by Everett True
“We all got drunk in Edinburgh on free booze from Island records,” recalled their booking agent Russell Warby in the same article. “Fantastic! I slept in the same room with Krist and Craig, and we got really drunk in the Ailsa Craig hotel bar. We’d checked in five people, but in the end about 16 of us stayed. Krist was totally drunk. There was a toilet cubicle in the room, and he climbed up on the roof of it in the middle of the night. I was carrying all the money [Russell was standing in as tour manager, as Alex had a prior commitment] and I was having this dream that all the money was fluttering down on me. I woke up with a scream, covered with paper, and I was thinking, ‘My God, the money!’ In fact, Krist had found all these leaflets on top of the cubicle and he’d been throwing them in the air, shouting, ‘ Frou-frou!’ That was always known as the Frou-frou Night.”
The final night of the tour was in Nottingham on October 27. According to Melody Maker photographer Stephen Sweet, who was watching the Trent Polytechnic show from the balcony, the lights were going up and the crowd trudging off home, satiated, when Kurt rushed back on to the stage to announce, “We’ve got a very special guest for you.” The fans raced back down the front, expecting Tad at the very least, only to hear Kurt complete the words, “. . . Everett True from Melody Maker. ”
I stumbled up to the microphone and muttered something about how I’d only play a song if Nirvana played one afterwards. Kurt strapped his left-handed guitar over my shoulder – wrongly – and he and Krist settled behind the drum kit, and started bashing away. We lasted about two minutes into my Sub Pop single ‘Do Nuts’ until Kurt began to comprehensively trash the drums, at which point I quit my vocal duties and turned around to watch.21
Afterwards, someone produced a pair of false eyeball joke sunglasses and Krist filmed everyone wearing them. Drunk as I was, and with Nirvana in support, I convinced L7 that I wasn’t in fact the London journalist who’d travelled up to interview them. Man, they were mad when they found out the truth.
“That whole night reminded me of a scene from Tony Hancock’s22 1962 film The Rebel,” recalls Sweet. In the film, Hancock plays an office worker trying to escape the nine-to-five rat race. “There’s one moment when he’s in a room surrounded by these beatnik hip dudes, explaining how everyone where he comes from dresses identically . . . and then the camera pans back, showing everyone around him wearing roll-neck sweaters and dark glasses. And that’s what it felt like, being surrounded by all these kids with their long hair and Mudhoney and Nirvana T-shirts.”
Tell me about Dave Grohl.
“We were sitting in my bed one evening in Los Angeles and he was playing this guitar like he was somehow a songwriter,” recalls Jennifer Finch. “I asked him if he thought there was anything wrong with our relationship, and he said ‘No’, and I said there was, and could he please leave. I saw him a year after that and he said, ‘Did you get the letter I sent you?’ I’d never gotten the letter. In 1996 when my father passed away, I found a pile of mail that had been unopened, and I found this letter, and I still have it today; it’s unopened. It could have been my house on the hill, Everett.”
You knew Dave, right? Did he have a motorbike?
“He moved to Los Angeles with his band Scream,” she replies, “and I believe that he had a motorbike at that point. And then he was called to Seattle to perform the duty that he performed.”
Do you remember a couple of drunken English people at your show in Nottingham?
“I quite well remember you,” the musician laughs. “I didn’t understand then that to be in a band you needed to conduct interviews. We were all so young. You know what I remember about that night? The theme of the venue was a dock, and it had chain link. The stage was long, and to get to the dressing room you had to walk up some steps.”
Does anything else stand out about that visit to the UK?
“I had a great time staying on afterwards. What else do you want, what are you driving at? That’s when Dave and I got together, that’s the second time we met. I’d booked his band in Los Angeles, Scream, a couple of years prior, with [LA rock band] Bad Religion. I went to the park, the zoo. I have very cute pictures of me and Dave holding pigeons, like you English do – hold the pigeons and feed the pigeons. We were trying to blend in.”
Addenda 1: Chad vs Dave
“You can’t underestimate how much Dave Grohl brought to that band,” says Ian Dickson. “Kurt told me after they toured with Dale, he was like, ‘Dale’s a great drummer but just won’t do what I say, basically. He has no ability to play with anybody but Buzz.’ Dave joining the band brought it all together. Dave is a colossal talent. His contribution to Nevermind is massively underrated – both in vocals and in drum tracks. And I didn’t even like Dave back then!”
“To me, Dave didn’t fit into the band,” complains early fan Rob Kader. “Especially if they wanted to blast Jason for his heavy metal record collection and then ignore Dave’s rock leanings.”
“I don’t like Grohl’s drumming at all,” comments Steve Turner. “I like things with a bit more finesse. I like Dan’s drumming. I like Chad’s drumming for Nirvana, a little sloppier and a little looser. It swung more. Grohl doesn’t swing, he bashes.”
I think that Dave joining was the crucial moment when Nirvana went from being an Olympia band to a Seattle band – or an LA band.
“LA Band!” the Mudhoney guitarist laughs. “They became pro. They were totally unpredictable with Chad. Sometimes Chad would be really shitty . But so would Kurt, so would Krist, you know? But with Dave’s big pounding beat behind them, they could do just about anything. He connects more of that innate anger and aggression. What’s weird, though, is that the songs got poppier when he joined; they were no longer as sludgy as when they used to imitate the Melvins’ song structures. It’s a weird dichotomy. I liked them right in the middle when they were switching over, when they did the demos with Chad on the songs from Nevermind . That’s my favourite stuff.”
How would you compare Dave Grohl to Chad Channing?
“Simpler, harder hitting,” replies Jack Endino. “There wasn’t a lot of difference at the end. Chad turned into a really good drummer. Dave himself has pointed out repeatedly that, on Nevermind , he was playing Chad’s drum parts. Chad had a good musical sense. He knew what to play and how to play it. He’s very underrated. The only thing he lacked was Dave’s power.
“ Grohl had power; nothing fancy, but very efficient,” Endino adds. “The bare minimum but played really well. He always hits two cymbals at once. Everything he does is extra. You’ll see his drum set shaking when he plays. Chad was a nice, pleasant, short fellow while Dave Grohl has a very animal, Neanderthal vibe. You just feel like he’s smashing people’s heads as he’s playing. They got that violent energy from Dave.”
Addenda 2: Olympia vs Seattle (reprise)
“If there’s any one city that can claim them, it has to be Olympia,” says Slim Moon. “They lived in Olympia; they left Aberdeen the instant they could. The whole career of the band from the time that they recorded their first demo to Nevermind breaking as a number one hit, Kurt lived in Olympia. So you could call them an Aberdeen band if you really insist, but you can’t call them a Seattle band at all. Seattle has no claim to them unless [Smiths singer] Morrissey is a Los Angeles artist because he moved there at the end of his career. It’s ridiculous to call Nirvana a Seattle band.
“Another way that I think you can claim Nirvana as an Olympia band is the massive transformation they underwent from the days of ‘Beeswax’ and the original demo,” the kill rock stars boss continues. “At first it was just about having the structure of Melvins and Scratch Acid. Kurt had a pop sensibility from day one, but he didn’t unleash it until it became OK to do so, when he was around people that embraced the pop sensibility. He once played me the first song he ever wrote and it sounded totally like Boston. It was a hard rock anthem. It was a pop song. It was a little heavy, but it was a pop song with really good hooks. He backed away from hooks because i
t wasn’t cool when he was loving Scratch Acid.”
So Olympia gave him the confidence to rediscover the . . .
“Yeah, he was in project bands with Tobi and he was in The Go Team, and that’s where he started doing stuff that was catchy again. ‘About A Girl’ came out of that experience. The first catchy songs he wrote were the acoustic, quiet, minimal songs. He snuck back into the big rock stuff after that. ‘Sliver’ is like the bridge between Olympia and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’: on one hand it has a totally powerful guitar line, but then the lyrics are totally Olympia – the whole ‘Grandma take me home’.
“We can’t sell Seattle short, though. The opening rhythm of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is pure Mudhoney. To me, it’s almost a Mudhoney rip-off. Kurt felt fairly comfortable being lumped in with the Sub Pop sound. He consciously wrote songs that were in the same style as Mudhoney and Tad and Swallow. And Mudhoney were by far the best of those bands.”
But Olympia gave his music a more feminine aspect . . .
“If he hadn’t lived in Olympia, he probably wouldn’t have written ‘Rape Me’ and stuff like that. A lot of the bands that involved women were musically more progressive and interesting. That was a last minute influence on their music, though. That’s not the whole three years they lived in Olympia. That’s the last six months of what was happening in Kurt’s life while the songs for Nevermind were being written. There’s the well-known story of the title of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ being suggested by Kathleen Hanna . . .”
NOTES
1 Teenage Fanclub are a Scots band, influenced by Dinosaur Jr’s heavy riffs and doomed Seventies country rockers Big Star, part of the same Glasgow scene that spawned The Vaselines and The Pastels. Their 1991 album Bandwagonesque was a massive personal favourite, recorded on to the other side of my Nevermind advance tape – and played back-to-back wherever I went.
2 In case you’re wondering: the other three Singles Of The Week were Madonna’s salacious ‘Justify My Love’, Afghan Whigs’ anguished post-Replacements Sub Pop single ‘Retarded’ and a reissue of Doris Day’s ‘Winter Wonderland’.
3 You know . . . bleedin’ ‘You’re So Vain’ . . .
4 2112 was the legendary 1976 concept album from the bloated Canadian rockers – it’s the future, all rock music is banned, then a boy discovers a guitar underneath a waterfall . . . Eventually he commits suicide. In my original review of Nevermind I ironically compared Nirvana to Rush, because they were a trio.
5 Big old meeting halls owned by Fraternal and Social organisations typically associated with Labour or Political or Charitable movements in the early 20th century.
6 Simple Machines and its brother label TeenBeat were home to Toomey’s Tsunami and to Mark E. Robinson’s equally poppy Unrest, among plenty of other International Pop Underground/punk bands such as Superchunk, Lungfish, Eggs, Versus and the all-girl Scrawl. Initially, Simple Machines favoured beautifully packaged seven-inch EPs, and cassette-only releases.
7 Naked Raygun: mid-Eighties melodic and art-damaged Chicago punk band.
8 Bad Brains were an extremely influential Eighties US hardcore band that played a whirlwind barrage of thrash and reggae-influenced tunes. Could make Black Flag sound like Destiny’s Child.
9 Corrosion Of Conformity: a North Carolina punk band – one of the many that blurred the lines between thrash and all-out metal.
10 In the early Eighties, Trouble Funk ripped up the dance floors of their native DC with the sound of ‘go-go’ – full-on blend of uptempo Seventies funk and Sixties-style horns.
11 Lunchmeat became Soulside, who eventually became Touch And Go artists Girls Against Boys. Imagine if Psychedelic Furs’ singer Richard Butler, instead of slumming it round art galleries all his life, had grown up hanging out with Ian MacKaye and Steve Albini.
12 Similar to Jack White’s Third Man studios set-up – which was based in the front room of his house.
13 Groovy Hate Fuck is screeching, muffled, feedback-drenched, offensive, minimal . . . now that’s what I call NYC art punk!
14 Stripped-down rockabilly. As the name suggests, a duo. Flat Duo Jets were a big influence on The White Stripes.
15 Boston, MA band Mission Of Burma ploughed some mighty riffs indeed in the early Eighties – modern classical music meets The MC5. 1981’s Signals, Calls And Marches EP, featuring the claustrophobic, jagged ‘That’s When I Reach For My Revolver’, is the one to buy.
16 ‘Revolution Summer’ is a reference to an attempt made by the DC punk community in the summer of 1985 to distance themselves from their more meat-headed, violent members by slowing down the frenetic thrash into more melodic, introspective music. The three bands Dave names were prime movers in this change – Rites Of Spring, in particular, have been credited with helping invent ‘ emo’.
17 The White Stripes’ drummer Meg White has been called a ‘baby Bonham’ – shades of Kurt announcing Grohl as a ‘baby Crover’ on KAOS radio.
18 Indicating perhaps why some Nirvana fans prefer Chad to Dave – because he understood where Krist and Kurt came from.
19 Don’t even ask! Primus ploughed the lowest form of ‘wacky’ collegiate funk metal.
20 Eugene Kelly went on to form the more straight-ahead rock band Captain America, later to change their name to Eugenius after Captain America’s comic book company, Marvel Comics, threatened legal action. That his band would be offered a record deal was put beyond all doubt once Kurt started wearing a Captain America T-shirt in photo shoots.
21 I have a recording of this show. The song is unlistenable, a deluge of feedback and off-time screaming.
22 Lachrymose British TV comedian, Tony Hancock was best known for his portrayal of the doleful yet caustic everyman. He reminds me a little of Jonathan Poneman.
CHAPTER 13
Angels In The Snow
“I DIDN’T meet Kurt officially until I moved to Olympia,” says Seattle resident Cheryl Arnold. “I was staying in the Martin, and I went over to Kathleen [Hanna]’s apartment to bum a cigarette, and there were a couple people there, Mikey Dees, Kurt and Kathleen . . . It was snowing out and Calvin was out of town so I was staying at his apartment, but I couldn’t sleep. I had really bad insomnia, so I was just going to walk to my mom’s house, and Kurt came over while I was putting my shoes on and asked if he could walk me home. And I was like, ‘ Heh heh . . . of course!!!’ ”
He was cute?
“Oh my god, he was so cute. I was totally crushed out on him from the first time I met him. He had beautiful blue eyes, but there was something about him that . . . I don’t know how to explain it. Like you wanted to find out what the secret was. It was December 1990; right before Christmas. I think there was a Christmas party at the Martin.”
When he walked you home what did you talk about?
“I don’t know, shit! You want me to remember what I talked about 15 years ago? I have no idea.”
So you started hanging out after that?
“Yeah.”
People thought you were going out, right?
“I don’t know what people thought.” Cheryl laughs. “I’m sure some people may have thought we were going out, yeah.”
Did you travel with Kurt anywhere?
“No. Well, we went to Aberdeen. We never got on any planes. I’d been to Aberdeen before, just driving through to go to the ocean. Aberdeen was dead. We went to meet his mom and his little sister. They lived in a normal little house. Aberdeen’s a weird, real small town.”
What kind of stuff did you do with Kurt?
“Uh . . . we ate chocolate cream pie. Wrestled. I don’t know . . . rented movies? Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He kept turtles. I’m sure he loved them at some point, but he told me they annoyed him because all they did was float up to the top and then float back down and then back up, all day long. His apartment was really messy, full of pizza boxes. He liked to eat lots of pizza.”
He had a pretty particular diet, didn’t he?
“Yeah. Pizza. Choco
late. Candy. He had a really fucked up stomach. He was in pain all the time. He liked cold cereal, like Fruity Pebbles . . . and pizza.”
Did you see any signs of narcolepsy?
“You’re kidding me. Oh, that’s funny. He also had Tourettes.”
Did you go to Nirvana shows with him?
“A couple. I don’t know if we ever went in the same car together. Kurt and me didn’t go ‘out’ a lot. We just hung out and stayed in: lots of craziness. We were young, you know? We did lots of crazy things. You know, Everett – what would you do on a typical crazy night?”
I can’t remember.
“Exactly. Getting drunk and, you know, ‘Woo-hoo,’ shooting BB guns and dancing around in weird high-heel platform shoes. Throwing eggs at cars. All the typical stuff youngsters do . . . ”
Did Kurt dress up in women’s clothes?
“Doesn’t everybody? I don’t know if it has anything to do with them being women’s clothes. People like to play dress up. I know I do!”
Me too.
“I went to see a demolition derby with Kurt and Dylan. It was somewhere north of here [Seattle]. Monroe? The night before, Kurt and I were going to drive to the ocean and spend the night there, but we didn’t realise it was the night before the 4th of July and that everybody and their dog goes to the ocean for the 4th of July. So all the hotel rooms were booked, and we had to drive back into Aberdeen and got the last room in this shitty motel called The Flamingo. They’d just shampooed the carpet, so we had to jump from the couch to the bed so we didn’t get our feet wet. We drove around in the car a lot. He had a Falcon or a Valiant. He didn’t like to drive very much so I drove a lot. Went to the drive-in movies in between Olympia and Aberdeen.”