by Everett True
“The official reason for smashing up their guitars was because their equipment was a bag of shite,” explains Anton. “They had literally boxes of guitar bodies lying around backstage, waiting to be smashed. Part of their energy was ugly beauty, destruction. Kurt’s a handsome man, but he defaced himself a lot.”
Mudhoney had arrived earlier that day: “Courtney was with us,” Dan Peters says.19 Later, a few of us – Dan, myself, Mark Arm and Kurt – were walking around backstage looking for mischief. Courtney was following a few yards behind. Dan takes up the story: “We’d spent the entire day getting fucked up. After awhile, I had gotten bored and was looking for shit to fuck up. Somehow I looked into this portable and I saw this big old thing of cooking oil. Before I did anything I sprayed it around in the portable. I thought that was pretty funny. Courtney was walking on this plank above me so I gave that bottle a huge squeeze and doused her with a bunch of cooking oil. It was a joke.”
Courtney ran away, mortified.
“Then somebody else came looking for me,” Dan continues – referring to the owner of a car that also got deluged with the oil. “And somebody I know ratted me out. Said it was Dan Peters from Mudhoney. I’m like, ‘ Shit!’ I’m standing there hiding. I’m like, ‘You son of a bitch.’ Save yourself first, Everett! Women and children first! Then you went into great detail, ‘He’s wearing ripped jeans, he has a red shirt on, got a chain wallet that’s dangling . . .’ ”
There’s a lovely story – reported extensively in several Nirvana books – about how Markey filmed Courtney at Reading drinking whiskey with Kat [ Bjelland] and Kim Gordon, saying, “Kurt Cobain makes my heart stop. But he’s a shit.” Trouble is, this footage doesn’t exist. It’s another myth. Courtney’s sole contribution to the documentary is a sequence wherein Thurston makes fun of her naked ambition.
Back in America, Shelli was hanging out with Debbi Shane in Tacoma, pooling their food stamps together in a Safeway’s car park to buy food: “The next time I saw Nirvana was at the Warfield in San Francisco [October 26],” Debbi says. “We were walking downtown to meet Krist and Shelli, and people were screaming Krist’s name in the street. He had no idea what was going on. We were like, ‘You’re famous. They play your video all the time.’ He was like, ‘Huh?’ They didn’t know.”
The day after Reading, Nirvana and Sonic Youth flew to Köln, Germany for the Monsters Of Spex festival: “Nirvana were meant to go on at four in the afternoon,” recalls their former agent Christof Ellinghaus. “They called up and said they’d be late. The local promoter freaked. The schedule for the other bands had to be turned upside down. Nirvana claimed they’d been held up in customs. It was a total scam. They just didn’t want to go on that early. They got there for about six, and were given a 20-minute slot. So they came out, ripped through five songs, blew everybody away and were told to leave. The next act on was [former Hüsker Dü frontman] Bob Mould, and he was booed for minutes. People had just been hit! They wanted to hear more Nirvana – and this was before anyone had heard Nevermind.
“Bleach wasn’t really a big record in Germany,” Ellinghaus adds. “I was booking all these Sub Pop bands, so when Nirvana signed to Geffen it was like, ‘Does that make sense?’ I never thought of it as something that would happen. But that show was such a sign of things to come.”
Then it was on to Hasselt, Belgium for Pukkelpop – which is where the incident with Black Francis’ nametag happened: Kurt also sprayed a fire extinguisher at the Pixies singer while he was performing.
“ Pukkelpop. Got there just in time to catch the last half of Nirvana’s set. They are getting progressively wilder as the tour goes on, and all this at 11 in the morning! The crowd just stood there dumbfounded. The sight of Kurt straddling Chris and spinning into oblivion was priceless.”
(www.wegotpowerfilms.com)
There were three shows in Germany, including one in Bremen, which is where the incident involving the lady from MCA took place. The tour ended in Rotterdam on September 1, at the Ein Abend in Wien indoor festival in de Doelen, a very clean, 3,000-capacity, performance centre with mostly seated venues.
“I had to convince my colleagues to include them in the festival,” reveals Dutch promoter Carlos van Hijfte. “Most of the others thought of Nirvana as just another Paperclip band.20 I had seen Nirvana at Maxwell’s in July 1989, where they really impressed me, partly by destroying their equipment. The day before the show, [Sonic Youth guitarist] Lee Ranaldo came to my house and played me a tape of Nevermind , telling me, ‘This will be massive.’ On the day of the show, an atmosphere of chaos was never far away. Somehow Nirvana had got hold of doctors’ outfits . . . When the band hit the stage they were already pretty wasted.”
The festival included all kinds of art performances, and one of the installations was a hospital room including nurses and doctors. Kurt and Ian Dickson had been knocking back vodka in large quantities: the pair later dressed up in face masks and smocks, writing ‘Black Francis Arkansas’ on the walls, and drenching all visitors to Nirvana’s dressing room with orange juice and wine. At one point, Ian was even pushing Kurt around on a hospital bed.
“The room was packed,” continues Carlos. “By the end, the band got in destruction mode: first, their own gear, and then the PA. Security, who had been warned about the band’s reputation, invaded the stage, stopped the band and kicked them off.” Krist clambered up the PA speakers, with his trousers round his ankles, swigging from a bottle. “I’m not sure if a couple of members were kicked out the building later that night. It’s very possible.”
Van Hijfte – unsurprisingly – saw things differently: “I have seen so many groups that decide to close a show by tearing everything down,” the promoter told Dutch magazine Oor in 1994. “When you assume your record company will pay for the damages, you are just another spoiled American rich kid. That I fought with Krist is bullshit. The security that night was dressed as nurses so when they came to help me get Krist out of the PA, the whole stage was full of hospital personnel. When four security guys grab you, you cannot move any more. Neither were they evicted from the venue. They simply went back to their hotel.”
Courtney was also present – backstage, she introduced Billy Corgan to Sonic Youth and Nirvana. “Everyone was vastly underwhelmed,” comments Markey. “After they left, Kurt scrawled on the wall in magic marker ‘Courtney + Gish’21 and smiled incessantly.” Courtney hitched a ride back on the ferry back to England in Nirvana’s van, where she flirted non-stop with Dave. She was definitely aware of Kurt’s increasing fame, though – Steve Gullick recalls standing behind Courtney and Lori Barbero at a Smashing Pumpkins gig, where the Hole singer was bragging about how she’d got in for free by claiming to be ‘Mrs Cobain’.
In England, Nirvana recorded another Peel Session – a stripped-back version of a new song ‘Dumb’, plus ‘Drain You’ and ‘Endless, Nameless’ – before flying home on September 4.
Kurt arrived back in Olympia to find that the place no longer felt like home: both literally – according to one report he slept that night in the back seat of his Valiant22 – and metaphorically. In his absence, Olympia had staged the first International Pop Underground convention: a get-together for friends and like-minded bands. There were no guest lists, and its brief wasn’t limited to music. “They tried to structure the IPU in a way that was counter to a lot of typical rock industry behaviour,” explains Rich Jensen. “For example, there were no special privileges for ‘important persons’.”
There was a barbecue, a cakewalk, disco parties . . . It was Do It Yourself incarnate. It was hardcore not punk (lifestyle, not fashion). It was from the first IPU that the burgeoning Riot Grrrl movement drew much of its inspiration.
“The idea wasn’t so much to bring bands together as bring people together,” Candice Pedersen explains. “It wasn’t about categorising bands or people. That’s why we had so many non-music activities, so that you could actually spend some time socialising.”
Nirvana had vol
unteered to play, but were rejected as unsuitable. This was a big deal to Kurt: he felt the rejection keenly and often referred to it afterwards in conversations with me (as a rare journalist who empathised with his love for Olympia). He felt betrayed, that his friends should be so exclusionary.
“I don’t think they’d have played it anyway because they had committed to the tour,” comments Ian Dickson. “Do you want to tour Europe with Sonic Youth or play a gig in Olympia? That’s what it comes down to.”
On August 20, the nascent kill rock stars label released the 18-track kill rock stars compilation to tie in with the convention – a stunning collection, it featured exuberant Riot Grrrls Bratmobile, the sweet acoustic stylings of Courtney Love (the band), Unwound’s mighty pounding groove, maverick Seattle producer Steve Fisk, Bikini Kill’s scathing ‘Feels Blind’, the righteous political anger of Canadian two-piece Mecca Normal, Kicking Giant’s solitary jangle, Slim Moon’s own ‘ fuck’ band Witchypoo, Melvins, Some Velvet Sidewalk’s towering ‘Loch Ness’23, Fitz Of Depression, Half Japanese’s sweet and special singer Jad Fair, Seattle’s all-girl 7 Year Bitch, the outrageously charismatic posturing of Nation Of Ulysses, and ultra-heavy Olympia metalheads Kreviss, among others. Indeed, this one record is a more accurate and challenging and entertaining document of the Pacific Northwest scene than anything from its time.
Just because Olympia bands and their peers didn’t wear leather jackets and thrash their hair around – although some of them did – didn’t mean they didn’t rock. Fuck yeah they rocked! The initial print run was 1,000, with a hand silk-screened cover, and . . . oh yeah . . . one of the tracks was by Nirvana, ‘Beeswax’ from the original Dale demos.
Slim Moon takes up the story.
“Once me and Dylan had our parting of the ways [in Earth],” the label boss says, “I was still perfectly friendly with Nirvana, but it wasn’t like, ‘Hey, we should hang out.’ We were still close enough that in ’91 when I put out that compilation, Nirvana gave me a song for it.”
Can you tell us about that?
“Calvin had never released an Olympia band on record other than Beat Happening,” Slim starts. “He’d done cassette compilations with local bands, but despite all the talk of regionalism that came out of Bruce and Calvin’s zine, they weren’t a local label. There was this local band I thought should put out a record, but I knew neither Sub Pop nor K would do it. They had a name that was like a star with just letters and numbers.
“This was about one month before the IPU convention. I knew that a bunch of people was coming from out of town to visit our town and they were going to be at all of these shows. I thought, ‘Well, what if I put them on a compilation of local bands? Maybe people would buy that, since they’re coming to our town.’ But I had no idea how to go about making an album.
“Somehow Calvin hears about it, so he calls me up and says, ‘So, are you doing this compilation?’ He had answers to everything. He was like, ‘I’ll record Justin’s [ Trosper, Unwound singer] band, you can totally get it done in a month, but you’ll have to do home-made covers, I’ll be your distributor so even after it’s over, you’ll be able to sell some more.’ He recorded what became Unwound later that day. I called a bunch of Olympia bands that I knew, and I called up Kurt and asked him, and he called Krist and Krist called me back. They came down the next day and brought a tape. They didn’t want to give me the original tape, so we went down to the radio station and the people there were kind enough to let us use their reel-to-reel tape decks to make a copy. So, the version that’s on Incesticide is probably one generation better than the version that’s on the kill rock stars compilation. We spliced it all together on reel-to-reel tape. We mailed it in and got the records back about three weeks later and it took a week to silk-screen all of the covers. We got it done for the second day of the convention.
“It ended up being a compilation of bands who were either from Olympia or played the convention. When we originally pieced it together, both Fitz Of Depression and Nirvana were on the compilation but not scheduled to play. Coincidentally, Calvin asked Fitz Of Depression after that to play. So Nirvana ended up being the only band on the compilation that didn’t play, which kind of made me look bad, like I put the big band on there even though they didn’t play.”
Nirvana’s inclusion presumably helped you cover your costs.
“Sort of,” Slim replies. “We hit a bad bottleneck because there was a lot of demand, but K as our distributor was just awful. It came to a point where they owed us $20,000 and they came to us with a plan to pay us $300 dollars a month until it was paid off. We sold 25,000 copies of that, so we were able to put out Bikini Kill and Unwound with that money. Later we put out [proto-Riot Grrrl band] Heavens To Betsy and [massively loud rock band] Godheadsilo.”
Back in Seattle, Kurt quickly grew tired of speaking to journalists, particularly radio DJs. He took the first few phone calls, started to lie outrageously, became bored with doing that and passed on press duties to Krist and Dave. Mostly, American journalists depressed and disgusted him: few of them were interested in the music, just the phenomenon. Sadly, most music critics are dullards.
“Kurt didn’t tolerate fools,” notes Anton Brookes. “He respected people’s intelligence, but if you asked him arsey questions then you were going to get an arsey interview.”
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was released on September 9 in the UK, backed with ‘Even In His Youth’ from the Music Source sessions. Four days later, Nirvana got thrown out of their own album release party. The event took place at a packed Re-Bar in Seattle, full of music industry insiders (Sub Pop, Geffen, the odd local journalist) and friends. Someone smuggled in a load of whiskey: Washington State has the weirdest liquor laws in the country – and the Re-Bar, despite being an, erm, bar wasn’t allowed to sell what Yanks call ‘hard liquor’ if they were serving food. Or something.
“I had a really cute dress that I’d just got from Basic,” starts Carrie Montgomery. “It ended up with onion dip all over it . . .”
I see a pattern forming here.
“There was a whole bunch of food at the Re-Bar,” Carrie continues, “and Kurt and I sat in the corner of the big main room and drank a fifth of Seagram’s – out of the bottle, very classy.” The band convinced DJ Bruce Pavitt to quit playing Nevermind – Bruce didn’t take much convincing – and start spinning New Wave and disco. Kurt threw some ranch dressing at Dylan and Krist, who responded in kind. “It was Green Goddess dip for vegetables, actually,” states caterer Nils Bernstein. The bouncers grabbed the offending miscreants, and threw them on to the street, unaware of the rich irony.
“It was so much fun,” laughs Kim Warnick. “Empty kegs were being rolled around on the floor. Finally they got asked to leave. Maybe that should have been how you knew they were going to turn into the next Beatles. So we went to some other party at a loft and somebody set off a stink bomb [some say a fire extinguisher] so we had to leave. Then we all came back to my and Susie [ Tennant]’ s house. Kurt would stay at our house when Nirvana came to town – he didn’t have a place to live so I’d give him my room.”
How did the food fight start?
“Oh, there was always a food fight,” Carrie exclaims. “It was inevitable, these guys were like children. There was egg throwing, food fighting, putting CDs in the microwave, it was just ridiculous. One time we were at [Nirvana T-shirt designer] Jeff Ross’ loft and I was in the hammock and Kurt flipped me out of the hammock and so I went in Jeff ’s kitchen and got a bag of flour and dumped the whole bag of flour over Kurt’s head. And then Susie [ Tennant] went and got the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed Kurt off with the hose part . . .
“Anyway,” she continues, “after we got thrown out the Nevermind record release party we all went over to Susie’s house and dressed the Nirvana guys up in dresses and put make-up on them and danced around the house and I think that was the night that Kurt was slingshot-ing eggs off of Susie’s porch at the neighbours’ cars. [Fastbacks singer] Kurt
Bloch made a huge mountain of Nelson CDs in the living room and people started running at them and chucking them and burning them. Susie was the Northwest promotion person for DGC so she had all these Nelson CDs . . . don’t ever tell David Geffen that, but, bless her heart she couldn’t stop them from doing it, it was just going to happen.
“There was a bottle of pain medication on top of the refrigerator,” Carrie recalls. “Kurt and I saw it and were like, ‘Oh! Those look good!’ So we took the rest of the bottle, and he and I decided it would be fun to jump from Kim [ Warnick]’ s bedroom window on to the roof of the garage next door. He’s wearing a flowered dress and red lipstick and I remember sitting in that window just laughing and laughing with part of our bodies hanging out, and Kim or Susie or somebody wouldn’t let us jump and we were pissed, like really mad that somebody is not going to let us do something so ridiculous.
“The next day,” Carrie adds, “Dylan came over and picked up Kurt and they said they were going to go shoot guns. They used to go buy big hunks of meat at the store, like a big ham, and go out in the woods and shoot their guns at it . . .”
Susie also had a Nelson gold disc on the wall, which Kurt defaced by rubbing lipstick into it, and then sticking it in the microwave. The party continued until dawn, Kurt falling asleep still wearing Susie’s little green and white Holly Hobby dress: “He looked better in it than anyone else I knew,” the rep laughed. Dave also wore a dress with big polka dots on.
Would you say Nirvana were mischievous in the early days?
“They’d have really fun parties where they’d just wreck shit,” explains Warnick. “That was the funnest thing about Kurt – he liked to break stuff. I remember him sitting in Susie’s chair, at her desk, just fucking around, drinking beer in her office. That night, Kurt Cobain and Kurt Bloch also set a paper bag full of beer on the burner and turned the heater on, and it started to catch fire. For as quiet and shy of a guy as he was, he liked to wreck stuff. Nothing is more fun than breaking shit.”