by Everett True
“In retrospect, everything makes sense,” the former Sub Pop boss continues, “but at the time, very few bands had signed to major labels. It was a shock. The label was taking every ounce of energy that we had to keep it together. So I felt that even though we were constantly broke, and in some ways dysfunctional, the least we deserved was to have some honest communication with the group. I would reflect back on memories like being in Rome with Kurt on Nirvana’s first tour there, when he had his nervous breakdown and he smashed his only guitar. Jon and I then took some of the last bit of money that we had to buy him a new guitar! Then he got his passport stolen and we helped him get a new passport. Remembering those little things, where you give everything you have to help someone out . . . so for them to do all this shopping and not even tell us – it didn’t feel good. It really sucked.”
Clearly, you modelled Sub Pop to some degree on lessons learnt in Olympia. And you would have tried to engender a sense of community as part of that.
“Exactly,” Bruce nods. “My view was not, ‘This is a business and we are going to funnel bands up to major labels and make money.’ The label turned into that, but it was a different sensibility that I was bringing to the table. However, I had a business partner that saw things differently, and it was the synergy of our two philosophies that made Sub Pop what it was. My sensibility was much more family oriented: it was about community building, about provoking the system and helping each other out. So, bailing for major labels . . . I was really upset. After that happened, my whole relationship with artists changed. I started to distance myself from the bands.”
“I was a little freaked out,” comments Jonathan Poneman, “because when we started hearing about this, Bruce and I were in England on a business trip, talking to our distributor about late payment. It seemed much more underhand because it was going on when we were out of the country. I’ve been asked this question a few times about Nirvana, and the thing that hurts is that people never seem to understand that it wasn’t about the business side of things. Business gets worked out. The thing that hurts is the sentimental side: the fact that you are working together for a common goal. You talk to these people regularly, your lives are integrated . . . and suddenly it’s like a divorce. Suddenly your life partner comes in, and they’re marrying up. It was emotionally traumatic on that level.
“I remember Susan Silver telling me one time, ‘Jonathan, Soundgarden’s got to move on. I’m sorry that they’re not going to be recording with you.’ ” The label boss bangs on the table for emphasis. “I don’t give a shit about that stuff! She was talking to me like, ‘Your meal ticket is going away,’ and it’s like . . . as long as there are talented people in the world, and people who want to hear what talented people have to say, there’s a place for me to do what I do. For me, the most essential part of what we do is building relationships. The times when Sub Pop has failed as a label it’s because we have not adequately built those relationships, or when it has been more about business than the holistic depth and breadth of what relationships are supposed to be about.
“So that’s the thing that stung about Nirvana talking to other people,” Poneman finishes. “It wasn’t so much . . . even if the business of things had not worked out in the manner in which they did, Sub Pop would have survived, albeit in a completely different way.”
So Nirvana was without a drummer. Again.
Wild rumours started to fly round the British music press as to who could fill the slot – the laconic singer of Dinosaur Jr, J. Mascis ( J. originally started out as a drummer), Tad Doyle, Dale Crover and Mudhoney’s Dan Peters. Dale was asked to stand in for an eight-date tour of the West Coast in August, supporting Sonic Youth, but there was no way Kurt could have convinced Crover to leave the Melvins, even if he’d wanted to.
Just as he had with the demo, Crover agreed to help out11, under one condition: they were not allowed, under any circumstances, to touch his drums. “He was like, ‘You can’t ruin my drum kit,’ ” recalls Debbi. “It was off limits, Dale made that clear to Kurt. More for the fact that Dale couldn’t afford to buy a new drum kit.”
Dale himself put it more strongly to Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are: “Not only did they comply with that request, but they also did not smash one guitar on the tour. I’m glad they didn’t do that stuff. It’s anticlimactic. Kurt trying to break a guitar – it takes him 15 minutes. By the time it’s over, it’s like, big deal. I think that’s guitar murder. I think guitars have souls. I don’t think any of that stuff is cool at all.”
“So anyway,” continues Debbi, “Nirvana is starting to get big. Chad is out of the band, and Dale toured with them. Everybody knew it was temporary. It was a favour. I went to the Sacramento show. Nirvana was really excited to be opening for Sonic Youth.”
The tour’s first stop was in Long Beach, California on August 13. Before the tour started, the band stayed a few days in San Francisco at Melvins’ singer Buzz Osborne’s house where – on Buzz’s recommendation – Nirvana checked out Washington, DC band Scream. Scream played solid, catchy songs, like an old school hardcore punk band. “They wanted a heavier drummer than Chad,” says Carrie. “I can remember Kurt telling me after the Scream show, ‘I wish we could get a drummer like that.’ ”
The next night, Nirvana and Sonic Youth played at a former brothel in Las Vegas – Youth bassist and tastemaker Kim Gordon was so excited by Nirvana’s set she danced down the front. Not everyone was impressed, however: “At the end of the set, there were more people in the parking lot than inside the venue,” sniffed one radio person. Three nights later, the bands played at the Casbah in San Diego – a tiny venue built to take about 75 people, but sold out twice over. Drunk Ted from Flipside fanzine was in attendance: “It was really weird,” he told Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna, “because when Nirvana showed up, Krist and Kurt had totally short hair, and Sub Pop was known for having long hair and playing punk-ish garage music that was authentic. Watching these guys play this totally twisted, hard music with short hair was strange. It was cool, though. They pulled it off.”
“On their days off they played little shows to make money, like in San Diego,” notes Anton Brookes. “At the party afterwards, I remember Kurt got laid, because we were waiting for him to drive back up to Los Angeles. Krist tried to kidnap a pig. We stopped off at a service station with a farm next to it. Krist was worried the pig was going to be bacon. He tried to catch it with his jumper. He said, ‘He can travel with us, life on the road! He’ll have stories to tell his piglets! I’m liberating it.’ ”
The bands then travelled to San Francisco – where past appearances guaranteed an enthusiastic crowd – and Portland, before Nirvana returned to Seattle on August 24, where they played the Moore Theatre, with Julie Cafritz’s wired post-Pussy Galore band STP opening.
“I remember going to the Melvins house in San Francisco,” recalls Anton. “It was freezing. Buzz and his girlfriend had this big house, like a tiny version of The Addams Family, loads of dolls and weird stuff. We sat watching The Simpsons . Dale played in his underwear, drum sticks stuffed down his pants. With his black hair he looked really pasty white. We watched The Simpsons for hours and hours . . .”
It was while on tour with Dale that Kurt and Krist were introduced to Sonic Youth’s manager, the wise-cracking, devilish John Silva12 – and, through Silva, Danny Goldberg, best known for having gone from being Led Zeppelin’s publicist to running their Swansong label in the US.13
“I had a management company called Gold Mountain,” Goldberg says. “At some point I realised I was out of touch with the next generation of rock’n’roll – I had [ bluesy, politically active Seventies singer] Bonnie Raitt, Rickie Lee Jones.14 I liked [Southern folk blues band] House Of Freaks. Silva was their manager. He was a smart guy who needed a place to work out of. He came with Redd Kross. After six months, we signed Sonic Youth as a client, just before they released Goo. That put us on the map. Sonic Youth were held in highest regard. Thurston, in particular, had the most comprehensive
awareness of new bands. In essence, he was the greatest A& R person of the moment.
“Sometime during the cycle of touring, Sonic Youth took Nirvana out on some shows,” Goldberg continues. “Silva came back enthusing about Nirvana, and Thurston called me saying how great Nirvana was. I had 100 per cent trust in Thurston. If he was excited, I was excited. So I called a lawyer and Nirvana came down to LA and had a meeting with us. Kurt didn’t do so much talking, Krist did. I knew we wanted them and they wanted to be with us because they similarly trusted Sonic Youth. It was not a difficult courtship.
“Nirvana didn’t like Sub Pop very much,” Danny points out. “On one hand Kurt felt he hadn’t been paid correctly, and secondly he wanted to reach a big audience. There was no ambiguity. At the first meeting I indicated Sub Pop were OK by us, but they were like, ‘We don’t want to be on Sub Pop, we want to be on a major. If Sub Pop have to be paid something, fine.’ Kurt Cobain wanted to be who he became. He was a fan not only of the Melvins but also of Kiss and AC/DC. They wanted the challenge of reaching the biggest possible audience, no question.”
Before Nirvana left to tour with Sonic Youth, however, Sub Pop wanted them to record another single – and Dale was still in San Francisco. And Mudhoney were on the verge of splitting up . . .
“We didn’t split up,” Dan Peters states. “Steve [Turner, guitarist] wanted to go back to school. I don’t know if we ever shot ourselves in the foot, but we definitely whacked ourselves in the foot a few times by not taking advantage of things while we could – but that was Mudhoney all over. It was never our intention to be successful.”
In the summer of 1990, Dan bumped into Shelli at The Vogue – and suggested he could fill the vacant Nirvana drum stool. “I had fought my whole life to get to do the stuff I was doing in Mudhoney; I wasn’t ready to give it up,” he explains. “I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ I’m 22, 23 years old and I have no skills as far as I don’t know how to do anything other than play drums.” Surprised and complimented by his proposal, Nirvana agreed. Dan immediately started rehearsing with Kurt and Krist at The Dutchman. Kurt and Krist bought Dan a huge, battered kit to play on, concerned that his compact set wouldn’t be able to compete with the sheer volume of their guitars. Dan rejected it all, except for the bass drum.
“It was a big hunk of shit,” he succinctly puts it. “If I’d known they were that serious I would have pursued another kit somehow.”
From the British perspective, we were pretty pissed off that Dan Peters was leaving Mudhoney to go join Nirvana.
“It was a choice that Steve made,” Peters replies curtly.
“By that point I was totally into Nirvana,” he continues. “[Matt] Lukin had a copy of the Blew EP while we were on tour in Eugene, Oregon. We were supposed to be staying in these people’s house, but Matt and me said, ‘ Fuck that, we’ll sleep in the van.’ So we sat out there and smoked pot and drank beer and listened to Nirvana. I remember hearing ‘Been A Son’ and being like, ‘Man, that’s a fucking great song.’ We played it over and over.”
How many shows did you do with Nirvana?
“One. One show – and one recording session,” the drummer grimaces.
Did you seriously think you were going to be joining Nirvana full-time?
“Yeah. At that point it was up in the air as far as what Mudhoney was doing. If it had worked out, I think I would have stuck with it. They’d come down from Tacoma, hang out, or Krist would come to my house, knock on the door, I’d hop in the van and we’d go down to the practice space. Kurt would be in the back, sleeping. We’d get there, Kurt would wake up, walk into the practice space, plug in his guitar and go, ‘I can’t hear your drums.’ ‘Neither can I!’ He’d just crank the amp. There was no real hanging out. I think we went out for beers once after a practice. I said, ‘Look, what do you guys want? If you’re looking for another drummer, let me know, I’ll step aside – I don’t want to be auditioning.’ They were like, ‘No, no, no, you’re going to be the guy.’ ”
Did you rehearse ‘Teen Spirit’ with them?
“No. ‘Pay To Play’ I played with them. ‘In Bloom’ I played with them. After I stopped playing with Nirvana I joined Screaming Trees for at least a good full tour. I had a great time with Mark Lanegan. He hadn’t drunk for five years and I did a big trip with him and he started drinking again. Unfortunately the drugs came into play with Mark.”
‘Sliver’ was written in a couple of minutes at one of The Dutchman practices with Dan. It was Kurt’s poppiest song yet, autobiographical, oddly naïve and Olympia-influenced with its repeated chorus of “Grandma take me home” howled over and over again with increasing anguish. It starts off innocuously enough, like The Sonics in a down mood, before exploding in frustration and a welter of electric guitars and feedback. The chorus is as climactic as the verses are sensitive and considered. The kid doesn’t want to be left with his grandparents, not eating, not playing – not doing anything. He’s not having fun, not at all. He’s lonely. He wants to go home. What part of that sentence don’t they understand?
“Mom and dad go off somewhere and leave the kid with his grandparents and he gets confused and frightened, he doesn’t understand what’s happening to him,” Kurt explained to MM journalist Push in December 1990. “But hey, you mustn’t get too worried about him – grandpa doesn’t abuse him or anything like that. And in the last verse he wakes up back in his mother’s arms.”
The single was recorded over the space of 90 minutes during a lunch break in a Tad recording session, at Reciprocal, on July 11: “We called Tad up and asked if we could come over and record the song,” Kurt told Push. “We used their instruments while they sat around eating. But that’s nothing new. We approached the recording of Bleach like it was a radio session. The key to a successful album is to get the fuck out of the studio before you’re sick of the songs.”
“I don’t know why the session was such a rush,” recalls Peters. “Jack stuck around and we hopped in behind their instruments. I used Tad’s drummer Steve’s kit, and the sounds were already up.”
‘Sliver’ was eventually released in the UK in December, thereby once again missing the tour it was supposed to help to promote. It weighed in at a fraction over two minutes and was, as Push suggested, “a hell of a pop song”, halfway between two of the poppier numbers on Bleach, ‘About A Girl’ and ‘Swap Meet’. For the B-side, the far more ponderous ‘Dive’ was lifted from the Vig sessions – rounded off on the seven-inch by a sliver of conversation between Jonathan Poneman and a hungover Krist Novoselic.15
How was that one gig you played with them?
“It was fun, kind of chaotic, lots of people on stage,” Dan replies. It took place at Seattle’s Motor Sports Arena on September 22, Nirvana’s largest headlining gig yet – in front of 1,500 people, with Melvins, Dwarves and punk band The Derelicts in support. “There was a lot of stagediving. There was a complete lack of security.”
One Nirvana biography says that show was the turning point.
“It probably was. It was a huge show. Mudhoney had done a show there before and it was one of the first times that this big old shed area was opened up to random fuck-offs. I was talking to the woman who put the show on about what I thought was my first show – not my only show – and she’s like, ‘How many backstage passes do you need?’ Kurt and Krist were like, ‘I need two.’ I’m like, ‘I need 40.’ I got all my friends to the backstage area. Not that there was much going on, but we could bring all the booze we wanted through the back gate. I just wish they’d told me what was up. So my memory of that night is kind of tainted.”
Dan Peters thought he was Nirvana’s new drummer, especially when, on September 23, he sat in with the band for a photo-shoot for UK music paper Sounds. But, unbeknown to Dan, Nirvana already had someone else lined up – Scream’s 21-year-old drummer Dave Grohl.
“Kurt called me up to tell me a new drummer was coming to try out,” recalls Anton Brookes, “coming up from Washington or LA, I can’t re
member which.”
“There was a lot of shifty stuff I found out about afterwards,” Dan says. “I went down to a party the day after I played that show, doing all those pictures for Sounds, sitting in on an interview and making an idiot of myself. Dave’s in the background sitting there, all like, ‘ doo be doo’. None of those fucking guys had the balls to tell me. That’s what pisses me off. I don’t need to feel like an idiot. I’m in fucking Mudhoney. Fuck you guys.”
“It wasn’t that we were unhappy with Dan’s drumming,” Kurt told Push. “It was just that Dave has qualities that match our needs a little closer. He takes care of the backing vocals for a start. We were blown away when we saw him playing with Scream, and we agreed that we’d ask him to join Nirvana if we had the chance. Ironically, that chance came a week after we got Danny in. It was a stressful situation, but it now looks like Dan will rejoin Mudhoney and they’ll carry on as before. The idea of that band stopping because of Dan coming over to us had caused us considerable distress.”
“It never reached the stage of me leaving Mudhoney,” Dan states. “We [Nirvana] were supposed to do a tour of England with L7 after Kurt and Krist got back checking out record labels. Kurt called me up and said, ‘Looks like we’re going to sign with Geffen.’ I’m like, ‘Well, what’s up with this trip to England?’ He’s like, ‘That’s what I’m calling about. I just want to let you know that we got another drummer, we’ve got Dave.’ I was like, ‘Well, talk to you later,’ and hung up. I was more relieved than anything – it didn’t exactly feel like I’d been having a bonding session with those guys.”
On September 25, a few hours after Dave Grohl auditioned for Nirvana, Kurt travelled down to Olympia to record four songs for Calvin Johnson’s Boy Meets Girl KAOS radio show. His performance was so impromptu that even Tobi Vail was caught unawares: “I have a tape,” she says, “but it cuts off halfway through and you have to change it over and start listening again. It sounds really good, though.” It was just Kurt and his acoustic guitar, playing live in the studio: ‘Lithium’ (sounding remarkably similar in both tone and structure to the recorded version that ended up on Nevermind ), ‘Dumb’, ‘Been A Son’ and a caustic, punk rock-influenced rarity, ‘Opinion’, the direct lyrics castigating the self-appointed tastemakers and hipsters of Seattle.