Green River

Swallow My Pride

Swallow My Pride became Green River’s signature song, and also an important one in the soundtrack to the 90s.

A hate song about a disintegrating relationship, it became not only Green River’s signature song but also an important one in the soundtrack to the 90s.

Upon first listen you might not detect the wicked gravity of Swallow My Pride. After all, it sounds like what it is: an ugly balled fist of fuzz and fury fuelled in equal parts by the hazy drug-doom of Black Sabbath and the flailing teenage electricity of Black Flag; a loud and rancourous hate song about a fizzling relationship between a horny young creep (singer Mark Arm, presumably) and his right-wing, Godfearing, gun-toting girlfriend.

But Green River weren’t just a gang of skinny, greasy-haired young assholes from some forgotten corner of America. Well, they were that in 1987, sure, but as time rolled on, the legacy of the band spread far and wide. Their break-up spawned Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone (and eventually Pearl Jam), and Sub Pop, the tiny, go-nowhere record label they were on, would eventually sign Nirvana, turning Seattle into an unlikely rock’n’roll Mecca and kick-starting the entire grunge movement. Swallow My Pride is Green

River’s best-known song, their very own Free Bird, and therefore it carries not only the band’s legacy on it’s back, but really, also the whole goddamn 1990s. That song is some magical, legendary shit, with ripples that are still being felt today. Not that anybody could see that coming back then.

“We were anything but legendary at the time,” laughs Green River bassist Jeff Ament. “If we were legendary for anything, it was for bringing Jello to a show and getting it all over the monitors [in January 1986, opening for the Butthole Surfers]. We weren’t allowed to play in Seattle for a year.”

Green River formed two years before the Jello incident, and recorded the first version of Swallow My Pride just a few months later. It appeared on their first EP, the comparatively obscure Come On Down (Homestead Records), a noisy, violent collection of sprawling proto-grunge that showcased the unique vocal stylings of Mark Arm. His band chugged along in weird, cacophonous spasms behind him. It was death on 10 legs, and their commercial potential was zilch.

A year later. Steve Turner, the architect behind Swallow’s signature riff, quit the band abruptly. He was replaced by a freshfaced young metal guitarist, Stone Gossard, and the band’s sound began to veer into a sort of psychedelic death-glam, which came to a head on their second (and last) record, the vital Rehab Doll. That album’s signature track was a new, super-sized take on Swallow My Pride. One that not only added vocals from Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, but inexplicably also threw in a Blue Öyster Cult chorus (This Ain’t The Summer Of Love) and a Stooges reference (‘Deep inside, I feel alright’) as a bonus. It was like a road map to the early seventies through the darkest path possible.

“That was so much of our relationship as a band back then, trading records and turning each other on to new bands,” says Ament. “I mean, I remember hearing the Stooges for the first time in high school and going: ‘I mean, it’s okay. It’s not Ted Nugent’. I sorta had to go through punk rock and hardcore before I came back to the Stooges and went like: ‘Wow, this is incredible!’ But, you know, I was thirteen the first time I heard them. I didn’t get it. Anyway, that’s how we developed, really. I still have mix tapes that Mark made for me at the time. I know I made tapes for him, too. We were crazy about music.”

Swallow My Pride was produced by Bruce Calder at Steve Lawson Studios, the “best studio in Seattle”, according to Ament. “We couldn’t actually afford it. We worked on it from ten at night to six in the morning, so we got it for half the rate. I think we did the whole record in about five or six days,” he says. And really, had they not lost their minds halfway through, they probably could have done it in half that.

“We were going through an experimental phase,” Ament says. “I remember Mark sang one of the songs under a piano, so you can hear all the piano wires resonating. We were just trying everything, but I don’t know if any of that ever came off. I mean, we still just sounded like a three-chord rock band. I don’t know if the anvil was necessary.”

The anvil?

“During Rehab Doll I was really into weird industrial music. I had this idea in my head that I wanted to create a snare sound that was like hitting an anvil. So we got an anvil and we used it to trigger the snare. The original mix of Rehab Doll is fucking crazy. Honestly, it’s like, ‘What are they thinking?’ But it’s mostly because I was really into

Love And Rockets. There were some fucking crazy snare sounds in the eighties, so I was going for that, some crazy goth thing. But it just came out really hard rock.”

Interestingly, Swallow’s lyrical bent (‘Yes, there’s a spirit in the air, we’re more American than anywhere/Well, I just smiled cos I could tell this little girl’s going to hell’) has boomeranged back to relevance in spectacular fashion, making it one of GR’s more prescient songs.

“Given how divided the country is right now, it does seem really relevant again,” Ament agrees. “But at the time, I didn’t even

“I remember hearing the Stooges for the first time in high school and going: ‘It’s okay, but

it’s not Ted Nugent’.”

know what it was about. Usually you’d get little bits of the lyrics here and there during rehearsals, but I never really knew what the lyrics to the songs were until I was putting together the artwork for the albums, and I’d be like, ‘Holy shit, that’s what this is about!’ Mark was always a great lyricist.”

While Ament acknowledges that Swallow has become the band’s signature song, he doesn’t even remember why they re-recorded it for the album.

“I figure it was because Sonic Youth were in town and we thought it would be a good opportunity for us to have Kim sing on it,” he says. “But we had plenty of songs, so I don’t know why we redid one.”

Was it worth it?

“I think I prefer the original,” he says with a laugh.

Deluxe editions of Dry As A Bone and Rehab Doll are out now on SubPop.