Nirvana

by Everett True

  NOTES

  1 Put together by The Supersuckers’ Danny Bland, the concept of Dickless was based round the Redd Kross teen exploitation movie, 1984’s Desperate Teenage Lovedolls . “They were great – terrifying, actually,” says Jack Endino. “The guitarist Kerry was completely unschooled, but she’d figured a way round it. She tuned the whole guitar to a chord, so all she had to do was use one finger to play punk rock guitar. Kelly Canary’s voice was like the secret weapon. You could stop armies with that voice.”

  2 Laibach are a sinister Slovenian experimental metal group, with guttural voices, thunderous instrumentation and a warped, warped sense of humour.

  3 Sub Pop claimed the Idaho heavyweight was a former butcher and deranged woodsman.

  4 Nirvana had started covering The Vaselines’ simple, riff-driven ‘Molly’s Lips’. I still have the fax somewhere from Bruce Pavitt asking if I could contact singer Eugene Kelly on Kurt’s behalf to ask if it was OK for Nirvana to cover the song.

  5 Badfinger were a melodic pop band signed to Beatle’s Apple label, best known for writing Nilsson’s mega-hit ‘Without You’ and two members committing suicide.

  6 Most Seattle bands had a problem with English cuisine: Mudhoney even named an album after it, Boiled Beef And Rotting Teeth.

  7 One year, The Legend! came about number 44, four places above the band I supported, Soundgarden.

  8 More like a couple of thousand.

  9 It was actually two days afterwards.

  10 The description of this concert has spooky parallels with a Hole show in Amsterdam I saw in 1995, where Courtney used the PA system to climb up into the balcony to pursue a heckler. Her guitarist Eric Erlandson and myself engaged in a furious chase through the crowd, trying our damnedest to stop Courtney from braining her tormentor.

  11 Mudhoney headlined both nights, with the hard drinking, wah-wah wielding, Australian punk band Cosmic Psychos supporting the second night.

  CHAPTER 10

  Duct Tape And Splinters

  You know what it’s like, touring with a band. Time seems to stretch into infinity – an endless procession of highways, byways, houses, factories and the odd traffic jam. You eat a little. You sleep a little. You pray that your van doesn’t break down or end up in a crash. If you’ve got a little dope, you light that up too, anything to relieve the boredom.

  We’re in a van with the Tad band, travelling the 160 miles between Seattle and Portland along the west coast of America. It is early evening and it’s sheeting it down with rain outside, visibility zero, with clouds of cigarette smoke fogging up the inside. We’re fighting a losing battle against time for the soundcheck for tonight’s show with Screaming Trees and Nirvana at Portland’s Pine Street Theatre, but we’re doing OK, stoked up on tapes of the new Boss Hog1, Bastro 2 and Melvins’ albums, M& Ms and crackers. It’s just another night on the road.

  . . .

  Tad. Hell. You know what this lard-ass dude is all about by now, don’t you? He’s a gross, near-mythical figure, responsible for some of the most uncompromising music around; music that rocks, hard and heavy and relentless, but music that also contains elements of disquiet, of bitterness at being the perpetual outsider, of anger at never quite achieving.

  He and his band have just released a new mini-LP Salt Lick and are out touring the west coast with Nirvana to promote it; Portland through San Francisco, Long Beach and Phoenix. The usual. It’s a tour that will take them through February and the best part of March.

  Portland was great: 500 suburban punks dancing, Nirvana trashing a few guitars through frustration, Tad thrashing with his usual aplomb, and the whole place like a Palm Springs pinball machine that no one could touch me on. Everyone got plied with dope; the bar downstairs served tofu and falafel only, beer was limited to over-21s. The video crew that turned up got rewarded with a show of blistering proportions – metal twisted and distorted so out-of-shape its origins are barely recognisable.

  . . .

  Every night on tour, Kurdt smashes up at least one guitar, often two. In Portland, it was because he was enjoying himself. In San Jose, it was through sheer apathy. While making for an entertaining spectacle, one can’t help feeling that if Nirvana continue this way they’ll either degenerate into the realms of self-parody, run out of money – or both.

  Right now, though, Nirvana are awesome live. The San Francisco show with Tad and Dickless is stunning: the Washington trio blow every other fucking band in existence off-centre with their potency and ferocious intent. ‘Love Buzz’ and ‘Stain’ spiral and shatter, leaving precious shards of the purest manic pop thrill in their wake. Chris trashes his bass out of petulance, Kurdt – not to be left out – smashes his guitar and then trashes the drums. Meanwhile, our man Tad is standing left of the stage looking worried. It’s his bass that Chris is now using.

  They encore, exploding with malice and annoyance at a crap PA system, leaving San Francisco’s Gavin Report new music seminar in no doubt whatsoever as to quite who is happening where.

  . . .

  I wonder what Kurdt’s idea of beauty is. I don’t think I’ve ever wondered that before.

  “Antique craftsmanship,” the singer replies. “Something that is built well, built to last, something solid. Values that my grandparents had – pretty much the opposite of the way things are going now. It’s the same with music – sincerity, craftsmanship. If you do a job you should do it well – that’s just good business sense. Same thing my grandfather used to bitch at me about when I was a kid, and I never understood him.”

  (Excerpts from The Larder They Come, author’s report of

  Tad/Nirvana US tour, Melody Maker, March 17, 1990)

  IN December 1989, Krist and Shelli flew to Yugoslavia to visit Krist’s dad. On their return, the couple announced their engagement. They got married on December 30, in a private ceremony at their Tacoma apartment conducted by an acquaintance of Shelli’s – the flat was packed with family and friends, including Krist’s mum, Shelli’s mother and stepfather, most of Tad, Kurt and Tracy, and Dan Peters and Matt Lukin from Mudhoney, the latter being a suitably inebriated best man. A drunk wrestling match between Tad, his guitarist Kurt Danielson and Krist marked the happy occasion.

  The drive down to Tacoma from Olympia was particularly fraught for Tracy – about to witness two of her closest friends exchanging vows, she pressed Kurt for signs of commitment. He refused to give any, telling her instead, “I’d still like to have sex with you because I really like it.” The sad fact for Tracy was that Kurt wasn’t ready to settle down. Their relationship was starting to draw to its natural end, despite Tracy’s comforting arms after Kurt’s frequent nightmares (vampires, thugs with baseball bats or knives coming for him), and despite the fact she was able to help him pursue his rock’n’roll dream by being financially supportive. Kurt wrote weird entries in his journal about lactating, or being unable to masturbate because he’d imagine, “My father, little girls, German shepherds, TV news commentators but no voluptuous pouty-lipped naked female sex kittens . . .” – a standard worry for most healthy young male adults, but one also guaranteed to freak out most girlfriends.

  On January 2–3, Nirvana returned to Reciprocal Studios to work on another song, ‘Sappy’. It took them 10 hours in total, and they weren’t happy with the results. “Part of that was getting a Steve Albini drum sound,” recalls engineer Jack Endino. “Kurt was very specific. That was the first time he seemed fallible to me. Everything up till then had been amazing. ‘Sappy’ just wasn’t very good. He ended up re-recording it several times.” Nirvana spent around $500 on the session – just $100 short of what it took to record their entire debut album.

  “I told him he should just write some more songs,” Jack laughs.

  So Kurt did. One of them, ‘Lithium’, was previewed later that spring when the group shot four videos on March 20 in an Evergreen State College classroom with a couple of friends. Payment was “$40 and some pizza,” according to cameraman Alex Kostelnik. T
he band played live while snippets of TV footage drawn from the numerous hours of meshed-up video montage Kurt had taped in Olympia was projected behind them: shots of Seventies teen idol Shaun Cassidy, Star Search with Donny and Marie Osmond tap-dancing, Fantasy Island. For ‘Big Cheese’, a silent film about witches was projected, interspersed with some of Kurt’s childhood Super 8 footage – “Broken dolls, dolls on fire, dolls put together all wrong,” as Kostelnik remembers it. Videos for ‘School’ and ‘Floyd The Barber’ were also recorded.

  Picture the scene. We’re at the Squid Row on Pike St on Capitol Hill, just down the road from the Comet Tavern. It’s Seattle, 1990 and the venue is heaving with people; everywhere, the smell of human perspiration and hum of overloaded amplifiers.

  On stage, Mudhoney are finishing their final encore. Mark Arm is lying heedless to the world, a sea of bodies on top, beside and underneath him. Around are the scenes of pandemonium: scattered amplifiers, stagedivers nursing bruised tendons, a bouncer at his wit’s end attempting to retain control over the constant stream of people on and off stage. Steve Turner’s guitar is howling with sexual frustration. Dan Peters has thumped his way into oblivion. Matt Lukin, meanwhile, has been drinking vodka for 14 hours straight, and he isn’t going to stop now.

  “Anyone want more?” he yells to tired cheers.

  Loud harsh music pumps out from the speakers. A 50-year-old in diapers wanders up to me and asks to be chastised. Toilet walls are covered in piss-stains and graffiti from local musicians boasting of their sexual prowess, plus diatribes against Sub Pop’s inner sanctum.

  Throughout 1990, Sub Pop was continually on the verge of going under. Tad, Nirvana and Mudhoney sold well – but not enough to support Jon and Bruce’s grandiose plans. The label offered share options to musicians in place of royalties – which in the long term would have made the artists extremely rich, but wasn’t particularly helpful back then. Sub Pop even asked Mudhoney if they could borrow half of their European advance. It wasn’t until Mudhoney’s album Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge shipped 50,000 copies in June 1991, through word-of-mouth alone, that Sub Pop started to become financially solvent. This was several months before the Nirvana royalties started to roll in.

  “That period from May to September ’91, when the distributor was obliged to pay for the records they shipped in May, was particularly dicey,” recalls former Sub Pop general manager, Rich Jensen. “The bookkeeper, my boss, quit coming in to the office and got real hard to reach on the phone. Eventually I took over and worked a couple of months without pay. There was a particular afternoon in early August where a potential investor finally came through on a $6,000 loan he’d been promising for weeks. The next day the phones were due to be shut off, the van was to be repossessed and the county tax authorities intended to barricade the premises. I think it was August 7. Anyway, I got the cheque from him about 4.45, shook his hand pleasantly, smiled as I showed him out the door and then sprinted several blocks to the bank before it closed at 5 p.m.”

  Enthusiasm oozes from every adrenalin-charged pore. Arm goes over to where Charles Peterson, the man who defined Seattle’s look with his hyper-focused highlights stolen from the music’s blurry sea of chaos, is standing vaguely shell-shocked. He checks to see if he’s all right, then laughs and rushes backstage to throw up from the heat. Ed [ Fotheringham] from the Thrown-Ups tries to balance a few beers on his head, not very adroitly. The beer goes everywhere, splattering a couple of Californian wannabe hipsters. In one corner, Sub Pop’s human press dynamo Jenny Boddy3 chats with Seattle’s Queen of Blarney Megan Jasper about the latest outrage perpetuated by Mudhoney manager Bob Whittaker. Tad Doyle is surrounded by a phalanx of admirers a quarter his size, cracking open a fresh Mexican bottled beer every five minutes.

  Similar scenes were happening almost nightly in the Pacific Northwest at shows by bands like supercharged punk-powerpop trio Fastbacks, The Walkabouts, Swallow and a hundred lesser hopefuls. Heads thrust in bass bins, T-shirts soaked with beer and perspiration, coloured strobes flashed in a dizzying symphony of light.

  “I was at the Crescent Ballroom in downtown Tacoma where for the first and only time I thought Nirvana was better than Melvins,” says former Seaweed singer Aaron Stauffer. “The Crescent was a really down and out place that was once a cool dancehall. The Sonics and The Wailers played ‘Louie Louie’ there in the Sixties. In downtown T-town in the late Eighties only cops, junkies, whores, gangsters, the homeless and random punk fans would be found at night. At this show, the Crescent was called Legends – and Nirvana were the best I’d ever seen.”

  “Because Nirvana weren’t from Seattle they’d get people from round here to ham it up a whole lot more,” explains Megan Jasper. “They’d get the Mudhoney guys to lose their minds in the most fun way imaginable. The Fluid played in Tacoma, and after the show Kurt and Krist found these huge wooden spools and tipped them sideways. Krist pushed the spool and Kurt’s in the middle, spinning like in a washing machine. It was the funniest thing you’d ever seen. And then he’d get out and be super-wobbly and goofy and Krist somehow managed to get his lanky weird body in, and everyone was pushing him . . .”

  “That’s one of the things that made Nirvana so great,” agrees Jonathan Poneman, “and by Nirvana I mean Chad and Krist and Kurt. There was this whimsical, childlike, silly thing that they had going on. They managed to have that and still be incredibly cool; it wasn’t like this fey, contrived thing. It was who they were that informed what they were and how they projected themselves, but they were total rock studs at the same time.”

  “My favourite Nirvana shows were the ones at Evergreen,” says Candice Pedersen. A couple more happened in early 1990. Students and friends would cram themselves into the tiny dormitory rooms and drink wine until campus security came by. “They were like Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ They were more organic. I didn’t like drinking or smoking, so that was good to me. They’d break a lot of instruments, but it wasn’t intentional – more from people tripping over because space was so tight.”

  On February 9, Nirvana set out for another West Coast tour with Tad; Portland, San Jose, Sacramento, San Francisco, Long Beach, across the Mexican border to Tijuana and back again to Phoenix, Arizona. It was a welcome break for Kurt and Krist from life in Washington – they’d briefly started up their own office cleaning business, Pine Tree Janitorial, advertised with the slogan, “We purposely limit our number of commercial offices in order to personally clean while taking our time.” Oddly enough, they didn’t get any bookings.

  “I know he worked for one day as a dishwasher,” laughs Ian Dickson. “I know he worked for a week as a janitor.”

  “I don’t know if we told many jokes,” Chad says of the February tour. “Reality was the funniest. We always thought it was funny to make jokes of white trailer trash type stuff. We bought all these redneck type hats. ‘I’d Rather Be Hunting’. I think mine said CBS Sports or something about fishing. And Kurt got this Day-Glo orange hunting hat. It’s because we figured we were going towards the south and didn’t want to look like grungy rockers and get frowned at. We were afraid that some rednecks would gang up on us and beat us up while we were on tour. And we fit right in! We’d try to eat at all the truck stops we could.”

  There’s a classic Peterson sequence of Kurt falling backwards into the drums – originally taken for Melody Maker – that was shot at Raji’s in Hollywood, in a venue designed for 200 people, but host to easily double that number that night. Robert Fisher, former art director of Geffen Records, told journalist Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna that, “Kurt was tearing the place up. I couldn’t believe he didn’t walk away from that without a broken back or anything.”

  Nirvana stayed that night with L7 bassist Jennifer Finch. Out of the people interviewed for this book, she’s easily my favourite. She’s the only one who still cares enough to lie to me.

  “I was always the one who would be like, ‘Everett, put Kurt down,’ ” she says, swigging a mine
ral water with Danny Bland, Charles Peterson and myself in a Pioneer Square bar. “‘We don’t want an accident; someone’s going to lose an eye.’ I was the child of the adult alcoholics. I was like, ‘Do you have to do heroin before the show? Can you wait? Do you need me to hold it for you, I’ll put it somewhere safe.’ I was that guy. That’s why I look so good and own a house now.”

  “We played with Tad and Nirvana in San Francisco4,” says Kelly Canary. “Tim and me stagedived straight into the ground, and Kurt stopped right in the middle of a song to ask if we were OK.”

  This was the same show where I got up on stage, and lasted precisely one-and-a-half songs before the power got turned off. “OK,” I rashly stated, parka hood pulled up tight over my head, ensconced in the heart of San Francisco’s gay district, “Last night in Portland I made $1.71 from coins thrown at me on stage. Let’s see how much you faggots can manage tonight . . .” Dwarves were also planning on playing, but after one look at the mayhem caused by my appearance, singer Blag Jesus declined. He was too busy laughing his ass off.

  “We went out for Thai food and Kurt just sat there,” Kelly continues. “He was the funniest guy ever but so weird and shy and quiet. He actually had a bit of a cold so all the ladies of Dickless who wanted to sleep with him – each one of us brought him our sleeping bags and our leftovers. He just had that look, ‘Take care of me.’ The ladies go crazy for it.”

  March was spent practising at The Dutchman, a rehearsal space in south Seattle sometimes referred to as ‘the birthplace of grunge’.5 A recording session had been booked at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin with Tad (Eight Way Santa) producer Butch Vig. Nowadays, Vig is best known for his work on Nevermind and as the drummer with mainstream Goth band Garbage, but back then he was renowned as the man behind albums from hard-ass underground rock bands like Killdozer and The Fluid.