by Everett True
NIRVANA
NIRVANA THE BIOGRAPHY
EVERETT TRUE
Copyright © 2006 Omnibus Press
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First Da Capo Press edition 2007
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ISBN-13 978-0-306-81554-6
ISBN-10 0-306-81554-0
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Charlotte and Isaac
INTRODUCTION
Have you noticed how the rock establishment all wear Ramones T-shirts now?
From Eddie Vedder to Jessica Simpson to the Chili Peppers, all the way through the Baby Gap generation, they wear the mark of a dead band like a badge of approval, now it’s acknowledged the Ramones accepted their status as Rock Outsiders with true stoicism: like they’re hoping that wearing the T might somehow help some of the Ramones’ natural flair for music transfer across. Fat chance. If you don’t know now, you never will.
None of them wears a Nirvana T-shirt. Not one.
Leave that to the kids – the eight-year-olds who weren’t even alive while Kurt Cobain was around: the 12-year-olds desperate for peer approval and fed up with the blandishments of the mainstream media: the 15-year-old Goths lounging round city centres, studiously bored, frightened of the encroaching adult world. They understand how it feels to be unloved, confused, misunderstood, betrayed by those in positions of authority who only ever claim to be helping you. The kids understand.
Stories need to begin somewhere.
Mine is a jumble, a confusion of nightclubs and pranks that turned out wrong; names and faces that went in one eye and straight out the other; nights that began drunk and ended in amnesia; crawling around airports on my hands and knees; punching walls with bare knuckles; shaved heads on rooftops underneath a red moon; laughter and screaming and – caught up right in the centre of it all – music; loud and plentiful and spontaneous and unpolished and beautiful and thrilling. I keep reminding myself. This is a book on Nirvana. Not Kurt Cobain. The gossip stories, the conspiracy theories have all been laid out in detail and by folk far more qualified to talk about these matters than me – folk with a vested interest in history and shifting units and keeping the myth alive. It was the butler. Every Agatha Christie fan knows that. The butler did it. If not him, then the nanny was responsible. Easy access, you see. The drugs took their toll. It was hereditary. Must’ve been the nanny. Maybe the wife’s responsible. Words get added on top of words until all semblance of reality is gone, smothered under cynical rewrites and well-meaning anecdotes from the past.
“. . . the Melvins were going on tour and so Kurt invited me down. He’s like, ‘Hey, they gave us these apartments to live in, come down any time you want, come down for the weekend, Shelli is down here with Krist.’ They kept calling and saying, ‘When are you coming, when are you coming?’ Finally, one weekend I decided to go down. We planned to meet up at this Butthole Surfers/ L7 show at the Hollywood Palladium, and from there we would go to the apartments. We flew in, rented a car, got lost and ended up at the club. We got there really late. We found Kurt, and Krist was super drunk. He either got a DUI [driving under the influence of alcohol] that night or almost ran someone over in the parking lot. Then I remember Courtney – someone who I had heard about and read about for years via other people I knew who knew her or were married to her. She was around . . .”
This is a book about Nirvana. I have to keep reminding myself. Nirvana. Schoolyard friends Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic formed the band in Aberdeen, Washington during the mid-Eighties through a mixture of boredom and a love for music. There wasn’t much else going on. Home life sucked; nothing to do but watch TV – Saturday Night Live, The Monkees , late night sci-fi films. The logging industry that had helped spawn their home town had long moved elsewhere in its search for cheap labour. Life was a succession of dead-end jobs, cleaning up hotel rooms and waiting on tables. Punk rock beckoned – punk rock and Olympia, Washington. Form a band. Why not? If it feels good, do it.
“Living in Olympia when I was 20 years old, I lived in a town where every band either had no bass-player or else it was keyboards and a singer, or someone singing along to a recorded tape or with just a guitar player. All we heard from the rest of the world was, ‘You’re not legitimate, that’s not real rock’n’roll,’ particularly from the big city next door, Seattle. They would laugh at us like, ‘You can’t play your instruments, you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s not rock’n’roll.’ In the days of hardcore, it’d become so that if you weren’t Black Flag, or some derivative of Black Flag, people would laugh at you for claiming to be punk rock. Today, kids live in a world where duos in particular are the thing like The White Stripes and Lightning Bolt – both big and small, duos or laptop artists like RJD2 are the norm in the post-Pitchfork world. We led the fight that made this possible. I laughed at the old people when I was 20 who said they’d paved the way for us and I can’t really expect the 20-year-olds now to understand that Godheadsilo made it possible for most of these bands today, or Beat Happening or Mecca Normal. They suffered all the degradation, the hard work that never paid off, the years of ridicule, so that other bands could . . .”
Nirvana went through several line-up and name changes, losing and gaining drummers, moving cities as circumstances dictated – before rubbing up on the wrong side of celebrity culture. They had a naïve belief in the power of spontaneity. They released three albums during their lifetime and momentarily changed a few million people’s worlds. They appeared on MTV a lot, and helped prop up and reinvent a decaying patriarchal music industry they professed to despise, much as the punk rockers had done two decades before. Reading Festival, the headline slot, was memorable. There was a benefit for Bosnian rape victims at the Cow Palace in San Francisco that stood out. Several small tours playing the clubs of the US and Britain and Europe helped hone their destructive tendencies. Kurt and Krist and Dave. Kurdt and Chris and Chad. Pat and Lori, and Earnie Bailey the ever-smiling guitar technician, and Alex MacLeod the acerbic Scots tour manager, and Craig and Monte and Anton and Nils, and Susie and Charles and Jackie and John and Janet and Danny, and Jon and Bruce from Sub Pop records . . . a lot of names, sure, though probably not as many as most large corporations shifting millions of units around the world. Nirvana: what a great live band!
“We started kind of raging and destroying our gear a lot, but we didn’t do that right off the bat. It was probably about the third show. I didn’t do it on purpose. I just joined in with what was already going on. But it was fun. It wasn’t like we said, ‘OK Krist, you jump really high and throw your bass in the air and have it knock you out; and Kurt, you get down on the floor and do the worm.’ It was that we were so sick and ti
red of the big rock – all the arena rock and special effects and all that that entailed wasn’t what we were about.”
Stories need to start somewhere, but of course they never usually do.
This is a book about Nirvana. Nirvana were a band who understand the primary rule of rock’n’roll: that spontaneity is at the heart of all great rock music, that you need to be able to react instantly to circumstance and context, that the idiot boards and sound-bites television saddled us with lead to a deadening of the senses. Art constantly changes. That’s why it’s art. It’s not there to be documented and pored over in stuffy galleries and libraries. Except everyone needs a vocation. Everyone needs a little history so they can understand their own situation better. And someone sure deserves a royalty settlement for the design on all those T-shirts . . . !
“I think he suspected her of cheating on him with Evan Dando and Billy Corgan. Was she? I think so. I mean, define cheating. Did they get fucked up and make out one night? That counts to a husband who’s wondering. Was it a real affair? No, probably not. The one intense moment, and we’re jumping ahead here, was when he called me from Italy, and I was in London with Courtney. We were late to see him. We were three weeks late. He was really serious and calm and like, ‘I know that you don’t get in the middle of our stuff and I know you don’t take sides, but can I ask you something as your friend?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Is she cheating on me?’ It was serious, no nonsense. I remember thinking, ‘I think that she is,’ but I didn’t say that. I didn’t know for sure and what if I had said, ‘I think, maybe?’ I don’t think I could have saved him from anything if I did say yes.
“We had been putting off going to Europe. We came down to LA for a couple of days because she had to do something. She immediately got two bungalows at the chateau – one for me and Frances, and one for her. She rented a car for me the second day. After what felt like a couple of weeks, I stopped asking when we were leaving every day. She kept putting it off and I was like, ‘Well, tell me when you want to go.’ I don’t remember how long we were there, but I remember he was calling, going, ‘Are you coming or what?’ I’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m coming. When Courtney’s ready to come, I’m coming.’ I don’t remember how long we were there, but I do know that I saw the hotel bill when we left, and it was for $37,000.”
I have to keep reminding myself. This is a book about Nirvana.
I slip and there’s sweat pouring down my shirt, legs kicking at the side of my face as another fan clambers up on stage to leap off pursued by five angry security men, sunlight blowing through eyes and temples that still hurt way too much from the night before, body a welter of cuts and bruises. What do you understand from your own brief lifespan? Did you touch others? Affect those around you? How? Why? Was it the music, the lifestyle, the projected myth that other people who never even knew or met you decide to place around a few random actions and interactions? Those in charge can never hope to understand Nirvana: most of us aren’t winners, don’t end up exploiting the rest for all they’re worth. Most of us struggle to get by, confused by what we perceive to be out there, life a series of disappointments and putdowns. Is it that difficult to understand Nirvana’s appeal? They captured the zeitgeist: the disaffection of their generation. And because Kurt killed himself, they remain true to that spirit, consequently resonating with all alienated teenagers. Kurt Cobain never got past the stage of being an angry, betrayed teenager.
“Die young, leave a good-looking corpse,” ran the conventional wisdom as I grew up. Kurt Cobain left one of the best-looking corpses around.
“I was a junkie for 10 years. Heroin makes you forget about everything else going on in the world. It makes you forget about the fact your band isn’t getting as much attention as another band, or that you have to go to work throwing fish around Pike Place Market. It’s pure comfort. It’s fucking great. And then later on, it turns on you. And yes, you steal your friend’s Sub Pop 45 collection and take old ladies’ purses and steal from your places of employment. You sell your own stuff first, of course: you don’t jump right into criminal activity. And we lost a lot of great friends and a lot of great musicians to it. I got lucky: I lived. And I stopped, eventually. The appeal is weird, and the danger involved is strange too, because it’s not like we don’t know what’s going to happen, but when you start, you don’t think it’s going to affect you. We’re such pompous egotistical assholes. We think it won’t happen to us.”
This is a book about Nirvana. Punk rock. It’s a book about the betrayal of Olympia, and how – just when you’re beginning to think there is light at the end of the tunnel, that it may just be possible to help change the world for the better, so that the ones with quieter voices get a chance to be heard – the world up and whacks you in the face. The corporations win. So ignore them. Don’t get involved. Step outside the mainstream, the conventional day-to-day and create your own communities, your own alternatives that don’t need or seek approval from the adults, the outside world. The saddest thing about the Ramones was the way the group never felt validated until they’d been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. After two decades of having their vision and sound and career thwarted, the Ramones felt vindicated because the selfsame bunch of assholes responsible deigned to recognise their talent long after it ceased to matter. The saddest thing about Nirvana was that the industry wholeheartedly embraced them even while making snide jokes and innuendo behind their back: Kurt Cobain wanted to view himself as an outsider, but how outside can you be when you’re selling eight million records?
“Kurt had one of those voices that could sing the telephone book and make it sound real and convincing. Nirvana frustrated me so much once they got famous: how could that band make as many mistakes as they made? Once they got a little bit of success, it was like, ‘Oh my God, you’re doing everything wrong!’ I never liked the production on Nevermind , it sounded like Eighties big rock. I don’t like Grohl’s drumming at all. He’s a hard-hitting, pounding drummer. I like things with more finesse. I liked Chad’s drumming for Nirvana, a little sloppier and a little looser. It swung more.”
This is a book about Nirvana. Forget melodies or virtuosity or image or marketing or any of that textbook stuff. It’s important, but anyone can do that. That’s just research. If you can’t react to the situation you find yourself in – whether it be by leaping on to the back of a bouncer who’s beating the shit out of one of your fans, stopping a song entirely because the crowd is singing along, or messing up the intro to The Hit Song so completely it’s unrecognisable – then you probably shouldn’t be on stage at all. Play to yourself and your mum in the living room, spend years honing your craft in a recording studio with soft lights and wood panelling, but don’t pretend to be a live rock band. It’s the thin line that separates the mediocre from the great, The Vines from The White Stripes, Coldplay from Oasis, grunge catwalk chic (Offspring, Muse, Alice In Chains) from Nirvana. CDs and videos mislead: they can never hope to recapture the feeling you get when you experience something live, blood pounding in your temples, hair a matted, sticky mess. They are only documents, fading snapshots of a time that is already fast disappearing from memory, preserved only in celluloid and in digital sound and Behind The Music specials . . .
“We didn’t have contracts. The standard etiquette was handshake deal, but over and above that, we did not have the money to hire an attorney. I reflect back on Nirvana’s signing and sometimes it seems divinely orchestrated to me. For one thing, I wasn’t at my house when Krist showed up that night. I was at my neighbour’s, and for some reason I’d decided, ‘I need to step out of the house.’ And the moment I stepped outside, Krist walked up. If I had stepped out of the house a minute later I would have missed him, and he would have woken up sober the next day and probably not threatened to beat me up over the contract. Little things add up to big things. But he demanded a contract and he was intimidating. He was drunk and big and very aggressive. So I called up Jon and said, ‘You’ve got to ge
t this guy signed, cos he is pissed. This is something that has to happen.’ Krist was in the room when I was talking to him, ‘Get the contract. This guy is gonna kick my ass, OK?’ So he went to the library and Xeroxed a contract out of some book, and used some whiteout and filled in some names. It was a 10-cent contract with no lawyer. When they signed it in the office, I remember thinking, ‘This could be a significant moment.’ It was the first time Sub Pop had signed a group.”
Once they’d shed their temporary fourth member, Nirvana shows were raucous, genius, a jumble of blurred emotions and shattered strings – Chad Channing pounding his way through another floor tom like he was Dale Crover, Krist perpetually drunk and wreaking havoc, Kurt inviting wasted friends up on stage to sing while he sat himself down behind the drum kit and proceeded to hammer the audience’s objections into silence. Encores got refused, got played out with no strings or guitars because every instrument in the place had been trashed, got spun out into painful abstractions of sound. Nirvana on record were the least of anyone’s worries . . . since when did such a fun live band become massive?
“Oh, there was always a food fight. It was inevitable. These guys were like children. There was egg throwing, food fighting, putting CDs in the microwave, it was just ridiculous. After we got thrown out the Nevermind record release party we all went over to Susie’s house and dressed the Nirvana guys up in dresses and put make-up on them and danced around the house and I think that was the night that Kurt was slingshot-ing eggs off of Susie’s porch at the neighbours’ cars. Kurt Bloch made a huge mountain of CDs in the living room and people started running at them. There was a bottle of pain medication on top of the refrigerator, and Kurt and I saw it and were like, ‘Oh! Those look good!’ So we took the rest of the bottle, and he and I decided it would be fun to jump from the bedroom window on to the roof of the garage next door. I remember sitting in that window just laughing and laughing, and then Susie or somebody wouldn’t let us jump and we were pissed, like really mad that somebody was not going to let us do something so ridiculous. The next day Dylan came over and picked up Kurt to go shoot guns. They used to buy big hunks of meat at the store, big hams, and go out in the woods and . . .”