Nirvana

by Everett True

  How did he teach you? When he got me to play his guitar on stage, he put it on upside down.

  “Oh yeah, because he was a lefty,” the singer laughs. “He just taught me a few power chords. They were really easy – and then he taught me a 13th Floor Elevators song, ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’. It’s the same chords as ‘About A Girl’. I wrote a whole Teen Angels album round those chords – Kurt told me they were all I needed to know.”

  In September, Nirvana set out on a short tour of the Midwest, partly to make up the gigs they’d bailed on the previous time.14 The Midwest dates lasted from September 9–22, and then October 3–8. This time they had a U-Haul truck to carry their equipment, a promise of between $100–$200 a night, and soundman Craig Montgomery and friend Ben Shepherd in tow. The tour was reasonably successful – 200 fans showing up at some shows, encouraged by the growing buzz around both band and label. Nirvana returned to Seattle with $300 each, after expenses had been subtracted. It felt like a fortune to Kurt.

  The opening date was in Chicago, at Cabaret Metro, supporting mentors Sonic Youth. It wasn’t an auspicious start: “Kurt fell into my kit, and then the bottles started,” recalls Chad. “We looked at each other, and ran underneath the stage. I had to leave my drum riser behind.” Dates in Louisville, Denver and Toledo followed – and a return to The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, on October 3, in between Steel Pole Bathtub15 and The Flaming Lips.16 Kurt’s mic didn’t work during the opening ‘School’ so the band played through it twice, oblivious to crowd reaction.

  “I remember talking to the club owner. He was so pissed off because The Flaming Lips played with so much smoke,” chuckles Chad. “It was so thick that I could barely see his face. He was like, ‘ Goddammit! They have these fucking smoke machines and I can’t fucking see my beer!’ It was hilarious.”

  Driving through mid-America, especially its long flat hinterlands, could be a tedious business. “When I got bored I would drive with my teeth,” Chad says. “One time we were going through Montana, which is a big flat stretch of beautiful nothing. Kurt and Krist were sleeping. Krist woke up and he saw me and went, ‘Oh, No! No! What are you doing? Drive with your hands!’ And I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been driving that way for over two hours.”

  Shepherd acted as surrogate tour manager, not because that was his role but because he’d been invited along as a friend and took it upon himself to act that role. There was also a chance he might replace Everman as second guitarist.

  “After Jason left, Nirvana said, ‘Hey, you want to try out?’ ” Ben recalls. “Kurt told me, ‘ Shit, I would have asked you to play first if I’d have known that you play guitar.’ The next day Soundgarden asked me to try out as bassist.17 And I said, ‘Well, Nirvana asked me to try out first so I have to do that.’ ”

  What made Nirvana and Soundgarden ask you to join them at the same time?

  “Both Kim [ Thayil, Soundgarden guitarist] and Chad knew me,” the soft-spoken musician replies. “I wound up playing just one soundcheck with them because we only did Nevermind stuff when we rehearsed, but on that tour they only played Bleach stuff. There was a point when we were in Ann Arbor and Kurt asked me, ‘How would you feel about not doing any of your songs?’ and I said, ‘That’s fine, this is your band’ . . . the whole time I was thinking they should stay a three-piece anyway.”

  Other Seattle musicians agreed. Both Mudhoney and Tad urged Kurt to keep Nirvana as a trio, concerned with how much Jason’s presence had affected the sound. Kurt later regretted his decision not to have Ben in Nirvana: “He would’ve added to the band, definitely,” he said. “He’s kind of crazy sometimes – but that’s OK.”18

  “I got to play one soundcheck while Kurt was out back puking in Minneapolis,” the guitarist laughs. “That was the same day that they said, ‘Sorry, you missed your brother’s wedding and you’re not in the band.’ ”

  Did you think they were going to be big at that point?

  “I knew they would. I didn’t know they were gong to be that big, but yeah. I knew they were going to have a musical career.”

  Why did you think that?

  “You could tell by the way the fans acted. Even though some of the shows would be to 20 people – because they’d cancelled the tour before – those 20 people went back. Omaha [October 8] was the only time I’ve ever seen a real motherfucking encore, besides one time for Soundgarden in Belgium. Nirvana got one, and they never did encores. We were all packing up and Chad’s drums were still mostly set up and Kurt was undoing his guitar case, and the whole crowd was like, ‘You guys didn’t play all your songs, man. You skipped out on us last time, come on! Play the rest of ’em.’ They came back on rather sheepishly and blew the fuck-ing doors off the place. It was at a fake chateau called The Lift Ticket.

  “A lot of times in the van, Kurt and I would be the only ones awake, driving late at night,” says Shepherd. “We’d play Screamin’ Jay Hawkins19, The Sonics, [Brian] Eno20 . . . We all had our little cassette collections with us. I remember feelings and scenery more than actual conversations. We’d talk books sometimes. Mostly it was just Kurt and Krist, and me and Chad. During that time I was into big band music and I was like, ‘Guys, this is what we should open the shows with.’ I would always joke about Johnny Cash playing with Motörhead or someone. After a while, that wasn’t even a joke any more.

  “That was right when the underground kids started realising that Nirvana was going to be the thing, not Mudhoney,” he adds. “I was always astounded that people liked Mudhoney as much as they did because I’m from the [Mark Arm’s first band] Mr Epp generation. For me, there were two sides of Seattle: there’s Malfunkshun, Mr Epp and [hardcore band] The Fartz, and everything else seemed too light. When the Melvins moved out, I was like, ‘Ah, Seattle’s blowing it again.’ I was more into the heavy, tripped out shit.”

  Back in Seattle, not everyone was happy with the way the scene was going . . .

  “In 1989, Sub Pop threw this concert called Nine For The Nineties,” recalls Slim. “They had nine bands on. One was Beat Happening and another was Cat Butt. This person I knew watched Cat Butt and was dancing around and having a great time. Then Beat Happening came on and within a few songs the person came to me and was like, ‘This is the worst band I’ve ever seen – they can’t play their instruments.’ I looked at her and I said, ‘They are playing their instruments as well or better than Cat Butt, they just don’t have distortion hiding how poorly they are playing.’ That, in essence, is the Seattle versus Olympia argument. Seattleites always wanted it big and loud and in leather pants. Olympia always wanted it minimal and naked.

  “She was like, ‘The songs are dumb,’ ” the label boss adds. “I was like, ‘Both bands play three chord rock songs. What’s the difference except that the one has distortion and a cool shtick?’ Yes, we are elitists, but Seattle was so elitist and had the world on its side that we remained the underdog. We used elitism as self-defence.”

  There again, the Seattle musicians were having a ball . . .

  “We played with Nirvana and Mudhoney at the COCA [Center of Contemporary Art, Seattle – August 26, 1989] for this big Sub Pop showcase,” recalls Cat Butt’s James Burdyshaw. “There was no air conditioning and it was absolutely packed. The first night was Dickless in the small room, and then Dwarves21, Tad and GWAR.22 That was something.

  “There was this big tub backstage filled with ice and Black Label,” the guitarist continues. “It was so hot that all the ice had melted into water and I was flinging the ice water in people’s faces as they came in, just to test their reaction. Matt Lukin came off stage and he was like, ‘ Eeagh! What the fuck you doing?’ Kurt was behind him, and I asked him if he wanted to be splashed.

  “He goes, ‘No, can you dunk me in there instead?’ and I was like, ‘Really?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah! Dunk me in that water.’ ” James laughs. “So I took his head and went ‘ Sploosh!’ into this tub of ice cold water. He kept his head under there for a long time an
d I was like, ‘Whoa. This is weird. He’s not coming up.’ After about a minute he came up and was like, ‘Yeah!’

  “The innocence and playfulness, and the incredibly unpretentious nice guy that Kurt Cobain was, came across heavy that night,” Burdyshaw finishes. “When people bad-talk weird things about him, like how depressed he was, I say I didn’t know him as that person. I knew this sweet, cool, fun, weird, unpredictable human being that wrote great songs. And the dark guy unfortunately took a hold of his soul but that was only one part of this person. There was another part that was really fucking cool. That’s somebody who doesn’t get written about enough. The person that I knew, he was one of us. He was a brother. He wasn’t a rock star. He was a weird, freaky, goofy, punk rock kid.”

  Addenda: the girls and Kurt

  “My unique perspective on Nirvana is that I wasn’t paying attention,” explains Julianne Anderson. “Green River and Sub Pop started percolating at the same time, so there was like, ‘Crazy Olympia Bruce Pavitt! And His Crazy Radio Show! And His Crazy Singles thing!’ Bruce was always this fabulous disaster of a kook, while Poneman was another one of these Ohio music intellectual geeks. I referred to Kurt Cobain as ‘that blond kid’ because to me, he was ‘that blond kid’. All my girlfriends had crushes on him, they thought he was the cutest thing in the world, so they would all drag me out to see this Nirvana band play – and, again, it was the little short guy, that big tall guy and the revolving drummer . . . We’d go out to the shows and I’d sit at the bar and drink myself stupid because I was always so happy to get in because I wasn’t old enough . . .

  “It was just a social thing. We didn’t think about it as this great artistic revolution, it was just those kids from Aberdeen are coming to play. I took one look at Kurt and decided he was too short and he was trouble. He was so withdrawn and introspective, but so explosive on stage, you could tell he was battling a bunch of demons. Frankly, Kurt lived 10 years longer than I ever expected.”

  Why do you think all the girls loved him?

  “He was an attractive kid. He was a very handsome guy. He had those blue eyes that were super-penetrating, but for me it was more like, ‘Wow, that guy’s really mad about something.’ ”

  “My band [the all-girl Dickless] were all so in love with Kurt,” sighs Kelly Canary. “We practised in the same building. Every single one of us was either in love with Kurt or Jason. It was embarrassing getting ready to go to practice, putting our make-up on. I’ll be totally honest. Kurt intimidated me from the first time I met him. He was so talented.”

  When did you first see him?

  “It was at The Vogue. Nirvana opened up for The Flaming Lips, but The Flaming Lips said they were probably the worst band they’d ever seen. And it was probably no shorter than a year after that that they took over the world. One time we went to see Nirvana and Melvins in Olympia, and this guy comes over to yell at me. So I blow my rape whistle, and when he’s walking up to me I scream out, ‘Somebody here has date-raped a woman.’ In Olympia! Girl’s gotta party.”

  NOTES

  1 Noddy Holder: much loved frontman with England’s Seventies glam stompers, Slade.

  2 Sub Pop bands always did have a way with a slogan: I preferred Soundgarden’s ‘Total Fucking Godhead’ T-shirt, and the label’s ‘ Fuck Me I’m Rich’ but this wasn’t bad at all.

  3 Maybe not so much now that Alice Cooper appears on ‘Top 100 . . .’ TV shows the world over, like a low rent version of Ozzy – but certainly back then, if only for ‘School’s Out’.

  4 Robert Wyatt’s late Sixties’ outfit, Soft Machine, straddled the divide between soul-based psychedelia and free jazz-influenced avant rock better than most.

  5 City Slang later became Hole’s European record label.

  6 Jason lasted only a few months in Soundgarden before being replaced by Ben Shepherd. Jason then joined Mindfunk as guitarist.

  7 The series included The Legend! as vocalist on ‘Breakfast In Bed’/‘Safe Little Circles’.

  8 Best avoided. Funk-punk from Vancouver – nomeansno were early precursors of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ style.

  9 The cover of ‘Loose’ was also ironic, because what Calvin did was in so many ways anathema to Iggy’s spirited, histrionic approach to rock’n’roll.

  10 The studio is now a flower shop on the corner of Summit and Pike. Other artists recorded there include Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Love Battery, Some Velvet Sidewalk, Beat Happening and Kenny G.

  11 The EP eventually came out in December on Tupelo, after the tour finished: ‘Blew’, plus the two Music Source songs, plus two songs culled from Bleach.

  12 They’re now available on With The Lights Out (2004) with the original guide vocals.

  13 Michael Gira was the Swans singer – Swans were similar to Melvins or Earth, heavy, slow and very loud, a decade earlier.

  14 They also played Iguana’s in Tijuana, Mexico on September 1 – and spent most of the summer playing home state shows.

  15 Steel Pole Bathtub were a slow and psychedelic rock band – but not too slow or psychedelic.

  16 Now they’re the new R.E.M. or something – but back then, Wayne Coyne’s acid-deranged psychedelic punk rockers, The Flaming Lips, were one of the most jarring bands around.

  17 Shepherd eventually joined Soundgarden in 1991: “I went straight from the garage to playing Copenhagen at the Rosskilde Festival,” he says.

  18 I can concur: I well remember being out drinking with Ben in Japan in 1994, when he was hurling glasses left right and centre out on the street.

  19 Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was a stylish, theatrical, bluesy rock’n’roll singer, known for leaping out of coffins and his deep, guttural grunts and moans – exemplified on the chilling 1956 hit ‘I Put A Spell On You’.

  20 It was probably the former Roxy Music keyboard-player’s angular and artful 1973 album Here Come The Warm Jets, rather than his later ambient work.

  21 Dwarves were notorious: infamous for the graphically explicit cover to 1990’s Blood Guts And Pussy, and for faking their own bassist’s death. Oh, and for singer Blag Jesus’ habit of pissing on the audience.

  22 GWAR are like a low-budget Kiss – dressed up in monster costumes and splattered the audience with fake blood while playing hard rock.

  CHAPTER 9

  Corndogs And Candy

  I don’t know if this is fun so much as exhilarating: being crushed under 3,200 pounds of writhing flesh – one foot in your crutch, another rammed up your nose, a body stretched tight across your legs, another pinioned across an arm – wondering why your bones aren’t broken yet. And people do this for enjoyment?

  Mudhoney and Dickless 1 in Seattle – you could write the fucking review yourself, couldn’t you? Just grab a handful of words, chuck ’em in the air, and see where they fall; pub rock for the Nineties, primal noise therapy for people scared of the eternity of silence; one-dimensional flailing hardcore for people with not enough imagination to be seduced by music which causes them to lose themselves – although, right now, I can’t think of any better way to attain a transcendental state than through the mindless metallic time-warp of a Motörhead or a Mudhoney, say. Let’s call it repetitious, deranged, riotous, pulsating, grungy and relentless, and move on, shall we? No.

  Dickless take to the stage like oysters on acid and have people stagediving into silence, whether they’re playing or not. An all-girl, indigenous quartet, the standard Dickless song (a) lasts under two minutes, (b) lifts the riff from ‘Smoke On The Water’, (c) is lucky if it finds itself with the bass and guitar playing simultaneously, and (d) is the funniest thing I’ve experienced since Laibach 2 covered ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. Or the Rocky Mountain ride at Disneyland. Pandemonium, I suspect, is the Everett Truism to use here.

  (Live review, Melody Maker, 1989)

  ON October 20, 1989, Nirvana left Seattle for their first European tour.

  They were to spend the majority of the next seven weeks squashed into a nine-seat Fiat van with thei
r gear, merchandise, Tad Doyle and his band, a soundman and a tour manager: 11 people belching and smoking and making crude jokes all the way across the continent. The shows were promoted as being part of the Heavier Than Heaven co-headlining tour – a reference to the two bands’ dense, sometimes lethargic, sound and also to 300-pound Tad Doyle himself.3 Kurt was ill when he arrived in London – while his fellow travellers sampled Britain’s frankly superior beer, he convalesced, suffering from bronchitis, at the band’s hotel.

  “They were staying at this little B& B in Shepherd’s Bush called the Dalmacia,” says Anton Brookes, “just round the corner from where Russell [ Warby, Nirvana’s UK booking agent] worked at The Agency.” They should have a plaque. “Right,” the press agent nods. “They’d just got in, and we went out for a Chinese takeaway. Kurt was curled up in his bed all night.”

  He had a very particular diet: pizza, corndogs and candy.

  “He had a very white trash mentality when it came to food,” laughs Anton, a vegetarian. “He couldn’t eat a lot of stuff because it affected his stomach.”

  “Every time you went to London, you had to stay in the Dalmacia,” confirms Craig Montgomery. What? Even though it used to lock people out if they got back too late? “I don’t know about that,” the easy-going Seattleite shrugs. “It must have been pretty tolerant, since there was a steady stream of grungers and rockers.”

  The tour called for the bands to play 37 dates in 42 days across several countries, sometimes necessitating overnight drives after the show. On top of this, the Dutch tour manager Edwin Heath – supplied by the same agency that booked the tour, Paperclip – often insisted the bands drive direct to soundcheck without checking in at the hotel first.

  “The first European tour was gruelling and long and cold,” recalls Craig. “We were staying in little bed and breakfasts. Often, a family ran them. At one, we go to knock on the front door and these two schnauzers start yapping, and Tad goes, ‘Oh, this place comes with complimentary schnauzers.’ So the rest of the tour, we wanted our complimentary schnauzers.