I Wanna Rock: The '80s Metal Dream

Our second album, Slave to the Grind,

it debuts at number one.

We're getting ready to go on tour,

and we were doing a photoshoot with a good friend of ours,

a real friend, Lonn Friend, for RIP Magazine.

We're shooting a Skid Row session with the band

and Sebastian and I go, "Dudes, you wanna hear something?"

And I popped the cassette in, and they-

And Bas goes, "Fuck!"

Nirvana.

I'll never forget Rachel looking at me and going,

"Things are about to change."

I remember this one particular meeting.

Teen Spirit has come out.

The marketing people are about,

and I remember them saying, "Don't do anything.

It's working."

And the record just exploded.

Once a band does well,

A&R people start signing bands

that are like that, which is how the hair metal scene happened,

and that's how the grunge scene

got bigger and bigger and bigger.

Everybody's flying to Seattle,

like trying to find the next band.

And a lot of bands out of Seattle got signed.

It's nonstop Temple of the Dog, Alice in Chains.

A long time ago, it's like a lot of the bands

came from L.A., but now it seems like

a lot of the great bands are coming from the Seattle area.

And Pearl Jam is one of those bands.

And we're a great band.

You're a great band.

Groups like Pearl Jam

were writing really strong songs.

So you can't get away with fluff anymore.

The competition's too fierce.

This new sound was saying something different

than our collective hard rock brand of music.

And it was a whole different culture.

Grunge was an anti-rockstar thing.

They were more about music connection,

just a little more thoughtful.

So all these like crazy getup outfits, that was like gone.

You're not gonna see Eddie Vedder in buttless chaps.

Thank God.

Grunge, in a lot of the videos,

were exactly what other videos were,

but that sound and the look and the attitude

took it into a whole different direction.

With metal, it was all about, again,

the exuberance, the excitement.

I started watching November Rain and it's like,

a guy jumping through a wedding cake

when it starts to rain.

That absurdity and the largeness of it, it's too much.

You can see then Nirvana coming up

with a dog with the bite collar on.

It's the anti-video.

So do they destroy what's going on with the metal?

No, but they just said, "We don't wanna do that."

I liked a lot of those bands. A lot.

But you know, there was no reason

to throw the rest of us in the trash.

I've never heard of a band getting a bigger buzz

quicker than this band, Nirvana.

Hi, Riki. - First of all, love the suit.

Thanks a lot. - Be very comfortable

on planes, I think.

People point to grunge, specifically Nirvana,

as wielding some sort of Game of Thrones sword

and cutting the heart out of heavy metal music.

That's ludicrous.

If you say that grunge killed metal,

you're a fucking idiot.

If you wanna talk about bands that you say

kill your music scene, and you're thinking, well,

what about the biggest artist, Nirvana?

Guess what, people, you're not saying the G word,

and that's Garth.

In '92, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Red Hot Chili Peppers

sold a combined 9 million albums.

Garth Brooks sold 12.6 million.

Got to be a point you didn't even care

about being the number one if you could be number two

under Garth, because you were never gonna beat Garth.

And pretty soon, all those people that were going

to all those rock and roll shows

were going to country shows.

And pretty soon you started having these

very independent strong female artists.

So having the Alanis Morissette...

Tracy Chapman.

Strong women that had something to say,

and they had their own festivals.

We had our rock festivals,

they had their Liz Fair festivals and--

Lilith Fair. - What did I say, Lilla Fair?

Liz Fair. - Liz Fair?

You meant Lilith Fair.

Yeah.

Lilith Fair.

Those are two totally different things, aren't they?

You know what's interesting about genres?

When one shifts and changes,

it needs to be filled in by something else.

In the same way that Poison was having

Nothing But a Good Time,

Temple of the Dog was going on a Hunger Strike.

OK, what's to say one kills the other?

["Still of the Night" by Whitesnake plays]

What killed the Strip?

Hair metal had a hand in taking itself out.

As metal evolved, a lot of bands didn't get it,

and they thought like the image

was the most important thing.

We were doing this sort of rebellious

but fun kind of music.

There wasn't a lot of darkness or anything to it.

A lot of colorful antics going on.

Like M tley Cr e's not necessarily the best band,

the best instrumentalists, but what they were doing

early on was authentic.

What diminished over the course

of the decade was that authenticity.

When hair metal bands

were no longer the next big thing,

there was a backlash.

You know, you become a laughingstock.

A lot of those bands who went from playing arenas

and theaters were back in clubs.

Some of them didn't survive at all.

MTV made a left turn. They just stopped playing it.

That was the media force.

I couldn't get a gig, lost my record deal,

lost the publishing, everything was gone.

I was sitting in Rick Krim's office when somebody came in

and said, "Hey, man, you got the new Metallica video?"

And it was Nothing Else Matters.

And I saw Rick's nervous face, usher the video out,

making sure I wouldn't go,

"Hey, man, let me check out the new Metallica video."

Metallica throwing darts at my poster in the video,

I didn't typically think it's cool

to slag off your fellow musician.

Hey, Butt-Head, check it out. I'm going as a wuss.

Our name was toxic.

This was very clear before Beavis and Butt-Head

and after Beavis and Butt-Head.

This is cool, huh, guys?

Shut up, Stewart. We're trying to watch TV.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I was on the scene of the crime.

I had my T-shirt on Stewart's chest.

I am the guy that represents everything that sucks.

I lost all my confidence.

It really shook me to the core of my being, you know.

What the hell is your mom's problem, Stewart?

Yeah. Your mom sucks.

We were no longer a viable musical entity.

It was horrifying.

There was inner turmoil in the band a little bit

because we didn't know what to do.

I didn't see it going anywhere.

So we called it quits.

I needed to do other things that I liked doing

other than music.

A lot of soul-searching,

spent a lot of time with my dog,

played a lot of golf.

There's not a big audience for that.

What do you see for yourself in the next five years?

Well, I don't know.

All of a sudden I felt it had just been ripped

out from underneath me, you know?

And I was devastated because I had nothing else to my life.

Nothing. It was all that mattered to me.