by Mick Wall
Having gone out of his way to label them a ‘corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion’ in an interview with Musician magazine, Kurt had since made clear his disdain for fellow-travellers like Alice in Chains, whose own major label debut, Facelift, had been released a year earlier but had been marketed initially as a cross between Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, both of whom were too macho for Kurt to take seriously. Alice in Chains ‘used to be a glam-metal band’, reckoned Kurt, like that said it all. ‘They’re obviously just corporate puppets that are just trying to jump on the alternative bandwagon,’ he ranted in an interview with Flipside in May 1992. Only Soundgarden, whose career on the Seattle scene preceded Nirvana’s, and who were also now enjoying mainstream success with their third album, Badmotorfinger, released just a week after Nevermind, escaped Kurt’s withering junkie gaze. He may have disapproved of them touring with Guns N’ Roses but he knew where they were coming from, could see the links. (Jason Everman had even been their bassist briefly.)
As Anton says, ‘That one album [Nevermind] came along and it was a complete game-changer on every level.’ Mostly, though, Kurt despised the new ‘scene’ that had sprung up around Nirvana like poison ivy. They called it ‘grunge’ like it was an organic fungi native to Seattle. For Kurt, ‘those bands have been in the hairspray/cock-rock scene for years and all of a sudden they stop washing their hair and start wearing flannel shirts. It doesn’t make any sense to me. There are bands moving from LA and all over to Seattle and then claiming they’ve lived there all their life so they can get record deals. It really offends me.’
Ironically, the only other musicians suffering along with Kurt at the advent of grunge were the bands whose careers the all-conquering success of Nirvana had virtually ended: the ‘hairspray’ bands like Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Poison and Whitesnake. Van Halen’s former singer David Lee Roth later blamed Kurt Cobain personally, claiming he ushered in an era in rock when ‘fun just wasn’t fun any more’. Or, as Anton puts it, ‘Kurt vanquished a race of bands overnight. As soon as Nirvana broke through, suddenly the poodle bands were non-existent. These were huge, established stadium rock bands. They just came along in a Nirvana-esque way and just vanquished everything that lay in front of them, by default, not by design.’
Even the ones who eventually managed to swim to safety, like Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses, did so with their sales intact but their credibility in tatters. The latter, arguably, suffered most by the comparison, releasing two double albums simultaneously – Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II, seen as the very limit of pompous rock star over-indulgence – just a week before Nevermind. So that by the summer of 1992, when Guns N’ Roses now toured the stadiums of America with a hugely overblown stage production, the highlight of which found their prickly singer, W. Axl Rose, sitting aloft a gigantic Harley Davidson motorcycle-styled piano, they looked even more preposterous when set against the stripped-naked stage set Nirvana were still touting like a badge of honour.
When Axl Rose wore a Nirvana baseball cap in the Guns N’ Roses video for their single ‘Don’t Cry’, Kurt was beside himself with embarrassment. Axl even told one journalist how much he’d love to hear Nirvana do a version of the Guns N’ Roses hit ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ – ‘their way, however that is’. He even put in a request to have Nirvana perform at the thirtieth birthday party he was planning in February 1992, an invitation Kurt dismissed out of hand. When Axl then offered Nirvana the opening spot on their huge summer tour co-headlining with Metallica, Kurt ran a mile. ‘We’re not your typical Guns N’ Roses type of band that has absolutely nothing to say,’ Kurt was quoted as saying in an interview with Seconds magazine at that time. ‘Whether we’re proficient in saying what we want to say doesn’t matter, it’s just the fact that we’re actually trying to communicate something different, something those cock-rock bands don’t.’
‘I remember being with Kurt and him getting upset about all the kids turning up to their shows in Guns N’ Roses T-shirts,’ says Anton Brookes, ‘and he found that really difficult, because I think the people he had in mind for his songs were not of that ilk. But they would also turn up in Sonic Youth T-shirts, Black Flag T-shirts, Mudhoney T-shirts, the purity and the message encapsulated within the songs, it just seeped out. It just went everywhere, and a lot of people who didn’t own a Stooges album or The Ramones or The Clash, for some reason Nirvana ignited something within their soul.’
Maybe so. According to Chrissy Shannon, though, it was around now that Kurt began to lose his own soul, or as he saw it anyway. ‘I know that Kurt did not want everyone to like him and love his band,’ she says. ‘That’s what he couldn’t take. He wanted to manage who his audience was. He was there for the misfits, the bullied, the freaks. He did not want the asshole frat boys, who beat him up in high school, to buy his records, but they did and the whole thing suddenly felt very out of control. I know that’s when he started slipping away.’
The first time Chrissy realised just how bad things had got, in terms of Kurt’s heroin use and his consequent isolation from the band, was during the video shoot for the ‘Come As You Are’ single, in LA in 1992. Though she didn’t know it at the time, it later transpired that Courtney was now pregnant, and that the two of them had checked into a Holiday Inn for three days while a ‘rock’n’roll doctor’ – a self-styled specialist in speedy heroin withdrawal – had been called in to hurriedly wean them off the gear. Courtney accompanied Kurt to the shoot, the couple hiding out in their own trailer. Kurt was still in such bad shape that he insisted there be no close-ups of his face in the video, forcing the director, Kevin Kerslake, to extrapolate from the Nevermind cover, as Kurt’s face becomes obscured by images of a baby swimming underwater and the sight in slow motion of a sinking revolver.
‘That was after things had taken the negative turn with Kurt,’ remembers Chrissy. ‘Krist and Dave were affable and lovely. In fact, Dave took me by the hand and led me around their elaborate set – he was really glad I was there to see it because it’s so hard to explain to people what they want it to look like.’ Later, they were all sitting around a picnic table set up with food for the band and crew, ‘shooting the shit, while Kurt was holed up – pun intended! – with Courtney in his trailer. Then all of a sudden he was with us at the table. Careful to sit as far away from the food as possible, but was hanging out for a bit. He looked like Brian Jones did in those last [Rolling Stones] films, translucent and like he was already in the spirit world. He didn’t stay long as the trailer door flew open and in her foghorn voice Courtney bellowed “KURT!” and he went back in with her shortly. That night I called my mom crying because I told her I thought he was going to die. Of course, I had thought it was going to be from the heroin…’
It was also during this period that the band performed live for the first time on Saturday Night Live – ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’. Kurt looked wan onscreen, his face shaved clean, his hair dyed a dull copper red, his cardigan hanging off him. Charged up at the thought of appearing on what was still one of America’s hippest TV shows, though, he at least puts some energy into his performance, even if his pained facial expression never alters. Nor was the tension surrounding Nirvana restricted to the stage. Back at the DGC publicity office, in LA, Chrissy Shannon was being hauled over the coals for sending limos to take the band to the show.
She explains: ‘When Nirvana was going to play Saturday Night Live, their manager, John Silva, called me and said, “Chris, when you book the cars, don’t send a limo for Kurt, he hates them.” Fine, so I call Music Express in Seattle and order regular cars to take the boys to the airport. At this point Kurt and Courtney are living out of a hotel. The car company had run out of regular cars and unbeknownst to me, sent a limo to pick Kurt and Courtney up. They refuse to enter the limo claiming it’s not “punk rock” to do so.
‘While I’m desperately trying to book another car company, Silva’s calling me saying, “Chris, you fucked up!”
So Kurt misses his plane to New York and Saturday Night Live is on the horn to Lisa Gladfelter freaking out. So now I have to re-book [Kurt’s] flight as well. Lisa meanwhile flies to New York to pick him up and deliver him personally to [producer] Marci Klein at SNL and Courtney has just scored them heroin off the street somewhere in New York. Lisa picks up Kurt and puts him in a cab personally to make sure he makes it to SNL and he pukes on her!’
In fact, far from stressing about limos and his punk credibility, Kurt had been out on a prolonged bender with Courtney, as revealed to the writer Lynn Hirschberg in an interview that went on the cover of the September 1992 issue of Vanity Fair, in which Courtney was quoted as saying, ‘We went on a binge. We did a lot of drugs. We got pills, and then we went down to Alphabet City and we copped some dope. Then we got high and went to SNL. After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.’ Elsewhere in the same story, Hirschberg quotes ‘a business associate who was travelling with them at the time’ as saying, ‘It was horrible. Courtney was pregnant and she was shooting up. Kurt was throwing up on people in the cab. They were both out of it.’
It was now that the whole over-the-top public persona of Courtney Love – and her Sid-and-Nancy-esque relationship with Kurt Cobain – threatened to overshadow anything Nirvana did next. The details and anecdotes began to fill up the pages of the gossip press, like bilge in an overflowing sewer. Courtney’s dad was a drugged-up hippy; Courtney’s mum was a rich girl gone wrong. Poor Courtney had been shuffled off to boarding school, yet somehow ended up stripping in Taiwan. Courtney lived in England, in Liverpool of all places, where she had flings with Teardrop Explodes’ singer Julian Cope and others less famous. Courtney fled back to America and ended up in Seattle, where she fucked more wannabe rock stars and took lots of Percodan. Courtney first took coke when she was 19 and had dabbled with smack on and off ever since. Courtney really loved Billy Corgan but Billy didn’t love Courtney so she settled for Kurt. These days any half-decent Google search will tell you a lot more than that and some of it is almost certainly true. But in the internet age, who doesn’t have a chequered past, a dysfunctional histoire, a few bodies buried somewhere? Nobody worth listening to with the lights out, that’s for sure, right, kids? Back in 1992, though, this was very hot stuff. Less Nancy, more Yoko – but with bite. Nobody in the media was gonna get away with running this gal out of town, right, dude?
Except they nearly did. By the time the Vanity Fair article broke, Courtney had given birth to her and Kurt’s baby daughter, Frances Bean. When the public realisation that her self-confessed heroin ‘binge’ overlapped with her early pregnancy became national news, the baby was taken into temporary child custody. Courtney would never forgive the writer for that, later making the astonishing claim that Hirschberg ‘deserves most of the blame’ for Cobain’s death.
In another, less sensational but equally telling part of the Vanity Fair story, when Kurt returned from a lengthy phone call from Dave, Hirschberg reports the following exchange: ‘Dave is upset,’ Kurt says after hanging up. ‘So,’ Courtney says, ‘why don’t you start a new band without [him]?’ Looking upset, Kurt says, ‘But I want Dave. He’s the best fucking drummer I know.’ Courtney signs off by telling Hirschberg, ‘The worst thing is when people say Kurt’s helping me to make it.’
‘Ah, the delicate flower that is Courtney,’ sighs Chrissy Shannon. ‘For a while she made life pretty miserable for Lisa and I. At first the Sid and Nancy thing was kinda funny, if creepy, and the phone calls from Dave spelling out his opinion on Kurt’s choice of girlfriend were hilarious … but as they descended into their addiction … it started to get ugly.
‘Then the infamous Vanity Fair article on Courtney came out and all shit hit the fan … When Child Protective Services went after them what did they expect? Dumb, dumb, dumb move and we had nothing to do with it.’
Both Kurt and Courtney had gone ‘ballistic on Lynn Hirschberg’, she recalls, ‘threatening her with bodily harm’. Then, ‘Courtney got obsessed with the unnamed sources quoted in the article. She was convinced that they came from inside Geffen for a while and so she set me up. She called me once claiming to be a writer from a fanzine and asked me a bunch of questions about herself to see what I would say about her. It was so lame and juvenile – she had another friend on the line listening, just like people do in junior high to their “enemies”! And, honestly, does anyone else on the planet sound like Courtney Love?’
Back on tour in Australia, earlier in the year, Kurt had been withdrawing so heavily it looked like they would have to cancel shows. Dave, future nicest man in rock, did what he was getting used to doing at times like this and looked the other way. What else was he supposed to do? It wasn’t really his band. Maybe things would get better once Kurt was ‘well’ again. ‘The first time Nirvana came down [to Australia] in January, 1992,’ Dave recalled disingenuously years later, ‘we were there for a few weeks and I had never been there before. I was just blown away because it was the best of both worlds. It almost had a European feel to it, but it was a little too friendly and sunny and beautiful to be considered European.’
It sounds so nice. It was not. The only way Kurt got through the tour and the subsequent dates in New Zealand and Japan was after a Sydney doctor prescribed him what turned out to be methadone pills. When the writer Dave Cavanagh joined Nirvana’s latest UK tour, in Belfast, in June, for a piece in Select, he was aghast at what he found. ‘There was quite a mood of fear. On the plane over, Anton said to me, “I’d really like you to just talk about the music with Kurt.” I was like, “What else am I supposed to talk about? Are there any other subjects?”’ In the event, Cavanagh interviewed Kurt for an hour or so, and found him to be ‘a nice guy, sweet, cute, dry and self-depreciating’, dressed in ‘grubby clothes, a second-hand watch … He looked like his entire life had cost about ten quid and he was deliberately eating the worst food he could buy, while everyone around him was becoming a millionaire. That’s how it seemed to me.’
The following morning, however, Cavanagh was awoken early and told to hurry as everyone was leaving early for the airport. ‘We were all being shepherded away from the hotel because, we later found out, Cobain had run out of methadone. He’d started withdrawing and paramedics had had to be called. When we rang up to ask more about this a couple of days later, we were told, “Oh, he had a dodgy kebab” or something.’
Anton Brookes sighs heavily at being reminded of such horror stories now. ‘When Nirvana came to town there was like a dark element that followed them. The junkie chic would latch on to them and these people would turn up and they were, basically, the walking dead. Zombies: just the colour of their skin, their eyes in their sockets. The way they dressed. It’s like, “Nobody understands us. We’re rebelling against whatever we’ve got to rebel against. And we’re cool but you’re not, because you’re not doing heroin.”
‘It was kind of like a little club. They’d be stood on one side of the dressing room and everybody else was on the other side of the dressing room. It was like poisons in the room. All these people like friends of Kurt and Courtney. You just want to go up and kick them out and go, “Fuck off!” But you can’t. And if you do, you’re not helping the situation, you’re making it worse. Suddenly you’re not a friend any more. It was a fine line trying to help and hinder, if that makes sense.’
Nobody was in a more difficult position than Dave and Krist, both of whom now found themselves on the wrong side of Nirvana’s dressing room. ‘There’s no denying that, to be honest,’ says Anton. ‘You could see the pain and the anguish etched on their faces every time you saw them and spoke to them. It was very self-evident. For a lot of us, it was the first time anything like this had ever happened.’ He pauses then goes on: ‘You add heroin into any situation – look at the whole history of rock’n’roll – it changes everything.’
How did Dave deal with this, as the new guy, the outsider? As the young guy parachuted into this situation, who always brings his best game to the s
how, now having to put up with all this horrible negative death-ray stuff going on? ‘I think he was quite worried,’ says Anton, simply, ‘and quite scared. He’s gone from punk rock kid, to working his way up into this really successful band, having an absolutely fantastic time. Then suddenly you wake up and the shit has hit the fan. We were all basically kids. We’d never experienced anything like this.’
When Nirvana arrived in Britain for their second successive Reading Festival appearance – this time as Saturday night headliners – in August 1992, they did so under a cloud. Kurt’s heroin use was no longer a secret and there was open talk that the band would either cancel the show or make an announcement that it would be their last. When Keith Cameron joined the tour in Belfast, ‘everything had changed beyond recognition,’ he later said. ‘All the talk was of heroin; the gigs almost seemed a diversion. They seemed static and distant from each other. I imagined that selling a lot of records might empower them. Success seemed to make Nirvana powerless.’
‘There was just a tidal wave of questions at Reading,’ recalls Anton. ‘“Are Nirvana playing? Are they splitting up?” People knew that Dave and Krist were on-site, they’d watched a few bands on the Friday night, but people were still saying that they wouldn’t play. Yes, there was turmoil in the Nirvana camp, but at the time you have to deny it.’
When Kurt arrived onstage in a wheelchair, dressed in a surgical gown and long, blond wig, it seemed like the joke was on the media. ‘Kurt got up from his hospital bed just to play for you,’ Krist deadpanned to the audience, as Kurt pretended to drag himself out of the chair by clinging to the mic stand. Then the joking stopped and the band leaned full tilt into ‘Breed’. Tony the ‘interpretative dancer’ was back for a second year running too but that was where the fun ended. Despite the celebratory air among the rain-soaked crowd, the driving 18-song set was as grey and glowering as the weekend skies, the atmosphere coming off the stage as muggy and grim as the knee-high mud the audience was forced to wade through just to be there, at what would prove to be Nirvana’s valedictory UK show. They would not be back, you sensed it somehow, in the way Kurt couldn’t even be bothered to remove his ‘comical’ surgical gown, nor speak much to the thousands who now believed all the guff about him being the spokesman of their generation. Sensed it in the way Kurt felt the need to tell them, ‘This isn’t our last show.’ Sensed it in the desperate way Kurt shared the fact that ‘Courtney is beginning to think everybody hates her’, urging the crowd to chant: ‘Courtney, we love you!’ even though no one there really cared either way. They just loved Kurt and would do or say whatever it took to keep him onstage with them, sensing this was the end. When Kurt then dedicated a new song, ‘All Apologies’, to Courtney and their 12-day-old daughter, Frances Bean, the words rang horribly true, as he hollered: ‘Married!’ Boom-a-boom-a-boom-ba-ba. ‘Buried!’