Clara Morrison was crying as she walked back to the car where Andy was waiting with his date. Andy agrees that his mother was hurt to be snubbed by Jim, but hastens to add that she was tough. ‘She got over it.’ Here is an insight into the psychology of the Morrison family, a family whose emotions were subjugated by military discipline to the point at which a child could turn his back on his parents, and a mother was expected to face rejection by her son with equanimity.
During the next four years Steve and Clara Morrison followed Jim’s career closely in the press. ‘[Mom] kept all the newspaper articles and all the magazines,’ says Andy. ‘They were proud of him.’ But they didn’t see or speak to Jim again. Unhappy family stories are found in the background of all the main 27s, but few stars had such a sad and peculiar relationship with their parents as Jim Morrison did with his mother and father. It is tempting to think that there may have been something in the relationship that made him self-destructive.
Five
KURT AND COURTNEY, AMY AND BLAKE
Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm: for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave.
Song of Solomon
1
Although their careers belonged to different eras, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse achieved success at around the same age as each other, and their 1960s forebears. As with the earlier stars, once Kurt and Amy had found their voices, their rise to the top was rapid, and in becoming celebrities they took up with partners who shared their weaknesses, which exacerbated their problems.
The first Nirvana album, Bleach, was recorded quickly and cheaply in Seattle in December 1988, with a $600 loan from a friend of the band, Jason Everman, who’d saved the money working as a commercial fisherman. Bleach has a freshness and energy that remains endearing. The guitars are loud and the tunes melodic, which would be a recipe for mainstream success. Kurt’s rasping vocals suited this music well, while his lyrics – though sketchy and repetitive – were not without interest. A sense of humour is a boon to any writer, and Kurt’s sly wit was evident on such numbers as ‘Floyd the Barber’, which describes a visit to a barber’s shop as nightmarish as Sweeney Todd’s.
Jason Everman was rewarded for his financial help by having his name and picture on Bleach, though he didn’t play a note on the album. He did join the band on tour, though, as a second guitarist, ‘playing small bars in front of five people and not being paid enough money to both eat and buy gasoline to the next town, things like that; sleeping on floors, sleeping in the van, sleeping outside at rest areas’, as he describes Nirvana’s first extensive trek across America in the summer of 1989. ‘I remember getting shaken down by police in Texas somewhere – it might have been Houston or Dallas – basically for taking the wrong turn and being in a nicer neighbourhood, these four probably dodgy-looking guys in a beat-up old van. We got pulled over and searched, hands on the hood, that whole deal.’
Everman didn’t stay with Nirvana, and there were changes of drummer before the final line-up was achieved. Chad Channing was drumming with the band when they went to Europe for the first time later that year. The maxim that a prophet goes unrecognised in his own land proved true for Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix, who had had to go to London to become a star. Nirvana’s Seattle-based record company, Sub Pop, tried to achieve the same result by sending Nirvana on package tours to Europe when the group had a tiny following at home. Sub Pop also courted the British music press with the result that journalists, including Everett True of Melody Maker, became important early champions of grunge rock in general and Nirvana in particular. True claimed to be the first to apply the word ‘grunge’ to the new bands coming from Seattle, of which Nirvana was only one.
As Nirvana started to gain greater recognition Kurt’s eccentricity was magnified. His outré interests in pornography, disease, disability and suicide increased. He exhibited the mood swings of bipolar disorder, being semi-catatonic offstage and crazed in front of an audience. When Nirvana played Rome in November 1989, Kurt freaked out during the show, smashed his guitar, climbed up onto the speaker stack and threatened to throw himself off. Some watchers feared he was having a nervous breakdown.
The following year there were major developments in Kurt’s life. He broke up with his girlfriend, Tracy Marander, and Nirvana recruited David Grohl as their drummer, thus completing the line-up that became famous. A second European tour followed. Although it was a success, Kurt was increasingly unhappy. His love life was a mess – he doubted he would ever find the right companion – and, like many 27s, he was tortured with self-doubt. Reviewing his life at 23 he wrote in his journal: ‘I am obsessed with the fact that I am skinny and stupid.’ His problem with body image, thinking himself unattractively puny, was comparable to the agonies suffered by Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse. All disliked and worried about their appearance to a degree that was excessive, even irrational.
Kurt also continued to grouse about stomach pain. He consulted a specialist in 1989 who found nothing wrong with his stomach, and went on to see several gastroenterologists, writing in his journal that they located ‘an enflamed [sic] irritation’ in his gut, but failed to alleviate the pain. Kurt’s stomach problem was never diagnosed. There may have been nothing much wrong, other than that he lived on his nerves and ate too much junk food. In any event, he used his real or imaginary stomach pain as an excuse to turn to heroin in the fall of 1990, not as a one-off high, but self-medicating on smack on a regular basis from now on. ‘When I got back from our second European tour with Sonic Youth I decided to use heroine [sic] on a daily basis because of an ongoing stomach ailment that I had been suffering from for the past five years that had literally taken me to the point of wanting to kill myself. For five years every single day of my life,’ Kurt wrote in his journal. Here was the old obsession with suicide, while his extraordinary conscious decision to become a junkie was in itself a significant act of self-harming.
Kurt’s willing descent into drug addiction began at the point when Nirvana started to see glimmerings of success. This is the pattern with many 27s. Like other club members, Kurt craved success. He was every bit as ambitious for Nirvana as Brian Jones had been for the Rolling Stones. Yet both musicians lacked the mental toughness to cope with success when it came. As Mick Jagger has observed, some people simply aren’t psychologically suited to be rock stars. He was. Kurt and Brian weren’t. Neither was Amy Winehouse.
Nirvana now signed with a new management company, Gold Mountain, run by Danny Goldberg and John Silva, who would guide them to worldwide fame. Looking back, Goldberg sees three distinct elements in Kurt’s character. First, he emphasises how motivated and ambitious Kurt was, involving himself in every aspect of Nirvana’s career from songwriting to the design of their CDs. ‘Although he didn’t like some aspects of being successful, he was driven to be successful.
‘The second aspect of his personality was that, when he was not on drugs, he was a very, very nice person: very thoughtful …’ The corollary of this was that drugs distorted his personality. ‘Then the third aspect was that he was prone to deep depression.’
One day when Kurt was looking miserable, John Silva asked him why he was in a bad mood. ‘I’m awake, aren’t I?’ Kurt snapped, in a way that made his managers realise he wasn’t just down in the dumps but seriously depressed. ‘And that was sort of a-ha!’ says Goldberg. ‘This is somebody who, when he gets bummed out, gets very bummed out.’
Under new management, Nirvana left their independent record label and signed with Geffen Records, which released their breakthrough album in 1991. Geffen had modest ambitions for Nevermind, being far more concerned with Use Your Illusion, the two-volume Guns N’ Roses album also due for release that September. Geffen had invested a lot of money in Guns N’ Roses. It so happened that there was a marketing meeting at the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles to talk about Use Your Illusion on a day when Nirvana would be performing at the Roxy, on the other side of Sunset Boulevard, i
n the evening. After the meeting Geffen executives crossed the road to take another look at Nirvana and were impressed by what they saw. ‘That’s when everybody said, Holy shit! … We were way more interested in Nirvana at that point than Guns N’ Roses,’ recalls former Geffen executive Michael Maska. ‘I was literally pinned up against the back wall of the Roxy watching kids jumping onstage. Kurt was hitting people with his guitar … he was slightly out of control, and very edgy and very loud and really good.’
There was an anger about Kurt’s performance that commanded attention. ‘His style of singing was rage, you know?’ says his friend Eric Erlandson. That rage is heard clearly on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the first single from Nevermind, released in the summer of 1991. The song caught on with radio listeners, sales propelled by a video played frequently on MTV. The single sold the album. Geffen’s modest expectations for Nevermind meant that the company had shipped only 50,000 copies. Demand outstripped supply as Nevermind became the hottest album of the year, a number-one bestseller that ultimately sold in millions at home and abroad. Kurt’s dreams of success were fulfilled far beyond his expectations, and beyond what he was able to deal with.
It was at this crucial point in his career that Kurt teamed up with the woman who became his wife, the mother of his child, and his partner on the helter-skelter ride of fame. It is not possible to write further about Kurt without also writing about Courtney Love.
2
Courtney Love is the stage name of Courtney Harrison. She was born in San Francisco in 1964. Her father, Hank Harrison, fleetingly managed the band that became the Grateful Dead, and counted Pigpen McKernan as a friend, one of several 27 connections in Courtney’s curious life. Her mother, Linda Carroll, later became a well-known therapist. After her parents broke up, when she was five, Courtney lived an itinerant childhood in various states, and different countries, suffering by her own account from a lack of parental discipline.
At the age of twelve Courtney was sent to a juvenile detention centre for shoplifting. In her late teens she claims to have worked as a stripper in places as far apart as New Zealand, Los Angeles and Alaska. She also dabbled in drugs. By the 1980s, she was in Liverpool, where she became part of the alternative music scene, hanging out with bands such as Echo and the Bunnymen, whose drummer, Pete de Freitas, died at 27 following a motorcycle accident, forming another Club connection. Courtney tried her hand at acting, appearing in the 1986 British movie Straight to Hell. Three years later she was back in America where she formed and sang with the punk band Hole, which played the same circuit as Nirvana.
Kurt and Courtney bumped into each other as their bands did the rounds, getting together as a couple in 1991. Some observers believe that Courtney latched onto Kurt for career reasons, his band being bigger than hers. Kurt’s uncle, Chuck Fradenburg – whom Kurt took Courtney to meet – calls her ‘a gold digger’. To Kurt’s grandfather, Leland Cobain, Courtney is ‘a bitch’. She is a woman who induces strong and often negative reactions. Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, Courtney’s lover at one time, describes a more nuanced character, ‘a loud woman [who can] charm your socks off’. He believes that Kurt and Courtney complemented each other, understanding their common ‘darkness’. He also notes that Kurt chose Courtney as much as she chose him, arguing that Kurt used his girlfriend to deflect attention from himself. ‘Having a loud woman, or even a strong woman to defer to, takes a lot of your load off,’ says Erlandson, citing what he calls the Yoko Ono Syndrome. ‘I’m not putting down Yoko Ono, I’m just saying that Yoko is that archetype: the person you want to blame for breaking up the band, or fucking up someone’s life. And Courtney knew she had that thrust upon her…’
As Nevermind went platinum, and Kurt’s sad little face became world famous, a strong, controversial partner strode beside him, a woman whom many people disliked on sight, and blamed for his subsequent self-destruction, even though that process had started before they met. It is a story mirrored a decade later in the life of Amy Winehouse.
3
Named Frank as a nod to Frank Sinatra, and for the directness of its lyrics, Amy’s début album was released in Britain in October 2003. Although it featured good songs, received positive reviews and garnered an Ivor Novello award for ‘Stronger than Me’ (Best Contemporary Song), Amy was never happy with Frank. Too many musicians and producers had been involved in making the record, over a long period, creating a ‘shit show with her in the middle,’ says contributor Stefan Skarbek. The resulting album lacks cohesion. Amy was unhappy with the track selection; she didn’t like some of the songs because they reminded her of her ex-boyfriend, Chris; and she was disappointed that Island didn’t release Frank in the United States, not thinking her ready for the US market.
Nevertheless, Amy set out to promote Frank with interviews and concerts, including a showcase event at the Bush Theatre in London in December 1993, to which family and friends were invited. One of the relations who came was Amy’s surgeon cousin, Jonathan Winehouse. This was the first time Jonathan had met his younger cousin in adult life and, drawing on his medical knowledge, he was immediately concerned about her. ‘She was very distant, and she was really sort of out of it, even at that stage,’ he says. ‘It was very difficult to communicate with her. I said a few words to her, and she asked whether we enjoyed the show, and things. I had a brief conversation. Then when I went to say goodbye she was just really, really distant, sort of in another world.’ Jonathan was so worried that he called Amy’s manager. ‘I wanted to get her some advice. I said her stage presence needed work, and she needed psychological support, and I just felt she was very insecure, and I didn’t see any reason why she should be because she was bloody brilliant. That’s what the conversation was about – it was about me trying to get him to get her some sort of psychological support really, and stage training.’ Jonathan says Amy’s manager agreed with him, but said Amy would go her own way. Over the next few years, as he became more concerned about Amy, Jonathan tried repeatedly to talk to Mitch Winehouse, but says Mitch was never receptive to his advice.
Amy proved an outspoken interviewee when it came to publicising Frank. Apart from mocking her ex-boyfriend, and making it clear that ‘What is it About Men?’ was partly about her father’s shortcomings, Amy was outrageously rude about contemporary artists she considered dull, fake, or past-it, saying that Dido made her sick, Katie Melua was shit and Britney Spears a joke. She was equally forthright about her record company and management. In an interview with the Sunday Times, Amy ridiculed Simon Fuller, the owner of her management company, comparing his pristine appearance to a plastic Ken doll. As for her record company, Island was staffed by ‘fucking morons’. Warming to her theme Amy complained to the Observer that the marketing of Frank had been a shambles. ‘It’s so frustrating, because you work with so many idiots.’ They were ‘nice idiots’, but idiots nonetheless, and ‘they know they’re idiots’. Amy wasn’t the first pop star to insult her record company in public – the Sex Pistols did so famously – and, like the Pistols, she may have spoken out to get publicity. At least one musician who played with Amy believes that she drew on her brief journalistic experience to manipulate the press. Still, her candid comments did her as much harm as good. Her manager Nick Godwyn says Amy’s remarks ‘alienated’ people at Island, while his own relationship with her deteriorated. Producer Gordon Williams agrees that Amy’s attitude ‘hampered the success’ of Frank.
As she emerged into the public eye Amy started to drink more. There were several reasons for this. As is generally true of the 27s, Amy had been experimenting with drink and drugs since her teens. Once her professional career started, it was natural to want to celebrate success and to have a drink to cope with the pressures. It is also true that pop musicians work in an environment where drink and drugs are readily available and part of the culture. More specifically, Amy was a nervous performer, prone to stage fright, who drank to calm down before a show. Her stage fright became worse over the years until she got
into the bad habit of drinking both before and during the show. Then, when she wasn’t performing, she had a lot of free time. With nothing much to do during the day, and money in her pocket, she went to the pub.
Amy’s favourite pub at this stage was the Good Mixer in Inverness Street, Camden Town, not far from her flat. If she was at home she would typically wander over to the pub shortly after it opened at noon, stopping en route to chat to her friend Catriona who worked in a vintage clothes shop on the corner of Inverness Street, and calling, ‘’Allo, gorgeous!’ to the men who sold fruit and veg on the market stalls. The Good Mixer became a second home for Amy who sometimes did her makeup sitting at the bar. She brought her guitar in and played songs she was working on, asking the staff what they thought of them. She became friendly with the landlady, Sarah Hurley, Sarah’s fiancé, John, and the bar staff. When it was quiet in the pub Amy and the barmen discussed books they were reading, forming an informal reading group, which Amy mentions in the liner notes to Back to Black, reminding us of her lifelong interest in books. ‘Thank you to the founder of PWRB (People Who Read in Bed), Gilly Mixer.’ Gilly was one of the Australian bar staff at the pub. With one thing and another, Amy could spend most of her day in the Good Mixer, and often half the night.
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