Nirvana

by Everett True

  “There was a lot of snoring, a lot of sweaty socks and a lot of exhausted rockers. Nirvana had the burned-out look of a young band at the end of its first toilet tour, playing to five people every night in some clapped-out venue. Those weeks on the road with no food, no audience and to little acclaim, this is the stuff that gives the greatest bands a galvanising inner strength.

  “The night before the Seminar, Nirvana played Maxwell’s to about 10 people. No one was too impressed, apart from a girl from their French record label who thought they were going to be massive. I thought they were fantastic. I loved Kurt’s voice – it reminded me of John Lennon and Noddy Holder. 1 It sounded old and weary, yet wild and free, a cracked rough gnarl of a voice, a voice that sounded like it had screamed hard down the mic many times – it cut right through. I dug the band’s primal, feral bestiality and the way on their first single they’d taken Shocking Blue’s original and turned it into a fierce blast of teen alienation.

  “At the end of the show, they smashed the drum kit, and stuck the guitars through the roof. It wasn’t contrived. There’s no way you would bother in front of so few people. It was Krist who instigated it. He had a longer reach than everyone else. He could knock everything to pieces on the stage just standing there with his bass.

  “We did the interviews beforehand. Bruce and Jon from Sub Pop were 100 per cent into the band. Their belief was incredible – I thought they were good, but they said they’d be enormous. When they said that, I thought of Sonic Youth, that they might end up selling 50,000 records!

  Krist talked about Serbia and the Balkans – he was quite political. Kurt was tired, so I spoke to him the next day. He was shy and exhausted in the heat of the flat, rubbing his eyes and lighting up to talk about rock’n’roll.

  His intensity was stunning. He started neatly with a rant about the sea of fakes. He had a tough work ethic and a burning creativity that needed to be sated. Kurt was unfazed by the burgeoning hype. ‘We were a band before we were on Sub Pop, so being on a hip label means nothing to us,’ he told me. ‘There’s been a lot of hype and that’s fair enough – there are some great bands on the label. But that hype doesn’t affect us.’

  “A couple of hours later Nirvana started the long drive back home. We helped them pack their gear into their battered van. Small time cult status seemed assured but they were too intense and exciting for the dull, grey world of the mainstream. MTV was hardly likely to embrace this wild and soulful cacophony – to them Michael Jackson was revolutionary!

  They wearily started the drive back across America, a five-day haul in all. It was a tough journey and one that underlined their guerrilla mentality. I pondered their fate sadly. Anyone who says that crawling out of the cesspit of rock’n’roll is easy is a damn liar.”

  (Interview with musician and journalist John Robb,

  November 2005)

  IN June 1989, Nirvana set out on their first proper US tour. “Sub Pop hooked us up with a company from LA called Bulging Eye,” recalls Chad. “They set up our tour, and it went down to California, all the way to New York and back and every place in between. It was the first time we played the Blind Pig show in Ann Arbor. We played that place a couple times. Those were big shows!”

  It was a “total hungry punk rock tour”, as Krist put it – 26 dates in just under a month, starting on June 22 at the Covered Wagon in San Francisco. Rob Kader and pals bought them a farewell 24-pack of Mountain Dew; Jason printed up box loads of a new band T-shirt, the infamous ‘Fudge Packin’ Crack Smokin’ Satan Worshipin’ Motherfuckers’ one2, and for once Shelli and Tracy weren’t going with them. Space – and money – was too tight, so Krist took on the role of band mother, making sure the van only stopped at certain petrol stations, refusing to allow the air conditioning to be turned on and insisting no one drove over 70 mph. The bassist collected what little money they got from clubs (100 bucks maximum, plus a case of beer) and handed out the PDs (per diems – band currency the world over). Nirvana blew what little they had left over after fuel and food on records.

  “We ate a lot of crap,” Chad laughs. “A lot of fast food stuff. It would be like a 7/11 or whatever – the worst possible food on earth. Kurt ate corn dogs. It was funny because Krist was pretty much a vegetarian, so he’d always be trying to find a Safeway’s and get a salad – and I’d go with him, try and find a deli sandwich to get away from the fried food. Jason was into McDonald’s.”

  For accommodation, local promoters were expected to find floors to crash on – often those of other musicians, such as Lori Barbero (Babes In Toyland, Minneapolis – where a drunken Krist fell backwards into a cabinet of plates) or John Robinson (The Fluid, Denver). Sometimes, the job would fall to people affiliated with the record company, like Joyce Linehan in Boston or Janet Billig in New York. “I was friendly,” explains Billig, “so I had a lot of bands stay at my place because no one could afford a hotel.”

  Janet first got involved with Nirvana after Caroline Records signed a distribution deal with Sub Pop. Part of the deal was that when bands came to New York, her company would handle East Coast publicity and promotion. Billig’s apartment soon became known as the punk rock Motel 6. “ Mudhoney, Tad, Nirvana . . .” she continues. “That’s how I met them.” Janet bonded with the Seattle musicians over a shared love for Minneapolis bands like Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum. Indeed, she’d graduated from high school early in order to follow The Replacements on tour.

  “My flat was on 7th between Avenues B and C,” she recalls. “It wasn’t even 400ft, very small – of course it was New York City. One strange thing was it didn’t even have a regular bathroom door, but a swinging saloon kind of door instead. There was a loft bed, with a mattress underneath. People would pile up in the loft and on the couch. And it’s not like today. Avenue B was not a safe neighbourhood back then. When L7 stayed there, [singer] Donita got stabbed just outside. Another time, a box of Mudhoney’s T-shirts got stolen when they were loading out. Rumour had it that for a few months the homeless people in the area were wearing Mudhoney shirts.

  “I met Nirvana on their first trip to New York. Chad was sweet. Kurt was quiet. I don’t remember having any conversations with Krist. The thing I recall is Kurt sitting in my bed eating bags of Chips Ahoy. Another time, they showed up and I had a girlfriend who was moving to Queens in a taxi, and she needed a van to move her bed. And they did it for her, and after driving 15 hours to get to New York, which was really sweet.”

  The night before the Covered Wagon, Nirvana played a packed show at The Vogue. “It was full of people from the other bands – Cat Butt and Coffin Break and Swallow,” Chad recalls. “Everyone was out in full force. It felt like folk were throwing a going-away party for us. The feeling I had that night was unique.”

  There was a bigger crowd in San Francisco than previously, but Sub Pop was having trouble convincing stores to take Bleach. An in-store at Rhino Records in LA two days later saw the shop with only five copies – but more important to Kurt was the interview he conducted with Flipside , the local cool punk fanzine, wherein the band discussed cockroaches, the heat and an ‘Elvis Cooper’ poster the band carried with them on tour, bastardised from an Elvis backdrop.

  “I fucking hate Elvis Presley,” commented Krist. “But Alice Cooper is cool.”3

  The tour continued on through Long Beach and Santa Fe, New Mexico and on into Texas, where the heat became so overwhelming the band would pull over on to garage forecourts and wait until the day had cooled down. The attendances weren’t high – maybe a couple of dozen people, often musicians connected with Sub Pop there to check out the new guys – but Nirvana were beginning to make an impression.

  “Usually, Nirvana ended up opening the shows,” recalls tour booker Danny Bland. “Being from Arizona, I begged them to put this band on. I said you’ll love them; they ended up playing second of four bands and their guarantee was $50 and a case of beer and the club didn’t even give them the $50. It was a place called the Sun Club in Tempe, Arizona
. I remember going back years later and they had a framed picture of Nirvana. Fuck you: you didn’t even give them 50 bucks. Probably made them pay for the beer, too. That was what the deals were in a lot of places. People hadn’t heard of them.

  “The only person I really talked to was Krist,” Bland continues. “Kurt was real quiet. This is how minimal our operation was: their itineraries weren’t even typed, they were handwritten itineraries that I made copies of and gave to everybody, and I had a meeting with them where I was on a chair and they were all sitting around on the floor like I was reading them a children’s story. That would be when Chad and Kurt and Jason showed up for the first time. I wasn’t even aware of Jason going on the tour until we were loading their crap in the van.”

  On the van’s tape player were artists like Talulah Gosh, The Vaselines, Shonen Knife, Leadbelly and Shocking Blue – and sometimes Krist’s choices of Led Zeppelin or Soft Machine.4 And, in between, Nirvana would listen to Seattle bands like Mudhoney and Soundgarden. “It’s weird,” comments Chad, “because everyone was into it. It wasn’t like the LA scene where it was like battle of the bands, and you’d put the other bands down.

  “Me and Krist would do the driving, so we’d choose the music,” he continues. “And then when Jason joined us on that one tour, he did a lot of the driving. Kurt never drove. I think he drove once, for like an hour.” Reputedly, he wasn’t that good a driver: travelling slowly, like an over-cautious old man.

  In Texas, the band stayed near a national park – essentially a swamp – in the middle of some woods. There were signs everywhere saying, “Beware of the alligators”. That night Nirvana slept with baseball bats by their sides.

  Krist was the livewire of the bunch: almost every night he’d get wasted, out of his head on alcohol. “First, he’d tell everyone how much he loved them, then the next thing you know he’s picked up a chair and is hurling it across the room,” recalls Chad. “Ranting about how none of us understood shit about love, or telling us how he doesn’t want to deal with us. But then he’d get this awesome puppy-dog face. I’ve always loved that about that guy. Everyone knows when he gets drunk he can get completely crazy and out of hand. But at the same time he’s like the biggest fricking teddy bear in the world.”

  “I couldn’t help confusing Krist with Latka [Andy Kaufman] from Taxi,” comments Craig Montgomery. “Very smart, very left wing, he sounded like a hippie sometimes. He had that laidback, laconic way of speaking. He could drink a lot and get really, really drunk before he passed out. Really out of control.”

  He was a fun drunk, though?

  “It could get negative,” replies the soundman. “Not that he was mean to you, it’s just that he would make a big scene and make it uncomfortable. Making a big mess that some poor person is going to have to clean up. But you know they were young, and drunk, and had never been anywhere before they were in this rock band. Well, Krist had.”

  It didn’t bother Kurt. “Everyone gets drunk,” he told Michael Azerrad. “It wasn’t every single night. It was just every other night. [ Krist] drinks to the point of oblivion and literally turns into a retard, unable to speak, gesturing and knocking things over. I’ve known so many people who drink it seems quite ordinary.” Kurt was still suffering from stomach complaints, but was the cleanest living of the band (next to Everman, who drank only Mountain Dew), having temporarily given up smoking.

  Although the drives were gruelling and the pay was bad, the band stayed enthusiastic – they were getting to see America and play rock’n’roll! What could be better? By the time they hit the Midwest, Sub Pop were getting the record into shops and attendances had started to pick up – college radios were finally playing songs from Bleach like ‘Blew’ or ‘About A Girl’.

  The day after Nirvana played the Uptown Bar in Minneapolis, Kurt bought a large crucifix at a garage sale in Chicago. To relieve the tedium on the road, he’d sit in the passenger seat with the crucifix in his hand, wind down the van window and stick it in some poor sap’s face – just to see their reaction. “We were passing this limousine and he shows the crucifix like that,” recalls Chad. “And he filmed it with his Pixel Vision camera. It was pretty funny.”

  It was around this time that Jason started to withdraw more into himself, feeling left out by Krist and Kurt’s camaraderie – meanwhile, the pair were becoming concerned at Jason’s penchant for showmanship, and the fact that with him in the band Nirvana were too ‘rock’. Jason was into strutting round the stage, whereas Kurt and Krist and Chad were much goofier. “He was like a peacock on amphetamines,” recalled Kurt. “It was embarrassing.” Neither Krist nor Kurt approved of the old-fashioned male rock attitude towards women – there to be used and then discarded – and didn’t appreciate the couple of times Jason brought girls back to his room after shows.

  “When Jason was in the band it stood out because they sucked,” laughs Candice Pedersen. “When they played in San Francisco and he wore that Mickey Mouse outfit with buttons and suspenders, I was like, ‘What are you thinking?’ ”

  “The worst part was when they had the four-piece line-up,” comments Steve Turner. “That was useless. Jason was so unfocused.”

  Everman wasn’t too pleased with Kurt and Krist’s disregard for their instruments, especially as the band was mostly broke. “Chad lost all his clothes at some point,” says Rob Kader. “Somebody stole them or he left them at somebody’s house, so he had one shirt that he wore for the last two or three weeks. He was a stinky nightmare by the time they got back.”

  On July 9, Nirvana played a show at the Sonic Temple in Wilkinsburg near Pittsburgh. It went well, so well in fact that Kurt smashed an old Fender Mustang because all 20 people present started rocking out and grooving. Jason may well have been pissed off because he was part-financing the tour with his T-shirt money – but Krist and Kurt saw him as far too uptight, too concerned with image.

  How on earth did Nirvana afford it?

  “We get good deals,” Krist told me in 1990. “You see, we live in Tacoma and things aren’t so expensive there. In Seattle, people are really into old guitars but in Tacoma they couldn’t care less.”

  “Why do I do it?” Kurt asked rhetorically during the same interview. “Why not? It feels good. Somebody already cut down a nice old tree to make that fucking guitar. Smash it! We only ever do it if the feeling’s right, it doesn’t matter where we are.”

  “We’d get in trouble with club owners from time to time,” smiles Chad. “Mostly due to after-shows. There were a couple places where people would be like, ‘You’re done playing, get out, beat it.’ Surprisingly, it didn’t happen that much.”

  On July 12, Nirvana played a sparsely attended JC Dobbs – a small Philadelphia venue that they would return to a few times. A couple of days later, the band played a couple of shows in Massachusetts – one at the Green Street Station in Jamaica Plain, and the other a fraternity party – the ‘Eating Club’ – at MIT in Northampton.

  “At the Green Street show, Kurt had smashed his guitar the previous night, and didn’t have one to play,” recalls Debbi Shane. “He sang and Jason played the guitar. We were a little disappointed, but in the end it didn’t matter because they were really great.”

  “They were impactful shows,” says Billig, who was present at both. “It was like watching a rolling ball of fire that kept getting stronger and stronger. No matter how cool Mark Arm was, or how wild it was to watch Tad, there was something magical about Kurt. You didn’t want to take your eyes off him when he had a guitar, and wanted to listen to whatever he said. They’d either implode at the end, break all their stuff, or walk off stage and go and have some beers.”

  The following night, the band hit the legendary Maxwell’s in Hoboken, just across the water from Manhattan.

  “The first time I met Nirvana was at the New Music Seminar, at a show with Tad at Maxwell’s,” reveals Anton Brookes. “Two vans went down from NYC, full of Sub Pop people. There must have been 50 people there. Nirvana were
amazing. Kurt smashed his guitar up and kicked over his amps and marched off. We all stood and watched Tad and then went back to New York.

  “After Kurt smashed his guitar, it was sat on the dancefloor for ages and I remember thinking, ‘I should take that,’” Anton continues. “And I thought, ‘How am I going to explain a broken guitar at Customs?’ Kurt had long hair and wore a plaid shirt . . . Sub Pop was the plaid shirt brigade. Krist was dressed in skintight jeans and a jumper. He had hair back then, too – straggly hair. Krist was the joker of the pack, Mr Funny Guy, the unofficial band spokesman. He was the one meeting and greeting, kissing the babies. He was about 8' 2", while if Chad had been any smaller he’d have been classified as a dwarf. There’s a famous picture in Sounds where Krist is on his knees, and he’s got his shoes underneath his knees and he’s still taller than Chad – and Kurt is just a little taller than Chad.”

  “Maxwell’s was an amazing show,” recalls Dan Peters. “They were totally on fire. That night Krist took his bass and was beating the shit out of Chad’s kick drum, but these guys are in New York and probably midway through a tour, and they don’t have any money, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ He just split that bass drum in half, and they duct taped the drum back together. I’m sure that drum kit sounded like fucking hell anyway, but it must’ve really sounded like shit after that. That boy, that Chad, he put up with a lot.”

  A couple of nights later, on July 18, Nirvana played at the Pyramid opposite Tompkins Square Park in NYC.

  “I saw them at the Pyramid with Jason and the numb energy and the big hair,” recalls City Slang5 boss Christof Ellinghaus. “My first impression was that the band was unbelievably powerful. After the show, Kurt was selling T-shirts, and I laid into him: ‘Give me a T-shirt right now! I’m your German agent, I’m booking your dates in November!’ and he was completely intimidated by this drunk, obnoxious German who got away with a T-shirt.”