27

by Howard Sounes

  An early example of Jim’s craziness came when the Doors visited New York to sign their record deal. While they were in the city, Paul Rothchild invited the band home to New Jersey for dinner with him and his wife. ‘Jim responded in character by getting stone drunk and coming on to Paul’s wife,’ John Densmore recalls, in his memoir. As Rothchild drove the musicians back to their hotel after dinner, Jim pulled the producer’s hair. He was so out of it that his band mates had to help him up to his room where he climbed out onto the tenth-floor window ledge, ‘shrieking like a banshee’. When his band mates coaxed him back inside, he wrestled with them, then urinated on the floor.

  5

  Kurt Cobain lodged with the Shillinger family in Aberdeen, Washington, over the winter of 1985–86, during which time he wrote songs, some of which he recorded at the home of his aunt Mari Earl, including a tune titled ‘Suicide Samurai’, which made Aunt Mari fear for her nephew.

  There was further cause for concern when Kurt was arrested along with his friend Eric Shillinger for trespassing on a building in downtown Aberdeen. Eric was let go, but the police detained Kurt because he hadn’t paid his $180 fine for writing graffiti on the SeaFirst Bank. Eric’s father, Lamont Shillinger, declined to post bail for his lodger, so Kurt spent eight days in jail. Not long after this incident he had a fight with the Shillinger boys and left the family home, reverting to sofa-surfing and sleeping rough.

  Although only nineteen, and living in close proximity to several family members, including his mother (whom he would visit for meals), Kurt was on the verge of becoming down-and-out. By his own account, he first tried heroin during this unhappy period in Aberdeen. He said he felt drawn to the drug. ‘I always wanted to do it,’ he told one biographer. ‘I always knew that I would.’ Trying heroin proved a fateful decision. Of all the drugs abused in the history of the 27 Club, heroin is the one that undoes musicians time and again, playing a significant part in the decline of five of the six main 27s.

  Kurt next moved into a shack on East 2nd Street in Aberdeen with friends, living in squalor comparable to that which the Rolling Stones enjoyed at Edith Grove in the early sixties. Somewhat like the Stones, Kurt and his friends made a decision to reject conventional life and live on their wits as artists. Also like the Stones they had no compunction about sponging off friends who had a job, such as carpet-fitter Ryan Aigner. Ryan says Kurt found the idea of a straight life ‘deplorable, and didn’t want to be traditional … I don’t think he ever really embraced the idea that you have an obligation to work.’ Much of the time Kurt and his slacker buddies sat around the shack listening to records, stony broke and stoned, cut off from and ignored by the world. ‘We didn’t really have a lot of places to go, or people calling us, or interested in what we were doing,’ observes Aigner (though he had a job). ‘We could sit around for days, listening to records, and the phone would never ring … or we would never even have a phone.’ It was, as he says, only music that mattered to Kurt, ‘and then music became a job’.

  In pursuit of his ambitions Kurt teamed up with a local youth named Krist Novoselic, a punk-rock enthusiast two years his senior and a veritable giant at six foot seven. The Novoselics lived among the better-off Aberdonians on Think of Me Hill. Krist sympathised with Kurt’s misanthropy and admired his individualism, describing Kurt as ‘one of the most independent people’ he had ever known, ‘a completely creative person – a true artist’. He particularly liked the way in which Kurt had transformed his shack home into a den of Dada art, a place where he ‘sketched very obscene Scooby-Doo cartoons [over the walls], made wild sound montages from obscure records [and] sculpted clay into scary spirit people writhing in agony’. Krist took up bass guitar. With Kurt on vocals and lead guitar, and a series of friends playing drums, they had a band, though it went by several eccentric names before Kurt hit upon Nirvana. He chose this name after watching a television documentary about Buddhism, which teaches that the life we are living is one of a cycle of reincarnated lives during which humans inevitably suffer. Only by renouncing the attachments of earthly life can a person escape the wheel of reincarnation and aspire to the blissful state of nothingness known as nirvana. Kurt liked the word because it sounded beautiful and was different from other punk band names. He also adopted Buddhism as his faith, attracted by the concept of blissful nothingness, a state of being that the drug-user achieves artificially, and the depressive may look for in suicide.

  Kurt’s obsession with death remained fundamental to his personality. His notebooks were full of morbid drawings and jottings. He wrote about death and he talked about it. One day Ryan Aigner asked him: ‘What do you think you’re gonna do when you’re thirty?’

  ‘I’ll never see thirty.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’ll never see thirty?’ Ryan was a year older than Kurt and he fully expected to live to thirty.

  Kurt was adamant. ‘I won’t.’ And, of course, he was right.

  It wasn’t so much that Kurt was living for the moment, like the other 27s, experiencing as much as he could as fast as he could. He was barely living at all, and he didn’t seem to look to the future with optimism. Perhaps he would have been more cheerful had he got laid.

  Kurt had never had much of a sex life. A misanthropic introvert with morbid obsessions, and somewhat unkempt, Kurt was not every girl’s dream. ‘I never noticed him to be smelly, but he was always dirty-looking, because he was homeless [some of the time], and people knew that. So he couldn’t find a girlfriend,’ says Aberdeen buddy Mitch Holmquist. ‘Before he was big, nobody wanted anything to do with him.’ Still, there were girls who looked closer and saw a gentle, intelligent, even quite nice-looking young man. Tracy Marander, a fellow punk-music enthusiast, batted her eyelids at Kurt until he got the message and kissed her. Soon afterwards Kurt moved into Tracy’s apartment in Olympia, the state capital of Washington, a university town with a busy music scene, situated roughly halfway between Aberdeen and Seattle. It was in Olympia that Nirvana developed into a tight band with a local following.

  Although introverted in everyday life, Kurt was transformed onstage. ‘He shocked me when he’d go out and perform, because he was so shy and withdrawn,’ says Mitch Holmquist, who attended many early shows. ‘He’d be the wild, crazy man out there.’ These early performances were not particularly interesting for the words Kurt wrote and sang. He was never a poet of song, like Jim Morrison. Like many punk rockers, Kurt was more concerned with the energy of the music than the lyrics that went with it. Yet his lyrics had interest and, like Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, he seemed to mean every word he sang.

  As far as Nirvana’s appearance and image was concerned, Kurt and his fellow band members wore the clothing of the average blue-collar Aberdeen male: sneakers, old jeans and plaid shirts, clothing layered for warmth in the frigid Pacific north-west. Kurt’s high-school contemporary Penny Lloyd recalls how surprised she was when this scruffy attire – which she associated with the men who worked in the mills – became fashionable in the mid-1990s, when Nirvana and grunge rock became all the rage. She and her friends at Aberdeen High had been trying so hard to look like Ralph Lauren models. ‘So we thought that was pretty funny.’

  As Kurt’s band became more proficient they were inevitably drawn to the big city, Seattle. Nirvana recorded a demo in Seattle in 1988 with producer Jack Endino, who passed the tape to a local label, Sub Pop, who put out Nirvana’s first single, ‘Love Buzz’, a succès d’estime. As Nirvana’s local following grew, the band took to smashing their equipment onstage – an act Jimi Hendrix and others had pioneered in the 1960s but came fresh to their young fans – and in the fall of 1988 Nirvana set out on tour in a van. After years of misery and obscurity Kurt actually started to enjoy himself.

  ‘Dear long lost grandparents: I miss you very much,’ he wrote, on a Christmas card to Iris and Leland Cobain at their trailer home in Montesano in December 1988. ‘I’m very busy living in Olympia when I’m not on tour with my band. We put out a single just r
ecently and it has sold out already … I’m happier than I ever have been.’

  6

  As we have seen, the six main 27s had a difficult start in life. In the years ahead, Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Cobain had little contact with their families. They were adults now, able to make their own decisions, and they didn’t need or want interference from their parents. Amy Winehouse was different.

  Although her father had left home when she was nine, and was a shadowy figure in Amy’s life for the second half of her childhood, as Amy embarked on her professional career Mitch Winehouse became a constant presence. Jewish families often work together; there was some tradition of that in the Winehouse family. Also, Amy was a teenager when she turned professional, so she needed adult guidance. Still, Mitch busied himself in his daughter’s career to a remarkable degree from the time she signed her management deal, aged seventeen, with Nick Shymansky and Nick Godwyn, until her death ten years later.

  Mitch was clearly very excited that Amy had broken into show-business, a career he had aspired to for himself. In contrast, Amy played it cool. Describing an early meeting with her new managers, Mitch writes, in Amy, My Daughter, that Amy ‘seemed to take it in her stride, but I could barely sit still’. As Amy’s career developed, Mitch often appeared star-struck, while Amy gave the impression that she didn’t care what was happening. When people asked her what she was doing, she didn’t gush about her management deal, and that she might soon be making a record, but would say casually, ‘I’m a jazz singer.’ She told her hairdresser that she was ‘a wedding singer’.

  Amy received a stipend from her management company of £250 a week ($397) while she worked up demos of songs that could be used to get a record deal. The months that followed were a happy time during which she was free to write and record at her own pace with young musicians and producers, such as Stefan Skarbek, with whom she worked at Mayfair Studios in London.

  A multi-instrumentalist seven years Amy’s senior, Stefan found Amy to be a conundrum. She was in some ways a typical teenager, caught up in dramas with her parents and boyfriend. One of her early unreleased songs, ‘Ease Up on Me’, was a plea to her mother to cut her more slack, while Stefan also recalls tension between Amy and her father. ‘I don’t think she was speaking to her dad at that point.’ At the same time Amy had an emotional maturity that set her apart from friends of the same age: ‘She was very, very wise, emotionally wise, very smart, very, very intelligent [and] funny,’ says Stefan, whose father was the noted psychotherapist Andrzej Skarbek while his mother, Marjorie Wallace, had founded the mental health charity SANE, all of which gave him some insight into human behaviour. He identified a fundamental conflict between Amy’s craving for normality and her need to express herself. ‘I think she was always craving a somewhat normal existence … that was an internal struggle that was constantly going [on] … She wanted to make everything homely, making chicken soup, making cups of tea all day long, being a mum. I felt like that was a big attempt by her to be a normal person … It’s a dichotomy … the two things don’t mesh [and] the conflict was what she wrote about.’

  Amy wrote in a notebook decorated with pictures of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. Early compositions from the notebook that Amy worked up into songs for her début album, Frank, included ‘October Song’, a lament for her pet canary, Ava, which died one weekend when she was away. Amy’s complaints about her boyfriend led to another song, ‘Amy, Amy, Amy’, the concluding track on Frank. ‘She came in talking about Chris, and would go into some weird story about something going wrong, and I was, like, “Amy, Amy, Amy, you’ve got to get serious …”’ says Stefan Skarbek. ‘And then we started to write a song of her talking back to herself.’ Sexy and funny though the song is, Amy was never satisfied with it. Songs that failed to make Frank included ‘Ambulance Man’, inspired by the drama of Cynthia Winehouse being admitted to hospital. Amy scat-sang in imitation of the ambulance siren. When she and Stefan ran out of ideas they sometimes crossed the road to Regent’s Park to visit the zoo (which inspired another unrecorded song, ‘Monkey Boy’) or went to sit on Primrose Hill with a bottle of wine.

  After a while Amy’s management sent her to the United States to work with ‘Commissioner’ Gordon Williams, who’d engineered a successful album for Lauryn Hill. Williams heard Amy singing before he met her and was surprised that such a mature and soulful voice belonged to a white English teenager. ‘She sounded like an old black jazz singer … because all she listened to was jazz.’ One of the songs Amy brought to Williams’s New Jersey studio was ‘What is it About Men?’ which addressed her misgivings about her father and men in general. ‘I completely did it over, because it was more like a ballad,’ says Williams. ‘I gave it a little groove and made it a little bit edgy, and she really liked the reggae thing, so it was also kind of finding a way to mix reggae, hip-hop and jazz together in one record.’ In this way he helped Amy set her lyrics in a distinctive soundscape that was ‘like something from the past but now’.

  To record these songs Williams recruited American and Jamaican session players, including reggae musicians who’d worked with Bob Marley, and jazz saxophonist Teo Avery, after whom the track ‘Teo Licks’ is titled. Avery was struck by how serious Amy was about jazz. She covered two jazz standards on Frank, ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ and ‘(There Is) No Greater Love’, and talked of making a purely jazz album. ‘She could have done it, because she had that sensitivity in the way that she sang,’ says Avery. ‘When you’re playing jazz, or singing jazz, there’s a high amount of sensitivity you have to have in order to bring the music up to bring it down. It’s not like soul, where it’s usually a full-on, high-velocity approach to music. She had that sensitivity where she could bring it way down to bring it back up.’

  Amy continued work on her album in Miami with Salaam Remi, who played a key role in the making of both Frank and Back to Black. One of the songs Remi produced for the first album was ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ in which Amy mocks girls who go clubbing to snare a rich husband. Her humour was equally pointed on ‘Stronger than Me’, in which she vented her frustration at her boyfriend – Amy made it clear that she had Chris in mind – for not being macho enough. Her wit and enjoyment of wordplay is evident in the very funny line in which she teasingly compares herself, a red-blooded ‘lady’, to a boyfriend who seems more like a ‘ladyboy’.

  Gordon Williams never met Chris. ‘We were supposed to meet in London, but I don’t think he ever did get to the studio. He was probably too embarrassed, to be honest with you!’

  During the recording of Frank, Amy’s managers negotiated two important deals for her: first, a music-publishing deal with EMI; and then, just before Christmas 2002, a record deal with Island/Universal. Although signing a record deal is a red-letter day in the lives of most artists, Amy failed to show up for the meeting. When her manager Nick Godwyn called her to ask where she was, she said she thought she’d already signed the documents. Her attitude was not good, and her working relationship with her managers and record label became strained. ‘The truth is she was complicated and difficult,’ Nick Godwyn wrote, after her death. ‘She could be disruptive and haughty. She liked to challenge you. And she was always kicking against something.’

  Mitch Winehouse was very excited about the record deal. Amy asked her father not to tell her grandmother because she wanted to break the news to Cynthia herself. ‘I promised I wouldn’t,’ Mitch wrote in his book, adding that he couldn’t help himself. ‘[I] phoned her the minute Amy left.’

  Publishing and record deals earned Amy a combined advance of £500,000 ($795,000), a huge sum for a teenager. A limited company, Cherry Westfield, was formed in 2002 to handle the cash. Amy owned Cherry Westfield outright, her mother being her fellow director. Mitch Winehouse was not allowed to be a company director at this time, as he was still disqualified, but he became company secretary, which he was permitted to do as long as he took no part ‘directly or indirectly … in the promotion
, formation or management’ of the company. If he did, he could face a fine or jail. Also, Amy was not allowed to take advice from her father in the management of her company. Years later, when his disqualification expired, Mitch was legitimately appointed to the board of directors of Cherry Westfield, and became a director of other companies created to handle Amy’s money.

  In light of the restrictions on disqualified directors, it is surprising to read in Amy, My Daughter how much Mitch involved himself in his daughter’s finances while he was disqualified. ‘Amy understood very quickly that if her mum and I didn’t exert some kind of financial control she’d go through that money like there was no tomorrow,’ Mitch writes, and goes on to describe how he and Janis talked to Amy about the benefits of investing some of her money in property. Amy had been sharing a rented flat with her friend Juliette Ashby. When he visited, Mitch found evidence that Amy was smoking marijuana, which was how he belatedly found out about a habit Amy had enjoyed since she was fifteen. Now that her record deal was in place, she bought a maisonette in Jeffrey’s Place, Camden Town. Mitch describes this purchase as a collective decision, writing of how we put down the deposit, and we took out the mortgage. He also became one of the co-signatories on Amy’s bank account. Indeed, he gives the impression that he was involved in every major financial and business decision his daughter took from now on, despite his history as a former bankrupt, despite being the disqualified director of a company that had gone bust owing millions.

  Amy’s new apartment was in a cobbled side-street, the front door accessed through a gated courtyard. She can be seen in the apartment in the photographs inside the Frank CD case: rolling what looks like a joint in her kitchen, her clothes, accessories and CDs everywhere. Amy kept a ‘floordrobe’ rather than a wardrobe, jokes her stylist, Lou Winwood, niece of the musician Steve Winwood. ‘She was a mixture between slovenly and fussy-housewifey. So you’d get Do you want this, babe? Do you want that, babe? kind of thing. You’d turn up and she’d be cooking chicken soup, which I never did when I was nineteen … She would always say, “I’m Jewish,” and fuss about you. But [then there were] things like the cat litter under the letterbox where the letters come through and land in the cat litter, and then the cats would [defecate on them]. I’d be like, “Amy! These are your bills – you’ve got cat shit on them.” So there was always chaos.’ Interestingly, the cover photo for Frank was shot in Spitalfields where Amy’s Russian ancestors had settled.