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RollingStone: “It’s never been entirely clear what this feud with Eddie Vedder was about.”
Kurt Cobain: “There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed — not probably against their will — but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.”
RollingStone: “Don’t you feel any empathy with them? They’ve been under the same intense follow-up-album pressure as you have.”
Kurt Cobain: “Yeah, I do. Except I’m pretty sure that they didn’t go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They’re a safe rock band. They’re a pleasant rock band that everyone like. [Laughs] God, I’ve had much better quotes in my head about this. It just kind of pisses me off to know that we work really hard to make an entire album’s worth of songs that are as good as we can make them. I’m gonna stroke my ego by saying that we’re better than a lot of bands out there. What I’ve realized is that you only need a couple of catchy songs on an album, and the rest can be bullshit Bad Company rip-offs, and it doesn’t matter. If I was smart, I would have saved most of the songs off Nevermind and spread them out over a 15-year period. But I can’t do that. All the albums I ever liked were albums that delivered a great song, one after another: Aerosmith’s Rocks, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks…, Led Zeppelin II, Back in Black, by AC/DC.”
Interviewer: “It’s never been entirely clear what this feud with Eddie Vedder was about.”
Kurt Cobain: “There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed — not probably against their will — but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.”
“I don’t want to see ‘COBAIN IS GOD’ spray-painted on the wall, my ego is already inflated way past the exploding stage. I feel embarrassed saying this, but I’d like to be recognized more as a songwriter. I don’t pay attention to polls and charts, but I thumb through them once in a while and see, like, Eddie Vedder is nominated number-one songwriter in some magazine, and I’m not even listed.” - Kurt Cobain.
Interviewer: “Soundgarden and other Seattle bands were labeled as “grunge.” Was that offensive?”Chris Cornell: “At the time it was. Not because of the actual name. It came from an organic place. But I didn’t feel that Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Nirvana ever sounded much like each other. I feel we were all indie rock bands that were part of an evolution.”
“Sometimes, whether you like it or not, people elevate you…and it’s very easy to fall. I don’t think any of us would be in this room if it weren’t for Kurt Cobain.” - Eddie Vedder.
“It’s so powerful, such a human moment and it is what happens outside the glare of the spotlight, the fact that it’s on film is amazing and so poignant.” - Cameron Crowe.
“It was incredibly emotional, just ‘cause he’s smiling… and you wish he just could have pulled through.” - Eddie Vedder.
A snippet of the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary featuring never-before-seen footage of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder slow-dancing at the 1992 VMAs. I cover this landmark event in my new book, Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge:
AMY FINNERTY (MTV director of music…
“There was a lot of stuff that got said, but none of it really matters. Now, thinking about it. And I like to think he may have had second thoughts about some of the things he said, you know… I mean there’s a person we both knew, who told me that Kurt asked about me a lot, like picked their brains about me, this person who knew us both. And I thought that was cool. That made me feel good, you know. Because so much bullshit was getting written about us. And we talked, we talked a couple of times. And this one time, he told me flat-out, just delivered me a whole paragraph on the respect he had for what I did, and he realised it was pure.
This was at the MTV Awards. ‘Tears of Heaven’ was playing in the background, we were slow dancing. I remember going out surfing the next morning and remembering how good that moment felt and thinking, ‘Fuck, man, if only we hadn’t been so afraid of each other…’ Because we were going though so much of the same shit. If only we’d talked, maybe we could have helped each other.” - Eddie Vedder.
Pearl Jam “Twenty” Trailer:
After the flop that was 2005’s “Elizabethtown,” Cameron Crowe comes back with a vengeance in 2011. He’s got three films in the can all coming out at various times this year, his Oscar hopeful, “We Bought A Zoo,” his Elton John doc, “The Union,” which chronicles John and Leon Russell‘s collaborative album which premiered at Tribeca earlier this year and finally, his “Pearl Jam Twenty,” documentary which was announced as part of the Toronto International Film Festival this morning.
Something special to note. Crowe lets loose a few details like the documentary will feature footage of Neil Young, Soundgarden‘s Chris Cornell and even footage of Kurt Cobain, presumably discussing Pearl Jam.
