by Mark Yarm
Then I get called into an office by Alex MacLeod, the tour manager, saying I’m not gonna mix the tour.
MARK ARM We did this leg on the first part of the In Utero tour. This is our first foray into the arena world, and we’re like, Okay, it’s our old buddies Nirvana, this will be great.
They’re having a dry tour because they’re trying to keep Kurt from drinking. But that’s not even his problem. He’s still doing pills, like massive amounts of pills, and he’s just out of his fuckin’ head. So they’re not letting Dave and Krist drink beer. We got beer in our room on our rider, so those guys would come into our room and drink beer. And in Chicago, we had a bunch of friends backstage, and the beer ran out really quickly. One of our friends goes into catering and grabs a case of beer and brings it back. Catering complains that a case of beer got stolen which sets off this fucking incredible kerfuffle, with their tour manager, Alex MacLeod, calling back to John Silva in L.A., back and forth about the beer, and they’re fuckin’ pissed off at us. They have to pay for this extra case of beer, which could be how much, 20 bucks or something?
MATT LUKIN Touring with Nirvana was a downer. They were really bummed that they were even there, it seemed like. Kurt was busy, I was busy. Sometimes we’d be in the same room, but we didn’t actually hang out very often. Same with Krist. We would hang out a bit, but it wasn’t, Hey, old brothers from Aberdeen hanging out! It was more like, they had their shit, we had our shit.
MARK ARM Kurt and I were on the bus between Davenport, Iowa, and Chicago, and Kurt said something like, “I don’t know how you do it.” At this point, I wasn’t doing drugs at all. The one thing I think that really helped me out in terms of stopping was that we went on tour an awful lot, so I was used to quitting, I was used to getting dope sick. I chipped until the summer of ’93, at which point I started going out with Emily—who has put up with me ever since—and she asked me if I was ever going to do heroin again. I was all wishy-washy: “Well … you never know what the future holds.” She said, “If you ever do it again, I’m outta here.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” That was enough of a push for me to finally walk away from that shit.
Kurt was just fuckin’ loaded on pills, and I said something like, “You just gotta want to do it bad enough.” What I regret not saying is, “You need to dump your junkie wife, because you’re not going to be able to do this while you’re in a partnership with someone who’s also an enthusiast.”
ALEX COLETTI Nirvana had agreed to do Unplugged, and the first meeting where I give the spiel about what I allow, what I don’t allow, was after their show somewhere outside of Boston. When the show was over, we went back into the band room. I was sat next to Kurt. I said, “I just wanted to talk about the show real quick.” I had just brought some set drawings and I showed it to him. He had asked for stargazer lilies. He said, “I want more, I want more.”
I said, “What’s the vibe you’re goin’ for?”
He said, “You know, like a funeral.” But it wasn’t like, bummm, heavy music plays and foreshadowing.
AMY FINNERTY The day of the Unplugged show, they were all nervous. I went to Kurt’s hotel before the show and he told me that he felt nervous and uncomfortable with the idea that people had to sit down the whole time and I said, “What would make you feel more comfortable?” He said, “I’d really like to meet some of the kids first.” So I bring him to the venue and he came into the studio where we were shooting and went around and he met the kids and hugged them before the performance, which was really sweet.
ALEX COLETTI Word had trickled down beforehand that they’re gonna bring guests, and I think that, in our naiveté and my missing the point, it was like, “Oh, he’s gonna bring Eddie Vedder out ’cause they’re all grunge buddies and they hang out at that one bar in Seattle and it’s gonna be great!” It’s like, “No. We’re bringin’ the Meat Puppets.” Oh great, I smell ratings! But that was never the point of it, so you trust the artist.
AARON STAUFFER I was in New York, and I got on the list for the Unplugged taping. Before the show, I ran into Dave and I told him, “I came to see you guys play.” And he kind of gave this face and groaned: “It’s not going to be good.” It hadn’t been good in rehearsal. I was like, “I saw Bob Dylan this week unplugged, so hopefully you guys can live up to that.” And he totally gave this look of horror, just like, That is never going to happen. But it turned out to be an amazing performance. It brought tears to my eyes.
AMY FINNERTY Everybody there was completely aware that we were witnessing history. I mean there was something about the coolness in the air of the studio, and the set was beautiful, and you could feel the anticipation and excitement not only from the crowd but from the band, as well. Every time they finished a song, you could kind of see this sense of relief on their faces.
ALEX COLETTI They closed with Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” and the ending is possibly the most memorable moment in Unplugged history. Kurt screams out the final “shiver” with that battery-acid voice, then makes a rubbery, hillbilly-ish face for “the whole.” Pauses, takes a breath, stares right into the camera, and hits that final “night through.”
AARON STAUFFER And here’s the tragedy of that show: The minute the last note finished ringing out, all the record company suits jump on Kurt like fuckin’ flies on shit. I couldn’t hear them, but I knew what they were saying: “Is this okay? Are we going to do another song?” And my heart just sank for the guy. He’s just put on one of the best performances I’ve ever seen—and I’ve been to thousands of rock shows—and now he has to deal with these fuckin’ leeches making sure that they don’t need to shoot some more, because their mouths are so wrapped around MTV’s cock.
ALEX COLETTI At the end, I asked them, “Is there anything else you wanna try? We don’t have to use it.” I didn’t even dare suggest “Teen Spirit.” And Krist and Dave were kinda brainstorming, and Kurt just looked at me and said, “How do I top that last song?” I remember reaching to my headset and going, “That’s a wrap. We’re done.”
AMY FINNERTY At the end of it, we went back to the hotel, and Kurt said to me, “I didn’t do very good.” I said, “What are you talking about? That was a historical moment, that was a really incredible performance. Why do you feel like you didn’t do very good?”
He said, “Because everybody was so quiet, nobody really clapped that loud and they just kind of sat there.” I said something to the effect of, “People felt like they were seeing Jesus Christ for the first time. It was intense for people. They were trying to be respectful by being quiet and just letting you do your thing.” And then he kind of got a little smirk on his face and said, “Thank you.”
ALICE WHEELER I was with Kurt one time at this show, MTV’s Live & Loud, and all these record people were around. Their eyes looked different—they had this coldness, like they’re out to take advantage of you.
TOM HANSEN Right before the Live & Loud show in Seattle, I sold to Kurt and Dylan. We were in my Camaro, under the Alaskan Way Viaduct. We had a conversation in the car where Kurt said he was disgusted with the rock-star treatment he had gotten when he came to New York for the Saturday Night Live thing. He just went on a bit of a rant, if I remember correctly. The only verbatim thing that I remember was, “Those fuckers in New York, man.”
COURTNEY LOVE Dylan and Lanegan were pretty much the only friends Kurt had. He really didn’t have any friends. He liked the dealers, which was gross. He liked being isolated.
I have this thing, me and my manager call it the Rocket. It’s what happened to Kurt, it’s what happened to me. It’s what happened to Eminem. It’s what happened to Britney Spears. Instead of just going up in steps—you’re an apprentice with a mentor, you learn your craft, you go up to the next level and the next level—you disappear into the Rocket. You have to fight centrifugal force. Who’s our friend? Who’s not our friend? Who do we fire? What do we do? What’s gross? What’s not?
CHARLES PETERSON Courtney and I had exchanged phon
e numbers at one point. She actually wanted me to go hang out with Kurt, because he didn’t have any friends. It’s like, Well, of course, because he’s a junkie. It’s really hard to hang out with a junkie.
No, unfortunately, it never happened. I went to Frances’s one-year birthday party, things like that. But you go over to a junkie’s house, and the TV is always on, and every hour or two they’re taking extra-long bathroom breaks, there’s always people coming and going. Junkies build little junkie worlds.
I’d already been through that with a relationship. Seeing my friends always near death … It’s tough. Tough. In retrospect, I think, Man, I should’ve just done it.
SLIM MOON Courtney hated me, she hated Tobi Vail, hated Riot Grrrl, hated Olympia, hated Mary Lou Lord. And I put out Tobi’s and Mary Lou Lord’s records. One time, Courtney called me at 1 in the morning, and told me, “You’re all right, you’re all right. You’re a Libra. You’re just misguided because you’ve been taken down a bad road by all your awful friends.” So she went back and forth; sometimes she claimed not to hate me, but mostly she just hated me by association.
She said, “You should come up and hang out with Kurt and be a good influence.” And I said, “Sure,” but I think it was just a wasted person saying shit in the middle of the night. I never got any concrete invites to come hang out.
MARK DEUTROM I was playing with the Melvins on the In Utero tour. There was a cocooned environment going on with Nirvana. For people who had come from the same small town and apparently had known each other super-well—with Kurt having this whole “I love you guys” thing—there was surprisingly little love expressed. Really, Rush were more friendly when we played a few dates with them. Trent Reznor was more friendly. Gene Simmons was the weird uncle, there every day in our dressing room going, “What can I do for you guys?”
I’m sure stories abound about the legendary last show. At the sound check, Kurt was throwing his guitar and saying, “This is our last fuckin’ show.” There was a catering area in this venue, and a bunch of phones. Everybody got to sit in the catering area and listen to Kurt on the phone, screaming every expletive in the book at Courtney.
BUZZ OSBORNE The last conversation I had with Kurt was in Munich, after he had the screaming match with his wife. I had told him this before and I basically reiterated, “I think that what you should do is give her everything, and run as if your very life depends on it. Sign everything over to her from this moment on and just be gone. And if you need money, just go out and do a fucking solo tour, play acoustic guitar, you’ll be fine.” He felt like he was trapped. He was embarrassed by her. He wanted to divorce her. He wanted to get out of it. But he was too much of a mess to get out of it.
Right when they were walking onstage, he said, “I should just be doing this solo.” And that was it. I never talked to him again. They canceled the rest of the tour.
DALE CROVER Kurt said he was canceling the rest of the shows because he had laryngitis. While we’re still in Europe, they’re reporting that Kurt Cobain ODs. Accidental overdose. Took a bunch of pills.
COURTNEY LOVE Kurt had gone all out out for me when I got [to Rome]. He’d gotten me roses. He’d gotten a piece of the Colosseum … I had some champagne, took a Valium, we made out, I fell asleep. The rejection he must have felt after all that anticipation …
I turned over about 3 or 4 in the morning to make love, and he was gone. He was at the end of the bed with a thousand dollars in his pocket and a note saying, “You don’t love me anymore. I’d rather die than go through a divorce.” It was all in his head. I’d been away from him during our relationship maybe 60 days. Ever. I needed to be on tour. I had to do my thing.
I can see how it happened. He took 50 fucking pills. He probably forgot how many he took. But there was a definite suicidal urge, to be gobbling and gobbling and gobbling. Goddamn, man. Even if I wasn’t in the mood, I should have just laid there for him. All he needed was to get laid. He would have been fine.
DAVE GROHL [Someone] called and said he’d passed in Rome, and I fucking freaked out. I just lost my mind and started wailing. As disconnected as our relationship had become, you just can’t imagine real tragedy in your life. Twenty minutes later someone called me and said, “Actually, no, he’s not dead, he’s awake.” How weird. That could have been the happiest moment of my life. When he came home, I talked to him on the phone. We tried to avoid the subject—we were talking about buying minibikes or something, and I told him, “Look, man, I was really scared.” He said, “I know. I’m really sorry. It was just an accident.” I was trying to reach out to him and tell him that I really cared about him, but it wasn’t enough.
DALE CROVER But the shows were getting rebooked. They were advertising it on TV over there! On MTV! We even saw posters about them being rebooked. And we’re just thinking, That’s really weird. Those shows are already getting rebooked after this guy basically tried to kill himself. What the fuck’s going on?
ANTON BROOKES Taking an overdose is a pretty big cry for help, so everyone did what they could to help. Everybody. There’s no one in the Nirvana camp with blood on their hands. No one whatsoever.
COURTNEY LOVE It’s only known to the inner circle that Kurt’s first suicide attempt with a note was in December of ’93. It was at home, around Christmas. I did all that shit you do, like CPR, like punching, poking, cold water. He wrote a big note, it was like a few diary pages, a list of reasons why he shouldn’t be alive and blah blah blah and how he could never stop doing heroin. It’s like, It’s the fuckin’ ’90s. The ’90s are going to be gone. Keith Richards does dope or did it for as long as … Whatever, it’s your lifestyle.
The inner circle? Janet knew about it, Rosemary knew about it, Danny knew about it, David Geffen knew about it.
SUSAN SILVER Courtney and I had touched base several weeks before Kurt died, after there was an incident. She had reached out and said, “You have to help, you have to help, he’s gonna kill himself.” So I hooked them up with a person that we’d been dealing with, with Layne for intervention. They ended up not using him. They did do an intervention, but it didn’t go particularly well.
COURTNEY LOVE Before that last intervention, Kurt dropped the kid. He dropped Frances. Not on her head. He didn’t drop her from a great height; he stumbled, he fell, he was too high to be holding the kid, and you don’t do that. And I was like, “That’s fuckin’ it! You can’t drop the kid, you don’t drop my baby!” I was just fucking outraged.
The great thing about our relationship is that we wouldn’t fight at all. We would have eruptions. We had three physical altercations. Around that time, he dragged me by my hair, dragged my cheek on the gravel. He’s stronger than me, and I’m strong. He was a tough fucker.
DANNY GOLDBERG Courtney had called and asked for some of us to do another intervention, saying that she felt Kurt was out of control. I was at Atlantic Records and living in New York at the time, so I flew to Seattle with Janet. She found some guy, a big Paul Bunyan kind of guy with a beard, and I think Silva came up and I forget who else was there. Kurt’s thing was “Courtney is more fucked up than I am. She should go into rehab, too.” “That’s not a great excuse for you being fucked up. You can’t solve these problems with the way you’re fucked up.” You know, a regular intervention-type thing.
I wanted to get back to L.A. because I have two kids there and had been away from them. Maybe I should have taken a later plane—I could have had a personal conversation with Kurt. When I did get home, I talked to him on the phone and he was kind of depressed. I put my daughter on the phone—Kurt liked kids a lot—and they talked for a minute. And that was the last I ever spoke to him. I don’t know what we could have done, if anything, that would have changed his decision to kill himself, but I’ll never stop wondering.
JANET BILLIG The last intervention was bad. It just went on for hours and hours and hours. It was inside, and then it was outside, at the Lake Washington Boulevard house. Everyone said their piece. I can’t remember
everyone who was there—Silva and Danny and Rosemary, and I think Dylan, Cali DeWitt. We were trying to get them both into rehab. Courtney went to rehab, and Kurt went, too.
JENNIFER FINCH I saw Kurt at Exodus. Just getting him in there and visiting him. He was very disturbed. Very upset. By the way, he never jumped over a fence. Exodus has a no-locked-door policy. You can leave. He chose to leave, and Courtney did her best to try to get someone to find him, cut off all his credit cards.
MARCO COLLINS In ’98, I ended up going to rehab at Exodus, the same place in Los Angeles that Kurt went to. There was a little courtyard there where people go out to smoke, where he jumped over the wall to escape. It was a horrible situation, but it’s somewhat humorous that Kurt jumped the fuckin’ wall instead of just walking around to the exit. The counselors there laughed about it well after the fact. They were like, “All he had to do is walk around to the side door to leave. We’re not jail.” It was very punk rock of him to escape rehab.
MARK ARM It seemed like something intense was happening in the couple weeks before Kurt’s death. Bob Whittaker was hanging out with Krist Novoselic an awful lot, and they would go on these hikes up at Tiger Mountain and they would have these conversations, and then Bob would relay the gist of things to me. He was like, “Maybe you should go talk to Kurt.”
And then we went on tour with Pearl Jam. Went from that Nirvana tour, where it didn’t seem like people trusted each other and no one was having a good time, to this Pearl Jam tour where the band had circled their wagons and was trying to take care of each other and trying to keep levelheaded about things. The atmosphere was completely different than the Nirvana tour. They went out of their way to hire good people.
CHRIS CORNELL I think Pearl Jam was the band that set the perfect example. Their big video, “Jeremy,” propelled them into becoming TV stars and one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, so they stopped making videos, which was proof positive that that wasn’t where they wanted to be. And that made a lot of sense to me.