Imagine being a former member of both Nirvana and Soundgarden. Jason Everman can list the two grunge giants on his resume, but as he revealed on The Joe Rogan Experience, it was his split with the second of those bands that hit him the hardest — in his words, breaking his heart.
Everman was a member of Nirvana in 1989, providing rhythm guitar and backing vocals for the still-underground act. He even paid for the recording of Nirvana's debut album, Bleach. "Kurt [Cobain] wanted a second guitar player for the live show basically — have a heavier sound live and take some of the responsibility off him so he could concentrate on vocals and that kind of thing," Everman remembered, as transcribed by Music Radar. "Initially I thought I was going to be able to contribute to the band creatively and then it got to the point when I realized that wasn't going to happen. And the same thing happened with Chad [Channing] the drummer, I think."
Everman's lack of creative input into Nirvana left him dissatisfied with his place in the band, so after completing Nirvana's first national tour, the musician took his leave. His immediate plan was to spend some time trekking through the Himalayas, but as he was buying maps for the trip, he got an unexpected phone call from Soundgarden.
"Kim [Thayil] from Soundgarden called and was like, 'Hey, Hiro [Yamamoto, bassist] quit, do you want to audition for the band?' At that point, Soundgarden was my favorite Seattle band, hands-down," Everman recalled.
Everman landed the gig, but was ultimately fired in 1990 after some internal conflict with frontman Chris Cornell. "At the end of the day, I wasn't getting along with Chris that well, and obviously, who's gonna go? It was me … It broke my heart. It was a bad spot for me because I loved that band."
"Getting fired from Soundgarden put me in a pretty bad tailspin," he added. "It was a rough patch of my life for sure so in order to cut this tailspin off I had to do something radical so what I did was I ended up moving to New York."
Everman would eventually join the U.S. military, becoming a part of the Army's 2nd Ranger Battalion before completing tours of Iraq and Afghanistan with the U.S. Special Forces. Check out Everman's incredible story in the clip above and listen to his full episode of The Joe Rogan Experience below.
