Songfacts®:

• The lead single from Live's breakthrough album, Throwing Copper, finds frontman Ed Kowalczyk grappling with the idea of his small-town band going big.
  
  "I pretty much knew that from the beginning that this would be a big record for us," he told Craig Rosen, author of The Billboard Book Of Number One Albums. "It was just a gut feeling that we had made a bunch of great songs that sounded really good. We figured we would be in front of a lot of people doing interviews. We probably won't write another song like it again, but being that it was going to be the first time that the mass media was going to pay attention to our band, we figured why not do a song about how f--ked-up we feel and also about how good we feel onstage, because it is a weird mixture of emotions."
• The song started out as being about "the world at large and the state of the leader and led" and the tactics political and religious figures use to manipulate the public. But in retrospect, it hit Kowalczyk on a personal level. He was mulling over the band's responsibility to use their music to say something meaningful. "After it was recorded, I sort of realized that it could apply to what we do as well, which is a public speaking of sorts," he said in a 1994 interview. "But yet, it just feels really good, but yet we should probably say something constructive to people, but yet we're not really sure why or how or what we're doing at times."
• "Selling The Drama" peaked at #1 on the Alternative Airplay chart and #4 on the Mainstream Rock chart.
• The ensuing singles, including "Lightning Crashes" and "I Alone," were released as promos for radio play and weren't available for purchase, which helped boost album sales. It was a common tactic with record labels at the time to withhold singles to generate interest in an album.
• The album went to #1 in America, where it sold 8 million copies - but it was hardly an overnight success. It took 52 weeks to reach the top of the chart.
• Live performed this during their set at Woodstock '94. Kowalczyk said it was a nerve-wracking experience but helped the band get the exposure they needed to take them to the next level. He told Tone Deaf in 2019, "We were just at this point in the record where we had just come off of a, sort-of, club tour where we were building the album and the excitement, and just found ourselves on this stage, really out of nowhere, and it really galvanized a new level of interest in us.
  
  From that performance, I think it was really important because so many people got to see us. We got to put these songs together with a really visceral and energetic band for the first time in a major setting."
• Live performed the song on Saturday Night Live on January 21, 1995.
• The album was recorded at Pachyderm Studio (the site of Nirvana's In Utero sessions) in 1993 and produced by Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads. "Jerry's pretty much a father figure in the studio," Kowalczyk said. "He just keeps everyone organized and psyched." As a result, the recording process was a simple endeavor. "It was really easy," he continued. "We did everything in pretty much one or two takes with very few overdubs. I went back and sang most of the vocals over, but other than that, we tried to keep everything as live-to-tape as possible."
• The album was mixed by Tom Lord-Alge, who won two Grammy Awards for his work on Steve Winwood's Back In the High Life (1986) and Roll With It (1988). Kowalczyk said the sonic elements that Lord-Alge brought to the track helped it become a hit. "He brought a punchiness, crunch, and sheen that I hadn't heard before with our music," Kowalczyk told Craig Rosen. "The first one he did was 'Selling the Drama.' It just blew me away, how well it came across and how immediate it was, so we had him mix the whole record. That's probably why it did so well at radio."
• The music video, directed by Julia Heyward, takes place in a forest where a long-haired Kowalczyk is angrily tearing pages out of a book. The singer adopted his signature bald-headed look in time for Live's next visual for "I Alone."