by Everett True
Or so he perceived . . .
It was beginning to feel like the band was constantly on the road – existing in that weird bubble of late rising, boredom, intense exhilaration and alcohol abuse that surrounds most tours. The vans and concerts may get bigger, the destinations may spread as far as Australia and Japan, but the routine remains the same.
And all the time, Nirvana were creating fresh converts, overwhelmed by the energy and unpredictability and sheer melodic force of the live shows.
“I thought it was great when they got huge,” J. Mascis told Plan B writer Hayley Avron. “For one moment, it seemed like the universe made sense. It seemed like something that was meant to happen, happened. Then he killed himself and it was all fucked up again.”
“I had not seen them play before I managed them,” recalls Danny Goldberg. “I was blown away at how good they were at the [Hollywood] Palladium [ June 15]. The intimacy they created with the audience blew my mind. Just the way Kurt related to the audience, the body language, the way he talked to people – Dinosaur were a great band but there was no comparison to the emotional connection Kurt had. It was a life-changing moment. Before that, I thought they were a good signing for our company. That was when I realised what a genius he was.”
Also in June, Sub Pop – never slow in seizing a marketing opportunity – released The Grunge Years, a killer compilation that featured Nirvana’s ‘Dive’, Afghan Whigs, ‘Retarded’, Mudhoney, Babes In Toyland and a rare Dickless outing, among other highlights. The cover showed two corporate types seated in the back of a limo, clearly discussing the latest ‘grunge’ deal (k-ching!!!) – “Limited edition of 500,000” boasted the strap-line. I took umbrage against its packaging at the time, accusing Jon and Bruce of gross and unseemly arrogance: behaviour like that is only funny when you’re on the outside, not when you’re on the winning side . . . but fuck it. It’s as close to the definitive document of grunge as it gets, superior even to Sub Pop 200.
Kurt returned to Olympia from the tour, flush (sort of ) with merchandise money, and bought himself a new second-hand car – $500 for a beige 1963 Plymouth Valiant, with 140,000 miles on the clock. His friends disparagingly remarked that it looked like the kind of car an old woman would drive.
Kurt was still missing Tobi, even though the pair continued to see each other. “We hung out casually for a year or so after we split,” the former Bikini Kill drummer says.
“Dating is such a weird thing when you are that age – maybe at any age,” she continues. “So much confusion . . . confusion is sex9, etc. Did we go out? Did we break up? Who knows really . . . especially at this point?”
“The only time I ever took payola was when I ran out of beer at the Central Tavern, and Kurt came up to me and asked if I’d put Nirvana on the cover of Backlash, and I said yes, if he gave me a dollar,” reveals Dawn Anderson. “He did, and I interviewed Nirvana again, right before Nevermind was released.
“We met Krist in Tacoma,” the writer continues. “He was ranting against the Gulf War and singing ‘I’m Against It’ by the Ramones. Then we went over to Kurt’s house in Olympia, and Krist went into his bedroom and said, ‘They’re here, it’s time to get up.’ Kurt rolled out of bed with his clothes still on. It was about two in the afternoon. He seemed OK, though. Krist was Krist. Grohl seemed a little dazed, like he still couldn’t believe he was in fucking Nirvana. I fed them ‘fish beer’, Schmidt.”
In July, Dave Grohl moved to west Seattle – where he rented a house with Barrett Jones who’d moved up to the Northwest shortly before: “My girlfriend and I were living in her van outside of Krist and Shelli’s apartment,” the engineer recalls. “Their apartment was small: one bedroom and a living room, that was it. They were so kind to let us camp in front of their house, and use their bathroom in the morning. For the next month, I was driving up to Seattle every day and trying to find a place.”
Kurt was left alone with his cat Quisp, and the remainder of his menagerie: the turtles and a rabbit called Stew. He dyed the white kitten’s hair red, white and blue, according to one account: although this story may have become confused in the telling – Carrie Montgomery (who is a hairdresser) recalls an occasion, in December 1991, when she dyed Kurt’s hair red, white and blue.
“It was so strange that he wanted his hair dyed that colour,” she says, “because that was when [glam metal brother combo] Nelson was on DGC and they wore flag-coloured leather coats and stuff. Maybe that’s why he wanted it, because of the irony. It was literally red, white and blue, striped all around his head. I rinsed it off and was like, ‘ Fuck. This is horrible. He couldn’t have known it was going to turn out like this.’ So he runs into the bathroom to look at it and he was like, ‘I love it! It’s perfect!’ ”
Another friend takes offence at a recent portrayal of events.
“All right,” begins Ian Dickson, “let’s start with this, page 185 [in Heavier Than Heaven]. [Charles Cross, Cobain biographer] says that I said, ‘Kurt said to me, “Look! You can see their little arms and pieces floating in the tank.” ’ Talking about the tadpoles that we had brought back from the quarry and he had in his aquarium in the apartment. And he says, ‘A young man who used to save birds with broken wings was now delighting in watching tadpoles being devoured by turtles.’ Kurt didn’t throw the tadpoles in his tank thinking they were going to be killed by the turtles. He wanted them to grow up to be frogs. It was a mistake of reasoning on his part because he could have probably figured out that they would get devoured by the turtles and yeah, he did point out the pieces of them to me, but I wouldn’t say he was delighting in it, I would say he was horrified by it. And then he dumped that stuff out in the backyard and yes he was irresponsible, but I wouldn’t say . . . I mean this makes him out to be some kind of a sadist. Which is just totally wrong.
“He’s using that as evidence of a change in Kurt’s psychology,” Dickson continues. “About how he changed from wanting to save birds to ‘delighting’ in killing [the tadpoles]. Maybe he had, but you can’t take what I said as an example of that. Kurt was irresponsible, certainly, but he didn’t put them in there to be killed. Not that I recall anyway. It’s not necessarily Charles’ fault. That’s the difficulty of representing the past.”
Shortly after Dave moved out, Kurt became homeless: on July 29 he returned to his Pear Street apartment after a promotional trip in LA to find all his belongings sitting on the pavement. He’d been evicted for nonpayment of rent.
On August 15, Nirvana played the tiny Roxy Club on LA’s Sunset Strip.
It was an industry showcase, designed to parade the band in front of their new record company’s employees – who were suitably impressed, and exhilarated, and blown away. (Fancy that! Real! Live! Rock! Music!)
“We were all awed by the velocity of Nevermind ’s success,” recalls Goldberg. “We thought we had a spectacularly good record, and that it was going to be big within our world of alternative rock – big in terms of the Pixies or Jane’s Addiction, big like the way Sonic Youth had sold 125,000. There was no history at all of anyone from the alternative world going on to the pop world. There was an incredibly exciting and shocking explosion of interest within weeks of ‘Teen Spirit’ being on the radio. Someone told me it was played on the PA before a big show and the whole audience cheered. The interest from MTV was immediate.
“I remember walking across the street after the Roxy show with several Geffen executives,” the manager continues. “We knew the first 150,000 sales were there, which meant they’d saturate the Sonic Youth audience. We thought the maximum audience was half a million, but there was fatigue among the generation who didn’t want the hair bands. They wanted a new rock’n’roll. It didn’t take long to realise what was happening.”
In the moshpit, Geffen’s art director Robert Fisher handed out flyers, asking for extras for the ‘Teen Spirit’ video shoot due to take place in two days. College radio station KXLU also broadcast an announcement: the response was so great that hundred
s of fans were turned away from GMT Studio, a sound stage at Culver City, CA made over as a high school gym, with wall-bars, basketball hoops, cheerleaders waving pompoms and all.
Kurt came up with the concept of the ‘Teen Spirit’ video, broadly based on Ramones’ classic trashy 1979 film Rock’N’Roll High School, and also 1981’s teenage delinquent punk outing Over The Edge. The idea was for the cheerleaders to have anarchy symbols on their chests, kids emptying their wallets on to a bonfire of the vanities, the cheerleaders to be awkward-looking geeks – a “pep rally from hell,” in Dave Grohl’s words. The video director Sam Bayer agreed with the concept, but not with anything else: the cheerleaders needed to be conventional ‘babes’, the mayhem had to be contained, and there was certainly no moshing to take place.
Kurt and Bayer got into a yelling match – partly fuelled by whiskey on Kurt’s part – the singer afterwards telling everyone how the director was a “little Napoleon”. The idea was for the crowd to look bored, complacent: when that didn’t happen, Bayer grabbed a megaphone and yelled at everyone to shut up. “It was just like we were in school,” Kurt sniggered, “and he was the mean teacher.”
Still, the video did the trick. Within weeks of its release, ‘Teen Spirit’ had been placed into heavy rotation by MTV – at that point desperate for an identity, having failed to capitalise on its status as America’s first dedicated music cable channel. In 1991, it was still a novelty to see a black face on MTV. It’s undeniable that MTV ‘broke’ Nirvana in a way that the myriad live shows and rave reviews could never hope to have done, reaching direct into the suburban heartland of America. But it was a two-way exchange: before Nirvana and ‘grunge’ (which MTV quickly pulled apart and distorted out of shape until it came to represent the hair metal bands it was professing to oppose), MTV was floundering. MTV may have made Nirvana, but Nirvana equally made MTV, not least by giving the station a much-needed jolt of credibility.
The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was perfect for MTV: it’s irritating and asinine – a betrayal of the music and disgust at corporate America that Nirvana lived and breathed. Not so much for the undeniable energy emanating from the band and sucker punks in the audience, but for those fucking cheerleaders posing every chance they get in front of the camera.
Or is it just me?
On August 19, Nirvana flew out of SeaTac airport for a nine-date European festival tour, as vividly documented in Dave Markey’s film 1991: The Year Punk Broke10 (starring Sonic Youth, and also featuring Nirvana, Mudhoney, Babes In Toyland, Dinosaur Jr, Gumball11 and Ramones).
This was a high point in the Nirvana story: the calm before the storm. The release of Nevermind was still a month away, but the songs were there, and the band was playing at the peak of its power and enjoyment: indulging in larks and escapades and mischief at every opportunity, relishing the rare sort of camaraderie that playing a whole series of European festivals with the same bands often throws up. “The most exciting time for a band is right before they become really popular,” Kurt told Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke. “For us, it was right before Nevermind came out. It was awesome. There was so much excitement in the air you could taste it.”
There was no Courtney on the scene, creating rifts within, but she was around; indeed Hole played their first UK tour in August, supporting Mudhoney and unnerving audiences with their vitriol, but she was dating Billy Corgan and getting wasted with UK rock journalists. There was no dragging weight of expectation, no lurid press stories to deny and become obsessed by. Nirvana were free to let rip, unfettered – and Krist, Dave and Kurt responded accordingly. Krist was temporarily separated from Shelli: in an attempt to calm him down, John Silva called Tacoma and asked her to have a word with her errant husband. Nothing doing. Shelli hopped on the next plane out, and joined the madness.
Glenfiddich and vodka were the drinks of choice: Krist handling the whiskey by himself, while Kurt shared the vodka with Ian Dickson, along for the craic. Dave was drinking red wine.
“It was crazy,” recalls Dickson. “It was really fun. Krist had moderated his drinking enough where he wasn’t blacking out every night. [This runs contrary to other reports, but doubtless Ian is speaking from experience.] Dave was having a great time, and Kurt and I were having a great time and we pretty much fucked everything up that was in our path . . . and,” he adds, face lighting up, “we managed to not get arrested or kill ourselves. We lit curtains on fire. We had dressing rooms full of food and alcohol that we’d put all over somebody else’s dressing room wall . . . we were 22 and completely out of control.”
Dickson’s inclusion on the tour came as a surprise to Nirvana’s management, who suspected Kurt might be gay, especially after he volunteered to share a room with the Earth musician, to keep costs down. “Kim and Thurston specifically told me Ian Dickson was Kurt’s boyfriend,” recalls Dave Markey.
“Here’s the deal,” says Ian. “We went to Larry Flynt12 publications, because we were being interviewed by Rip magazine . . . ha!”
Ian catches himself.
“‘We’ were being interviewed . . . I was only there because I was star-struck. I was a groupie, basically. They took us out to a Chinese restaurant, very LA, but there was a moment where we were in the editor’s office and he goes, ‘Well, you know, normally I’d offer you guys a big stack of pornography, but I know you’re not into that sort of thing.’ Like, what was the difference between a hair metal band and a grunge band? You’d offer the hair metal band the porn because they were into strippers and teasing their hair, but the grunge guys . . . ? Who knows what they’re into! All the assumptions about a rock band were out the window with Nirvana. Which is a good thing.”
So what did they offer? Anything?
“Nothing,” he exclaims. “I was bummed. I really wanted to get some porn.”
After playing two shows in Ireland13 – Cork and Dublin’s The Point – Nirvana headed over to England to play the Reading Festival. Nowadays, when every last corporate sponsor is throwing a summer festival and they merge into one squalid whole, late night bonfire after bonfire of smouldering plastic containers and endless queues for the toilets, this means little. Back in 1991, however, Reading was it.14 Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth were two of the headliners: Nirvana went on at around 3 p.m. on the Friday, after Silverfish15, and just before rightly forgotten Brit shoe-gazers Chapter-house, who never recovered from the ignominy of following such a terrifying live act.
Nirvana were sensational. I have no real memory of the show, despite instructing everyone staying on the floor of my hotel room to get their ass down to the site early to see them. I could sometimes be badly behaved at Reading Festival. That year, I thought I’d take it easy. On the London train down to Brighton the night before, I bumped into Bobby Gillespie from Scots dance/rock crossover pioneers Primal Scream. I had a bottle of whiskey in my bag. One thing led to another, and we ended up playing old soul records and drinking red wine back at my place till 5 a.m. Ah well, I thought, I can get some sleep now. Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. It was Courtney in London, wasted. She wanted to come over. Instead, we chatted on the phone for two-and-a-half hours, and then it was time to go.
Krist danced around the stage like a cumbersome angle-poise lamp on acid. The sound was typically obstructive, blustery winds whipping the noise of Nirvana’s first UK festival appearance everywhere. I went off in search of solace, and found it in a bottle of Mudhoney’s whiskey.
“There was a kind of cockiness to Nirvana that day,” recalled tour manager Alex MacLeod. The band only played for 40 minutes – including Kurt clambering all over Krist while they were both playing their instruments; an on-stage dancer16 covered in face-paint and dancing even worse than the MTV cheerleaders; a version of ‘Teen Spirit’ that the crowd roared as one, despite the fact not one of them should’ve known the words17; and Kurt’s walk through the photo-pit dressed in Sounds T-shirt and leather jacket, seemingly oblivious to the world, before he was pulled back on stage by Thurs
ton Moore – but they were stunning, ferocious, on fire. Eugene Kelly was invited on stage to duet on ‘Molly’s Lips’, an honour for Kurt that he would later refer to as “the greatest moment in my life”.
“Kurt was carrying around that Covonia cough mixture stuff that had codeine in it,” recalls photographer Steve Gullick. “I took pictures of him basking in his codeine heaven and flaunting the product. I’d always preferred Mudhoney to Nirvana – but Nirvana were undeniable that day. It’s one of the few daytime performances I’ve seen that was as exciting as a gig. They made that stage seem like a tiny club.”
“Before Reading, the press only grudgingly acknowledged Nirvana,” says Anton Brookes. “After Reading, everyone wanted to know them.”
“The sky is grey and looks like rain as we pull into the Reading station. Trudge through the mud and make my way to the backstage. I gather there were 60,000 plus people out there. It sure looked great from the stage. Nirvana pretty much stole the show, hands down. Kurt dove into the photo-pit, and spoke right into my camera and said, ‘This is known as the blues scale . . .’ as he wailed away discordantly on his guitar with a Feederz 18 sticker on it. And then he dove into the crowd . . .”
(Taken from Dave Markey’s online diary of 1991: The Year Punk Broke at www.wegotpowerfilms.com)
Not everyone was convinced by the wanton destruction: “By that point, it seemed like Nirvana had to smash their instruments,” comments Mark Arm. “It was really dumb. A roadie would remove all of the mics from the drum kit so they wouldn’t get hurt. What the fuck?”