by Everett True
On stage, Kurt wore crushed velvet bell-bottoms, a Hawaiian shirt and platform shoes, and sometimes attempted coordinated jumps similar to Danger Mouse.
“The first time I ever saw Nirvana was at the Community World,” recalls Ian Dickson. “I went with Slim and Dylan. There were eight people in the audience. But man, all of us, as soon as they came on and started playing – I think it was ‘School’ – our jaws hit the floor. Like, ‘Oh my God! This is it!’ We’d seen the Melvins, we’ve seen Green River and The U-Men, but the opening note of the fucking first Nirvana set I ever saw was like, ‘This is the shit.’ ”
It was during 1987 that Kurt began experiencing severe stomach pains – quite probably exacerbated by his drug use, Vicodin (a painkiller) and codeine. “It’s burning, nauseous, like the worst stomach flu you can imagine,” he told Azerrad in Come As You Are. “You can feel it throbbing like you have a heart in your stomach. It mostly hurts when I eat.”
The condition would haunt Kurt to the end of his life.
Kurt and Tracy’s move to Olympia coincided with Krist and Shelli moving to Tacoma where the bassist found work as an industrial painter, working in aircraft factories and paper mills. The band briefly fell apart – so Kurt sent Krist a letter encouraging him not to let all their hard work go to waste. Krist remembers the note being quite formal: “It was like, ‘Come join the band,’ ” he told a local journalist. “‘No commitment. No obligation (well, some).’ ”
Tacoma is a blue-collar town located midway between Seattle and Olympia, similar to Aberdeen, but “more violent” (Kurt). Although Tacoma has its own beauty spots – the train ride alongside the placid Puget Sound, for example – it’s notorious locally, mostly because of the ‘Aroma of Tacoma’, a pungent, burnt rubber smell that assails the nostrils as the city looms into view. It’s also home to the most polluted bay on the West Coast – Commencement Bay.
“It’s the sawmill,” laughs Candice. “Olympia used to be really bad, too, you could see faeces in the water. Tacoma had an air of danger or depravity that you didn’t see in Olympia, although there was certainly a pocket of not-healthy stuff in Olympia going on at the time. I would have lived in Tacoma but there were no good jobs. Tacoma was very punk, very lower-middle class. Girl Trouble was an atypical band. When we were growing up, we were really poor, but it was a different kind of poor, it wasn’t city poor. That had a play in the kind of music and partying that took place there. It was much more traditional punk.”
“People from Tacoma got a lot of respect from Olympia in the mid-Eighties,” says Pigeonhed’s Steve Fisk.29 “If Seattle is New York, Tacoma is New Jersey. New Jersey doesn’t need New York. People talk different and have lower rent concerns and priorities. Maybe that’s what made Girl Trouble easier to relate to than Soundgarden, if you were from Olympia.”
The two bands were contemporaries. “Girl Trouble are Tacoma,” explains Seattle musician James Burdyshaw. “They’re Sixties garage hounds. They love The Cramps, The Sonics, The Wailers and goofy TV like The Banana Splits.” Soundgarden, meanwhile, started in the mid-Eighties after guitarist Kim Thayil moved down to Olympia specifically to be part of the KAOS/ Op scene. Odd, considering how heavily influenced by Led Zeppelin Soundgarden were. Not so odd, considering how cool – in their attitudes towards women especially – Soundgarden were for a heavy metal band.
“But Kurt went to Tacoma as well,” says Candice, “because that’s where Tracy lived. Then Tracy came to Olympia because it was less expensive. Their choices were made by where their girlfriends were. I don’t think it was a philosophical choice. It was a reality.”
“Tacoma is a little more sleepy and grittier than Seattle. It’s a quasi-city,” says Burdyshaw. “My memories of going to Tacoma are all weird keg parties with heavy metal guys and punks and normal kids drinking together.”
So Kurt moved into an apartment with Tracy. Was that the one you were living next door to with Dylan?
“It was a house converted to three apartments,” corrects Slim. “I had lived with Dylan in this place called the Alamo. I lived on a porch, then I had my own apartment that I got just for Jean Smith30 and after she dumped me I went back to living with groups of people. Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare had broken up because Dylan heard the first Melvins album and declared he would never play guitar again, moving back to Seattle in despair. So I started this new band Lush, then Dylan moved back and we had an empty room, so he moved in with us.
“I was the weirdo that hung out sober while everybody else got plastered. Tracy and Shelli almost never got to hang out because they had the graveyard shift at Boeing [ Shelli later took a job at the same cafeteria as Tracy]. They’d get off work at six in the morning and go to King Solomon’s Reef, for Longshoremen’s happy hour, and get drunk, and then go to sleep. When they were home, and if Kurt wasn’t feeling sorry for himself, or having band practice, we’d go to parties. We were teenagers, it was social.”
Why did he feel sorry for himself ?
“He was a mopey guy. Except for when he was doing the thing he was born to do, or he was loaded and being hilarious, he was either depressed, or quiet, or introverted. There was a ton of record listening. Me and Dylan listened to a lot of crazy jazz and King Crimson and Uriah Heep and some metal like Metallica. There was a lot of classic rock like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. I liked Beat Happening and The Vaselines, Talulah Gosh.31 I wasn’t scientific about it. We loved X32 and the bands that were written about in Forced Exposure.33 That was much more the world that enchanted Kurt: Big Black and Killdozer34 and Scratch Acid and Sonic Youth.”
Addenda 1: Olympia vs Seattle
Most of the literature about Nirvana portrays them as being a Seattle band. Do you agree?
“Well . . . they weren’t from Seattle,” mulls Steve Fisk. “Some bands came to Seattle and changed their sound. Whatever they were, Nirvana were like that already when they got here. Nirvana were big and fuzzy and metal-like because they hung out with the Melvins. Do you think of Melvins having more to do with Olympia than Seattle?”
Of course I do.
“There’s your answer. You should have seen the shit I gave the guys putting together that TV show.35 I told them, ‘What, you’re coming to Seattle to talk about Nevermind ? Why, because they won’t talk to you in Olympia, where Kurt had real friends? Or haven’t you figured that out yet?’ During the Eighties, the same 100 people would travel an hour to see a show in Washington. Calvin would put on these weekend tours that lasted a month: Girl Trouble, Beat Happening and Danger Mouse. Everybody would get together on the weekends and play each other’s hometowns. One weekend they’d play Eugene, another weekend Olympia, another Bremerton. They weren’t playing big cities because they weren’t from big cities. For me, the world was two things: from Seattle, or not from Seattle. There was Tacoma with the garage rock thing and Boise’s got the clangy guitar sound. There really weren’t bands that sounded like Seattle in Olympia. You had to go into Portland to find a band that sounded like it was from Seattle.”
What separated Olympia from Seattle and the other regions?
“Nobody played solos in Olympia – ever. Even if something happened between the second chorus and the third verse, it was more of a rhythmic thing. There might be some single string guitar playing in there, but it wasn’t a solo. Also, having no bass-player meant that you were not going to be a conventional band.”
Doesn’t the bass traditionally provide the sexual element in rock music? “The kick drum is a little more sexual than the bass.”
Obviously, the fewer instruments you have to play, the easier it is to form a band.
“Olympia is all about Tobi Vail throwing her drink across the room and saying, ‘Damn it, let’s make a record.’ Then you go do it right then and there. A bass is heavy. Not only is it heavy to play, but also the actual gear you have to plug the bass into is expensive and heavy, whereas some guitar amplifiers are cheap and small and crappy. The smaller the guitar amplifier, the better it sounds at
a low volume. There you’ve got your Olympia aesthetic. No bass, nothing complicated, and a guitar that sounds great when you turn it all the way up and you can still play in your apartment, hopefully without bugging anybody.”
What would you say the K records aesthetic is?
“A friend told me about how he’d been playing Frisbee on the courtyard of Evergreen State College and he had his shirt off. Another Evergreener, a man, had come up and casually said, ‘It’s a sunny day. I notice you’ve got your shirt off .’ He goes, ‘There are a lot of women out here. They’d probably like to take their shirts off too. Maybe you ought to put your shirt on. What do you think?’ Olympia was a place where one man would tell another man to put on his shirt to support women’s inability to take off their shirts. Talk about subjugating your own ego: ‘The only way the world’s going to get any better is if the men get together and give the women a chance.’ And it’s so condescending and so stupid and so un-feminist, but that’s kind of the mentality of an Evergreener. And so Kurt, trying to be cool and fit in, trying to be an upright, moral human being, got some third-hand version of how to be an Evergreener.”
How did you meet Calvin?
“It was 1978. I’d just moved to Olympia. My friends there, the people who ran KAOS and Op magazine, were telling me how they had kids with their own radio shows. Calvin was one of them. Someone described him as this really mean punk rock kid: ‘He’ll walk in and he’ll be in such a bad mood that he won’t even play the news. He’ll just get on the air with some surly voice and play records. He’s a real jerk.’ The first time we met, I suspect he was trying to figure out if he could trust me because I had long hair. He was wearing girl-watcher shades and sported serious spiky hair. It was 1980.
“I later recorded him in The Cool Rays. The Cool Rays played half covers and half originals. Just like Beat Happening, there was a soft-spoken guitar-player who was the brains behind everything, the guy that made the music stuff happen. Calvin always needed a six-string guide.”
Why do you think Calvin has such an influence?
“He picked one thing he was good at, and did it. He did it really well, did it all the time, and lucked out. The adults did all the paperwork. Calvin was a very young person, surrounded by six older people who really knew what they were doing. By the time Calvin was 30, these people had lives, but Calvin was still running strong in the philosophy and ideals of the time. KAOS was really important, Op as well. So why was Calvin? He’s charismatic, a very good dancer. I don’t know how he talked the world into starting these two-piece bands and singing about bunnies and picnics.”
Nirvana was an Olympia band. Do you believe that?
Al Larsen: “I don’t know. Olympia is not very together ever, it seems like.”
Rich Jensen: “Personally, I thought they were an Aberdeen band that wanted to be an Olympia band.”
Al: “Hey, wow. Black Flag, Screaming Trees, Beat Happening, The Vaselines, The Pastels . . . I was working with some of these pieces in Some Velvet Sidewalk, and putting them together. And Nirvana worked with some of these same pieces in a really pleasing way.”
Screaming Trees were a windswept, psychedelic noise band, whose members met in an Ellensburg detention centre. The Conner brothers (guitar and bass) weighed 300 pounds each, and their dad was the local school principal – so they were easy targets for redneck humour. Singer Mark Lanegan has one of the great Pacific Northwest nicotine-laced voices, and a penchant for trouble. Kurt Cobain, for one, was heavily influenced by Lanegan’s laconic world-view, drug use and musical preferences.
Rich: “ ‘Swap Meet’ is one of my favourite Nirvana songs, because that’s an Olympia song, not a Black Sabbath song.”
Al: “I think that your central contention for your book is probably really good, but Rich and I won’t be able to agree with you. It doesn’t mean you’re not right. It just means you can’t have us saying it.”
Rich: “I disagree. They’re a rural Washington band whose image of the artistic cultural Valhalla was Olympia but they never quite managed to fit it in with their sound because they grew up surrounded by shit-kickers.”
Addenda 2: Sonic Youth
The first time I saw the NYC quartet was in 1983 for their Confusion Is Sex album, when they filled The Venue in Victoria, London with a cacophonous maelstrom of mangled sound that still reverberates, more than two decades on. Through the Eighties, I loved them because they sounded like none other (1986 – Evol , 1987 – Sister, 1989 – the incredible Daydream Nation; and especially the chilling collaboration with New York performance artist Lydia Lunch, ‘Death Valley ’69’). I remember seeing a 1985 show of theirs in Woolwich, south London where the sound engineer decided he needed to leave early and started dismantling the PA system around the New York band. It didn’t faze them one bit. Shorn of microphones, the band continued to play one of the most exhilarating, frightening wall-of-guitars instrumentals I’ve ever heard.
At the start of the Nineties, the NYC quartet changed gear. Listened to now, albums like 1990’s Goo and 1992’s Dirty with their bubblegum pop sensibilities don’t sound so out-of-line with the previous albums, but at the time it felt like a minor revolution was taking place. Not so much for the music, more for its source: Geffen records. If Sonic Youth could worm their way into the heart of the beast then surely anyone could?
So it proved. Before Sonic Youth signed to Geffen, ‘alternative rock’ and MTV grunge didn’t exist. Check your history books.
“Our whole scene was under their shadow,” comments Slim Moon. “They’ve remained ‘the band’ forever. They’re royalty. If Sonic Youth had only made three or four records, they might be part of a list of the greatest American bands. Considering they’ve made 20 years of great records, they pretty much left everybody in their dust.”
“Sister [Sonic Youth’s 1987 album] is more bad acid trips I never took,” stated Courtney Love to me in 1992, “plus physics or psychics, Philip K. Dick, astronomy, best bending of English and football, no boyfriends at all, no girlfriends either, lots of cigarettes and bad drugs, a frozen spring in a room all alone for six months not talking to anyone except the regulars at the strip bar. Bad wine and the same old stinky old nightie and trench coat, big holes in my shoes all over NYC, until I got bag lady blisters and I had this record, anti-depressants don’t work now. Times Square is sick, I gotta go back to LA, maybe I’ll stop listening to this damn velvet shiny light Josephine Wiggs’ [Breeders bassist] sticky New York dark. I can’t get the rats out of my hair, angels are dreaming of you.”
It’s easy to take Sonic Youth for granted: whereas their peers who split up long ago are re-forming and cashing in, the Youth have maintained an astonishingly high musical standard – never static, always fluid, bringing on board only their second new member in 15 years with Chicago’s Jim O’Rourke in 2002 on Murray Street. If Sonic Youth had split after Dirty and got back together in 2005 they’d be making a million bucks a year too.
I had a minor epiphany in Portland, winter of 2004, when watching the Sonic Youth compilation video with M. Ward. The songwriter turned to me and said, “I think they’re as good as Nirvana.” For him it was the highest compliment.
I looked at him, dumbstruck.
How could he even begin to compare the two bands?
. . . So Thurston Moore’s leaning over the front of the stage, lanky, his instrument howling with distortion; one moment he’s sawing at the edge of an amplifier and throwing his guitar into the galley; the next he’s pulling a speaker across the stage, lacerating sound. Steve Shelley slumps down low over his drums, spent, hammering out the occasional roll of distant thunder; Lee Ranaldo races across to the wings to pick up another Fender to mutilate; saxophonist Mats Gustafson blows deep squalls of dementia. Kim Gordon walks off stage, bored by the boys’ indulgence. Over on the far side, Jim O’Rourke sways back and forth like a drunken Nick Cave, cracking his guitar lead (or possibly a steel tape measure) like a whip, lashing layers of noise with every swirl of
his arm.
Suddenly there’s a blur of movement, and next thing anyone knows Thurston has been brought crashing to the ground, arms thrown up too late to protect himself, as a member of Detroit’s noise overkill lords Wolf Eyes hurls himself on to his back. For a moment he rides Thurston, cruising on a wave of elation: the next it’s all over, folk shaking their heads at the sheer unpredictability of the performance. How do they keep their music so fresh? We were making jokes about their name – Sonic ‘Youth’ – over a decade ago; Kim Gordon’s been like the coolest person in rock for easily that time; and yet their sound continues mutating, challenging and inspiring wave upon wave of disparate artists. It’s no exaggeration to claim that without Sonic Youth Plan B magazine and the community that fuels it would not exist. Wolf Eyes. Lightning Bolt. Nirvana. Part Chimp. Pussy Galore. Huggy Bear. Liars. Afrirampo. Pavement. Sonic Youth is a primary source for all these bands.
Last year’s Sonic Nurse album is as emotionally charged as 1984’s scouring Bad Moon Rising. The tension still rises. The momentum grows.
(Plan B issue 7, 2005)
NOTES
1 The Gossip are a relocated Olympia band: singer Beth Ditto has a bluesy vibrant voice to rival Etta James.
2 Bangs are Maggie’s own Ramones/Joan Jett-inspired Olympia trio.
3 Seattle’s answer to The Birthday Party’s warped suburban take on Iggy Pop: The U-Men had elements of garage rock, The Sonics and The Fall, The Cramps, voodoo, mysticism, art rock, boogie-woogie. Guitarist Tom Price later joined Cat Butt and then Gas Huffer.