I Found My Friends

by Nick Soulsby

  MARIA MABRA: She and I played music together in several things outside the Gits—like Hell Smells. I was also one of her vocal teachers, so not only were we best [friends] but we were inseparable—we would always sing together … When people die they put them into these strange states of angelic being. She was my best friend. I had no problem telling her, “Fuck off, you’re full of shit”; she was my sister, we fought a lot—we might be in a corner at a party fist-fighting and rolling around on the ground then we’d make up twenty minutes later. Sisters, inseparable. She meant everything to me … That show in 1993, I was really glad Nirvana wanted to do the show—as much as they inspired everyone else at that time I was glad they looked back at us and recognized one of their own and were willing to help. That made me love them more too. Thanks, guys, I’m glad you did that. They honored where they came from because we all came out [of] the same scene.

  JOSH SINDER: That show was absolutely the most insane oversold-out show I’ve ever played. We in Tad knew that Nirvana was going to announce their playing the show at the last minute on the radio (I think it was KISW), but no one else knew. Anyway, there was like two hundred people at the King Cat Theater before anyone knew Nirvana was playing and after they announced it on the radio, it seemed like the entire city swarmed the building. There were probably a couple thousand people flooding the streets. It was mind-blowing. Dave Grohl borrowed my drum kit and when I got it back all the drumheads were beat to a bloody pulp.

  LARRY SCHEMEL: Everyone was really having a good time that night despite the reason we were all there. It felt like we tried to go back to our little scene for a night; it was for a good cause and really cool to see the community come together for Mia … [Nirvana] seemed to be having a good time, very loose and I think maybe relieved to not be playing an arena show or festival. It also seemed like it was sort of a homecoming for them even though it was a solemn occasion … The covers stand out because they seemed to be having fun with them.

  STEVE MORIARTY: Mia … she was funny, gregarious, but also an introspective artist, [a] poet like Patti Smith. She had a fighting spirit, didn’t take shit. Completely honest and direct … We organized about two hundred benefits all over the country, all over the world—every band from Sonic Youth to Hootie and the Blowfish played at one of those shows. Home Alive, they formed to teach self-defense to women in Seattle so it wouldn’t happen again as it did to Mia. They did a load of compilations—everyone got in line to be part of that—X, Soundgarden, William S. Burroughs, Pearl Jam—it’s just insane. Nirvana, too. They talk about the bands in the ’60s, Jefferson Airplane living next door to the Grateful Dead next to Janis Joplin—it was like that except we were all around the Comet. All in houses on Capitol Hill—similar … Kathleen Hanna was really wonderful when Mia was murdered; she was the one who turned Joan Jett on to the Gits and they both loved Mia’s voice and singing, so that’s what led to the album with Joan doing Gits songs. I still have gratitude to them.

  Despite the tragedy, it was time for Nirvana to return to business. The pace ratcheted up—DGC released “Heart-Shaped Box,” the band played Saturday Night Live, and the media rounds commenced.

  YOURI LENQUETTE: When they were promoting In Utero, I went to Seattle for a photo session. The idea was to go over there with this young kid who won a Nirvana competition with the prize being to meet the band in Seattle. So it was me and this young sixteen-, seventeen-year-old, we got there in late August and spent maybe three days in Seattle. The photos I shot for Best were mostly taken … in the garden of Dave’s house, in front of a car. At some point Kurt sees this little toy M16—it’s a lot smaller than the real thing—he grabs it, puts it in his mouth. We do three photos—click-click-click—he puts it down and we finish the photo session … It was just some toy, it could have been a clown nose—he would have put it on. It was the spirit; that photo session was very happy, I remember we went to do some go-karting. We were hanging out at Dave’s place, the weather was good, we were happy to see each other, all making jokes. A happy moment … Kurt wasn’t the guy who’d say, “Yeah, let’s go out, get a drink, have fun…” It just wasn’t him. It meant he could look like someone who was closed, someone sad. But that wasn’t all he was. The way he ended makes it hard to recognize that he had this other side, that his music was fed by his enthusiasm, that he could be a very funny guy, witty—very funny jokes. You don’t imagine that of him, but he could if he was in the right atmosphere. The reality is, though, that touring is very stressful, very tiring, and on top of that he was a sick man and simply not a very social person.

  Meanwhile the planning went on for the upcoming tour but already there were rumblings of discontent.

  JOSH SINDER: We were confirmed to be the opening act for Nirvana on the In Utero USA tour. We were so excited; the first show was Seattle, I think, and we were even hearing the ads for the Seattle show on the radio. So anyway like a week before the tour was to start we got news that we were kicked off. What happened was Tad was doing interviews in New York weeks earlier and a journalist from Melody Maker was pressing him about what he thought about Courtney Love or something like that. I think he said something that Kurt didn’t like and we were off the tour.

  KURT DANIELSON: Kurt always tended to be a quiet, withdrawn, soft-spoken person; but back when Tad used to tour with Nirvana, there were many times when he would open up, and his sense of humor would emerge, making it possible to achieve a closeness with him that was impossible later due to how isolated he eventually became due to Courtney’s interference and also his drug use.

  19.0

  Creaking: The In Utero Tour

  October 1993 to January 1994

  When Nirvana ended their US touring for 1991 they had been lined up alongside Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers—mainstream talents. By contrast, when planning their first full US tour since becoming superstars, Nirvana ignored the mainstream entirely and plucked comrades from the underground. They were the world’s biggest band but were making decisions the way Sonic Youth had in 1990. They had no desire to emulate lucrative superstar follies like the Metallica/Guns N’ Roses tour.

  JAD FAIR, Half Japanese: It was funny how I found out about Nirvana wanting Half Japanese to open for them. I had a show in Toronto and picked up a copy of Spin magazine at the airport. There was an interview with Kurt, and Kurt said that Half Japanese would do the tour with them. That’s the first I’d heard of it. I called my booking agent and she told me she was just contacted by Nirvana’s manager.

  CRIS KIRKWOOD, Meat Puppets: A request came in through the management—maybe they’d realized that we were still alive or something—it was cool realizing the guys liked us, that they wanted to ask us to go out with them on tour … It was amazing seeing these bands who dressed like us, who name-checked us, suddenly on the radio and MTV. Scruffy hair, jeans, T-shirts—that we could relate to. The ’80s, there were some extreme hairdos and there’s me thinking I was lucky if I remembered to put some gloop under my arms so I don’t stink.

  Old favorites alternated with up-and-comers, Nirvana doing for them what others had done for Nirvana scant years earlier.

  THALIA ZEDEK, Come: Come had played with Hole a few times early on, before Kurt and Courtney became involved. And Come’s manager at the time, Tom Johnston, was friends with Janet Billig, who managed both Hole and Nirvana (I believe?). We had heard through the grapevine that they (Kurt and Courtney) were both Come fans and really into 11:11, so probably both that and our managers being friends were factors in us being asked. I think we ended up with the Southern leg of the tour simply because that was what was available; we weren’t given a choice in that.

  TROY VON BALTHAZAR, Chokebore: They heard our music through some friends, I think. They asked us personally, not through any managers or anything, very low-key. I remember seeing Krist Novoselic at a few Chokebore shows the year before and I heard that Kurt liked our music. They just asked and we said “YES!” … There were no contracts or legal junk, from what I
can remember … I think the second time we played in Seattle, Krist was there. Just a tall, dark figure standing in the back. I didn’t think anything would come of it. But somehow he got the CD to the band, or maybe it went through their friend Cali. The next thing we knew they just asked us to do some shows. It was all very casual.

  This was how the underground had always worked, right back to the days of wearing each other’s T-shirts at local shows. Cobain’s attitude toward the trappings of his newfound fame are summed up by a private moment.

  TROY VON BALTHAZAR: When we were on tour he would let us stay at his place if we didn’t have anywhere to sleep that night. We would stay there between shows. The house was usually empty when we got there because Nirvana was also on tour. It was nice of him to lend us a place to sleep. (We were tired boys…) I remember using the bathroom one time and seeing an MTV Music Award on the floor sitting there holding the door open. Awesome.

  The rock-star insouciance of using the award as a doorstop matches their unwillingness to place success on a pedestal.

  STEVE DIGGLE: [Kurt] was into a load of bands from the punk era—and a lot of little-known bands too. It was great that he was in that position, then, of doing the big gigs but fishing out people that were playing in very tiny places and bringing them. He felt real.

  As with Calamity Jane back in Argentina, there was a bad side to these invitations—a lot of these bands had never been anywhere near shows on this scale.

  CHRIS BROKAW, Come: Our understanding was that the invite came from the band. None of us knew anyone in Nirvana, so, it came somewhat out of left field. We were excited and a little bit scared at the prospect—it was a very, very high profile tour, playing bigger places than we’d ever played before. Arthur [Johnson], our drummer, was particularly freaked out at the prospect of playing at the Omni in Atlanta, where he had seen Loverboy, et cetera, when he was in high school. When we were asked to do the shows he exclaimed, “I can’t play my $150 garage-sale drum set onstage at the Omni!”—which was in fact the drum set he had been using up till that point (first with BBQ Killers and then with Come). We promised him we’d buy him a new drum set and he mopily said OK. I think he was really nervous about playing the Omni.

  TROY VON BALTHAZAR: Backstage [Nirvana] seemed really nice and would always try to talk and comfort us because we were a little out of our league going from playing in front of 50 people one night to 20,000 the next opening for them.

  MARK ROBINSON: We were asked to open for them at a few 20,000-seat arena shows in and around Florida and we politely said no, since we had done our share of opening gigs at big shows. Never this big, of course, but the bigger the show, the less interested folks are in watching the opening band. We had also just finished a long nationwide tour with Stereolab and were a bit tired. Our booking agent was perplexed by our refusal and wondered what we were trying to accomplish with our band.

  Nirvana carried their own fears. Despite having played 244 shows since dispensing with Jason Everman, Cobain now felt he needed a second guitarist to share the burden; Pat Smear from the L.A. punk band the Germs came on board.

  CHRIS BROKAW: I wasn’t a big fan of Nirvana, but I was a huge Germs fan, and really excited at the prospect of meeting and touring with Pat Smear! Prior to our touring with them, I actually thought that Nirvana was sort of mainstream hard rock … By the end of the tour, I’d become a fan; I liked the songs, and I liked Dave Grohl’s drumming a lot. What’s funny now is that I hear a band like Alice in Chains, and I think they sound a lot like Nirvana … and maybe vice versa … I understand the differences between the two, and they’re vast; but they also sound a lot alike … and they are viewed now in such different ways.

  Choosing to bring a punk veteran into Nirvana was another sign of the urge to hold tight to what Nirvana had been, changing as an act of resistance.

  The other fear was about what Cobain could, or would, endure. While Metallica racked up 272 shows from 1992 to 1994 and Guns N’ Roses hit 202 on the Use Your Illusion tours, Nirvana had managed a threadbare 105, and at its peak, the In Utero tour saw just 16 shows per month.

  STEVE TURNER: The In Utero tour seemed very chaotic, unorganized, and kind of a bummer all around … Their team seemed confused as to what to do and when to do it. They were walking on eggshells afraid of being fired. It wasn’t much of a team, I guess—every man or woman for themselves … Except when Nirvana was onstage. They were pretty awesome most nights. Krist and Dave would come hang out some, it was cool to meet Pat, and I rarely saw Kurt. We just did our thing and watched how chaotic it all was.

  CHRIS BROKAW: We had heard that Kurt Cobain had a bad drug habit, and that they were thinking of canceling the tour; the shows weren’t confirmed until very soon before they happened … At any rate, it was no secret that both Kurt and his wife had a lot of drug problems that were causing unrest in the band. No one was sure if the shows were going to happen … no one knew what shape Kurt would be in … I honestly don’t know whether he was “on” or not during the tour. It wasn’t my business and I didn’t ask.

  The venue choices showed a nervousness also.

  THALIA ZEDEK: They were big, but not humongous? Definitely stadiums, but basketball/hockey stadiums not baseball or football ones (thank God) … We did things a bit differently than for a normal Come tour: we hired a tour manager who had a cell phone (a rare and expensive thing in those days). Nirvana’s management kind of insisted on that, if I remember correctly. And we brought along a friend (Curtis Harvey from Rex) to be a general roadie, string-changer. Because when you’re playing in front of 40,000 people you really can’t ask everyone to wait while you change a string! And we brought along our own and favorite sound person, Carl Plaster. But besides that we traveled in our van and stayed at the same shitty motels we would have otherwise. We didn’t travel with Nirvana, and their management team didn’t make our travel arrangements.

  JAD FAIR: I’m not good at guessing audience size, but yes, it probably was in the three- to ten-thousand range.

  These shows were deliberately a fraction of the size of the South American events or the summer festivals.

  For all the caution, Nirvana onstage could still be an awe-inspiring spectacle.

  CHRIS BROKAW: The thing to remember is that this was the first big tour they did after becoming successful—about two years after Nevermind came out and sold ten million copies. So people had been waiting a long time to see them and everything around them was sort of a constant soap opera with the press … The audiences were wild … crazy, just really excited that they were finally seeing Nirvana. And yes, every night people constantly threw clothing onstage. A lot of shoes. Hundreds of shoes! It was insane. The crowds were cool to us. One fascinating thing: when the tour was happening, the Breeders’ song “Cannonball” was the number-one song on MTV’s BuzzBin—and every night that song got the biggest response of the whole night, more than anything Nirvana played. Just total pandemonium. It really showed how powerful MTV was then.

  THALIA ZEDEK: The audiences were absolutely incredible to the opening bands, which was so cool. We were the first band on and they cheered the second we walked onstage, even though I doubt hardly any of them had any idea who we were. No one was shouting “Nirvana” or “Get off the stage!” They were incredibly receptive! I remember there was a strange shoe-tossing thing that was going on at the time, where kids would express their devotion to the band by tossing just one of their shoes onstage, meaning that they had to walk home half-shod. We didn’t inspire that level of emotion, but the Breeders did, and they didn’t appreciate it.

  TROY VON BALTHAZAR: I remember standing on the side of the stage one night while [Nirvana] were playing and thinking, This is a damn good band. They were an exciting band. The fame around them was also exciting to watch, but seemed a little heavy. I looked out that same night from the side of the stage and realized I couldn’t even see anyone’s face. The audience was too far away. It’s like they were playing to an imaginary crow
d a million miles away. I remember thinking they must be phenomenal in a small club. That’s where I wish I could have seen them … Playing ten shows with Nirvana on their final American tour was really a thrill. Something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

  NAOKO YAMANO: I enjoyed the shows in front of the big audiences. It was easy for us because we were a front act and the set time was just thirty minutes. It seemed that the audiences liked Shonen Knife because we were all female and came from a faraway country and the audiences knew we were invited by Nirvana … [Kurt] looked tired but performed very hard onstage … I was impressed by Kurt’s attitude toward music. He always performed as hard as he could for shows and had a pure mind for music.

  JAD FAIR: The set time for us was tight, but we knew it was going to be. I didn’t notice bouncers. I’m sure there were some, I just didn’t feel their presence. It was pretty relaxed … Nirvana was such a great live band. I enjoyed every show … Kurt was a great performer at all of the shows I saw. He certainly could perform.