LIVE NIRVANA INTERVIEW ARCHIVE October ??, 1991 - ??, ??, US
Personnel
- Interviewer(s)
- Greg Kot
- Interviewee(s)
- Kurt Cobain
Sources
| Publisher | Title | Transcript |
|---|---|---|
| Chicago Tribune | Now That They've Been Found, Seattle Bands Fight For Their Independence | TBC |
Transcript
Seattle, that gray, gloomy bastion of long-haired, turn-up-the-amps alternative rock, is entering a new era. Now that corporate America has "discovered" the Pacific Northwest scene, some of its best bands are signing with major record companies-which isn't exactly cause for celebration in a musical community that once took great pride in its independence.
"All this attention is getting to be a bit unrealistic," says guitarist-singer Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, which was formed in nearby Aberdeen, Wash. "I hardly have any time for my life anymore. I don't have a life. It's Nirvana, Nirvana, Nirvana. It's a bit exaggerated. We just want to play music."
Cobain isn't the only Seattle musician experiencing culture shock. Besides Nirvana, other area bands snapped up recently by major labels include Soundgarden (by A&M), Pearl Jam (Epic), Alice in Chains (Columbia), the Posies (DGC), the now-defunct Mother Love Bone (Polygram) and Screaming Trees (Epic).
And there's plenty more where they came from, including Mudhoney, Tad, Skin Yard and Beat Happening, who have developed national followings while remaining with local independent labels.
Seattle's musical motherlode is attributable to any number of factors, including a thriving club scene and a reasonable cost of living conducive to bohemian pursuits such as playing in a rock band. But most musicians say the reason's simple: geography.
They say Seattle's isolated location and perpetually lousy weather drove them into their basements, where they used loud music and local beer as insulation from the cold and damp.
"We're 33 hours by car from Minneapolis and 17 hours from San Francisco," says guitarist Mark Arm of Seattle's Mudhoney. "A lot of bands didn't bother coming up here, so a lot of things grew out of this inbred scene."
In an era steeped in the vagueness, irony and detached cool of its cutting-edge icons (Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Talking Heads), the Seattle bands act like nerdy garage-band throwbacks with a severe case of cabin fever everytime they hit the stage, a blur of dirty sneakers, tattered flannel shirts and tangled yards of sweat-soaked hair.
"We didn't have any preconceived notions of jumping around or rolling on the ground, but when we'd do shows once a month, there'd be all this reserve energy waiting to come out and we'd spazz out," Arm says.
Cobain concluded last weekend's ferociously paced Nirvana concert at Cabaret Metro by clubbing David Grohl's drum kit with his splintered guitar.
"Our energy, our approach is very sincere," Cobain says. "If anything we probably try too hard."
Initially, many of the new Seattle bands took their cue from the punk and hard-core groups such as Minor Threat that ruled the underground and college circuit in the early '80s, but soon even that became constricting.
When the Melvins, a local trio, put the brakes on the breakneck tempos that were all the rage at the time in favor of exaggeratedly slow, acid-rock and metal riffs, they were an inspiration to bands such as Soundgarden and Green River, which contained future members of Mudhoney, Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam.
"Around 1985, '86, the hard-core scene seemed exhausted to us," Nirvana's Cobain says. "It was boring, so we just started accepting the fact that we liked the music that we grew up on: Alice Cooper, the MC5, Kiss. It was almost taboo to admit something like that in '85, but we grew our hair long and said, '[Expletive] what everybody else thinks, we're going to do what we want.'"
About that time, a local record label devoted to Northwestern talent set up shop. Sub Pop soon became synonomous with the "Seattle sound," even though it represented only a small portion of the area's bands, and by 1989 was the hottest label in underground rock.
The "Seattle sound" actually covers a wide variety of styles, from Soundgarden's molten-lava metal to Tad's biker rock. What defines the bands is their aggressive, in-your-face esthetic built on grungy guitars and a universal repudiation of anything that smacks of fashion, from spandex to sampling machines.
"It's mainly just an homage - we're paying homage to all the music we loved as kids, and we haven't denied the punk-rock energy that inspired us as teenagers," Cobain says.
"Everything comes from something else," says Mudhoney's Arm. "Any band that thinks it's completely original is only kidding itself."
Many in the Seattle community of musicians hang out with one another, drinking and jamming together when they're not on the road. When Andrew Wood, the charismatic lead singer of Mother Love Bone, died of a heroin overdose last year, some surviving members of his band and Soundgarden gathered to pay tribute.
The outcome of that impromptu two-week session, "Temple of the Dog" (A&M), says much about the motivations of Seattle's musicians, whose sincerity and soulfulness often overcome quibbles about originality. The centerpiece of the "Temple" album is the 11-minute "Reach Down," in which Soundgarden's Chris Cornell sings a moving epitaph to his late roommate.
Ament was upset that A&M didn't give "Temple of the Dog" a bigger marketing push, but he has no complaints about Epic's handling of his new band's debut, Pearl Jam.
The loose, no-rules atmosphere of the "Temple" sessions prevailed on Pearl Jam's "Ten" (Epic), a mix of free-flowing acid rock and cauterizing ballads distinguished by the introspective lyrics and burning baritone of singer Eddie Vedder.
"When someone comes in with an idea, each one of us hears it a different way, so that by the time everyone gets through with it, it becomes unconventional," Ament explains. "We don't set guidelines for what a Pearl Jam song should be. It's more about exploring for sounds that get us all off."
In the same way, DGC gave Nirvana free reign on its raw-yet-melodic "Nevermind," the best record yet from any of the new-breed Seattle bands.
"We were afraid to record in a big studio with a professional sound-mixer," Nirvana's Cobain says. "But we wouldn't have signed if we didn't have final say in the outcome of the album. If we wanted to make it really raw, we could have. We didn't feel we had to compromise at all."
Integrity and honesty are words that come up a lot in conversation with Seattle musicians, and it remains to be seen how these ideals hold up once big-time corporate marketers get ahold of them. But it's encouraging - and also ironic - that just as the world is discovering the "Seattle sound," its creators are trying to escape it.
"There's a corporate tag on the Seattle scene now and they're trying to lump us into it, which I find really offensive," Cobain says.
"I'm at the point that I'm sick of the Seattle tag," Pearl Jam's Ament says. "If it was up to me we'd move to Sante Fe and not have to deal with it."
Arm of Mudhoney says the key mistake record companies make is assuming that "being from Seattle automatically makes you a good band."
"There are a lot of bad bands here, and a number that used to be good who aren't so good anymore," he says. "I only hope the new bands coming up aren't pale imitations of what came before. I hope things change."
© Greg Kot, 1991