by Everett True
Nirvana felt frustration. I could relate to that. After all, what had my frantic dancing been if not a manifestation of my sexual frustration? Nirvana felt frustration with shit club engineers and the life that had dealt them such a crap hand and everyone who didn’t immediately cotton on to their genius. Not to mention the fact it was almost impossible to express sensitivity within their chosen medium of punk rock/grunge.
Years later, Courtney Love explained to me that “punk rock is a Marxist rite of passage, one that has nothing to do with women”. Unfortunately, by the time bands like Black Flag and Dead Kennedys began to exert a stranglehold on US counterculture in the mid-Eighties, this was true. Initially, punk in NYC and the UK had sought out fresh ways of communication, a way to channel conflicting emotions, and a way in for women previously excluded by rock’s patriarchal set of rules. It soon solidified into another, even stricter, set of male-centred rules from which you could not veer if you wanted to belong.
This frustration at their surroundings was why Nirvana’s early songs – from the nerve-shredding Shocking Blue cover to Jack Endino’s inspired grunge production on ‘Negative Creep’ – sound so brutal and alive. Nirvana had so much angst to get out of their scrawny systems.
That’s also why Kurt started leaping backwards into the drum kit, forwards into the crowd, like Nick Cave and Iggy Pop before him. And that’s why I loved Nirvana so much initially. They made a goddamn effort – by leaping around and gurning and groaning and screaming so much on stage, it was obvious that they were merely doing what any half-awake fan would have done in their stead. Get up on stage and have a good time! Put your heart and soul and body into it, because you know what? Outside of tonight, nothing exists. Nothing. What, you want to go back to that crap job as a railway engineer, as a printer, as a nobody? Make some noise! Not along preordained lines, but in your own time and in your own space and inspired by your own emotions.
So . . . did any of this stuff even happen? You begin to wonder; you read so many accounts that fail to capture the excitement, the sheer thrill, that block off whole tours and unique shows. Did I even get up on stage with Nirvana to scream the encore on several occasions? Not according to any of the books I’ve read. Was Nirvana an exhilarating, mind-bending band with an appetite for destruction or was Kurt just a sad junkie with a big mate who looked after him? I know which version I experienced, but you do start to question your own memory . . .
“The first time we toured all we had was that single and that’s it,” explains Chad. “Audiences were random. We’d play at some club in LA and pack the place. And then we’d play in Tucson, Arizona to 30 people at best, and leave with just 50 bucks in our pockets. The next time we went out, it was a different story. Every place we played was packed. And when we went over to Europe, every place we played was from 500 to 850 – and we played the Astoria. What does that seat – 7,000?8 Nothing was ever enormous, but every place was packed. The people that were into the music scene, those were the ones that knew about Nirvana. Your average public didn’t know about Nirvana until Geffen pushed them. Or pushed and pulled them, I should say.”
Something happened between 1989 and 1990. I’m not sure I know what it was. I was too busy enjoying myself to take notes. Bleach came out halfway through ’89 – an album I listened to about two-and-a-half times before realising that, as ever, with this sort of music, records can never compare to the live experience. I concentrated instead on going out.
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down – and Tad and Nirvana were in Hanover, preparing to travel to Berlin.
“The band was on their first European tour,” states their German booking agent Christof Ellinghaus. “They played in this little village in the middle of Germany and were scheduled to play Berlin on Saturday night. It would have been a guaranteed sell-out, there was such a buzz on that first record. We had a really good feeling. And you know what happened? On Thursday night, the bloody wall came down. So these guys were stuck in transit traffic of little cars going each way into Berlin or West Germany. You can imagine how done they were when they finally got there.
“There was an atmosphere in Berlin I have never seen again. It was a love-fest for some reason,” he jokes sarcastically. “Thousands of East Germans in their stonewashed jeans arriving in capitalist Germany – welcomed by money and bananas. The party was in the streets. It was huge. People were out and about, so there goes our 600-capacity Nirvana show. When the bands got there they were so pissed off, they didn’t even realise. ‘Why are we stuck in traffic? What are all these funny cars?’ The theme of the tour was a porn movie called Barnyard Fun, which had a fascinatingly cheesy soundtrack. First, they were pissed off because it took them 20 hours to get there, but then we explained, ‘Hey, come on, you are witnessing history in the making!’ There was a lot of drinking going on. They played, Tad opened, Nirvana finished, and gosh . . .”
The venue was half-full: “227 people,” remarks Ellinghaus in precise Teutonic fashion. “Kurt smashed his guitar during ‘Breed’ and walked off.” The band had nowhere to stay, so they slept upstairs at the venue, the Ecstasy Club, no beds, with their jackets rolled up under their heads – or stayed up all night smoking hash.
“We were driving there in mid-afternoon, and I was talking to Edwin,” recalls Chad. “I was like, ‘What is up with all these cars?’ because there were DDR cars lined up forever over there. We had a great show that night. If we’d played the night before, we would’ve had West Germans at our show not East Germans. We had both. The club we played was only four or five blocks from the wall, so we walked over and there were still a lot of people there. It was cool.”
“That fall, we toured Europe with our label-mates Tad,” Krist wrote in Of Grunge And Government. “We found ourselves in Berlin the day after the wall fell.9 We counted a column of little Trabant cars, 27 kilometres long, on the Eastern side, waiting to enter the West. The emotion of history in the making was in the air. The West had much to offer and this wasn’t lost on me when I noticed all of the Trabants parked on the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s notorious avenue of booze and sex.”
After a fairly extensive German tour came four dates in Austria – including “the troll village up in the mountains,” as Kurt described one place – and then on to the heavy metal club in Budapest, and Switzerland.
In Mezzago, Italy, Kurt joined Tad to sing Tad’s songs ‘High On The Hog’ and ‘Loser’.
“Tad had passed out from the heat, so Kurt jumped up on stage,” recalls Craig. “At the end, some kid reached over the barricade for Krist’s shoes. And I knew that Krist couldn’t be shoeless in Europe. That would be bad. So I jumped over the barricade, and I must have scared the crap out of this kid, because he just gave them up to me.
“Maybe I had my cycling cap on,” he laughs.
Nirvana played Rome on November 27. It was a disaster.
In a typically extravagant and somewhat thoughtless gesture, Jon and Bruce had flown out to see how the tour was going – much to the resentment of the bands being forced to get by on sleep deprivation in cramped surroundings, barely breaking even. “It was a gruelling schedule,” comments Craig. “If the bands did have a day off it was a travel day, or they were doing a session.” Rome would prove to be the beginning of the end of Sub Pop’s relationship with both bands: the musicians viewed their appearance – intended as emotional support, a pair of friendly faces to help prop up flagging spirits – as sheer arrogance, the act of record company moguls out of touch with their roster.
“This was the tour where they were still destroying their back line every night,” says Christof. “They flew into their drum kits, specially made drum kits too. It was one of the most powerful rock shows I’ve seen by a three-piece. Tad was really amazing, but Nirvana had the songs. Kurt was an impulsive little fucker, so if a microphone wasn’t working, he’d throw it down and walk away. Kurt was passive/aggressive and full of drama. It was a danger element when Krist would swing his bass towards the en
d of the show.”
“Rome was a bad show for Nirvana,” remembers Craig. “There was a bad attitude and Kurt quit early. He walked off the stage. He wasn’t happy with the sound. I think he was just unhappy in general. There was a big blow-up between Kurt and Edwin. Kurt quit, and then Edwin quit, and Kurt threw a fit about bad monitors . . .”
Kurt smashed his guitar during ‘Spank Thru’ and clambered up on to the PA stack, threatening to jump off: “The bouncers were freaked out,” recalls Bruce Pavitt, “as were the crowd. Everyone was begging him to come down. He had reached his limit. If he’d dived he would have broken his neck.” Kurt clambered up into the rafters, and from there, into the balcony – where he threatened to hurl chairs at the audience.10
“Afterwards, the venue’s sound guy was peeved with Nirvana over breaking some mics,” adds Craig. “He came up to Edwin and Kurt and showed them the broken mics, which looked fine, so Kurt took them and threw them on the ground and said, ‘Now they’re broken.’ Edwin did not take kindly to that: ‘From this point on, I am not going to tour manage Nirvana!’ I’m not sure how it got patched up.”
Poneman took Kurt outside to cool off: “He was ranting, saying, ‘I don’t want to play for these morons, I just want to go home,’” the label boss recalls. “He was like, ‘I want to go home to my girlfriend and never have to play music again.’ ” Jon promised to buy Kurt a new guitar when the tour got to Geneva in Switzerland, and a train ticket to the next city. His concern was to get Kurt out of the pressure-cooker conditions of touring in a van so he could make it to the final England show in a few days time.
Krist and Chad also momentarily quit Nirvana that night.
The next day was a rare day off: Nirvana visited the Coliseum and matters cooled down – but only briefly. During a border crossing on the train between Rome and Geneva, Kurt fell asleep and his wallet and passport and shoes were stolen. “That,” Jonathan comments wryly, “was the perfect picture of unhappiness, Kurt sitting there with his hood pulled up over his head, not speaking to anyone, drinking a cup of hot chocolate.”
“Yeah, we had to go to the consulate in Berne, Switzerland, which was not a city on our tour,” sighs Craig, “and sit there for six hours, while the paperwork got done. It was at least a day lost.”
It was when the tour returned to England on December 3, for the opening night of Lamefest at London’s Astoria11, that Nirvana totally tore up the rulebook. This, in many respects, was the show that changed everything.
Going on first, it seemed that the trio would be faced with an uphill struggle to impress those who’d arrived especially early to catch them. What were we thinking? Nirvana had driven all the way from Dover to London in freezing fog, arriving 20 minutes before they were due to go on: no soundcheck, no rest period, nothing. It didn’t matter. After 30 minutes, they’d pulverised their way through four guitars and left the stage for dead. I’m not saying Nirvana bettered Mudhoney – who were at the peak of their considerable power – but that night they unsettled and bewildered any number of people with the force of their performance.
“Remember Lamefest?” laughs Christof. “The show scarred me. There was a lot of stagediving, Mudhoney headlined, but Nirvana stole the show. They were a menace, amazing.”
“It stunk,” Krist flatly stated. “On a scale of one to 10 it was a zero.”
Opinion of this show is all over the place. I have a vivid memory of Tad Doyle lurching towards the front of the stage, about to dive off . . . but did he? I can recall the stage battered and laid bare, amplifiers and guitars and mic stands all swept to one side as Nirvana exited . . . butwas it that show? I can’t recall the songs, but I can still feel the emotion, the anger manifesting itself as Kurt hurled his guitar towards Krist only for the bassist to casually bat it away with his instrument, splintering it into several shards. I have a feeling they tried several times before Krist connected but . . . who knows?
Some friends feel the show was one of the greatest they witnessed. Others are equally vehement it was the absolute pits. Yet I’m sure this is the night that I first really connected with the power and rage and frustration and sheer devilment of Kurt Cobain.
“Kurt was in turn full of terror and gentleness,” recalled MM photographer Stephen Sweet. “He threw himself around like nothing existed outside of each moment he played and sang.”
Simon Price slagged off Nirvana in Melody Maker the next week, singling out Krist for most of his vitriol, claiming that, “It all falls apart when the lanky, rubber-legged, frog-like bassist starts making a fool of himself.” Others were similarly unimpressed.
“It was our tour,” growls Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters. “We had been over for nine weeks. My recollection was that Nirvana was fucking horrible and they were fucking shitty. They could barely get through a song, let alone 10 songs. They were breaking strings left and right. At one point Krist was swinging his bass around and I was standing on the side of the stage. All of a sudden it got loose and I fucking had to put my hand up and the butt of his bass hit me. If I’d been any slower, it would’ve totally gotten me.”
My recollection is that it was the first time I ever liked them live. I might be confused . . .
“You talk to anyone in Mudhoney,” replies Dan, “and we all remember that show. I was sitting there going, ‘This sucks.’ I wasn’t saying that they sucked, but I was saying, ‘This sucks that this is the big London show and this is happening.’ Ever since then I’ve been reading stuff like, ‘If you weren’t there, you missed out. Nirvana blew all the other bands away.’ History has definitely changed that show in a lot of ways.”
Maybe I enjoyed it because there was a lot of stagediving going on.
“They pulled up, and there was Tad and Nirvana,” recalls Anton, “and their crew all crammed into this small van. Standing outside, they tossed a coin to see who would go on first and it was heads, so Nirvana did – which they were pleased about cos it meant they could have rest of the time off. That night was the turning point. There were a lot of hipsters there, the cool bands – Kurt came off stage and his knees were all cut up and grazed because he’d jump four or five foot in the air off something and land on his knees. We used to joke how we’d have to get him sponsorship with a kneepad firm . . . he was constantly covered in bruises or abrasions.”
Do you remember everyone lining up at the side of the stage to jump off ?
“Yeah, from the label,” nods Anton. “Everyone, Tad, publicists, promoters, journalists, other musicians, catering.”
Do you remember their set being good?
“I thought it was really good,” he replies. “The following week all the reviews made Nirvana out to be the band. I felt sorry for Mudhoney because I thought they were amazing those nights, but it was Nirvana getting the accolades.”
“I still have it, never worn but once, that pullover from the show,” brags Chad. “Yeah, that was a cool show. It was cool because we were hanging out with Mudhoney. Mark Arm and Matt [ Lukin] stagedived during our set. Kurt stagedived during Mudhoney’s set. I don’t think Krist ever stagedived too much. You would be pretty wary of some guy like Krist coming down on you, he’s a pretty big dude, but then Tad . . . He laid himself down on the crowd that night. If he’d dived he would’ve killed somebody.”
I remember Nirvana being amazing at Lamefest.
“I don’t remember if I even watched them,” Steve Turner sighs.
Other people told me that they sucked.
“I know they were in bad shape,” Steve agrees. “Both those bands were exhausted. There was some question of whether they could even make it there. I’m sure I watched some of it. Some of those big shows were still freaking me out a little. So I was kind of . . . hiding.” He laughs. “Drinking and hiding . . .”
Steve starts reading from his journal: “ ‘At Lamefest, The Legend! came with Tad and Nirvana . . . very party-like. Tad and Nirvana break all their guitars and Tad borrows mine to do his Peel Session the next day. They look ready t
o go home . . .
“ ‘Second night at The Astoria. Didn’t sell out but it was really crowded. Tad and others were there and tossed us off the stage except me. Bill from Cosmic Psychos couldn’t get me. We met Jason [Pierce] from Spacemen 3 whose new band, Darkside, opened. Total chumps. Darkside were doing coke backstage and shit. I let Mark deal with them . . .’ ”
While Nirvana were in Europe, their first non-Sub Pop track appeared: ‘Mexican Seafood’, released on the compilation seven-inch EP Teriyaki Asthma Vol 1 (C/Z). Daniel House, C/ Z’s boss, worked for Sub Pop for a while. He would’ve offered Nirvana a deal, “but Jonathan jumped on them so fast,” House explained. The other artists on the record were Coffin Break, Helios Creed, and Yeast.
Addenda: project bands
So tell me about your jam with Kurt Cobain.
“It’s splendid because it’s something I can tell my grandkids,” smiles Rich Jensen.
“One day, I was messing around with Dylan and Slim at the practice space they had at the back of their house. A weird hippie guy with stringy hair is playing a broken bass with two strings – the neck is broken and only just hanging on. He’s bending the head and thwacking it. It’s turned up really loud, going ‘ Phwam phwam’ – this big booming sound. We go into the room and, because everybody’s friends with everybody, I start playing with a little drum sampler and Slim’s doing something, and we continue to put noises on top of his thwacking. I don’t remember exactly, except there was this really peculiar fellow thumping at this broken thing – not musical, just horrendous thwacks and thwamps. He did it the whole time we were messing around – for, like, an hour. We leave, and as we’re walking away, half a block away, we hear him continuing to thwamp and thwamp. I always imagined he thwamped like that for days.”