Today, Cameron Crowe is a Hollywood hotshot, but in the early 1990s, he was coming off of his debut movie, “Say Anything” and he was looking for something new. He found it in Seattle’s burgeoning grunge scene and started
filming “Singles,” with Matt Dillon playing a member of a local band named “Citizen Dick.”
The film featured coffee bars, which were still a bizarre mystery to most of the country, and local music talent such as Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. Members of a relatively unknown grunge Seattle band played the roles of Matt Dillon’s bandmates. Those relatively unknown band members would soon call themselves Pearl Jam. In
fact, according to Wikipedia “most of Matt Dillon’s wardrobe in the movie actually belonged to Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament.”
The executives at Warner Bros. studios were unimpressed. Until, as Crowe explains it:
“…And then, ironically, Nirvana broke. Actually, Alice in Chains broke. Then Nirvana broke. Then the kind of zeitgeist story started to become Seattle. And then Pearl Jam broke and the studio was like, ‘Okay. Well, all right, the guy that shakes his head with the dreads, we like him now…. we can kick the movie off to let people know they can see all this crazy popular Seattle music.”
The rest is part of Seattle music lore. But just in case you missed something: Check out our other Pearl Jam Week articles. It really is a cool week to celebrate this iconic band.
(also read about how these other bands are related to Seattle: Beatlemania Week, and Nirvana Week)
