60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Temple of the Dog—“Hunger Strike”

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Rob explores grunge supergroup Temple of the Dog’s signature single “Hunger Strike” by discussing the rise of Seattle as the center of the alternative rock scene, the band’s fixation with darkness, and the genre’s complex relationship with ’70s nostalgia. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Eric Harvey Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What I got here is a Russian nesting doll of grizzled rock dudes, most of whom are wearing flannel shirts, many of whom are also wearing baggy shorts over black tights, quite fashionable at the time. It was mystifying. And all these grizzled rock dudes are either condemning cheap nostalgia or actively generating exquisite nostalgia or both. That's what I got here.

I will now unstack and reveal these dolls for your delight and amazement. First up, Mike Watt. best known as bassist for the Minutemen, pride of San Pedro, California, one of the best punk bands of the 80s, double nickels on the dime is arguably the best album of 1984, and that's the year Purple Rain came out. Mike Watt, flannel shirt, definitely.

Shorts, overtights, definitely not. Mike often refers to his bass guitar as a thunder broom. The thunder part is self-explanatory, but the broom part is also. He is reliable, he is conscientious, He is workman-like. We Jam O'Connell was the unofficial Minutemen's slogan for a reason.

The best song on double nickels on the dime is called Maybe Partying Will Help. Get a load of Mike Watt on the Thunder broom. Rest in peace, Dee Boone on guitars and vocals most of the time. D. Boone died in a car accident in 1985. Since then, Mike Watts

formed a bunch of other bands and done a bunch of other stuff. Most notably, for our purposes, in 1990 As already a revered, grizzled rock dude and punk elder statesman, Mike Watt released a solo album called Ball Hog or Tugboat. The album title makes sense if Mike Watt explains it to you. Ball Hog or Tugboat had an all-star cast, most notably on the lead single, which condemned cheap nostalgia

and was called Against the 70s. Lift off the head of that first Russian doll and who's next under there? Holy shit, it's Eddie Vedder. Great Thunder broom action on this song, obviously. I loved this song when I was 17. First of all, because when I was 17, I loved Eddie Vedder. And partly, thanks to Eddie Vedder, I knew that I was supposed to love Mike Watt, like many people. I'd learn to love Mike Wat for real when I got to college.

That's Dave Grohl on drums, by the way. That's Chris Nova Selig on organ, by the way. That's right. This song is as close as you're ever getting to Eddie Vedder, fronting Nirvana. And of course, when I was 17, I loved Nirvana, too, because I loved 90s alternative rock, which would never die, which would never get old, which would never die before it got old, like the 70s did. Fuck the 70s. Fuck the past. Fuck nostalgia. Eddie Vedder told me so. But now it's a quarter century later, and we're not talking about someone else's

sentimentality anymore. We're talking about mine. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s, and it's time for hunger strike by Temple of the Dog. That riff is like a reissued 1962 Fender Stratocaster plugged directly into your soul, or at least my soul. We got a few more grizzled rock dudes to sort out here. Temple of the Dog was a Seattle supergroup featuring members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. From a man, Chris Cornell and drummer Matt Cameron, were the Sound Garden guys,

occasional singer Eddie Vedder, guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, and bassist Jeff Amentz, were the Pearl Jam guys. They put out one album, also called Temple of the Dog, in 1991. Hunger Strike did not become a breakout hit in MTV staple until Pearl Jam and Soundgarden

emerged as two of the hottest young rock bands in America. Seattle. Grunge. Grunge will never die. Grunge will never get old. Guitars, Fender Stratocasters, and Gibson, Les Pauls, mostly, will rule the world forever. The song hits me harder now than any one song by either Pearl Jam or Soundgarden, though I still love both those bands dearly and blast their music in my house, often to the consternation of my loved ones. Hunger Strike is a pure thunderbolt of nostalgia, not the cheap. kind, the exquisite kind. Why this song, as opposed to a live or spoon man or corduroy or outshined or elderly woman behind the counter in a small town or whatever? Probably it comes down to death and getting old, but mostly death. Temple of the Dog was a tribute album, morning a Seattle

rock star who didn't quite live long enough to see Seattle rock stars take over the world. Hunger Strike is one of the great rock star duets of the 20th century. It's a monolith of rockstar grief and rock star deification. And maybe part of the reason this song has grown, in my estimation, lately, is that it sure hits a lot harder nowadays that the first voice you hear is Chris Cornell's, and one day we'd be mourning him, too. Chris Cornell is the primary songwriter and engine for Temple of the Dog, a band that formed in tribute to his roommate and fellow aspiring Seattle rock star Andrew Wood,

who died of a heroin overdose at 24 years old on March 19, 1990. Andrew Wood was the charismatic lead singer for the hard rock band Mother Love Bone, whose only album, Apple, came out posthumously in July 1990 and featured a couple future members of both Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog, namely Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament. Mother Love Bone are exactly halfway between hair metal and grunge. This band is the exact moment that torch was passed with both hands still on the torch. Andrew Wood, quite proudly, was not a guy willing to defend himself against the 70s.

This dude's plan was to record Led Zeppelin's 5 through 12. He was flamboyant. He was lascivious. He sang like he had 30 armadillos stuffed in his trousers. You just hear his voice. and like a really intense, oversized hat magically appears on your head. Seriously, Mother Lovebone press photos are a real good time. The long and illustrious hair, the wacky hats, the occasional bandana,

the super ostentatious sunglasses. They all look like they're auditioning for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie 15 years too early. This is your periodic reminder that grunge didn't kill hair metal so much as hair metal just became grunge. It's as much about style as about sound. What differentiated alternative rock from plain old rock was that alternative rock stars weren't supposed to act or, for that matter, look like rock stars. They had to be indifferent to fame, embarrassed by fame,

tortured by fame. But Andrew Wood evoked Axel Rose far more than, say, Eddie Vedder did. Andrew Wood was a hip-sweighing snake charmer guy, an unabashed power ballad guy, an unabashed guy in general. Talking to Rale Stone in 2016, Chris Cornell put it like this. In his mind, he was already a rock star, and he was waiting for the rest of the world to figure it out. Also, Mike McCready said, Andy carried himself around Seattle like a rock star. I would see him walking around with his scarves and glasses. Seattle people thought they were cooler than that, but he just didn't care. He carried himself in this glorious 1970s way. But Andrew Wood's death further cemented the 970s, Antipathy toward the 70s. Self-loathing was the new flamboyance.

And by the time Mother Lovebone's best song, Chloe Dancer, Crown of Thorns, showed up on the soundtrack to the movie Singles in 1992. Andrew Wood had already been gone for two years. It took a long time for me to realize that Hunger Strike is just the guitar version of this. I have this recurring fantasy about learning Chloe dancer on the piano,

just so I can play it at parties to the delight and amazement of everyone? Who am I kidding? To the delight and amazement of exactly one other person at the party, and then in the fantasy, I go talk to that one person

for exactly 20 minutes, and then I leave. Partying does not help. Singles, of course, was the delightful Cameron Crow rom-com about the vibrant and dominant Seattle rock scene, which thanks to Nirvana and Pearl Jam

and Soundgarden and Allison Chains, was by then dominating the charts, an alt rock radio and MTV. Part of the tragedy of Andrew Wood is that he helped build all of that, but he also missed all of that. To your average MTV watcher, Andrew Wood was an angel, an abstraction, a romantic cautionary tale. He was the guy Chris Cornell wrote all those Temple of the Dog songs about, starting with the power ballot called Say Hello to Heaven. Also a tough one to hear Chris Cornell sing now. Say Hello to Heaven, which is bluesy and sultry and like a black,

diamond difficult song to actually sing. Also gives you, let's say, 85% of the Jeff Buckley experience a couple years in advance. Speaking of extravagantly mourned alt rock stars, by 1990, Soundgarden's already got a couple albums out. And Chris Cornell is clearly the best pure singer and maybe the best pure rock star in the Seattle Farm System. I already did it in another episode, so I'll resist the urge here to play the clip from the song Big Dumb Sex again.

but if you know, you know. There were 35 to 40 armadillos and Chris Cornell's trousers, though he was also a big baggy shorts over tights guy. It's mystifying. Soundgarden's catalog is rad, dude. It's heavy and it's thorny, and it's the closest you're getting to actual Led Zeppelin 5 through 12 energy. I'm a super unknown man, which I suppose isn't too incendiary.

Mailman is the best song on Super Unknown. Maybe that's incendiary. But the Temple of the Dog record is arguing. your first glimpse of Chris Cornell at full power. He somehow still sounds soulful and sensual and deep, even when he's basically just barking at the moon. Chris told Rolling Stone that Hunger Strike was about his existential crisis when Soundgarden triggered a major label bidding war. When he sings about stealing bread from the mouths of decadence, he's basically talking about cashing checks from A&M records. Quote, we were living our dream, but there was also this mistrust over what that meant.

Does this make us a commercial rock band? Does it change our motivation when we're writing a song and making a record? Hunger Strike is a statement that I'm staying true to what I'm doing, regardless of what comes of it. But I will never change what I'm doing for the purposes of success or money. In other words, he's going to pay tribute to Andrew Wood by becoming the rock star Andrew Wood never got to become, but he's going to do it for the right reasons. the table and the mouths are choking.

The problem with this song was that it had only one verse. And so Chris either had to write a whole second verse, suboptimal, or find a guy who could sing the first verse again, but with an entirely different 90s rock star vibe. And just like that, holy shit, it's Eddie Vedder. Eddie Vedder does not quite have Chris Cornell's range octave-wise, Doesn't have the Banshee Howl action. What he does have is one of the most striking baritones of his generation, the depth, the gravity.

His existential crisis is permanent. He's romanticizing everything. He's mistrusting everything. The reluctant rock star who made reluctance sexy, or at least made reluctance profound. The guy in Spin Magazine in 1993 complaining about the size of the arena he was playing in Rotterdam, saying things like, how can you have a religious experience? watching a band in a place this size by clinging to Eddie Vedder's baritone. That's how.

Pearl Jam is just forming as a band in this moment. They almost called themselves Mookie Blaylock after the NBA player, drafted by the Nets in 89, average 10.1 points as rookie season. For Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, Temple of the Dog was away to both welcome Eddie to the fold and mourn Andrew Wood. Jeff later said, it helped us come to terms with losing a friend.

As for Hunger Strike, it's Eddie Vedder's first major recording session ever. 20 years later, in the documentary Pearl Jam 20, directed by Cameron Crow, of course, Eddie put it this way.

It was the first time I ever heard myself on a real record, so it could be one of my favorite songs that I've ever been on or the most meaningful. That noise in the background is the giant crackling fire, Eddie Vedder's sitting next to because he's an intense romantic guy.

Quite possibly, I listen to Pearl Jam more than any other artist from the 90s while living through the actual 90s. Maybe we'll talk about that more. Sometime, Vitology is their best record, Yield is their last great record, Crazy Mary is a top five Pearl Jam song. None of this is terribly incendiary. I'm living my truth. But Eddie Vedder, more than anyone else, taught Teenaged Me what a rock star was or was now. And a huge part of being a rock star then was that growly sort of self-loathing. He was almost self-defeating.

Don't do videos. Pick a fight with Ticketmaster. Piously absorb a bunch of shit talk from Kirk Cobain. Reject rock stardom as an idea. Act like you hate it. Talk about how you hate it. This is how Eddie Vedder defended himself against the 70s. He idolized the who, for example, but he did not want to be in the who, or act like he was in the who, or be revered like a guy in the who.

I don't blame you. I don't blame anybody who finds this attitude joyless or pretentious. It did get tiresome. Pearl Jam, as a whole, could sound tired. But Eddie Vedder's voice, the quiet ferocity of it, still triggers something in me. Eddie Vedder's voice intertwined with Chris Cornell's voice, quadrupley so. So in 1991 Soundgarden break out with their third album, Bad Motor Finger, and Pearl Jam break out with their first album, 10.

Throw in Nirvana's Nevermind, and there you go. Seattle's takeover is complete. This is Shangri-La. Hunger Strike only really caught on at MTV and Radio in 1992. The same year, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden play the second annual Lollapalooza Festival. Still jealous of the kids' freshman year of high school, who got to go to that one. It was a really scary looking dude sitting behind me in Algebra.

He got a pearl jam t-shirt. I was super pissed and also scared. But the Hunger Strike video is still a great way to see Eddie and Chris and the boys before they truly blow up, before they become the rock stars they were trying to be or were worried about becoming. It was a chance to watch a bunch of handsome and earnest and endearingly awkward and only slightly oddly dressed men rock out on the beach. that's the part of the video where they're rocking out on the beach some severe fashion choices happening here eddie's got a leather vest over his flannel shirt plus the shorts and tights situation jeff ament is also rocking the shorts and tights plus a windbreaker with like ten pockets plus a big poofy hat he looks like a mini boss and a teenage mutant ninja turtle's arcade game that's rude i'm sorry say something nice about jeff ament jeff ament's ascending baseline on hunger strike very quietly hold holds this whole song together even when it gets screamier. And then everybody on that beach went on to play a whole bunch of arenas and steal a whole lot of bread.

Despite the reticence, the unease of grunge, broadly as this music peaked and then plateaued, and then passed the torch again to new metal or whatever, grunge was always suspiciously good at eulogizing itself. For me, the Seattle rock songs from this era that hit hardest now tend to be the softness, or at least dabble in softness. In 1995, Mike McCready, now a guitar tablature magazine superstar, thanks to Pearl Jam, joined yet another Seattle one-off supergroup

called Mad Season that included Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin and Allison Chain's frontman, Lane Staley. Not to be incendiary, but the best Allison Chains' album is Jar of Flies, the acoustic one. Lane Staley's single greatest vocal performance, the most startling in its stillness,

the most moving, is quite possibly Mad Seasons River of Deceit. 1994, of course, is the year Kirk Cobain died by suicide. He was 27. 2002, of course, is the year Lane Staley died of a heroin overdose. He was 34. 2017, of course, is the year Chris Cornell died by suicide. He was 52.

These guys all left such tender, such overwhelmingly powerful monuments to themselves long before they passed. This entire era we used to just call rock and roll. Before rock and roll became a corny and undignified way to put it, there was this overwhelmingly mournful quality to it. Feeling nostalgic for the 70s, totally uncool. Don't be a lame stain. Don't be a cob nobler. Put away your wax slacks. All right.

But 90s rock stars. Even the reluctant ones had the rare ability to evoke nostalgia for themselves, nostalgia for 10 seconds ago. It sure made a lot of gawky teenagers feel wistful and melodramatic and wise beyond our years and our flannel shirts. Don't trust anybody else to write your own epitaph. My buddy David told me this story once about doing karaoke with a super, super drunk friend. This is the kind of karaoke where you get up on stage and everyone in the bar watches you. So the super drunk friend really wants to do hunger strike. And David's like, all right.

So they get up on stage and there's two chairs for them to sit in on opposite sides of the stage. And David takes the Chris Cornell part. So he starts. And he sings the whole first verse. And it jumps right to Eddie Vedder's verse. And everyone in the bar turns in unison toward the super, super drunk guy who's passed out in his chair. And so just this beautiful image of a bar full of people gaping at this passed out. drunk guy to just total silence other than the guitar riff for hunger strike it's just the most

poignant thing in the world to me to this day i'm intensely nostalgic about that moment and i wasn't even there such as the power of hunger strike which in 1992 helped mtv's audience mourn the death of a guy the vast majority of mtv's audience was probably not familiar with there would be plenty of other people plenty of other artists plenty of other scenes plenty of other supreme states of being to mourn in the decades to come. Being a teenager, not the least among them. My guest today is the critic and professor and author in Renaissance man, Eric Harvey,

who's written for Pitchfork and the New Yorker and tons of other places. His book, Who Got the Camera, A History of Rap and Reality, will be published in October 2021. Welcome, Eric. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me.

Of course. So a couple of years back, you wrote a great pitchfork piece about, I think, the 25th anniversary of the singles soundtrack. And you talked a lot about how dark grunge was. It was all these really troubled guys like singing about death and sickness and pain. And in some cases, singing really passionately about the things that would kill them one day. Was that darkness obvious to you at the time?

Did it feel real to you at the time? Or is it only in retrospect that you realize how troubling and how sad this whole era was? Yeah, I think, I mean, the first thing at the time was it was just cool. Right. It was the kind of music that really resonated with young men, especially, you know, young men who could relate to how some of the imagery in the videos looked. You know, the video of Hunger Strike, you know, it's like standing in tall grass and stuff like that. It's very cool. Yeah, it's very, it looked itchy, frankly.

It looked uncomfortable, but they played it off well. Yeah, jamming on the beach and so forth, you know. Exactly. Picking ticks out of your skin and things like that. It's like, I've done that before. I can relate. I thought they were cool. Obviously, the music was dark. I related to Lane Staley the most, you know, just because I thought he was the coolest dude, but it was just all this, this big kind of awesome scene. Obviously, once Kurt Cobain killed himself, and then Lane Staley,

and then Scott Weiland died, and then, you know, now really the only, one of the things I read about in that piece, you know, the only, the last man standing is Eddie Vedder. Eddie Vedder, yeah. Who was, you know, not even a local. He was, you know, he kind of relocated. And I wrote it right after Chris Cornell's death. And it really just made it sink in so much more that, like, you know, this was music that was that was not only dark. It was, it was fixated on death.

It was fixated. I mean, songs like Jeremy. Right. It's just the kind of stuff that when you're 15, you don't really think about in the same way that you think about when you think about when you're when you're in your 40s, especially compounded by the tragedies that have kind of befallen everybody. Yeah, I was drawn to Lane Staley as a teenager, too, and then you go back and, like, he's just, he's singing about heroin, like just explicitly, unmistakably singing about drugs. And I try to imagine myself at 17, like, what the hell I was thinking. Like, it didn't make me

try drugs, but I don't understand the attraction if it didn't get me to try drugs. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think, you know, I was really just attracted. I loved dirt. And still to this day, when I think back to high school, dirt is one of my favorite albums. And like you say, I mean, it is an incredibly dark album. And it's about some of the kind of stuff that we don't like to necessarily think about. It's also very melodic. I think it's got killer bass lines. Jerry Cantrell just is an incredible songwriter. And you have stuff like Rooster, which is more about Vietnam. which is still traumatic. But I think on top of all of those, you know, just Lane Staley's presence, his voice could make things, you know, like heroin addiction or, you know, any other kinds of trauma sound, you know, really appealing to a kid who, you know, I was seeking, I was looking for stuff. I was not a troubled kid. I was lucky enough to be, you know, I grew up in the suburbs. I didn't have a whole lot to worry about. So I think like a lot of kids like me, I was looking for stuff. I was looking to identify with people who were troubled and who were kind of tapped into the kind

of darker impulses of humanity. And, you know, I found it. And I mean, that's one of the sort of double-sided coins of being a fan of rock and roll is that, you know, you do. You want to kind of get close to the flame. But then at the same time, what are you asking of these people, right? You know, as a fan, you're asking these people to do some stuff and to kind of keep pushing and keep pushing. Right. I was a huge pearl jam guy in high school, but Hunger Strike was not necessarily my favorite song at the time, you know, but I think it's my favorite grunge era song now. Did that song mean anything to you at the time? And like, does it mean anything more or difference to you now? My favorite song from Temple of the Dog was say hello to heaven, because I loved Chris Cornell's

vocal performance on that song. But, I mean, everybody, liked Hunger Strike. I mean, Hunger Strike was this, it was weird because, as we know, it came out kind of before, quote-unquote, Seattle. It came out before Brunch. It was, you know, released in the wake of Andrew Wood's death, and it was sort of a tribute album, kind of a supergroup before Earl Jam was even a group in a manner of speaking. And when they were really pushing it to radio in 92 after Nirvana, et cetera, the interplay between Chris Cornell's voice and, and Eddie Vedder's voice is just, I mean, how do you not love that? It's like the chocolate and peanut butter kind of, you know, it's like they're just,

they're perfect in their own way. You know, Chris Cornell had that metal kind of scream and Eddie Vedder had that voice that nobody, everybody does an Eddie Vedder, you know, it's kind of easy to do. It is. Yeah. Yeah, you just kind of, you know, sing from the chest and just kind of, you know, mutter. You can do it now if you want. I'd rather not.

Okay, all right. Just because it's being recorded. Yeah, okay. But that's way better than me trying to do Chris Corps now. Right, no, that's, you could injure yourself. Yeah, that's a tough one answer myself. I actually do have one minor story about this is that I sang for some friends, band for Battle of the Band senior year in high school, which was 1995.

Okay. I'm not a singer. I'm only a passable musician in any sense of the term. But I was willing to humiliate myself in front of my high school. And so I agreed to do it. And so at the first rehearsal, they said, hey, we're going to do Outshined. Oh, no. And I was like, I was like, I love O'Shine.

I love sound. I didn't know you guys knew this. I was like, let's do it. I knew it, you know. And 20 seconds into the song. Right, I was going to say. It's not going to happen. Thank you for trying.

You know, so we ended up doing, we did, we did Weezer. And we did the beast. Yeah, there we go. We did stuff that's like very easy to sing. Mm-hmm. But that's the thing about hunger strike. It has that sort of difference of emotionality. So you get somebody like Eddie Vedder who kind of defines what it means to be kind of a brooding intellectual frontman.

And then, you know, Chris Cornell, on the other hand, is grunges direct link back to Robert Plant and the shrieking kind of, you know, sex god front man. And there's not a whole lot to the song. You know, the last minute or so of the song is just them kind of riffing, it feels like. But the way they kind of intertwine and kind of bounce off of each other, I mean, I still love it. And it's just, you know, especially when Cornell starts kind of soaring up toward the top of his register at the end of the song. And it's just, yeah, it's great. I just talked about it for 20 minutes and resisted using the word bromance. I just ruined it now by saying it now.

I feel bad about that. But yeah, there's some real chemistry, platonic chemistry there. And one of the cool things I think about Chris Cornell and Eddie Vetter is that in the movie singles, like I see the two of them merged in the character of Cliff Ponce, you know, Matt Dillon's character of the lead singer of Citizen Dick. I see that he has kind of both a little bit of the heshire and a little bit of the brooding kind of intellectual. And it just seems like there's a little bit of thoseism in him. Yeah. So this whole episode is your fault because you got me thinking about hunger strike and

grunge nostalgia. So somebody was tweeting about that show, The Wonder Years, right? Which was a really melodramatic sitcom, late 80s, early 90s. It was set in the 60s. It had all the 60s music. And somebody said, if you made the Wonder Years now, it would be set in 2001. And your point was that boomer nostalgia, you know, for the 60s, mostly is completely different from Gen X nostalgia for the 90s or like millennial nostalgia. So like a Wonder Years now set 20 years ago would feel completely different. Like how would it be different to you? Oh, man. I mean, I feel like it first off the, I don't know, it'd be weird. I'm just trying to think about, well, what would the theme song be? You know, so the Wonder Years theme song was the Joe Cocker cover of

a little hell from my friends. And I was like, would it be daft punk? Would it be the strokes? The strokes. Yeah. But then it, you know, it made me think like when I, yeah, limbiscuit. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, nookie as the theme song for a show about 2011. Hey, who knows? It might work. But it made me think. And I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for a long time about how how nostalgia works kind of in cahoots. with technology and in cahoots with how technology gives us access to our shared past. And when Wonder Years debuted, as a kid, I only knew the Joe Cocker song from the show. I didn't know it from Woodstock. I didn't know it from, you know, Joe Cocker's kind of outsized imagery from, you know, playing with Leon Russell and all that. stuff in the 70s. And I had a vague sense of what, quote unquote, Vietnam men, I knew what some of the

kind of cultural references. I'd seen old photos of my folks who were kind of around then. So I knew kind of what the clothing styles were. But it was very blurry. And you know, you could access it through that as a teen. But it wasn't like we, I didn't have a whole lot of exact digital replicas of that era as every human being does now of 2001. And so you hear this a lot. It's just like, we're as close to X as this person was to X or something like that. And it's just like the difference between 1920 and 1940 is the same as the difference between 2021 and 1991 or something like that.

It's like, okay, it's an easy thing to do and it works really well as a tweet. Makes you feel old, which is the... Makes you feel old and it makes you kind of think about kind of the passage of history and stuff. But I just so I don't think that that history works in the same way across generations that that easily. So having access to the entire history of the past 20 years and a lot of it being not collectively shared, but, you know, the last 10 years or so obviously being kind of relived on social media and we're in a state now. were 510, 15, 20, 25, 30 year anniversaries. It's like, oh, yeah, what are we celebrating today?

It's like Interpol's fourth album came out and now this is worth coronation or something, right? Yeah. And I'm thinking about, like, the way that we interact with the past, it's a combination of technology. Everything is available, but it's also marketing and always drawing attention to old stuff. Whereas back in the 60s or even in the 80s, there were like five or six things that we cared about the 20th anniversary. Right. Right. It was like the Kennedy assassination. It was the moon landing, the Beatle, you know, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play and that kind of stuff. Where now it's like we're celebrating the historical importance of the first Ice Age album or whatever, right?

It's things. So I feel like a lot of the historical importance, the importance of the past is really sort of collapsed. And so a show, you know, about 2001, in essence, to kind of put it bluntly, it just doesn't feel nearly as long ago as it does. Honestly, like 2001, to me, I don't know what other people think, but it doesn't feel as nearly distant as the difference between the late 60s and the late 80s must have for folks who had some Polaroids or some family members. And so I think that technology really does play a big role in that. And so that's kind of what spawned this idea for me.

Yeah. The Internet ruined the wonder. years is what you're saying. The internet ruined the wonder years. The internet ruined a lot of stuff. And everything else, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I can go off, you know, a lot more about, about how nostalgia works and earnestness and irony and things like that. But, you know, it'll depend on sort of where we want to go. Sure. With this. Well, you and I, I think, share a great affection for Mike Watts against the 70s, the song, you know, which was a song from 1995 denouncing nostalgia for the 70s. So when you were a teenage,

in the 90s. Did it feel like 70s nostalgia was personally oppressing you? Was rock and roll nostalgia oppressing you in general? Did it seem like something that was attacking? Yeah, it wasn't, but it felt good to say that it was, right? I was at a college radio station. It was at Franklin College, 89.5 WFCI, shout out Franklin, Indiana. And we got the ball hog or tugboat promo and, you know, threw it in and went right to the Eddie Vedder track. Totally. It's Pearl Jam, and so we played it. And it's a jam.

I mean, it's a great song. It's a really well-written song. Great vocal performance from Eddie Vedder and like what. But at the same time, I was, you know, I was just thinking about this. I was like, I was also like listening to a ton of Jeff Rottal and Zeppelin and Steely Dan. And I was listening to the 70s. Right. While I was also kind of thinking like, yeah, fuck the 70s, man.

Like, it is. It's my dad's generation and it's, you know, what is it? It's not reality. It's someone else's sentimentality. I mean, that's a great, great line, right? But it's also, like, I don't know if I necessarily believed it at the time. Here's the other thing I think is interesting about that song. So you've got Mike Watt and you've got also playing on song.

obviously Eddie Vetter and Dave Grohl playing drums. And I think Chris Nova Sellich might be playing Whirlitzer or something. Organ or something, yeah, yeah. And so you've got in the song, you've got Mike Watt. And I think Mike Watt's connection to nostalgia is super interesting and worthy of comment, if I may. Please. Because if you go back and you remember the Minuteman, their cover of Dr. Wu, I don't know if you can access this immediately in your brain, but you listen to their cover of Dr.

Wu, and it is not a nostalgic cover. is not a cover that is trying to recapture a sense of lost past. This is a cover that kind of breaks Dr. Wu down to its component parts and kind of, you know, splays them out on the coffee table and says, hey, this is what we think of Steely Dan. This is what we think of the of the past is as something to kind of toy with, not as something to to kind of luxuriate in as the sort of lost home. On the other hand, I think when did Vitology come out? Ninety-95. I want to say 95. I think it was before this record, before the Mike Wah record. Right.

So Vitology comes out in 94, and what's the, I think it was the first single was Spin the Black Circle, where Eddie Vedder is worshipping vinyl records. Old vinyl, right. Old vinyl, which peaked in the 70s. And so this isn't me kind of sitting here pushing my glasses up my nose and saying, actually, I think there's an error in your logic, sir. But I think, you know, and you got Dave Grohl and the drums. And Dave Grohl, I mean, you look at him now, and he's like the epitial.

of earnestness and the epitome. And so is that even. Sentimentality. Yeah. Sentimentality, right? And obviously, foo fighters had their Mentos video and, you know, they had their moments of playful irony, but they were at heart of, just like Pearl Jam, a deeply earnest band.

And, you know, Mike Watt, I think, in a lot of ways, was not deeply earnest. I think he had earnest convictions and, you know, Project Mersh and, and avoiding kind of commercialism, just like Pearl Jam did. Right, yeah. But I always, I like this sort of like distinction that exists in the, in the makeup of that one record where you have a guy who is, is bemoaning the 70s, but who also clearly loves the 70s. And so I don't think that makes the song bad.

I don't think it invalidates anything. I mean, I think rock and roll is always kind of stepping on its own toes and, and logic is something that doesn't often come into play when you're looking at lyrics. But I do think that's an interesting way to kind of think about the relationship with the past. Is it something to, you know, when you think about another way that you could look at Steely Dan's relevance in 2021 is as quote-unquote yacht rock, right? And so you have bands that tour and they play note-for-note renditions or they, you know, you can't play note-for-note-node. You'll kill yourself. But like you try to play, you know, Hall of Notes and Seeley Dan and that kind of stuff.

Kenny Loggins, yeah. Yeah, as like a blanket fort of I love my childhood. I want to go back. Yeah. Which is a very nostalgic urge. I don't think Mike Watt necessarily had a whole lot of that in his DNA. Right. I do think that Eddie Vedder did.

Yeah. There's a cover of maggot brain on that record, actually, now that I think about it. Yeah, with Eddie Hazel. Yeah. So much for against the 70s. You were in Indiana, and I'm curious, in the early 90s, this grunge is exploding. Like, how did you personally imagine Seattle, like, as a physical place and as a vibe? Did it feel like a real city to you, or did it feel like a marketing construct?

I wasn't smart enough yet to really hone in on the whole marketing construct angle of scenes. Yeah, I mean, it might as, you know, I was born in 1977. So when Nirvana hit, I was 14. Perfect. And I mean, it was like, it was like right in the strike zone. I was like, holy shit, what is this? And Seattle became kind of a synecdochie for disaffection and cool and flannel. And, you know, the Doug Prey's hype documentary, which I'm sure we've seen.

Everything that that documentary kind of decries is really what I bought into. I mean, I was, you know, and I saw singles. I had to wait until it came out on video because it was rated R. but when I saw it, I was like, Seattle is, it's nothing like suburban Indianapolis. It seemed like sort of a magical place where they kind of grew cool rock stars. Last question. What's the deal with the shorts over the tights? Both of us are fashion icons. I think we're qualified to address this. Is that purely functional? Like they're cold, but they're active. Like, what was the deal there?

Yeah, I think that when flannel became sort of the style signifier of grunge in the 90s, I mean, I do think, I remember in that, in Doug Prey's documentary, it was like, it's cold here. Like, we wear flannel because it's cold. Yes. And so then obviously it became this kind of style icon. And it's cold in the Midwest, too. So it works, as you can relate. It's cold right now. I will say, though, I was a fan of exposed thermal underwear. I was a fan of long-sleeve thermals under a T-shirt. I was a fan of thermal underwear under cargo shorts, and I was ripping it directly from my sort of imagined goulash of grunge iconography. I think it was a lot of Jeff Amit. Yes, the hats also, yeah. Windbreaker. The fact that he loved sports, and it was like Pearl Jam was like they were initially named Mookie Blaylock.

It was like cool to be a band and like, and I liked sports and I liked music. And I was like, Jeff Ament is a guy who for a couple of years, I thought it's like, you know what? That's style. Did you look cool? Did you look cool when you did it in your view? There's a difference between like head cool and mirror cool or head cool and like photograph cool. I looked head cool. I was like cool as hell if I just thought about it.

Sure. But I was, I was, I was, uh, dude, you're a tall guy. I'm a tall guy. I was six or about 130 pounds. Right. I didn't look cool in anything. No, no, we did not. Yeah.

We tried, though. Yeah. But I will say that, you know, flannel and, and thermal, long johns is very accessible. Right. The style that, you know, it was the moment when everybody started going back to the thrift stores and stuff. And so, yeah. Yeah. It was good.

It was a net positive, I think. Yeah, no one has ever announced that they're a fan of long underwear on this show, and I'm thrilled that that finally did happen. Thank you so much, Eric, for being here. I'm bringing it back. Thanks for having me. Thanks very much to our guest this week, Eric Harvey. Thanks to our producers, Isaac Lee and Justin Sales. And thanks very much to you, of course, for listening.

And now, without further ado, here is Temple of the Dog with Hunger Strike. We'll see you next week.