Nirvana

by Everett True

  “I wasn’t into drugs,” explains Tobi. “I drank beer a few times a month at parties, but that was it. The Melvins thought I was innocent. I think they liked having me around because it made them feel more corrupt. Dylan [ Carlson] used to tell me that I was like a member of the Manson Family. Michelle Phillips1 was another one I used to get. I had really long, natural brown hair, didn’t wear make-up, etc.”

  The couple started dating officially a week before Tobi’s 21st birthday, July 1990 – when Tracy moved out of the Pear St apartment, to go back to Tacoma. Tobi seeing Kurt was problematic at the start – not only was her friend living with him, but Tobi was allergic to cats. And after Tracy left, the flat became even more squalid . . . Piles of washing-up mounted up in the sink, dirty clothes spread across the floor, empty pizza cartons and beer bottles lay discarded all over. Sounds like a typical student house.

  So he stayed on in the apartment? How did he afford to keep it?

  “He would get cheques,” Ian Dickson replies. “They’d get delivered to our [Ian and Nikki’s] apartment so we’d see them occasionally. They’d be for a few hundred bucks – but they were working on deals with DGC, and there was some money coming in from touring. They made money selling T-shirts and stuff. The rent wasn’t exactly exorbitant – $150 a month probably.”

  Kurt continued to live at Pear Street for a year after he broke up with Tracy, so someone must have been paying the rent. “Maybe Sub Pop?” queries Tobi. “There was graffiti all over the house after Tracy moved out,” she adds. “I was in school and working and in three bands. So I didn’t see him much, just sometimes. He would disappear and then come back.”

  “It was hard,” says Ian. “Kurt lived off Tracy. She’d make him little lists of things to do . . .”

  Tobi did that. I know because Courtney used to show me them.

  “Are you sure they weren’t Tracy’s lists – that doesn’t sound like Tobi to me. I bet Courtney was . . .” Ian breaks off. “I bet it was Tracy.”

  Tobi and Kurt were in love with one another: Kurt was so nervous the first time he spent an evening with her, he threw up. He admired her, both for her creativity and feminist polemic. Also, Tobi was a total music buff, exhibiting an obsessiveness more commonly associated with male fans. Influenced by Calvin Johnson and Olympian female artists such as Stella Marrs and Lois Maffeo, Tobi started a fanzine, Jigsaw, coining the phrase Riot Grrrl in its pages to describe a sense of female empowerment that she saw naturally occurring in people around her, that she also felt was lacking from most independent music of the time. In 1990, punk rock was a very white male, testosterone-led movement – with cool ideals, and some fun music, but exclusionary. It mostly still is.

  Tobi wanted to counter that sense of exclusion. With a few like-minded friends, she formed the inspirational punk band Bikini Kill.

  “Kurt’s taste in women was curious to me,” comments Carrie Montgomery. “There didn’t seem to be any common denominator except for being creative and smart. Tracy Marander was really nice, easy-going. He’d talk to me about how bad he felt about breaking up with her, because he cared about her a lot, even after he felt it wasn’t going to work any more. He just felt she deserved somebody that was around and knew what their future was going to be. It wasn’t that she wasn’t supportive of his music or his career, but he needed to be free to do what he wanted to do . . . not to sleep around or anything. He worried about her being at home and him being away, just feeling like it wasn’t the best time to be in a relationship. He was torn.”

  Tobi was different from Tracy in terms of how she viewed relationships: where Tracy was nurturing, Tobi considered herself an equal, not to be taken advantage of. It was quite an eye-opener for Kurt, who up to that point had undeniably been influenced by society’s insidious belief that it’s man who is the leader, woman the comforter.

  There isn’t a shadow of a doubt that Kurt thrived on Tobi’s attitude – even if it did later lead to feelings of inadequacy (which, truth be told, the singer felt towards anyone he considered an equal – it’s that very insecurity that fed his artistry). Indeed, he soon found himself in difficulties trying to keep up with her enlightened attitude towards ‘dating’ – which, in Olympia, didn’t really exist as a concept. You hung out with someone if you liked them – and slept with them if you found them attractive.

  No one owns anyone.

  Not everyone saw it so straightforwardly.

  “The way Kurt talked about Tobi,” Carrie says, “it seemed like she had him wrapped around her little finger. He thought that she was really cool. He looked up to her and thought she was too good for him. She made him feel he wasn’t very important. So I didn’t like that. I didn’t see what he saw in her. I thought she was bratty. But there again, I didn’t really know her . . .”

  “Some of us played the Nirvana demo for Calvin [ Johnson] early on, and he was not impressed,” comments Slim Moon. “Somewhere along the line, Calvin realised that Nirvana was a great band. The Go Team was happening, and him or Tobi pulled Kurt into their orbit. Kurt also had this project with Tobi called The Bathtub Is Real.2 I have a tape somewhere of one or two songs.”

  What’s it like?

  “It sounded like the minimal quiet pop songs that Olympia is known for. Both of them sang; it was really good,” Slim replies. “Kurt was still telling Tobi he was going to make a Bathtub Is Real record six months or a year down the road, even though we all knew there was no way that Courtney would allow that to happen. He would get drunk and call her on the phone and say, ‘We need to make that Bathtub Is Real record!’ ”

  “Our ‘band’ was pretty much just us playing music together,” Tobi explains. “He would play the songs he was writing, I would play the songs I was writing and we’d record them on my dad’s four-track. Sometimes I’d sing on the songs he was writing and play drums on them. Some of the riffs and lyrical ideas turned into Nirvana songs later on. I never got him to sing on any of the songs I was writing, but that was OK, they were my throwaway songs! He did play drums on some of my guitar songs and help me figure out which ones were good. He was really into the fact that I was creative and into music. I don’t think he’d ever played music with a girl before. He was super-inspiring and fun to play with.

  “Kurt had a lot of cool ideas about how to approach songwriting,” she continues. “He told me the first thing you have to do is decide a singing style. This was a big revelation. I realised that you could use your voice as an instrument and that you weren’t just stuck with the sound that came out naturally or whatever. I was listening to Yoko Ono3, Frightwig, early B-52’s4 and The Slits, so my punk singing style came out of this idea. Before that I just sounded like an out-of-tune Heather from Beat Happening. I didn’t have the idea that you could shape the sound of your voice like it was a guitar. We were also listening to The Shaggs, The Marine Girls, The Breeders5, Pixies, The Beatles, The Raincoats, etc. Sometimes people would try to get me to join Nirvana – and I was like, ‘I’d rather not.’ We talked about it, and my drumming style was not heavy. Kurt had songs that weren’t heavy too, so we’d work on that kind of stuff. Eventually, he figured out a way to work that into Nirvana – the pop element – The Velvet Underground, The Vaselines, Beat Happening, etc.

  “We learned a lot playing together,” Tobi adds.6 “I had mostly played with people who didn’t know how to play their instruments up to that point, in The Go Team and Doris [ Tobi’s teen punk band with Tam Orhmund] – which was cool – but I was learning how to manipulate sounds, developing a punk aesthetic with a female sensibility. He was really inspired by that and encouraged me to play with girls. Of course, we both were into The Stooges and Black Flag, too.

  “We wrote ‘The Bathtub Is Real’ on a demo and it got misunderstood as the band’s name,” she comments. “ ‘Israeli Donkey’, as well . . . I don’t know why! This got repeated a lot. I think it was Bathtub, then we realised there already was Steel Pole Bathtub. At the time most people who lived downtown didn’t
have showers in their apartment, and [The Go Team] had this thing where we’d say, ‘In Olympia we take baths, not showers,’ as a kind of silly thing. That might be where it came from.”

  Who moved you to thoughts of hatred this year?

  “Men I see in the street. I don’t know their names”

  – Jon, Huggy Bear

  Here’s what I hate about ’77 punk, and The Sex Pistols in particular: commentators stuck in time, stunting the development of those they’re supposed to be informing by their constant referral back to that one moment when everything was still vivid for them. Critics speak of how The Sex Pistols were a one-off, something special beyond everything that came after. “It was incredible the impact they had, considering how short a time they were around,” reads the standard line. No. What’s incredible is how much space has been devoted to one moment that was great, sure, but which would never have taken on such shades of importance if the media weren’t composed of such dullards. Likewise, Nirvana and the ‘last great revolution of rock’.

  Life is about perception. People are often defined by the moment they are first exposed to the outside world and never move on, least of all in their own minds. Twenty years ago, it was the Sixties kids, all going on about the Paris riots and how incredible, never to be repeated, the hippies and Sgt Pepper were. (1985 was the exact date critical opinion turned. You could see the new hipsters turning to one another and saying, “ Sgt Pepper? I don’t think so.”) Now, it’s the turn of Stuart Maconie, Julie Burchill and their forty-something British media chums to relive their youth while stifling everyone else’s.

  How did the definition ‘independent’ crystallise and become sterilised into one form of music, one that basically means white boys playing guitars that jangle? Blame the perpetually frightened breed of A& R men stumbling over one another to sign Last Year’s Sound. Blame the media. Critics who pride themselves on their impartiality are deluded. Every objective decision made is based round a subjective core judgement, usually informed by others, that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to play guitar, or paint a picture, or to read a book. There is no such thing as good art, only good and bad participators. You don’t ever have to be ashamed of liking crap like The Strokes and The Doors. If something touches you, it touches you. It doesn’t matter how facile or ordinary or manufactured it is.

  That phrase from Huggy Bear’s7 classic 1993 single ‘Her Jazz’ – “This is happening without your permission” – I swear that’s what rankled their detractors the most. “Face it,” screamed Niki with a searing fervour. “You’re old and out of touch.” No one likes being told that. It confused critics no end. Before Riot Grrrl they had been above suspicion. Riot Grrrl formed immediate divisions, refusing to indulge passive consumers trying to figure out what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. The Riot Grrrls just got on with having a glorious good time while simultaneously challenging notions of sexual stereotypes. If you weren’t with them, then you were against them and, yes, that did make you old and out of touch.

  As gender-confusing punk Jayne County once sang, “If you don’t want to fuck me baby, fuck off!”

  Bikini Kill only had one idea – Inspire! Inspire! Empower all females, at least the ones we like! – but they carried it out with such venom, humour and fervour, it didn’t matter. Live, they were equal parts intimidation and inspiration. Male dancers were instructed to keep to the sides and the back, leading to charges of (inverse, presumably) sexism. Bikini Kill wanted to even up the odds facing women at shows for once; this was a girl-centric band, make no mistake. Female fans were encouraged to take the microphone and detail when they’d felt abused and/or used by men. The music was storming, driven by the heavy repetition of Tobi’s drumming and Kathi Wilcox’s bare bass. The token male, Billy (he kept changing his second name), filled in on purposeful, abrasive guitar; but the main focus was singer Kathleen Hanna – her voice resonant of youthful Day-Glo ’77 punk, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex – cajoling and tormenting, teasing and pleading, in control and always demanding respect.

  I never invested Riot Grrrls with sexuality. I don’t know why, especially as it was one of their most potent weapons. Early press about Bikini Kill harped on about the fact that Kathleen was a stripper, something she shared in common with Courtney Love. I knew I was doing the women involved a disservice by thinking of them so cerebrally, but perhaps it was the only way I could cope with my own inherent sexism . . . or so I thought back then.

  Bikini Kill were hardcore, not punk. That is, their music was formulated along a rigid series of rules and ideologies that didn’t brook dissent. It was only later that Kathleen came into her own with the brilliant improvisational low-cost dub-pop of Julie Ruin. Confusion always arises at this point: is Olympia hardcore or punk? It’s hardcore, through and through. That’s where its sympathies lie. Beat Happening may have been a confrontational – and thus punk – band, but those who followed were already preaching to the converted. Olympia provided a blueprint to live by. Hardcore is about providing an alternative to society’s norms, a counterculture. Punk is far more contradictory: it’s where the underground meets the mainstream – The Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy, Nirvana on Saturday Night Live.

  Jack Endino disagrees with some of this interpretation, however. “ Nevermind was no more of a punk album than [Seventies stadium rock band] Boston’s first album,” the producer says, “and Bleach was no more of a punk album than Deep Purple’s Fireball. Nirvana’s lyrics, pre-In Utero , are no more punk than Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’. They were a classic rock band. I never heard any punk in them whatsoever. I think this is a convenient myth. If their music had actually been punk then it would not have broken.8 The only punk record they made, sorta, was In Utero , which was punk in the same way John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ was punk.9 Nirvana’s live show was no more punk than The Who’s – which was sorta punk, admittedly. Did punk break in America with Who’s Next in 1971 then? It did not. Punk ‘broke’, sadly, with The Offspring and Green Day.”

  Kurt may have fallen under Tobi’s influence, but that didn’t mean he shared her ideas. Disillusioned with Sub Pop – and especially Jon and Bruce’s continual brinkmanship, which meant that bands frequently didn’t get paid and studio cheques got bounced – he and Krist began looking round for another label. They didn’t want to sign to an independent like Touch And Go or SST any more. They couldn’t see the point. Instead, inspired by the examples of peers like Soundgarden and Sonic Youth (who had just signed to Geffen), they began looking towards ‘the majors’.

  Sub Pop was also in the process of looking for a major label distribution deal.

  In May 1990, in anticipation of the second album, Sub Pop gave Nirvana a new contract – it was 30 pages long, and tightened up the label’s rights considerably. Kurt didn’t want to sign it: he and Krist asked Soundgarden’s manager Susan Silver for advice. Shocked by the band’s antipathy towards the label – among other complaints, the pair mentioned bad promotion for Bleach10, no accounts and bad distribution – she told them they should find themselves a lawyer.

  “Kurt was well read,” comments Nirvana’s former UK PR Anton Brookes. “He read a lot of rock’n’roll books. It’s almost like he educated himself how to be a rock star. I remember going with him to a few meetings – it was when they were looking for managers and I’d kind of fallen out with Sub Pop because I’d taken Nirvana’s side – and we’d seen a few labels and a particular publisher, and they’d been completely patronising towards him.

  “I remember standing outside with Kurt,” Anton continues, “and he was smoking, and he said, ‘I’ve got songs on the next record that will be number one. These songs are very poppy and very accessible in a Nirvana way.’ He knew. When people ask me, ‘So Nirvana, did you think they were going to be big?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, as big as Sonic Youth at least, as big as the Pixies. Hopefully, they’ll sell out the [4,500-capacity] Brixton Academy, and maybe in a few years’ time even headline the Reading Festival. They�
��ll be able to stay in Seattle with a good standard of living, with houses and be able to have families, but they’ll have to constantly supplement their income by touring.’ And anyone who says they said any different is a fucking liar.”

  Via Susan, Nirvana met up with music business attorney Alan Mintz in LA, a lawyer who specialised in finding deals for new bands. Impressed by their music, if not their attire – Mintz called Nirvana the scruffiest band who ever walked through his door – he started sending out the Butch Vig ‘demo’ to major labels, looking for deals.

  They weren’t difficult to find. Sub Pop by this point was generating massive media interest (even the US press was starting to write about the label): “Almost every record company with an A& R man wanted Nirvana for the same reason we did,” former Gold Mountain management boss Danny Goldberg comments, “because Sub Pop were a trendy new company and Bleach was one of Sub Pop’s most successful records. There were five or six labels clamouring for them – Columbia, a division of Virgin (Charisma), MCA and Atlantic.”

  “Things got exciting when Nirvana started getting label interest,” says Debbi Shane, who by this point was dating Dale Crover. “The bidding war had begun and for them it was fun – free food, free drinks and they could bring their friends. Kurt invited us [Dale and Debbi] out on an A& R dinner once. We went to this Thai restaurant and got really drunk. The A& R guy, to me, was pathetic because he didn’t know much about music and didn’t get where Nirvana were coming from, but wanted to sign them anyway.”

  “I was extremely upset and hurt when they started talking to major labels,” says Bruce Pavitt, “because I was the last person to hear about it. Everyone was telling me, ‘Hey, I was down in Olympia. Nirvana are driving around in a limo and everything.’ Which you have to realise, pre- Nevermind and in Olympia, you just didn’t do.