On This Day: Why Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain Refused Interview Cover Story With Time Magazine in 1993

The 1993 cover of Time Magazine, which was released on October 25, is a pretty iconic one. On the cover, outlined by the iconic red border of the magazine, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder screams into a microphone with the words “All The Rage” directly next to his image. It was a picture-perfect depiction of the times. Grunge and alt-rock had taken over and started to wiggle their way into the mainstream. 

However, Vedder wasn’t exactly happy about the cover.

Pearl Jam, San Jose, 1993. My senior year in high school. Eddie Vedder jumped on me in the crowd a few days after being on the cover of Time magazine. pic.twitter.com/C07TPGVSAQ

— James Oliveira (@jamesaoliveira) March 4, 2023

Why Did Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain Opt out of the Time Magazine Interview?

Both Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain opted not to speak with Time for their write-up on the growing grunge movement. However, that didn’t stop the magazine from using Vedder’s likeness (and name-dropping Cobain) in the magazine in 1993.

It was definitely a bit tone-deaf, considering the kind of magazine that Time was (and still is). The publication is a general interest magazine. Plenty of readers were and still are from an older generation. So, their writing about the screeching, cut-throat lyrics that Pearl Jam and Nirvana popularized leaned more toward contentious than curious. To put it simply: Old magazine yells at cloud.

So, why did the two frontmen turn down interviews? Realistically, their rejection of authority and mainstream symbols of entertainment wasn’t just for show. It reflected who they were as people. Why would Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder even consider sitting down for a pleasant chat with a Time journalist? It just wouldn’t make sense.

Regardless, there was at least some semblance of a positive intention behind Time’s decision to publish their cover story about the bands and grunge music in general. A lot of their readers had kids who were super into alt-rock music at the time. The writeup was an attempt to break down the core of the movement and why so many kids were p*ssed off and listening to songs titled “Territorial Pissings” or “Breath And A Scream”.

Christopher John Farley, the writer behind the Time story, said that he felt that both Vedder and Cobain “wanted the attention, and didn’t want to have the attention. They didn’t want to be seen as selling out.”

“Back then, part of the power of Time was synthesizing the cultural moment and reducing it to a single face,” Farley continued. “I wanted the face to be Nirvana, but their handlers had played a little bit coy as to whether they would talk to me.”

You can actually still read the OG story online. How’s that for a bit of music history?

Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

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