27: Kurt Cobain

by Salewicz, Chris

  On 16 September, three days later, the trio played an instore show at the city’s Beehive Records. Fans appeared from as far away as Montesano. ‘I realized that if people you went to high school with – especially in Montesano – were aware that I was a rock star in Seattle, then it was getting kind of big,’ Kurt said.[35] In response, all three Nirvana men went out and got drunk.

  Was there another dimension to Kurt’s cynicism? For an ultimately fatal subplot developed almost simultaneously with the release of Nevermind. The same month that this ostensibly mainstream album came out, Kurt had consciously decided to become a ‘heroine’ addict.[36] He later wrote down his experiences of the drug for a treatment programme. He said he had first tried heroin in Aberdeen in 1987, and until 1990 had done it around ten more times:

  ‘When I got back from our second European tour with Sonic Youth, I decided to use heroine on a daily basis because of an ongoing stomach ailment that I had been suffering from for the past five years, [and that] had literally taken me to the point of wanting to kill myself … the only thing I found that worked were heavy opiates … So I decided, if I feel like a junkie as it is, I may as well be one.’[37]

  He also wrote that after he and Courtney Love, a different ‘heroine’ who would bear his daughter, would later spent a fortnight coming off the drug, ‘I instantly regained that familiar burning nausea and decided to either kill myself or stop the pain. I bought a gun but chose drugs instead. I stayed on heroine until one month before Frances due date.’ Later it would sometimes be asserted that it was Courtney who had got Kurt into heroin. But the opposite is true. She had developed a heroin habit in Los Angeles in 1989, but had successfully undergone treatment and come off the drug. When she and Kurt first fully got together, Courtney was so smitten that the relationship continued despite his ongoing use.

  For some time, Kurt had wanted to become part of a sort of Sex Pistols-like punk act, exploding quickly and suddenly. When they had been about to sign their deal, he had joked of getting the DGC advance and immediately splitting up. An emulation of the Pistols seems to have been an aspect of Kurt’s thinking, certainly if we recall how Courtney reminded him of Nancy Spungen. But did some part of Kurt also want to be the tragic Sid Vicious? As things would turn out, such a conceit would not prove to be too far-fetched.

  Although they would become increasingly dominant in subsequent months, such extra-curricular interests needed to be put to one side. On 20 September 1991, Nirvana embarked on a headlining North American tour, on which they were at first supported by the Melvins.

  A month into the shows, they started moving up the West Coast from San Diego. If they were lucky, Geffen Records had expected Nevermind to sell 50,000 copies. So when the album began to sell in unanticipated amounts they quickly had to order further pressings. ‘The album had sold 100,000 copies by San Diego, 200,000 by LA, and by the morning they hit Seattle, for a Halloween show, it had gone gold, selling half a million,’ wrote Charles R. Cross. In Seattle Nirvana played the Paramount Theater. Kurt’s guitar had a message stuck on it: VANDALISM: BEAUTIFUL AS A ROCK IN A COP’S FACE. This was a gesture which might be felt to be playing to punk’s lowest common denominator.

  The night of the Seattle show, at which Kurt had insisted they be supported by Tobi’s Bikini Kill, his former girlfriend ended up as one of the clump of friends sleeping on the floor of Kurt’s hotel room. ‘It was a small irony,’ said Cross, ‘that Tobi was sleeping on his floor the day he’d sold half a million copies of an album that was ostensibly about how she didn’t love him.’

  In November, Nirvana were off to Europe again. Courtney’s group Hole were booked onto the same circuit, their schedule commencing a fortnight later. At first their blossoming love affair was complicated by the presence of another American woman, Mary Lou Lord, with whom Kurt had had an affair earlier in the year, and who surprised him by turning up at Nirvana’s Bristol show on 4 November. Kurt told her of the growing severity of his stomach pains.

  He was aware, however, of the imminent arrival of Courtney, and in a very public way, Mary Lou learned that her relationship with Kurt was doomed. Appearing on The Word, a Friday night ‘youth’ television show, Kurt announced to the British nation, ‘I just want everyone in this room to know that Courtney Love, of the pop group Hole, is the best fuck in the world!’ Suddenly, as a result of this declaration, Kurt Cobain was fodder for the front pages of the mass-market media.

  And Kurt was adept at giving the media what they desired. On 27 November, Nirvana recorded a slot for BBC television’s long-running chart show, Top of the Pops. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was charging up the UK singles chart – reaching number 9 that week – but in his performance Kurt sent up such glory by dropping his voice an octave and changing the opening line to ‘Load up on drugs, kill your friends’. Meanwhile, Krist and Dave made it obvious that they were miming playing their instruments.

  The European tour ended with a date in France on 7 December; then Nirvana flew back to Seattle; there Kurt was astonished how successful they had become in their homeland during their overseas absence. ‘We’d finished the [‘Teen Spirit’] video and they started to play it while we were on tour,’ Kurt said, ‘and I would get reports every once in a while from friends of mine, telling me that I was famous. So it didn’t affect me until probably three months after we’d been famous in America … a friend of mine made a compilation about all the news stories about our band that was played on MTV and the local news programmes and stuff. It was frightening: it just scared me.’[38]

  After a brief end-of-year West Coast tour, concluding at San Francisco’s Cow Palace on New Year’s Eve, the band flew to New York. Nirvana were scheduled to perform on Saturday Night Live on 11 January 1992. The previous day the band did a photo session with Michael Lavine at his Bleecker Street loft. Kurt, his hair dyed bright red, nodded out several times, the effects of heroin now evident to those around him. ‘I remember people having to go out and score dope. I remember Kurt telling me that the reason that he loved Courtney so much was that she was the only girl he knew that would stand up at a party and smash a glass table to bits just for the hell of it. I remember thinking that was a pretty odd reason to love someone,’ said the photographer.[39]

  By the end of 1991, sales of Nevermind in the United States were growing exponentially. But the album seemed unable to climb higher than the number 6 slot. The week after Christmas, however, its sales catapulted when kids went out and spent their present money – or returned unwanted album gifts. In those seven days 400,000 copies of Nevermind were sold, and the album knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top slot in the Billboard charts, where it seemed to have taken up permanent residency. Suddenly they were the biggest group in the world. ‘Nirvana is that rare band that has everything: critical acclaim, industry respect, pop radio appeal, and a rock-solid college/alternative base,’ trumpeted Billboard, the American music business trade paper.

  Now, with their album at number 1, Nirvana would appear on Saturday Night Live, a show that commanded huge viewing figures and was also extremely credible. Yet for this performance on American network television, Kurt was smacked out. He had to force himself not to throw up, and his eyes looked sunken into his head – a sign he had shot up earlier in the evening. But he rose to the moment with blistering performances of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’, before stabbing his guitar neck through several speakers while Dave Grohl tossed his entire drum kit about the stage.

  As the show’s end credits rolled over the conclusion of their performance, Nirvana decided to do their utmost to ‘piss off the rednecks and homophobes’, in Kurt’s words, as he later claimed credit for something Krist Novoselic had instigated. On camera the bass player came over to Kurt and French-kissed him, a gesture both loving and supportive.

  During an interview following the performance, Kurt ‘borrowed’ $40 from the journalist, enough to buy a handy a
mount of smack. Kurt got off on the seedy social underbelly that is a feature of the ritual, lonely world of heroin, especially in New York City, where he would line up with other addicts to score smack in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side. What was on sale on the East Coast was China white – stronger than the Mexican black tar heroin available on the West Coast.

  And it was in Manhattan that the full extent of Kurt’s heroin problem became apparent to those around him. Returning to his hotel, he climbed into bed next to Courtney. When Courtney Love woke the next morning, she found Kurt had overdosed on heroin. She managed to revive him. As a counterpoint to such darkness, it was around now that Courtney found out she was pregnant. She claimed she stopped using drugs as soon as she learned this.

  With his girlfriend pregnant, Kurt temporarily rose to the responsibilities of impending fatherhood. After flying to Los Angeles, both he and Courtney checked into a motel. This was on the advice of a doctor whose chosen field of expertise was rapid detox. He felt they needed to be somewhere quiet and discreet . Under the influence of sleeping tablets and methadone, they both endured this shock treatment – feverish, puking, and devastated from diarrhoea. Halfway through this process, Kurt was obliged to be in a video being made in LA for ‘Come as You Are’, the next single off Nevermind, but he only did so on the understanding that the film would not feature a single clear image of his gaunt, blotchy face.

  As so often with Kurt he had more than one reason for trying to get clean. Yes, he was allegedly readying himself for the birth of his child. But at the end of January Kurt was due to fly to Australia, followed by New Zealand, Hawaii and Japan, for a tour, and he was worried that in these unknown territories he wouldn’t be able to score.

  The tour proved as deleterious as Kurt had feared. Hardly speaking to his bandmates, and doubled up from stomach pain, he ended up being prescribed Physeptone, a synthetic heroin substitute – or methadone, as it is better known.

  In Japan the record company was at a loss as to how to behave after Kurt’s controversial declaration on arriving in the country, announcing he was there to ‘repay the cunts for Pearl Harbor’.

  Then he was off to the land of Pearl Harbor itself, Honolulu. Courtney had joined Kurt in Japan. During the plane flight the pair agreed to marry in Hawaii. A prenuptial agreement was signed by both parties. (Although Kurt had yet to receive the colossal amounts of money that would shortly flow his way from the success of Nevermind and lucrative live shows, he knew full well he could build significant wealth. But their relationship would not be financially one-sided: Hole were about to sign a deal with DGC for a million dollars and a higher royalty rate than Nirvana, which was important for Courtney’s self-esteem.)

  On 24 February 1992, Kurt and Courtney married on Waikiki Beach. Kurt wore blue-check pyjamas – habitual garb for him by now. Courtney wore an antique silk dress that had once belonged to Frances Farmer, the actor, also from Seattle, who at the peak of her career had suffered egregious mistreatment of her mental health problems.

  For the wedding Kurt arranged for Dylan Carlson to be flown over from Seattle to act as his best man. A subtext to this role was Kurt’s inability to find quality ‘heroine’ on the island but by the time of the ceremony he was slightly out of it on smack[40]. The sentiment of the occasion could still reach him, though, and at times he burst into sobs. ‘She’s my one and only chance,’ was how he defined Courtney Love to Dave Grohl.

  None of Kurt’s family had been invited, and Kurt had banned Krist’s wife Shelli from the event because he believed she had been talking behind Courtney’s back. The next day, when Krist and Shelli flew out of Hawaii, they believed that Nirvana had broken up. ‘Kurt’s a fucking junkie asshole and I hate him!’ Krist cried to Shelli. After the wedding, he and Krist could never be the same. Although he and Dave had also been like brothers, Kurt was now talking about firing the drummer. Kurt really had formed Nirvana to have a group to play his songs. So for the sake of personal expediency he had no problems with the idea of dumping Krist and Dave. He made them sign a retroactive deal over songwriting credits, giving himself the lion’s share of songwriting royalties – perhaps not unreasonably, as essentially the songs were all his.

  Nirvana did not in fact perform for another four months. This was unsurprising, really, as over the ensuing spring Kurt did little except take drugs after he and Courtney had flown back to Los Angeles. Dave Grohl was furious: there had been plans for a lengthy arena tour that spring, which had been aborted.

  There were occasional efforts at self-control. In March Kurt entered an inpatient dependency unit at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills, where his heroin intake was swapped for methadone. In an interview that appeared in Rolling Stone the next month, Kurt expounded his personal worldview as he imagined it the instant of the interview: ‘I don’t even drink anymore because it destroys my stomach. My body wouldn’t allow me to take drugs if I wanted to, because I’m so weak. All drugs [do is] destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem. They’re no good at all.’

  In April Kurt and his new bride flew up to Seattle to look for a house to buy. On a visit to his sister Kim in Aberdeen, he threatened her that if she ever used heroin, he would get a gun and kill her. Kim was aware that Kurt was projecting his own inner hell onto her.[41] In January Kurt had been spending $100 a day on heroin. Six months later it was up to four times that, a staggering amount.

  At the beginning of the summer, Nirvana were thrown back together, honouring a booked European tour which kicked off with a Dublin date on Sunday, 21 June. Five days later they played the massive annual Roskilde festival in Denmark, outside Copenhagen. There were further festival dates, in Norway, Finland, France and Spain. And in late August, Nirvana returned to the UK, to again play Reading festival, this time headlining. The show began with Kurt singing a couple of lines of Bette Midler’s ‘The Rose’ after being wheeled onstage in a wheelchair by Melody Maker journalist Everett True.

  While onstage at Reading, Kurt may have had something on his mind. In an article published in the September edition of Vanity Fair, which appeared in early August, Courtney Love confirmed to writer Lynn Hirschberg that she and Cobain had been using heroin early in her pregnancy. The article, still on the newsstands on 18 August 1992, the date of birth of Frances Bean Cobain, would have devastating implications. Although both Courtney and Kurt claimed that Hirschberg took her words out of context, child welfare services launched an investigation questioning their parenting abilities. Although the investigation was eventually called off, it was not before Frances had been removed from her parents’ custody for a short time, beginning when she was two weeks old.

  Returning to Los Angeles from a triumphant visit to England at the beginning of September, Kurt decided once again to enter a treatment programme, this time at Exodus in Marina del Rey. Was the new responsibility of fatherhood weighing on his conscience? Or was it fear of the consequences of the Vanity Fair article? At Exodus he was prescribed buprenorphine, an anti-addiction drug which almost had the effect of immediately relieving his stomach pains.

  Kurt took a brief leave of absence from Exodus to appear on the MTV Awards show. When Kurt announced he wanted to play ‘Rape Me’, a new song, the MTV bigwigs were apoplectic. On learning that the MTV employee assigned to deal directly with them would be fired if they played the song, the band agreed to stick to the agreed number, ‘Lithium’. Live, to the MTV executives’ horror, Kurt played the opening chords of ‘Rape Me’ … before strutting into ‘Lithium’, as promised. Backstage Kurt and Courtney, with Frances on her lap, found themselves face to face with Axl Rose, an especial bête noire of Kurt’s on account of his absurd rock star posturing, and his model girlfriend – rock star model girlfriends were sneered at by Courtney as an ultimate cliché. When Courtney asked Rose if he would be Frances’s godfather, the Guns N’ Roses man was not oblivious to her intended sarcasm. ‘You shut you
r bitch up, or I’m taking you down to the pavement,’ he threatened Kurt. Kurt responded with a smile: ‘Okay, bitch. Shut up.’ [42] Rose and his girlfriend departed, tails between their legs.

  The next day there was a Nirvana show in Portland, followed by a benefit against music censorship in Seattle. At the 16,000-seater sold-out Seattle date, Kurt’s father Don showed up backstage, the first time Kurt had seen him for eight years. Also present was his mother Wendy and his sister Kim. When Kurt began to raise his voice towards his father, Wendy led the others out of the dressing room. Later – unusually – Kurt walked to the stage in utter silence to perform the finest show Seattle had ever had from Nirvana. Don’s reappearance would grant Kurt songwriting material, specifically for the autobiographical ‘Serve the Servants’.

  For some weeks Kurt and Courtney stayed in assorted expensive Seattle hotels, Kurt worryingly registering as Simon Ritchie, the real name of Sid Vicious. They had bought a house overlooking Lake Washington, some thirty miles away, and it was being substantially rebuilt and renovated. As cigarette burns and drug detritus built up in hotel rooms which they would request were never cleaned, invariably they would finally be kicked out of these assorted lodgings. During this time in Seattle, in October 1992, Nirvana recorded several songs, mainly as instrumentals. The demo session was with Jack Endino, the Bleach producer, and many of these songs would later be re-recorded for In Uterh.

  That autumn of 1992, with Frances still kept from them, Kurt and Courtney seemed on the edge of madness. Cracks were very visible. When Victoria Clarke, an Irish journalist, announced she was proposing to write an unauthorized biography of Nirvana, Courtney was enraged. She called up Clarke and – accompanied by Kurt – left a 31-minute harangue on her answering machine. Some of Kurt’s threats went as follows: ‘At this point I don’t give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I’m threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few thousand dollars to have you snuffed out, but maybe I’ll try the legal way. First.’ Surprisingly vicious words from a man who, in 1992, was the world’s leading stoner anti-hero.