Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [248]
At the Grammys, Tupac and Snoop Dogg were sitting in front of me and my wife and they got up literally every 10 minutes to go blow dope in the lobby. Every 10 minutes, they’d look at each other and smile, leave, and come back five minutes later just reeking. I saw Ed Vedder up there sayin’ that shit and tryin’ to be cool. I’m like, Okay, that’s silly. And then you look at someone like Snoop Dogg and you think, Okay, that guy is actually a badass. That guy actually is cool.
JACK ENDINO There was a period there in ’95, ’96 where I thought, Maybe I’m going to have to find another career here. There’s no more bands to record! The scene died! It’s gone, it’s over. Maybe that was just a flash in the pan back then, and I’m going to have to either start recording really bad bands or I’m going to have to find some other line of work. So I started recording people in other countries, because people wanted me as a producer there.
TIM HAYES I moved away from Seattle in ’90 and came back in ’96. When I got back, the life had been sucked out of a lot of people I knew. They weren’t out looking for new bands. They were just relying on their old bands, like Mudhoney, to keep them going. I love Mudhoney, but they’re what people already knew. My friends were holding on to the past a little bit. With some people I would say it was a function of their age, but I think it was more because the industry had permeated the scene with so many shitty bands, like Candlebox and Alice in Chains.
LANCE MERCER When the scene died down, the musicians and other people in the business who didn’t make it had to back up and reevaluate. I always say they had to either put on the orange apron, the green apron, or the blue apron: Home Depot, Starbucks, or Kinko’s.
CHARLES PETERSON In some ways, with a lot of photo editors, my career died when Kurt did. So I needed to go and reinvent myself and validate myself as a photographer. I went and did some traveling to Southeast Asia. I just needed to put it away for a while.
Then around 2001, when it was the 10th anniversary of the release of Nevermind, I started getting more requests, and I started pulling out the files and going through stuff, and just going, My God, there’s some good work in here that nobody’s ever seen. Or old work that nobody’s ever seen properly. That’s when I sat down with my friend Hank Trotter, and we designed my book Touch Me I’m Sick. And it keeps going. I keep selling Nirvana photos on a weekly basis. It’s a little bit weird, living with this dead guy.
KURT DANIELSON We were dropped from Giant when we were in Europe with Soundgarden. What screwed things up with Giant wasn’t really the way it’s been told—as being because of the poster with Clinton on it. Have you seen that poster? I don’t know who did it; it was somebody in connection with the European tour. It was a black-and-white photograph of Bill Clinton making a speech. And his hand gestures and facial gestures were perfect for the insertion of a fake joint, and there was a quote on the bottom saying “THIS IS HEAVY SHIT,” referring to TAD’s music, of course. It was hilarious.
Unfortunately, somebody at Giant didn’t have a sense of humor and thought it was a politically damaging thing, even though not that many people saw it. Giant used that poster as their excuse to drop us. But more important than that was that we had a manager at the time who was less than trustworthy, let’s just put it that way. All we can surmise is that he must have caused more problems than solutions when he dealt with Giant. And we weren’t selling a lot of records.
We got a new manager, Jonny Z, who originally was Metallica’s manager, and he got us onto Elektra/East West. Gary had left the band, and we were back on the road again, promoting