Did you ever feel any ill will towards the grunge era?

You know, it’s weird … look, first off, you hope when you work your entire life towards something that it’s not gonna be over in a year in a half. You think what you’re doing is building a career.

I didn’t have any resentment, but I gotta be honest with you, when I was in the middle of it, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it at all, because I never got beat poetry lyrics. I’m a pop guy. So when Nirvana came out, I could understand the attitude, but I couldn’t understand the songwriting. I thought the lyrics sucked balls. To this day I still do.

I think the best thing about Nirvana is Dave Grohl. That’s just me, but Dave, also, is a pop guy. The guy is an amazing songwriter.

I never got Kurt Cobain. I never thought that he was a genius, or a god, or anything like that. I thought he was really really lucky. I’m probably gonna lose some friends saying that, and no disrespect meant for the dead, I just never thought he was that great.

The problem for me was the whole movement happened on our label, on David Geffen Records. We go out on this 13 month tour, and we come back, and the entire staff that I had spent five years in development building relationships with, all my radio guys, all my promo guys, all my PR guys, they’re all gone, and they’re replaced by 19 year olds in flannel.

We’d just made the company $23 million bucks, and they’re telling me, “Well, you guys are uncool, and we’re about what’s cool, so we’re not gonna put anything behind your next record.” It’s like, I don’t understand, we made you a fortune, and we deserve a little bit of loyalty.

John Kalodner put us back in the studio for three or four years just wasting our time because it would have been embarrassing to let us go to another label. For us to have success on another label, they would have looked stupid, so they did the worst thing they could have done, and by our contract we had to listen to them.

Do you still have the platinum plaques from that era up, or are those just mementos from the past?

I earned every single platinum record, so we got all that stuff up. I’m really proud of everything we did back then, but I also grew up in the same house at Rick Nelson, who was the comeback kid.

It was exactly the same for him in his day as it was for us in our day with grunge.

Things got shaken up, but it wasn’t an organic thing, is what I’m saying.

There were six people who actually ran the music business at the time, and they all got together, just like they did during the death of disco, and they just said it’s too expensive, this is too crazy.

[With disco] they all got together and said, “Donna Summer is asking a million bucks a record, and we can’t do this. There’s a movement going on in London right now, it’s called punk. Keep those guy in the heroin, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, and a Happy Meal and they’ll make whatever music you want ‘em to make.”

That’s when the punk thing happened. Disco died. Punk happened.

Same thing happened with the confidence rock thing. You notice it didn’t happen gradually.

MTV, overnight, stopped playing the videos from the bands from the era before, and became all grunge. And The Gap, how was The Gap supposed to anticipate flannel?

All of it was engineered.

Now, when something like that happens, the only thing you can do is go, “You know what, really the reason I’m making music is I absolutely love making music,” so you stick with it.

Even with the changing music climate, you guys have always attracted your fair share of diehard fans. Hit us with your craziest fan encounter.

Matthew had a very credible death threat. It turned out the woman was dumb enough to start pen-palling some of the other fans and sent her picture to them, and then said she was going to go to a particular show in Milwaukee and kill him. We actually put her picture out to all security, and they caught her coming in, and sure enough she had a loaded .38 in her purse.

How do you perform after that?

You know, the show must go on. We come from a line of people who’ve been doing this for over 100 years.