by Everett True
The Covered Wagon show was, according to one account, a miserable experience. There was almost no one there: the band, reduced by circumstance and cancelled gigs and the necessity to find money for petrol, were driven to eating out afterwards at a free soup kitchen run by the Hare Krishna sect. Afterwards, seven people shared an apartment floor: a miserable time – or the reality of being in an up-and-coming band still being played out countless times the world over? It can be exhilarating to share your nights and drugs and friends in such close proximity, especially when you’re starting out.
The night after the San Francisco show, Nirvana played Palo Alto, supporting Mudhoney. It was Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner’s favourite ever Nirvana performance.
“We played a small show with them in this place that was like a storefront with a big plate glass window and a tiny stage,” he recalls. “And Kurt was rolling around on the stage and he kind of rolled backwards and somehow managed to be balancing on his head and still playing his guitar – it was the weirdest thing because he was like magically balancing on his head without using his hands. There was not a big crowd in there, maybe 50 people, and the guys were cracking up at the absurdity of it. Nirvana were a wreck but in a really great, chaotic way.”
The band returned to Seattle on February 25 to play the HUB Ballroom at the University of Washington – an all-ages show, four bands for four bucks.
Kurt didn’t have much experience of singing and playing guitar at the same time: a second guitarist was needed. Jason Everman seemed to fit the bill. “We were ready to take anyone if they could play guitar OK,” Kurt said. “He seemed like a nice guy and he had the Sub Pop hair.” So Jason joined, and even though he didn’t play on the album, he was credited on the sleeve. “We just wanted to make him feel more at home,” explained Krist.
The first show that Jason played with Nirvana was a drunken Evergreen dorm party. Problems began to arise immediately. Although Jason was into punk rock, he was more interested in speed metal – not the ‘cool’ punk of Olympia, but testosterone-fuelled exercises in seeing how fast and loud one could play the guitar. His guitar sound was much more ‘metal’ than Kurt’s.
“What you heard on record was pretty much what the band sounded like,” says soundman Craig Montgomery. “More chaotic live. Noisier. When they had Jason in the band, I would listen to each guitar-player in the headphones, trying to figure out who was doing what, and only Kurt’s guitar made any sense. What was coming out of Everman’s amp was just a bunch of noise. It wasn’t that it made no sense, more that it didn’t sound good. I’m sure he was playing the right chords, but he didn’t have a good sound. To make the mix work I needed to lean on Kurt’s guitar.”
“Jason worked out fine in the beginning,” says Chad loyally. “He was really into his speed metal. He turned me on to some of the more obscure metal bands, like Testament, and Celtic Frost before they went glam. We knew each other already, because he’d played in my old band Stone Crow – who were speed metal. Destruction and Possessed and Slayer, all that stuff, influenced us.
“Jason was a working type of guy,” the drummer adds. “He was almost on the music scene more than into the actual music. We’d go record shopping, and anything new he’d pick it up. He was the fan that got a chance to play with bands he was a fan of. The dynamic of Nirvana didn’t change much when he joined. Essentially, Kurt always wanted somebody to play the parts he was playing so that he didn’t have to concentrate so hard. So Jason hung back and kept the rhythm parts going.”
“The first show I saw them play with Jason was in San Francisco,” recalls Jonathan Poneman. This runs contrary to accepted Nirvana history, which has the HUB Ballroom as Jason’s first major show, but recent documents unearthed support Jonathan’s claim. Melvins’ new bassist Joe Preston interviewed Nirvana at the Covered Wagon for his Matt Lukin’s Legs fanzine – and Jason was present.6
“I can’t confirm the soup kitchen thing,” Poneman continues, “but I can confirm that Bruce and I rode with Nirvana to Palo Alto the following night. That was the first time that I heard NWA7, in the Nirvana van. You remember the first time you hear [ NWA debut album] Straight Outta Compton. You just do. Personalities aside, Jason made Nirvana much more powerful. That Nirvana eventually took on another auxiliary player must mean that Kurt appreciated the results as well . . .
“So I get to the gig, and there’s another guy on stage!” Poneman goes on. “Kurt says, ‘It’s my surprise for you’ – because I’d been saying he needed another guitar-player. I don’t know whether it was because of a lack of volume pedals or whatever but when they used to play it would be this monster roar of a sound and Kurt would go to do a solo and suddenly it would get very thin sounding. That was the first show they did as a quartet, and it was fucking great.”
You always were more into the metal than me . . .
“I was,” he agrees. “Not metal, but it was more Soundgarden-like. They were the big band at the time. He or Courtney later wrote Soundgarden off as being meat-headed rock, but Kurt loved Soundgarden early on.”
What were you doing 15 years ago?
“I had just got out of high school,” replies Nirvana fan Rob Kader. “I was working at my uncle’s deli on Eastlake alongside some punk guys from Tennessee. After work, I’d go over to their house in the University District and drink, do psychedelics and listen to music. They had a roommate, Jason Everman . . .”
Can you describe Jason?
“Jason was a very sweet guy. He’s portrayed as having anger management problems, but he was a pretty good friend. He was the one that was sober in the whole household – and, at the time, acted as a big brother to me. He played me the ‘Love Buzz’ single when it came out, and its beauty floored me. I was like, ‘ Fuck, you’ve gotta get into this band!’ The HUB Ballroom show was my first taste of Sub Pop in general. I went into the bathroom after a great set from The Fluid8 – and in walks Krist, a big bouncy funny guy yelling and being like he always is with his running commentary. I thought, ‘Wow, this is so cool.’ ”
What was the band like as people?
“They were very down-to-earth guys. We went to Jason’s house afterwards, and Kurt was smoking a bowl, attempting to mellow out after a fierce performance. Everyone was pretty quiet until they ended up in Jason’s room and started to scrutinise his record collection. Jason had a whole range of tastes, but he did get some ribbing for his extensive, obscure, metal collection. Ha ha.”
Does anything stand out about their performance that night?
“Just the intensity. The whole band, and Kurt in particular, played until they had nothing left. It was brutal, the way he put his body through so much. I would go up to Kurt sometimes after shows, and he’d be so exhausted he couldn’t even carry on a conversation. Some people might think it was drugs, but he was sober every show I knew of.”
What did you think Jason brought to the band?
“He brought a lot of hair,” laughs Rob. “And he brought some money. I think . . . a little extra crunch. And I’m sure it was nice for Kurt, as he was flailing around, to have a second guitarist. Having a second guitarist added a security blanket to Kurt’s psyche, allowing him to play and move more freely.”
The HUB Ballroom show was my first experience of Nirvana live.
I was disappointed. I loved their single, but what was this mess of noise and hair and alcohol-fuelled banter? I’d thought of their sound as Mod – a definition crucial to this English boy9 – but this was anything but. This was just another Blood Circus or Cat Butt; another formless compendium of noise for noise’s sake, no pop tunes or spark or anything. Sure, they seemed like fun, mischievous folk: Krist in particular was determined to make an impression, whatever it took. Placed next to characters such as Tad Doyle and his gross, evil humour, though, this Aberdeen quartet paled into insignificance. Despite reports years later from people who weren’t present, the crowd wasn’t much impressed either: the slam-dancing and frantic stagediving10 that were reported
as taking place during Nirvana’s set mostly happened while The Fluid were playing – there’s a damn fine Peterson photograph taken then that adorns a reissued Sub Pop 200, the crowd a blur of emotion and sweat. Nirvana took too long between songs to inspire such movement.
They did destroy their instruments, though – after the show, the management suspended live bookings for a short while, due to damage incurred during Nirvana’s set.
Standing at the side during The Fluid, I indicated that I fancied performing myself. You could almost picture the thought processes going through Jon and Bruce’s heads, like, “Who the fuck is this guy? We’ve paid for him to come over here and write a big article on our label and now he wants to get on stage? We better humour him . . .” So the singer from Tacoma’s garage kings (and queen) Girl Trouble offered to lend me a guitar – a fancy piece of Sixties work. “You’re not going to be rough with this, are you?” he asked, catching the gleam in my eye. Jesus yes. Er, I mean no. So I took the stage just before Girl Trouble (Skin Yard headlined), drunkenly essaying my way through The Beatles’ ‘I’m Down’ and 13th Floor Elevators’ ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ in front of the Seattle rock cognoscenti, before exhorting the audience to sing along with my a cappella take on ‘Sweet Soul Music’ . . .
“Do you like good music?” I chanted, and 800 voices chanted back, “YEAH, YEAH!” I segued it into a new cover, of The Inkspots’ ‘Do Nuts’.11 The crowd fucking loved it. I liked this city.
That night, as far as I was concerned, Nirvana were trounced on every front. All week long, Jonathan had been pumping the band to me over Mexican beer. On course for world domination was the gist of it. I began to think it was the deluded wanderings of a fevered mind. But it seemed I was in the minority, even then . . .
“The first time I photographed Nirvana live was at the HUB Ballroom,” recalls Charles Peterson. “They totally blew me away. They blew everybody away. The buzz was on. Were you at that show?”
Yes. You liked them? I thought they sucked.
“That’s because you hadn’t seen them really suck,” he laughs. “I liked them because visually they were night and day compared to what I had seen before. They tore up the stage. I don’t know if that was Jason’s influence because he was very active. He had the ‘grunge’ thing nailed down.”
“It was the first time I’d seen stagediving,” recalls Craig Montgomery. “I was never a big fan of it because it would fuck up the sound. I just wanted to hear the music. I hated it when some yahoo was up there, bumping into the mic stand and kicking the guitar-player’s pedals around. It didn’t have anything to do with the music. It was like a thrill ride or a football game. I don’t think Nirvana cared either way. I’d guess that Kurt would rather have been listened to than stagedived to. Especially later when it got to be dick jocks venting their testosterone.”
In an interview conducted that day with the University of Washington paper The Daily, Krist and Chad admitted to earning money from dishwashing, Jason was living off his earnings, while Kurt was living off his girlfriend Tracy.
“I’d like to live off the band,” Kurt told journalist Phil West, “but if not, I’ll just retire to Mexico or Yugoslavia with a few hundred dollars, grow potatoes and learn the history of rock’n’roll through back issues of Creem magazine.”
Kurt turned 22 in February 1989.
He was to spend most of the year touring with Nirvana – over 100 shows compared to a scant two dozen in the previous two years – and creating art at Tracy’s Pear Street apartment in Olympia. He’d paint with whatever medium came to hand: acrylic paints, magic marker, spray cans, blood, pen, pencil – and on whatever improvised canvas he could scarf up at local thrift stores: often the back of board games. On rare occasions, he’d even paint using his own semen. He’d paint aliens, diseased children, grossly distorted childhood images utilising pop icono-graphic figures such as Batman and Barbie – his paintings increasingly folding into three dimensions. Driven by a lust for expression, he began to collect junk and general ephemera: toy cars, action figures, headless dolls – most of which would later be broken down or melted in the backyard to become part of his artistic endeavours. Everything was dark and distorted and disturbing: sexual organs would be changed between male and female and given fresh layers of meaning. He’d paint in his underpants, in home-made band T-shirts, in his striped sweaters – that is, in between lounging around and watching TV, rehearsals, jotting down ideas for songs in his journal, and looking for cheap equipment in charity shops.
“There were lots of thrift stores in Aberdeen,” laughs Ian Dickson. “We’d take road trips down from Olympia and meet in Tacoma a lot. Kurt knew where every pawnshop was too because he was always looking for musical equipment. He would just drive around . . .”
What kind of stuff would he get? “Effects pedals,” Dickson replies.
“Effects pedals,” Dickson replies. “ Mudhoney and Nirvana and the grunge guys changed the industry for effects pedals. Before Nirvana’s success, Kurt went to huge lengths to get the pedals he wanted because they didn’t manufacture them any more. They were all manufactured in the Seventies by MXR, and MXR had gone out of business. Kurt and Dylan would constantly be looking for them – Tacoma was a goldmine because it was off the map. This stuff was highly technical. Kurt was an artist and he had all these crazy ideas, but he also knew what he wanted and he’d go to any lengths to get it, pretty much.”
I can recall the broad brush-strokes of my first meeting with Nirvana if not the fine details. It was a sunny winter’s day in Seattle along the lake front about two blocks down from Sub Pop’s penthouse apartment on 1st Avenue, and a two-minute walk from Pike Place Fish Market. A little patch of green much favoured by tramps and passing hawkers on bicycles served as the venue for Nirvana’s first major press interview. I remember it well because on the day of Kurt’s memorial service in 1994, the preacher instructed us to all go seek out the place where Nirvana were most special to us, and remember them that way. I thought he was full of bullshit, but walked down there anyway, mainly because I felt that the other speakers that day were even more full of bullshit.
Jonathan took me down the steep hillside to meet the four chaps who comprised Nirvana: Kurdt Kobain (as he spelled his name back then), Chris Novoselic (also the original spelling), Chad Channing and temporary extra guitarist Jason Everman. Already Poneman, a master of hyperbole, was pumping me full of half-truths and promises about Nirvana’s potential.
“This is the real thing,” he told me in a quote I later took as my own, which then, to my undying shame, got repeated the world over. “No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination. You’re talking about four guys in their early twenties from rural Washington who want to rock. You’re talking about four guys who, if they weren’t doing this, would be working in a supermarket or lumber yard, or fixing cars.”12
Jonathan always did have a great way with words. I’d swear he’d missed his true vocation if he wasn’t like a thousand times richer than me.
“ Kurdt Kobain is a great tunesmith,’ he continued, “although still a relatively young songwriter. He wields a riff with passion. He’s your archetypal small guy: wiry, defiantly working class and fiery. His provincial and witty lyrics bring to mind an American Mark E. Smith.13 Nirvana deals a lot with Calvin Johnson type themes: innocence and the repression of innocence. Nirvana songs treat the banal and pedestrian with a unique slant.”
The band themselves were lively, excited to meet a music critic from England, eager to distort the truth, not for any sinister purposes but because it was fun. Jason said he’d worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska for three years – true! Chris, the lanky friendly bassist, informed me he’d once been a competitive tree-climber – false! Kurdt said his pet rat had once bit Bruce Pavitt – true!14 The singer also admitted to a love of the Pixies, told me how the band had been branded as Satan-worshippers back home and got into a momentary argument with a passing sales
man, flaunting tapes.
“How much are those?” he asked.
One dollar, came the reply.
“ Shit,” said Kurdt. “One dollar for a Van Morrison cassette? There are pawn shops around here that will give you 20 bucks for them.”
The guy disappeared, after trying to sell us some hash.
“We set that one up,” Chris claimed. “To give you a taste of weird Americana. He’s the fifth member of Nirvana.”
Jonathan stopped by to see how the interview was going and gee us up into creating more ridiculous quotes. A cat walked by on a leash. I had a five-minute coughing fit and nearly asphyxiated.
It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts to my relationship with Nirvana, although the band partly revealed their musical preferences: “ Aerosmith, Tuxedomoon15, NWA, [Sixties pop group] Herman’s Hermits, Leadbelly, hard rock, punk rock, power pop, hip hop, Sub Pop . . .” When the interview finally appeared in Melody Maker several months later, Everman had left the band. So, in time-honoured music press fashion, I doctored the conversation – to make it appear I’d only been speaking to three people. It hardly mattered. I couldn’t tell one speaker from another anyway.
In truth, Nirvana barely registered with me. There was plenty else happening at that time, during my first two weeks in America – a trip to my own personal Mecca, Olympia, for one – to divert my attention away from this group of youngsters who seemed somehow separate from everyone else. Sure, I’d made ‘Love Buzz’ single of the week but I knew plenty of bands that had flamed just as briefly and then flickered out.