Back when the UK had weekly music magazines - NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Kerrang!, Record Mirror, etc,. - nothing sold issues quicker than wars of words between mouthy rock stars. So when Nirvana's Kurt Cobain decided that he had “strong feelings towards Pearl Jam” and went on to dismiss the band as “corporate puppets that are just trying to jump on the alternative bandwagon”, there was much excitement in London media offices... and a fair amount of bemused head-scratching in the Pacific North-West's music community.
Everyone in the Seattle scene knew that Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were punk rockers at a time when Kurt Cobain was buying tickets for Sammy Hagar concerts and drawing Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie in his notebooks, so the notion that Pearl Jam - signed to Epic Records - were somehow less 'alternative' than Nirvana - signed to Geffen - seemed curious. But Cobain's antipathy towards his grunge peers may have had its roots in the fact that, when Gossard and Ament were members of Sub Pop band Green River alongside Mark Arm and Steve Turner, later of Mudhoney, they had hoped that they might be able to - the audacity! - make a living from music, and had courted major label attention. Kurt Cobain was a fully paid-up Mark Arm fanboy, and his outbursts against Pearl Jam may have been less about his personal feelings about the band, than about his desire to look 'punk' to his beloved Mudhoney.
