Nirvana

by Everett True

  Journalists would attempt to make something out of the fact that Kurt Cobain – like 99 per cent of his peers in small town America – saw some butt rock band at his first ever show; and even caught UK hard rock/metal outfit Judas Priest at the Tacoma Dome the same summer. Kurt also once owned an REO Speedwagon album. So what? Doesn’t mean he’d found his calling: just that he didn’t know where to look. It wasn’t until mid-’83 that Kurt discovered what he’d – unknowingly – been searching for.

  It was during that summer that Kurt Cobain discovered the Melvins – and through the Melvins, the world of punk rock. “I remember hanging out at Montesano, Washington’s Thriftway,” he wrote in his journal13, “when this short-haired employee box-boy who kinda looked like the guy in Air Supply handed me a flyer that read: ‘the Them festival, tomorrow night in the parking lot behind Thriftway. Free, live rock music’.” The employee in question was Melvins’ singer Buzz Osborne, an older pupil at Montesano High. Melvins had formed the year before14, playing the sped-up hardcore that was in fashion among US bands such as Dead Kennedys and the Minutemen.15

  “I showed up with stoner friends in a van . . .” Kurt continued. “They played faster than I had ever imagined music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden records could provide. This was what I had been looking for. Ah, punk rock.”

  Nirvana historians conflict over what happened next: in one account, it’s claimed that Buzz passed along copies of over-feted US rock magazine Creem to Kurt. In others, Kurt claims to have had a subscription to Creem at the age of 12, following the exploits of The Sex Pistols as they disintegrated on their calamitous tour of the US in January 1978. Excited, he took out a copy of the only ‘punk’ record on offer at Aberdeen’s library, The Clash’s sprawling, mediocre triple album set Sandinista.

  “I blame that record for not allowing me to get into punk rock faster than I wanted to,” he told me later. “When I got that, I said, ‘If this is punk rock I don’t want to have anything to do with it.’ ”

  Whatever the truth, there’s no denying that the Melvins – Buzz Osborne with his shock-headed afro; hard-pounding drummer and Neil Young lookalike Dale Crover; and heavy drinking bassist Matt Lukin – were to change Kurt’s life irretrievably. Buzz gave Kurt a mixtape of underground US punk bands, mostly Californian hardcore like Flipper, MDC16 and Black Flag.

  The first were a seminal dissonant psychedelic punk band from San Francisco, closer to conceptual art than rock music. The influence of their menacing debut single, ‘Love Canal’/‘Ha Ha Ha’ (1981), can clearly be heard in the Melvins – slowing down the thrash and becoming even stranger. The second were more notable for their fierce polemic – the anti-police ‘I Remember’ and anti-capitalism ‘Corporate Death Burger’ – than their music. The testosterone-charged Black Flag, meanwhile, took the raw directness of the Ramones, merged it with rhythmic changes and topped it off with lyrics that dwelt harshly on alienation, loneliness and paranoia. 1981’s Damaged is a benchmark of US punk rock – the aggression in its grooves frequently spilled over into fist-fights at live shows.

  Popular legend has it that the first song on Buzz’s tape was Black Flag’s apocryphal ‘Damaged II’, with singer Henry Rollins screaming, “I’m confused/ I’m confused/ Don’t want to be confused.” 17

  “With Melvins, context was everything,” Dawn Anderson, former editor of Seattle fanzine Backlash explains. “The Eighties were very anti-rock, and a lot of us thought it was great that these guys were willing to completely lose their heads and rock out without the slightest embarrassment. At their early shows there would always be some whiney hipster standing next to me saying, ‘I can’t tell if they’re kidding or not!’ They totally blew those people a new asshole.

  “I partied with them a time or two,” she continues. “I bonded with Buzz over pro-wrestling. I was a suburban heavy metal gal, and never met too many people I could talk about things like that with. I remember a party where Matt Lukin almost blew up my house. ‘Oh, you mean this is real dynamite? Sorry.’ Later, he spilled orange juice, got down on all fours and licked it off my rug. He’d charm every girl who walked in the room by saying, ‘Is that your head or did someone crap on your shoulders?’ I thought he was great.”

  “ Melvins were kids from Aberdeen who’d come up to the hardcore shows in town [Seattle],” explains Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner. “They stood out because we didn’t see them anywhere else but they looked like anybody: short hair, Converse, Vans. Matt had dyed hair. The top dog hardcore band was The Accused, but the Melvins were faster and tighter. Then everyone started reaching for other music . . . and they reached further. Black Flag influenced them to do that. Black Flag was just huge.”

  Black Flag slowed their music down – notably on 1984’s My War – so Melvins slowed their music down. But Melvins took it to extremes: an unbelievably dense, sludgy grind, that on 1987’s thunderous Gluey Porch Treatments album helped inspire a new musical form, grunge.

  The greatest pop music is throwaway. There to be listened to one moment and discarded the next. I can understand musicians not liking to be told this, but critics have for too long indulged them on this point. Many bands have only one idea, and most not even that. The rest of their career is then spent in a hopeless quest to recapture the initial buzz. Why else do so many musicians turn to excess drink and drugs after a few years in? It’s because they have no way of feeling otherwise.

  I love Melvins because they are loud, basic and primal. That’s it. They’ve had their one idea and they’re not budging from it. They want to rock, and they do just that, with no consideration for taste or sales or carving out a place in history. It’s the real grunge. Together, the Melvins have a knack of slowing time down so each note seems to last an eternity. This is indubitably a good thing, if only because life is too short.

  Melvins received attention because Nirvana were fans, but even without their patronage they would’ve attained cult status. Bands as focused as that always do. Even their fiercest enemies have to admire their singularity of purpose. Through their inexorable grind, the Melvins provided a sense of community to Aberdeen friends who felt outside of their peers. Everyone needs to feel special and if that means supporting a band few others understand, all the better.

  In the Eighties, while Lukin was still in the band, Melvins scared and confused the hardcore punks by playing even heavier chord sequences than Flipper. Not in a guitar store show-off way, more like James Brown or Ted Nugent where everybody played the same thing: the music was one huge power riff. Dale Crover hit the drums so hard he would wear gardening gloves, underwear and nothing else on stage.

  “They were like nothing you’d seen before,” explains Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters. “They were great performers – Matt gave it his all, Buzz was totally rocking, while Dale would sit behind his cobbled-together drum kit that looked like it was tied together with baling wire. They wore furry-collared Levi’s vests. Somehow I got a vibe on them. When Matt joined Mudhoney, I was shitting my pants. Mark and Steve were in Green River and I’m like, ‘Eh, whatever,’ but I was like: ‘I’m going to be in a band with the guy from the Melvins!’ [Green River were Mark Arm and Steve Turner’s pre-Mudhoney Seattle band, notable for containing a couple of future members of Pearl Jam, releasing the first Northwestern record on Sub Pop records, the Dry As A Bone EP, and for being the proto-grunge group of the Eighties.]

  “The first practice we had with Matt was killer,” Peters continues. “I was 20 and still not old enough to buy beer. Matt comes down with a buddy of his and we’re like, ‘Let’s go to the store and buy some beer before practice.’ Matt’s like, ‘Sounds good,’ grabs a half case of beer and is like, ‘Got mine!’ I was like, ‘Well, I’m not of age, but I’ll take one of those!’”

  In America, you’re deemed old enough to drive a car and fight for your country long before you’re allowed to down an alcoholic beverage in public. Fake IDs are a way of life: this restriction directly affects rock shows – m
ost small gigs take place in bars where under-21s are not allowed. Hence the rise of all-ages shows championed by Fugazi and Beat Happening.

  “The first time I saw Melvins was amazing,” says Tom Hazelmyer, boss of Amphetamine Reptile records. The Minneapolis label was home to a circus of the insane during the Nineties, where singers would stab themselves in the ass with large crucifixes while singing about salvation and serial killing, where it was as important to be a showman as to rock out. Best-known bands on AmRep included Helmet18, Cows19 and the libidinous Nashville Pussy.

  “It was in Seattle ’84,” Haze continues. “Some friends from back home were playing – Hüsker Dü.20 All of a sudden the opening band starts up, the Melvins. What the fuck! They were doing the same stuff as now but hardcore speed. It was insane.”

  Melvins played a major role in Nirvana’s career. You can trace their influence through to latter-day Nirvana improvisational encores such as ‘Endless, Nameless’, where the trio would take a riff and build upon it for as long as it took. Most importantly, it was via the Melvins that Kurt met his future bassist, lanky Aberdeen resident Krist Novoselic.

  “One of the first times I met Krist was at Bob Whittaker’s21 cabin on the Washington coast,” recalls Seattle photographer Charles Peterson. “We were having a bonfire on the beach and Krist drank a good portion of a bottle of whiskey. As the whiskey went down, a piece of clothing came off. By the end of the evening he was naked on the beach, running up and down. The rest of us were all bundled up. I was freezing. And he was like, ‘Whoa,’ running and singing.”

  How would you describe Krist?

  “Goofy,” responds Kelly Canary, former singer with Seattle all-girl chaos band Dickless. “Back then he was just the big, tall guy that fell on stuff. He was like the Chevy Chase of grunge.”

  Krist Anthony Novoselic was born in Compton, California on May 16, 1965, the first-born of Croatian immigrants Krist and Maria.

  Krist Novoselic senior first fled his childhood village of Veli Iz in 195522 in an attempt to escape Marshall Tito’s communist rule. The 17-year-old walked 74 miles north along the Adriatic coast with three other men. After four days they reached Trieste, Italy where they were thrown in jail for three months. He was later held in a refugee camp for six months before signing up to work on a tugboat on the River Rhine – reaching America six years later. After briefly living on the East Coast, he began fishing for tuna, mackerel, salmon and squid. Soon after, he moved to Gardena, CA where he got a job driving a truck delivering Sparklets drinking water. Maria came out to join him a year later.

  Two other children were born after Krist: Robert and their younger sister Diana. During their pre-teen years, the brothers felt no real affinity towards their peers and soon resorted to vandalism: “Robert and I were kind of big boys and we used to get into trouble,” Krist told Michael Azerrad. “Slash tyres, stuff like that. My dad would just have to whip us, because that’s all he knew how to do. We were scared of him. But it wasn’t like he was an abuser. It was action and reaction.”

  The move to Aberdeen in 1979 – necessitated by rising California property values and the attraction of ready work for Novoselic senior as a machinist in one of the town’s lumber mills – was not met with wholehearted approval by all the family. Aberdeen had a sizeable Croatian community, but compared with Gardena it seemed like an East European town to Krist: people were judgemental; the clothes were dated – flares compared to Krist and Robert’s straight-leg Levi’s. Aberdeen High School kids listened to the Top 40 but Krist preferred Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Devo.23 The Novoselic family moved into a house on Think Of Me Hill, so named because there had been a sign promoting ‘Think Of Me’ tobacco on the spot several decades earlier.

  The young Krist – six foot seven, gangly like Joey Ramone skipped a couple of generations – would have looked out of place in even the most liberal of cities. In Aberdeen he must’ve stood out like a ballad on a Black Flag record. Kurt recalled seeing him sabotaging Aberdeen High assemblies: he described him as a “really clever, funny, loudmouth person [that] everyone laughed at, even though he was smarter than them”.

  Krist grew depressed in the small, rainy, provincial surroundings of Aberdeen: “I couldn’t get along with those kids,” he complained. “They were assholes. They treated me really badly.”

  In June 1980, concerned for his state of mind, his parents sent Krist to live with relatives in Croatia, then still part of Yugoslavia. There, Krist became fluent in Croatian and even heard some punk rock – The Sex Pistols, Ramones, and local bands. Not that it made too much of an impression.

  “The slick, canned sounds of mainstream heavy metal didn’t appeal to me,” he wrote in his autobiography, 2004’s Of Grunge And Government, Let’s Fix This Broken Democracy. “Yugoslavia had a home-grown scene with good, diverse music. But when I returned to the US, I found that it was hard for punk to make its way to Aberdeen because of its geographic isolation.”

  Frustrated on his return by the stupidity of the Aberdeen kids who treated him like some sort of a freak, Krist became a heavy drinker and began to smoke marijuana. He wasn’t even known by his native name in Aberdeen – he spelt his name Chris in a forlorn attempt to fit in. He went back to the original spelling in 1992 in a show of solidarity with his native Croatia when Yugoslavia dissolved amid some of the most terrible and bloody fighting seen in Europe since World War II. Indeed, one can trace Krist’s present-day championing of voters’ rights and discriminated-against people to his parents’ homeland’s turbulent history.

  After several months of partying, Krist got a job at Taco Bell. He started saving, eventually having enough for a car, a guitar and a pair of stereo speakers. Alongside brother Robert, he began taking guitar lessons from Warren Mason24, but soon quit and retreated to his bedroom where he’d spend days picking out B.B. King riffs.

  Then he, too, met Buzz and Matt of the Melvins. There’s a great story in Azerrad’s Come As You Are about when Lukin first caught sight of Krist at the Taco Bell: “There was a big, tall, doofy guy back there,” Lukin recalled, “singing along to the Christmas carols they were playing on the Muzak.” Via the Melvins, Krist discovered punk bible/ fanzine Maximumrocknroll. Through its pages, he was introduced to the activism of politically charged hardcore bands like Minor Threat.

  “As a badge of my independence, I dressed differently from the status quo, and unlike some punks, I didn’t dress dangerously,” he explained in his autobiography. “I didn’t have a Mohawk or a studded leather jacket. I didn’t throw away my Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin records either.”

  It was around this time that Kurt first registered Krist – via Robert, who brought him round to the Novoselic house. Kurt asked what the noise was coming from upstairs: “Oh that’s my brother,” Robert replied. “He listens to punk rock.”

  Tell me the story about when you first heard about Nirvana.

  “When I lived in Seattle as a teenager during the Eighties, I went to every fucking show that happened,” begins Slim Moon, founder of Riot Grrrl label kill rock stars25 and ex-neighbour of Kurt Cobain. “Good or bad, that was my life. A friend would drive me to the shows, even if they were in Bellingham or Anacortes or Bremerton or Olympia or Tacoma or Ellensburg. Green River was the biggest band in town, but the Melvins were the one that the cool kids like us liked the best. In 1986, I became aware there was a much cooler music scene in Tacoma and Olympia. There was Girl Trouble [Tacoma’s answer to The Cramps26 – a stripped-back, blue-collar, garage rock band that used to hang out at a café shaped like a teapot], there was Beat Happening, there were a bunch of other bands . . .

  “Hardcore was taking over in Seattle,” he continues. “There were all these early grunge bands: people playing hard rock or glam or metal, influenced by a non-stop wave of punk from California and Texas. Every weekend there’d be four hardcore bands playing. The Seattle all-ages scene had tons of violent moshing and pit action. It became hard for me to find friends that were into music other tha
n hardcore. If you went to Olympia, there was tons of dancing and contact, but the contact was friendly. Instead of flying elbows and people getting bruises and cuts, it was bashing into each other and rolling around on the floor and having this great sense of community.

  “At a warehouse community space called GESCCO27, we started getting bands like the Melvins. Meanwhile, I started going to a lot of parties. The Melvins were such gods that if they were in the house, we were always aware of it. So I went to this party at the Dude Ranch with my friends Dylan Carlson and Kurt Flansberg and his girlfriend Tracy Marander, who lived in Tacoma. And there was Krist Novoselic. We knew Krist because he always drove the Melvins around. He was like their roadie. He had this zebra-striped VW van, so you always knew when the Melvins were there. There was always a crowd of these Aberdeen guys – these inbred, scary, loser, freako weirdos – who would go wherever the Melvins went.

  “Dylan and me were walking up the driveway having an animated conversation about Big Black28, when I see this guy walking towards us. I’d seen him before: he was one of the Melvins’ hangers-on and he always wore the same grey trench coat. He went, ‘I like Big Black,’ and kept going. He said it in a self-aware way, like he knew we thought he was just one of these losers that hangs out with the Melvins. He was trying to tell us, ‘I’m cooler than that, I’ve heard of Big Black.’

  “That was the very first thing that Kurt ever said to me.

  “The next memory I have of Kurt was at GESCCO. Melvins were playing and they needed an opening band. Buzz was like, ‘Can my project band29 play?’ We couldn’t figure out their name exactly from his phone conversation, so some of the flyers said Brown Cow and some said Brown Towel. There were ads on the TV where a woman would hold up a towel and go, ‘How can you tell if a brown towel is clean?’ But the name could also have been inspired by the ‘How now brown cow?’ playground chant. I’m not sure anybody knew – and they only played this one time. Buzz played guitar and Kurt was singing, but he wasn’t playing guitar. I think Dale was the drummer . . . it was just Buzz playing with one of those crazy Aberdeen guys.