But the dudes in Green River are standing just offstage watching a pre-national-fame Jane’s Addiction kick ass in front of like 2,000 hometown fans.
The “Been Caught Stealing” video, Lollapalooza, “alternative rock,” none of that shit exists yet. The two big Jane’s Addiction albums haven’t come out yet. So Green River in 1987 play a show in L.A. Tell me this song doesn’t sound like a white Camaro furiously backing up and then pulling forward in a futile effort to dislodge a giant bassist turd on the hood. This is a Cat Butt song called “Big Cigar.” Sometimes a big cigar is just a big cigar. It got stuck in there, and he drove off.” Wow. And then Dean says, “The guy actually came out, and we watched him try to get it off: He backed the car up and slammed on the brakes so it would roll off the hood, but it ended up rolling back towards the windshield wipers. The car offended me, I don’t know.” So he takes a crap on the car. And Cat Butt’s bassist, a guy named Dean Gunderson, is inexplicably enraged by the mere presence of a white Camaro in the parking lot. The bands Mudhoney and Cat Butt are on tour, and they’re hanging out in an apartment complex or some kinda condo situation in Davis, California. My favorite anecdote from Everybody Loves Our Town is when the bass player in a Seattle band called Cat Butt takes a dump on the hood of a white Camaro.
Super-informative and also grody as all hell. My second recommendation is a book called Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, by the author and critic Mark Yarm, published in 2011. Eddie is both Ally and Jackson Maine that was great. I dug the chapter that ties Eddie Vedder’s arc into the Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga version of A Star Is Born. Our friend Steven Hyden in 2022 published a book called Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation. If you are hankerin’ to get bogged down in the broader Pearl Jam or the Seattle of it all, let me enthusiastically recommend two books to you.
The history, the backstory of Pearl Jam, and by extension the backstory of late ’80s and early ’90s Seattle, the coolest rock scene on Planet Earth at that or any other time, the mythic and teenage-identity-defining musical genre and lifestyle brand known grudgingly as grunge-this backstory is well-documented, let’s say.
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