by Everett True
Shortly after his graduation, Krist’s parents divorced. Around the same time, he had his jaw wired shut for six weeks to correct severe under-bite. Lukin recalled dropping by his house the day Krist had the surgery: “His head was totally swollen up,” he told Michael Azerrad, “like a fat oriental baby. It was like seeing the elephant man.”
“You fuckers,” Krist cried, having been woken from his anaesthetised slumber. By March 1985, Krist and Shelli were dating – he got laid off and gradually moved into Shelli’s apartment: no phone, no TV, and all adornments and furniture bought at thrift stores. By December they’d moved into a larger, more run-down house – briefly relocating to Phoenix, Arizona the following March in search of work – before settling on an apartment above a garage in Hoquiam, where they became vegetarians.
Meanwhile, Kurt got himself thrown out of the Reed residence after an incident where he forgot his key, and either smashed a window or kicked down their door to get in. Once again, he was homeless. On June 1, 1985, Kurt moved into an Aberdeen apartment with Jesse Reed where he continued to write songs (‘ Spam’, ‘The Class Of ’85’). The flat was tiny, enlivened by pink walls and a mutilated blow-up doll decorated with shaving foam swinging in the window, dirty plates stacked up in the sink, shaving cream fights, writing on the walls and stolen lawn furniture.
Later, Nirvana would revel in their earlier reputation as freaks.
“[Jesse and I] were branded Satan worshippers back home,” Kurt told me in 1990. “This girl came knocking on our door looking for a wallet and she goes, ‘You know what all the other kids told me in the neighbourhood? Don’t go in there, they worship the Devil.’ That’s why nobody ever bothered us in redneck country. We would neither confirm nor deny satanic affiliations.
“Maybe it was those desecrated cemetery pieces buried in our front yard,” the singer added – jokingly – in the same interview. “But you didn’t have to do anything to be considered extreme back there. Just take a lot of acid.”
Jesse and Kurt were asked to remove the doll by a local sheriff; a more serious brush with the law occurred the same summer after Kurt was caught graffiti-ing the SeaFirst bank with the words “ Ain’t go no how watchamacallit” with a red marker pen. He was fingerprinted, fined $180 and given a 30-day suspended sentence.
“Kurt was a completely creative persona – a true artist,” Krist wrote in his autobiography. “When I first met him, he had just got a job and found his own place. What a den of art/insanity that was. He tried to make his own lava lamp out of wax and vegetable oil (it didn’t work). He sketched very obscene Scooby Doo cartoons all over his apartment building hallways. He made wild sound montages from obscure records. He sculpted clay into scary spirit people writhing in agony. He played guitar, sang and wrote great tunes that were kind of off-kilter. Kurt held a sceptical perspective toward the world. He’d create video montages that were scathing testimonies about popular culture, compiled from hours and hours of watching TV.”
Kurt had two temporary part-time jobs: as a janitor at Aberdeen High where he dressed in brown overalls, and as a swimming instructor for kids at the local YMCA.7 The work didn’t last long, and neither did the apartment – after three months Jesse moved out to join the navy. Kurt stayed till late autumn. Then, unemployed and homeless, he convinced the Shillinger family to take him in. Dad Lamont was an English teacher at Aberdeen High, while son Steve was a heavy metal kid who liked to party hard, who’d noticed Kurt because he’d scrawled Motörhead8 on his folder. He moved in during the winter of 1985, and stayed on their sofa for the next eight months.
The Shillingers had six kids and were used to taking in strays. Usually, concerned parents would call to check up on their offspring: Wendy and Don didn’t. “Kurt kept his sleeping bag behind the couch,” Lamont Shillinger told one interviewer, “and was put into rotation on the family chores. I don’t believe that either his mother or stepfather attempted to make contact with us the entire time he was there.” Steve’s brother Eric played guitar, and Kurt jammed with him through the family stereo on Iron Maiden9 songs.
In December 1985, Kurt formed a band with Melvins’ drummer Dale Crover on bass and Greg Hokanson on drums called Fecal Matter. They played original material and, depending on which history you believe, they either did or didn’t play one show, supporting Melvins at a Moclips beach bar. Whatever. Hokanson didn’t last long, so it was Cobain and Crover, driven by Lukin in his blue Impala, who went down to Seattle to record a demo on Aunt Mari’s four-track TEAC deck.
With Crover behind the drums, the session lasted a couple of days. Early versions of ‘Spank Thru’ and ‘Downer’ were recorded, alongside ‘Sound Of Dentage’, ‘Laminated Effect’, ‘Bambi Slaughter’, ‘Class Of ’86’, ‘Blathers Log Dinstramental’ and several untitled songs – but not ‘Suicide Samurai’, as has been erroneously reported. “There was a song that was among his lyrics he never did record on that particular tape,” Aunt Mari remarked in the documentary Kurt & Courtney. “It was called ‘Seaside Suicide’ [sic] and it left me with an impression he had possibly tried suicide before.”
“The drums were strong and forceful,” Mari told Gillian G. Gaar, “and Kurt was playing some pretty good bass by then. The guitar riffs were fast and furious, with a powerful hook. The lyrical content was rebellious and angry. Mostly slams against society in general. Kurt didn’t like the social ladder in school. Kids thinking they were cool because they wore the ‘right’ clothes or were handsome or pretty, or had money.”
Copies were dubbed on to cassette, entitled Illiteracy Will Prevail. The cover featured a Cobain-drawn picture of flies buzzing round a pile of shit, there to illustrate a lyric from ‘Class Of ’86’, “We are all the same/ Just flies on a turd” . Fecal Matter split up shortly after, despite yet another incarnation featuring Osborne on bass and original Melvins’ drummer Mike Dillard.
Meanwhile, Kurt – bored with life in Aberdeen – stepped up his petty vandalism, fuelled by Bad Brains’ Rock For Light, and frequent acid trips.
“Hell,” I wrote back in Melody Maker in 1991, referring to a series of conversations I’d had with Kurt while we skipped out of commercial radio interviews in Philadelphia, “you even told me something of your past in Aberdeen, how you would get bored out your skull and go round and break into people’s homes, trash them, not steal anything, just trash them, graffiti the walls, break up the furniture, smash the adornments – anything for a thrill, the buzz. Sounded pure James Dean10 to me. You mentioned the buzz you get from the after-effects of your troublemaking, the exhilaration of being confronted by a truckload of angry officials.”
With Steve Shillinger in tow, Kurt changed a Pink Floyd mural to read Black Flag, and spray-painted many a back alley in Aberdeen. He’d brag to Steve how he was going to be in a band “bigger than U2 or R.E.M.”, and continued making silent Super-8 movies.11 Kurt loved the skewed, melancholic pop of Michael Stipe’s R.E.M., but like all punks scorned the self-righteous preening of U2 as being derisive bombast on a level with Bruce Springsteen. On May 18, 1986, after having been found wandering on top of an abandoned building, Cobain was charged with trespassing and being a minor in possession of alcohol: he was thrown in jail when it was discovered that he hadn’t paid the fine from his previous conviction. He stayed there for eight days, unable to raise the bail.
Kurt has said he first did heroin in the summer of ’86, after checking out the opiate Percodan: “It was really scary,” he told Azerrad. “I always wanted to do it – I always knew that I would.” Other versions of his story place his introduction to the drug at around 1990.12 Kurt was drawn to the drug partly because of its forbidden nature; also because it’s supposed to induce a euphoric high and he was on the lookout for new drugs to try; but mainly for its seedy glamour, its association with rock stars like Iggy Pop. He claimed he knew it was OK to take because it was in short supply in Aberdeen and hence it would be impossible to become hooked.
What kind of damage does heroin do to peo
ple?
James Burdyshaw [ex-Seattle grunge band, Cat Butt13]: “Oh my God . . . Well, there’s a line in a Jon Spencer14 song, where he says, ‘You look like a vampire’, talking about somebody close to him that has a really bad habit. That’s sort of what it’s like. It’s like you’ve been bit with a weird blood disease. It makes you a night creature, and taking heroin becomes your number one priority. It’s always in your mind, and no matter what you do or say or how you act, your goal is to get it and get on it and when you’re on it you don’t give a shit about anybody or anything, just being high and blazed out of your head.”
Have you done heroin?
“Yeah.”
Can you describe the feeling of being high?
“It’s not like doing a hallucinogenic where your mind does weird things and you start thinking about how your father beat you or how beautiful everybody is. It’s just this weird sort of numbing sensation, like if you overdose on about four or five painkillers. Imagine doing that in an IV. You get this warm feeling in your brain and your skin, and you get really loopy and lethargic. It’s a painkiller – it’s like morphine, only it’s street morphine.”
Heroin has got an incredibly bad rep – why do people take it in the first place?
“That’s part of it. The thrill of danger, the unknown . . . At first it was kind of scary, the whole concept of sticking a needle in your arm and injecting something liquid, but then, when you’re young and you’re fearless of drugs if you’re into them, you think, ‘Wow, this is a kick.’ You’re obsessed with the idea of doing the same chemicals as your heroes. Some addicts deny this, but that’s bullshit. When you’re young and stupid you totally want to follow your idols, and I think that listening to Lou Reed and John Lennon and the Stones and John Coltrane . . . the list goes on and on and on, Johnny Thunders, Sid Vicious, Ray Charles . . . it’s almost like a rite of passage, like if you don’t do this somehow you’re not a suffering musician.”
Why is it that Seattle has such a strong association with the drug?
“Before heroin became popular and a lot of people who ended up on Sub Pop records started taking it, the drugs of choice were MDMA and psychedelics and ecstasy. That’s what the kids were into, but the gnarly guys did heroin so everyone got interested in that. The kids who would never think about doing heroin in 1986 thought it was cool the following year. Friends influence friends. Kurt was one of the last people to use. Everybody else was doing it before him. He was a pot-smoking, drinking guy when I met him. The only reason why I think he fell in love with it so much was because of his background in Aberdeen. He needed the numbness. And if you fall in love with the numbness . . . you’re in trouble.”
Kurt’s drug usage increased his sense of paranoia and anger. He developed nervous tics: cracking his knuckles, scratching his face compulsively. He began to imagine that everyone he knew had it in for him – whether true or not. He grew ever more distrustful of ‘outsiders’ (ironically enough, mirroring his town’s general attitude towards the rest of the world) and retreated more and more into his music and opiates.
The singer’s falling out with the Shillingers in August 1986 had an air of inevitability to it. Matters came to a head after a particularly bloody fight involving both Eric and Steve. The next morning, Kurt paid Steve $10 to transport his belongings to Dale Crover’s house. Once again, he was homeless. Kurt survived the next month by sleeping in the library during the day and crashing at friends’ houses at night. Sometimes, he’d sleep in Krist and Shelli’s van: sometimes he’d sleep at his mother’s, unbeknown to her, while she was at work: other times it would be in the apartment above Krist’s mother’s hair salon.
That September, Kurt convinced his mother to loan him $200 so he could pay the deposit and a month’s rent on 1000 1/2 East Second St., Aberdeen (‘the shack’). The house was decrepit – and, after Kurt moved in with new housemate Matt Lukin, everywhere the smell of discarded, rotting food and stale beer. Fortunately, Lukin was a skilled carpenter. A hole was drilled in the floor, underneath Kurt’s bathtub of turtles placed in the middle of the living room, to drain away the foul-smelling water. The arrangement wasn’t entirely successful: the water merely collected in stagnant pools beneath the house.
Living with a Melvin meant that Kurt got to hang out and jam on a regular basis with both the band and their regular coterie of hangers-on. The shack soon gained a reputation as a party house.
Kurt took a job as a caretaker at the Polynesian Hotel in Ocean Shores: he wasn’t the most reliable of workers, frequently he would just kip down in one of the guests’ rooms and dream about the day he would have his own rock’n’roll band and get revenge on all the people who treated him like dirt.
“Aberdeen is a terrible, gross place that smells like vanilla,” says former K records co-boss Candice Pedersen. “We would drive down, and meet Dale and Buzz who worked out in Montesano, then go over to Kurt and Matt’s house. The weird thing is there were no girls. Those people dated girls but they didn’t hang out with girls. So you’d go to these parties that weren’t really parties, more like people just sat around drinking beer. We’d be the only girls there. It was only Shelli who was a girlfriend. A lot of the Aberdeen folks thought we were weird.”
Where would you hang out?
“Not really anywhere. At the house,” replies Candice. “The people in the periphery were what would have been called burnouts in high school. In a very small town, you’re identified early on if you’re a burnout, or a slut, or a jock. Kurt worked at some disgusting hotel, and that’s where I learned about everything gross that happens there: rooms would be trashed or there’d be condoms everywhere.”
Let’s get back to Skid Row, the band Kurt formed with Krist . . .
“Skid Row was really cool,” says Slim Moon. “I thought their songs were all right. They played really heavy. Kurt was totally glammed out – he was in platform shoes, like a parody of a glam costume. You have to remember we’re talking 1987 here, at the height of Guns N’ Roses15 and [hair metal band] Poison.16 Their songs were basically riffs. They’d play a riff for a long time and Kurt would scream into the microphone, then he’d drop the guitar and play with the digital delay and make crazy noises instead of a guitar solo, and then he’d pick the guitar back up and play the riff some more and scream some more. Right away, he was a showman.
“Because Dale Crover was their drummer and Dale Crover was the heaviest drummer in the universe, they were great just playing a riff, then a solo, then a riff and ending. The songs weren’t like verse, chorus, verse; they were riffs – they were unfinished bits.
“Soon after that, GESCCO got notice from Evergreen17 that they’d realised their insurance didn’t cover off-campus activities so they cut off their funding. We only had four days’ notice, so I hastily put on a show and got this band from Tacoma, my band Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare and Skid Row to play. Krist was so drunk and being so dumb, it looked like Skid Row wouldn’t be allowed to play. We appealed against the decision on three levels: this band is really great, we’ll make him calm down . . . and who cares? It’s the last show ever. What can he do, get us closed down? They did play, and it was just as I described. Then there are so many Nirvana shows after I can’t remember the sequence any more.”
Addenda: Matt Lukin’s butt
Did you ever count the number of times you saw Matt Lukin’s butt?
“Oh God . . .” laughs Mark Arm’s old girlfriend, Carrie Montgomery. “My son and his friend were talking about picking up a dollar bill with their butt cheeks and I thought of Matt instantly. How many times did I see Matt carry a quarter in his ass across the room? Really a bad influence, too. He wasn’t just destructive, though; Krist Novoselic was the same. Those Aberdeen guys were just crazy, they were like animals – almost hippie-like, but crazy. Olympia was the same. Aberdeen was hippie-redneck, while Olympia was more hippie-hippie.
“Mark would keep a diary while he was on tour and he’d write me a lot of letters . . . somethin
g I learned about Matt Lukin that I never ever wanted to know was that when he takes a shit, he’s afraid to have the toilet water splash back up on him, so he’d line the water with strips of toilet paper. Yeah. This is a guy who’d walk around naked in front of whoever and carry a quarter between his butt cheeks but he didn’t want any toilet water to splash on his ass. Where does this person come from? What kind of an environment creates this person? But such a great guy, so nice, never any malicious intent.”
NOTES
1 “I’ve been up there,” says Seattle resident Candice Pedersen. “There’s the train tracks to Olympia and you might end up staying overnight on them. That myth could be true.”
2 Kurt played drums in the school band.
3 Possibly. Come As You Are also mentions an abortive attempt with two school friends, jamming in an abandoned meat locker in the woods, Kurt playing a borrowed right-handed guitar.
4 Krist was also supposed to have attended the same church, Central Park Baptist, but only ‘for the girls’.
5 The Beachcombers released several 45s including ‘Purple Peanuts’, ‘Chinese Bagpiper’ (1963), ‘ Tossin’ And Turnin’ ’ (1964) and ‘All To Pieces’ (1965). Kurt’s Uncle Chuck played with them for a while, and they also turned in a very creditable version of ‘Louie Louie’, as evinced on their 1997 reunion CD The Legendary Beachcombers, Live In The Great Northwest.
6 Krist also played in several of the Melvins’ satellite bands – such as The Stiff Woodies, whom he fronted. The Woodies had a revolving line-up including Kurt on drums.
7 Kurt later cited his stint working with children as the best job he ever held.
8 Motörhead were perhaps the greatest heavy metal band ever: British contemporaries of Ramones. I once saw singer Lemmy bust all four strings on his bass with the opening chord to ‘Ace Of Spades’. Without missing a beat he threw the instrument away, a roadie slipped a new bass over his head and the band continued. Metallica couldn’t have existed without Motörhead’s influence.