Evicted from his turtle-filled dump, Kurt moved into Tracy Marander’s studio apartment in Olympia, escaping Aberdeen once and for all. Tracy was Kurt’s first real girlfriend, and they enjoyed thrift-store shopping together, filling their tiny apartment with a strange mixture of sixties kitsch and Kurt’s art collages—tortured dolls, ruined religious artifacts, pictures of diseased vaginas from medical texts, dead insects. He played with Nirvana almost every night and cleaned dentists’ offices by day, lifting enough nitrous oxide to pay for Nirvana’s next recording session. But mostly he slept on the job and was fired after eight months. He hated working, being around what he called “average people.” “They just get on my nerves so bad,” he said. “I just cannot ignore them at all. I have to comfort them and tell them that I hate their guts.”
During this time in his life, Kurt experienced his first bout of stomach pain, so severe that it almost disabled him. He started taking more drugs to dull the agony and even did heroin a few times. “You can feel it throbbing like you have a heart in your stomach,” he said. “It just hurt really bad.” The condition would torment Kurt for the rest of his life, confounding an endless stream of specialists.
The Nirvana demo was recorded in six hours and cost Kurt $152.44. He did all his vocals in one take and was very pleased with himself. Jack Endino engineered and was so touched by the raw power of Kurt’s voice that he handed the tape over to Jonathan Poneman of the new underground Sub Pop label, who played it for his partner, Bruce Pavitt. They offered Nirvana five hours in the studio, where the band recorded four songs for the upcoming Sub Pop 200 sampler. They were also asked to contribute to a compilation EP for the C/Z label. Nirvana’s “Mexican Seafood” was included on the Teriyaki Asthma EP, and because they weren’t sure how to spell Kurt’s name, decided on “Kurdt,” which he glommed on to for a short time.
Aaron Burckhard was fired after an embarrassed Chris had to pick him up at the local jail, where he had called a black cop “a fucking nigger.” When he was “too hung over” to come to the next rehearsal, Kurt let Aaron go. He was replaced with Chad Channing, who played his first Nirvana show in May 1988 at Seattle’s Vogue club. This was when the “Seattle sound” was really brewing. Soundgarden had just gotten a major deal at A&M, Mudhoney was doing local gigs, and Mother Love Bone was starting up. In June Nirvana recorded a single, “Love Buzz,” for Sub Pop, and Kurt handwrote the bio, which closed with: “Willing to compromise on material (some of this shit is pretty old). Tour any time forever. Hopefully the music will speak for itself.” The Sub Pop catalog claimed that Nirvana’s single was “Heavy pop sludge,” but only printed a thousand copies, which sold out instantly. When Kurt heard himself on the radio for the first time, he was thrilled but didn’t expect more than playing clubs—and maybe even paying his rent.
Nirvana ended 1989 with intensive rehearsals for their Sub Pop album, Bleach, recording the basic tracks in five hours on Christmas Eve. Kurt either hastily scribbled lyrics on the way to the studio or during the sessions, later saying that he hadn’t put much thought into the words. But songs like “Negative Creep” and “Scoff” are pretty telling. Bleach was completed by the end of January at a cost of $606.17, paid for by fan and friend Jason Everman, who joined Nirvana just in time for a two-week tour of the West Coast.
Once again Kurt wrote Nirvana’s bio beginning: “Greetings, Nirvana is a three piece spawned from the bowels of a redneck loser town called Aberdeen,” after listing Nirvana’s musical influences, including such widely different groups as the Knack, Black Flag, Led Zeppelin, the Stooges and the Bay City Rollers. Influences also included “H. R. Puffnstuf [sic], … divorces, drugs, … the Beatles, … Slayer, Leadbelly, [and] Iggy.” Kurt proudly proclaimed that the underground music scene had become stagnant. Nirvana didn’t want to rock the scene, Kurt explained kiddingly “We want to cash in and suck butt up to the bigwigs in hopes that we too can get high and fuck wax figures hot babes, who will be required to have a certified AIDS test two weeks prior to the day of handing out backstage passes.” Someday soon, Kurt said, the band would “need chick spray repellent” and “do encores of ‘Gloria’ and ‘Louie Louie’ at benfit [sic] concerts with all our celebrity friends.”
In one of his first interviews, Kurt said that Nirvana had a “gloomy, vengeful element based on hatred,” adding “I’d like to live off the band. I can’t handle work.”
When Bleach came out in June, Nirvana didn’t think it sounded “heavy” enough, but were still happy to slog around America on a very low-budget promo tour. Playing the sleaze circuit, the band rarely made over a hundred bucks a night and often had to sleep in the van, but spirits were buoyant. Audiences were eating them up. And the record was selling. In Chicago Kurt dragged a huge yard-sale crucifix onstage. Excitement was so high in Pittsburgh that Kurt smashed his favorite guitar. It really pissed Jason off. That’s when Kurt and Chris realized that he wasn’t right for the band. Canceling the final seven shows, Nirvana drove home in silence, and Jason was fired when they got to Seattle. He never got his $606.17 back.
A “three piece” again, Nirvana drew ecstatic crowds in Seattle, then went on a two-week Midwestern tour, but it started out badly. Kurt was sick. He was rushed to the hospital after collapsing in Minneapolis, but the doctors could do nothing for his horrendous stomach pain.
Right after recording the Blew EP, Nirvana headed for Europe with the band TAD, playing thirty-six shows in forty-two days. Though the tour was difficult due to Chris’s escalating drinking, Nirvana’s falling-apart equipment, and the shocking workload, Kurt was amazed to discover that Nirvana were getting raves in the rock press and had masses of devoted fans. All the shows were sold out, and the pressures enormous. By the time they got to Rome, Kurt was frazzled and exhausted, totaling his guitar five songs into the show and climbing onto the speaker stacks and threatening to jump. “He had a nervous breakdown onstage,” said Sub Pop’s Bruce Pavitt, who attempted to coax him backstage. Kurt then crawled through the rafters, bellowing at the audience, and when he finally made his way down, he told the band he was quitting, then collapsed in tears. The next day on a train to Switzerland, Kurt was robbed. He got so sick, the show had to be canceled. At the final date in England, Nirvana was left with just one guitar, which Kurt threw at Chris, who splintered it with his bass.
On the tour of America that followed, Nirvana had a decent road crew for the first time, and all went fairly smoothly. Members of one of Kurt’s favorite bands, Sonic Youth, brought Gary Gersh, their A&R man from Geffen Records, to the gig in New York, but Chris thought the show was so bad, he shaved his head as penance. In Massachusetts Kurt called his girlfriend, Tracy, on her birthday and told her they shouldn’t live together anymore. Happy birthday to you.
Bleach was a consistent seller, but due to mismanagement, Sub Pop was floundering and nearly bankrupt. With a guilty heart, Kurt decided to look for a major label. But Kurt’s fear of confrontation forced Chris to do the dirty work, so Chris told Bruce Pavitt the band was leaving Sub Pop, taking their seven newly recorded songs with them. Then they fired Chad Channing. Kurt would later say that he and Chad never really got along, but Chad insists it was his decision to leave the band. “I never felt like I was totally in the band. I felt like I was just a drummer. I was thinking, Why don’t they get a drum machine—get it over with?” For their final Sub Pop single, “Sliver,” Mudhoney’s Dan Peters played the drums and did one gig with Nirvana at Seattle’s Motor Sports International and Garage. Scream’s drummer, Dave Grohl, was in the audience that night and was impressed enough to call the Melvins’ Buzz Osborne to get ahold of Chris Novoselic. Chris liked Dave’s drumming and invited him to Seattle for an audition, where he was picked up at the airport by Chris and Kurt. When Dave politely offered Kurt an apple, he replied, “No thanks, it’ll make my teeth bleed.”
Chris said he knew they had found the right drummer two minutes into Dave’s audition, and Nirvana was complete. Dave’s first gig with the band sol
d out in one day, and then Nirvana headed for Europe, playing to a thousand screaming people every night, snagging consistent raves. Back in America record labels were champing at the bit to get at the band from Aberdeen, Washington. Sonic Youth’s management company, Gold Mountain, offered assistance, flying Nirvana to L.A. to meet with Danny Goldberg and John Silva, who set up several meetings with record company bigwigs. About one of the encounters Nirvana had with an uptight Capitol exec, Kurt said, “I just wanted to dance on top of his desk with a dress on and piss all over the place.” When one label offered a million dollars for the band, Kurt mischievously suggested they take the money and then break up, just like the Sex Pistols’ Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, but after being wined, dined, and serviced beyond their most ludicrous dreams, Nirvana decided on Geffen, even though their offer was considerably lower. Geffen had broken Sonic Youth, after all, and Gary Gersh seemed to actually understand Nirvana. Geffen paid off Sub Pop, giving them two points on Nirvana’s next two records, which pulled them out of the red and put them back on the map. Kurt excitedly told people that Nirvana were going to have complete creative control over their album. While the band waited for their advance money, Gold Mountain gave them a thousand dollars a month, and they continued to scrape by, pawning their amps and eating corn dogs.
By November 1990 Kurt was spending quite a bit of his meager cash on heroin, and Chris and Dave finally realized the extent of his problem. At first Kurt had indulged once a week, but it was slowly escalating. Heroin seemed to calm his tortured stomach as well as help him sleep. “While I was asleep, my stomach wouldn’t hurt,” Kurt explained. “Then I’d wake up and curse myself that I was still alive.” He often wore pajama tops, just in case a snooze might creep up on him. “I’ve felt like most of my conversation has been exhausted, there’s not much I can look forward to. Everyday simple pleasures that people might have in having conversations or talking about inane things I just find really boring, so I’d rather just be asleep.”
The day Nirvana hit Los Angeles to begin recording, they checked into their fancy Oakwood Apartment (which they soon trashed) and went on the Universal Studios tour. Geffen had suggested several hot producers, but Nirvana had already asked their former producer, Butch Vig, to do the honors. Eventually they got their way, and in May 1991 Nirvana started work on Nevermind with a budget one thousand times higher than the cost of Bleach.
That same fateful month Kurt ran into Courtney Love at a Butthole Surfers gig at the Hollywood Palladium, where they revealed their mutual attraction by slugging each other and wrestling on the floor. “It was a mating ritual for dysfunctional people,” Courtney later claimed. Kurt thought Courtney looked like Sid Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, and he was smitten. Courtney already had a crush on Kurt, and he still had the trinket-filled heart-shaped box she had given to Dave Grohl for him a few months earlier.
Courtney, a fearless reform-school dropout, had been on the scene for years, appearing in B movies, strip-dancing all over the world, and singing with various bands before forming her own band, Hole. Their first album, Pretty on the Inside, had just been completed—a dauntless, driving, self-incriminating, ballsy hunk of music.
Kurt seemed to know that hanging out with Courtney could be a serious matter, and after a few phone calls he decided to concentrate on his record. The basic tracks for Nevermind were done in a few days because Kurt refused to do second takes. He fiddled with the melodies and lyrics until the last minute—“Pay to Play” turned into “Stay Away.” The anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” almost got tossed because the band thought it sounded too much like the Pixies. When he didn’t like the way “Lithium” was sounding, Kurt screamed and thrashed while the tape rolled, totaling his left-handed guitar, which ended the session for the day. Butch Vig discovered that Kurt sang so brutally hard that his voice was shredded after only one or two vocals. Kurt hung onto a little bottle of codeine cough syrup, sipping continuously, hoping to preserve his voice along with getting high. Since he didn’t know any dealers in L.A., Kurt got stoned on the syrup and a whole lot of Jack Daniel’s.
When the album was completed, everybody involved knew it was going to be colossal. Kurt had his usual fun with the bio, claiming that he had been a “sawblade painter specializing in wildlife and landscapes.” Nirvana did a short stint with Dinosaur Jr., then opened for Sonic Youth on a tour of European festivals. In England Kurt and Courtney met up and had a few backstage words. During the filming of a documentary, Courtney leaned into the camera and announced, “Kurt Cobain makes my heart stop. But he’s a shit.” Later Kurt whispered into her ear, “I never would have picked on you in high school,” like he knew her inside out. But they still didn’t hook up. When the object of her passion left that night with two girls, Courtney yelled, “I hope you get fucked!”
Nirvana began their own headlining tour days before the September 24 release of Nevermind. When Courtney heard from a friend that Kurt had been talking about her, she tracked him down on the road and they spent hours on the phone, finally meeting up at a party in Chicago, where the rock-and-roll mating ritual continued. Courtney had brought a bag of sexy lingerie with her, and Kurt tried it all on for her. They were thrown out of the party twice before heading back to the hotel room Kurt shared with Dave. The mating lovebirds were so loud that Dave was forced to spend the night with the soundman.
Nevermind was flying out of the stores, but Kurt was in turmoil. He had always felt it was “us against them” and now a whole bunch of “them” were buying his record. The band took their confusion out on their instruments, thrashing them to bits. Kurt threw fits. “We were feeling so weird because we were being treated like kings, so we had to destroy everything,” Kurt said. “I was obnoxious and showing my weenie and acting like a fag and dancing around and wearing dresses and just being drunk … . I was out of control.”
Said the Alternative Press: “In September 1991 Nirvana was just a local cult, the latest alternative morsel to drop down Geffen’s gullet. By October they were U2 and Springsteen, Presley and the Pistols, rolled into one snarling bundle.” Nevermind appeared on hard rock, modern rock, college, AOR, and CHR stations, and Billboard called it a “cross-format phenomenon.” “It was like I went to bed one evening and everything was fine,” Kurt said, “but when I woke up the next morning they said on the news that I was an escaped Nazi child killer.”
Courtney showed up at various gigs along the way and Kurt’s spirits improved. At the October 29 show in Portland, Nirvana learned they had gone gold. While they were on tour in Europe, they were told that Nevermind had reached platinum. In December they knocked Michael Jackson out of the number-one spot. It didn’t seem to make much difference to Nirvana. The touring was constant and it was wearing thin. Chris had a severe drinking problem, and despite the fact that Kurt was stressed out and very ill with bronchitis and chronic stomach pain, he and Courtney were dabbling with heroin. Kurt later insisted that he had instigated it and did a lot more of the drug than Courtney.
Back in Seattle, Kurt found himself a heroin dealer, determined to get a habit, claiming that it was the only way he could numb his pain. When Hole got back from their European tour, Kurt and Courtney stayed in various L.A. hotels, shooting what Courtney called “bad Mexican L.A. heroin.”
During the January 1992 taping of “Saturday Night Live,” Chris and Dave realized how bad Kurt’s habit had gotten, and Courtney wrongly got some of the blame. Bam magazine was the first to point the needle at Kurt, stating that he was “nodding off in mid-sentence … . The pinned pupils, sunken cheeks and scabbed, sallow skin suggest something more serious than fatigue.” Though Courtney claimed it was a “drug love thing,” Kurt insisted he used heroin to kill his pain.
When they got back from New York, Kurt and Courtney moved into an apartment in Hollywood, where they cuddled up and watched TV Kurt painted and played his guitar. Every morning he would go to the dealer’s house and bring home the heroin. Courtney only used a little bit eac
h day, but Kurt had a hundred-dollar-a-day habit. At least his stomach wasn’t killing him.
When they discovered she was pregnant, Kurt and Courtney went to a birth-defects specialist who told them that heroin use during the first trimester of pregnancy was virtually harmless, although down the line there could be a minimal risk of learning disabilities. “Having a kid is a big deal,” Kurt said. “It’s one of the biggest things that can happen to you. It’s corny, but all kinds of different people, including punk rockers, do react that way.” The couple detoxed together, and Kurt said it wasn’t “too bad … . I just slept for three days and woke up.” Courtney didn’t agree. “It was gross. That was a sick scene if ever there was a sick scene.”
After the video shoot of the second single, “Come As You Are,” Nirvana went to Australia, where Kurt’s stomach problems were so intense he called Courtney, sobbing in pain. Everybody assumed he was still shooting heroin. One emergency room doctor believed Kurt was detoxing and wouldn’t even treat him. Angry and miserable, Kurt finally located a “rock” doctor who gave him the drug Physeptone, which amazingly took away his pain. Later he found out he had been taking methadone and had become hooked. He was soon back on heroin.
Courtney Love became Mrs. Cobain in Waikiki, Hawaii, on February 24, 1992. The bride was pregnant, the groom was weepy and smacked out. And despite Chris and Shelli’s no-show (they assumed Courtney was doing drugs and were making a statement), Courtney said the wedding was “transcendent.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, conducted under the covers in his pj’s, Kurt said his relationship with Courtney was like “Evian water and battery acid,” and when you mix the two, “you get love.”
Kurt deeply resented his fame, spending almost all his time in the Hollywood apartment with Courtney doing his drugs in the closet so she wouldn’t be tempted. He and Courtney saw a sonogram of the perfectly developing baby girl and Kurt insisted Frances gave him the forefinger/pinkie heavy-metal salute. He refused to tour, because he wanted to be with his pregnant wife, and his relationship with the rest of Nirvana was strained. The band almost shattered when Kurt decided that, since he was the songwriter, he should get 75 percent of the music-writing royalties (they had been splitting it three ways). And the situation got worse when Kurt demanded that the new arrangement be retroactive. Chris and Dave finally agreed to the split, but feelings were bitter.
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 10