Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [249]
JOSH SINDER Then TAD got dropped a final time. I left because I didn’t like other people’s attitudes. Everybody was getting fucked up too much. At the end, there was a lot of drugs, and things weren’t going good. I started playing with Gruntruck.
MIKE MONGRAIN (TAD drummer) My first show with TAD was August of ’96. At that point, it was a band in decline. I liken it to stepping on the Titanic about five minutes post-iceberg. And I rode that bitch to the bottom, yeah.
It was tough on Tad and Kurt because so many of their peers—and I’m speaking here as an outsider seeing it from the inside—had done so well. All the bands that they started with were living in big houses and making their mortgages. TAD and Soundgarden and Nirvana and Alice in Chains all came up together, and TAD was always passed over for that one big promotion. I don’t think anybody was ever explicit about it, but every now and then you would see flashes of anger and resentment. It was the only thing I could attribute it to.
And there were so many crappy bands getting on the grunge bandwagon that were kind of a joke. I always had a serious distaste for bands like Stone Temple Pilots and Bush. They were capturing the essence of what was going on, at least the sound, but they were missing something. Something that was tongue-in-cheek and humorous and ironic, like TAD or Mudhoney. I never caught a shred of humor in anything the Stone Temple Pilots or Bush were doing. They were being serious rockers, copping a sound and missing the irony.
RON RUDZITIS After Kurt died, the big media thing was, “Grunge is dead, along with Kurt Cobain.” Yet the biggest bands on MTV were people like Bush, who were blatant Nirvana rip-offs. I felt a lot of resentment, going, “Well, what the fuck?” How can some bands like Bush, which is just a fuckin’ Nirvana wannabe, get all this exposure, when the bands that actually started that sound are getting left in the dust?
Our major label very unceremoniously dropped us. Maybe there’s a reason why Love Battery never made it big—because I’d be dead by now. I have to try and look at the bright side. (Laughs.) If I had all that disposable money, I really doubt I would’ve quit drugs.
KURT DANIELSON Tad and I had difficulty in communicating because we were both doing a lot of drugs. It seemed easier just to continue doing a lot of drugs than to deal with the problem of the band. My first marriage was falling apart, the band was falling apart, I had chronic pain issues, and instead of facing those problems, I just escaped. The pain that resulted from my back injuries, plus migraines, led me to experiment with all kinds of painkillers and eventually with heroin, so I became a long-term opiate addict. The heroin started about ’95 or so.
TAD DOYLE I liked coke a lot, and I found that I couldn’t afford it that much, so I went for the cheaper version of that, which was crystal meth and glass. I was taking cash advances on my credit card to go buy more. And I’d only leave at night. I was becoming essentially an addicted vampire. I had a police scanner that I bought that I’d listen to ’cause I was sure they were coming after me someday—that’s how far it went.
MIKE MONGRAIN I wanted to try to nudge us in a direction that was post-grunge. TAD had already been going in a more melodic direction, but it just didn’t have the cohesion yet. I thought, Let’s continue in that direction, with some more refinement. I remember when we were on tour in the Netherlands in ’97, we walked past a department store and there was a display in the window. It had a whole bunch of flannel shirts hangin’ in the window with a humongous sign that said 70 PERCENT OFF. I was like, “Guys! Look at that. Let that burn into your brain. That’s the reality.”
KURT DANIELSON The question of “Should we continue or should we break up?” was on the table for a month or two, and finally Tad and I had a conversation in 1999 and we decided, “Let’s just break it up.”
DAN PETERS I was actually shocked that