by Everett True
“We listened to The Vaselines4, Leadbelly and The Beatles,” the engineer adds. “I think we had Shonen Knife. Pixies, oh yeah, the Pixies. [Many critics – and Kurt himself – have commented on the debt Nirvana owe to the Boston band’s inspired opening brace of albums, particularly 1988’s offbeat and furious Surfer Rosa, with its quiet/loud dynamics and surf music-warped take on Americana. Kurt’s progression in his musical tastes from Melvins’ primordial sludge to Pixies’ ferocious college rock is a major contributing factor to Nirvana’s success.]
“You wouldn’t believe how much we listened to Abba,” Craig continues. “It’s good travelling music, and somehow when you’re driving around Europe, the vibe is right. We listened to some Seventies rock, maybe Queen or Badfinger.5 I don’t think there was a lot of super-abrasive punk rock-y stuff. We didn’t listen to Black Sabbath or anything. Edwin did all the driving so we were all in the back, drinking. Is that legal in Europe?”
Oh probably.
“It’s hard,” Craig explains, “because you’re up late every night, and you’re sleeping somewhere that’s probably cold and there is a shared bathroom down the hall. And in the van you have to sit up, the seats don’t recline and every seat is occupied. One of the places we stayed in Austria was a college dorm. Budapest [November 21] was bizarre, because no one knew who the bands were – they just knew they were American rock bands and that was it.”
Not everyone remembers the tour as a downer. Chad Channing, for one, has fond memories (it must be said that most of the others recall Chad as being almost insanely stoical) – “Europe was fun,” the drummer reminisces. “Some people would complain about the food, ‘I’m sick of eating this bologna and salami spread’ . . . that kind of stuff.6 Not me. Some people were so used to being around their own home that after a while they got irritable. Never happened to me. I’d make a point to wake up an hour before we had to leave, and walk around whatever city we were in. Try to pick up some language.”
The bands loved to hold food fights in the dressing room: one of Kurt’s favourite tricks was to empty an ashtray over a couple of slices of bread, to create a dirt sandwich. Other times, he’d be seen wandering around with flowers sticking out of his trouser fly.
Kurt often roomed with Kurt Danielson, guitarist with the Tad band. He was missing his mother, and Tracy – to whom he sent postcards, sometimes with the words ‘I Love You’ scrawled over and over again, other times a sketch of an Italian toilet with no water but plenty of excrement. Nights were spent discussing the turn of events that had led both musicians to lead such squalid lives in pursuit of a rock’n’roll dream neither had thought through. Novoselic would escape reality through alcohol, Channing was used to constant change because of his childhood, and he’d often talk to himself – “In weird voices,” claimed Cobain – while Kurt’s way of coping was to fall asleep. He relished it, and developed a knack of falling asleep during soundchecks. Often, he’d be sleeping right up until the moment he had to be on stage. It was the easiest way to deal with the situation.
“Tad was a very loud snorer,” reveals Craig. “We were sharing rooms, always two to a room, if not more, and you did not want to be the guy sharing a room with Tad, because you were not going to sleep. He couldn’t do anything about it, and he would apologise. There’d always be someone who was sleep deprived, more than ordinary.”
Tad had his own problems: every morning before the van departed, he would vomit. Kurt Danielson told an apocryphal story about how Kurt Cobain used to stand in front of the van with a plastic basin, waiting for Tad to throw up into it so he could examine its multi-coloured contents. Only Kurt was allowed to hold the basin: no one else.
It is true that Kurt was fascinated by bodily functions; witness the diseased carnal display on his fridge door back in Olympia. Tad’s dietary problems helped to inspire the Nirvana song ‘Breed’ – its original title, ‘ Immodium’, was taken from Doyle’s diarrhoea medicine. Whether Danielson was guilty of exaggeration or not, shit and vomit are regular sources of amusement for travelling musicians. And Nirvana and Tad certainly weren’t above such humour.
“There’s a certain frequency, 27 Hertz or something, that’s been proven to make people shit their pants,” Tad told me when we first met. “We’re searching for that frequency. Our guitarist almost manages it, so people kind of shit their pants when they see us.”
It was in the UK that Nirvana and Tad made the biggest impression. The country was primed. Mudhoney were in the middle of a very successful tour. Soundgarden and Screaming Trees had already been over. In the wake of my Melody Maker articles (another one appeared on October 24, a straight Nirvana interview entitled Bleached Wails) and John Peel’s continuing support, plus write-ups from sympathetic journalists such as John Robb, Keith Cameron, Roy Wilkinson, Push and Edwin Pouncey, the kids wanted a piece of the Sub Pop action. Even if not all the critics were convinced . . .
“First, Bleach came out,” says Anton. “The reaction was scant. Back then it was all metal magazines like Metal Forces and Kerrang! and they were like, ‘It’s not poodle enough for us,’ even though Nirvana rocked harder than a lot of their rock bands. NME were patronising: ‘Nevada, from where?’ Until Keith Cameron went there, there was no one. Sounds and Melody Maker were supportive – but there were two camps at the Maker. There seemed to be a lot of pettiness and even envy towards your involvement with the Sub Pop camp, because of the way bands would call you up when they came to town. If a band was perceived as an Everett band then they’d never sell more than 200 copies or get beyond doing a Peel session. When Nirvana became popular, there were a lot of people unwilling to put them on the cover . . .”
Still. The buzz was on. All the bands needed to do was deliver the goods – and that wasn’t a problem. Tad looked demented on stage, his entire bulk shivering and wobbling, his lumberjack shirt pouring with sweat, as he thrashed out another fudge-packing riff and roared into the microphone: and what Krist and Kurt lacked in grace they more than made up for in energy, mayhem and drunken unpredictability.
You never knew what was going to happen next. This, at a time when the critical bands of choice – (the awesome) My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Chapterhouse – were lumped together under the sobriquet ‘shoe-gazing’ because all they’d do on stage was stand there and gaze at their shoes.
“Nirvana are very much a band that would like to say, ‘Hi, this is us and we’re having fun, too!’ ” I wrote, “But the band are also a little bit weird. They’re a little bit gross and a little bit awesome. And a bit too determined to be content with just messing around. What else could you be if you grew up in the redneck hell town of Aberdeen, a zillion miles away from the isolated capital of the Northwest, Seattle?”
The opening night was at a packed Newcastle Riverside on October 23. Someone threw a beer bottle and hit Krist on the side of his head. In retaliation, Novoselic smashed his new bass straight through a couple of amps – rental amps that were supposed to last the entire tour.
“They didn’t really break anything on that tour because they didn’t have a lot of spare guitars,” says Craig, “except at that first show, where they had this wimpy bass amp that wasn’t loud enough. Here’s poor Edwin, who doesn’t know these people at all, and he’s like, ‘What the hell is this?’ We had to go back down to London and get a good amp.”
The following night at Manchester Polytechnic was better: desirous of full-on rock, the crowd went crazy. There had long been a tradition of crazed slam-dancing and stagediving in the UK, part-fuelled by the Minneapolis bands of the mid-Eighties and also British psychobilly and garage outfits such as The Meteors and Billy Childish’s Thee Mighty Caesars. It didn’t take much to set the kids off again. European fans were much more appreciative of Sub Pop than their US counterparts. There again it’s easy to take for granted what’s on your doorstep.
Witness Seattle’s own music paper, The Rocket’s attitude towards Sub Pop. Contrary to revisionist reportage since, The Rocket was not
the first magazine to feature Nirvana on their cover. Even the British music press beat them to it, with John Robb’s article in Sounds. The Rocket followed three months later, with a cursory 750-word story. You’d have thought a local publication might have been faster to react, for news value alone.
“I went up to Leeds to see them, at a two-thirds full Duchess Of York,” recalls Anton. The Duchess was a classic perennial on the UK ‘toilet circuit’ – backstage was up a steep, cold flight of stairs, pub dance floor capacity around 200; vibe was friendly. “I remember Krist walking off the stage and saying to him, flippantly, ‘ Krist, you haven’t thrown your bass.’ He went, ‘Oh yeah,’ and just threw it behind him without looking. You could see everybody looking down to where the moshpit was, and then every one of the dancers moving their heads back as the bass came flying down. Upstairs afterwards, everyone was getting stoned. It was winter: freezing, wet and cold – a load of labels had gone up there to see Nirvana and Tad.”
The next day, Nirvana travelled to the BBC’s studios in Maida Vale to partake in the time-honoured tradition of recording a John Peel Session – four songs; ‘Love Buzz’, ‘About A Girl’, ‘Polly’ and ‘Spank Thru’. On October 27, Nirvana played their debut London show at the School of Oriental and African Studies ( SOAS) – home to a kick-ass Mudhoney/ Soundgarden double headliner a few weeks earlier where the stage collapsed and a handful of UK music journalists had to physically hold up the trestle tables it was resting on while the mess was sorted out. Security had walked a long time before.
“The thing that struck me most about playing SOAS was that the crowd was 100 per cent white,” comments Mark Arm. “People were falling over the stage, and we were getting pushed back. So I made this crack like, ‘Hey, let’s everybody get on stage!’ which the crowd took at face value. At once everyone tried to get on stage and security got really mad. You and Anton and Keith Cameron were trying to keep things under control. Things got underway again and I was thinking, ‘This is so absurd. How can I show the absurdity of it all?’ So during the next song I told the crowd – to illustrate a point of how dumb they are – to climb the PA stacks. At which point people did and one of the security guys started charging me, and Anton had to take him out. That’s where our version of sarcasm didn’t translate at all. I remember it being considered a riot, but it was hardly a riot. It was just overenthusiasm.”
None of the newly converted Sub Pop fans were going to miss a chance to have fun like that at the Tad/Nirvana show. “Kids were jumping off the speaker stacks,” exclaims Craig. “I’d never seen anything like it. People were losing control of their bodies entirely, both the band and the audience. It was a temporary set-up in a school cafeteria, not a concert venue at all, so there was very little security and the room was packed.”
“Kurt came off stage at SOAS, and he’s looking for something, and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Anton smiles. “He was like, ‘I need to do something and I don’t know what.’ I asked, ‘Why don’t you let off a fire extinguisher?’ You could see his face light up like a naughty child. And so off he goes to let one off . . .”
To be honest, it’s hard to remember most of these concerts. Everything folds into a blur. Even though I’m the commentator most Nirvana historians quote when it comes to the early shows – credited or not – I’m fucked if I can recall what happened from one show to the next. Was it at the Astoria that Tad leapt off stage during Nirvana’s set, straight on to Matt Lukin, knocking him cold for 15 minutes – or did I imagine that? All I can recollect is long hair and faces insane on alcohol and heat, body aching from constant dancing, head spinning from resting it within the bass bins . . .
Some mornings, I would wake on the stairs outside my flat, cassettes smashed at my feet. Other days, I can recall physically shaking from lack of alcohol, walking across Blackfriars Bridge at 10 in the morning. I hung out with Mudhoney and Tad way more than Nirvana back then – preferred their music, and the guys drank more too. (Well, except Krist Novoselic.) There must have come a time when Nirvana went from being a second-rate Soundgarden to an incredible, emotionally charged live act and it must have happened on this tour, but what made me change my opinion?
I’m not the only one confused.
“I’ve played so many shows, hardly anything significant stands out,” says Chad. “Like that time in New York when the bass cracked, or the time at the Chicago Metro when everybody started throwing bottles at us – but they weren’t throwing bottles at us because they were angry at us but as encouragement. They have that over in England. I remember when we first played over there, in Manchester, people showed their appreciation by spitting and throwing bottles. That happened at a number of shows. We were like, ‘Oh this again! Quick, duck!’ ”
“I thought Nirvana were one of the good Seattle bands, but didn’t see their potential,” says Ruud Berends, ex-Paperclip. “I thought Tad was a little better and Mudhoney were a lot better. I thought the Tad/Nirvana tour was four or five months too early. We had 50 people a night, on average.”
The band travelled from the UK to Hilversum, Holland, where they recorded ‘About A Girl’ and ‘Dive’ for radio station VPRO on November 1. The Dutch dates were in bigger places – nicer, but more reserved. The shows included nights at the communal Vera venue in Groningen with its excellent hippie food and table-tennis table and end-of-year charts rating the staff ’s favourite bands7, and Melkweg in Amsterdam. The Melkweg gig ended with Kurt smashing his guitar and then screaming into a mic as the band jammed on some noise number (later to spawn the closing ‘Endless, Nameless’ on Nevermind ) – and afterwards, the pot-smokers headed off to the red-light district, to the Bulldog bar and all that.
Not everyone was impressed by Nirvana’s behaviour.
“ Krist bought a bottle of whiskey on the boat and finished it alone,” Edwin Heath told a Dutch magazine Oor in 1994. “Drunk as a donkey, completely wasted. At one point, we’re waiting for a traffic light in Den Haag, next to a police car without lights. All of a sudden Krist opens the side door and shouts, ‘Turn on the lights, motherfuckers!’ The cops stayed behind us for another 15 minutes.”
The band stayed at the Quentin Hotel in Amsterdam, a regular Paperclip spot for small bands: “ Krist, still completely drunk, went to lie down in the hallway,” Heath continued. “The hotel is run by two cool guys, one of whom, Philip, looks like Freddie Mercury. He goes to Krist to put him on a chair and when Krist sees him coming he shouts, ‘ Fuck you, Freddie Mercury fag!’ and we’re told to leave. Later, Krist got on top of the van to curse to the whole world. He apologised later . . .”
After Holland, it was off to West Germany.
“The first show we played in Germany was in a tiny little place,” recalls Craig. “Sound-wise, the show was an abortion. You remember the times that were exceptional – when they smashed up some equipment, or got in a fight with a bouncer – but Nirvana was actually very consistent. Their shows weren’t always a shambolic wreck. They were well rehearsed, and they had good songs, and they played them.”
Understand this: I used to go to concerts to dance. There was no other reason. If I liked a band, I’d be flailing wildly, often by myself, at the front. If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t watch them and I’d hide in a corner. It was as simple as that. Attending concerts wasn’t a social event for me – I had few friends – and it certainly wasn’t an excuse to get drunk and behave obnoxiously. That came later. I wanted bands whose energy I could feed off, and to whom I could give some energy back.
That’s why I loved Nick Cave’s Birthday Party in the early Eighties: the man made an effort. We screamed our approval when he’d fall back into the crowd, arms akimbo, trusting us to bear him up. We’d punch, kick, scratch to get hold of the microphone and yell a few words down it while Nick’s back was turned. “Express yourself,” he would scream possessed, to his adoring faithful, and a few of us did. If you listen closely to the start of the 1982 Lydia Lunch/Birthday Party live 12-inch you’ll hear
a deep bass voice singing “Danger zone in the heart of the city/ Danger zone in the heart of the town”. My first recorded performance, thank you.
Likewise, Half Japanese singer Jad Fair – the epitome of a geek with his big glasses, ordinary clothes and battered guitar that he sometimes forgot to plug in. Faced with abuse as he often was, he’d jump into the crowd and face off his oppressor who would invariably bottle it. Likewise, The Slits. Conventional rock wisdom ran in the face of these girls’ unequivocal glee at being allowed on stage and given a chance to scream and show off and wear their knickers on the outside of their clothes, and create a wonderful, bass-led dub sound ripe for dancing to.
So it was with Nirvana in 1989 and 1990. After the initial shock of seeing them pretend to be a heavy metal band had worn off and they’d lost Jason, they turned out to be super fine. Hey, the heavy metal tag is fair enough. Would Nirvana have been signed to Sub Pop without the hard rock connections? I doubt it. I don’t know what fucked-up shit the kids in small-town America have to suffer and lose before they can express their feelings, but I suspect that back in Nirvana’s day it included mandatory exposure to Aerosmith and Kiss. Remember: punk rock didn’t break till the year 1991 in America when Nevermind charted. Before then, and before the Internet, Edge City kids had no access to the cool shit which us big city kids took for granted.
Indeed, Nirvana turned out not just to be super fine, but rather special. That much was apparent from the first time I saw Kurt trying to destroy his amp with the aid of a much-abused guitar and fists. In this, Nirvana reminded me of the glory days of 1985 when John Robb’s Membranes would clear college stages of all obstacles within a few seconds. Well I remember the look on the faces of London’s famed Marquee bouncers when they saw us beating the crap out of their stage with 10-foot metal bars, and realised they were powerless to stop us.