Nirvana

by Everett True

  Kurt first met Tracy Marander while living at the shack.

  “Tracy was awesome,” says Tobi Vail. “She was one of those punk girls that every scene has, who knows more about music than most guys and totally nurtures the scene but gets no credit for it because nurturing isn’t valued, although people need that kind of love and support. She was really into girl bands – there weren’t many then. I think I found out about Frightwig12 through her. She documented Northwest punk shows for years in photographs. She should put out a book. She had a great sense of style and a lot of guts. She was older than me and I totally admired her. She was tuff. She really did take care of him . . .”

  Tracy and her friend Tam Orhmund were unlike Aberdeen girls: Tracy sported a zebra-stripe coat and bright red hair. She changed her hair colour a lot: from shocking punk to thick wavy dark brown with bangs – later, she’d look like a typical Olympia indie kid; tights, clumpy shoes, flowery skirt, cardigan pulled down over the hands. She was larger than Kurt, who would dress himself in layers of clothes, Pacific Northwest style (because then you can remove each layer as it gets less cold or rainy). Kurt and Tracy first met a year earlier, outside an all-ages punk club in Seattle, the scene of one of Kurt’s under age drink busts: it took a while for Tracy to convince Kurt she wanted to date him. The two bonded over their pet rats: Kurt had a male one called Kitty that he’d reared from birth and given free run of the shack.

  “Tam and Tracy were totally punk-looking – and Aberdeen is all plaid shirts and baseball caps,” recalls Candice Pedersen. “We’d all drive up to Aberdeen together, and listen to music – Black Sabbath, Kiss. We’d stay up all night, listen to music and drive home. It was pretty innocent.”

  “Tracy was super sweet,” says Ian Dickson. “She worked at the food court at Boeing and took care of Kurt entirely.”

  Kurt stayed on at the shack for two months after Lukin moved out. Then, in the autumn of 1987, Tracy moved from Tacoma to a new apartment at 114 1/2 North Pear St, Olympia, and Kurt moved in with her. Tracy made Kurt lists of tasks to do while she was out at work, leaving them pinned everywhere – to the fridge door, cupboards and walls. Stuff like, “Do laundry, mop floors, clean cages, get shopping, vacuum.” The usual.

  “The first time I met Kurt was when we knocked on his door to talk to Tracy about moving into the apartment,” relates Ian. “I was 19. He was a couple of years older than me. I had the most powerful first impression of him because he was so sweet. He brought us coffee to where we were sitting on the steps. Nobody did that at our house. It sounds totally normal, but he was like, ‘You guys want some coffee?’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God! It’s Kurt Cobain! He’s in Nirvana!’ And of course, you know, they weren’t even called Nirvana then . . .

  “The front door opened on to a kitchen and a big room,” he continues. “There was a huge rat cage with these different levels and a giant rat called Sweetleaf [probably named after the Black Sabbath song]. The apartment was crammed full of stuff he’d collected. They had cable, which was weird – nobody had cable back then. He would channel surf for days. This was back when Jerry Springer was starting and there were all these Christian channels. There was this thing they called The Power TV, these Christian weightlifters that’d do stuff like, ‘In the name of Jesus!’ and smash bricks with their elbows. He’d make tapes of them and inter-cut them with weird scenes he’d find elsewhere on the dial. We were like, ‘Oh my God. You’ve done way too much acid and got way too much time on your hands.’”

  Kurt would stay at Nikki McClure’s house while she was away. He was a good houseguest – he kept the place clean and tidy, much to her surprise. “It was probably because he was so timid, and didn’t cook,” she explains. “There was one time I came to Kurt’s house and saw him in the kitchen,” she continues. “When he saw me he was like, ‘Oh good! I’m cooking! Would you like some?’ He was making this Rice-a-Roni stuff out of a box with random ingredients mixed in.” Nikki wasn’t tempted by his offer – not only was the food unappealing but the place was a mess and Kurt kept a rabbit in a cage above the fridge.

  “Kurt was a hermit. He kept weird hours,” she says. “They were a presence at parties, though: especially Krist. He would sit there with two jugs of wine – one in each hand – and he was just so big!”

  Tracy’s apartment was decorated with a defaced Paul McCartney poster, Kurt’s mutilated dolls and paintings – anatomical models, religious artefacts. “He’d make incredibly detailed sculptures out of stuff he’d find in thrift stores,” says Slim. “A strange mix of pop culture ephemera and clay sculpture.”

  “I didn’t mean to make the dolls look evil,” Kurt told me in 1992, “but somehow they always ended up that way. I liked Goya13 a lot.” The singer painted the bathroom blood red, writing RED RUM14 on one wall. Outside in the backyard, the pair placed strings of cheapo Fifties lights. Pictures of meat intermingled with those of diseased vaginas in a particularly gruesome montage on the fridge. “He was fascinated by things that were gross,” Tracy explained to one journalist. One of Kurt’s skeletal self-paintings hung on the wall. The apartment was small, cramped; smelly and fly-infested because of all the pets . . . but it was home.

  “There was the rat, a bunny rabbit and a cat,” remembers Dickson. “The cat would have sex with the rabbit and it would cause the bunny’s vagina to invert and so Kurt would have to take a pencil and push the vagina of the rabbit back in. I’d come up and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And he’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here! I’m going to push the bunny’s vagina back in!’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah! Check it out!’ He had this cool fish tank that took up one side of the apartment that these turtles lived in. They’d haul themselves out the tank . . .”

  Did they have posters on their walls?

  “They had junk,” he says. “You could never tell what was trash and what wasn’t. Things would be ripped out from magazines and taped up. He read NME and Melody Maker, bought on import from Positively Fourth Street.”

  “Kurt made audio collages from the kinds of records you get for a dollar at garage sales,” Slim says, “everything from TV actors doing really schmaltzy covers to instructional things or dog noises and Halloween records. On the other side of the first Nirvana demo was something called ‘Montage Of Heck’ that was like half an hour of audio collage.”15

  Kurt took a job as a cleaner and, with the little money he earned, bought a second-hand Datsun car. He’d practise guitar, watch TV, write in his journals and create art. Mostly, he was unemployed.

  “ Candice told me about this guy in Olympia that everyone thought was a genius,” recalls former K artist Rich Jensen, “who just hung around in his room listening to Seventies music all day – serious butt rock.”

  If that’s the case, how did The Vaselines16 and all the others come about?

  “Kurt admired Calvin,” Rich replies. “Calvin is a student of youth culture – a serious student, from World War II on, into films and music and the whole rise of an industry centred around teenagers. Calvin could have earned multiple PhDs on that topic. My impression was that Kurt learned about those bands through mix-tapes, passed down to him, possibly from Calvin via Tobi.”

  “Olympia is a small town with amazing resources, specifically KAOS radio,” states Bruce Pavitt. In 1979, Pavitt moved from Chicago to study in Olympia. There he wrote a column on US independent rock for Op, and in 1980 started a fanzine called Subterranean Pop, dedicated to the same music. It lasted for a couple of years and was followed by some tape compilations. In ’83, he moved to Seattle and started a monthly column in The Rocket and a biweekly radio programme, both called Sub Pop.

  “ KAOS had the most comprehensive collection of independent music of any radio station in the United States,” he continues. “And that’s because John Foster, who was the music director, specifically pushed for a priority system for independent record labels. That meant, if you were putting out your own record, you we
re guaranteed to get airplay on KAOS. From that collection of music, he put out Op magazine, which specialised in independent music.17 So, from the late Seventies on, Olympia became a magnet for independently produced records. KAOS had the mother lode library in the universe of independent punk records. Because of that library, there were a handful of people who had access to a wide body of information: Calvin Johnson, a few others and myself. If you were involved in the music scene in Olympia, chances were you knew about records that people in Seattle didn’t.

  “There was a higher degree of sophistication in Olympia, an almost academic approach to punk rock. That’s what I studied at Evergreen State College. I hung out at the KAOS library, studied their records and got college credit for it. Anybody going through Olympia at that time was most likely bumping into Calvin Johnson or doing interviews on KAOS – or in Kurt Cobain’s case, being interviewed by Calvin Johnson on KAOS. Even though Kurt was from Aberdeen, the fact that he was sitting in the KAOS record library could not help but influence his approach to music.

  “There was also a real purity about the vision coming out of the Olympia scene, a high level of integrity, while the Seattle scene was more about business. Kurt was schooled in Olympia. Kurt made money in Seattle. That’s how I would define it. And Kurt probably partied in Tacoma. But when talking about Olympia, it is crucial to mention the honouring of the feminine. Female punk bands like The Slits and The Raincoats18, and obviously The Marine Girls19, were highly valued and that helped lead into a lot of the Riot Grrrl stuff. That’s really a key to Kurt’s personality, his honouring of the feminine. Whereas in Aberdeen it was about hard rock, whether it was metal or punk, a lot of what Olympia was about was, ‘We’re going to dig through the crates and find female punk stuff that isn’t quite as popular.’ ”

  I used to break it down that Olympia is a mod town, and Seattle is a rocker town. Another definition is that Olympia is hardcore as defined by Ian MacKaye and the LA bands of the early Eighties, whereas Seattle is more punk, as defined by The Sex Pistols and the British bands of the late Seventies. As much as punk disrupted things, it was always trying to work within the mainstream, whereas hardcore didn’t see any point in engaging with the mainstream. Punk is an attitude. Hardcore is a lifestyle. The first seeks to subvert society. The second aims to live outside of it.

  “Exactly,” agrees Bruce. “Calvin and I go way back. He was the only other person to work on Sub Pop when it was a fanzine. I envisioned Sub Pop as kind of a networking tool. I was interested in having different regional scenes that were isolated due to lack of media to connect. I’ve always been interested in the synergy that happens when people or scenes come together. Hence the Sub Pop magazine being set up so that all records were reviewed from a regional perspective. And then I started putting out cassettes – and the Sub Pop 100 compilation – with artists from different scenes from around the country.

  “K started out as a vehicle for Beat Happening recordings, and it grew from there. In both cases, the personalities and interests of Calvin and myself came through in what we were doing. K’s vision was to establish Olympia as a vibrant alternative scene. And although Sub Pop started out in Olympia and moved to Seattle, it was more about looking at things nationally, trying to facilitate sharing music between scenes. Sub Pop morphed into a label that promoted what was going on in Seattle. And from that, it reached out once again with the Singles Club and started working with bands from all over the country.

  “Kurt was very influenced by Calvin’s championing of obscure independent artists, and Thurston Moore [Sonic Youth guitarist] influenced him the same way. I remember visiting Kurt down in Olympia, trying to convince him to sign an extended contract with Sub Pop. I spent eight hours at his house. As a diplomatic gesture, I brought down copies of The Shaggs20 record, and a Daniel Johnston disc, just to let him know in a symbolic way that Sub Pop supported alternative music. A couple of years later I saw him in Rolling Stone in a Daniel Johnston T-shirt.”

  My T-shirt!

  “Your T-shirt!” Bruce exclaims surprised. “Well, I turned him on to Daniel Johnston. So I appreciated the fact he used his celebrity to promote some of the most obscure and independent music out there. Even though his music didn’t always reflect that. I mean, just wearing the Daniel Johnston T-shirt was huge!”

  Yeah, it got Daniel signed to Atlantic.

  “Yeah, but what it really meant was, ‘Even though I am the biggest rock star in the world, I am going to champion the least appreciated artist on the planet.’ ”

  On their final US tour, they took Half Japanese21 as support.

  “That’s great,” says Bruce, smiling. “That is a real demonstration of the Olympia influence. Half Japanese was a huge influence on Calvin and me. Seattle wasn’t listening to Half Japanese. Olympia was. This is important: Kurt’s conflict of wanting to be the biggest rock star in the world but at the same time wanting to be a fully independent artist in control of his career. It can be seen in the relationship between Olympia and Seattle. Olympia was about valuing integrity. Seattle was about becoming successful. Sub Pop reflected those tensions as well. Because Sub Pop grew out of Olympia and wound up in Seattle.”

  It was during early 1987 that Krist and Kurt began practising with Aaron Burckhard.

  Aaron was a bit of a ‘character’: he was one of the Melvins’ cling-ons, worked at Burger King, boasted a moustache, lived with a divorced mother on benefits, had been in a couple of accidents – once as a passenger in a vehicle that drove through the front window of a local shop, another time when a car he was in caught fire after it rolled over, killing its driver. But he played the drums – albeit a kit comprised of a few bits of his own, a few bits of Dale Crover’s and a music stand. Basically, Burckhard was a straight metal kid more interested in getting drunk than practising, which irritated Kurt immensely. He was becoming more and more driven with each rehearsal: “There wasn’t much to do,” said Burckhard, “except drink beer, smoke pot and practise. Every night we’d do our set three or four times.”

  By this point Krist was into incense, tie-dyed T-shirts and psychedelic Sixties rock: hippie music. One of his favourite albums was Shocking Blue At Home, the 1969 heavy rock album by Dutch band, Shocking Blue.22 Kurt agreed to cover their song ‘Love Buzz’; the interpretation accordingly influenced by his then-favourite bands like Butthole Surfers and The Meat Puppets.23 It wasn’t the first cover the pair had attempted: early on, Krist and Kurt played numerous cover versions, including Led Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’ and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s epic ‘Bad Moon Rising’ – in fact, they’d briefly formed a Creedence covers band called The Sellouts that fell apart once they realised they wouldn’t make any money from it.24

  House parties were in vogue. So it seemed natural that the trio would play their first show at one.

  In March 1987, Kurt, Krist and Aaron headed out to Raymond, a tiny isolated community, 30 minutes’ drive from Aberdeen. The band was determined to make an impression on an audience they all considered redneck (apart from Burckhard who described them as ‘yuppie’, perhaps reflecting his own world view), and the Raymond kids in their Def Leppard25 T-shirts, lumberjack shirts and mullet hairdos were thrown by the band’s appearance. To Raymond residents, Aberdeen kids seemed like ‘big towners’. “We scared the hell out of everyone,” laughed Burckhard. “Kurt was climbing all over the furniture, pouring beer over the couch.”

  Krist covered himself in fake blood and jumped out of a window while playing his bass, drunk on Michelob; Shelli and Tracy pretended to make out with the bassist while Kurt introduced ‘Spank Thru’ as ‘Breaking The Law’ (later to become one of MTV cartoon critics’ Beavis & Butt-head’s favourite phrases). Other songs played included ‘Downer’, ‘Pen Cap Chew’ and ‘Hairspray Queen’, plus ‘Heartbreaker’. Despite Krist pissing on cars from atop their van, and Shelli getting in a fist-fight with one of the local women over a broken necklace, the band went down OK.

  Such extreme music alway
s attracts some measure of support.

  In April 1987, Nirvana did their first radio session – a live midnight performance at Olympia’s KAOS, with producer John Goodmanson. John hosted the Monday night rock show (mostly SST-type bands26), a four-hour block back-to-back with Donna Dresch. He’d seen Kurt play the week before, supporting his and Donna’s band Danger Mouse27 at the closing night of GESCCO.

  “I thought Nirvana was awesome,” says Goodmanson. “They were like an Olympia band. They were obviously the best of the Northwest rock bands – they transcended the whole Seattle Seventies cock-rock macho thing. So we invited them in.

  “There wasn’t much banter,” he continues. “They were like, ‘Are we still on the air?’ after every song. Kurt had a tiny Fender amp, like something your uncle would buy you at a guitar store. He was playing around with the same Boss delay pedal I had – very un-punk rock. It was very minimal, like around 11 songs. I could barely afford the tape to record on, so a couple of them were cut off when they were talking about where to go get soda pop.”

  Early on, Nirvana often played the Community World Theater in south-east Tacoma. CWT was a converted porn emporium in a white trash neighbourhood, kept running through the enthusiasm of local punk rockers. Mostly, bands played for nothing.

  “I saw all the early Nirvana shows at Community World,” recalls ex-Seaweed28 singer, Aaron Stauffer. “They sounded like a heavy metal Scratch Acid. Kurt told me he enjoyed watching ‘Faces of Death’ movies on mushrooms. These mushrooms called liberty caps grew in many places throughout the fall, so any punker worth his or her salt would be tripping a lot for free throughout October.

  “It was hands down the coolest rock theatre I’ve been to,” Stauffer continues. “I played my first shows there reading poetry until the owner’s brother told me I would never get a girlfriend until I learnt some chords. Myself and many other local punks would show up and work for free, sanding and painting, making our theatre happen! There was a Melvins’ show where Krist got up and sang a bunch of classic rock songs (Kiss, Judas Priest) for the encore. He yelled, ‘Punk rock is dead and gone, but rock’ n’roll will still live on,’ into the mic as he took the stage.”