Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready discussed the legacy of Grunge in a new Salon interview, and why it shouldn’t be seen as solely dark and depressing. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“Their perception of that is what the perception was back then too. Everyone is super serious, and it’s dark, and nobody wants to have fame, we’re against all that stuff. In reality if we were against all that stuff, we wouldn’t have been signing with major labels or doing videos, which we actually stopped doing. All of the stuff that you do as a band to be successful, at least in terms of a major label.
But we had a lot of humor, and still do, stupid guy humor, we’re friends. Stone and I watch Year One all the time, that movie, and we drive everybody in our band crazy because we’ll quote it. There’s a lot of kind of sarcasm that happened in Seattle, sarcasm they say is a form of anger, and I always thought that interesting. But we used that as humor, David Letterman was kind of our guy that we looked at, I think Stone did.
There was kind of a cynical humor that happened, which Chris [Cornell] had, which everyone from Seattle had, that was maybe off putting. But it was also funny. We also had a great time, I can’t say it was all depressing. There were times that it was, and angsty times, but it was also great. It wasn’t as dark as everybody thought.”
