Click to listen to the actual interview, conducted by phone in the summer of 1992.
Rock Power was published out of London in the early 90s, translated into ten languages and distributed globally.
SINGLES, a movie set in Seattle starring Matt Dillon and directed by Cameron Crowe (husband of Heart’s Nancy Wilson), brings to the silver screen the sounds of Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and more! MICHAEL BROWNING meets the director of what may go down in history as Grunge -The Movie…
MAKE SURE EVERYBODY KNOWS we did this movie a year and a half ago,” Cameron Crowe, writer and director of Singles, emphasises. The irony is that all this stuff, which is the music I was listening to, or the music we love, has become very commercial. So it was a good investment for Epic, but still nobody’s getting rich off of this.”
Then again, you couldn’t really call it a losing proposition either, now could you?
In fact, in advance of the movie’s release, most involved are probably hoping the film itself makes as big a splash as the soundtrack {out since midsummer) already has. Heralded as a quintessential composite of Seattle tastes, if not the entire sound, the ‘Singles’ LP contains ten cuts from the city’s creme de la creme, as well as three songs from non-residents that still manage to embody the region’s musical vibe. Which, for the clueless, all boils down to honesty. Crowe, former editor at Rolling Stone magazine and screenplay writer of Fast Times At Ridgemont High, The Wildlife, Say Anything and Singles (also directing the last two), recognises the value of honesty in music and shows his appreciation of honesty (and loud guitars) by liberally adding his favourite artists to his movie making formula. “I love guitar. I love hard, guitar-oriented rock, and in the middle ’80s there was all this synth-pop garbage everywhere and I just found that guitar was still alive in the Northwest.” 1990’s Say Anything had both Mother Love Bone and Soundgarden in it and this year he’s upped the Seattle ante by including music from Alice In Chains, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Chris Cornell, Jimi Hendrix, Pearl Jam and, perhaps the most intriguing addition, The Lovemongers, a hometown side project of Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson. With that list, you could easily think that the movie is about the Seattle scene itself. It’s not.
While Matt Dillon does play the singer/songwriter of fictitious band Citizen Dick, Crowe likens the film to Woody Allen’s Manhattan where intense personal relations (a new direction for Allen) are played out against a colourful, cultured backdrop. With the Washington metropolis as the stage, Singles is about how six young lives intertwine within the building in which they live.
“Pearl Jam plays Matt’s band in the movie so that’s how the rumour got started that it is a movie about the Seattle scene.”
So how did Crowe come up with the idea a couple of years back to do a film in the now globally acclaimed climate of Puget Sound?
“Nancy (Wilson – she and Crowe are now married) gave me someone to visit up here, but I always loved the area. I first came here in 74, writing a story on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; I was 17 at the time. I really loved it up here and I just love music, so it was kind of a natural thing to get hooked into some of these bands.”
Now wait a minute: Smashing Pumpkins and Paul Westerberg (of The Replacements fame) aren’t from Seattle. What’s with that?
“The incongruities serve to show that we’re not in the business of selling Seattle music. (Sub Pop’s) Bruce (Pavitt) and John (Poneman) have done an amazing job with their samplers and the truth is, this is just the music that I love and that worked in the movie.”
The rest of that truth is these artists have a kind of soul connection to the Northwest. Firstly, Seattlites seem to dig all things Butch Vig (the Pumpkins’ producer, and Nirvana’s as well) and “Paul Westerberg really is the spirit of the movie. Paul was one of the first guys to have pretty melodies built into hard, thrashing rock and punk attitude.”
Westerberg also got the job of scoring the film, with some incidental guitar work from Chris Cornell. You may have noticed that this is the first solo work ever released by Cornell, although the deeply personal Temple Of The Dog LP comes close This was no easy feat for Crowe “I don’t want to start a thing with A&M (Soundgarden’s label), but they have fought putting music in stuff I’ve written for years and I don’t know why. They had the Soundgarden music from Louder Than Love pulled out of Say Anything, so we used stuff from Ultramega OK!, a Sub Pop label Soundgarden release. They’ve had a nasty attitude towards us whenever we’ve wanted to use some of their music, and the truth is only with great jockeying from Susan Silver (Soundgarden’s manager) and Chris Cornell were we able to get a new Soundgarden song and Chris solo in this movie.”
In all, Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson have compiled a collection of songs that truly captures the essence of Singles. Effectively sidestepping his idea of the current trend in soundtracks, which for him is like,
“What is this? is this some tangential sampler that has ‘something’ to do with the movie? Cos it’s not a soundtrack. It’s weird, the soundtrack has turned into a really crass marketing tool.”
Although there’s a ton of other music from John Coltrane to REM in the movie, every song is prominently used in the film. Most importantly, they deserve to be on the soundtrack and they effectively conjure up the appropriate images. This soundtrack exactly fulfills the aim of the director.
And hopefully it fulfills the listener as well.