by Everett True
“It’s obvious that when Bleach came out I was very set in one frame of mind, except for that one song ‘About A Girl’,” he continued. “I had a few more like that that I could’ve put on the album, and I wish I had because then it would’ve sounded more like Nevermind and it wouldn’t have been such a drastic leap.”
The album was remixed by Andy Wallace at Sound City at Gary Gersh’s behest: Nirvana’s A& R man had deliberately kept a low profile during recording, realising it was best to let Nirvana think Geffen’s influence on the album was minimal – indeed, he was so low-key, Dave Grohl called up John Silva concerned that Gersh didn’t care about his new signings.
Gersh, however, started to take charge once Vig played him the rough mixes: he wasn’t happy at the way they sounded, Butch seemed a little burnt out from the recording – the band was several days behind schedule – and he decided Andy Wallace needed to come in and finish off the job, sweeten the mix. His presence doubled the budget for the album. Wallace had previously worked with Madonna and on Slayer’s radio-friendly metal album Seasons In The Abyss. The band weren’t entirely happy with his inclusion – Kurt wasn’t the only person who later compared the resulting sound as being like “closer to a Mötley Crüe record than punk rock”, while Grohl complained that the drums sounded “too digital” – but, as Krist admitted, they went along with his presence because they just wanted the damn thing to come out.
“It wasn’t a dispute,” comments Goldberg. “There were conversations. When Nevermind was done, Gersh called and said, ‘I don’t think it’s a good mix, the drums don’t sound so good’ – so we held a band meeting and Kurt said, ‘Let’s try something different.’ Gersh suggested Andy. As soon as Kurt heard those mixes he was fine with it.”
It was the old digital versus analogue, vinyl (everything compressed, warm) versus CD (everything separated, cold) argument all over again. Butch was more in tune with the US rock underground and Nirvana’s live sound, but Wallace was able to create the necessary separation between the drums and guitar to ensure radio airplay.
“ Nevermind isn’t grunge,” complains Chad Channing. “It’s a freaking rock album. That’s what happens when you get to the major labels. They want everything crisp and clean, so perfect. And that really sucks, because it sucks the soul right out of music.”
“It always felt like Kurt was making it up as he was going along,” suggests Charles Peterson. “And I think they lost it with their big studio recordings. I’m not a fan of the ‘dirt rock’ genre, but Nirvana twisted it all around and made something special and unique with it. And they lost some of that when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ got so crammed into our brains.”
Tapes of the sessions filtered through to insiders, who – Nirvana’s early Seattle peers aside – were stunned by what they were hearing: “The first time Nirvana registered with me wasn’t until Susie Tennant told me that Geffen had signed them,” sighs Seattle musician Kim Warnick. “She brought home a copy of Bleach and I realised I should’ve heard that album a long time before. It was obvious just from the tambourine on ‘About A Girl’ that someone in that band was listening to The Beatles.
“Shortly thereafter she got the advance cassette of Nevermind ,” the former Fastbacks bassist continues. “I took it to work with me in the car, and I was 45 minutes late because I played ‘Teen Spirit’ over and over. It was so good. I couldn’t believe it. Susie was so mad at me for taking that cassette; she needed it. She was like, ‘You know, there are other good songs on there.’ It’s like, ‘I don’t care! I’m sure there are, that’s the best one in the world.’ Every band touring at that time had a copy of that cassette – it must have been the most copied cassette ever. If advance cassettes could go gold or platinum, that would have done. Everybody I knew had it.”
There weren’t many outtakes: “They had about 15 songs they were working on,” Vig told Gillian G. Gaar for Goldmine. “There were a couple that Kurt never finished the lyrics on. One was called ‘Song In D’; it was really catchy. It had an R.E.M. feel to it. And one was more of a punk thing. He had one other he was playing on acoustic; it was kind of bluesy. And Kurt may have given part of the chord progression from one of the songs to Courtney for a Hole song – for ‘Old Age’, I think.”
The cover to Nevermind came about after Kurt saw a documentary on underwater childbirth and sketched out the idea of a baby chasing a dollar bill on a fishhook. Geffen hired underwater photographer Kirk Weddle to shoot various babies swimming around – although the inclusion of five-month-old Spencer Elden’s penis on the cover later caused controversy, it wasn’t deliberate. “Some of the babies were girls,” recalled Geffen’s art director Robert Fisher. “We didn’t particularly care if it was a boy or a girl. The penis happened to be in the shot.”
The back cover featured Kurt’s toy monkey Chim Chim, placed in front of the collage of diseased vaginas and meat by-products from Kurt’s fridge back in Olympia. “I was in a bohemian photography stage,” Kurt told US journalist Kurt St Thomas. “Everyone thinks it’s a real monkey but it’s just a rubber monkey I’ve had for years. The collage I made years ago. I got these pictures of beef from a supermarket poster and cut them out and made a mountain of beef and then put Dante’s people being thrown into hell and climbing all over it. If you look real close, there’s a picture of Kiss in the back, standing on a slab of beef.”
Fisher thought the band should try and duplicate the cover shot in a swimming pool in Van Nuys, photographed by Weddle once more – but “Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong,” the director recalled. “The pump of the pool was broken and it was really windy, so the water was really murky and the pool was cold. Kurt was really, uh, sick. He’d sit at the top of the water and kick to try and go underwater and he couldn’t do it.”
So for press photographs, Kurt hired his Sub Pop contact, Michael Lavine. The New York photographer showed up at the studio on May 23. “It was very hot, the studio was very dark,” Michael recalls. “ Krist and Butch were there, and they were like, ‘Listen to this!’ – and it was ‘Teen Spirit’. I was like, ‘Holy shit that’s a great song!’ Kurt woke up from where he was sleeping on the couch and gave me a big hug, opened his mouth wide and showed me his gums. His teeth were rotting away. We walked around, ate Tacos and shot a bunch of portraits. Kurt was like, ‘Hurry up before I pass out.’ I was like, ‘You’re fucked up – have some more whiskey!’ He drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam.”
Addenda 1: Peter Bagge
It was in the pages of Hate in the early Nineties that Seattle-based comic book artist Peter Bagge helped to define the generation he was lampooning – grunge. In among the anarchic, dope-dulled, cigarette-fuelled concerts of fictional band Stinky And The Love Gods, slacker Buddy Bradley and his constant arguments with neurotic girlfriends Lisa and Valerie, and paranoid roommate George, Bagge managed to capture the spirit of Seattle in a way few others did – Charles Peterson, Mudhoney, Backlash maybe. Indeed, Hate is a far more accurate depiction of what it felt like to be in your early twenties in the Pacific Northwest in 1991 than any amount of scratched vinyl. You should salute Peter Bagge for this fact alone.
Like cartoonists Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton in the Sixties – with the hippies and San Francisco – Peter was there when he was most needed, to document the cultural fallout. Grunge wouldn’t have been grunge without Bagge there to give it shape.
“It was pure serendipity,” the artist says. “The comics were just about people in rock’n’roll bands. I happened to live in Seattle; it was all association. When I started doing Hate – that was in 1990 – I was already 32 years old. Fantagraphics Comics moved here and all of a sudden every other employee had a band going and were looking for a manager so they could make it big. Everything changed so fast. Nirvana was just a band at the time I was drawing it, but by the time those particular issues came out, they were a huge phenomenon. The characters in the comic were all named Kurt. It had nothing to do with Kurt Cobain. It was m
y very small, private joke about the fact that it seemed like every band that I met had a guy in it named Kurt [Bloch – Fastbacks, Danielson – Tad, Cobain]. The only Kurt’s I knew back in New York all spelled their name with a C, short for ‘Curtis’. Maybe it’s a Scandinavian thing?”
You must have frequented some of the same parties and venues to portray them in such scathing detail: did you feel sometimes your depictions were too exaggerated?
“As long as they rang true I felt safe in what I wrote,” Bagge replies. “Occasionally I would make up something outlandish strictly for entertainment’s sake, but someone would always write to me and say, ‘I did that once.’ Thus proving once again that truth is stranger than fiction.”
That reminds me of one of my favourite grunge anecdotes, from ex-Sub Pop employee Michael John:
“On my first week at the Off Ramp club, I show up at work early and my boss Jan takes me upstairs to an apartment of an ex-employee, a junkie who stole some money and skipped out. Jan tells me, ‘Keep what you want and throw the rest away, you might want to wear gloves, I think he shoots up.’ The room was bright yellow, a pigsty littered with garbage, decorated with porn under a fluorescent light. I went into the kitchen and hanging on the wall is a picture of Christ on the cross, sticking into his neck was an actual needle with blood still in the chamber and dripping off the wall. I just stood there. It was raining outside and below me in the show room a shitty band was doing a shitty version of the Mudhoney anthem ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’. I was locked in a cliché.”
And here’s another one: “The ‘loser’ is the existential hero of the Nineties . . .”
“True, yet so contradictory!” Bagge agrees. “Like saying, ‘The bad guy was the good guy.’ ”
“. . . You have nothing to lose because you’re already under the minimum wage. You pay too much in taxes, you can never get your head above the ground and you live in a shitty apartment. You work overtime all week and that’s still not enough. You own a credit card, but you’re always in debt.”
Kurt Danielson said that.
“The rest of Kurt D’s quote is typical of this wilful defeatist attitude that a lot of Gen X slackers adhered to back then,” Peter points out. “They didn’t really believe it, though, or they wouldn’t have bothered trying to make anything of themselves otherwise. They just liked to whine. But grunge didn’t just happen in the Northwest. There was music that sounded like grunge coming out of everywhere. What was that record label out of Chicago? Touch And Go? Wasn’t a lot of that music the same genre?”
Absolutely.
“Sub Pop weren’t shy about running with it,” Bagge suggests. “That’s another reason why Seattle got associated with grunge. Compared to all those other labels, Bruce and Jon were the most shameless hucksters. When they were still working as a team . . . I was about to say they weren’t good businessmen, but they suckered millions of bucks out of Warners. They convinced everybody that they had the mightiest touch, but they lucked out with Nirvana. Pavitt always had a good sense of what the next big thing will be. He’s a very open-minded fellow.”
So you felt it was a little ridiculous, all this music?
“Sure, of course,” Peter replies. “Some of it I liked. Everything about it, like the way everybody dressed and the music too, it reminded me of the early Seventies. Besides obvious people like Iggy Pop, it reminded me of early Alice Cooper, Steppenwolf11 – you know, before grunge it was called heavy metal. We used to just call it hard rock. The flannel shirts and the thermal underwear – when I was in high school [on the East Coast] we wore that all the time. It was because everyone was hanging out in the woods and it was just clothes to keep you warm when you get stoned. So it really surprised me, especially when they started having fashion spreads in magazines of people dressed the way we dressed in high school.
“Seattle was – and still is – a real provincial town,” he finishes. “Back then, people were very suspicious of outsiders, and resentful and envious of New York and LA. Coming from New York, what used to always make me laugh was how getting a mention, let alone a good mention, in The Rocket was like life or death. I was like, ‘The Rocket? Who cares?’ I almost feel bad for a lot of the local bands, that they didn’t enjoy it. They didn’t seem to realise or appreciate how rare it is that your town becomes this focal point, this phenomenon. It seemed to mainly threaten them and piss them off. There was all this talk about, ‘Oh, there are too many journalists.’ I kept thinking, ‘How long is that going to last? Seattle is not going to be the centre of everybody’s attention forever.’ ”
Addenda 2: Steve Turner
Seattle had a pretty parochial attitude, didn’t it?
“It was not so much distrustful as that usually no one comes here,” the Mudhoney guitarist points out. “It was a stopping off point. It never felt like a big city to me. It still doesn’t. Now it just seems like a city that got too big and collapsed on itself.”
There was certainly a point, around about 1991, when local musicians started to become resentful . . .
“. . . of people moving here,” agrees Turner. “Yeah, because people came with a different attitude. The people here, we weren’t expecting to get anywhere. I was already over a lot of the music that my friends’ bands were playing; I never even liked Soundgarden or Mother Love Bone. But seeing people move here and start dressing and sounding like Alice In Chains just made me hate that kind of music even more.
“In Mudhoney,” Turner continues, “the reaction against that was Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge [1991], totally stripping things down, smaller amps, garage keyboards and playing a bunch of punk rock cover songs to remind us of what we actually liked about rock’n’roll in the first place. It certainly isn’t bombastic, pompous, fucking ‘Jesus Christ Pose’ [Sound-garden single]. For me, the whole thing was over the minute it exploded – I was already over it, even with Mudhoney. I said, ‘That’s it. I’m taking a year off and going back to school.’ In 1990, I was like, ‘Yawn. Whatever. Done.’
“Then it exploded a second time with the whole Nirvana Nevermind thing and it really got shitty here,” Steve laughs. “The first explosion, that was fun for a little while, and then I got bored with it. I never had even a secret dream to be a rock star, so other people’s dreams like that soured it for me. Going to the Off Ramp or something, to me that was the end of the world. I hate all that stuff. People with [ Soundgarden singer Chris] Cornell hair . . .”
NOTES
1 Future Nirvana tour-mates Teenage Fanclub also signed to DGC around this time.
2 The actual deal wasn’t cemented until April 30, 1991.
3 Jawbox were post-grunge (one of the many bands of their generation who signed to a major, and shouldn’t have done), and Velocity Girl a poppy Anglophile female-fronted Sub Pop band.
4 Hype! (1996) is extremely viewable – featuring incandescent live performances from bands like Mudhoney and The Gits, plus acerbic commentary from local luminaries such as Steve Fisk, Jack Endino and Mark Arm. And, on the DVD section, a bonus ‘grunge’ cartoon from Peter Bagge.
5 Singles (1992) features many locations and faces familiar to Sub Pop fans (notably Pearl Jam) but it’s basically standard Hollywood romantic comedy fare.
6 Susie Tennant was DGC’s Seattle promotion rep, and was the label’s direct point of contact with Nirvana. Always up for a good time, the Capitol Hill house she shared with Fastbacks singer Kim Warnick acquired a reputation as one of the party houses, alongside places rented by folk like Charles Peterson and Sub Pop PR Nils Bernstein.
7 Don Dixon co-produced R.E.M.’s debut album, 1983’s Murmur, with Mitch Easter.
8 Kurt stole the master tapes to Knievel’s album and sent them back to Olympia, phoning up Dale Crover the next day to brag.
9 Lifted from The Youngbloods’ peace-loving late Sixties hit, ‘Get Together’.
10 Only on the CD version – and not on initial quantities either, due to a pressing plant mix-up.
11 Steppenwolf w
ere San Francisco rockers best known for their monster hit ‘Born To Be Wild’, as featured in Dennis Hopper’s classic biker movie, 1969’s Easy Rider. Sometimes credited with inventing heavy metal.
CHAPTER 15
Love Is The Drug
IT was during the recording of Nevermind that Kurt Cobain first met Courtney Love.
Part One: Everett True
I remember the hotel.
Stepping down from the canopy into the cool, dark lobby, a haven from the oppressive heat. Laidback, hushed. The fairy lights twinkling among the tree borders like it was Christmas time already; the soothing, pastel colours: the ground level apartments; the concierge who didn’t sneer at us as we walked in.
This was the hotel where Prince was rumoured to have indulged ladies with baths full of rose petals. This was the hotel where we lounged for days by the swimming pool, sipping beer and multicoloured cocktails, basking in the LA haze, calling record companies and industry people up on our mobile phones, eager to extend our stay. Desperately, we lounged by the pool and waited for folk to call us back. Every now and then, we’d call up London, just to smirk. “How’s the weather over there? It’s raining? No, not really? What a shame.”
This then was the hotel where I first met Courtney Love and her band Hole. It was May 1991. I can still see them now, walking across the tiles at the far side of the pool to where we were idling in our English swimming trunks, the smog-filled sunlight catching in Courtney’s unkempt hair. In sharp contrast to the tanned legs and pastel clothes of our fellow guests, they looked shockingly overdressed and anaemic. Courtney’s tights were ripped, drummer Caroline Rue boasted a chin stud long before they became fashionable and bassist Jill Emery was a tiny dark-haired Gothic abrasion. The shy guitarist, Eric Erlandson, meanwhile, was almost the most startling of all – with his long scraggly hair and pale skin, lanky like Thurston Moore, it looked like he hadn’t seen daylight for several years. The hotel management couldn’t have dreamt up a bigger collection of home-town freaks in their darkest nightmares. Courtney seemed very taken with our Englishness, laughing at our accents every opportunity she got. Or maybe it was the trunks. Eric refused to shake my hand because, he explained, then we would be friends. And it’s not right, being friends with a journalist.