by Everett True
On April 1, Nirvana played Chicago’s Cabaret Metro as support to Eleventh Dream Day.6 “Kurt was screaming his guts out the entire night,” Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot told Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna in Kurt Cobain: The Nirvana Years. “He looked like he was in the jaws of this giant invisible Rottweiler and the Rottweiler was shaking him back and forth. At the end, he did the whole set-thrashing, drum-trashing routine. Every instrument on stage was in splinters. The drummer was still pounding away and Cobain had completely destroyed his drum kit and was lying splayed across it. People looked at each other, like, ‘God, how do you follow that?’”
After the show, the band drove overnight to be at the studios on time.
“I wasn’t crazy about Bleach the first time I heard it, except ‘About A Girl’,” Vig told Gillian G. Gaar. “The funniest thing was I remember Jonathan Poneman saying, ‘If you saw Nirvana here in Seattle, it’s like Beatlemania. And they’re going to be as big as The Beatles!’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, right.’ Now all I hear is, ‘This band’s going to be the next Nirvana!’ ”
The April 2–6 sessions were intended for Nirvana’s second Sub Pop album, provisionally entitled Sheep. The title was a dig at the doubtless countless hordes of music fans that would be buying a copy, driven by fashion. In the event, they ended up being used as demos for Nevermind .
“May women rule the world,” Kurt wrote in his journal, in a spoof ad for the album. “Abort Christ. Assassinate the greater and lesser of two evils. Steal Sheep. At a store near you. Nirvana. Flowers. Perfume. Candy. Puppies. Love. Generational Solidarity. And Killing Your Parents. Sheep.”
“My studio was right next to Sub Pop on 2nd Ave,” says Charles Peterson. “One day I get a knock on the door and it’s Kurt and Krist and they have this little kitten with them. They’re like, ‘Take a picture. We do this thing where you pull the kitten’s face back and it looks really weird.’ They wanted to use it for a single or album cover. Of course as soon as I got the camera they couldn’t get it, and I was like, ‘OK. Cuckoo. Go back to Aberdeen.’ ”
When Nirvana arrived at Smart, the sum total of their instructions to Butch was that they wanted to “sound heavy, very heavy”. “They were actually very funny and charming, particularly Krist,” Butch told Gaar. So Vig – as much a pop freak as he was an underground rock nerd – obliged with a sound that was both thunderous, particularly on Chad’s drums, and surprisingly tuneful.
“Kurt was an enigma,” Vig says. “He’d get moody and sit in the corner and not talk for 45 minutes. I didn’t have to do too much fine-tuning to the actual sound. Kurt wasn’t too pleased with Chad’s drumming. He kept getting behind the kit showing him how to play things.”
Although Chad was still very much part of Nirvana, he was becoming dissatisfied with his place in the band – he considered himself a songwriter, and could play guitar, bass and violin. “I started to feel like a drum machine,” he says. “Kurt had promised me more input, but it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.” It certainly wasn’t. Kurt referred to Chad’s Bainbridge Island-influenced music as, “Elfin music. You just kind of shudder, because it’s so stupid and dorky.” He liked Chad as a person, but was looking for something very different in a drummer.
Nirvana raced through several songs – ‘In Bloom’, another version of ‘Polly’ recorded on a ‘really shitty’ five-string acoustic guitar that sounded like a ukulele, ‘Dive’, ‘Pay To Play’ (a diatribe against small venues’ policy of demanding money from bands upfront in exchange for a booking, later renamed as ‘Stay Away’), ‘Lithium’, ‘ Immodium’ and ‘Sappy’ again – plus a straightforward version of ‘Here She Comes Now’, a White Light/White Heat Velvet Underground song (eventually released as a split seven-inch single with Melvins). Five of the songs ended up being used on Nevermind . “Kurt was having problems with his voice,” Vig recalls. “Except for ‘Polly’, which was soft, he’d get through one or two takes and wouldn’t be able to sing any more. We had to take a day off in the middle.”
“I liked working with Butch,” says Chad. “I got the idea he was a fairly healthy guy, vegetarian and everything. He was soft-spoken. The idea was to record for a new album. They weren’t meant as demos. It would’ve been the first time we recorded demos, and I don’t know what their use would have been. We already had an album out.”
Many Seattle musicians I’ve interviewed feel you don’t get enough credit for Nevermind .
“It’s weird because on the songs they pulled off the Madison sessions, all of the drum parts that I wrote are on Nevermind ,” he replies. “There are minor little differences, like on ‘In Bloom’ – I wanted a more structural kind of thing. But that’s it. It’s a hard thing to think about because when you’re in a band, you put everyone’s collaboration together and everyone should get an equal share. But the only share I got off that was ‘Polly’ because I actually play four cymbal heads on it. Nobody ever wrote my parts for me. Kurt wrote the lyrics and the guitar and that’s it. He couldn’t even play drums, just in a makeshift sort of way. So yeah,” Chad says, shaking his head. “I don’t know. It’s confusing.”
“I noticed right off the bat that Kurt wrote amazing songs and Krist wrote super hooky bass lines,” Vig says in the sleeve notes to With The Lights Out. “The bass lines are really melodic, and the hook under the song was in the bass, at least musically. And that works so well with Kurt’s vocal melody. They have a cool, interweaving, quality.”
The sessions took place right at the start of another US tour – after Chicago, it was the Underground in Madison with Tad and local band Victim’s Family; and on April 9, with Tad at the 7th Street Entry in downtown Minneapolis.
“It was through Steve Turner I encountered Nirvana,” recalls Tom Hazelmyer.7 “He was sending me boxes of free shit from Sub Pop on the side. I was at a party at [U-Men singer] Tom Price’s where I heard Nirvana’s first single. I wasn’t the biggest fan, but I was a fan of Tad’s definitely. The 7th Street Entry was like the Minneapolis equivalent of CBGBs.8 It was sparsely attended and they weren’t impressive. Tad asked me what I thought and I was like, ‘Man. That “Love Buzz” song just drove me nuts and not in a good way.’
“But meeting Kurt afterwards,” Haze continues, “there was this insane amount of . . . charisma, impact, I don’t know what you’d call it, a guy sitting backstage, not even talking. I could never put my finger on it. Even after years of being round shit-loads of bands I’ve never sensed that level of charismatic presence again.”
After Minneapolis, it was on to the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor9 (where Krist destroyed Chad’s drums), Cincinnati, two dates in Canada on April 16–17 where Krist climbed up on some speaker cabinets and bottles were thrown . . .
On April 18, in Cambridge, MA, Kurt threw a pitcher of water at Chad that missed his ear by inches.
“Nirvana was really mean to Chad,” sighs Carrie Montgomery. “Kurt would break his drums every night and he didn’t have any money. His drums were duct-taped together and it was funny to watch, but I always felt bad for him. He didn’t look like he was having fun. He knew he’d have to piece his drum set back together every night.
“When me and Mark caught up with Nirvana, they had been on tour for a long time and Chad didn’t have any socks, so I literally took the socks off my feet and gave them to little Chad,” she adds. “And I felt so bad about how Kurt was to him. It seemed like Kurt was pissed at Chad, and this is from the perspective of, ‘Why is that guy picking on that little drummer guy? He doesn’t have any duct tape left even!’ ”
The tour reached New York’s Pyramid Club on April 26. Among other attendees at what was fast becoming an almost clichéd nightly feast of destruction10 was the godfather of punk Iggy Pop, plus Sonic Youth, Helmet and Geffen’s head of A& R, Gary Gersh.
“I would shoot all of Sub Pop’s bands for them in New York,” says photographer Michael Lavine, a former Evergreen College student. “Bruce [ Pavitt] phoned up and said, ‘I’ve got this band.
They’re going to be huge.’ I was like, ‘Right. You say that about all your bands.’ I photographed Nirvana in my loft at 2 Bleecker St, right across from CBGBs. They showed up at my door in their white van, and handed me the excellent Butch Vig demo. Kurt was sickly and mellow, but sweet. The running theme was, ‘Where’s Kurt? Oh, he’s asleep in the van.’
“I was shooting Iggy Pop that day, and played him the Sub Pop stuff,” the photographer continues. “Nirvana was the band he liked best – so I took him to see them. I introduced Iggy to Kurt. The meeting was very cordial and funny, and they shook hands.” Afterwards, Nirvana were depressed because they thought they’d fucked up big time in front of a crowd of such prominent hipsters. But of course they hadn’t . . .
“That was the night Chad was really late,” Lavine recalls. “Kurt was pissed, and they trashed the drum kit.”
“At the Pyramid, they came out and took over NYC,” enthuses Janet Billig. “They were amazing, but didn’t realise it themselves. Second show, at Maxwell’s [with The Jesus Lizard11]: I remember Krist shaving his head because, he told me, it was penance for their blowing the previous show with Iggy Pop in the audience. The next day they shot the first ‘In Bloom’ video in downtown NYC walking around the seaport.12 Krist’s bald head made shooting the video a bit problematic as he has hair in some shots but not others. At Maxwell’s, Kurt destroyed his guitar, and I still have the remnants of it, packed away somewhere. Just the head and the back, the part you play with the strings, and if you touch it, it would splinter.”
“I think Kurt had made guitars,” says Chad. “He had the necks made, and cut out the bodies. There were three different guitars that were all handmade and spray-painted different colours, like powder blue. So when a guitar got destroyed, we’d just take the guts out and put it in another one.”
Krist went on record as saying the Pyramid was one of the worst shows Nirvana ever played, and – for the band anyway – the second night was just as bad. Not least because on the day off in between, Kurt called up Tracy from Amherst, Massachusetts and told her he no longer wanted to live with her. The date was April 27, Tracy’s birthday. Kurt wanted to let Tracy down easily but didn’t know how, so he suggested they could still ‘go out’ together even after they moved apart. That was obviously not going to work.
“Kurt was in one of those moods where shit was going bad and he was going to make everyone else suffer,” says Carrie Montgomery of the Maxwell’s show. “It was really traumatic for me to see that. I just couldn’t understand that kind of aggression, depression, anger, but they’d been on tour for a long time. It almost seemed like they weren’t going to last. It was really volatile. As I got to know him more later, he was the exact opposite, just so gentle and sensitive.”
Carrie laughs: “He liked babies and animals.”
The tour progressed through the 9.30 Club in Washington, DC, JC Dobbs in Philadelphia, North Carolina and Tampa Bay, Florida on May 4 – where the band stayed the night at a fan’s dad’s luxury condo. Krist and Kurt took the opportunity to take some acid and thoroughly abuse their host’s hospitality, especially the next morning when they woke and found no one was home.
“They took out all the food, and destroyed the kitchen,” recalls Craig Montgomery. “They were frying mayonnaise in the pan, stuff like that. And then Krist starts wandering around naked in the cul-de-sac, shouting at the top of his voice. I was just embarrassed, but I couldn’t say anything. No one likes the guy who plays dad. Krist left a $100 bill on the counter as we departed.”
Over the next dozen days the tour took in Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska – but Chad was nearing the end of his tenure. On May 17, Chad Channing played his final show with Nirvana, in Tad’s hometown of Boise, Idaho. A couple of weeks after the band returned home, Kurt and Krist showed up at Chad’s house in Bainbridge Island, unannounced, and told him he was out of the band.
“I felt like I’d just killed someone,” remarked Kurt.
Before he left, however, there was one last Charles Peterson photo-shoot.
“It took place in my studio, which I was sharing with a screenprinter, Jeff Ross, who was doing all the Sub Pop tour posters and T-shirts,” says Peterson. “I had no idea what to do, so I had a white piece of seamless paper and strobe lights. The band came in, and Kurt was like, ‘White piece of paper, that’s boring. Is there anything we can do, do you think?’ I looked around and there was a can of black spray paint sitting there so I said, ‘Let’s paint something on it.’ He’s like, ‘Cool, cool.’ He walks up to it and does a big plus and a minus, and I was like, ‘That works.’ The interesting thing is, the way they posed for the entire session was Kurt and Krist under the plus and Chad under the minus.”
“Chad was great,” comments Craig. “I was sad when they fired him. Super-nice, always cheerful . . . Kurt and Krist could be downers sometimes, but Chad would try to keep a positive attitude. They liked Chad personally. They were frustrated with him as a drummer. I think he’d be the first to tell you he wasn’t the strongest drummer. He’d drop beats, make mistakes and when the drummer makes a mistake it’s kind of glaring.”
Did Kurt actually pick on Chad other than the drum kit thing?
“Well, I mean, he fired him,” Carrie laughs. “No, but he always made Chad feel like he wasn’t good enough at his drumming . . .”
He could be really perfectionist. Towards the end of Nirvana, I saw him pick on Krist . . .
“When you’re a miserable, unhappy person you’re not going to be supportive to anybody else around you,” Carrie suggests. “Kurt wanted Chad to play hard and loud, and Chad wouldn’t do it. He was like a hippie jazz drummer. I was sad when Chad got fired. He was just a nice little hippie, you know? It was like, just when it looked like something might happen, they kick the guy out who was there through the crappy van tour in New York . . .”
“Those guys were back from tour,” Ben Shepherd recalls. “ Krist pulled me aside and told me they were booting Chad out of the band. He goes, ‘What do you think?’ and I go, ‘Damn. I don’t know, man.’ ”
It seems like that’s when they decided to get serious.
“Mm-hmm,” the former Soundgarden bassist agrees. “That’s pretty much when I saw the ambition change. I talked to Chad about it and he said it was amiable. Chad’s got more spirit than just about anybody you’ll ever fucking meet.”
“Here’s the way I’ve always looked at it,” Chad says now. “Had I somehow changed things, yeah, I’d probably have a few more bucks in my pocket, but I don’t know if I’d have been that satisfied. It was cool playing the songs and stuff, but all my life I’ve never been a drummer’s drummer. I’ve never been single-minded about one particular instrument. I can’t be – I’m a songwriter first and foremost. I’ve always seen music as a whole. And Nirvana was the first band I had ever been in where I didn’t have any contribution.
“One time I talked to Krist after Kurt’s death, and he said, ‘You know, you didn’t miss out on that much. The best times were what we had before everything got big, because things got crazy and out of hand.’ Back then we had a lot more control over ourselves. Everyone knows when you get hooked up with a major label a good part of the majority of the decision-making in your life goes to them, and you can either deal with it or you can’t. A lot of bands and people can’t.”
The same week Chad parted ways with Nirvana, Kurt broke up with Tracy.
Unbeknown to her, he was already in love with one of her friends, Tobi Vail.
NOTES
1 Boss Hog were another Pussy Galore spin-off – their 1989 Drinkin’, Lechin’ And Lyin’ album on Amphetamine Reptile was a glam sleaze garage classic, notorious for the cover shot of singer Cristina Martinez, naked except for thigh-length boots and arm-length leather gloves.
2 Bastro: art-thrash trio.
3 Jenny Boddy was later the subject of a particularly vitriolic Hole song, ‘Jennifer’s Body’ – written after Courtney wrongly assumed that I was slee
ping with her. There’s a line in it that goes “Sleeping with my enemy . . .”
4 This was one of Kelly’s last shows with Dickless. Megan Jasper was her replacement: “It was super-fun and super-goofy and super-retarded,” Megan comments. “But I don’t think about it a whole lot, to be honest. I’m glad I did it. But I’m also glad I don’t have to dress up like a mermaid any more and scream like I’m being stabbed in the bladder. The good days, right?”
5 Screaming Trees, Tad and the psychedelic grunge band Love Battery also rehearsed there.
6 Eleventh Dream Day were a Neil Young-influenced Chicago rock band.
7 The ex-marine kept a semi-automatic rifle in his AmRep office just in case the world turned Mad Max or Minneapolis had its own version of the Rodney King LA riots – the offices were in a ‘bad’ part of town.
8 CBGBs is the legendary New York home of Seventies punk bands like Ramones, Television and Talking Heads.
9 Birthplace of Seventies rock insurrectionists The Stooges.
10 Not un-coincidentally, the show was being videoed.
11 The Jesus Lizard singer David Yow and bassist David Wm Sims had been in Scratch Acid. The Jesus Lizard played deranged, powerful rock music reminiscent of Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party: it was all about the performance – Yow was frequently cited for indecency due to his habit of exposing his penis on stage. The first time I interviewed the Chicago band was in a bar populated by 50-year-old (plus) strippers. 1991’s Goat is a particular favourite.
12 For the Sub Pop Video Network Program 1 compilation – ‘In Bloom’ appeared alongside clips from Beat Happening, Mudhoney, Afghan Whigs and Mark Lanegan, among others.
CHAPTER 11
We Take Baths, Not Showers
TOBI Vail first met Kurt Cobain when he was one of the Melvins’ entourage. She saw a couple of the early Nirvana shows – Pen Cap Chew, Skid Row – but didn’t become good friends with Kurt and Tracy until the spring of ’88, when she started visiting because he had ID to buy beer.