic elements of Soundgarden and that kind of ferocious element, as well. We had a huge hit with it. Superunknown was a huge, huge record for us, and getting on the radio for the first time with a pop hit just cemented the success. I felt like we had infiltrated the system with our sound. We didn’t compromise at all.
STEVE TURNER The reviews for My Brother the Cow were just horrible. We made a big, grungy record, and I think we even used the word grunge in the press packet. We were just being funny because we knew it was probably gonna be savaged. Grunge had been in everybody’s face and there was a horrible tragedy that came out of it and there was also the new punk explosion—Epitaph bands, Offspring, Green Day—that was getting