27: Kurt Cobain

by Salewicz, Chris

  The K scene was extremely purist, and Calvin Johnson’s first name led to Kurt dubbing its devotees as ‘Calvinists’. The overriding attitude was not dissimilar to that at, say, the UK’s Sniffin’ Glue fanzine which, in 1977, had railed against the Clash for signing to a major label. While on one hand Kurt was extremely taken with such a stance, it was also incompatible with his secret ambitions, a source of extreme inner conflict in the coming years.

  Meanwhile Krist Novoselic had bought a VW van with his Taco Bell earnings and become the driver for the Melvins. He also became involved with a Melvins side project, the Meltors, who would play Melvins covers. Krist became the Meltors’ bass player. Some outsiders, like Slim Moon, the founder of the Kill Rock Stars label, thought him to be the coolest member of the Melvins scene. But others noted how much he drank, and his confrontational tendencies. Unlike most of his young male contemporaries in Aberdeen, however, Krist had a girlfriend, Shelli.

  In his autobiography, Krist Novoselic wrote about his initial impressions of Kurt: ‘Kurt was a completely creative persona – a true artist. When I first met him, he had just got a job and found his own place. What a den of art/insanity that was. He tried to make his own lava lamp out of wax and vegetable oil (it didn’t work). He sketched very obscene Scooby Doo cartoons all over his apartment building hallways. He made wild sound montages from obscure records. He sculpted clay into scary spirit people writhing in agony. He played guitar, and wrote great tunes that were kind of off-kilter. Kurt held a sceptical perspective towards the world. He’d create video montages that were scathing testimonies about popular culture, compiled from hours and hours of watching TV.’[18] A longstanding problem for Kurt, however, was the fact that Krist’s mother never cared for him.

  For his part, meeting Krist made a considerable difference to Kurt’s life: ‘I hated everybody. I always managed to have at least one close friend at a time, through most of my life. There have been years where I would just put up with my best friend, and not really like the person. But since I’ve been in the band and since I’ve known Krist … I have a handful of friends that are great …’[19]

  In 1987, a year after Kurt had given Krist the Fecal Matter cassette, they formed a group, with Krist on bass and Dale Crover on drums, which they called Skid Row. ‘Their songs were basically riffs,’ Slim Moon said. ‘They’d play a riff for a long time and Kurt would scream into the microphone, then he’d drop the guitar and play with the digital delay and make crazy noises instead of a guitar solo, and then he’d pick the guitar back up and play the riff some more. Right away, he was a showman.’[20]

  Soon, after Kurt had watched a television show about Buddhism, Skid Row’s name was changed to Nirvana. ‘It means attainment of perfection,’ explained Kurt.[21]

  Part of the Olympia K Records scene was a girl called Tracy Marander, arty-looking and unusual with her vivid red hair. When she and Kurt first met, she was living in Tacoma, outside Seattle. Even though she was slightly larger than him, Kurt went for this stylish, exotic girl, and she became his first girlfriend. In the autumn of 1987, Tracy relocated from Tacoma to Olympia, renting an apartment at 114 ½ North Pear Street. Kurt, now in his twentieth year, moved up to live with her, along with a rabbit he kept in a cage on top of the fridge. After he had painted the bathroom bright red, Kurt spray-painted the words ‘RED RUM’ – an allusion to the horror film The Shining – on a wall. Living-room walls were covered with pictures and articles taken from the pages of Melody Maker and NME, which he would buy on import. Despite his evident eccentricities, people in Olympia’s first impressions of Kurt were that he was a sweet guy.

  Historically, the Pacific Northwest has leant towards the political left. As state capital, stylish Olympia was endowed with myriad cultural facilities for its citizens. This included KAOS radio, which was reputed to have the most comprehensive library of independent music of any station in the USA. Any record on an independent label was guaranteed to be played on KAOS, part of some unwritten charter of the station. (Even in the very early days of Nirvana, the group were regularly playing or being interviewed on KAOS: April 1987 was the month of their first broadcast, when they played eleven songs during an early-hours show.) Unusually, there was also an ethos in the city of paying serious respect to women musicians, a stance echoed by K Records. Amongst those so honoured were such British female acts as the Slits, the Raincoats and the Marine Girls. After having hung out with Myer Loftin and gained an understanding of a gay frame of mind, Kurt Cobain’s sensibility was again widened, as he came to appreciate not only a feminine but also a feminist point of view. The extent to which Olympia was both hardcore and ‘Calvinist’, simultaneously liberating and trammelling, and how precisely this came to define a part of Kurt Cobain, should not be underestimated.

  Krist Novoselic and his girlfriend Shelli also moved up to Olympia, Krist taking a job as an industrial painter at the Boeing aircraft factory. Later they would shift residences to Tacoma. Briefly Kurt and Krist formed a group covering Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes called the Sellouts, but after a few attempts to play taverns, they abandoned the project. Later, there were those who were reminded of Creedence’s John Fogerty when they heard or saw Kurt sing.[22]

  In the winter of 1987, the pair started playing with another drummer, Aaron Burckhard, an Aberdeen local who worked at Burger King and hung around with the Melvins. Aaron was more into conventional heavy metal, and he had a moustache, an aesthetic issue for Kurt and Krist (and, indeed, for the owners of the record label to which they would soon sign). Rehearsing at his house, Kurt applied himself with assiduous effort. ‘We would play the set and then I would just start playing those songs again right away,’ he said.[23] He had made a decision to get a record out as soon as possible.

  Kurt was very influenced by Big Black, Killdozer, Scratch Acid and Sonic Youth – groups that he was really into and had read about in the Massachussetts-based Forced Exposure fanzine. He was also getting into the Sonics, the original early 1960s garage band from Tacoma: ‘The Sonics recorded very, very cheaply on a two track you know, and they just used one microphone over the drums, and they got the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard,’ Kurt told an interviewer on CITR-FM. ‘It’s still my favourite drum sound. It sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever known.’

  In the Tacoma of 1987, the atmospheric Community World Theater, a former porn cinema, became an important venue, where most acts played for nothing. The early Nirvana frequently appeared there. When the Sub Pop scene hit, as it did imminently, Tacoma was a big part of that phenomenon, largely because of the venue.

  *

  In an unfashionable part of Seattle was located Reciprocal Studios, the base of a producer called Jack Endino. His ramshackle premises were hardly state of the art. But it was there that Endino had produced a number of revered local acts: Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Soundgarden. Jack Endino was the producer Nirvana wanted to work with.

  On 23 January 1988 Nirvana drove down to the Seattle studio. In six hours, for $152.44, they put down and mixed ten complete songs: ‘If You Must’, ‘Downer’, ‘Floyd the Barber’, ‘Paper Cuts’, ‘Spank Thru’, ‘Hairspray Queen’, ‘Aero Zeppelin’, ‘Beeswax’, ‘Mexican Seafood’ and ‘Pen Cap Chew’. For the session they had reverted to using Dale Crover on drums. That night Nirvana had a show at the Community World Theater, where they played the songs in the order they had been recorded. As soon as the concert ended, Dale Crover hit the road to San Francisco for dates playing with Buzz Osbourne in a reformed Melvins. Before he left, he recommended an Aberdeen drummer, Dave Foster. But after Foster was arrested for beating up someone who had been hitting on his girlfriend, his driving licence was revoked[24]. As he could no longer drive to rehearsals, Kurt and Krist worked briefly again with Aaron Burckhard. But he was held overnight for drunk-driving and for abusing the arresting officer, who happened to be black[25]. When let out of jail the next day, he said he was too
hungover to come to rehearsals. Accordingly he was also out of the group.

  The band found yet another drummer, Chad Channing, born on 31 January 1967. While Kurt and Krist were spending a brief spell under the name of Bliss, they played with Chad’s group, Tick-Dolly-Row. The two Aberdeen boys were impressed by Chad’s fibreglass drum kit, but they didn’t really communicate. Eventually they were introduced at the farewell show of a group called Malfunkshun at the Community World Theater. Unenthusiastic at first, Chad soon succumbed, going over and jamming with the pair at Krist’s home, where he and Kurt had constructed a rehearsal studio. Chad and Kurt were not dissimilar: softly spoken, creative, very sensitive. Like the other two members of Nirvana, Chad was the product of a divorce.

  On 24 April 1988, they played their first concert together, at Seattle’s Vogue. A review of the group, the first ever published, in Backlash, a Seattle music free-sheet, concluded with a radical prediction: ‘with enough practice, Nirvana could become … better than the Melvins!’

  Seattle was beginning to reveal that it had a very specific scene of its own. As Olympia had hinged around K Records, so Seattle’s burgeoning musical movement was largely underpinned by the Sub Pop label. Sub Pop sprang out of a fanzine, Subterranean Pop, which Bruce Pavitt, then living in Olympia, had started in the early 1980s in order to pick up additional graduation credits. Moving to Seattle, he would put out cassettes with the magazine, working with Jonathan Poneman, who became his business partner. In 1986, Sub Pop put out its first album, a compilation that included Sonic Youth, Scratch Acid, Wipers and Naked Raygun. ‘Sub Pop was cultivating a certain vibe, à la Blue Note or Factory,’ Bruce Pavitt said.[26]

  Part of that ‘vibe’ was the release of original-sounding singles, for which the Sub Pop pair had spotted the worth of Nirvana. So it was that on 11 June 1988, Nirvana recorded ‘Love Buzz’, their first single, a cover, written and originally recorded by the Dutch group Shocking Blue in 1969. Sub Pop had suggested they record this song, their favourite from the live set. Produced by Jack Endino, the B-side was entitled ‘Big Cheese’, an original credited to Kurt and Krist that would also appear on their first album.

  In November 1988 Sub Pop released ‘Love Buzz’ as the first single in the Sub Pop Singles Club, a subscription service by which subscribers received new releases by mail every month. Realizing that exposure through the American media was almost impossible, its owners took the same route as another son of Seattle, Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix had moved to Britain to break the charts, then emulated this success in the USA. As the UK music press was available widely in America on import, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman concentrated on promoting Sub Pop through the British papers. In February 1989 they paid for Melody Maker journalist Everett True to fly out to Seattle and document the scene in a series of articles. When True arrived, Kurt Cobain defined the sound of the city to him: ‘Hard music played to a slow tempo.’ Yet Nirvana were by no means at the forefront of this new Seattle scene. It was significant that their ‘Love Buzz’ single was restricted to the Sub Pop Singles Club, meaning the record never had a true release of its own. This distressed Kurt, and also reflected the fact that most locals were underwhelmed by Nirvana.

  Prior to the show at the Vogue that secured them their deal, Kurt Cobain had suffered from stomach ache and vomited. Simple nerves, perhaps, as suffered by many performers and sportsmen. Except that from then on the stomach pains never really went away, and Kurt was obliged to adapt his life to cope with this constant torment.

  But the source of his stomach ache was more than nervousness, and it intersected with the very source of his art. Because Kurt was so sensitive and so intelligent, and could feel and perceive so much, he was extremely hurt and frustrated that everyone else didn’t see and sense what he glimpsed. Stomach pain also ran in the family. ‘It’s a psychosomatic thing. My mom had it for a few years in her early twenties, and eventually it went away. She was in a hospital all the time because of it.’[27]

  He would spend the next years of his life in thrall to this debilitating illness, enduring numerous hospital visits and doctors’ examinations, all to no avail. Later, in 1993, he would explain: ‘Most of the time I sing right from my stomach. Right from where my stomach pain is. That’s where the pain and anger comes from. It’s definitely there: every time I’ve had an endoscope, they find a red irritation in my stomach. But it’s psychosomatic, it’s all from anger. And screaming.’ The pain in Kurt’s belly was now added to another constant hurt: the backache he suffered from his scoliosis, exacerbated by his guitar playing. ‘That really adds to the pain in our music. It really does. I’m kind of grateful for it.’[28]

  In September 1988 Krist temporarily broke up with Shelli. Krist no longer had regular work, while Shelli had a night-time job. Although Krist was obliged to move back to Aberdeen, to stay with his mother for a time, he was now able to play music full time, and Nirvana could practice above his mother Maria’s hairdressing shop. Yet the split put pressures on Kurt and Tracy, especially from Tracy’s end, as she certainly did not want to split up with Kurt. As a salve to his girl, and after listening to the Beatles’ Meet the Beatles album for hours, Kurt wrote her a song, ‘About a Girl’.

  Now there were more live performances, all over Washington State. Kurt became legendary for his readiness to smash up his equipment at the end of shows. On 30 October 1988, at a show at a dorm in Evergreen State College, Kurt smashed up a guitar for the first time. And on this first significant tour, they would pick up cheap guitars from pawnshops to be destroyed onstage that night. Similarly, Kurt would seek out effects pedals wherever they travelled. But onstage it was often Krist Novoselic who stood out more than the guitarist. ‘Kurt is a really good songwriter, but to the extent that those songs became full and alive, that was Krist,’ said Jonathan Poneman.[29] Others also noted that Krist was far more confident and at ease with himself than Kurt, rather more in charge. Yet Kurt had an intensity that you could feel, and you knew he was the creative force in the band.

  Sub Pop recognized this. They had decided they wanted Nirvana to record an album, with Jack Endino once again producing. On Christmas Eve, 1988, Nirvana were back at Reciprocal Studios for the first recording session for what would become known as Bleach. There would be five more sessions, each of around five hours, until the record was completed on 24 January. Total recording costs came to just over $600 for a record that ultimately would sell one and a half million copies.

  Now Kurt revealed a side that others might not expect, visiting the local library and reading books about music business deals. Aware that Sub Pop made it a statement of their company’s ‘cool’ that the label would not issue contracts – secretly because these leftie bohemian ‘businessmen’ didn’t know what a record company contract looked like or might contain – Kurt brought this to the attention of Krist. One night a drunken Krist turned up at Bruce Pavitt’s home. He demanded a three-album, three-year deal with Sub Pop, and that they would receive $6,000 in year one, $12,000 in year two, and $18,000 in year three. Sub Pop agreed.

  In December 1988, another Nirvana tune appeared, on the Sub Pop 200 box set. ‘Spank Thru’ (written by Kurt, with masturbation as its subject) was a really great song, with a burning drive. The song had been recorded on 6 November 1988, but was one of the earliest of Kurt’s tunes, first heard on the Fecal Matter tape. It also set the template for the dynamics in almost all Nirvana songs: slow and quiet, followed by loud, fast and forceful.

  The recording of Bleach was followed by a two-week West Coast tour, bottom of the bill to Mudhoney and the Melvins. There were worries over Kurt’s abilities to sing and play guitar simultaneously, so a second guitarist was added. Jason Everman – who had given Nirvana the money to record Bleach – got the gig. On 11 February 1989, famously, as though in an effort to upstage his legendary Seattle forebear Jimi Hendrix, Kurt played guitar standing on his head, in San Jose, California.

  In 1989 Nirvana wou
ld play over a hundred shows, five times what they had managed the previous year. When not on the road, Kurt would stay at home at the Olympia apartment he shared with Tracy. There he would paint all day. ‘He’d paint with whatever medium came to hand,’ she said. ‘Acrylic paints, magic marker, spray cans, blood, pen, pencil – and on whatever improvised canvas he could scarf up at local thrift stores: often the back of board games. On rare occasions, he’d even paint using his own semen. He’d paint aliens, diseased children, grossly distorted childhood images utilizing pop iconographic figures such as Batman and Barbie.’[30]

  On 9 June, with Mudhoney and Tad, Nirvana played bottom of the bill at Sub Pop’s Lamefest ’89 at Seattle’s Moore Theater. It was a big event – a year previously these acts couldn’t have played such a venue to a packed-out audience. Bleach was released days later. Sub Pop were amazed that the record immediately started to sell, as essentially, Nirvana were an almost unknown band. As soon as the record was out, Nirvana set off on their first US tour. They played twenty-six dates, mainly in bars, never earning more than a hundred dollars a night. They often slept in their van, but were tremendously excited that they were now living the full rock ’n’ roll travelling band life. Although at first there was rarely a large audience, soon attendances picked up, after college radio began to play tunes from Bleach such as ‘School’ and ‘About a Girl’.