by Nick Soulsby
Reciprocal Studios had definite advantages for bands just starting out, including price—Nirvana barely scraped together the $152 required.
JAIME ROBERT JOHNSON, Crunchbird: The first time I went over there to record, it was affordable, comfortable, and very unpretentious. I was someone with hardly any resources to generate income in those times, so that was a very important consideration.
PAUL KIMBALL, Lansdat Blister and Helltrout: Reciprocal, it was the place to track heavy music at the time. Jack Endino pulled folks in with all the great work he was doing for Sub Pop bands, and Chris [Hanzek] wound up doing lots of the stuff that Jack couldn’t do. We didn’t know either of them before we recorded there, but we knew we wanted some of that Reciprocal magic.
Nirvana would come to work with Endino more than with any other producer—an indication of how his approach and attitude set musicians at ease.
DUANE LANCE BODENHEIMER, The Derelicts: Most of our stuff was engineered by Jack Endino—super nice guy. Really easy to work with, put up with our crap … No attitude at all—very knowledgeable in his profession … Straightforward, precise, does everything timely … One time I recall I said I wanted to practice first, I didn’t want him to record it, I wanted to practice first. He said, “All right, cool,” so I did it—and of course he recorded it and it was a great take. He just laughed—“This is it, this is the take.” He knows what he’s doing. He makes you feel comfortable.
JAIME ROBERT JOHNSON: I was a pretty squirrelly guy back when I met Jack. I didn’t have the ability to sit still because I was so intense … I wanted to be in a constant state of constant creativity, whether it was working out a song by humming the chords to myself, writing poetry on the nearest piece of paper … what I liked about him was the fact he was an opposite to me in a good way, and the first thing I learned from him was how to listen to other people and how to actually hear what they were trying to communicate … If I mentioned any bands like King Crimson or brought up an artist like Frank Zappa or Ornette Coleman, he didn’t judge and I didn’t have to explain what I was talking about to him … When Jack said it, he said it with the authority of his expertise and (excellent) taste in music. Also, Jack knew how to do things with a guitar that I wanted to learn to do, and if you catch him in an unfettered moment, he is more than glad to share his expertise … The other thing that Jack has is this ability to tell me the unvarnished truth.
JOHN PURKEY: When you’re in the studio with him, basically … he knows when he hears a mistake and he’s not going to let any mistake slip by. He’s not going to be all, “Oh, how do you feel about that?” If he hears something, he’ll just say “OK, let’s do that again.” He’s a really nice, really mellow guy.
The session created a decent-enough effort on limited time.
JACK ENDINO: None of them were recorded or mixed with any time spent due to budget; plus, I had only been working as a recording engineer for three years at that point. The songs with Dale drumming were all mixed in a total of two hours … ten songs on the original demo … do the math. It would have been nice to remix them with some care taken … I never liked the way it sounded …
Unfortunately, the band had only limited money, which meant they couldn’t finish the last song they attempted—“Pen Cap Chew”—or record two other songs that they had prepared—“Annorexorcist” and “Erectum.”
JACK ENDINO: The multitrack master tape ran out just at the start of the second chorus, and the band didn’t want to buy another reel, so more correctly the song is “permanently incomplete,” not “unfinished.” You can’t finish it when a third of the song is missing. I did the fade ending for the hell of it, just so they could listen to what was there less jarringly.
That same night, back at the Community World Theater again, the band ran through all the songs they’d taped, still veering between sounds and styles.
DAVID WHITING, Vampire Lezbos: I felt like they were just another new band playing rock ’n’ roll while periodically trying to throw in some musical elements of punk … usually the quick, faster, yelly stuff.
JOHN PURKEY: I specifically remember when those guys played with Dale—it was just that one show, right after they recorded the demo—it was one of the most intense Nirvana shows I ever saw. I think the level of intensity with Dale helped form some of those songs—he’s a really original drummer, he has his own style. I think Kurt wrote some of those songs along the lines he thought Dale could play. So when Chad [Channing] joined, he was more of a 4/4 basic drummer and that could have influenced what Kurt wrote—he would have written stuff Chad could play. And Sub Pop turned down the first album, so Kurt just wanted to be part of Sub Pop … He may have changed the sound, but I think it was more to do with the drummers he was with. He was a drummer, he played a little bit, so that could have easily been something he kept in mind, depending on who he was playing with.
Cobain’s most underrated talent lay in assimilating sounds that were swirling through the underground and stamping them with his own approach.
1988 had started well. Most significantly, Jack Endino would become the band’s newest champion.
JOHN PURKEY: He was one of a handful of people who gave a shit about early Nirvana; Jack was there. He was instantly a fan—the early stuff was that good … Literally, I’d be standing next to Jack at most of the shows—two or three shows where I’d be hanging out with him … right after Nirvana had recorded their first demo with Dale I heard it. I had conversations with Jack about it and how amazing it was and then I’d see him at the shows and we’d hang out and talk.
Endino’s appreciation made a lasting difference to the future of the band. He passed the tape into the hands of Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman at Seattle’s upstart label Sub Pop while the band themselves continued to pass out copies to anyone who would take the time to listen.
ABE BRENNAN, My Name: We got into Nirvana before they put anything out via demo tapes that our friend John Purkey had—he was friends with Kurt; these were the recordings that Dale Crover … played drums on, some of which ended up on Bleach (and maybe Incesticide; I can’t remember—fucking pot! I’m telling you! I’m glad I quit!) … We dug the Nirvana stuff right away and started going to their shows—really small stuff back then; we’d go see them play parties at K Dorm at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, stuff like that …
BRUCE PURKEY: It wasn’t until the fall of ’88, when I got a cassette copy of their early demo from my brother that I fell in love with them. I played that tape to death in my dorm room … At the time, the dorms were filled with the sounds of Rush, the Cult, Love and Rockets, and the Cure. I tried to play Nirvana and tell everyone how amazing it was, but was mostly met with comments like, “They have horrible production values.” … All the while I was in Bellingham, my brother was telling me stories about his band and Nirvana, but neither of us really possibly expected that Nirvana would gain any sort of widespread success.
3.0
The Lost Drummer
February to May 1988
Nirvana’s first recording was in the can, but they were still little more than a no-name garage band with barely a half dozen shows under their belt. This was to change rapidly in the short time their third drummer, Dave Foster, occupied the drum stool. He is the mystery man of the Nirvana story.
SLIM MOON: He was during the time Nirvana was still based in Aberdeen, and I doubt there were any better drummers in Aberdeen, other than Dale Crover.
RYAN AIGNER: If anybody thinks that Dave doesn’t have the chops then they have obviously never listened to Helltrout or Psycho-Samaritan—any of the projects he’s worked with … If you want to find the most prejudiced people in the world, talk to a bunch of punk rockers, because if you’re not “in,” if you don’t have the tattoo and the clothespin or whatever, if you’re not part of the club, then they’re worried about it. They want you to be a bona fide member and they want you to be one hundred percent. It was pretty obvious Dave wasn’t and was never going to be—
it had nothing to do with his ability to play the drums. I think they didn’t know who else to bring on. Most of the bands ’round here are musicians playing with each other not because we’ve all been the best of friends but because they’re the only other musicians we know. There weren’t a lot of other options—Dave was the logical decision, he was the right age, he had the chops, he could do it!
Foster’s tenure started with a seemingly unimportant house party, yet this wasn’t just someone’s home, the Caddyshack was a very well-connected residence. It was this rapid introduction to key individuals in other bands and labels that would allow Nirvana to progress at pace.
SCOTT VANDERPOOL, Chemistry Set: I went to high school in Bellevue [an east Seattle suburb] with Ron “Nine” Rudzitis [later of Love Battery] and Scott Boggan … I quit to go to the Evergreen State College and was promptly drafted into the Young Pioneers with Brian Learned [who had been in the Silly Killers in Seattle and would later end up in Chemistry Set] … Chris Pugh [who would go on to start Swallow, Creep, and SABA] and Brad Sweek [who would go on to be a major junkie who got clean and helped tons of Seattle music people get off that shit] … It was there I met Bruce Pavitt and Calvin Johnson … We were the Kings of Oly back then. Room Nine got a new drummer and went on to be quite popular in the pre-grunge years in Seattle where the Young Pioneers shared bills with them at places like the Metropolis [where the future Mrs. Chris Cornell, Susan Silver, worked the concession counter] … Chemistry Set played our first show at the Rainbow Tavern, directly behind the notorious Room Nine house, where I lived along with photographer Charles Peterson and artist Ed Fotheringham.
This intertwining of personalities was a constant feature, and Nirvana was regularly playing for fellow musicians, plus the label bosses, journalists, and photographers who made up the Seattle scene—though it didn’t mean luxurious circumstances.
SCOTT VANDERPOOL: A totally beat two-bedroom house with Visqueen plastic for a roof. Painted the moldy walls with paint-store mistake colors … this dump happened to be on the tenth green of a private golf club, so we called it the Caddyshack … When I moved back to Seattle, Chris Pugh stayed and Mike McDowell, lead singer of Noxious Fumes from Tacoma, moved in … I’m pretty sure that’s who was there when Nirvana played … I was fairly bummed when the landlord, a former Thurston County commissioner (who once told the religious zealot that called him regularly to complain that the Young Pioneers’ satanic music was killing her daughter to quit complaining because we usually got paid when we played and she was getting it for free) finally told ’em all to get out because he was building a luxury golf-course home there. So they had a party and totally destroyed the place … And no one told me!
CHRIS PUGH, Swallow: That place was great—bands on tour would stay there, lots of bands played there. Olympia was so small and such a tight-knit scene, if there were ten bands in town then you knew everyone and every member … I was friends with Bruce [Pavitt]; we’d worked at a place called Muzak that provided music services to restaurants and businesses—we’d go out to lunch, see each other. I gave him a cassette of my band and since we were friends already it wasn’t a sophisticated contract or anything—he just said, “Yeah, we could put this out for you.”
The Caddyshack was another element splicing Cobain and company into the wider music scene of the Northwest.
March 19, 1988, was the first Nirvana performance.
JOHN PURKEY: I got this phone call, I answer the phone, it’s Kurt: “John, I found a band name, I wanted to know what you think … Nirvana.” “Man, it’s perfect, great.” “That’s the new name of the band…” Kurt went to Buddhist meetings in Olympia; Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism. In 1980 my mom became a Buddhist; I was really interested … I became a Buddhist and was off and on through the ’80s, I’m sure I told Kurt one time … he went to a couple of meetings in Olympia … I believe the name Nirvana could have been inspired by Buddhism …
The show that night was the first time Nirvana took the stage.
DAVID WHITING: When I phoned the Community World Theater in Tacoma saying we were coming over … we were offered headline position to an already “in-process” show. After all, this was the month of our first LP release, which was a big thing at the time, for the area and for us, and we had played the CWT in the past. When we got there, we used our “headline clout” to ask to play middle slot so that we could push onward to Seattle for a late-night show. Typical headline-band maneuvering.
LARRY SCHEMEL, Kill Sybil: The Nirvana Community World show had Dave Foster on drums. I never met him and my only memory of him was his massive drum kit and how great of a drummer he was, very hard-hitting drummer …
Yet while it marked the beginning of Nirvana, the show was when the band said an unwitting farewell to the Community World Theater, which closed before a planned July 3 return. Instead, over the year to come, the fledgling band would perform across the state of Washington. In Nirvana’s first year, half of the bands they played with had been Tacoma-based, yet on March 19, their co-performers were Lush, from Olympia, and Vampire Lezbos.
DAVE WHITING: Born on the conservative-cowboy-laden plains of eastern Washington, in the Orwellian year of 1984 … We spent five years of our initial history in Spokane …
Of the bands Nirvana played with during Foster’s stint, not one had its roots in Tacoma.
DAVE WHITING: Needless to say, I don’t remember much from that night, or the actual band. We of course met, talked superficially, and courteously listened to each other while mulling about, all the while waiting to push onwards to Seattle … I was fairly oblivious of the music from that night and was not stricken with any sort of awe of having heard something great. My head was more into what we came to do that night, so anything less than extraordinary would not have registered with me … No succinct memories except the vague ones mentioned earlier. What a downer, eh?
Even later, in May, it was still the case that Nirvana were playing second fiddle or lower to numerous other bands.
SHAWN LAWLOR, Herd of Turtles: I don’t remember their show much. People were moshing from the get-go and really into their sound … It was a big crowd. I remember Nirvana played earlier than we did—so yes, I joke about being able to claim that Nirvana opened for my band—we played right before the Young Fresh Fellows, who headlined the show …
And this wasn’t unusual. Neither was the Olympia house party.
RONNA MYLES-ERA, Treehouse: This was a fun, crazy, and productive time in Olympia. There were a lot of bands and there were shows pretty much every weekend. In Olympia you didn’t need a club to play at, just someone willing to let you play in their house, and there were plenty of those. House shows were the best … House shows were a really big part of the music scene, and that made it easier to play because even if there were only fifteen people, it felt like a full house and you just gave it your all. And if you didn’t get invited to play a show, you just put on your own … Our practice space was in the basement of our house, and Steve [Helbert], Damon [Romero], and I all lived there. Our house was called the Tree House.
Nirvana readily embraced the house-party ethos of the local music community. At least a third of their shows from 1987 to 1988 were house parties or college dorms.
SLIM MOON: I think that some of the house-party shows have been lost to the ages and aren’t on any lists. At that point Lush was hopeful of putting out an album, or going on a tour, but we never did … Locally (meaning Olympia and Aberdeen and Tacoma), everybody knew that Nirvana were special. We knew we weren’t nearly as good as them. And they drew more local fans than we did. We always played before them, even at parties.
The community within which Nirvana’s members lived and socialized throughout the majority of their career was one of living in shared band houses in Olympia, playing one another’s shows, sharing parties, and living life on the cheap.
LISA KOENIG, Calamity Jane: The good ol’ Alamo … there was the Witch House, the Glass House, the Caddyshack—and the first
place I ever lived after moving out of my parents’ house was the Mansion, or, I think it was called the White House too; it was so cool it had two names. There were twelve of us living there, so our rent was only $50 a month. And we still couldn’t afford coffee! What losers we were! None of us really had jobs, we just jammed and made money wherever we could … Then Tim Tafoya brought home scabies one day and the whole house broke out itching. It sucked the big one ’cause we kept passing it around and it seemed like it took forever to get rid of. I think we can rename that one the Scaby House.
While building their reputation within the band-house crowd in Olympia, it was Dave Foster, an old friend from Aberdeen, who held them together on drums. Yet there has been precious little true assessment of Foster’s time in the band.
DAMON ROMERO: I thought he was a solid drummer, good with the band. He rocked hard, he hit hard—I remember once having a conversation with Kurt and Krist where they were sort of complaining, but not about his drumming. It was just that they didn’t think he was committed, that he didn’t really want to leave Aberdeen. They wanted to be a band that worked and played and recorded and toured and they just got the sense he wasn’t on board with that. He just wanted to play in a rock band and drink beer and be a good drummer.