I really loved the song by the Pretenders called “Message of Love,” and wanted to write a song like that, but we needed a bass line. We are all living in this house in Richmond, California, and I think I went to a movie. Everybody back at the house had dropped acid. So I came home and Mike is sitting on the floor in the kitchen tripping balls, and he had his bass on, and he goes, “I figured it out, man! I figured it out.” He played the bass line for me for the first time right there. I didn’t know what to think about it, because I was like, “Well, he’s on acid, so I can’t tell if he’s even going to remember it.” Then we ended up playing it the next day, and it just stuck.
The lyrics to it are about feeling like a loser, watching television, jerking off, and feeling lonely. I was pretty frightened at the time. I was in limbo. I didn’t have a girlfriend — it took, like, four years for me and Adrienne to get together, from like ’90 until ’94. We had signed to a major label, and there was a backlash at the time because we had been this underground band. Things felt out of my control, and it felt like a make-or-break deal. It’s such a unique-sounding song, when you really look at it. Nobody was playing rhythms that swing, or that kind of power in the choruses. Grunge had turned into something that was bastardized by lameness, and I think we were coming from a place that felt a little harder and more upbeat. And it was super-danceable and got people to go crazy.