Nirvana

by Everett True

  Kurt was unhappy, dissatisfied with his life. He was going through a traumatic break-up. Some people turn to religion, or get married on the rebound. Some lose themselves in their work, or get violently drunk for months on end. Kurt turned to his journals and drawings, self-righteous in his pain, searing and authentic in his anger, however misguided. “I purposely keep myself naïve and away from earthly information because it’s the only way to avoid a jaded attitude,” he wrote in his journal. “I can’t speak. I can only feel. Maybe one day I’ll turn myself into [inspirational deaf-blind author] Helen Keller by puncturing my ears with a knife, then cutting my voice box out.

  “Thanks for the tragedy, I need it for my art,” he wrote another time, bitterly aware of his main motivation.

  Dave first heard about Kurt’s heroin use when he was in LA in November, deputising on drums for L7 at a Rock For Choice benefit. He was on the phone to Krist when the bassist broke off in mid-sentence and said, “Wait. I have to tell you something. Kurt’s doing heroin.”

  Kurt had phoned Krist up earlier the same month to tell him he’d tried the drug. Krist was immediately concerned. Aside from the straight edge K kids, Olympia had a reputation during the Eighties of being somewhat of a dark place, a dangerous town – a place where people died because of drug abuse. Andrew Wood, singer with Mother Love Bone, had died in March 1990 from a heroin OD. Kurt told Krist he wouldn’t try it again, that the drug was lame. He lied. Soon, he and Dylan Carlson were renting cheap Olympia hotel rooms once a week so they could shoot up, undisturbed.

  There was an incident where Kurt went with Tracy Marander to see Bikini Kill play in Olympia, and he was nodding off in the car – behaviour Tracy had never before experienced in Kurt. After the show, on the way to a friend’s party, Kurt asked to stop at his house so he could use the bathroom. After about 15 minutes, she heard a crash and there was Kurt passed out, one sleeve rolled up, and a bottle of bleach on the floor (to clean his needle). She was shocked, and angry.

  “That whole winter was the most depressing time I’d had in years,” Kurt told Michael Azerrad. “It was so fucking small and dirty and cold and grey every fucking day. I almost went insane. I was so bored and poor. We were signed to Geffen for months and we didn’t have any money. We ended up having to pawn our amps and our TV, just to get money to eat corndogs. All we did was practice. That saved us.”

  Addenda: heroin

  How big an influence do you think heroin was on grunge?

  Danny Bland [ex-Seattle band, The Supersuckers]: “I don’t think heroin can influence a sound.”

  Why did Seattle have such a rep for it?

  Danny: “I don’t know. People theorised that it was because of the weather. It was rainy and miserable so you didn’t go out and play kickball, but stayed in the basement and played music with your friends, and that’s good. Also, when it’s that cloudy all the time you get down and that makes people more predisposed to heroin.”

  What’s the attraction of it? I’ve never done heroin.

  Danny: “I was a junkie for 10 years. Heroin makes you forget about everything else going on in the world. It makes you forget about the fact your band isn’t getting as much attention as another band, or that you have to go to work throwing fish around Pike Place Market. It’s pure comfort. It’s fucking great. And then later on, it turns on you. And yes, you steal your friend’s Sub Pop 45 collection and sell it down at Cellophane Square, and take old ladies’ purses, and steal from your places of employment. You sell your own stuff first, of course: you don’t jump right into criminal activity. And we lost a lot of great friends and a lot of great musicians to it. I got lucky: I lived. And I stopped, eventually. The appeal is weird, and the danger involved is strange too, because it’s not like we don’t know what’s going to happen, but when you start, you don’t think it’s going to affect you. We’re such pompous egotistical assholes. We think it won’t happen to us.”

  Yeah, it’s always someone else . . .

  Danny: “I remember when the guy from Mother Love Bone died, and the arrogance that consumed me at the time. I thought, ‘What kind of guy dies from a drug overdose?’ You don’t know what’s in that needle when you shoot it, but because I’d done it for a few years and not actually overdosed myself, I thought you were an idiot if you overdosed. What an arrogant shit-head I was.”

  People always paint a depressing picture of taking drugs, but they’re fun, aren’t they?

  Danny: “That’s the nature of drugs. Of course it’s fun when you start or else you wouldn’t do it. If you shot dope one time and all your shit was stolen and you were in jail for stealing your mom’s car, you’d never do it again, but it’s the nature of the beast: it’s really fun for awhile.”

  I wasn’t aware of drug use back then. Except, by 1993, I realised that at least one person in pretty much every American band I knew was doing smack.

  “I wasn’t,” replies Megan Jasper. “The weirdest thing about moving here was that I’d never been around so many people who did such intense drugs. That’s not what Boston was like.”

  Half the time, doing the interviews for this book feels like being at an AA meeting.

  “That’s so funny,” Megan replies. “I said a similar thing not so long ago. I had this huge awakening that almost everyone I knew either had been a smack addict or dabbled with it. It made me feel so weird.”

  NOTES

  1 Record company bosses always conveniently forget they’re dependent for their livelihoods on the very musicians they look down upon.

  2 A favourite stoner’s joke at the time was, “What if Evel Knievel had a son and he called him Ken, and he turned out to be wicked? Would he then be known as Evil Ken Evel Ken Evil?”

  3 There are two pieces of copyrightable property in a song. One is the composition. The other is the master recording. Often, they are handled together but they can come apart and be handled by separate companies. Some bands that are conscious of indie record sales and distribution and who wouldn’t work with a major, have no problem selling their songwriting rights because the link seems invisible. Publishing companies have their own A& R agents.

  4 The idea of recording a joint single, featuring Kurt and Tobi on one side, and Dale and Debbi on the other, was floated.

  5 Superchunk were a fiercely independent Chapel Hill, North Carolina band. Their self-released 1989 single ‘Slack Motherfucker’ (Merge) is one of its generation’s mightiest roars of disaffection.

  6 Sebadoh was Dinosaur Jr bassist Lou Barlow’s side project. The Boston, Massachusetts trio started ‘for real’ after J. Mascis split Dinosaur in ’89 and re-formed the band a couple of days later without telling Lou. His loss. Over several albums of varying consistency, Sebadoh have come to represent a certain strand of American underground music. This is ironic. I’m sure that was never the intention. Yet on records like 1994’s biting Bakesale , 1996’s patchy Harmacy and 1991’s sprawling Sebadoh III, Sebadoh became standard-bearers for a generation – the geeks, the punk kids who got left behind while their jock mates went off and slammed to Rollins, and their smart friends were out romancing. The beauty of Barlow’s solo recordings ( Sentridoh) isn’t that the songs are brief, or that the tape crackles and wobbles, or that his guitar is out of tune. The beauty is that he records as he sees fit, and moves on when his mood changes. The beauty lies in his wavering voice, his direct words that he never labours over or dwells on, the awesome tunes he stumbles over because he isn’t looking for permanence.

  7 The Sorrows Of Young Werther was Goethe’s vaguely autobiographical 1774 German novel of doomed love – presented as a series of letters between friends. Over 2,000 readers were supposed to have committed copycat suicides after reading it.

  8 Here’s a link to the lyrics to Bikini Kill’s ‘Anthem’ and an essay Tobi wrote in the autumn of 1991: www.bumpidee.com/yokoanthem.html

  CHAPTER 14

  The Will Of Instinct

  Trios are perfect. Live, and on record. There’s no
refuting the fact. When they get the balance right, there’s no stopping them. Think of The Jam, Young Marble Giants, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, Cream, The Slits . . . Nirvana. Trios strip music down to its basics and then, having worked out what it is that makes it work, build it up again with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of effect. Four’s unnecessary. Five is unwieldy. Three is just about perfection. It’s got to be. The three finest

  It’s got to be. The three finest albums to come out of what could be loosely termed ‘the US Collegiate Scene’ have all been made by trios. First there was Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade. Then, Dinosaur Jr’s first, Dinosaur. And now Nevermind , Nirvana’s startling follow-up to their 1989 debut Bleach. Forget all the prejudices you may or may not have about bands whose origins may or may not lie in Seattle’s Sub Pop scene of three years back. There will not be a better straight-ahead rock album than Nevermind released all year.

  A lot of this is down to the sheer melody of the songs – songs such as the outrageously plangent ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, which opens this album and blows the listener straight out of the water. Songs such as the two which follow it and make for as strong an opening sequence since that of The Jam’s Setting Sons: the menacingly poignant ‘In Bloom’ with its rapture-full hook line, “He’s the one/ Who likes all our pretty songs/ And he likes to sing along/ And he likes to shoot his gun/ But he don’t know what it means” and the unfathomably wistful ‘Come As You Are’. And how about the acoustic ‘Polly’, with Chris’ gentle lead bass, which finishes side one? But we’re merely talking melody and harmony and tunefulness and all those kind of things you’d more commonly associate with some band with their toes stuck deeply in the Sixties. Nirvana (produced here by Killdozer’s man Butch Vig) have more going for them than that.

  Nirvana have power, oozing out of every guitar line and ripped snare – just check side two’s opener, ‘Territorial Pissings’, which wouldn’t have been out of place on Metallica’s latest, or the hyper-ventilating ‘Lithium’. Listen to the turbo-charged ‘Stay Away’, perhaps the only weak link here, or ‘On A Plain’, a raw blister of pain.

  Nirvana have emotion, raw emotion, the sort where the singer bares his soul all the way down the line and with the use of but a few simple words and phrases communicates way deeper with the listener than this sort of music is meant to. Take ‘Drain You’ and ‘Lounge Act’, for example, with the words coming from Kurdt Kobain’s cracked, hurt voice almost indecipherable, but dreadfully moving nonetheless. And when he starts screaming, unable to bear whatever demons he sees crushing down on top of him, it’s like your worst nightmares about babies crying and buses crashing and skyscrapers falling come true all at once. Never underestimate the power of a good scream.

  When Nirvana released Bleach all those years ago, the more sussed among us figured they had the potential to make an album that would blow every other contender away. My God, have they proved us right.

  (Author’s review of Nevermind , Melody Maker, September 14, 1991)

  “THE first time I saw Nirvana after I left was Dave’s first show in town at the Off Ramp,” says Dan Peters. “It was so great. They kept playing and the bar closed down. So they kicked everybody out on the street, put away the alcohol while the staff cleared up, let everyone back in and Nirvana played for another 30 minutes. I was sitting there going, ‘Yeah, pretty good.’ ”

  The drummer laughs.

  “Dave was great,” he adds. “Phenomenal. It made perfect sense to me why they chose him over me. I wasn’t going, ‘I’m just as good as him.’ I was like, ‘He’s the fucking guy for the job.’ ”

  That night – November 25, 1990 – there was a pack of A& R people present, reportedly more than at any other show in Seattle’s history: MCA, Geffen, Charisma, Slash, Polydor, Columbia, Polygram, RCA . . . Nirvana played 18 songs, 12 of them as yet unrecorded, the crowd moshing so wildly that the light fixtures got smashed. “They played ‘Lithium’,” says Ben Shepherd. “And that’s when I knew. That was their first Top 40 hit right there.” Charisma came close to signing the band that night, with a $200,000 advance, Nirvana even got their lawyer Alan Mintz to call them two days later – but Gold Mountain had other ideas.

  Shortly afterwards, Nirvana signed with DGC/ Geffen records1 – in return, they received $287,000 (a sizeable amount for a new band at the time), plus full merchandise rights, and full mechanical royalties if and when the album went gold. Sub Pop were given a buyout fee: two per cent of Nirvana’s next two album sales (and the Sub Pop logo on the back sleeve of Nevermind ), plus $75,000 – money that, when it finally came through2, put an end to Sub Pop’s financial worries once and for all. That is, until the next crisis came along . . .

  “This whole business is full of shit,” Dave Grohl commented. “Of all the labels we looked at, Geffen seemed the coolest. At least they weren’t big old fat men with cigars in their mouths, looking at how much M.C. Hammer was making.”

  “I particularly found it was an easy decision,” remarks Danny Goldberg. “We got what at that time was as good a deal as possible: afterwards, the deals got better because Nirvana had raised the bar on the commercial potential for alternative rock.”

  As part of their agreement, Sub Pop released one last single in January – a limited edition (4,000 print run) split single featuring The Fluid’s ‘Candy’ and Nirvana playing The Vaselines’ deadpan sexual innuendo ‘Molly’s Lips’ live. The version is fairly throwaway. Kurt didn’t even want it released. On the vinyl, Sub Pop etched a laconic one-word farewell, “later”.

  On New Year’s Eve, Nirvana played Portland’s Satyricon, another sold-out whirlwind of bruised limbs and braised emotion: “Nirvana were clearly getting bigger all the time. That was the first time I saw a really attractive girl in the front row making eyes at Kurt,” comments Slim Moon. “It had reached the stage where Nirvana were getting . . . groupies!

  “However,” he adds, “Kurt didn’t notice. He went home alone.”

  The same month, Dave Grohl recorded several songs on Barrett Jones’ eight-track at the Laundry Rooms, Washington, DC – released in 1992 by Simple Machines under the pseudonym Late! as the Pocketwatch cassette: “I was doing a lot of local stuff,” says Barrett. “Velocity Girl, Jawbox3, TeenBeat, Simple Machines, some Dischord. Dave started playing in my band, Churn. Sometimes, he’d be like, ‘I have a song, let’s record it.’

  “He did everything first take,” the producer says. “I was surprised at how good it was. He did all the instruments. I’d play something here and there, but he had it all in his head. Jenny [ Toomey] heard the stuff and asked if she could put it out. This was pre-CD. She’d have a master cassette, and if someone wanted to buy it, she’d copy the tape [five at a time] and send it [tapes cost between $3.50 and $5 to buy]. It was very low budget. Cassette was not the right way to put it out, though. It didn’t do it justice.”

  At the start of 1991, Nirvana once again found themselves in a studio – Seattle’s Music Source – recording on New Year’s Day. The choice of public holiday wasn’t a coincidence: “My friend Brian worked at the studio,” explains Craig Montgomery, who engineered the session, “and he said that we could get in there for free on New Year’s Day. We set up, recorded and mixed the songs in one day. It didn’t sound good because their gear was in bad shape.”

  Nirvana ran through several songs including an early version of ‘All Apologies’, ‘Aneurysm’, ‘Even In His Youth’ and a song that later became ‘On A Plain’. “They weren’t interested in making the songs sound good,” the engineer explains. “They just wanted to play. The only songs with a finished vocal were ‘Even In His Youth’ and ‘Aneurysm’ [both of which sound excellent now – the first, pounding and hammering away, magnificent in its alienation; the latter, impassioned and bruised violet raw in its invitational vocal]. The rest of them weren’t finished yet, so for guide vocals we used Kurt’s typical process of making sounds that went along with the songs in his head. The sounds were raw and noisy, and not in a
good way. Recording takes time.”

  Nirvana played a handful of dates in early 1991 – Evergreen State College on January 16, four shows in Canada at the start of March. The most famous Nirvana show – possibly ever – took place at the OK Hotel in Seattle, on April 17. They headlined above Fitz Of Depression and Bikini Kill. According to most accounts, the gig was a benefit for Fitz Of Depression singer Mikey Dees, who was facing jail unless he paid off his fines for traffic violations.

  The venue was packed out, being filmed for a future documentary featuring Seattle music and the furore surrounding it, brilliantly titled Hype!4 Ironically, the show wasn’t a complete sell-out, because there was a party being held the same night for the launch of Singles.5 Kurt took to the stage with the words, “Hello, we’re major label corporate rock sell-outs.” The set included suitably excited versions of ‘Wild Thing’ (The Troggs), ‘D-7’ (The Wipers) and ‘Turnaround’ ( Devo) . . . and an unfinished, sometimes mumbled, version of a brand new song, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.

  “I was at soundcheck,” recalls Carrie Montgomery, “with Susie [ Tennant]6, of course. We were waiting for them to get done so we could go eat, and Kurt was like, ‘I wanna try this new song’ . . . They played it all the way through and we all looked at each other, like, ‘What was THAT?’”

  “When it started, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is a good song,’ ” says Jonathan Poneman. “Like, ‘Wow, this is a really catchy verse’ . . . and then it came to the chorus, and it was like time had stopped still for a second. Everyone was like, ‘This has got to be one of the greatest choruses I’ve ever heard in my life.’ The reaction was instantaneous. The crowd went absolutely crazy. The first part of the song was so good, and then it goes into the chorus and the chorus left the verse in the dust.”