MTV NEWS: Do you notice? Is there a trade off? When you're playing arenas obviously its a lot of people. I want to hear you talk about the difference in the mind of the audience. How close you are to them. Can you see the people... you can see the people off the spill lights. But the people forty yards away, you know, one hundred feet away... Do you have a sense of that? Do you feel the energy?
KURT: Oh yeah, I can feel it, I can sense it. At certain times when the house lights come on during certain parts of the songs I can see everyone. I think "Lithium" is a good example because when we break into the distortion part, the lights all come on and I can see everyone jump up and down and I realize it's not only just the front part that I can see, it's the whole audience. And it's great. There's nothing better than that much of a capacity of people in tune with the band and giving off that much energy, its just like a little club but one hundred times more. Yeah... they always sing during "Lithium," which is kind of neat.
KRIST: Or if they don't speak English they just go... (hums).
MTV NEWS: Is this an arena tour?
KRIST: We're playing some theaters
KURT: But it says arena on a lot of the shows on the itinerary, but they're like five or six thousand seat places.
DAVE: They just do that to make us feel like we're popular
KURT: They put arena down there to make us feel better.
MTV NEWS: Worcester's got a mini-Madison Square Garden, it's got like five thousand seats. It's laid out like it, but just shrunk. Did you guys think of playing smaller places?
KURT: We wanted to for sure. We determined about a year and a half ago after getting off of that grueling tour that we had. Well, first of all, that we were going to put out a record that would completely ruin our reputation and only a few thousand people from every city would show up. But that wasn't the case. And then we realized that because of the production costs and because we have to bring our own lights and PA and all that stuff... It costs a lot of money, and if we were just to play venues and clubs and stuff we'd be totally in the hole. We're not nearly as rich as everyone thinks we are, so you have to try to play the biggest kind of place that you can if you're using this kind of production. We actually have... We have a couple of mannequins on stage. Nothing compared to an inflatable monster or an Eddie from Iron Maiden...
MTV NEWS: So, do you have backups in case you took some shots at the one... anatomical stuff usually isn't too cheap.
KRIST: Well they can glue it back together...
PAT: Duct tape...
MTV NEWS: It looks glued together. Talking about audiences, I seem to remember you guys talking about when you get an audience larger than a certain size you start attracting people that maybe isn't your audience. I remember the bass player from Jane's Addiction was going off that in the audience at Lollapalooza there's always people he'd never want to play to coming to their shows.
KURT: I think in the beginning when we were doing all those interviews when "Nevermind" was getting really popular, we were really concerned with the people who wanted to come and see our shows and have a good time. We were afraid we would have these mean type of people who just went to the shows to cause trouble and we didn't want that. We didn't want to have to have security to beat up on people to keep them in line. But since we've had the experience and we've had to play a couple of shows like this and there hasn't been any trouble. We're relieved of that kind of pressure. That's the only concern that we really had but it obviously translated into we hate our audience, which is bulls***.
KRIST: There's a meeting before every show between our road managers and the security people and they're saying you know anybody who gets too violent you just grab a person sit him down and walk him over to the side. We don't want to see any kind of nasty violence. It just escalates. People see that and they get appalled and we see that and we get appalled. It just drags the whole show down.
MTV NEWS: People also talk about selling out when you got big. That "if you've sold a lot of records there's something wrong" doesn't seem to be following you anymore.
KURT: It's too far beyond that now. It's far beyond that now. It's been going on for so long now. That issue doesn't even come up anymore.
MTV NEWS: You said before these weren't your words, but you said let's make a record to blow away that audience. Of that eight million people let's get rid of seven and a half million whatever you're thinking... When you say that, what do you mean?
KURT: Well when I say that, like I said the main reason was to make sure that we could have a good time at live shows. We just weren't comfortable with it at the time. And now that its been proven to us that there aren't any problems at the shows then it doesn't matter. People are behaving themselves. Maybe the message got across to them somehow, maybe all that bitching and complaining that we did may have worked a little bit.
MTV NEWS: So you weren't talking at that point about alienating or losing most of your audience?
KURT: I was at that point about a year and a half ago. I was completely fed up with the whole thing. I didn't want to be a rock star at all. It was just freaking me out, you know. But I've had two years to recuperate.
