Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  I went to the park to smoke some pot, and there were these kids who were definitely sightseeing. They’re like, “Do you know where he lives?” Well, he doesn’t live there anymore. I knew the area pretty well, so I said, “Yeah, you know, I’ll show you.”

  You could see their house on the other side of this hedge, and their windows were open, and the kids are talking really loud, just like tourists, and I said, “Have some respect, there’s a widow and child in there.” After a few moments, a security guy came through the hedge and said, “Hey, you guys need to keep it down. We’re not asking you to leave or anything, but out of respect for the family, you really should keep it quiet.”

  A few minutes later, Courtney and Kurt’s mom come out. And this was weird—they both struck me as if they were on drugs. Kurt’s mom in particular looked really—the word I would use is beatific. She seemed very peaceful and okay with everything. She rarely talked.

  I came to realize Courtney was just a media whore. Even though she’d just lost her husband to a violent suicide, she liked the fact that there were people coming to see her. She had some stuff, a sweater and a pair of rolled-up socks. Unlike the mother, she looked like she had been crying, she looked distraught. Courtney basically said, “Hey, I’ve got some stuff of Kurt’s, and I guess I won’t need it anymore, so if you guys want it you can have it.” In retrospect, I should’ve grabbed the sweater. The guy next to me did, and at that point, I’m thinking, Well, I really don’t want the socks. It just seemed disrespectful that she was giving away his clothes. You know, if you had a guitar pick of his, that would be nice—that would seem more appropriate. But, no, I don’t want a pair of rolled-up socks that was in his sock drawer when he blew his head off.

  Then Courtney sat down next to a tree with the mother, and the kids sat in a ring. Courtney was saying things like, “You know, you guys really need to love each other and just appreciate the people in your lives.” What I eventually concluded was that she wanted a huge outpouring of kids in that park, that she wanted some kind of “don’t forget Kurt” movement to spring up around their house, and she was chumming the waters, basically: “Oh, yeah, if you go there at night, Courtney comes out and gives you some of his stuff.” “Really? Wow! Let’s get 100 of our friends and go there and chant Kurt’s name and hold candles and talk about how great and beautiful Courtney is.”

  I mean, it was twisted. I felt like an alien visitor. It was all horribly wrong.

  PATTY SCHEMEL Courtney has a reputation of not being a nice person. It depends on the situation, though. She’s completely self-absorbed. And all that anger that she has is just one big cover-up, because, really, she’s just kind of a scared person. I was not threatening to her. I’m not interested in her husband—I’m gay. I’m a drummer. I’m not going to wear the same dress she’s wearing. We came from the same place musically. That’s why we got along.

  ERIC ERLANDSON In our Western society, Courtney’s known and she’s an archetype—it’s like she’s this destroyer woman, kind of like a Medusa type. People tend to not like that type of woman, not realizing that we all have that inside us, and the more you hate it on the outside, the more you activate it inside. Deep down inside, she’s just a person with a soul, with her own karma, with her own life and her own experiences, and we don’t understand what that is and where she came from. You watch Behind the Music and think, Oh, now I know her. But you don’t know shit.

  GRANT ALDEN One of the things I said when I had been asked about the manner of Kurt’s death is that I knew the coroner, Nik Hartshorne, and Nik knew me, and Nik knew I had a kind of bully pulpit at my disposal. We never talked about it, and Nik’s been dead a long time now, but I absolutely believe that if there had been something wrong with the way Kurt died, Nik would have come to me. By “something wrong” I mean: Did Courtney kill him? Did he really commit suicide? All that bullshit. No. If there had been any irregularities, I am morally convinced that Nik would have raised total hell.

  ERIC ERLANDSON A lot of people I know, who I wouldn’t expect to say this, ask me, “Did Courtney kill Kurt?” They actually ask me that, because they’ve watched the movie Kurt & Courtney. I’m like, “Wow, I thought I knew you, but since you just asked me that question, I don’t really know you anymore.” I presume that people would see beyond this problematic documentary. I was in the proximity of Courtney in L.A. at the time, so I don’t think she killed him or had him killed. It’s pretty clear what really happened.

  Also, everybody thinks that Kurt wrote our album Live Through This. I treat that like a conspiracy theory, too. I was there for most of the writing of that album, and so I just laugh when people say that. Though Courtney didn’t help matters by dragging him in the studio and making him mumble over a couple songs.

  PATTY SCHEMEL Right after Kurt died, I went into rehab for the first time and tried to sort everything out. When I got out, Hole’s bassist, Kristen Pfaff, calls me up and says, “I’m going back to Minneapolis.” We would trade records all the time and she was like, “I have your Live Skull record, do you want to come over?” I remember saying, “I can’t make it.” I didn’t want to go over there because I was too worried that I might end up getting high. Kristen was using when I was using, but we would try to keep it secret from each other. So I sent my friend to go over and grab my stuff and give Kristen her stuff.

  Then I got a phone call that Kristen had OD’d and died, and that was crazy. Crazy. I ended up staying clean for a while, but it didn’t last very long.

  ERIC ERLANDSON Our album had come out the week after Kurt’s death. But Courtney was not in any shape to do anything, so everything was kind of crazy for a couple months. Just as things were starting to mellow out a little bit, Kristen died and there was that tailspin again. With Kurt it was like, Fuck the album, fuck the band, it’s over, it doesn’t matter. But when Kristen died, it spurred a feeling of, We have to get out of here and go on the road and support this album. The album was so connected to the whole situation, with the lyrics and when it came out and the fact it was called Live Through This.

  PATTY SCHEMEL Through Billy Corgan we found Melissa Auf der Maur to play bass, and she stepped into this really crazy, toxic, dysfunctional band. On that tour, Courtney would unravel here and there. There was one moment where somebody threw some shotgun shells onstage in Philadelphia or somewhere. We just stopped playing the show. It hurt me bad, but I couldn’t even fathom the beginnings of how it felt for Courtney.

  COURTNEY LOVE I’ll tell you this, if you go and you watch a Hole show—and this happens to this day—after we get offstage, there’s this little contingent of boys. They’re wearing fuzzy little sweaters and somebody at their school has told them that they look like Kurt, and they stand there and they stare at me. I don’t know what they want. They don’t want to fuck me. But it is one of the strangest phenomena you’ll ever see. They’re like wounded children and they just want a hug or something. I don’t understand the cult of that, and I’ve asked my guitarist Micko, because he’s English and he grew up with the NME, “What is it about Kurt that you fucking think is so great?”

  “ ’Cause he’s just fuckin’ really cool, man.”

  I’m like, “What, because he killed himself? That’s cool? I have a daughter who’s fucking never known her father and you think that’s cool?”

  But there’s a part of rock journalism, like possibly yourself, that thinks that’s really cool. In fact, the NME had Kurt on the cover very recently, with fucking free color-poster pullouts of dead rock stars.

  Well, it’s not fuckin’ cool. It is a cult of death.

  KEVIN MARTIN Our album came out in July ’93, and it exploded that summer. We first met Madonna at a dinner in New York in March of ’94. We went to Sfuzzi, an Italian place by her apartment on Central Park West. She was 30 minutes late. All she talked about was sex.

  The rest of the band was there, but she just talked to me the whole time. She goes, “Are you a good dancer?” She was sitting right next to m
e. “You can tell a lot about how somebody fucks by the way they dance.”

  I’ll never forget her saying that. She was very much a provocateur.

  SCOTT MERCADO It was weird because she was actually kinda quiet. But then Kevin was talking, and he tends to dominate the conversation. And one point, he poked fun at her for a brief second—I wish I could remember what it was about—and I remember her smiling and saying, “Don’t quit your day job,” in reference, of course, to the fact that she owned the record label.

  KEVIN MARTIN Afterwards, she invited us back to her apartment. We all went. Her place was fucking incredible: Degas, Chagalls, Monets, Picassos—you name it, it was all there, hanging on the wall. She had a Steinway in the main living room. It was immaculate.

  SCOTT MERCADO I was so naive and I’d never seen a bidet before, so I said, “What’s this for?” And at the top of her lungs, Madonna goes, “IT’S A PUSSY WASH!”

  BARDI MARTIN The thing that struck me the most was she had a really tiny painting on one of her walls by Dalí, maybe six by eight inches. I just remember spending quite a bit of time just looking at it, and it was beautiful.

  KEVIN MARTIN At the end, she said, “Okay, I’ll see you guys tomorrow. And you, stay”—or “Why don’t you stick around for a little bit?” It could have been for a cup of coffee, but you know exactly what she was talking about.

  BARDI MARTIN I didn’t witness any of that. I was staring at that painting.

  SCOTT MERCADO There was a little bit of flirtation there, yeah. I mean, it was all in good fun; it wasn’t serious. She’s very personable that way.

  KEVIN MARTIN I said, “Look, you know I can’t stay. I’ve got a show at Madison Square Garden tomorrow”—we were opening for Rush—“that I’m nervous as hell about. I’m going to bed.” If I’d have been single I would’ve been like, “Sure,” but the girl I was dating at the time I was crazy about—and she happened to be Madonna and Freddy’s assistant at the label. She ended up becoming my wife. Did Madonna know about me and Renee then? Oh, yeah. Did Renee ever get wind of this? Yep.

  At the time, the other assistant who was there was looking at me like, What are you doing? It was very strange. It’s very Italian, like a “You don’t tell Tony Soprano no sort of thing.” What? I do.

  We saw Madonna again that July, after we had sold a million records, and they gave us our plaques. She was like, “Hi, how are you? What’s going on? Congratulations,” and then left. It seemed as though that person we had met was turned off and gone. It was like nothing had ever happened.

  KEVIN MARTIN The grunge label was a fuckin’ major hindrance to us. We were labeled “grunge lite.” They would say, “Grunge-lite band Candlebox.” We were lumped in with Bush, Live, Collective Soul. People confused us with Collective Soul all the time. I got divorced in ’02 and was dating Zoe, Jason Bonham’s sister, briefly. I went over to see her in London and hang out with her, and her brother is like, “I love your band.”

  I’m like, “Wow, cool. I can’t believe you know us.”

  “Yeah, man: Duh nuh nuh Nah nuh nuh Nah nuh Nah nuh NAH. ‘Yeah!’ ”

  I’m like, “That’s Collective Soul.”

  RUSTY WILLOUGHBY Flop played a show with Candlebox in Boise. We showed up at the club, and we’re in our little crap-ass van, and they had a bus. They were trying to be real nice to us, but we just thought they were jerks because they were in a bus. Who knows, they could’ve been nice people. But you’d see the lead singer of that band driving around town in his new red Porsche.

  KEVIN MARTIN I was so embarrassed to drive my fiancée’s Mercedes 190E in Seattle. That’s like a toy car. Anybody could afford it, but I was embarrassed to drive it. I thought that I wasn’t supposed to have a nice car in Seattle. Your mentality turns into that because you’re dealing with what people are writing about you in the press.

  Rolling Stone did an article on us, but they didn’t want to, so they fuckin’ bashed us. It was ’94, when we were touring with the Flaming Lips. The guy came out with us for two weeks. Then he just talked shit. During a show, Pete went to kick over his amps, and his guitar tech was tired of fuckin’ rebuilding them, so he put some pillows down behind them. The writer is like, “They’re so concerned about their gear they put pillows behind it.” That’s not us.

  BARDI MARTIN The drum tech had a cushion that he used to sit on waiting for Scotty; rather than sitting on the hard ground, he sat on a fuckin’ pillow or something. The writer had to have known it. He couldn’t have been that blind. Can’t you find enough shit to throw at this band without actually lying about it?

  He basically painted a picture of four undeserving dipshits on the road.

  GUY OSEARY Did I ever have discussions with the band about their reputation? Absolutely never. It didn’t matter. We were doing great! We did great, we made good fans, we had a good album, we had a good ride. First album sold three and a half million, which is great! That was done week by week by week by week, man.

  WAYNE COYNE (singer for Oklahoma City’s the Flaming Lips) Candlebox wasn’t just the nail in the coffin of grunge. To me, they arrived as the coffin of grunge music.

  We toured with them for three months at the end of 1994. At the beginning of that phase, they were playing to 4,000 or 5,000 people a night, and by the end, they were playing these giant arenas—hockey rinks, for the most part, that hold 10,000 people—and they’re selling them out a couple of nights in a row.

  I think we were invited because they thought we made the tour seem more authentic or more cool. And I’m not saying we were cool, or authentic. I think there’s an element of, Look, we’re Candlebox. You may think we’re shit, but we like the Flaming Lips, and doesn’t that make us seem cooler?

  We all were against it on sort of a practical principle level. We don’t like the group, so why would you want to spend three months playing with them? And then you think, Well, we could make some money, and we would be able to play to an audience that would never come to see us otherwise. And I think it worked out great for us. By the end of that tour, our song “She Don’t Use Jelly” was being played on the radio everywhere we went. Part of it probably was because we were playing with Candlebox. We would play “She Don’t Use Jelly,” and the audience that literally hated everything else that we did liked that one song.

  KEVIN MARTIN Touring with the Flaming Lips was inspirational. This is a band that blew us off the stage every fucking night. And look at ’em now. If you look at the story of the Flaming Lips, these were four buddies that just started writing really fucking eclectic, weird music with no real agenda. There’s no argument, there’s no fight, they just keep producing these brilliant fucking records. Candlebox, unfortunately, as good as the songs that we’ve written are, we’re just this fucking disjointed band.

  Pete and I argue so much, it’s ridiculous. And that’s because we weren’t friends when we started the band, so we didn’t have an understanding of each other’s characteristics. We’ve learned them over the years, but neither of us is really happy with the other person’s idiosyncracies. We’re like coworkers, exactly. That’s a great way to define what Candlebox is. Fortunately, we’re coworkers that can produce some really fucking great products.

  WAYNE COYNE We saw the clumsiness of their shows and their songs and their identity, and everything about it just seemed like, damn, this is too much, too soon. Candlebox really had nothing. They’re just like, We like grunge! We’re a big grunge band! I’m not putting it down simply because it’s popular; it just wasn’t our trip.

  The band would offer you cocaine virtually every time you would run into them backstage, like, We’re big rock stars, and we’re going to do some cocaine backstage. We were by no means straight edge, but we’re making $500 a night, they’re making $5 million. We’re not really rubbing noses with the same people here. And their road crew were guys who six months ago were touring with Mötley Crüe, and it was a very arena-rock mentality.

  KEVIN MARTIN When we asked Flaming Lips
to open for us, people maybe started to pay attention to what we were doing. That we weren’t having bands tour with us to sell tickets. We wanted bands to play with us that we appreciated.

  We were always very into being from Seattle, and because we were fortunate enough to have some success, we always wanted to take bands from Seattle on the road with us. We took Sweet Water; we took Green Apple for a few weeks; we took Seaweed for fuckin’ six weeks.

  SCOTT MERCADO The big three or four bands in Seattle were like, This is our club, you’re not invited. Like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam. I was still friends with some of them, but they would never take us on tour or anything like that. But at that point, it didn’t matter. We were getting offers from Metallica, Living Colour, Rush, so we didn’t need to go on tour with them or feel a need to share a stage with them.

  I was friends with Sean Kinney, and he told me, “I like your style, you’re a great drummer. I just don’t like your singer” or “I don’t like your music.” I admired Sean for saying that, as opposed to talking about us behind our backs. This was actually after we got the gig with Metallica, because Alice in Chains dropped out.

  SEAN KINNEY We were rehearsing at the Moore Theatre to get ready for Metallica. Layne was in a treatment place, and we’d been rehearsing ourselves. Nobody had talked to him—he’d been gone all that time. He just showed up, and there were bad circumstances. It just wasn’t happening. Lost a lot of trust in him. Lost some trust in each other for a while.