STEVIE RACHELLE By the late ’80s I think bands started running out of names. You had Bang Tango and Bang Gang and Dangerous Toys and Electric Boys and Pretty Boy Floyd. There were multiple Wild Sides, there was Paradise and Pair-A-Dice. I remember it got to the point where bands had to start using, you know Queeny Blast Pop and Juicy Miss Lucy and Back Alley Sally—the names got longer because all the one-word names and two-word names were taken. Then you had David Lee Roth and Vince Neil and Bret Michaels and Jani Lane and now Ted Poley and Stevie Rachelle and Drew Hannah … another blond singer with a headband on. It just became saturated. And the Strip was even worse. Whatever you saw on Headbangers Ball or in Metal Edge, there were hundreds of those bands in Hollywood.
OZZY OSBOURNE Every band, the singer had blond hair and the band had dark hair, it was kind of like a uniform.
TRACII GUNS I remember going to see friends’ bands and being like, “Man, you guys are just like Poison. You guys are like this weird Junkyard-meets-Jetboy.” Where if you really look at Junkyard and Jetboy and Faster and L.A. Guns and Guns N’ Roses, it was like, “We all love Mötley Crüe, but we love this other stuff, too.” It was this crossbreeding thing and adding a new angle to it, whereas at the end nobody was really adding a new angle. But even Pretty Boy Floyd had a song I liked. A ballad. But it was too late.
RIKKI ROCKETT It was kinda like, “No, this nest is full. We don’t need more of that.”
RON KEEL How much spaghetti can you possibly eat in a week? The fans had enough. They’re gonna go pick something else off the menu.
JACK RUSSELL All of a sudden you have 38 Guns N’ Roses, 20 Ratts, 14 Warrants, 12 Great Whites … It was like, “Come on, really?” And it was a carbon copy, you know? Lesser and lesser than the original. And then the bottom fell out.
RON KEEL The emphasis was put on two things: fashion and sex. Everybody called it cock rock, right? It’s about how promiscuous you can be and how many conquests you can notch on your barrel. Well, all of a sudden in the mid-’80s sex became deadly because AIDS was a huge epidemic. All of a sudden you sing about that, you’re an idiot! Why would you wanna go out and screw six chicks a night and your odds of dying increase exponentially? Everybody loves sex, everybody wants sex, everybody needs sex, but you gotta sing about real life, love, heartbreak, drinkin’ beer … You just can’t sing about “Bang Bang,” “Let’s Put the X in Sex,” the list goes on.
CLIFF BURNSTEIN If you were a little intelligent at that point, you would go, “God, this stuff is absolute shit!” How much makeup, how big can the hair get, how many scantily clad young girls are going to be hanging around … What does this have to do with the music that I really like?
RUDOLF SCHENKER Longer hair, more colorful stage clothes. Left arm a girl, right arm a girl, great cars. Guitar player playing faster than hell. Everything was too flashy. And also us, we were a little bit overdressed.
OZZY OSBOURNE In the mid-’80s I said to Sharon, “This is gonna last forever.” And she said, “Wait until 1990.”
JAMES LOMENZO I could see the writing on the wall for any number of reasons. Our relationship with MTV—I could see they were struggling to figure out how to keep us in there.
LONN FRIEND MTV, they just stuck a knife in it. Because they couldn’t get the exposure anymore. Just a year or two before, the Top 10 Billboard charts were Scorpions and Def Leppard and Whitesnake … All those bands were ruling the charts, selling millions of albums. Then, you know, it’s gone.
RICK KRIM We had the thing called “Buzz Bin” or “Buzz Clip”—it was called different things in different years—where we’d pick a video each week to really put our stamp of approval on and get behind. And there was a week where it was either going to be Thunder or Alice in Chains.
JAY JAY FRENCH Thunder were on Geffen—that was the latest hair band jet that was supposed to take off. Album cost a million bucks. Band looked perfectly coiffed. Everything was ready to go.
RICK KRIM We were looking at that and Alice in Chains’ “Man in the Box,” which came before “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And we decided as a group, and I literally remember this meeting, it was a very intense discussion, and we decided we’re going to go with “Man in the Box.” I think that was the changing of the guard right there. We were like, “There’s been enough, we’ve done our thing, we recognize this new thing coming.” It just felt like it was time. We’ve got to keep the train moving forward.
JERRY CANTRELL You know, I get the slant. And the slant is “That shit needed to be killed. ’Cause it was fucking stupid.” And like, I’m not gonna say that, you know? And I’m not gonna say that we were so much cooler and that’s why we fucking took over. I don’t think anybody had some big master plan of how it was gonna go. It just kind of organically did. It was a cultural shift.
KIM THAYIL We were never motivated to damage another genre. We were motivated to advance ourselves.
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN Peter Fletcher was the product manager at Columbia for both Warrant and Alice in Chains. So I get this phone call from him one day and he says, “I have an interesting request for you … but it pays well.” He said, “Layne Staley [Alice in Chains lead singer] is obsessed with the costumes for Warrant and the costuming in general for the ‘Heaven’ video, and he’s especially obsessed with the Joey costume. Can you re-create the Joey jacket?”
STEVE BROWN I thought it was kind of sad the way that a lot of the grunge bands turned on us. Because all those bands—let’s not forget, Pantera, Alice in Chains—all those guys were hair metal, hard rock bands. They were all Van Halen, Def Leppard fans, you know? Alice in Chains opened up for Poison. The same time that we were out, they came out after Trixter on the Poison tour in ’91. So it was kind of funny how all the bands kind of changed their tune a little bit. I was like, “Dude, a couple months ago you were pounding beers in our dressing room. Now you’re slagging us in the press?”
JERRY CANTRELL We always had the attitude that we would play with anybody. I just wanted to get on a fucking stage. I didn’t care if it was with fucking Poison or Warrant or Iggy Pop or fucking Slayer and Megadeth. Whatever.
BRET MICHAELS I was the sole instigator of calling and getting Alice in Chains to play a bunch of Northwest dates with us. This was ’91. They came onstage and we did a Kiss song together. “Rock and Roll All Nite.” It was amazing.
KIM THAYIL I remember [Green River, Mother Love Bone, and Pearl Jam bassist] Jeff Ament was really into that first Poison album. He turned us on to that.
JERRY CANTRELL We opened for Helix and fucking Extreme. And fucking Great White for god’s sake. We got signed fucking opening up for Great White on a fucking racetrack out in fucking eastern Washington.
LARRY MAZER I went to a meeting at DGC Records, and in every office in every department it was advance cassettes of the Nirvana album playing. All they wanted to talk about was Nirvana.
MATTHEW NELSON I was in the parking lot of Geffen Records on my way in to have a meeting about our next record, and Tony Bird, an A&R guy there that was big with the whole Seattle thing saw me and said, “What, you’re still here?”
DANNY GOLDBERG Axl Rose apparently had heard the Nevermind tape, and he wore a Nirvana hat in a Guns N’ Roses video.
JIM MERLIS (publicist, Geffen Records) Lisa Gladfelter, Nirvana’s first publicist at their label, had worked with hair metal bands, so she brought them to the people she knew.
KATHERINE TURMAN She sent me the advance cassette of Nevermind. And she’s like, “I don’t know what this is, but I think it’s gonna be big.”
LONN FRIEND Nirvana came to my office at RIP and I had all these pictures on my wall. One of them was me pinching Metallica’s butts at the … And Justice for All photo sessions. And another one was Alice Cooper and me in a bathtub. Oh, and there’s a Queensrÿche photo that Ross Halfin insisted on taking of me naked just wearing a towel with Chris DeGarmo and Geoff Tate. So there were a lot of pictures. And Kurt apparently fixated on these Hustler kind of images. Even though Dave [Grohl, Nirvana drummer] and Krist [Novoselic, Nirvana bassist] had a great time at that lunch, Kurt didn’t get me, he didn’t get my vibe, he thought I was kind of a clown.
NEIL ZLOZOWER I was asked to shoot Nirvana once. I had to bring my gear backstage at the L.A. Sports Arena. I probably brought four hundred dollars’ worth of film. I get to the gig and I look around to see what I could do within the parameters and the boundaries of what I was given to work with. Kurt comes out and I’m like, “Oh, hey, Kurt, how’s it going? Look, I just want to let you know I’m really fast and painless, I’ve been doing this for twenty, twenty-five years. So look, we’re gonna shoot here, then we’re going to move ten feet over here, then we’re going to move ten feet over there…” And now all of the sudden he’s like, “Gidodo gadagideo dooda gagaga.” I’m like, “What the fuck planet is this guy on?”
So then the other guys come out and we get to the first location. We start shooting. And they’re just sitting there talking to each other. The tall guy, he’s turned around looking at Kurt and Dave, and he’s talking to them so I get the back of his head. So I’m like, “Guys, look here.” They were ignoring me. I pop off a frame and the guys are still talking. So I pop off another frame. Then I’m like, “Guys come on. Look in the lens.” And this is my big-format Mamiya camera, which is only ten shots on a roll. Finally, they look at me for about three or four shots and then they start talking to each other again. So after literally ten shots, I was like, This ain’t fucking happening. Fuck this shit. I say, “Okay, guys. We’re done.” And they look at me like, “We’re done?” I’m like, “Yeah. See you guys in the next world. Bye, bye! Adios! Nice knowing you.” And I just packed up and left.
ROSS HALFIN When Nirvana came along, someone played me “Teen Spirit.” I started laughing. I thought it was fucking rubbish.
BRIAN BAKER I remember very clearly when I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time. I was in my car at Vine and Hollywood Boulevard. I just had an AM/FM radio and I heard it and I immediately knew that this was a whole new thing that was going to be huge. I really was blown away by how great it was. The elements were just all perfect and they sounded like everything, if that makes any sense.
HOWARD BENSON I remember that day, too. I remember exactly where I was—in the studio with Little Caesar. I turned on MTV and I saw the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and all I thought was, I’m so fucked. I knew we were screwed. And it was sort of like, as a producer, there’s nothing you can do.
MICHAEL WAGENER When I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” I went, “Shit, that’s a great song.” It was noisy and it wasn’t played that well and it was not in tune that well, but I knew that it was a great song and that it was going to have a big influence. And it did. I got out of audio for a while.