Copyright Variety
In the fall of 1987, Ronald Reagan was president, Bon Jovi was the breakthrough band of the year, and mullets were still worn without irony by people who were not country musicians. Into that world dropped an orange-vinyl EP called “Screaming Life” by a band named Soundgarden — from Seattle, of all places — that combined the then-disparate sounds of punk and hard rock in a way that no one had really done before. In many ways, that EP represented the birth of grunge. It would be drastically reductive to say “the rest is history,” but this week, Soundgarden will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And after nearly 40 years of articles and books and documentaries and deluxe reissues and whatnot about the band and the scene, there is one key person whose story hasn’t really been told: Susan Silver, who managed Soundgarden and Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees during their peak years of success and helped guide all three to the upper echelons of the music world. While Soundgarden’s rise was not as meteoric as Nirvana’s or their longtime friends Pearl Jam’s, that’s partially because they were, in many ways, the first ones from the scene over the wire: They were the first act to make a splash in New York, with a sweaty, smokey and jam-packed July 1988 show at CBGB; they were the first to sign with a major label; the first to make a big-budget video; and the first to undertake a major North American tour. They also may have been the first to score a gold record — but incredibly, Pearl Jam’s “10,” Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and Soundgarden’s “Badmotorfinger” were released in August, September and October of 1991 respectively, so whichever album first passed the 500,000-sales mark is all but impossible to call. It is no overstatement to say that the careers of Soundgarden, Alice and many other bands of the era would not have been what they were without Silver. She was not only one of the most important music managers of that era, but she is also one of the most important female managers in music history. This writer has known Silver since late 1987 and even then she showed a poise, professionalism and politeness that was rare, to say the least, for that brawny and undomesticated sector of the indie-rock scene. More importantly, Soundgarden themselves showed a level of discipline, focus and ambition beyond that of many peers, and their rise was intentionally measured and gradual: They released their first records on the then-small Seattle indie Sub Pop, then an album on legendary indie powerhouse SST, before releasing their major debut, “Louder Than Love,” on A&M in 1989. Over the next five years, Soundgarden, fronted by singer Chris Cornell, Silver’s partner and later husband, became one of the biggest bands in the world. Alice in Chains, whom Silver also managed (and still does), were just a couple of years behind them and became just as big. “Susan came on board in ‘86 or ‘87, and for those next 10 years, she was very important,” Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil tells Variety. “We had a pretty good knowledge of the music industry, but we didn’t have the time or certainly the managerial skills to navigate that kind of world — we were probably a little more clumsy and blunt,” he laughs. “You need someone who has that kind of skill, that kind of tact. Susan played it serious, and she played it smart; we read that in her and we trusted it. And we grew together — it could have been very problematic if we’d had a more experienced manager, because we knew who we were and how we wanted to address the music community and industry, and a more experienced manager might have tried to tell us what to do and how we should do it, and we would have butted heads and wouldn’t have worked.” A proud Seattle native, Silver had a hand in nearly every major landmark from the scene of the era: Cameron Crowe’s era-defining “Singles” film and blockbuster soundtrack album, early Lollapalooza tours, her bands touring with everyone from Guns N’ Roses to Van Halen before becoming arena-level headliners themselves. She even helped out a nascent Nirvana early in their career. “From the first moment you meet her, you know Susan understands music and the creative fire of musicians like few others ever will,” Cameron Crowe tells Variety. “Her passion runs deep, as well as her guidance in what makes a great song or a great band truly timeless. Authenticity: That is Susan Silver.” Soundgarden and Alice were among the biggest bands of their generation — both have sold an estimated 30 million-plus albums worldwide — but as has been well documented, there was a tragic side as well: Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died of a heroin overdose (in 2002 at the age of just 34) and Cornell passed away in 2017. Yet their legacy is formidable. “Meeting Susan and the band as a very young lawyer and having the honor of representing them changed my life forever,” says Universal Music Group EVP and former Soundgarden attorney Michele Anthony. “Susan was and still is the den mother of what was one of the most flourishing and important music communities of our generation. She embraced me into that pioneering community of musicians, just as it was on the verge of changing music and culture forever. Soundgarden, with Susan as their manager, helped define that change. That was also the beginning of our lifetime friendship.” While always a fierce advocate for her artists, Silver has never been one to call attention to herself, and this interview literally was years in the making. Part of that is due to modesty on her part, but it’s also due to her tough divorce from Cornell. Yet if there was ever a time to tell her story, it’s now, as the band that she helped guide to superstardom is finally getting its moment, and she has the opportunity to share the wisdom from the challenges she overcame and the triumphs she witnessed as a woman — at a time when sexism was at a peak — in a still-male-dominated business. That wisdom is top of mind: She still manages Alice in Chains, who tour and record regularly, and Lily, her daughter with Cornell, is currently managing a band herself, the Seattle-based Americana outfit the Brudi Brothers. This interview has been edited and condensed from a two-hour conversation late last month. Did anything in your background prepare you for this career? What did your parents do for a living? My mother worked at Boeing during the [World War II] war effort in her early twenties — that was long before I came along — and then she worked some retail jobs as we as we got older. And my dad was the fourth pilot hired for Alaska Airlines, which gave us the opportunity to see all different parts of the world and instilled the travel bug in me. But I also had two little brothers. They’re just two and four years younger than me, but they have very different personalities, and one in particular seemed to raise the ire of our father quite regularly. So I really honed some mediation skills, and I also mediated between my parents. I do think those were fundamental experiences that helped me learn the importance of gaining trust from whoever it was that was looking to me for support or advice, the importance of being a good listener, providing critical feedback — and trying to make peace in non-peaceful times. In a family dynamic, of course, that had to be done in a compassionate way. By nature I’m pretty empathetic and observant, and that’s helped a lot. Did you have a musical background? I played piano and clarinet when I was growing up, but no, I didn’t have that gene. What did you initially want to do for a career? When I was around 16 I was working at an art-supply store and had started volunteering in arts organizations, and I was able to see that creative people often aren’t particularly organized. So I had what I thought was an original idea: that I could represent painters. Little did I know that had been going on for millennia, but it definitely jump-started the idea that I could be a useful force in creative people’s lives. As I continued to volunteer for arts organizations in Seattle, everything from the opera to a science-fiction fair to Bumbershoot [music festival] in its early days, the calling became clearer and clearer — that creative people could benefit from having some modicum of organization and strategy and goals around them. Then everything unfolded in unexpected ways. I desperately tried to get a job at a nonprofit, and no matter how many times I nailed the interview and pressed the director with ideas, they just kept putting the carrot further and further out, and then eventually hired a family member — so I learned about that early on too. But as I try to [communicate] to the young people in my life, those disappointments are usually a detour to something better. And it certainly was: When I was in my early twenties, lo and behold, along came a band that needed a manager. My background was in the art world, but a band is still a group of creative people. They were a pop band called the First Thought, and soon that turned into helping out two bands — [proto-grunge outfit] the U-Men came along a couple of months later. So I was working out of the stock room of John Fluevog shoes, managing a couple of bands and helping people fit their shoes in between. I hope John doesn’t ever read that! The First Thought made a record and did a tour down the West Coast, but the U-Men already had some history in Seattle, they had a record out on [influential indie label] Homestead, and the friend that was managing them got a full-time job and couldn’t keep doing it. So I took over and booked my first couple of national tours using phone books from the library. Did you have any business background? I’d taken some business courses in college and was still volunteering in the arts, but before I started managing those bands, I helped some people who opened an all-ages club called Metropolis that ended up being a very pivotal place in the genesis of the Seattle music scene. It was the most diverse array of artists imaginable: In one week you’d have Jah Wobble, John Cale, the Violent Femmes and GBH, and the [local] musicians who played there went on to be in Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Mudhoney. The club had two partners, and like my brothers, they were very different personalities, so I got to hone those mediating skills further, and I learned about booking and promoting. It was a really, really important part of my past. I started promoting shows, and a year or two later, in 1985, I was at a life-changing Halloween party where a little power trio played called Soundgarden. Even though I was dressed up in drag that night — I was with my wonderful friend Hal Upchuck, who was quite an extraordinary performer, he had a beloved band called the F*gs and could dress like nobody else, and he dressed me up as him that night. So even though I looked like [Twisted Sister singer] Dee Snider, with a fright wig and the whole bit, the drummer of Soundgarden came up to me after they performed and said he recognized me from the vintage clothing store that I was working in at the time — where I did not dress like that, by the way. Little did I know that he had been repeatedly stopping in the store to quote-unquote shop, but later he told me he was really trying to work up the nerve to talk to me. So that’s how Chris and I met — at the time, he was the drummer and singer in Soundgarden. By then I’d been promoting shows for some time, and also had started helping another seminal Seattle band called the Blackouts, so I told Chris I could take their band’s cassette to my promoter friends in Portland and Vancouver, where we would cross-promote shows a lot, and that conversation at that party led us to my great honor of managing Soundgarden, and the two of us being together for almost 20 years. What happened next? Bruce Pavitt, who I knew because he had been a DJ at Metropolis, was starting a project called Sub Pop [which was originally a fanzine that also put out compilation cassettes] and he had a kind of subculture network that he would send music to. Around that time, ’86-’87, Kim Thayil introduced Bruce to Jonathan Poneman, who was a musician but also had a very good business mind, and he thought Sub Pop could become a bona-fide record label. That became the next step for Soundgarden — I remember sitting on the floor at Bruce’s apartment, boxing up records. Sub Pop started to take off, but the band had a different focus: They wanted to be on SST. When do you feel like the band started to break out beyond the Northwest? Let me think for a second… I knew about the CMJ Music Marathon conference, and I said “This is the sort of thing you guys should go to,” but not everybody wanted to. So Chris and I went — we found the “best” flight, which meant flying overnight from Seattle to Dallas to Chicago to New Jersey! We rolled in in the morning and went to the convention. Not only was that the first time he was on an airplane, but also his first time in New York, and the first time being in and around the music-business culture. I remember we were leaving the convention one day and waiting for a cab, and there was Ronnie James Dio standing on the sidewalk — it was a little bit like, Wow, these are more than just people in pictures and on records, they’re real! I think that began the reach-out into the world. The tours started shortly thereafter, just in our own cars, driving down the coast. Then once they signed with SST, they started getting better tours and signed with [longtime agent] Don Mueller, although it was still a good couple of years before they were playing on big stages. Things moved gradually, but they got very big, and neither you nor the band ever seemed intimidated by major labels or opening for Guns N’ Roses or anything like that. Soundgarden had a work ethic that really served them. They all had day jobs until touring made it impossible, and we were very, very conscientious about money. I mean, I had a little fund and I would write them $600-a-month paychecks. It was a “slow and steady wins the race” attitude and a really, really strong work ethic — not that the other bands here didn’t also have one, but they might not have had perhaps the same crossover [potential], and the goals were different. Even though major labels were pursuing them fiercely, Soundgarden’s goal was to be on SST. I remember the painful conversation with Jonathan [Poneman of Sub Pop], standing on the corner at the Pike Place Market, and him saying, “We want to put out the next Soundgarden record, let’s do this,” and having to say, “Jonathan, you’re a dear friend and I wish I could say that was going to happen. But this thing is a juggernaut, it’s a rocket ship to who knows where, and they want to take the next step: They want to be on SST and then sign to a major.” They were very diligent about their steps — they didn’t want to jump right to a major, like Alice in Chains did later. They very cautiously weighed their opportunities, but the ethos was still, “There’s no benefit in leaving our roots behind in one fell swoop.” They were extremely methodical about the steps they took. The major label world at that time was very sexist — it still is. How did you deal with that? Well, I had some mentors, but let’s preface that with the next major occurrence for me. By 1988, I had set up an office with a fellow named Ken Deans who was running a production company. A man he knew asked him if we would consider working with a band that a guy named Randy was managing, “We’d love for you to come to the show, Randy has a surprise for everybody, they’re going to pick you up” at 7 p.m. or whatever. And a limo pulled up — which was unheard of in Seattle, I don’t even know if I’d ever seen a limo in Seattle. So I got in, with some trepidation, and met Alice in Chains for the first time. We drove to this venue, a 45-minute ride, and the whole time they were reciting, from beginning to end, the movie “Fletch.” It was absolutely hilarious, I laughed the whole way, and then they put on a show that blew my mind and I listened to their cassette for the next four weeks. Eventually Randy dropped out of the picture and Ken decided he didn’t want to be in the management business, so he asked his friend Kelly Curtis [later Pearl Jam’s manager] and I if we would like to adopt Alice in Chains, and we did. Anyway, my first mentor, with Soundgarden, was [attorney] Peter Paterno. He helped me learn everything I needed to know about the record business and he shepherded the band through the various offers. The learning curve was steep, and he was incredibly patient and is one of the most wonderful humans on the planet. So I brought Alice to him when Kelly and I started managing them and the record companies were showing strong interest. I was in his office one day and a woman walked by. Peter said, “Hey Michele, come in here. I want to introduce you to Susan Silver — you’re a chick, she’s a chick, and she’s managing a band with a chick name. Maybe you should work together.” And that’s how I met the amazing powerhouse, Michele Anthony. Michele took over as lead counsel for Alice, and we weighed through the various offers that they received and started to hone in on Columbia. She beat them senseless — so much so that as a signing gift, Alice gave her a pair of signed boxing gloves, which she still has in her office. And eventually [Columbia chiefs] Don Ienner and Tommy Mottola said, “We don’t ever want to be on the other side of the fence from you. Would you come and work with us?” Which is how she got to the label side of the business. Peter re-adopted Alice [as attorney], and he is still their attorney to this day, and Michele became an incredible mentor and a dear, dear friend. She showed me how this can be done with strategy and a deep concern for the welfare of the artist — she was a very, very pro-artist attorney, certainly, but even as a label executive, she continued to fight for the artist’s vision. And she taught me a lot about staying strong when you feel like you’re being treated unfairly, whether it was the client being treated unfairly or where we as women were being not taken as seriously as we should have been — and also to just not believe [the unfair criticism]. Then the next mentor that she introduced me to, Sharon Osborne, is also the personification of strength and grace. She gave me the confidence to keep moving forward with my career. She’s really one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever witnessed — in life and in business. Her ability to encompass and balance personal and business life, while remaining one of the fiercest negotiators the industry has ever seen, sets her in her own pantheon. That was brought so strongly back to me this summer when I had the experience of being in Birmingham at “Back to the Beginning” [the final Black Sabbath concert, last July]. I’ve been to a lot of events in my life, but none that radiated with such an incredible sense of love and community. I saw more misty eyes in leather jackets than I ever thought imaginable! And it was Sharon who set the tone and the directive for that incredible day. But your approach is so different from hers. I’ve never even heard you raise your voice. Well, I don’t have the sort of profile that she or even Michele does, so the motto for me has always been to walk softly and carry a big stick — and as the ironies of life would have it, who do I end up having for management partners with Alice in Chains but Velvet Hammer [Management]? But I will fight for my client, and there are people who have received my ire if they go up against the ethos of what a band stands for. I’m thinking of one poor [major-label executive] with the Screaming Trees, when he started down a somewhat condescending path about how many records they’d be able to sell and how their idea of putting out vinyl, although quaint, was not going to happen — and he was saying it in front of [lead singer] Mark Lanegan, by the way. It was so inappropriate and I just felt so protective, and he needed to be schooled — he didn’t understand, from a major-label perspective, where bands like Screaming Trees had come from. So… just put it this way: At the end of the day, they got the vinyl! Soundgarden and Alice in Chains’ rise to the top was almost in lockstep — the 1991 Clash of the Titans tour for Alice (with Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax) and the 1991-92 Guns N’ Roses tour for Soundgarden pushed things to a whole other level. A whole other level. From ’90 through ’93 and even into the ’94, it was nonstop. And don’t forget, in January of ’92 Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson out of the Billboard No. 1 slot, and there was the “Singles” film [which featured all three of the bands Silver managed], there was so much going on. How did the bands cope with all that happening at once? Wasn’t it overwhelming? At the time, it didn’t feel overwhelming. Honestly, it felt … Vindicating? No, no, there wasn’t that energy at all. There was never that “We’ll show you!” vibe. It was more excitement, “Wow, we’re getting to do this!” and building every day, building, building, building. People talk about it being an overnight success, but it wasn’t. I started in the early ‘80s and this was almost a decade later. With a band like Alice, they just wanted to be out there playing, they were born for this. With Soundgarden, there was a little more pacing needed because they, as I mentioned, did things very methodically and… what some people would assume are the alluring parts of life on the road were not of interest to them. That was not who Soundgarden was; they did not fall under “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” It was about work and playing great shows and seeing other bands that they loved get opportunities. I remember listening to Kim try to convince the head of A&M to sign [Seattle band] Presidents of the United States of America, like, “You don’t understand, these guys are amazing! You’ve got to give them a listen!” And they ended up going somewhere else and becoming very successful. [The band’s 1995 debut album went triple platinum.] I remember Chris as a pretty shy person. How did he deal with all the attention and becoming the iconic rock god that people made him out to be? Chris was very private, that’s something we shared. We were both shy kids and shy growing up, and as he grew into the incredible singer and performer that he became, I think he had to put a sort of invisible shield around himself because he was very, very sensitive to external energy. He wasn’t the guy to sit around and read reviews or listen to people’s opinions about his band or about his performance — and he hated gossip. So I think it was more as a sort of eyes-down, walk straight ahead, put that invisible force field around himself. And that often could be interpreted as arrogance, but really it was shyness and being a very sensitive person — and a necessary self-defense. Because as we’ve seen, this business, the industry and the fans themselves, will chew an artist up and spit them out. And with the onset of instant information, it’s almost like we as a people have somehow demonstrated this sort of lower vibration of feeling better about ourselves when we see other people fail. I feel so lucky for myself and for my clients that they had this success before the digital age. So now we’re up to 1994 and ’95. We know what happened with Alice, but when did it feel like Soundgarden was starting to break up? “Down on the Upside” [released in 1996, the band’s final album until 2010] was a tough record to make. I think they started to be of different minds creatively. And with success comes a pressure that doesn’t get discussed enough. There are incredible upsides to success that are very obvious, but there also comes a payoff in not only a lack of privacy, but sometimes in real physical threats — not only externally but internally. So we often see people second-guessing themselves: “How did this happen so fast? Where am I going? Have I done the right thing?” There’s a momentum in it, and then it’s really, really hard to get off the gerbil wheel. It can cause some real mental suffering. When young people have that kind of success — and certainly money is an element in it — that access becomes problematic if the person has any sort of mental-health issues. Self-medicating becomes an avenue that a lot of people take, thinking it will help them make sense of it, and as we’ve all seen, it’s even encouraged. The access is there. You mean access to things that are not healthy? Yeah, accesses that lead to substance abuse, but there’s also access in terms of … there’s a world in which doors open. There are people who are paid to do things for successful people, not exclusively musicians but also actors, executives, athletes. There’s an access that starts to create a different set of expectations, and if not monitored, can turn into entitlement — which I think is one of the greatest core-rotters there is, when people start to demonstrate entitled behavior. It’s as hard to recover from as narcissism. Success can breed that, it can breed all of those ills. We all have dark sides of our unconscious minds, and it takes a lot of self-awareness and self-actualization to check our behaviors and ask the deep questions: “Am I on track?” And sometimes the route becomes substance abuse, sometimes it becomes abuse of the people closest to us. And sadly more times than not, I’ve seen successful people lose the plot, and then their world just becomes other successful people, and they’re in this bubble that is missing a healthy dose of reality. They’ll step out of it once in awhile to do some charity work or something, and then go right back into it. I get it, because it’s safe being around people who know what you’re going through. But at the same time, if not monitored, can become destructive. Is that what happened? To Chris? To any of them. Oh, it’s happened to many, many of the musicians that I watched as my professional life grew. And some it hasn’t, and they’re wonderful. But there’s a price that gets paid at the crossroads for success, and it just takes it takes a lot of introspection to not fall into it irretrievably. This all deserves someone smarter than me doing a dissertation or a well-funded scientific study. But, you know, idol worship is… well, we all know where it leads. Just bringing it back to your career, did you stop managing at any point? No. After Soundgarden disbanded in ’97 and Alice was in their dormant period — they never broke up — people just assumed that I wasn’t managing, but I was doing administrative management for both bands. I managed Alice the whole time and still do, and Soundgarden up until 2010, when they got back together. Chris and I were divorced by then, and Alice was active and I was really back full-time with them, and it made sense for [Soundgarden] to be under a management umbrella with Chris. Weren’t you also raising your daughter at that point? Yes, that was my main focus. From the time that Soundgarden disbanded, my main focus was bringing Lily into the world. And then, sadly, Chris and I parted when she was two. So yeah, I had some understandably quiet years. But then, in 2005, when Lily was almost five, Alice put on what’s known as the “tsunami show.” After the Indonesian tsunami in December of 2004, Sean Kinney [Alice in Chains drummer], who is one of the most caring human beings on the planet, was just devastated by what he was seeing on the news and said, “We have to do something.” That’s how the tsunami benefit came together [where Alice in Chains’ surviving bandmembers performed together for the first time in six years, with guest vocalists including Tool’s Maynard James Keenan filling in for Staley], and it was such a profound experience. A few months later, [AIC guitarist/singer Jerry Cantrell] and Sean called and said, “We want to do this again.” I was really focused on my daughter and getting through a very painful divorce, and I said, “I’m really happy for you guys, you’re not too old, go for it.” But Sean said, “I said we are going to go out and do it one more time. That’s you and us. We’re not doing it without you.” And I swear to you, after all the therapy and soul retrievals and praying that I had been doing to put my heart together over the previous few years, it was like all the disparate pieces came back together. I had been given such an incredible gift, and of course initially I started to backpedal and came up with a million reasons why I couldn’t do it. And they just said, “We’re not doing it without you. You’re coming with us.” So by the end of the year, they had brought [current singer] William Duvall into the mix, and they had to do the slow build in the club scene. At first, I couldn’t get them arrested. I’d call people and say, “They would love to perform at your benefit” and I’d hear, “Yeah, call us later, bye!,” laughing. But it built slowly, 2006, 2007, and by 2010 they were headlining Madison Square Garden. That was a very satisfying and solidifying experience for all of us. It changed the dynamic of my relationship with them, certainly. Management is often considered the parental figure in a band’s life, and I can understand that, but we had been through so much together. Certainly the loss of Layne and, shortly after, the loss of [bassist] Mike Starr, and all of the substance abuse that they had been through and the subsequent sobriety. So by the time they started working again, our dynamic had changed to one of a very familial partnership. I’d work for free for those guys for the rest of my life if they wanted. They really gave me my life back. Wasn’t it hard to do that as a single mom? It was incredibly hard to get back into business mode as a single mom. There is no greater hero in this world than a single mom. It is the hardest job, hands down, I’ve ever done and that I’ve ever witnessed. Teachers are right up there as unsung heroes, but it’s really, really painful to leave your leave your child and go on a business trip. Your brain and your heart get split in two different directions. But at the same time, it has provided a life for us and a sense of purpose for me — not that being a parent isn’t one of life’s great purposes, if not the greatest. And I had amazing people around me, including Chris’s family, who are our lifeblood and our stability, mine and Lily’s, they have been absolutely incredible and are to this day. But it was difficult, for sure. Are you managing any other acts right now? I am only managing Alice and I currently have the good fortune of acting as, call it guidance counselor or consigliere, for the Brudi Brothers. One of the other things I do is volunteer at a music and film youth camp that also has a young entrepreneur division called Prodigy Camp. There’s a twofold path: Helping to support young people, 13 to 19 years old, as they face and think about their life’s most difficult times, and then helping them to transform that into film or music. I’ve been with them for five years, and watching some of these young people navigate really hard circumstances into solid careers in film and in music has been one of life’s great satisfactions. They create an incredibly collaborative environment between the Campers and the mentors — the mentors are industry professionals like me, and they’re also returning Campers. One of the original Campers who has come back for 10 years to mentor is Chappell Roan. For her to be there in the midst of all of her wild success is a testament of the camp and to her. As we were saying earlier about how people cope with fame and attention: She has the foundation to say what she needs with vulnerability, honesty and strength. I admire her so much for how she’s handling it all. How is your daughter’s career as a music manager going? It’s going well. The Brudi Brothers came out of the box with basically no road experience, and there was a feeding frenzy a la ‘80s Seattle. But they wisely — and intuitively, I think — picked [New York-based indie label] Mom + Pop, who have given them a lot of space as well as a tremendous amount of support. So they’ve really been growing and working this year, and got some great tours. They’ve been out with Sierra Farrell a few times, did some Charlie Crockett shows, another little tour with Wyatt Flores, so it’s been really fun to watch them grow. Top-of-mind, what advice would you have for young female managers or executives who are trying to get into the business? Stay the course. Double-check your work, because somebody else will be double-checking it. Don’t give anybody a reason to think you’re not 1,000% capable. Keep emotions out of the business dealings and out of the interactions with the clients. Suit up, show up, and do good work, and your work will speak for itself. And you have to care about what you’re doing — that’s the other thing. A lot of musicians who become public figures, they almost don’t have a choice; they’re driven internally by some North Star. It’s the same in business. You have to want it so badly that you’re willing to do it for free, to put in the hours to go above and beyond. I don’t think the world has changed radically in terms of being male-dominated, but certainly we’re making inroads. We could get into a deep philosophical conversation about the “last swing of the patriarchy” and all of that, but really, you know, old habits die hard. You look at countries where there are, for example, female prime ministers, and it works just fine. So the United States is a little behind in both politics and business, but we’re making progress. I had incredible mentors that helped open doors for me and encouraged me to just keep doing good work. Last question: How does it feel to see Soundgarden going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? I’m so proud of them. So proud of them. It’s so deserved, so well-earned, I’m absolutely thrilled and excited to be there with them, to see them perform, to see the surprises they have in store. It wouldn’t have happened, at least not in this way, without you. (Through slightly gritted teeth.) And it wouldn’t have happened without me (laughing). You actually said it! (Still laughing) I’m trying! I’m really trying to look at this with some inclusion for myself, which is why I’m talking with you today. We get reflective at this stage in life, especially as the losses mount, and I have to say again, Sharon did it with “Back to the Beginning.” I left that event feeling more alive, purposeful, excited about the future than I can remember feeling in decades. I remember standing in the front with [Alice in Chains bassist] Mike Inez’s wife, Sydney, while Mike played bass with Ozzy for those five songs. Ozzy was so powerful, and when he started singing “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” it was an otherworldly experience. His voice changed, his features changed, the audience got quiet and I could feel the tears coming. Then the audience started singing and finished that song for him, and he had tears streaming down his face. There have been a lot of reasons to reflect lately, and seeing this next generation take over has been a big part of it for me, whether it’s Chappell or the Brudi Brothers. It’s torch-passing time, and I’m thrilled to see yet another Seattle group carve out a place in yet another genre of music. I continue to be super, super proud of Seattle.
