Nirvana

by Everett True

  I reviewed three unknown Pacific Northwest singles together: The U-Men’s ‘Solid Action’, ‘Love Buzz’ and Some Velvet Sidewalk’s ‘I Know’, making them US Singles Of The Week. I wrote:

  Some more serious disorder from Seattle. Singles of the . . . fuck it! Whatever time-period you want, babe! These shit-kicking muthas make ANYTHING released previously sound positively lightweight in comparison.

  The U-Men single keeps grinding on in there like a DEMENTED cat force-fed Motörhead at 78rpm, or Dinosaur Jr stuck in a time field of Green River shaking down The Stooges. “SOLID ACTION! IF I EVER FIND BILL WE’RE GONNA RIDE A BUS! ACTION! SOLID ACTION!’” That’s how the lyrics go; sometimes frenzied, other times highly frenzied. But they always have warm red POP tunes coerced in underneath. Blistering.

  Nirvana are beauty incarnate. A relentless two-chord garage beat which lays down some serious foundations for a sheer monster of a guitar force to howl over. The volume control ain’t been built yet which can do justice to this three-piece! WHAT IS GOING DOWN OVER THERE? Someone pass me a gun. Limited edition of a thousand; love songs for the psychotically disturbed.

  ‘I Know’ has marginally less structure, but oodles more trebly feedback. There are only two members in this group? HUH? So why are my fucking ears bleeding?! Dementia personified; especially the songs on the flip. Steve Fisk and Calvin Johnson were present at the recording. That might go some way towards explaining some of all this . . . The International Pop Underground marches on.

  Here were bands that achieved what I had thought hitherto impossible: they made metal sound cool. During the mid-Eighties, pop music was anti-guitar. You couldn’t pick up a music paper in the UK without reading someone telling you guitars were old and dead and phallic symbols of repression. Jon and Bruce’s stroke of marketing genius was to push rock’n’roll as rebellion – an ancient credo – while allowing people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility. Up until grunge, there had always been a line drawn between popular and underground music; Journey on one side, Dead Kennedys on the other. People got beat up for being punk rock, especially in the US.

  Sub Pop confused that line once and for all.

  “There were very few people that understood all the references that I and Calvin knew,” explains Pavitt. “When you came over there was an instant bond. Here there was this heavy primal music coming out of Seattle that could have been picked up by metal magazines, but wasn’t. And because it was funnelled through your perspective, it took on a different flavour. It was filtered through a deeper understanding of independent music and punk rock. It was our connection that helped – you talking to me, me talking to Mark Arm, Mark talking to Matt Lukin, and all of a sudden there is this hook-up between someone who is very literate, such as yourself, hanging out with Matt Lukin, who is a metal rocker dude. If you’d just showed up and started hanging out with Matt Lukin, there would have been cultural dissonance and it wouldn’t have happened.”

  Arriving at Bruce’s place in Seattle, I found myself expected to share a mattress with my photographer Andy Catlin. Our companions were a borrowed record store rack filled with rare – even then – Sub Pop singles and a couple of beanbags. Above our heads loomed the twin radio towers of Capitol Hill. I stayed. Sleeping on floors was nothing unusual for me, and I relished the idea of staying with the guy who ran the whole operation. Andy checked into a hotel the next morning.

  I can still picture Bruce and me wandering along Pine across the Interstate 5 bridge in the freezing winter air, on our way past the big department store downtown. He was explaining how 95 per cent of all body heat is lost through the head. “Excuse me Legend!” he said to me, “but do you mind if I borrow your hood?” So I unzipped the detachable hood from my parka, and he pulled it over his shaved head. We must have made an odd couple: me, all strained and bubbling with excitement; him, wearing a weird hood to match his epic beard, filling in my noise with the odd hesitant silence.

  We hooked up with Calvin and Olympian friends for an all-night dance party, no alcohol involved. We danced to the cool sounds of Sixties soul and Mod, all of us comfortable in our own steps. It felt like the norm for Seattle, these fun and frantic and innocent celebrations of music.

  I loved the little roundabouts in the centre of each meticulously laid out street around the Capitol Hill area, flowers and trees growing on each one. We’d rise early and walk down to Bruce’s place of work, on the 11th floor of the Terminal Sales Building on 1st and Virginia, stopping off for a coffee. There we met ace radio PR Erica Hunter, whose task it was to amuse the eager Limey; sales people Daniel House and Mark Pickerel; musicians like Swallow’s Chris Pugh, and Tad Doyle. People like Jonathan Poneman, a man who always reminded me of a big loveable shaggy dog, and photographer Charles Peterson.

  “I was given the task of entertaining the English journalist until they could get you a band to interview,” recalls Charles. “I took you to the Starbucks at Pike Place Market. At the time, Starbucks was still a novelty. You ordered two coffees, grabbed a couple of cookies and a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans. I was like, ‘Oh my god, he’s just gonna lose it if he ingests all of this.’ ”

  It wasn’t until about four visits in that I got to recognise anywhere in Seattle apart from the tiny strip along 1st outside Sub Pop: all the necessary bars were downtown, either in Belltown or near the Showbox, the opposite way.

  Nirvana began work on their debut album, Christmas Eve 1988. “We had nothing else to do,” commented Krist. Lyrics were finalised at the last minute: some written the night before and others in transit. Chad remembers Kurt scribbling the words to ‘Swap Meet’ on the drive down to Seattle, resting a piece of paper on the dashboard. The basis for about 10 songs was laid down with Jack Endino in five hours. Kurt wasn’t satisfied with his vocals, except for the one on ‘Blew’, which happened only because he’d accidentally tuned to ‘drop-D’ – much lower than standard. That explains the track’s almost giddy, leaden, drunken tone.

  Songs recorded included ‘About A Girl’, ‘School’, ‘Negative Creep’, ‘Scoff ’, ‘Swap Meet’ (a very Aberdeen song concerning a man and a woman who meet up at Sunday swap meets to sell bric-a-brac and handicrafts and general household junk), ‘Mr Moustache’ (a possible reference to ‘rednecks’ like Dave Foster) and ‘Sifting’.

  “Our songs are about changing yourself, frustration,” Kurt told me in 1990. “ ‘School’ was some surreal idea I had about being in school and being in social cliques all the time, and then you grow up, having to deal with exactly the same things with your friends at parties and in clubs as you did in high school.”

  More specifically, ‘School’ was written about Kurt’s feelings of irritation on finding himself “back in school again” after Nirvana’s first couple of Sub Pop-promoted Seattle shows. “If I could have thrown Soundgarden’s name [into the song], I would have,” he dryly commented.

  ‘Paper Cuts’ was far more horrific, based on the true story of an Aberdeen family who kept their children locked up in a single room – entering only to feed them and remove the soiled newspapers the children had been forced to relieve themselves on.

  “They were mostly songs about lower life society and stuff like that,” says Chad, “and there were some campy things like ‘Floyd The Barber’, taken from The Andy Griffith Show.2 There was nothing particularly that stood out for me. I just went in and recorded my parts, you know? I didn’t have much of a say in band decisions. ‘Swap Meet’ was one of my favourites – that, and ‘Negative Creep’. ‘About A Girl’ was a good song. I always liked ‘Mr Moustache’, just because it was so fricking funny. I liked them all. ‘Big Cheese’ is probably one of my favourite Nirvana songs of all time.”

  “ ‘Swap Meet’ was originally spelt ‘Swap Meat’, which would’ve been funnier,” comments Endino.

  “You know about ‘Negative Creep’, don’t you?” asks Steve Fisk. “I got told it was about the guy who lived across the street from the duplex
and would come over while Kurt was gone to try to smoke Tracy out.”

  “That sounds positively Pear Street, Olympia,” suggests John Goodmanson.

  I thought it was a tribute song to Mudhoney, its heavy thunderous music and hook line of “Daddy’s little girl/ Ain’t a girl no more” echoing Mudhoney’s “Sweet young thing/ Ain’t sweet no more” (from ‘Sweet Young Thing’). After all, as Kurt explained to Flipside in 1989, he didn’t care too much for lyrics: “I don’t consider [them] a big deal at all,” he said. “As long as it has a good melody line; a hook and live energy is far more important . . .”

  Or perhaps the song is about Kurt himself, with its scowling refrain, “I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned”. Whatever. It’s hardly Blood On The Tracks or William S. Burroughs. It’s fucking rock’n’roll. There to be hurled shimmering into the air alongside Mr Novoselic’s bass for a few brief glorious seconds, and then discarded. It’s not that important what the songs are about.

  Nirvana were always more about the intonation, the energy, the emphasis Kurt placed on certain syllables and guitar riffs than actual words. And don’t trust anyone who tells you any different.

  The trio returned to Jack’s studio on five occasions to finish off the album – December 29 (five hours), December 30 (five hours), December 31 (four and a half hours), January 14 (five hours) and January 24 (five and a half hours). Krist would drive as far as 400 miles on the days off in between in his white stub-nosed Dodge; from Aberdeen to Olympia to collect Kurt for rehearsal, then on to Seattle to pick up Chad who’d taken the ferry in from Bainbridge . . . and all the way back to Aberdeen.

  “They were professional,” says Jack. “It was just show up, plug in, tune up, ‘OK, you know the songs? Good. We can record then.’ Most of the Sub Pop bands were professional. Mudhoney, they were rehearsed, they knew how to play, everybody knew their songs . . .”

  If you’ve got no money you’re not going to waste time fucking around.

  “No, exactly,” replies the engineer. “You don’t have time to spend two months in the studio ‘writing the songs’ and working out whether you should have two chords before the verse or three. I love indie rock because it’s right now. This is it. We have to mix tomorrow. There’s instant gratification.”

  It allows for spontaneity.

  “Absolutely. I’ve done a lot of records that have taken weeks – months even – and I don’t look back that fondly on many of those. The ones I still enjoy listening to are the weird indie records, strange bands that came in and recorded in a day and had a spark.”

  I was going to ask about recording budgets . . .

  “Bleach, $600. It’s true. OK, next question.” Jack looks bemused, then realises why I’m asking the question. “Oh, that’s right,” he sighs. “You and me were on the same panel about grunge as Jonathan in 1998.3 He was arguing that it cost more, and I was like, ‘No, I’ve got the studio log sheets.’ He thinks he wrote a cheque for more money than that. And yet the Nirvana contract is at the EMP4, behind glass, and it says $600 on it. I know what we spent. It was $606.17. Now that leaves out the fact ‘Love Buzz’ and ‘Big Cheese’ were recorded at an earlier session, along with ‘Spank Thru’ which went on Sub Pop 200 and ‘Blandest’ which is on the box set [With The Lights Out, 2004]. Those four songs were recorded during the ‘Love Buzz’ sessions for $150 or something, so you could maybe add another $75 for that portion of it – but I may have even taken that into account. In any case, it wasn’t much over $600.”

  Bleach was recorded in a haze of cough medicine and alcohol. “We were all sick by then,” Krist told Michael Azerrad. The band was drinking codeine syrup on prescription from the Pierce County Health Department. Money was still at a premium: if a song wasn’t good enough to be used it would be recorded over.

  Heard in the context of 2006, Bleach sounds remarkably tuneful – maybe familiarity blurs the senses because back then the general feeling was that it sounded too metal. But this is because metal, and our perception of it, has since changed. It’s got more extreme. Led Zeppelin were once considered metal. Now people just think of them as hard rock.

  Kurt himself felt the album had shortcomings: “Bleach seemed to be really one-dimensional,” he complained in 1992. “It has the same format throughout – there were a few guitar overdubs, but that’s it. All the songs are slow and grungy and they’re tuned down to really low notes. And I screamed a lot.” There again, Kurt was never satisfied with anything.

  Now, Bleach sounds vibrant and buzzing with melody: it’s an album that’s matured well. Back then only the jangling love song, ‘About A Girl’, with its plaintive acoustic guitar intro, stood out – and perhaps ‘Blew’. There was a little too much Melvins-esque torpor: not enough Olympian underground pop fervour. Not all critics agreed: Simon Reynolds, reviewing Sub Pop 200 in Melody Maker, called Nirvana, “Too complex for their own good.”

  But that was when everyone expected anything associated with Sub Pop to be heads-down, no-nonsense, hair flailing, three-chord thrash.

  “I think Kurt felt nervous about putting ‘About A Girl’ on there,” Endino told Gillian G. Gaar. “But he was very insistent on it. He said, ‘I’ve got a song that’s totally different from the others, Jack, you’ve gotta just humour me here, because we’re gonna do this real pop tune.’ The question was raised at some point, gee, I wonder if Sub Pop’s going to like this, and we decided, ‘Who cares?’ Sub Pop said nothing. In fact, I think they liked it a lot. Jonathan is a total pop head. And Bruce didn’t like Bleach that much anyway, because I think he thought it was a little too heavy metal.”

  Kurt had already written a few other pop songs similar to ‘About A Girl’ – most notably the disquieting tale of rape, ‘Polly’ – but held back from using them. He realised the time wasn’t right.

  “We purposely made Bleach one-dimensional, more ‘rock’ than it should have been,” Kurt told Michael Azerrad. “There was this pressure from Sub Pop and the scene to play ‘rock music’, strip it down and make it sound like Aerosmith.”

  Three remixed songs from the Crover demo ended up being used on the final version of the album, ‘Floyd The Barber’, ‘Downer’ and ‘Paper Cuts’. “They weren’t happy with the way Chad was playing,” Endino comments. “Dale had written the drum part for those three songs; he played them the best. And Chad was good on the stuff that they had written with him. That’s the way it is with drummers.”

  The night before the first recording session, the band stayed in Seattle at a friend of Dylan Carlson’s, Jason Everman. He too was the product of a broken home and an ex-Aberdeen resident. Everman had also spent a few summers working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, which came in handy when Nirvana asked him for a loan to meet the album’s recording costs.

  Jason willingly stumped up the money.

  The band set off on their first tour of the US in high spirits. It was just a two-week West Coast tour, supporting Mudhoney and Melvins – down to California and back – but it did wonders for their confidence, even if Sub Pop’s logo appeared on the flyers more prominently than Nirvana’s name.

  “We went out in Krist’s white van,” recalls Chad. “Before we left, he built a bunk across the back, just below the back windows. And he sawed off the top of the knob on the inside so the only way you could get into our gear was by opening the door with the key. Even if you broke the windows, you couldn’t get in to our gear. I remember sliding in the amps sideways and they just fit. To this day, bands use those bunks. They’re basically impregnable unless you have a welding torch.”

  “I booked the first couple of Nirvana tours,” says Seattle musician Danny Bland. “Sub Pop was passionate and people from Seattle were too, but outside of the immediate area no one cared. We had our stops along the West Coast. All the Sub Pop bands stopped in the same places. Raji’s was a stop, the Pyramid in New York, the Chatterbox in San Francisco, Jabberjaw in LA, Satyricon in Portland5, Santa Barbara and UC Davis at the school.”

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sp; “I did a fanzine in Boston,” recounts independent promoter Debbi Shane. “At that time indie labels were little hype machines, and then Sub Pop released the first Soundgarden single and their little hype machine began to spin rapidly, increasing the attention to all of their bands. Mudhoney were great. I got their single on brown vinyl. Next was Nirvana. I bought ‘Love Buzz’ in Eugene, Oregon and was blown away. I was so excited. I was a huge fan. Candice [Pedersen, K co-boss] came and lived with us [in San Francisco] for a summer. She knew Nirvana. They wanted her to manage them, and she didn’t feel like she was qualified. We went to a show and I had read so much into Kurt’s lyrics because I thought he was a genius.

  “It was at the Covered Wagon in San Francisco [February 10]; they played with the Melvins,” Debbi continues. “They were amazing. What stood out was the embarrassment afterwards backstage when I asked Kurt what ‘Spank Thru’ was about. I had read so much into it that I thought Kurt had come up with this really cool metaphor. But it’s basically about what it’s about. They kind of laughed at me, but because I was with Candice they were sweet.”

  How did Kurt strike you when you first met him?

  “He was sweet, quiet and almost as painfully shy as I was. We didn’t have a lot of interaction. I don’t remember thinking, ‘This guy is a jerk.’ ”

  It was in San Francisco, on their way to the Haight-Ashbury free clinic to pick up more drugs to combat the flu, that the band noticed a major AIDS prevention poster campaign. Billboards encouraged drug users to ‘Bleach your works’ (clean needles with bleach to kill the virus). Kurt had been thinking of calling the album Too Many Humans, but after joking around with the phrase with Jon and Bruce who were in the van at the time, the idea that bleach could – as Bruce Pavitt put it – “become such a valuable substance” stuck in his head.