by Mick Wall
Even the six-song encore seemed as though it was concocted as a taunt, almost, to the fey tropes of traditional festival-going. ‘Territorial Pissing’, always a cue for onstage havoc, lent itself to the biggest auto-destruct yet, as Dave and Krist spent the next several minutes absolutely destroying anything they could get their frustrated hands on, while Kurt, his hospital gown flapping in the stinking wind, did a mocking, shocking version of Seattle’s other prodigal left-handed son, Jimi Hendrix, doing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, as if to underline the fact that this was not Woodstock. ‘An ironic soundtrack for generational pain’ is how the review in Rolling Stone later described it. But that was being kind. This wasn’t irony on display any more. This was just pain. Not generational, but specific and of the moment.
The fandango now surrounding Nirvana wherever they showed up continued in September, at the MTV Video Music Awards show, broadcast live from the Pauley Pavilion at UCLA. Having agreed not to perform their newest number, ‘Rape Me’, Kurt then strummed the opening chords, before cutting into ‘Lithium’, throwing the production team into a major spin, as MTV’s vice-president, Judy McGrath, was about to order the director to cut to a commercial break.
In the event, Nirvana ran through ‘Lithium’, as planned, but as the number ended Krist threw his bass into the air, as he’d done a thousand times before, but mistimed his catch, the bass catching him square in the jaw, knocking him down onto the stage. Kurt then tried to stab his guitar right through the amps while Dave kicked over his drums and stumbled to the mic to call out, ‘Where’s Axl? Hi, Axl! Hi, Axl! Hi, Axl!’ over and over to the general confusion of everybody – except Guns N’ Roses’ singer, W. Axl Rose, who knew exactly what was going on.
It was the latest instalment in the Kurt-hates-Axl row that had been simmering for months. Round one had occurred the year before when Axl and GN’R’s guitarist, Slash, had gone to see Nirvana play at the Palace in LA. Courtney later recalled in the press Axl standing next to her at the side of the stage, ‘doing that dance he did in the “Sweet Child o’ Mine” video.’ She claimed that after the show Axl had told Kurt: ‘You’re everything I could’ve been.’ Kurt did not know what to say. For him, Axl Rose was everything he would never want to be. As Axl was ‘obviously a racist and homophobe’.
For Kurt Cobain the idealist, Axl Rose and Guns N’ Roses represented everything he claimed to most abhor about rock stardom, seeing them as unforgivably self-indulgent and out of step with the times. No matter that Kurt and Axl actually had a lot in common: both contrarians never happier seemingly than when cutting off their noses to spite their faces; both from highly dysfunctional families in which the son had essentially run away from home, fending for himself on the streets since his teens. Both of whom had finally found a twisted kind of self-validation through forming mega-successful rock bands; and had fallen for the rock star lifestyle clichés, including sex and drugs and deliberately going against the grain. But Kurt had underestimated the personal animus Axl could bring to bear on anyone who crossed him, including his closest friends and band mates. When Kurt’s public rebukes of Axl and his band hit the press in 1992, Axl was bent on revenge, telling one audience: ‘Right now alternative – the only thing that means to me is Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, who basically is a fucking junkie with a junkie wife. If the baby’s born deformed, I think they both ought to go to prison, that’s my feeling. He’s too good, and too cool, to bring his rock’n’roll to you, because the majority of you he doesn’t like, or want to play to, or even want you to like his music.’
Kurt responded in kind, telling the Advocate: ‘I can’t even waste my time on that band, because they’re so obviously pathetic and untalented. I used to think that everything in the mainstream pop world was crap, but now that some underground bands have been signed with majors, I take Guns N’ Roses as more of an offense’, adding, ‘They’re really talentless people, and they write crap music.’
The only thing he had in common with Axl, Cobain told his biographer, Michael Azerrad, was that they both came from small towns. ‘His role has been played for years. Ever since the beginning of rock’n’roll, there’s been an Axl Rose. It’s just totally boring to me. Why it’s such a fresh and new thing in his eyes is obviously because it’s happening to him personally and he’s such an egotistical person that he thinks that the whole world owes him something.’ This from the guy who now shut himself away from his own band and management before shows so he could shoot heroin.
When both Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses were booked to appear at the 1992 MTV awards, it was an accident waiting to happen. Elton John had agreed to join Guns N’ Roses on piano and backing vocals for their number, ‘November Rain’. As a childhood fan of Elton’s, Axl was in a deep swoon over the occasion, yet the show is now recalled for very different reasons. The trouble began when, as he left the stage, Kurt spat on the keys of the piano he believed belonged to Axl, but which actually belonged to Elton. Then when Kurt and Courtney were sitting backstage with baby Frances in Courtney’s arms, as Axl walked by with his then girlfriend, the model Stephanie Seymour, surrounded by his usual retinue of bodyguards, Courtney called out, ‘Axl! Axl! Will you be the godfather of our child?’ Embarrassed, Axl strode over and jabbed his finger in Kurt’s face. ‘You shut your bitch up,’ he snarled, ‘or I’m taking you down to the pavement!’
To which Kurt replied, sarcastically: ‘What? What are you going to do, you’re going to beat me up?’ Axl glared at him. ‘You better keep your wife’s mouth shut. You embarrass everybody. You embarrass your wife, you embarrass your old man, you embarrass me.’ At which, Kurt turned to Courtney and wagged his finger: ‘Shut up, bitch!’ Then burst out laughing.
In a desperate attempt to try and smooth the situation, Stephanie asked Courtney: ‘Are you a model?’ Courtney sneered. ‘No. Are you a brain surgeon?’
Furious, Axl stormed off. Then later in the show a posse from the GN’R camp pushed their way into Nirvana’s trailer, and a brief but pointless scuffle broke out, quickly extinguished in a kind of music industry stand-off as executives from Geffen – to whom Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses were both signed – intervened to calm the situation. The incident was reported around the world, with Kurt coming out of the story as the frail hero, Axl the screwy-eyed monster. Later, when the media dust settled, Axl told friends that Courtney had actually been attempting to do more than just rile him. She was actually trying to possess him. ‘He believes people are always trying to find a window through to control his energy,’ said a friend. Axl’s way of dealing with it was by ‘controlling the people who have access to him’.
The harsher reality, though, was that Courtney had already taken possession of Kurt’s soul, and, by extension, that of Nirvana. And the only other people Kurt was now allowed access to were their heroin dealers.
‘I’d go backstage to get him,’ Anton Brookes recalls, ‘and you’d knock on the door and, “You can’t come in! You can’t come in!” Because he was shooting up before he goes onstage. It’s just kind of like … it’s just no fun. All the fun has been sucked out of what a few months previously was such an exciting, absolutely brilliant time.’ Anton adds, tellingly: ‘I could be naïve here but I think it’s wrong to blame Courtney for all of that. I think in any relationship you have to accept a certain amount of responsibility for your actions. Kurt was his own man and Kurt was doing heroin before Nirvana became big. He was doing heroin probably before Nirvana even started. But he didn’t have the money to be able to sustain a habit.
‘Once you get more money, it becomes easier to get it and the ways to get it become … simplicity, really, isn’t it, after a while? Junkies attract junkies.’ Before that, ‘Kurt was a laugh. People are shocked to hear that now but it’s true. He was a funny fucker! Kurt was a good person – a very nice, caring, charming person. But you throw heroin into that and the nicest person at times can be a bastard … I didn’t used to get the full brunt of it but you can bet your bottom dollar management did on
a daily basis.’
Not to mention Dave and Krist, who were now beginning to think seriously of a life beyond Nirvana. Could such a thing exist? They would soon be forced to find out.
7. Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
Things just got worse and worse and worse. As they always do with junkies. ‘I feel like people want me to die, because it would be the classic rock’n’roll story,’ Kurt was quoted as saying at the end of 1992. But nobody wanted Kurt to die. Least of all Dave Grohl, who would put his own career on the line by eventually telling Kurt that he wasn’t prepared to play in Nirvana any more unless Kurt stopped taking heroin and got himself the fuck together. Not that that worked, either.
The last 18 months of Nirvana’s career were just horrible. When Kurt wasn’t injecting heroin he was injecting speed, when he wasn’t doing that he was taking Percodan and methadone, or Valium or any other super-strength tranquilliser and opiate he could get his hands on, legally prescribed or simply bought off the street. Courtney, freaked to the bone by the temporary removal of Frances, had sworn to stay off drugs. But she was always falling off the wagon. Sometimes they would be using the same drug dealer but without telling each other, constantly lying to each other about what they were or weren’t taking, and how much or how little. Both would go through various stages of detox, but many around the band found Kurt even harder to deal with when he was off drugs than when he was on them.
Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic might have decided they must be the ones on drugs though when they received written notice of some amendments Kurt now insisted on being made to their existing band contracts. Spurred on, many believed, by Courtney, Kurt, through the band’s own lawyers, was allegedly demanding 90 per cent of all songwriting royalties, leaving Dave and Krist to split 10 per cent between them. Moreover, this new agreement was to be made retrospectively, covering the songs on Nevermind, too. Thus putting Dave and Krist into a position where they had to actually pay Kurt back millions of dollars.
Grohl’s future biographer Paul Brannigan recalls the pair’s bitter reaction to this latest development. ‘Kurt’s own latter history rather overwhelmed any decision that was made at that point. But certainly at the time, I think, both Dave and Krist were close to walking away from the band. “Like, really? Fuck you! I thought we were all in this together!” Even as much as it was Kurt’s vision that was driving the band, and Dave was a late arrival onto that album – seven of the songs on Nevermind had been demoed without him, in pretty much exactly the same form – initially there was a hostile reaction. But then, later, Dave said something to me like: “At some point you just think, well, shit, I’ve got my house. I’ve been able to look after my mum. I’ve got more money now than I ever thought I was gonna have two years ago. So, in a sense you go, right, well, that’s the way it is then.”’
He goes on: ‘In pragmatic terms, I can imagine that there’s a sense of ego where you just wanna just throw your toys out of the pram and go, fuck you, this is not what I signed up for. Then another part of you thinks, right, well, so this is how it is then, I guess. We know the rules now. We know this isn’t all for one, one for all. And you deal with it. This is business. This is life. So suck it up. Yeah. It’s something of a rewriting of history. I know Dave’s, legally, not allowed to talk about it. They had to sign a nondisclosure thing when they did it. But it was backdated to one point in time, I’m not exactly sure when. It wasn’t just that in future they weren’t gonna get the same money. It was that Dave and Krist actually now owed Kurt money. You can imagine it being a bit of a kick in the balls.’
When asked for his memory of events, Anton Brookes says now that he has ‘no idea how much the split was, but when it did come along, I got the impression, because Kurt wrote the lyrics, and chiefly the songs, even though the band developed them, I think [Dave and Krist] were quite happy with it … I think that was more to do with Courtney, more than anything.’ He pauses, then adds: ‘I only saw that, when it happened, as Courtney looking out for her husband. Looking out for his interests and everything.’
Somehow, in the middle of all this, Nirvana managed to record one last great album, In Utero, released in September 1993, and another multi-platinum smash, even though it was as far removed from the sugarcoated punk-pop of Nevermind as it was possible to imagine. The original title Kurt wanted for the new album was I Hate Myself and Want to Die. Everyone else shuddered at the idea, not least DGC, which had everything riding on this next release. With Nevermind on its way to 30 million sales worldwide, this was no time for pathetic junkie jokes. Kurt was adamant, though. It was only after Krist put the case to Kurt that such a title would open the band up to endless lawsuits from parents of kids whose deaths had potentially been inspired by listening to the album that Kurt finally saw the light. (Both Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne had recently faced lengthy and expensive high-profile court battles over two such cases.)
Then Kurt wanted to call it Verse, Chorus, Verse, a marvellously prosaic title that again met with frowns and much shaking of heads. In the end, Kurt came up with In Utero, a phrase lifted from a poem he admired by Courtney, and which was enigmatic enough – most Nirvana fans would have no idea what it actually meant – to work for everyone else in the band and their management and record company. Harder to swallow for ‘the grown-ups’, as Kurt called them, however, was the music itself: 12 tracks of such unremittingly bleak power that they amounted to a refutation of everything Nirvana had achieved with Nevermind, including that album itself, and most of all its totemic single, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
The uncompromising Steve Albini, once of Big Black, now renowned as one of the most anti-establishment producers in the business, with his distrust of digital technology, his insistence on ‘old school’ recording techniques, cutting bands live to tape, their ‘pure sound’ captured by the placement of microphones around the room – much as the early Zeppelin albums had been recorded by, as Jimmy Page put it, ‘moving the air around in the room’ – was exactly what Kurt was looking for to return Nirvana to the vanguard of punk.
In a letter Albini sent to the band prior to taking the album on, outlining his own ideas, Albini wrote: ‘I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm.’
He also underlined his own freethinking philosophy when it came to payment for his work. ‘I explained this to Kurt but I thought I’d better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band writes the songs. The band plays the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band. I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars, or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.’
All of which endeared the maverick producer to Kurt in a way that went beyond money. Whatever this album was going to sound like, its primary focus, as far as Kurt was concerned, was that it not sound like the slickly produced Nevermind. Now, in Albini, it seemed like they had found someone who could do ragged justice to the subject matter of the album’s cornerstone tracks – ranging from Kurt’s ‘teenage angst’ that has ‘paid me well’ on ‘Serve the Servants’ to his longing to ‘eat your cancer when you turn black’ on ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, his open love-hate letter to Courtney (originally titled ‘Heart-Shaped Coffin’), to promising the world that now judged his every move to ‘kiss your open sores’ on ‘Rape Me’, or, most moving of all, to cooing about dis
tilling ‘the life in me’ on ‘Pennyroyal Tea’, a drink once used to induce abortions.
Other tracks, like ‘Milk It’, ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ and, most especially, the vicious ‘Tourette’s’, are sheer fury, fired like a gun in a crowded room, not caring what tender parts their bullets might hit. While still others appeared to belie the whole sense of the album as one long howl of rage, realigning it to something much more poignant and frail: the touching ‘Dumb’, with its lonely midnight cello, reminiscent of wistful mid-period Beatles; the hypnotic ‘All Apologies’, with its callused call-and-response lines about wishing ‘I was like you, easily amused…’ and its signature switch from feather-light guitar to thunderous rock avalanche.