by Everett True
In August, a photo-shoot was organised for the cover of ‘Love Buzz’ – black and white, to save on costs – with Seattle photographer Alice Wheeler. The photographer was paid $25 for the session. Wheeler had met Pavitt when she was living in Olympia, attending Evergreen: “He was always around talking about taking over the world and stuff,” she told Gillian G. Gaar. Wheeler also helped run GESCCO in Olympia, and was a friend of Tracy Marander.
Krist drove everyone to Tacoma where the band posed in front of local landmarks, including Point Defiance Park and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. “I was having technical difficulties,” Wheeler told Gaar. “I didn’t have a very good camera. The pictures are infrared so they’re kind of fuzzy.”
Dawn Anderson’s Backlash article appeared around this time: “I knew them only as friends of the Melvins,” she laughs. “Fortunately, they also kicked ass.”
In the interview, Kurt admitted his biggest fear at the beginning was that, “People might think we were a Melvins rip-off ”. The Melvins got mentioned a lot. Dawn suggested that, with enough practice, Nirvana could perhaps be “better than the Melvins”.
“Most of the stuff that was written about us, and every other band early on, was just corny phrases,” smiles Chad. “ ‘Nirvana is a flurry of sweaty, tangled, messy hair with lash brash grash blash splashy music, swampy gooey gumby.’ Get to the freaking point! It was always positive, they were just hyping up their own deal.”
In September, Shelli split with Krist – the strain of their separate lifestyles telling. Shelli worked at night; Krist had just quit his job. The pair decided to live apart. Shelli was 21, and had never been by herself. The separation didn’t last long – the couple missed each other too much – but it did have several knock-on effects.
Krist was forced to move back in with his mum in Aberdeen after blowing $400 in two weeks on beer and partying – “Once, I gave out a case of beer in two minutes,” he commented. “Next thing I knew, I was broke” – and hence was able to practise full-time with the band. Rehearsals moved from the Tacoma basement to a space above Maria’s Hair Design ( Krist’s mum’s shop).
It also placed a strain on Kurt and Tracy’s relationship: Tracy loved Kurt and was looking for some token of commitment from him, especially now her best friends had split up. Kurt didn’t respond, so she decided to call his bluff – threatening to throw him out of the house. Instead, Kurt called her bluff, telling her that he’d go live in his car if she acted like that. “You don’t have to do that,” she replied. He won the argument – and continued to live with her, spending his days rising late and watching TV while Tracy continued vainly to write lists of chores for him to do while she went out to work at Boeing.
“I went over there to ask if Nirvana would contribute a song to this tape compilation me and Donna [ Dresch] were putting together,” recalls John Goodmanson, “and he was painting in the living room in his underwear. I used to see Kurt driving around in her car and think, ‘Man, that guy is totally taking advantage. She has a really good job and he stays home and paints.’ ”
Tracy complained that Kurt never wrote a song about her, even though he’d written a paean to masturbation (‘Spank Thru’16), so the following week he began to write ‘About A Girl’, never admitting that it was about Tracy – even though the chorus, “I can’t see you every night for free”, was a clear reminder of their argument. It’s a stunning song, plaintive, melodic – Kurt told a friend he’d played Meet The Beatles for three hours straight the day he wrote the song, to get himself in the right frame of mind. The title came after Kurt played the song for his bandmates and Chad asked what the song was about. “It’s about a girl,” Kurt told him, and the phrase stuck.
All the while, Nirvana continued to gig across Washington State – in Tacoma, at dorm parties in Evergreen, in Bellingham and in Seattle. “Those early shows were crazy and that’s why they were so fun,” recalls Sub Pop employee Megan Jasper. “It ruled, the way Kurt would smash up his guitars at every opportunity – we all knew he didn’t have any money, but he’d do it anyway.”
“That’s what I heard – that this guy was so crazy he smashed up a brand new amp,” confirms former Sub Pop general manager Rich Jensen. “ Jimi Hendrix would do that. The Who would do that.17 So Nirvana carried on that tradition, which was pretty impressive because these guys didn’t have much money. One of the first Nirvana shows I saw was at The Vogue, either with Pussy Galore or Tad, at a Sub Pop showcase. At the end, they smashed up all of their gear. Apparently, that was something Kurt would prepare for. Ian Dickson told me his amps were all pre-broken so he could jump into them and smash them, and do it again and again.”
The first commonly agreed occurrence of a totally smashed guitar happened at Evergreen State College on October 30 (two days after a support slot to Butthole Surfers at Union Station). After a storming live performance from Lush – during which the drummer punched Slim Moon in the face, and the campus cops got called – Nirvana covered themselves in fake blood and went for it.
“My band was middling but when we were in sync, we could be pretty good,” says Slim. “We put on our best show ever that night and then they had to go and fucking smash their instruments. I felt that they only did that because otherwise we’d have upstaged them. It hurt my feelings because we were close friends and they still wouldn’t let us upstage them just once.”
Nirvana weren’t adverse to showmanship when it was called for: “Someone once told me about a Halloween fundraiser,” remembers Jensen, “maybe for the GESCCO space in Olympia, really early, like ’87 or ’88. Where Kurt imitated a rock star by having fake syringes, either hanging off his arm or drawn on. The point being, it was so laughable that he could turn into a degenerate, junkie rock star.”
‘Love Buzz’ came out in November 1988 – Sub Pop single number 23 – packaged in a hand-numbered sleeve. The sleeve was the first time Kurt used the alternative spelling of his name in public, ‘ Kurdt Kobain’.18 As it was near Christmas, Kurt gave copies as gifts to members of his immediate family: “I was really excited and proud of him,” Mari Earl recalled. “As I was putting it back into the jacket, I laughed as I read, ‘Why don’t you trade those guitars for shovels?’ etched in the vinyl on the ‘Love Buzz’ side.” The line was a reference to a favourite expression of Krist’s father.
It was accompanied by a press release, drafted by Kurt:
GREETINGS,
NIRVANA is a three piece spawned from the bowels of a redneck logger town called Aberdeen, WA, and a hippie commune on Bainbridge Island. Although only together for seven months Kurdt – guitar/voc, Chris – bass and Chad – drums have acquired a single on Sub Pop records, one cut on the Sub Pop 200 compilation, a demo, an LP in April, success, fame and a following of millions.
Selling their bottled sweat and locks of hair have proven to be the biggest money makers so far, but in the future: dolls, pee chees, lunch boxes and bed sheets are in the works.
From the wonderful offices of Sub Pop world headquarters our talent agents Bruce Pavitt and Johnathan [sic] Poneman have treated the boys good.
NIRVANA hope to work on more projects with them in the future.
NIRVANA sounds like: Black Sabbath playing The Knack, Black Flag, Led ZEP, the Stooges and a pinch of Bay City Rollers. Their personal musical influences include: H.R Puffnstuff19, Marine Boy20, divorces, drugs, sound effects records, The Beatles, Young Marble Giants21, Slayer, Leadbelly and Iggy.
NIRVANA sees the underground music SEEN as becoming stagnant and more accessible towards commercialised major label interests.
Does NIRVANA feel a moral duty to change this cancerous evil?
No way! We want to cash in and suck butt of the big wigs in hopes that we too can GET HIGH and FUCK. GET HIGH and FUCK. GET HIGH and FUCK.
Soon we’ll need chick repellent spray. Soon we will be coming to your town asking if we can stay over at your house and use your stove.
Soon we will do encores of ‘Gloria’ and ‘Louie Louie
’ at benefit concerts with all our celebrity friends.
NIRVANA c/o SUB POP, 1932 1st Ave . . . #1103 . . . Seattle, WA 98101
Thank you for your time.
The song itself was repetitive, stripped-back. Over an insistent seven-note bass, Kurt kept screaming, pleading the same refrain again and again, “Can you feel my love buzz/ Can you feel my love buzz”. The atmosphere was restrained, claustrophobic – the guitar only occasionally being let off the leash to let rip with some wah-wah fuelled feedback. Controlled power, that’s what mattered.
Reaction to the single was immediately favourable.
“In the fall of ’88, we put out the single, and they played a couple of dates with Mudhoney,” recalls Bruce Pavitt. “And the two people whose opinions mattered most to me at the time were Charles Peterson and Steve Turner. Charles came up to me a few days after the single came out and said, ‘I had a party last night, and we put on “Love Buzz”, and then we flipped it over, and then we just flipped it over all night, and that was the party.’ Steve Turner came up to me and said, ‘We toured with this band and they are amazing. Kurt Cobain played guitar standing on his head’ [February 11, 1989, San Jose, California]. And I wouldn’t have believed him except Charles took a picture of it. Look at that picture! It’s unbelievable.
“And so things started to pick up and kept accelerating,” Bruce continues. “We put out Bleach and the response was overwhelming, especially considering Bleach is fundamentally an OK record with a couple of great songs – ‘About A Girl’, ‘Blew’. It’s not brilliant but it had a special alchemy that people related to. Between ’88 and ’90, the songwriting just transformed. That level of growth was magical to see.”
Initially, it wasn’t Kurt Cobain who attracted the audience’s attention – but his gregarious giant of a bass-player, Krist Novoselic.
“ Krist is remarkably intuitive,” Jonathan Poneman says. “His contribution to Nirvana is underrated. He was the only bass-player who could have filled that position. Kurt is a really good songwriter, but to the extent that those songs became full and alive, that was Krist. It wasn’t like Krist was Kurt’s sideman, which is what the assumption became.”
Did anything stand out the first time you saw Nirvana?
“ Krist,” responds Nirvana’s former guitar tech Earnie Bailey: “ Krist was the focal point. He was hilarious. He’d mimic Sixties TV shows, doing impersonations of Beverly Hillbillies characters. I’d just laugh my ass off. Nirvana were easily as funny as Mudhoney – as much as I like to catch a good rock band, one that’s equally good at stand-up comedy is a big plus. The first few times, I don’t recall much about Kurt, other than this guitar-player with an incredible voice who had this long blond hair in his face all the time. His guitar sound really stood out, there was a lot of that screechy and shrill solid state feedback going on, but rather than trying to avoid it, Kurt was going after it and getting new sounds. But it was Krist who stood out.”
“ Krist was very outgoing,” recalls Bruce. “He liked to party. He and Matt Lukin from Mudhoney, those guys could rage. A lot of what touring is about is networking and meeting people and building contacts. And Kurt by nature was fairly reserved and shy. So Krist was the guy forging a lot of social connections, the fun guy to hang out with. Specifically, I remember him being way into the first Jane’s Addiction22 record. He was very progressive. It’s not like he was the metal guy and Kurt was the sensitive punk guy. But the social dynamic was key.”
And Chad?
“Chad was, I think, a little bit more like Kurt,” Pavitt replies. “He was a very sensitive guy, kind of soft-spoken, creative.”
In December, Nirvana’s ‘Spank Thru’ appeared on the Sub Pop 200 box set. The song had been remixed on September 27 at Reciprocal, recorded over the original take of ‘Blandest’. It’s an odd number, almost laidback: a mishmash of Sixties pop sensibilities, spoken word segments and topped off by Kurt’s mighty roar. The ‘grunge’ quotient is to the fore – the scuzzy-sounding guitars, thumping drums, distortion. In truth, it’s one of the weaker songs on the collection.
The set, issued in a run of 5,000, was made up of 19 songs over three 12-inch EPs and a booklet, packaged in a plain black box; although the compilation was focused on the Northwest, the breadth of musical style was astonishing, giving the lie to the idea of Sub Pop being a ‘one sound’ label. Freewheeling beat poet Steven Jesse Bernstein nestled next to Beat Happening’s stark pop and Soundgarden’s rip-roaring pisstake of Seattle ‘attitude’ on their inspired tribute to Kiss, ‘Sub Pop Rock City’. Mudhoney covered Bette Midler’s ‘The Rose’ with enthusiastic panache; The Walkabouts and Terry Lee Hale ploughed a bittersweet country groove; Tad crushed with his grinding distillation of the rage and frustration and hurt inherent in a thousand dead-end lives. Screaming Trees played acid blues. Nights And Days were similar to early White Stripes influence, The Gories.23 Fastbacks played pop, pure and simple. Girl Trouble rocked.
“My philosophy of Sub Pop is this,” Pavitt told me at the time. “I worked at Muzak for three years with a lot of these guys. It was a classic corporate set-up. It started off by being easy-going but soon, like most businesses, it was curtailing our freedom of expression. And when, for eight to 10 hours a day, your personal freedom is being restricted, when you’re being punished for being creative, then you’re not living in a free, democratic country. You’re living in a fascist dictatorship. Sub Pop is a business set up to encourage freedom of thought.”
“As far as A& R goes,’ Jonathan added. “You go to see one of your friend’s bands and you think, ‘Yeah that sounds cool.’ It’s only occasionally we go out on a limb. I did with Nirvana.”
Inside the booklet, there were 14 pages of black and white Charles Peterson photographs, no words (save identification of artist): indelibly stamping a visual style upon the longhaired musicians of Seattle and its surrounding areas, circa 1988. Blurred movement lines, arms flailing, mostly live captures with guitars in musicians’ hands, immediately exciting, immediately enticing.
Pavitt and Poneman had been smart: by giving all their artists to one photographer to document, they’d stamped an identity upon their nascent scene far greater than any number of words could ever do.
There was a time when it seemed mandatory for Sub Pop bands to have recorded with Jack Endino and been photographed by Charles Peterson. How deliberate was that?
“Extremely,” replies Bruce Pavitt. “First of all, they are both brilliant. I was extremely interested in creating a label identity, looking at Blue Note or 4AD24 as models. Factory25 was the perfect example with the design and the production being so focused. I wanted to transpose that. The punk scene seemed fairly scattered and unfocused, with the exception of SST.
“It was Charles Peterson’s photos that inspired me to step into doing regional recordings, even more so than the music,” Pavitt continues. “I was at a party at the [early Seattle band] Room 9 house, and Charles had just finished printing up the 3' × 9' photos of his work. The house was like an art gallery. I remember feeling the energy of those photos and being completely taken in by the aesthetic. I said, ‘If we can translate the energy that I am feeling from these photos, people will be moved.’ He offered a vision of unification. It totally captured the essence of the music. The aesthetics of how things are presented visually is absolutely key.”
“As far as graphic identity went, it was mostly Bruce’s vision – and also Jeff Ament and Linda Owens, our original graphic designer,” says Jonathan. “Bruce could articulate in a very simple way. He isolated immediately what he liked and didn’t like about album art.”
Bruce refers to a specific incident when he went around to Charles’ house for the first time and saw all the massive photos up on his walls.
“That’s absolutely right,” Jon agrees. “Charles was the most essential ingredient, particularly early on. I had never seen anything like the shots that Charles had been taking. It was a visual signature that defined the whole scene. The
re was this colossal quality to everything. Everything was exaggerated and just heavier than heavy, and sexy as can be. In many ways it was the antithesis of everything that was popular at the time.”
The photo of Nirvana in the Sub Pop 200 booklet came from Peterson’s first formal session with the group – taken earlier that summer on Bainbridge. “We drove all over the countryside with Shocking Blue playing on the cassette,” Peterson recalls, “and did the standard ‘find a location’. I had no fucking clue as to what to do for a photo shoot. It was awkward because Krist was a head and a half taller than the rest of them. They were super-nice and a bit hippie-ish. Kurt was kind of unwashed, very shy – very frail. At the end of the day, we ended up in this field of dried flowers. We were all self-conscious about it. In the end, because we knew it was stupid, the pictures are quite sweet.”
“Six months after I saw them, they started to become really good,” recalls Pavitt. “The turning point was at the Annex Theatre on Fourth where they played an all-ages show. Even though they spent five minutes tuning up between each song, there was definitely something there. A friend from Olympia, Dave Todd, came up and said, ‘They are the next Beatles.’ It was an interesting reaction because I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or being sincere, and I found that my own feelings were wavering the same way – even though they were still really young, immature and barely able to tune up. And that was pretty outrageous, because there was something going on in that room that was magical, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.”
“What really got me into Nirvana was when Cat Butt played the Sub Pop 200 record release party,” says James Burdyshaw. To help promote the album’s launch, Jon and Bruce threw a two-night party at The Underground, featuring eight of their bands, on December 28–29. Nirvana opened the first night. “There were about 40 people there. I remember standing with my mouth open – because that’s when Kurt started pulling out those melodies. I was not expecting that. I did not see that craft in the same guy who just a few months earlier was doing nothing but screaming in Squid Row. The rest of the night I couldn’t give a fuck about any of the other bands, all I could think about was how good Nirvana was.