God damn, you have a lot of stuff.
- What's on there? - "Floaty"
and "Alone + Easy Target."
Yeah, that would've been in the 38th Street house.
Right.
This is January of '92.
I came home and I had written a bunch of stuff
on the road in my hotel room.
- Do you want to play that one? - Yeah!
"Heavy Handed" was a good song.
I don't know if you remember that one.
I don't remember "Heavy Handed."
I remember... "Alone + Easy Target,"
that was the... Like, Kurt heard that
and kissed me on the face...
- Aw. - ...as he was in a bath.
He was so excited. He was like,
"I hear you recorded some stuff with Barrett."
I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "Let me hear it."
And I was too afraid to be in the same room as he listened to it.
Oh, there's times on here, huh?
I didn't zero it.
God damn it.
Produce, Barrett.
The suspense is killing me.
Sync, corrected by icephoenix www.addic7ed.com
_
It was isolated.
People literally did think, like, we lived in teepees.
It's a little-town vibe with a big-city attitude.
It bred a lot of entrepreneurial success stories
and it could be because there's nothing else to do.
But I also think that it has to do with
an eagerness to try new things.
It's beautiful in the summer, you know?
It's... It's those...
those long, moody winters.
It's hard to describe, really,
the oppression of low black clouds
and kind of light, pissing rain
nine months out of the year.
It gets old.
Being in a windowless, soundproof basement,
it's not really that big of a loss, really,
when the weather's horrible outside,
you know what I mean?
It's like you might as well just, like, isolate yourself
from the gloom and just write some songs.
I had just been to Seattle for the first time
maybe three months before I moved up there.
I didn't know anything about the city.
This is where I live. This is my house.
And that's our van. Pretty cool, huh?
I didn't know anything about the climate.
It's really cold.
I moved up there with nothing
and moved in with people I didn't know.
I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Seattle.
I have a lot of great memories,
and I have a lot of heartbreaking memories.
Seattle's like my phantom limb.
I still feel it.
Ayo! Ayo!
There he is.
- Hi. - Hello.
Dude, there's a Sub Pop store at the fucking airport.
They're selling, like, shirts and coffee cups and postcards...
- Easy, man. - And records.
- And neck pillows. - And neck pillows.
They had a lot of Sunny Day shit all over the place.
You get a piece of that action?
Come on, at the end of the day, man,
Sunny Day brother is standing right here!
I grew up in Richland, Washington,
which is about four hours east of Seattle.
I was in Sunny Day Real Estate,
you know, just prior to the whole grunge explosion.
And then I remember, like, literally just watching it
go up the charts and our minds were being blown.
We were rooting for, like, a sports team.
You think that's gonna pull together?
You ready to make some noise?
Wow, man.
Oh, my God.
It's like... Reminds me of an ancient spa.
Kurt wanted to record a new song
that we'd been working on while on tour.
And someone told me about this really weird studio
right down the street from where I lived.
So Chris and I decided to go check it out.
What were your first impressions of Robert Lang Studio?
I thought it was the coolest place ever.
And the drums sound so good in that room.
It doesn't follow any of the rules
of a normal studio in terms of design.
Just kind of like a bizarre castle underground.
There's no parallel walls, the surfaces are all uneven.
And it's stone.
There's something to the sound of subterranean.
Nothing resonates too much.
You just get the sound of the instrument itself.
Robert Lang Studio had such a big impact for me
because it was the last place that Nirvana recorded.
That's where I did the first Foo Fighters record by myself.
To me, that place represents totally starting over.
- Look at your view, man! - Yeah, how 'bout that?
Okay, so what part of this was the original house?
The west wall, 20 feet by 20 feet
over there by where that corner is there, Dave.
It went 20 feet that way. And this was it.
But from the garage to the house was just a hill, right?
- Yeah. - So how did you connect the two?
One shovel at a time.
So when you first found the place...
Uh-huh. - It was...
It was just a little garage on the street level?
A little garage with a beach house.
That's correct, yeah. Yeah.
And they said that I wouldn't be able
to build a studio in there,
but after I took the classes at Kaye-Smith
Recording School of America, I decided to start excavating.
How many trucks of dirt did you haul out?
A couple hundred at least.
10 years of digging and I'm still not done with it in the back over here.
Was this the first room?
The first room was there, 20 by 20, you know.
- Wow! Hold on. - I want to look at it.
- So this was the original garage. - This is the original garage.
And what was it like when you first started working in here?
Just four cement, concrete block walls.
It used to be that on the other side of that wall was just...
- Dirt. - Dirt.
Yep. Where were my friends?
I would trade studio time, you know, for guys to come,
and help me dig, you know.
I bought a conveyor belt. "Okay, let's go," you know.
I remember it when it was just the one cavern and then he started,
"What you got going there, Robert?"
"I'm building another cavern for a symphony." "Okay."
Look how far down it goes, straight down.
- Isn't that nuts? - That just scared the shit out of me.
Bob's the mad genius.
He's just gonna be digging and digging, you know.
I mean, there's always something.
Another room? What's... Where'd this come from?
Wait, was this here or not?
- No, this was not. No. - Whoa, dude.
There is a pioneer spirit
to how he's built that recording studio
that may or may not be on the level.
I've got some, you know, finance
to go ahead and, like, dig some of this out...
What's wrong?
- That was scary. - Watch out.
- That one got me. - You're at your own risk in here.
How's your insurance company doing, Bobby?
- Woo! - Whoa... Yep.
Did you take classes for this shit?
No, no, no, never, never. I just figured it out, you know?
I almost got buried alive a couple times,
but I remember the local... The local bar up here, Duffy's,
they had a fricking pool like whether the little man
was gonna be buried alive.
You know, then when the neighbor's wall collapsed,
that's when the building department came in here.
And, boy, I'll never forget that. Wow.
Why the fuck did you pick marble and stone?
I don't know many studios that...
- Have what you have. - It just...
God, you know, that's a good question.
I think I was destined
because I'm cutting on a piece of marble
and a bright flash light happened.
I see a saint in the... In the marble
holding a vivid candle with lit flame,
and head, eye, nose,
mouth, eyebrow, you know, it...
A little beard, you know, a whole torso.
And I looked at my buddy John and I said,
"God damn it, John,
that was some pretty frickin' good bud, you know, man."
- It's like... - You showed it to us
- when we first got here. - Yeah, I think gave you...
I swear to God, we walked out of here like...
- What the fuck? - "This place is freaky. We've gotta work here."
Hey, what was the Dave Matthews thing?
Dave came and they did a, like, 30 people in the studio room.
- It was a live thing. - Why did he pick this place?
Just the vibe.
What did The Presidents do here?
They mixed that whole record here.
- Lump, Peaches. - Oh, really?
Yeah. Death Cab for Cutie.
Oh, did they do a bunch of songs here?
Yeah, yeah, a couple of their different records.
- Oh, no way! That's us! Look at that! - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was for, like, an X Files session.
- It may have been. - I think so.
I think so. It was...
That stupid fucking hat. What a jackass.
Look at me. God.
- This used to be your paper route. - That's correct.
I grew up just about three blocks up this way,
up east from here.
- A good family. - So what was Seattle like then?
There wasn't much to bring anybody here
outside the clean air and the mountains.
54,000-horsepower transonic wind tunnel at Boeing...
It was all about Boeing, initially,
and the World's Fair when we moved in.
This was pre-Internet, pre-Microsoft,
pre-Amazon, pre-everything, pretty much.
There was shipping, aerospace, which Boeing was part of.
And there was still logging.
What did you know about Seattle musically then?
Well, Seattle had good music already going on.
People like Ray Charles came up in Seattle and Jimi Hendrix did,
even though he went to England to make it.
There was The Kingsmen and then Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts.
She had that hit "Angel of the Morning."
And then I remember
the only band we listened to was The Sonics.
♪ And she's the witch, duh, duh, duh, duh... ♪
They influenced so many good bands in Seattle.
I think every house in Seattle had a Sonics record.
That sound, the northwest sound, was really grungy
even before what they call "grunge" happened later.
What did you even call your music?
- And, what was that? - It was just rock 'n' roll.
I used to drop... Drop tune my E string to D
so I could make it sound like it was bigger
and meaner sounding, you know, rough sounding.
I'd get a pick, a heavy pick
and put screwdriver grooves in it
and then just scratch it...
With the pick
and you'd get these harmonic overtones,
and I was really into sounds like that, making it sound mean.
'Cause I wasn't any good, you know.
I couldn't play the darn thing,
but make it so you're squeezing the life
out of that guitar neck, you know?
- Did people get into it? - Apparently.
We thought it was totally illegitimate.
We always felt like maybe we're not really...
Maybe we shouldn't be here.
We were playing at the Spanish Castle
and some guy came up and asked if he could sit down, like they always do,
and we were trying to politely say no,
and I don't know how...
Who told me this, who would know it,
but he said, "That was Jimi Hendrix."
And he had his own guitar and amp in his trunk
and that he would've brought it in and sat in.
You didn't let him jam?
No. Bummer. If I only had known.
You know, in the early '70s
there wasn't really much going on regionally
that I could see as a teenager.
What did we have? We had Heart.
There is that whole attitude of girls can't rock,
but I never heard anyone say that about them.
Woo!
So at what point did the Heart thing
really start to come together?
My sister ventured out first
and joined some of the founding fathers of Heart.
One of them was the brother of a draft evader,
then being from the era of Vietnam.
He had snuck down over the border to watch them rehearse in this garage
and Ann was, um, auditioning for the band
and they locked eyes and it was zing.
It was the Magic Man moment.
So she followed him up to Vancouver
and the rest of the band followed her
because they knew a good singer when they saw one and they heard one.
So that's how come they started up there,
playing cabarets and stuff first
and I joined after a couple of college years.
It was sort of a sound that emerged from, um,
Ann and I trying to put, like, a poetic spin on jam music
with love and humanity.
We were trying to make a statement.
Okay, so when Heart started getting popular,
like wouldn't Seattle be like,
"Fuck, we have the coolest rock band!"
- You know what I mean? - Yeah.
They just kind of became a huge band
that was also touring all the time,
um, and then you heard they're from Seattle,
like, I... At the age we were,
when suddenly they're all over the radio, um,
I'd never heard of them playing like, uh, clubs.
As of the early '80s there was kind of
a new wave punk scene sort of bubbling up here in Seattle.
The U-Men and The Blackouts,
those were kind of the kings of that scene.
There was nowhere to see a band.
The Vogue only had shows on Tuesday and Wednesday
and we had the Central Tavern and we had maybe the Ditto Tavern,
and I think a lot of bands would skip Seattle
because it was just too far of a drive.
If you're in a band and you're travelling around in a van
and, you know,
the kind of information travelled
the way it did at that time...
are you really gonna drive 900 miles from California
to play a show to five people in Seattle?
Nowadays, everything interconnected so much
that all you have to do is pick up your laptop
and see what's going on Tuesday night
at that tiny club in Portland, Maine.
When I was young, as a touring musician,
it was a crap shoot.
You never knew if the promoter had put flyers on the street,
you never knew if the college radio station
was playing your band's music.
You'd show up to a club and cross your fingers
that people would come to the gig
so that you could get gas money to go to the next city.
From Minneapolis to Seattle is 2,000 miles.
Good luck on getting any shows
in Spokane or anything, forget it, you know.
I got the real sense as a kid that, you know,
the scene in Seattle created itself
because nobody else wanted to come up
and entertain Seattleites, you know?
I mean, people had to kind of start their own bands
and their own scene because that was the only way
live music was gonna get played here.
Because nobody was gonna make any money,
the scene was a network of hobbyists
who were just playing for their friends,
and when you're playing music as a hobby, you take more risks,
and from that attitude,
uh, a lot of these bands kind of created their own style.
Did you imagine
that you were going to start a record company?
- Like did you really... - Absolutely not. No.
My ongoing joke is I went to college
and majored in punk rock,
which is pretty close to the truth.
People go, "Well, what are you gonna do with that?"
"I don't know, maybe start a record label,
sign Nirvana, or something like that," you know.
Sub Pop really started as a fanzine...
And then it became a column in a local music magazine,
now defunct, called The Rocket,
and he put out a few cassette tapes,
and then he put out the Sub Pop 100 compilation record
which had different bands from all over the country.
We pressed 5,000 copies, sold them all.
The next record I put out was by Green River,
who I thought was awesome, featuring Mr. Mark Arm
went on to starting Mudhoney and so forth.
The third record was, uh, Soundgarden's "Screaming Life" EP.
Jon Poneman was probably
the biggest Soundgarden fan in Seattle.
So we joined forces to put out that record
and then we opened our offices
and put out all sorts of legendary stuff.
Did anybody have any formal business training
or know what the fuck they were doing?
Still don't.
Sub Pop figured all of that stuff out
by fucking up and trying to learn from them.
We rented our first place
on First and Virginia in downtown Seattle,
uh, April 1st, 1988, and, uh,
we've been going out of business ever since.
I remember the early days of Sub Pop,
we'd get our checks
and we would literally run down to the bank
'cause whoever was first in line
would probably get their check cashed.
But at the same time, we were okay with it
because we were sort of all in it together.
You know, yeah, we'd get pissed,
like, "How am I gonna pay rent this month?" or whatever,
but we couldn't take ourselves so seriously.
We weren't LA, we weren't New York,
so in order to sort of move beyond
this whole serious music industry thing
we were all like, yeah, let's just take the piss take.
Let's just have fun, you know?
This is rock and roll, you're supposed to have fun with it.
There was absolutely no thought of commercial success.
I mean, commercial success, I mean, if you could make
a few hundred dollars at the Vogue on a Tuesday,
that was like... That was kick ass.
Half the musicians were working in restaurants or cooks
or just horrible day jobs.
I at least had the studio to starve in.
You know, I was making five bucks an hour.
Jack would tell me about
the interesting things that he had recorded.
He said, "This is great."
Some of it he would go, "This isn't so great."
Jack's relationship with Bruce and John
created something that defined the entire city.
I have the studio logs from that time period,
and it's insane.
It's just like you got Soundgarden, Green River, Mudhoney,
Mother Love Bone, Nirvana.
It's just... It just goes on and on.
And then Charles Peterson
put a face on that sound.
I remember Mark Arm was talking to Bruce Pavitt,
he was like, "Oh check out these Green River photos
that my friend Charles took. They're amazing."
And Bruce was just like, "Wow, you know, these are great
and I'm gonna put you on every record
and we're gonna make a scene out of...
A visual scene out of this."
Um, I said, "Sure, yeah, let's do it."
As soon as I saw those images,
that very second it...
Charles Peterson is the definitive visual artist
of Seattle during that... That period.
He'd get right in the pit.
All of the images were blurred, so they're all action shots.
And he would capture the audience
interacting with the band.
I wanted to really portray that catharsis that happens.
It's like, why do people go to shows,
why do musicians get on stage,
especially in this sort of setting?
they're not making money,
the band's not hugely popular, by any means,
it's just really that they want to come together and have that release.
Before this alt rock kind of boom in the early '90s,
like, you know, being a kid in the suburbs, like,
you think that the only way you can be in a band
is if you can play, like, shredding guitar.
Like, I remember, you know, watching MTV and, like, watching
some fucking hair metal band just, like, ripping it up,
and I'm looking at this guitar magazine with, like, the tablature
of like how to play, you know, a Warrant song or something like that
and being like, "Well, I mean I can't do that."
Mudhoney was pretty much my favorite band
when I was 15.
The songs were so fucking catchy
and at times so sloppy,
hearing them gave me the confidence
to start playing music with other people.
When the music scene started blowing up in the '90s,
were you paying attention at all at that point?
- You were out of it? - Yeah.
I was totally out of music then.
After '67, The Sonics seldom ever played again.
I went in the military.
Came out and raised my daughter
as a single guy for the next, you know,
15, 20 years.
So you didn't know your influence?
- No. No. - That's so nuts.
And I still think that's phenomenal.
Nirvana, they were late comers.
They were kind of the outsiders
and we were all a little bit like,
"I don't know if they're up to it."
Nobody knew who they were.
They didn't even have a name when they recorded with me.
It was just Kurt Cobain and his friends.
Nirvana did a little showcase for Jon and I.
It was Jon, myself, the bartender
and the door man checking them out
and we thought, yeah, there's... I think there's a single in there.
The very first time I saw them they were
at the Vogue on a Sunday night, Sub Pop showcase,
and Blood Circus opened for them.
So everyone went and saw Blood Circus
and then half the audience left.
And I didn't particularly like Nirvana that show
and I didn't even take pictures,
which was, like, now and looking back, was so stupid.
I was like, well, you know, these guys aren't going anywhere.
Then the second time I saw them it was like night and day.
When I joined Nirvana, they had one record
on Sub Pop called "Bleach."
By our standards, it was really popular.
Girls liked Nirvana.
Girls didn't really like the bands that I had been in
or most of the bands that we played with.
The rest of the world was not really paying attention.
Bruce and Jon had the clever idea of getting
an English journalist out to Seattle to write about it
because they said, "Okay, if it appears in the English press,
suddenly the American press is going to notice it."
Which was a very, very clever move.
And after NME
called Nirvana Sub Pop's answer to the Beatles,
major label scouts
started coming out and checking out the band.
When did we all come in here? What was that?
- It was an X-Files thing. - Remember?
- Oh, right. - We did the Gary Numan song.
It was fun to be living in Seattle
and be the age that I was
and to have come from the scene that I did.
I was not really part of the grunge scene, so to speak,
but it was just... The music was close enough and so good,
it still felt like that high school thing
where it's our music and, you know,
it's a thing that you share with your friends
and it's outsider music.
And then Nirvana came along
and it was no longer outsider music.
It was music for everyone.
When I was a kid, like 11 or 12 years old,
I was recording songs by myself.
I'd get two tape decks.
I'd record guitar on one cassette...
hit play so that guitar sound is coming out
and I would sing along to it as I hit record
on this other cassette.
Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of songs
I never wanted anyone to hear
because I was mortified.
They just weren't any good.
I was practicing. I was woodshedding.
I was writing just to exercise that muscle.
It was just fun.
I was in bands with brilliant song writers,
great singers.
Who the fuck cared about what I was doing on my time off?
So I'd come home from a tour or come home from rehearsal...
go into my basement in the house I lived in with Barrett Jones,
and he'd hit record and I'd record some songs on my own.
Perfect, man.
Okay, let's listen to it.
We had the house on 38th Street.
- Was that the first studio? - Yeah.
Right. How much stuff did I do? I don't even remember.
There's, like, 40 songs.
- Wow. - 40 various things.
I mean, some of it's just fucking around.
You know, the "Hooker Song" which is still awesome.
- Do you remember that one? - No.
Come on.
♪ Hooker on the street. ♪
♪ Moving the beat. ♪
♪ Uh, hooker! ♪
♪ Aaah, yeah, yeah, yeah! ♪
♪ She's hooking it up to the clinic for the clean yard. ♪
Amazing.
What else do we have?
This reminds me of our living room when I hear this.
♪ Watered it down now. ♪
♪ Watered it, watered it, ♪
♪ watered it down now... ♪
♪ Watered it down. ♪
♪ You watered it down. ♪
♪ Down, you watered it down. ♪
♪ Water, water, water, water, water, water. ♪
♪ Watered it down. ♪
♪ You watered it... ♪
Yup. Yup.
That's what you did. That's how serious you were.
Just making music.
I remember this. I remember this.
♪ Heavy handed. ♪
♪ Heavy handed... ♪
It totally... Here it comes.
Wow, that's fucked up.
More tapes.
It's a treasure trove.
- Remember this? - No.
♪ Faking me out 'cause the times are mine... ♪
Oh, yeah.
You know, the last thing
in the world that I ever wanted to do in Nirvana
was disrupt the chemistry of that band.
What we had worked pretty well.
Kurt wrote these unbelievable songs.
And all we had to do was plug in and play.
Explain what happened with Nirvana
leaving the label and going to DGC.
Well, that's a very interesting question.
Nobody's ever asked me that.
I thought the label had generated an enormous amount
of hype and attention on Seattle,
on the label, on the bands,
but at the same time were very cash-strapped,
so I fully understand why an artist
would want to maybe make more money.
So it was just one of those things that happened
Could you imagine that what happened was going to happen
Could I imagine that Nirvana would become
the biggest pop music phenomenon since the Beatles?
No, that did not cross my mind.
Here they are, Nirvana.
Suddenly, there was all these hard rock bands
from Seattle on the album charts. It was crazy.
Knocking Michael Jackson down to number five.
One of the biggest music biz stories these days
is the so-called Rain City Renaissance
with the emergence of noisy, punk-metal grunge rock.
Bands like Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice In Chains,
and Pearl Jam from Seattle, Washington.
You don't remember when I bet Kurt that you guys
would be on the cover of Rolling Stone by the end of the year?
You did?
Even Rolling Stone magazine calls it a startling success story.
And it happened kind of all at once.
I remember going into a grocery store
and hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
- And the winner is... - Pearl Jam.
- Nirvana. - Soundgarden.
Like, you just don't go into a grocery store
and hear one of your friend's bands.
Probably the biggest band in the world right now.
The band's new album will debut at number one...
You know, from then on, everything went crazy.
Look, Mom, your favorite. Nirvana.
The nation's media declared Seattle
the coolest place in the known universe.
Every flight was booked with A&R people
from LA on their way up here to court the next Nirvana.
Seattle was an exciting place to be in the early '90s,
but it was getting to be a little surreal
because there was so much corporate interest
in what was happening.
You'd open up a magazine and there would be
the grunge wear section,
which you would have your flannel shirt,
your jeans, and your work boots.
And there were grunge pencil sets being sold down at Walgreens.
Could have saved you some cash on this call,
but what do I care? We're getting the band back together.
Hey, Slick, you could have spoken for a lot less
by dialing 1-800-collect.
Even to Seattle? Thanks, phone dude.
Everybody was trying to jump on the bandwagon
and be labeled "Sounds like this or that band from Seattle."
I kind of watched it happening
and I was just like, "Oh, my God!"
And I wanted no part of it.
And the scene was no longer there.
Everyone that I knew was out making records and touring.
Pre-money, pre-drugs, pre-business,
there was a lot of crazy fun that happened.
- I mean, it's really good. - I just don't...
- I just wonder if that's... - If that's the right vibe?
Yeah, because everything else is so trippy and atmospheric.
Um...
That's as dry as we can get it in there.
If we want it drier, I think we'd have to
move it to a small room, which we can do.
I'm afraid that if we do it like that,
it's just gonna sound like everything else on the record, in a way.
And the good thing about it is that it
doesn't sound like anything else on the record.
What if Dave played the cymbals and I just played the drums?
Yeah, like...
The cymbal separation technique
is where you do the drums separately from the cymbals.
It give you ability to manipulate the sound of the drums even more
because you're not dealing with the bleed of the cymbals.
And this is all sort of technical bullshit.
You probably won't care, but I'm telling you anyway.
Man, we like one fucking drummer, man.
I would be so much better if Dave would just play the hi-hat.
Maybe I'll just become the cymbal guy.
I'll be like... ♪ This is a call to all my... ♪
Then I would, like, only play the cymbals.
Go like...
♪ Hello, I've waited here for you... ♪
♪ Everlong. ♪
♪ Tonight... ♪
And be the lead singer. That would be badass.
- Right in front of the stage. - Yeah.
- Just me up there with cymbals. - Cymbals and lead vocals.
- It would be awesome. - That would be so fucking fucked up.
Totally. ♪ All my life I've been searching for something. ♪
♪ Something never comes... ♪
I'm the lead cymbalist.
Oh, we would be so fucking tight.
Well, let's record one. See what happens.
Whenever!
- Ready? - Yeah.
Here we go.
From the top.
Let's try one. Here we go.
Same punch here.
Give me one more of those.
Lovely. And one more.
Kind of don't really remember...
a lot of that summer.
I can't remember how I heard.
I think some friend called me one morning.
It was sad.
But I remember not being really surprised.
Yeah.
I ache a little bit when I come to Seattle.
Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain,
an extraordinarily gifted singer, songwriter,
and guitarist was found dead in Seattle...
...about 8:40 this morning when an electrician came...
...one of the most powerful voices of his generation.
He was the lead singer of one our most important bands.
It wasn't that 24-hour news cycle thing that happens now.
So it came out in Time magazine a week later
or Rolling Stone a couple weeks later.
So it didn't go away that quickly.
How do you think it affected the city?
Well, you know,
even just you saying it kind of gets me choked up.
It's like... I mean, I was 17
and I remember, like, you know...
Ugh!
It's, um...
I remember my mom coming into my room
in the morning and being like,
"You know, honey, Kurt Cobain just died."
And I just lost it, you know?
I lost it. And it was like, "I have to go to fucking school now?"
You know, the music didn't have to be important to you
to understand how important it was to other people.
I don't bring this up much, but it affected me
really, really strongly on a personal sense
because my father committed suicide.
So at that time I remember going to the memorial
almost, like, grieving as much for my father
as I did for Kurt.
I mean, it did sort of became all kind of one.
Fuck. I never called you guys, you know,
after that happened.
And I was kind of one...
Maybe one of the last people to see him, you know?
And I wrote a column about it, you know,
where I apologized for not calling you that you lost your friend.
You know? Rock band stuff all aside.
We know about rock bands, but you got your friends.
You know? And so I just wanted to say that.
- Sorry I never called you. - Thanks, man.
Yeah.
After Kurt died,
I didn't know what I was gonna do.
I spent a lot of time doing nothing.
No radio, no TV, nothing.
I just couldn't stand the sound of music.
I was scared of music.
I remember being in Ireland
driving around the country
away from everything.
Just rocks and moss and sheep and...
being totally disconnected from the rest of the world.
And I drove past this kid who was hitchhiking.
He had a fucking Kurt Cobain shirt on.
I saw that and I thought,
"Fuck, I've got to do something quick."
And then I realized that music
was the one thing that was gonna help me out of that place.
So I started writing again.
Starting from scratch.
Pretty much the next thing we did was come in here
to a big studio
and record all this stuff on a 24 track.
We went and printed up the 100 cassettes
that we basically handed out.
The one thing that I found out about starting over
is that, yeah, you are truly pigeonholed.
I knew that everyone only knew me
as the drummer in Nirvana.
But I felt like I had nothing left to lose.
Because of the way the whole Seattle music scene was going with the deaths,
I went to San Francisco for a couple of years.
I just ended up just travelling
for much of the early '90s and mid-'90s.
We all had to sort of, like,
back away from it and start over.
We've been to more than a few funerals.
Seattle's lost a lot of great talent.
But in some ways, that loss has only strengthened our bond.
The Seattle community has always been close.
And we are like a family.
Ah!
All right, cool. Second D section.
Throughout my career as a musician,
I've been so blessed to have this community of people
who are other songwriters and bands that we're really close with
that we've, you know, toured with,
that we've gone and sang on their new thing
or played guitar on something.
And, you know, just being a part of...
A part of a community I think is what really
pushes you forward creatively.
I think that if you believe in yourself and you believe in
what it is you're doing and not worry about what's going on outside,
that always seems to draw excitement.
People are drawn toward confidence
and they're drawn towards someone that seems to really be into what they're doing.
I was an underground rapper
for 15 years, really.
The Seattle hip-hop scene was small. Like, super tiny.
No one came out of this neck of the woods.
Sir Mix-a-Lot did, but it was almost an anomaly.
I never thought that I would be in
the position that I'm in now.
Never thought that one of my records
getting played on the radio was even possible.
When we put out the album,
the first week, labels started calling.
Was this on your label?
Yeah, we did it ourselves.
And we did the music video
and it started to gain traction.
And it's like we're watching the numbers go up.
It's two million, three million.
It jumps to 10 million, 15 million.
All of a sudden, like, this thing is viral.
You were the number two record on your own fucking label?
- Yeah. - That's so fucking rad.
I have always felt
that the revolution starts at home.
You do things the way you want to do them.
You create a culture. And eventually it can blow up.
And that's pretty much what happened in Seattle.
As new talent and new scenes
have emerged in Seattle,
it's amazing to see how much of the past
is still making a mark today.
I mean, the Sonics
have actually started playing together again.
Ann and Nancy Wilson from Heart are still doing it.
And Sub Pop...
Still going out of business.
What do people do when they come in here?
They freak out. Just like you did when I saw you walk up here.
Don't you think it's fucking weird?
It's very surreal, yeah.
It's even more surreal that I have to get up at 10 minutes to 5:00
and to go sling records.
- At the fucking airport. - Yeah, at the airport. Yeah.
Hey, people, Mark Arm of Mudhoney here.
To avoid transporting items without your knowledge,
please keep your carry on and checked baggage in your possession at all times.
Report unattended items...
It's a... It's... It's a weird world we live in, isn't it?
And if you see something, say something.
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport welcomes our military...
What's your best selling item in the shop?
What if I told you it was Nirvana "Bleach"
and not "Nevermind"?
Would that end the interview?
Okay.
Only because we got our "Nevermind" shipment late.
That's good.
_
Sync, corrected by icephoenix www.addic7ed.com
Oh, my God, we did "Kids in America."
- Yeah. - Let's hear that.