In 1990, Nelson were on top of the world. Twin brothers Gunnar and Matthew had monster hits with “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection,” and “After the Rain,” and the duo were performing to capacity crowds every night.
By the time they’d completed an extensive world tour, however, grunge had taken over the music industry, and Nelson didn’t have a seat at the table.
While Gunnar and Matthew were no longer all over radio, they were still creating music and performing. After launching their own label, Stone Canyon Records, they’ve seen success each of the past two Decembers with Christmas singles that have reached the Top 10 of the holiday chart.
With ‘90s nostalgia at an all-time high, the twosome recently completed a holiday tour with Wendy and Carnie Wilson, and Gunnar couldn’t be happier. “Bottom line is I’m really fucking glad I didn’t quit.”
Myspace caught up with Gunnar to learn more about the twins’ journey, what it was like coming home to a changed industry, and the incredible impact the video for “After the Rain” had on one young fan.
You had a heck of a ride to the top in 1990. What moment do you feel best represents the pinnacle of your fame in that era?
You don’t really realize what’s going on when you’re in the middle of it.
Looking back, it’s remarkable that we were able to do what we were able to do WHEN we were able to do it, and I’m glad we did it at that age, because when you have that kind of New Kids On The Block level of success with the chicks, and all that kind of stuff, honestly, that’s something you really should be doing at 21, 22. So for me that’s really great, and things have changed over the years, obviously, in a bunch of different ways, but that was sure a cool way to spend your youth.
So while you may not have realized what was going on, you were still enjoying the moment.
I was.
We had to spend a year promoting the After the Rain record, because we released our record a year after the Milli Vanilli scandal happened. You see the Nelsons come along, and there were a lot of people who saw the strong image and thought we were “Milli Vanilla,” so we had to go out to radio stations for a full year with just acoustic guitars, and our voices.
Matt and I also filled in for Daisy Fuentes (at MTV) for two weeks, and that’s what really broke the record. Going on Dial MTV, with our acoustics, and VJing, and playing ourselves in and out of the commercial breaks, people realized, Oh shit, these guys actually really play, and really sing.
For us, uniquely, we really needed to do that. It was kind of doing the damage control, because for the nepotism, and for the image, we were really considered guilty until proven innocent.
I suppose it was that same kind of decadence that was part of the backlash when Nirvana came to the forefront, and we experienced the single largest paradigm shift in music industry history, and that shit happened on my label, it was on DGC.
We were in the throws of this major world tour, we’d sold millions of records, and then basically the industry execs got together and said, “Things have gotten bloated, we’re not making as much money as we could be making, so we’re gonna sign bands from Sub Pop for ten grand a pop,” and the rest is history.
Did you ever feel any ill will towards the grunge era?
You know, it’s weird … look, first off, you hope when you work your entire life towards something that it’s not gonna be over in a year in a half. You think what you’re doing is building a career.
I didn’t have any resentment, but I gotta be honest with you, when I was in the middle of it, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it at all, because I never got beat poetry lyrics. I’m a pop guy. So when Nirvana came out, I could understand the attitude, but I couldn’t understand the songwriting. I thought the lyrics sucked balls. To this day I still do.
I think the best thing about Nirvana is Dave Grohl. That’s just me, but Dave, also, is a pop guy. The guy is an amazing songwriter.
I never got Kurt Cobain. I never thought that he was a genius, or a god, or anything like that. I thought he was really really lucky. I’m probably gonna lose some friends saying that, and no disrespect meant for the dead, I just never thought he was that great.
The problem for me was the whole movement happened on our label, on David Geffen Records. We go out on this 13 month tour, and we come back, and the entire staff that I had spent five years in development building relationships with, all my radio guys, all my promo guys, all my PR guys, they’re all gone, and they’re replaced by 19 year olds in flannel.
We’d just made the company $23 million bucks, and they’re telling me, “Well, you guys are uncool, and we’re about what’s cool, so we’re not gonna put anything behind your next record.” It’s like, I don’t understand, we made you a fortune, and we deserve a little bit of loyalty.
John Kalodner put us back in the studio for three or four years just wasting our time because it would have been embarrassing to let us go to another label. For us to have success on another label, they would have looked stupid, so they did the worst thing they could have done, and by our contract we had to listen to them.
Do you still have the platinum plaques from that era up, or are those just mementos from the past?
I earned every single platinum record, so we got all that stuff up. I’m really proud of everything we did back then, but I also grew up in the same house at Rick Nelson, who was the comeback kid.
It was exactly the same for him in his day as it was for us in our day with grunge.
Things got shaken up, but it wasn’t an organic thing, is what I’m saying.
There were six people who actually ran the music business at the time, and they all got together, just like they did during the death of disco, and they just said it’s too expensive, this is too crazy.
[With disco] they all got together and said, “Donna Summer is asking a million bucks a record, and we can’t do this. There’s a movement going on in London right now, it’s called punk. Keep those guy in the heroin, a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, and a Happy Meal and they’ll make whatever music you want ‘em to make.”
That’s when the punk thing happened. Disco died. Punk happened.
Same thing happened with the confidence rock thing. You notice it didn’t happen gradually.
MTV, overnight, stopped playing the videos from the bands from the era before, and became all grunge. And The Gap, how was The Gap supposed to anticipate flannel?
All of it was engineered.
Now, when something like that happens, the only thing you can do is go, “You know what, really the reason I’m making music is I absolutely love making music,” so you stick with it.
Even with the changing music climate, you guys have always attracted your fair share of diehard fans. Hit us with your craziest fan encounter.
Matthew had a very credible death threat. It turned out the woman was dumb enough to start pen-palling some of the other fans and sent her picture to them, and then said she was going to go to a particular show in Milwaukee and kill him. We actually put her picture out to all security, and they caught her coming in, and sure enough she had a loaded .38 in her purse.
How do you perform after that?
You know, the show must go on. We come from a line of people who’ve been doing this for over 100 years.
I want to close with a big moment of triumph for you. I’m sure you remember MTV’s 25 Lame.
No. I’m not familiar with that at all. What was this?
I’m sorry. I’m going to bring up bad news from like 20 years ago. They did the “25 lamest videos,” and “After the Rain” was included. It had comedians like Jon Stewart, and Janeane Garofalo, doing commentary.
Oooh yeah, the postmodern, I’m so cool, and I’m so dark. Yeah, OK, that’s fine.
‘90s nostalgia is now at an all-time high, and having back to back Top 10 singles at the holidays, and consistently being on the road, how good does it feel to have the last laugh?
You know what … one of the first questions you asked … was there a particular moment when you felt the high, when you felt like this was it? Here’s the moment for me: I wrote the video for “After the Rain” two days before we filmed it. We already had a No. 1 with “Love and Affection,” and we were trying to go out on tour, so you had a management company saying, “You gotta do a video that shows you guys playing live, because we gotta sell tickets,” but we had no idea what the video for “After the Rain’ was gonna be.
Two days before shooting the video I had a dream that was like an acid trip. The entire video you see for “After the Rain,” from the concept stuff in the beginning, all the way through the end, literally came to me in a dream two days before.
We submitted it to the committee that was deciding which videos went on MTV.
I called our manager, and he said, “You’re not gonna believe this, they rejected the video. They want you to pull all of the spiritual references out of there. They want you to cut all the concept off, all that stuff. All they want is the performance part of it.” I said, “I want you to call them back and make a deal …”
Basically, what they did was agree to broadcast the video, as is, at two or three o’clock in the morning, one time.
That gamble worked out pretty well for you.
It was the most requested video for four weeks straight, and when they added the video they added it exactly the way we shot it.
That was the moment. That was it. That was the moment that was the high for me.
I love the fact that I get to make music. I love the fact that I get to make music with my brother, and I love the fact that it’s that exact video, cut exactly like it was, that I got letters from. One in particular was really cool.
It was about a month ago, I had a woman come up to us in an autograph line, and she had three kids. She handed me a letter she had written, and not sent, back in the day. She said she was sitting there, and at the time she was in junior high, had a horrible childhood, parents fighting, all that kind of stuff, and she had a bottle full of pills in front of her, and her dad’s .357 magnum in her lap, and she was about to take herself out.
Kids don’t know what permanent is. She was 14 years old, and she was about to do one of those, “They’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,” kind of things. Then the video for “After the Rain” came on, with the horrible parents, and the kid being pulled into a poster, and all that kind of stuff. She instead picked up the phone and called her grandmother, who got her some help, and I got to meet her kids.
That’s a helluva story.
It’s the truth.
I’m just gonna sum up by saying the only thing I ever wanted to do in my entire life was to make music, and I’m getting to do that still. Knocking on 50 I’m still making vital music, I’m still writing songs, I’m still touring, and meeting people, and hopefully making a difference, and that’s all I ever wanted to do. I’m just like the most grateful guy out there.
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