Nirvana

by Everett True

  Bleach hit the streets on June 15, 1989. Sub Pop’s press release boasted, “Hypnotic and righteous heaviness from these Olympia pop stars. They’re young, they own their own van, and they’re going to make us rich!” The first thousand copies appeared on white vinyl. The next 2,000 came with an awesome Charles Peterson poster.

  Choosing a cover was a problem. Alice Wheeler did a session, but the results weren’t good: “Nirvana came over to my house in the afternoon,” she told Gillian G. Gaar. “We went up the street and took some pictures and they weren’t that great. Jason was like Mr Glam Boy compared to Kurt; Kurt looks pretty washed out in most of those pictures. I don’t like them very much. And the band didn’t like them. Bruce loved ’em, though. But of course he liked the idea of the scary hick from Aberdeen.”

  One of Tracy Marander’s pictures appeared on the cover instead – a live shot of Nirvana performing at the Reko Muse art gallery in Olympia. It was a fun night: Ben Shepherd led friends in ‘the worm’ (a dance wherein participants wriggle around the floor, trying to make unwary members of the audience fall over) and Shelli and Krist got back together.

  The Sub Pop hype machine started to swing into full effect. My two-part Melody Maker profile appeared on March 18 and 25 – the first stages in generating an explosion of interest in the music, both outside the city and within. Almost overnight, Seattle became the place to namedrop. Of course, it helped that Mudhoney began their debut UK tour supporting Sonic Youth the week after the first article appeared, and that they were so incredible. But Nirvana were fast catching up . . .

  “Kurt had a brown wood Fender Mustang guitar with a Soundgarden sticker on it,” recalled Jason Troutman, former roommate of Jason Everman. “And he just smashed the shit out of it at the Annex Theatre in Seattle [April 7, 1989].”

  “They were going crazy at that show,” confirms Poneman. “It was the first time Kurt had been lifted up into the air by the crowd, which was like a rite of passage that only Mark Arm had previously been privy to. There was a real tribal quality to it. It was that night Bruce finally accepted how great Nirvana was.”

  A week later, Nirvana played Screaming Trees’ home town of Ellensburg – a show truncated brutally by an unsympathetic soundman, but one that created an instant fan out of the Trees’ frontman Mark Lanegan.

  “They completely blew me away,” he told Spin magazine in 1995. “It was like seeing The Who in their prime. After two songs some jerk who worked there stopped the show – they’d gone over their time limit. So they stood there for a second and then Krist started throwing his bass up in the air, up to the top of this 20-foot ceiling, and catching it with one hand. Meanwhile Kurt was letting his amp go loud as hell, and their road manager got in a fist-fight with the jerk guy. And this was in Ellensburg!”

  Not everyone was convinced. Future Nirvana producer Steve Fisk saw the same show: “They were terrible. They couldn’t even get it together to play a song. Kurt broke a string, ran in the corner and started throwing a fit. He started throwing his guitar around in the case. The two songs I stayed for didn’t go anywhere, like the most aimless kind of SST jam. When Jason started moving his hair and it had nothing to do with the beat, I said, ‘Posers,’ and walked out. If you had hair like that, you had to move it on the beat or not at all. The PA sucked bad. I had work to do, so I left.”

  “I was excited to see Nirvana at the Reko Muse Gallery,” says Goodmanson of another early ’89 show. (Nirvana played at the Gallery twice: the place was co-run by Kathleen Hanna, future singer of Bikini Kill.) “The flyer said, ‘Industrial Nirvana’. It was a gag show. Nirvana had got so sick of playing benefits they’d decided to take the piss out of the whole concept. They played a noise set . . . a really terrible noise set.”

  “I think Tobi Vail joined them for a little that night, and borrowed my drum machine and played repetitive beats,” adds Slim Moon.

  “It was a noise jam thing,” Vail admits. “It was fun. Everyone knew everyone. Nirvana played with a bunch of mates. I have no idea how it sounded. I do remember I had blisters all over my hands afterwards.”

  Whatever. There’s no stopping the hype machine once started.

  “Britain is currently held in thrall by a rock explosion emanating from one small insignificant West Coast American city, Seattle,” I wrote in Melody Maker. “Seattle, home of Quincy Jones, Bobby Sherman, Heart, Bruce Lee and the Space Needle (as featured in the 1962 Elvis Presley movie It Happened At The World’s Fair). Now it has a new claim to fame – the Sub Pop recording emporium, residing on the penthouse suite of the Terminal Sales Building . . .

  “As if from nowhere, hordes of shit-kicking, life-defying, grungy, gory, guitar bands, with one foot in the early Seventies and the other on punk rock’s grave, are springing up. Names such as Tad, ‘the Meatloaf of the New Wave’ and his spine-crushing band, and the incredible Nirvana, barely alive, yet already one of the finest exponents anywhere in the art of marring a simple instinctive two-chord song to oceans of speakers . . .”

  My use of the word ‘grunge’ in the above paragraph wasn’t the first use of the word in a UK music paper – I’d even used it myself a year before to describe the sound of Manchester’s fucked-up baggy kings Happy Mondays – but it was the first use in the context it became infamous for.16

  When Nirvana came to play Lamefest ’89 on June 9, the Moore Theatre was heaving with expectation. It was the largest place Nirvana had played, and they didn’t disappoint. By now, they were in full swing – instruments being smashed, the lot.

  “Kurt was swinging his guitar by its strap, hula-ing it around his neck,” remembers Gas Huffer drummer Joe Newton. “I was like, ‘He’s gonna get hurt!’ They had this abandon that rock’n’roll is supposed to have, this ‘rolling in glass’ kind of thing. Just the ability to let go of your mortality . . . to not fear getting injured. I couldn’t do that. It always made me mad, like: ‘I can’t afford that stuff either, what are they doing smashing that? I’ll take it!’”

  “That was really fun,” comments Chad. “The show was advertised for weeks in advance. I still have a flyer for that show. It’s the largest flyer I have ever been on. It was Mudhoney, Tad and Nirvana. It was crazy. A year ago, those three bands would have never been able to pull off a show at the Moore – and a large majority of the people in the world still didn’t know any of those bands! Unless you were living in Seattle, you’d wonder what the heck was going on.”

  “That was the show where they first released copies of Bleach,” recalls Rob Kader. “I picked up four white vinyl copies: I was so excited to have it. As I would get to go to more Nirvana shows, I was always impressed with how inclusive and ego-free the guys were. I remember hanging out with Nirvana in the van afterwards and pondering what to do next. There was a big party at the Annex Theatre and people were urging us to go and join the festivities. Everyone from Sub Pop was there. Kurt just shrugged the whole thing off and decided to go home.”

  The following night, Nirvana got asked by Sub Pop to step in for Cat Butt in Portland. Kader picks up the story.

  “We get to this tiny club, unload, go for some pizza, get back and are like, ‘ Fuck, there’s nobody here.’ The club’s hilarious. It’s set up like a war zone. It has these sandbags and fake barbed wire, but there are only about 12 people there. The band starts compiling a set list and look at me laughingly: ‘ Fuck it, we’ll play whatever song you want.’ Tracy is buying me beer after beer, so I’m all lit, and deep in their set I ask for ‘Sifting’ for a second time and Kurt says, ‘What the fuck, we already played that one!’ So Jason’s like, ‘Dude, ask for “Big Long Now”.’ So I do, since it’s one of my favourites. Krist exclaims, ‘We don’t play that one any more.’ Instead of waiting for another request from me they decide to close the show with their rendition of ‘Do You Love Me?’ they had just recorded for that Kiss tribute album.17 That was pretty much it.”

  Addenda 1: Olympia vs Seattle

  “We didn’t make the single to be Singl
e Of The Week,” replies Al Larsen. “We put out that single and we got a bunch of pictures taken, walking around town pushing our bikes. Really dull pictures, on purpose. If you try to break everything down at once, it’s not going to be popular . . . but if you just break one little thing, you know? People are like, they have a weird name, dumb pictures, the guy can’t sing. Yeah, it’s brilliant, but they’re not going anywhere.”

  When I made those three records Single Of The Week it’s because I thought all three records were great. I didn’t differentiate, but other people did.

  “Early November 1991, working at Sub Pop. Looks like we’re going to stay in business,” recounts Rich Jensen. “About that time, Nevermind is demonstrating that it’s a popular record. And the local TV news station, who of course ignored anything any of the artists my age were doing, is coming to Sub Pop asking, ‘What’s the deal with this record? Where’s it coming from?’ And I addressed the camera and said anybody who liked The Beatles would like Nirvana. That wasn’t a good story, but maybe there’s a point to it. Nirvana’s success wasn’t a surprise to me.”

  It was a surprise to me. Why would one band be favoured over the other?

  “Do you ever listen to Guns N’ Roses?” asks Al. “Do you know the song ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’? That’s a really sweet song. Formerly they were a hard rock band, but this song just cut across a full range of things. That’s what happened with Nirvana. There was this heavy, ironic and appropriate Seattle sound going on, and there was this band that fit that description, but were also having real poetry that cuts across . . .”

  “The single you’re talking about is ‘Big Cheese’ [B-side of ‘Love Buzz’],” comments Rich. “For me, it was the sound of the bass, that clobbering sound. It seemed it was a logical extension of other rock’n’roll sounds. That was a primal man sound, whereas with Some Velvet Sidewalk the approach was more poetic and abstract.”

  I remember being in Olympia at Nikki’s house and all of a sudden you turned to me and said . . .

  “I really liked you, and I wanted to come clean about it,” explains Al. “In the spring of 1989, I was on a tour and our car broke down in Pittsburgh for two days, missing shows. And we were stuck at someone’s house and their roommate came home and he was really nice to us, we went up to his room to hang out, he had a Melody Maker open on his desk to this double-page spread about Sub Pop and the grunge scene – by Everett True. And here we are in Pittsburgh missing our shows and we’re reading about how all the long hair bands in Seattle are the coolest thing happening. I was like, how could he do this to us? He’s fucking everything up. Taking the camera and turning it in the wrong direction and taking a whole bunch of pictures.”

  I wasn’t seeking to promote a certain type of band, but a diversity of bands. It wasn’t my fault if people picked up on just one sort of music.

  Addenda 2: hype

  The single most quoted paragraph I’ve ever written was that description of Nirvana in the original Sub Pop article. And it was, word-for-word, what you told me. I was up against a hard deadline, and we were on the phone a lot . . .

  Jonathan Poneman: “I remember those conversations. I know I’m going to sound like a complete bumpkin, but as someone who’s a devotee to all kinds of rock, to have a real live British music journalist in our midst, particularly one from Melody Maker. Seriously! I was in awe. So when I looked at that article . . . I always set out to read it word-for-word but I was so impressed that our little scene got written up in Melody Maker I could only take it in as a whole. I was like, ‘Wow, there’s Chris Pugh [Swallow singer]. Who’d’a thunk Chris Pugh would end up in the Melody Maker!’ No offence to Chris. The whole event was really so amazing to me on a very fan-boy level and it continues to be one of my most cherished memories.”

  When I got back after leaving Seattle I had maybe 48 hours to write the Mudhoney story up. It was a big deal. So I got home and I must’ve got food poisoning because I was throwing up the entire time. Not only that, but I lost the entire story when my computer crashed. I had to travel across London to the Melody Maker offices about midnight to rewrite that story, vomiting the entire way.

  Jonathan: “Now that’s grunge!”

  One of the things that first attracted me to Seattle bands was the fact that everyone blatantly lied to me. I thought that was awesome. No one in the UK did that; everyone was so earnest in their attitude towards the press – people took us way too seriously. I know why musicians did it in Seattle. It was because no one thought that they were going any place. But that attitude was instrumental to Sub Pop’s – and Nirvana’s – early notoriety.

  Jonathan: “I think it’s retarded to talk about [Sex Pistols manager] Malcolm McLaren or [ Monkees manager] Don Kirshner or [Seventies Hit Parade/ Creem critic] Lisa Robinson, the people who in their respective ways were manipulators and hype-masters, but so much of this shit isn’t true. The fact of the matter is that the fantastic is so much more interesting than the pedestrian, normal truth. Maybe a lot of people did bullshit you because they didn’t think that they were going anywhere, but I’d like to say I bullshat you because I thought we were going somewhere.”

  Megan Jasper (Sub Pop president): “Also, you have to remember that the Sub Pop offices were small and the people who worked there were funny. So when someone lied, even about the smallest, most retarded thing, it made all of us laugh. You weren’t the only person who was lied to, but you were certainly one of the most fun people to lie to.”

  Jonathan: “I would regularly lie to Bruce about how much money we had in the bank.”

  And I certainly made up my share of lies.

  Jonathan: “That’s what it’s about, you know? You need to make the gullible think they’re reading the truth, but the idea that they actually are reading the truth is, to me, ridiculous.”

  I used to say that the only goal I ever had with my writing was to make people jealous of me.

  Jonathan: “And you know what? I think you are a brilliant writer for that very reason. Don’t quote me on that.”

  NOTES

  1 Shop Assistants were an Eighties female-fronted Scots pop band – the exact midpoint of Ramones, The Velvet Underground and Jesus And Mary Chain, with a little Blondie thrown in. Sadly only released one album, 1986’s poignant Shop Assistants.

  2 The Andy Griffith Show was a hit Sixties American TV comedy show; the names Floyd, Opie, Aunt Bee, Andy and Barney in the song all come from the series.

  3 It was part of a symposium held in a Capitol Hill bar, and filmed. I forget why.

  4 Experience Music Project – the rock music museum in Seattle.

  5 Nirvana actually played their first out of state gig at the Satyricon on January 6, 1989.

  6 Kurt revealed a hitherto forgotten band name during this interview: Ying Yang Valvestem.

  7 NWA were Dr Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E’s incendiary gangsta rap group from Compton, CA.

  8 The Fluid: explosive early Sub Pop band from Denver whose live fury – think MC5, Minor Threat – never quite translated to vinyl.

  9 Think of the compressed fury of The Who, The Kinks, The Jam . . .

  10 I recall being particularly impressed when both Jon and Bruce were passed over the crowd’s heads.

  11 ‘Do Nuts’ was later recorded in NYC with Sonic Youth’s engineer Wharton Tiers, and issued as a Sub Pop single. I recall showing up at Wharton’s studio in the meatpacking district, no instruments, nothing. “Is that it?” he asked, surprised. “Yep,” I replied. “Switch the mic on, and let’s roll!”

  12 Either consciously or not, Jonathan listed two jobs that Kurt’s dad had held.

  13 Mark E. Smith is the singer with The Fall – perhaps the single most bloody-minded English band to have been thrown up by punk in the late Seventies.

  14 It happened on Bruce’s first visit to Kurt and Tracy’s apartment in Olympia, the same visit where Bruce brought down copies of The Shaggs and Daniel Johnston albums in an attempt to woo Nirvana.

  1
5 Tuxedomoon: an experimental avant-garde New Wave group from San Francisco.

  16 When the EMP started up in the mid-Nineties, I had an idea that I could present them with a typewriter, claiming it was the implement I wrote the original story on. It would have paper hanging out of it, and where the story said ‘grungy’, I was going to have it say ‘sludgy’, scribbled out and changed to ‘ grunty’ and . . . finally . . . ‘grungy’ – with three exclamations next to the word.

  17 This was the only session Everman did with the band, recorded at Evergreen. The Hard To Believe compilation was later released by Seattle label C/Z.

  CHAPTER 8

  $50 And A Case Of Beer

  “In the summer of 1989, I flew to New York to cover Tad and Nirvana for Sounds. The American underground rock scene was in a boom period, having just gone through SST and Homestead. It was the tail end of post-punk – and Sub Pop was the next step on.

  “We stayed on the Lower East Side. It was really hot, steaming New York midsummer heat. The flat was small, and there were two tired and smelly touring bands holed up at the end of a long tour waiting to play one last gig at the New Music Seminar. Tad were immediately friendly – older and more worldly wise than Nirvana. Behemoth frontman Tad Doyle would hold court while Nirvana sat around looking spaced out on the floor. He and his band were like older brothers to Nirvana, making sure they didn’t fuck up too much. In many ways Krist Novoselic was like a mini-version of Tad, because Kurt was the kind of guy who couldn’t look after himself, even to make a cup of tea.

  “The flat was so damn hot. The air conditioning was broken and there were about 20 of us crammed into a tiny room. Even the cockroaches had bailed, appalled by the heat and the grimy man stink of touring rock bands. It was a fair old squeeze in there – me, my photographer Ian Tilton, a press agent, some people who never said who they were, plus the exhausted Nirvana and Tad, who are big, big guys. We didn’t even have any sleeping bags. We slept as we were on the kitchen floor. Kurt was wiped out and spent most of the time curled up asleep.