Nirvana

by Everett True

  Did you drive up to Seattle with him?

  “Yeah. We were supposed to go see Hole one night and only made it to Tacoma.”

  Was that before Kurt met Courtney?

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me . . . Everett?” Cheryl places emphasis on the final word, aware that I know more than she does. “Yes, I think so.”

  Did you hang out with Kurt after he met Courtney?

  “Maybe for a little while. Kurt and I stopped hanging out in August ’91. He had this awesome painting of Iggy Pop that I wanted. I never saw him doing drawing or anything. We hung out with Ian [ Dickson] a lot, Dylan a bit. Dave [ Grohl] was sleeping on Kurt’s floor for a while.”

  How was that?

  “Fine.” Cheryl laughs. “I wasn’t the one that had to sleep on Kurt’s floor. I don’t know how it was for him. He might have hated it. One time, Dave dumped a jar of glitter on us . . . and glitter doesn’t go away. It was in my ears, stuck to my scalp for weeks – up your nose, in your ears, not to mention various other nooks and crannies. It’s like sand, only worse. It was awful.”

  What’s the hit that you get off of heroin?

  “Very warm and very euphoric and very slow,” replies Frances Bean Cobain’s old nanny Cali De Witt. “It’s a downer. It doesn’t amplify anything. It dulls all the problems and all the screaming and the yelling in your mind. It just brings you to a blissful state.”

  How long does it last for?

  “Depending on how much you’re using, it should last a few hours. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of coke.”

  Dave moved into Pear Street, Olympia on Nirvana’s return from the UK.

  The same week, Kurt and Krist flew down to LA, courtesy of MCA, whose A& R man Bret Hartman was keen to sign Nirvana. One meeting with the company’s president was enough to convince them it was a bad choice. He behaved with the typical arrogance of his breed1, being both rude and dismissive – the encounter lasted seconds. So the pair took advantage of being in LA and visited Gold Mountain again. They appreciated John Silva’s enthusiasm for underground rock music – he owned a large seven-inch collection and had once shared an apartment with Dead Kennedys’ singer Jello Biafra – and the fact that Danny Goldberg previously worked with Led Zeppelin.

  “Dave Grohl was the big Zeppelin fan,” recalls Goldberg, “although I later learnt that Kurt was as well. Grohl was obsessed with [ Zep drummer] John Bonham and wanted to hear stories about him. John [Silva] wanted me to talk about my activism at the ACLU [Goldberg was president of the South California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union], which was something that resonated with the guys. I felt we needed to pitch them on why we were good managers, but in retrospect I think they’d already decided because of Sonic Youth.”

  Nirvana signed with Gold Mountain after Silva came down to Olympia to take the band out for dinner. It wasn’t as straightforward as all that, though. While Silva and the others waited in the restaurant for what felt like hours, Kurt rode a tiny children’s Swinger bicycle round in the Washington State Lottery car park. The bicycle was so small he had to hunch over it with his knees almost up to his neck. Eventually, Kurt turned up and demanded that Silva come with him to see Beat Happening play across town. Silva agreed and realised he needed to enthuse about Calvin’s band in front of Kurt – even though their very presence on stage ran alien to everything the savvy businessman liked about music. (No bass!) He thus passed Kurt’s inspection.

  The bicycle had been bought a few days before, together with a couple of BB guns, some Pixelvision video cameras, a Nintendo games system and Evel Knievel2 action figures from Toys ‘R’ Us. The total came to nearly a thousand bucks; and was paid for out of Kurt’s $3,000 share of Nirvana’s advance from the Virgin publishing money, the band’s first big cheque.3 “He bought crap basically,” admitted Joe Preston, who was with Kurt at the time, “junk he could destroy.” The gun was used to shoot out the windows of the Washington State Lottery building across the street from Kurt’s apartment.

  Gold Mountain started sending Kurt a retainer of $1,000 a month. Goldberg told Nirvana that their best bet would be to sign with Geffen: “They’d just signed Sonic Youth, so I knew they had people who were tuned into the music – Mark Kates with his access to college radio, Sonic Youth’s A& R person Gary Gersh, Ray Farrell who was sensitive to independent retailers . . .” the manager explains. “Culturally, Geffen had a lot of people who really understood the aesthetics of the newer generation of rock’n’roll. And they were willing to pay whatever anyone else offered.

  “ Krist did much of the talking initially,” Goldberg continues. “Kurt only really started talking to me around the third time we met. John had told me they wanted to do a poster based round an eye chart. I thought it was hackneyed, and John must’ve told Kurt, because he cornered me and asked why. The level of intensity he brought to the conversation made me realise how serious he was. That was the first glimmer I got into how focused he was.”

  Grohl’s upbeat personality was to prove a relief to Kurt – who, over the summer, had become more withdrawn, troubled by his relationship with Tobi. Before Dave’s arrival, Kurt had taken to staring into space for hours, speaking only when he was spoken to – retreating behind a barrier of silence (known as J. Mascis’ Fifth Amendment, after the Dinosaur Jr’s singer’s legendary reluctance to answer questions in interviews). He claimed to be suffering from narcolepsy. He wasn’t, but it was a useful defence mechanism. In sharp contrast to his relationship with Tracy, Kurt wanted to settle down with Tobi – but Tobi was too independent, despite her love for Kurt.

  “There was a time that Dale [ Crover] and I went over to Kurt’s house, and Tobi was there,” recalls Debbi Shane. “All four of us were super-shy and uncomfortable. Kurt asked Tobi to make some macaroni and cheese. There was a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen; I took a shot because it was a really weird, awkward night. Nobody could talk. Kurt wanted to start bands with everybody4 – and because we were all sitting looking at the floor, not saying anything, he thought that should be the photo.”

  “ Krist and Kurt had more of a co-dependent relationship and Kurt and Dave didn’t,” explains Carrie Montgomery. “Dave was just Dave. He was young and cocky and didn’t have anything to lose. He knew that his place was cemented in the band. Kurt was never going to get rid of Dave. He was like a young rocker dude; dirt bike on tour, get a tattoo at every show, kind of guy. Those guys had a little hip bachelor pad down there. They had a lot of people in and out. Cheryl was down at their place a lot. They were always playing video games and eating hot dogs and junk food and being gross . . .”

  Dave taught Kurt how to do rudimentary home-made tattoos with India ink and a needle. This in turn inspired Kurt to go along to an Olympia tattoo parlour to have a proper tattoo done. With Candice Pedersen along as support, he had the K logo (a K inside a shield) tattooed on his arm.

  The choice of tattoo surprised some of his friends.

  “I think he liked the records K distributed better than the records they put out,” Dylan Carlson remarked. Indeed, K’s distribution – often releases from cassette-centric imprints like Simple Machines, the UK’s Bi-Joopiter label and like-minded International Pop Underground labels – was exemplary, a real education for anyone looking to discover the vast undercurrent of music bubbling up in America’s cities and heartlands in 1990, separate to the mainstream. Superchunk5, Polvo, Sebadoh6, Shonen Knife, Australian pop band The Cannanes, Gravel . . . these were all bands I discovered via Calvin Johnson’s goldmine of a storeroom just across the road from the Capital Theater, upstairs in a dilapidated building.

  “We went up to Aberdeen for Christmas,” says Debbi. “ Krist and Shelli were there, and Kurt went because he wanted to see his little sister. In Aberdeen there’s nothing to do. We piled into a car and went out for coffee and played those pull-tab things, and I won $30. The next day Kurt and I drove back to Olympia. Kurt wanted to get back to see Tobi and just to get back home. He was obsessed
with Dinosaur Jr. He wanted to know everything about J. Mascis.”

  Rightly so – Dinosaur Jr were a huge influence on the Seattle scene. The description that was applied to grunge early on – ‘hard music played to a slow tempo’ – could have been designed for Dinosaur. The opening song on 1988’s Bug, ‘Freak Scene’, invented the slacker generation. J. plays guitar like he skis: effortlessly and fully in control. The song slows down, catches on fire, whispers sweet harmony and then starts blowing a tornado. “So fucked I can’t believe it/ If there’s a way I wish you’d see it,” J. sings with heavy resignation, a sentiment Nirvana could only echo with their “I found it hard/ So hard to find/ Oh well whatever, never mind” line from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. “Don’t let me fuck up will you?” J. pleads, helpless in his slumber. “Because when I need a friend, it’s still you.”

  The Holy Trinity in the late Eighties was Dinosaur Jr, Steve Albini’s Big Black and Sonic Youth. The second group was always too in thrall to the jagged post-punk rigours of UK 1979; the third made pure art-rock nirvana, unobtainable to all but the most gifted – it was left to the shy Amherst, Massachusetts trio to supply the necessary primeval volume for the grunge generation to come.

  “I remember Kim Gordon saying that [Dinosaur’s second album] Youre Living All Over Me [1987] could’ve gone huge like Nevermind if the production was a little cleaner,” mused ex-Dinosaur Jr bassist/ Sebadoh singer Lou Barlow to Loose Lips Sink Ships editor Stevie Chick. “People would go buy the exact same equipment J. used, the same amps and pedals. He embraced the Marshall Stack as something that could be expressive, not some bludgeoning heavy metal crap. I was reading some crappy Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitarists list a while back; Kurt Cobain was in there, Kevin Shields [My Bloody Valentine], even Frank fuckin’ Black [Pixies], but not J. And he was so fucking influential. He was the progenitor of that style.

  “I remember hearing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was influenced by the Pixies,” Barlow told me. “I thought, who the hell is influenced by the Pixies?” He laughs. “Why would anyone want to be influenced by the Pixies? It’s beyond me. I thought Nirvana were like a Sub Pop singles grunge band. I didn’t hear any Dinosaur. They were more like Melvins and whatever heavy metal shit they were into up in Seattle. I even thought ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was Metallica when I first heard it. I was like, wow! This is a really good new Metallica song!”

  Man, Dinosaur Jr could be loud. Walking into one of their early gigs, you could almost physically feel the waves of volume. But loudness wasn’t all – Dinosaur Jr’s first three albums have a base passion to match the pyrotechnics, and an inventiveness that is startling to hear 20 years on. Their debut album, 1985’s Dinosaur, is all over the shop – but in a brilliant, spontaneous way, recorded on the cheap after Homestead boss Gerard Cosloy informed J. he’d release anything Mascis recorded. Lacerating screams fade to indie mumbles: New Wave guitar signatures melt into horrific feedback-laden guitar solos melt into self-pitying bedroom introspection. And throughout, the lyrics are shot through with a ‘loser’ sensibility that later proved so popular it sold a million Sub Pop records.

  Grohl was like a husband to Kurt – tidying up after him, feeding him, filling the role that both Krist and Tracy had taken on earlier. “The house became boy-land,” laughs Nikki McClure. “Dave and Kurt started to have this real married couple vibe to their relationship.” Grohl dated Kathleen Hanna for a couple of weeks, and the Nirvana/Bikini Kill couples briefly socialised together, skateboarding and indulging in the occasional spot of vandalism. It was during one of these nights that Hanna spray-painted “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall – referring to the brand of deodorant Tobi used to wear.

  Kurt was still wracked by self-doubt, though – conflicted by his desire to sell millions of records and by the attitude of his Olympia/K records friends. In Michael Azerrad’s biography, there’s a telling passage where Kurt reveals that he felt signing to a label came down to a straight choice: K or Geffen. “We were really close to signing to K,” Kurt told Azerrad, clearly deluding himself. It’s unlikely that Calvin would’ve ever signed Nirvana, however much he liked them. For one, K didn’t have contracts. For two, Nirvana were too traditionally rock. (They had a bassist, for Christ’s sake!) For three, Calvin would’ve been aware of Kurt’s ambition and known there was no way K could help him to realise it. Still, that didn’t stop Kurt from dreaming – the idea was to follow The Sex Pistols’ model, wherein they would sign to a major label for a million bucks, split up, change their name and sign to K.

  Kurt was lonely. He felt excluded by Tobi’s self-assurance and youth (she was 21, he was 23 but she made him feel older). He wanted something more. And as much as he felt energised by her creativity, Kurt Cobain was essentially a solo creator. The couple would help each other write songs but they weren’t a songwriting team. “He was in the process of writing the whole next two albums of songs,” Tobi recalls. “He’d always be revising stuff – he wouldn’t have all the words, but he’d sing them anyway.” Kurt and Tobi would discuss one another’s songs, but not in a, “This means this, this means that, kind of way,” Vail explains. “He didn’t talk a lot about lyrics. He would really argue with you if you said something sucked. But he hated people who agreed with him for the sake of it. And he’d probably be secretly agreeing with you later.”

  Self-hating and dissatisfied with life in Olympia but not wanting to admit it, and frustrated that his relationship with Tobi wasn’t progressing as he wanted, Kurt decided to split up with her. Even though the couple had agreed they were in love with one another. It was October 1990.

  “He was a wreck,” says Dave Grohl.

  “Contrary to popular belief, he broke up with me,” Tobi states firmly. “The idea that I broke his heart, and that he was helpless and fatally wounded by that, is just stupid romantic tripe. I am sick of being the girl who is blamed for his suffering. That idea doesn’t come from anything that really happened. It comes from The Sorrows Of Young Werther. ”7

  It was Kurt who split up with Tobi. Not the other way around.

  “I read stuff from time to time,” says Tobi. “Nothing that I’ve read is like anything I recognised that happened. I wasn’t there for all of it but I don’t recognise anything from when I was there.”

  What’s missing?

  “The way people write the story is like it was tragic from the beginning,” Tobi replies. “They try and make it like a Greek myth when it was a lot more random. People say that Kurt was always suicidal – but isn’t that true of a lot of people you know? It’s another matter whether you do it. It can happen that if you go through a really bad time in your life you actually do it; but I know a lot of people who are crazier than Kurt was and who have lived longer. I really don’t hold with the whole idea of the inevitability of it; that people are born to end up committing suicide, or even born to write certain songs.”

  Hurt, and plagued by insecurity, Kurt was in the perfect frame of mind to write more songs. His new numbers were self-indulgent and full of loathing – both for himself and for others, where anyone could make sense of them: angry, petulant and heartbroken. Although it was Kurt who’d broken up with Tobi, he was reacting as if it had been the other way round. The fact the split wasn’t clean increased the misery on both sides.

  ‘Aneurysm’ was one of the first Nirvana songs to address the relationship, having been written before the break-up; “Love you so much/ It makes me sick,” Kurt pleaded, referring back to the first night he spent with Tobi, unashamed to sound neurotic. “One baby to another/ Says I’m lucky to have met you,” he wrote in ‘Drain You’, touching on the way that love can make its participants feel like they’re children again, such is the feeling of wonder and awe engendered. There was ‘Lithium’, ‘Lounge Act’ – songs touched by Tobi’s presence, with their references to secret understandings and pacts. And of course there was ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ with its famous “Over-bored and self-assured” reference
to both Tobi and Kurt’s personalities. “Boredom: the desire for desires,” as Russian philosopher Leo Tolstoy once wrote. What was there to do in life, now that the adults had grabbed all the fun adolescent stuff for themselves? No point growing up, that’s a crock.

  “The songs were confusing,” comments Tobi. “Who really knows what they are about? They sound great and some of the imagery is strong, but as far as them being about any one person or thing or situation – it’s not clear, is it? I think people respond to the emotional quality of his voice and the phrasing of his words rather than to the actual meaning of the songs. They seem to be written in code. Do they make sense? On some level they do. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was supposed to be called ‘Anthem’, but Bikini Kill had a song called ‘Anthem’ and we got in a big argument and I won so he had to change it.8 Our song never came out, but it was quite good.”

  The original draft of ‘Teen Spirit’ included a line later picked up on by his future wife Courtney Love, used to highlight her status as Rock Royalty with her husband – “Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?”

  Clearly, it was intended for Tobi.

  Now we come to one of the nastiest of Nirvana myths. Kurt Cobain started taking heroin directly as a result of his break-up with Tobi.

  Never mind that in the official biography, Cobain claimed to have dabbled with hard drugs while living back in Aberdeen (this last fact is unsupported, and was probably invented by Kurt to shift some of the focus away from his future wife’s involvement in his usage). Never mind that it was his decision to try the drug that may well have contributed to the breakdown of relations between himself and Tobi. Not the other way around.

  The book says she broke his heart.

  “So fucking what?” Slim Moon replies. “That may or may not be true. People’s hearts get broken every fucking day. He was a junkie before his heart got broken, and if people try to intimate that he was a junkie because she broke his heart, that is bullshit. If you find out your boyfriend is doing heroin and he’s not going to change and you break up with him, are you the bitch? I don’t care how broken-hearted he is, are you the bitch, really? No, you’re just someone who drew some healthy boundaries.”