by Everett True
“I had the same feeling again,” enthuses Anton. “I was blown away – I remember Jonathan saying that if ever Mudhoney and Nirvana played the same night in Seattle more people would go to see Nirvana and a bigger percentage would be female. Everyone thought Kurt was cute. Whereas Mark Arm had that massive . . .
“It wasn’t until I saw them live I understood Jonathan’s words,” he explains. “Because within this rage, this tornado, there was a subtlety and a tenderness. Nirvana’s songs were ugly-beautiful. It was the same with Kurt’s lyrics – one beautiful letter to one ugly, let alone words, or verse to verse. ‘I’ve got a really good riff ! Let’s fuck this up!’ ‘I’ve got a great couple of lyrics that are really nice. Let’s make them offensive and fuck with people’s minds!’ When they played live, one minute it would be this huge monstrous noise and the next, these beautiful, almost soft, swirly songs. And then the next minute, the whole place would be going mental because they’d be playing ‘Negative Creep’ or something. They had such an intensity.”
The band was supposed to continue up to Canada, but after the Pyramid Club, Kurt no longer wanted Jason involved. Despite Christof and Anton’s enthusiasm, most people present remember the show differently. It was a dud. One day while staying at Billig’s, Krist and Kurt scored some cocaine while Jason and Chad were out sightseeing with the British journalists. Later that night they got drunk, snorted it and decided to sack Jason. Only thing was, no one bothered telling Jason. He later claimed that he quit. Either way, he couldn’t have been too bothered when a few weeks afterwards, he was asked to join Soundgarden as bassist.6
“I saw the show at the Pyramid,” says Danny Bland. “They were awful. Cows stole the show, as they do. I remember [Cows singer] Shannon had two broken arms. Supposedly he had fallen through a glass roof in New York. One arm was tied up with some sort of metal and the other one was taped to his chest while he walked up to the microphone. He had pants on. Nirvana didn’t play well that night. They were getting ready to toss Jason out of the band, so they decided to cancel the remaining four dates and drive back to Seattle [which they did, in near-total silence].”
“They left him at my apartment,” recalls Janet. “They were like ‘ blurgh blurgh blurgh’ and left him there. They drove him home but they were going to leave him. I don’t think he had any idea. He was a really weird guy in a good way. He’s very uncommunicative, and he was with people who were uncommunicative. He was a stranger. Kurt told me before, the Jason thing’s not working. Maybe that was my conversation with them: ‘Can we leave him?’ ‘No, you can’t leave him here.’ ”
Kurt returned home to Olympia but Tracy’s apartment was feeling more cramped by the day, what with their menagerie of animals and their litter, and Kurt’s collection of busted-up amplifiers and guitars and found art . . . and the mould growing on the walls in the middle of summer. “I once caught Kurt defrosting the freezer with a kitchen knife,” Slim Moon recalls. “He was rushing the animals outside in their cages because he’d poked a hole in it, and didn’t want them to die from the fumes.” The pair later moved to a slightly more expensive, bigger apartment in the same house.
Kurt’s stomach continued to trouble him. Tracy made a couple of appointments for him with a specialist in Tacoma, but he took off after the first, claiming he was scared of needles. Kurt would frequently vomit during the night: his bandmates urged him to change his junk food diet but he refused to listen.
In July, while Nirvana was still on tour, a Go Team single, ‘Scratch It Out’/‘Bikini Twilight’, came out on K. The band – centred round the core of drummer Tobi Vail and guitarist Calvin Johnson – started 1989 with the intention of releasing a single a month, featuring various guest musicians.7 They got most of the way through the year before parting ways. Nine singles eventually came out. The July single featured Kurt on guest vocals.
“It was a grand idea, but we fell behind,” explained Candice Pedersen. “We were going to package them in a bag, with a label on top, like cheap candy. But after the first month – I mean, my God, we were hand-stapling them, and stuffing them and pressing the bags – I was like, ‘This is a nice concept but it’s not going to work!’ ”
“The Go Team was about process,” explains Tobi. “I liked to go make stuff, partially as an excuse to hang out with people – that is where the collaboration came from – but then the tapes would be rolling; and the result would turn into a K release. The documentation was Calvin’s thing. He’s always been into that. Sometimes we’d leave stuff out deliberately to incite participation in the listener. Donna Parker Pop, our first K release, featured all instrumentals but included the statement ‘Make up your own words and sing along’ – and people did. We recorded with some of those people later.
“The Go Team played together from 1985–89. I played my first show with The Go Team shortly after I turned 16. For the first three years we played around Olympia and released cassettes. Some people, most people probably, thought we sucked because we’d often improvise or play stuff that was unfinished sounding. That this was deliberate – an aesthetic/ conceptual choice – really confused a lot of people. We got a reputation for being arty, so a lot of interesting people got into us. Dylan Carlson and Slim Moon were huge Go Team fans. We’d sometimes play cocktail parties where people would perform songs in a cabaret style – we’d be the band that played background music while people talked. Sometimes we’d project films over ourselves, usually Super 8 movies that Calvin found at garage sales. We often didn’t have vocals. I doubt that Kurt was a big fan, although he was interested in K and drawn to anything different to the college rock or generic hardcore bands of the era.
“On the West Coast around this time,” continues Vail, “there were a lot of boring metal-ish punk bands and he wasn’t too into that – there were also a lot of math-y ‘tight’ bands influenced by nomeansno8, The Rhythm Pigs, Beastie Boys and Red Hot Chili Peppers. This was a funky jam-band skater thing that was super male-dominated. Sub Pop was different, they were arty and more into darker, weirder stuff like Big Black. K was pretty much the opposite of that kind of macho wankery, and The Go Team was the most extreme example of this – we were minimal, deliberately amateurish and didn’t have songs in the conventional sense.
“On the one hand we were trying to demystify music and encourage all people to play songs in public – if they wanted to. On the other hand, we actually liked what we sounded like, and we hated most of the pro-sounding jam bands/shredding metal-punk bands that played parties in Olympia. We were interested in ideas, quiet sounds and driving beats. We embraced chaos and rejected mastery. We challenged conventional notions of ‘the pop song’ or punk music. We wanted to disrupt the audience/ performer dichotomy – we were punk kids in a loose collective, experimenting with music and documenting our work.
“Kurt approached Calvin with a demo of some mellower songs he’d been working on, and Calvin was like, ‘Hey, this is great, why don’t you come down and record with The Go Team?’ At that time, Kurt was into playing music as much as possible, so any chance to record or play was welcome. We did a version of [early Iggy Pop signature song] ‘Loose’ because Kurt really wanted to hear Calvin sing those twisted lyrics.9 He taught Calvin to play the bass line – so there is a bass on it. It kind of sucked so it didn’t come out.
“In my mind it was kind of like [beat generation author] Jack Kerouac’s idea of writing on a roll of paper; we were focused in on the rhythm of making stuff up. The Go Team idea/aesthetic was very beat. Kurt was more of a mastery type guy – even though his performances embraced elements of chaos head on, his songwriting was extremely structured. I’m not sure he really saw what we were doing as songwriting. He probably thought of it more as jamming, that later there would be a time to revise and finish the songs/weed out the ‘mistakes’. So in that sense the tapes are incomplete. But as a document of a creative moment of three people in a room together they are pretty great. I’d say it was one of the more invigorating Go Team sess
ions.”
In the first week of August, Nirvana returned to the studio – to Music Source, a 24-track studio on Capitol Hill10 that specialised in movie soundtracks and commercials – with producer Steve Fisk, to record two new songs for the Blew EP timed to tie in with an upcoming European tour.11 Fisk was surprised when only three people showed up to record. “I had heard later that Jason was in the Sub Pop office that day, telling folk he was still in the band,” he explains.
“It happened over two nights,” Steve recalls. “ Krist had spent all day trying to get his bass amp together because it was all trashed from touring. There were two speakers and only one of them worked, and that didn’t work that well. The bass was also fucked up. Chad Channing had the big black plastic drum kit. It also was held together with tape. Kurt was the only guy who had gear that was working. The Music Source had little booths that opened up on to a big room. The ideal is you put everybody’s amps off into the ISO booths with the doors wide open so you wouldn’t need headphones. We recorded five songs, and we did some overdubs that night on two of them. We came back the next week and mixed two songs. And we all got paid.”
How was the band?
“Very nice, very serious about what they were doing. They weren’t exactly professional, but they wanted to get it right. I was excited that a good band, and not a stupid band, was coming in. I recorded a lot of stupid bands back then and I really liked Nirvana. I had gone from gagging at how ugly it was to really digging what they had going, and how it fit into Jack [ Endino]’ s little pantheon of what he had going. They all had similar approaches, but inside that there were big differences.”
“I’ve always liked working with Steve,” comments Chad. “I was a fan of [Steve’s SST band] Pell Mell. It was obscure, really bizarre stuff. I don’t know why we switched producers. They’d just say, ‘Hey, we’re recording at so and so with Steve Fisk.’ Maybe Jack was busy. The business end, I was way out of the loop.”
The songs were noticeably poppier and lighter than on previous recordings. “We want a big Top 40 drum sound,” Kurt announced, conveniently overlooking the fact that Chad’s drums were held together with duct tape. Indeed, the Blew sessions were to be the last appearance of Chad’s old drums.
The two songs that appeared on the single were fine: ‘Been A Son’, with its unwieldy bass solo and Rubber Soul-style double-tracked vocals, a number inspired by Don Cobain’s statement that he would’ve preferred Kurt’s sister Kim to have been born a boy; and ‘Stain’, another song dealing with feelings of familial rejection and inferiority, a pile-driving bass-driven number with its twin guitar solos – “on equal volume, like squabbling hens,” as Fisk memorably remarked. And the three unfinished songs12 were even more exciting: ‘Token Eastern Song’ was an old-fashioned floor churner in the tradition of ‘Negative Creep’; an absolutely storming version of ‘Even In His Youth’ that just ground away into eternity, a worthy follow-up to ‘Love Buzz’ and in much the same vein; and an electric version of ‘Polly’ (originally called ‘Hitchhiker’).
“We had a hard time getting the feel right to ‘Polly’ at the beginning,” recalls Fisk. “They started it three times. They couldn’t hold the tempo together with Chad playing the pulse on the cymbal. Chad was slipping and Kurt was finger picking. It was the first time Nirvana had recorded on the industry standard, two-inch, 24-track format. If they sounded lo-fi with Jack you figured it was the cheap gear. Once you’re on the 24-track, what it plays back is theoretically what you’ve got. Maybe that’s why Krist was trying so hard to get his bass together.
“When it was all over with, we played ‘Been A Son’ really loud on the big stupid speakers three times and stood up on the client tables in the back room and danced. I don’t ever dance, but I danced because Nirvana wanted to dance.”
So this was after they’d started to get bigger?
“Yeah, you’d written your nice little article in Melody Maker. Mother Love Bone was still together when I recorded Nirvana.”
Did they say anything about how things were going with Sub Pop?
“Yeah. Bruce and Jonathan were giving them a bunch of money to make a second record, maybe $10,000–$12,000. They were talking about doing it with me, and coming back to the Music Source. It was during that strange time period where Andy [Andrew Wood, Mother Love Bone singer] was still alive, Chad was still in the band and Soundgarden was still the biggest band in Seattle.”
Did you get the impression that these songs had massive potential?
“No. As a matter of fact, we were joking about how stupid we wanted to make the drums on ‘Been A Son’.”
Were they freaked out being in a big studio?
“They understood that they had x amount of time to get it right. Sub Pop was broke. It was recorded on some used tape we had lying around. And Sub Pop wanted to do everything as cheap as possible, so any corner we could cut we would cut.”
Later that same month – August 20 and 28 – Kurt and Krist joined Mark Lanegan and Mark Pickerel from Screaming Trees to record some Leadbelly songs at Reciprocal. It was a casual, off-the-cuff session, but the recorded results were startling: emotional and ponderous with some stunning vocals from both Mark and Kurt. The version of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ ended up on Lanegan’s debut solo album, 1990’s The Winding Sheet – Nirvana later covered the song, in partial tribute to Mark himself. ‘They Hung Him On The Cross’ was brief, but sweltering with emotion. ‘Grey Goose’ was a heavy blues jam, while ‘ Ain’t It A Shame’ boasted a quite terrifyingly deep vocal from Kurt.
“Mark and Kurt got drunk together, or really stoned,” Endino told Gillian G. Gaar, “and wrote a bunch of songs, and got all excited and told Jonathan, ‘Hey we want to do an album together! And we’ve got a name for it – The Jury.’ And so Jonathan said, ‘OK, OK, get in with Jack and record.’ And then finally they show up at the studio, and Kurt goes, ‘Well, we forgot all the songs, because we didn’t tape any of them! And I lost my lyric book. So we’re going to do some Leadbelly songs instead.’ ”
“It’s a misnomer to call those Nirvana songs,” comments Slim Moon about the fact that they have since resurfaced as such. “They weren’t intended to be. It was a different drummer, a step up – or a step sideways. Every time a step up happened, it was a shock, like when they started rehearsing in Alice In Chains’ rehearsal space. It’s not that Alice In Chains were big yet, but Alice In Chains was a band that had aspirations to be big, so we were like, ‘That’s so official and pro.’ ”
Kurt wanted to hear Leadbelly after reading a William S. Burroughs article on the black folk singer, so Slim lent him his copy of Leadbelly’s Last Sessions. Kurt felt a connection to Leadbelly’s almost physical expressions of longing and desire.
“It’s so raw and sincere,” Kurt explained to me in 1992. “It’s something I hold sacred. The songs are amazingly heartfelt. Leadbelly was this poor black man in the early 1900s who went to jail a few times for wife beating and robbery and getting into fights and bootlegging liquor. While he was in prison, he started playing the guitar, and he sang so well that the governor started to like him and let him out of jail. Leadbelly became an apprentice with Blind Lemon Jefferson and started recording songs, but none of the commercial recordings he made ever captured his true essence, except for his last sessions.
“I’d hope that my songs approximate that honesty,” he continued. “That’s what I strive for. I think of his life as like a party with balloons, you know? But this was a unique mixture of balloons and folk music and storytelling all at once, it’s something that had never happened before. He was like the first punk rocker, because he was such a hardened person. He’d get into town, walk into an all white bar, try to have a drink, get beat up and then go to jail because of it. So it’s really cool to hear this music, especially the air of the recordings themselves, because it’s so eerie to hear it on this crackly two-track. He’ll start off with a little introduction on what the song is about, play a little and [dive]
in.”
The same month, Kurt helped Dylan Carlson record his first EP.
“Lush broke up, and Dylan had decided he was going to play guitar again, despite how good the Melvins were,” explains Slim. “So we formed Earth. Kurt played bass for us for a bit while we were living in Olympia, but his instrument was strung for a right-hander so he was trying to play it upside-down. We were like, ‘You need to restring that so it works for you.’ He was like, ‘I can’t do that. Other people want to borrow it.’ So we kicked him out.
“I quit Earth after Dylan and I got in an argument of how I should sing in the band,” Moon continues. “He wanted me to sing in a high Ozzy-like voice, and I wanted to sing in a low Michael Gira13-like voice. His argument was that voices had spoken to him from across the universe and declared that the reason our band existed was to cause the end of the universe, but it would only be achieved if I sang in a high voice.”
So, bereft of Slim, and with Dave Harwell and Joe Preston both playing bass, plus a couple of guest vocalists, Dylan travelled down to Portland to record the immensely dense Extra-Capsular Extraction EP for Sub Pop, released in 1991.
“I remember doing that Earth record,” smiles ex-Dickless/ Teen Angels singer Kelly Canary, “only because I wasn’t drunk for that whole time because we were in the middle of nowhere. Kurt and me were the backup singers. It was five days in Portland and my vocal part took 20 minutes, so it was literally four and a half days of sitting around, during which Kurt slept on the couch constantly. I was dope-sick, trying to find dope on the street, Kurt was sleeping and they were in the basement recording. I’d hang out at Fred Myers for fun because there was nothing to fucking do. That’s when Kurt started teaching me how to play the guitar.”