(Credit: Charles Peterson)
Jason Everman, the former member of Nirvana and Soundgarden, has revealed that being fired from Chris Cornell’s group hurt him much more than being dismissed from Kurt Cobain’s band.
Everman joined Nirvana in 1989 as the second guitarist, receiving credit on their debut album from that year, Bleach. He’s not heard on the final recordings, but he paid $600 for the sessions before being dismissed after a tour later in the year. He then replaced the outgoing Soundgarden bassist Hiro Yamamoto in Soundgarden but was fired in 1990.
“With Nirvana, I guess initially when I came onboard, Kurt wanted a second guitar player for the live show,” Everman recently told The Joe Rogan Experience. “Initially I thought I was going to be able to contribute to the band creatively, and then it got to the point when I realized that wasn’t going to happen.”
Continuing: “On the rare times where we actually rehearsed as a band – which was not a lot – Kurt kind of halfheartedly [asked], ‘Who has ideas?’… I’d throw a couple of ideas out. And Chad [Channing, drummer], a very accomplished musician in his own right, would throw some ideas out. And then it would just be glossed over and [Cobain] would be like, ‘Well, here’s the new song I wrote,’ and we’d start learning that.”
Everman then implied that Channing concluded that he’d never get any creative input, but the band weren’t equipped to discuss this subject. “Everyone in the band, including myself, were poor communicators – a lot of passive aggression,” he said. “We were kids.”
After being fired from Nirvana, Everman prepared for a trip to the Himalayas but changed plans when Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil phoned and asked him to audition for their bassist. “At that point, Soundgarden was my favourite Seattle band, hands-down,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I wasn’t getting along with Chris that well – and obviously, who’s gonna go? It was me.”
Everman recalled being kicked out of Soundgarden “broke my heart. It was a bad spot for me because I loved that band. I never thought they would get as big as they did. Honestly, it was surprising because they were a great band, but I always thought they were a little bit too quirky to be huge, despite the Chris factor – a genetically engineered rock star.”
“Getting fired from Soundgarden put me in a pretty bad tailspin,” he conceded. “It was a rough patch of my life for sure, so in order to cut this tailspin off, I had to do something radical.” Everman joined the US Army in 1994, eventually becoming part of the Special Forces.
