by Everett True
“Have you been in a Top 40 American radio station before?” Kurt asked me later. No. I don’t think so. “Well, you can probably imagine what it’s like. These guys with eye-level swooping haircuts, finely sculpted and styled moustaches talking in a professional American radio DJ voice, not having any idea who the fuck you are, or knowing who you are just enough to have heard your music and not like you, and asking the most ridiculous questions you’ve ever heard. And you’re there for the purpose of exposing your band when at the same time I didn’t really want to expose our band any more. I felt we were getting too big. I felt guilty about that and I also felt guilty we’re supporting this crap radio station that has nothing to offer anyone except commercial music. And so after a while I started not showing up for these, so I got a lot of flak from my label and from other people. Chris and Dave are still going through the motions and going to these fucking radio stations because they’d committed to it. I honestly couldn’t do it any more.”
Shortly after this incident, Kurt refused to be interviewed by radio DJs, full stop.
The October 2 show at Washington, DC’s 9.30 Club – situated in a very bad part of town, but very close to all the state capital’s tourist attractions – was incredible once again, perhaps fuelled by Kurt’s minor act of rebellion. It was hotter than fuck, support band Das Damen having their work cut out to divert the rabid punk audience: and it was so packed! No room to stagedive after my three-number support set, I had to crawl off the side to hefty slaps on the back from Krist and Kurt. Nirvana opened with The Vaselines cover, ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’, which is . . . let’s face it . . . a pretty fucking cool way to start a show!
Beforehand, our entourage had almost been turned away from the fancy restaurant the DGC rep had found for us, for being ‘too scruffy’. Not that we cared: it looked well up its own arse – we ignored the fancy food on offer, preferring instead to partake of the 9.30 Club’s legendary ‘pizza’ rider, sharing a slice with Dave’s ultra-cool mom and sister. It was at a barbecue thrown by Dave’s family the following day that Kurt told me of his love for Mary Lou Lord.
After DC, it was off down to the south-east: Georgia, North Carolina and Memphis – it was while Nirvana were in Athens, Georgia, partying at R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck’s house (instead of doing more press interviews) on October 5, that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ moved up to number five.
Mary Lou Lord rejoined the tour a few days later, in Ohio, where she found Kurt in a particularly foul mood, cursing sound problems and claiming the previous night’s show had sucked. She travelled to Detroit, Michigan with the band before leaving the next morning to fly back to her job at a record shop in Boston. That day, Nirvana were playing at the Metro in Chicago, with Urge Overkill in support.
The same morning, Courtney Love flew from LA to Chicago.
Courtney wasn’t there to see Kurt Cobain. She had nurtured an on-off, volatile relationship with Billy Corgan. This flight was just the latest in her long-running affair with the self-obsessed, preening Smashing Pumpkins frontman. Neither Kurt nor Courtney had indicated to me before Chicago that either felt a particular attraction towards one another – and this was during a time when I was talking to Courtney several times a week: but Kurt was becoming famous and he was cute and sensitive, while Courtney had a real sexual charge. Plus, they both had a desperate edge to their hedonism.
“She was there with Lori [ Barbero],” recalls Danny Goldberg. “That was one of the first times I met Courtney. She was schmoozing me, self-effacing, charming, working her way into this group of people. I was talking to her backstage after the show one minute, then I was talking to someone else, and when I looked over again she was sitting on Kurt’s lap. She was bigger than him; so sitting on his lap was memorable. From that night on they were connected.”
Courtney had no idea Nirvana were playing in Chicago that night, but she’d arrived at Corgan’s apartment to find his long-term girlfriend there. Shoes were thrown from the window and she was unceremoniously booted out. So she took a $10 cab ride over to the Metro. It was somewhere to go. (Courtney actually showed up 15 minutes from the end, just as Kurt was getting into his destruction routine.) Feeling scorned, she called Corgan from the club to inform him of her intentions as regards Kurt – she already knew how intensely jealous her lover was of Nirvana – and then made her move, as described by Goldberg.
“A lot of people were there,” says Craig Montgomery. “The Urge Overkill guys were there, management was there, I think the non-Corgan members of Smashing Pumpkins were there, and that was the night that Dave came and slept in my room [at the Days Inn, along Lake Michigan] because Kurt and Courtney were getting it on in the room that Kurt and Dave had been sharing.” The soundman pauses. “I don’t know if memories I have of her from that night are from what I’ve read or if they’re really my own,” he laughs. “Chicago was my first night of the tour. The band was anxious for me to come out, if only because my soundchecks were shorter than Monty’s.”
The show that night was pulverising – Kurt and Dave joined forces in decimating the drum kit with the remains of a guitar. “The buzz in the air was unbelievable,” Butch Vig told Gillian G. Gaar. “Kids were screaming and crying, and almost everyone already knew all the lyrics. I was thinking, ‘Wow, I might eventually have a gold record,’ and of course it went gold in a matter of weeks. [It debuted in the Billboard Top 200 the day of the Chicago show, at number 144.] A few months later, I talked to John Silva and asked if there was any chance of Nevermind going number one. And he said, ‘No way, not a chance.’ The next week it was number one.”
Courtney headed back to LA the following morning . . . possibly because the next date of the tour was in Minneapolis, one of her old towns, where her reputation preceded her. As was her wont, however, she laid siege to Kurt by fax and telephone over the following weeks.
“I was Courtney’s lawyer,” says Rosemary Carroll. “She started calling me because she wanted me to represent [Courtney’s first husband] Falling James. Then she asked me to represent Hole – the first show I went to, she was wearing the debutante dress with the perfectly pressed bow in the back. It was a breathtaking performance, electrifying. On stage, she was playing with images of male beauty and female dominance and female submissiveness in a rock’n’roll context. She seemed very brave and fearless. There were elements of Patti Smith9 in Hole’s performance, and that in itself was enough to win me over.
“I met Kurt through Danny [Goldberg],” Rosemary continues. (Danny and Rosemary are married.) “It was that night that she and he hooked up: she borrowed money from me to get a plane ticket to Chicago to follow him there.10 Did she say, ‘I have my eyes on Kurt and I want to close the deal’? No. You know what she’s like. She talks a mile a minute, a stream of consciousness, but very well informed. That was why she went to Chicago, though – she had no other reason for being there that I was aware of.11 I never lent money to her any other time, nor did she ask me.”
“[ Jane’s Addiction manager] Tom Atencio really wanted to manage Courtney so he paid for some of it,” corrects Janet Billig. “She was going to see Billy, and Billy or the girlfriend threw her out.”
“Kurt was quiet,” Rosemary says. “I had heard so much about him before I met him I expected someone about seven and a half feet tall and monstrously charismatic, but he was this small undemonstrative person with beautiful, beautiful eyes.”
It was in Dallas, at Trees, on October 19 – the first of three Texas shows – that one of the more notorious incidents in Nirvana’s history occurred: captured for posterity on videotape, from the moment when the bouncer first pushes Kurt in the face . . .
“The place was absolutely packed, stuffed with people,” recalls Craig Montgomery. “No one could move. When Nirvana would play a song they’d whip into an uncontrollable tornado frenzy and people would float up on to the top of the crowd from the sheer pressure. There was nowhere for them to go because security couldn’t let them on the
stage, so they would push them back out. The sound system at this club was weak, especially the monitors, and it made Kurt really angry. They might have been cutting in and out.”
“I was in Dallas – I had the flu,” the Nirvana singer told me in 1993. “A doctor came to my hotel room and gave me unnamed antibiotic shots in the ass. Drunk again, and feeling the results of the antibiotics and heavy booze, I stumbled on stage and played four songs. In the middle of the fourth song, I took my guitar to the monitor board, smashing it to bits as the crowd cheered, ‘Bullshit, bullshit.’ ”
“After a while Kurt got frustrated with the monitors,” explains Craig, “so he wielded his guitar like a hatchet and put a giant dent in a bunch of the channels and walked off stage, and the band went up into the dressing room. No one knew what to do. The crowd was chanting and yelling and throwing things and wanting the band to come back out, and meanwhile the local sound crew were extremely pissed off, along with security. After a while, we managed to patch into some undamaged channels of the monitor console and get the band back out.”
“The bouncer, who was also the owner of the monitor board, didn’t appreciate what I’d done,” continued Kurt. “For the next five songs, he paced back and forth, punching me in the ribs. I jumped into the crowd with my guitar [during ‘Love Buzz’]. He pretended to save me from the vicious crowd, yet he grabbed my hair and punched me in the ribs a few times. I swung the butt-end of my guitar into his face. He bled, and proceeded to beat the shit out of me.”
“I’ve read lies about what happened next from the bouncer and his friends in Texas,” Craig fumes, “but I saw [the bouncer] giving cheap shots to Kurt while he was pretending to pull him back from the stage and then I saw Kurt trying to use his guitar to ward the guy off – the guitar hit the bouncer in the head and opened up a cut. When the bouncer saw his own blood he turned into a raging bull. The band ran off stage with this enraged bouncer following them.”
The bouncer punched Kurt on the back of his head, and also kicked him when he was down: “Monty, the tour manager, somehow managed to get the band out of the club and into a taxi, but while they were in the taxi, the guy was pounding on the windows,” continues Craig. “Meanwhile, the rest of us were back in the dressing room hoping he didn’t come back. It was funny and scary. It was funny because the guy had been nice earlier in the day – he helped us load in, and I couldn’t believe that he had turned into such an asshole.”
Kurt later admitted that he was behaving obnoxiously at that point on the tour, and had thrown a ‘star fit’ that night.
“After the show, Chris and I got into a cab,” he continued, “only to be greeted by the bloody bouncer and 10 of his heavy metal vomit friends with Iron Maiden and Sammy Hagar T-shirts. The bloody bouncer smashed his hand through the side of the cab and choked me senseless. We couldn’t move because we were stuck in the traffic. After 20 minutes of cat and mouse, we fled away into the night.”
Meanwhile, Nevermind climbed from number 144 to 109.
Nirvana, Hole and Sister Double Happiness played Iguana’s in Tijuana, Mexico on October 24 – another scary evening. Kids leapt from 18-foot balconies on to the backs of other kids, fans got trampled underfoot in the frenzied moshpit while security stood by helpless, and the stage was swamped with fans stagediving.
“That was a scary place,” recalls Craig. “Everything was made of concrete. It had all these levels, no security. Any time you played there it was a night you just wanted to get through and get the hell out. Lots of shows happened at Iguana’s. It was in this sort of desolate, half-finished shopping mall and the only things open was a grocery store and an American style, sort of gringo, Mexican restaurant. It fancied itself as a nice place; so here comes Nirvana to try to eat there and Krist asks them if they have an English menu and we’re told that the English menu is broken.”
The following evening, Nirvana played at The Palace in Hollywood, headlining a Rock For Choice benefit over a bill that included L7, Hole and Sister Double Happiness. “Dave was friends with one of L7 [ Jennifer Finch],” says Danny Goldberg. “John [Silva] said Dave wanted them to play this benefit: then the leader of the Feminist Majority organisation called, and asked for Nirvana. It was consistent with Kurt’s values. He was a strong proponent of feminism.”
The LA rock elite turned out in force: Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee whining to anyone who’d listen that he’d had to pay, Axl Rose turning up backstage with the Geffen president. Kurt really didn’t want to hang out with such obvious progenitors of cock rock, so he slipped out and stood anonymously by the dressing room door, ignored by Nirvana’s new ‘fans’ who had no idea what he looked like. Even the then-current kings of metal Metallica sent a fax: “We really dig Nirvana. Nevermind is the best album of the year. Let’s get together soon, Metallica. PS, Lars [Ulrich] hates the band.”12
It seemed like the metal world was trying its hardest to bond with the new kids, claim them for their own. The same day as the Palace show, Krist and Kurt taped a segment for MTV’s big-haired metal show Headbanger’s Ball. Kurt wore a yellow prom dress for the occasion – “because it’s a ball,” as he explained at the time.
Courtney was present that evening: she and Kurt stayed up the entire night before the show, “drinking and fucking”, in Kurt’s words. “It was during our romantic period,” he laughed. There’s a lovely, though probably untrue, story that Courtney told a Seattle journalist about how Kurt helped her shoot up heroin back at the hotel – Courtney apparently had a phobia of needles13 – and then later the two musicians went out for a walk, when they stumbled across a dead bird. Kurt pulled three feathers off the bird, passed one to Courtney and kept one for himself. “And this,” he said, brandishing the third, “is for the baby we’re going to have.” How beautiful.
More prosaically, Monty Lee Wilkes recalls seeing the couple together in the back of the tour bus, surrounded by old beer cans and empty crisp packets, spread out like decaying royalty. “It was pathetic,” he sneered.
Courtney’s childhood was similar to Kurt’s inasmuch as she’d been shunted around from relative to relative, and indulged herself in petty larceny and drugs. Kurt was more naïve, but he wanted to learn. He wanted that rock’n’roll fantasy, hating himself because his training from Olympia spoke out starkly against the way he’d chosen to direct his life, and needing to feel anger and repression to create. His success should have provided him with security, but security was the last thing he was looking for. He needed diverting. He needed challenging, even while simultaneously retreating into a heroin-made unreality and detesting strife.
Tobi’s attitude had been too hardcore even for him, and Tracy hadn’t provided any sort of foil, but Courtney was punk through and through, wildly argumentative and contradictory, talking a torrent of ideas, extravagantly funny and quick to anger, but even quicker to please. One of Courtney’s former lovers confided in me that she was a genius in picking out her paramour’s deepest fantasy, and acting on it. She had no scruples, and few morals; and could act on impulse, especially if she was bored – well I recall having to ferry her around Reading Festival 1995 in the mud, in her high heels, her screaming at security because we had no passes, leaping on stage to rugby-tackle and slap pop stars in the face, myself made helpless by the bottle of vodka I’d drunk beforehand.
Kurt wanted his own punk rock girlfriend, his own Nancy Spungen – to Courtney’s later detriment. But it was a conveniently easy fantasy for her to live out. The fact of the matter is that neither Courtney (too conventionally mainstream, wannabe Hollywood blonde) nor Kurt (too hardcore, sensitive and fucked up by his myriad contradictions) was anywhere close to Sid or Nancy, but they were roles they took upon themselves because it suited them at the time.
Courtney didn’t turn Kurt on to heroin, though: even Krist Novoselic, a man who has more reason to dislike Courtney than most, will tell you that. In 1989, she’d been addicted, but she was trying to break free. All she ever did was alcohol and pills. Courtney
was everywhere that first Hole tour of the UK; brawling, screeching, being manhandled off stages, telephoning in the dead of night, starting fights for no apparent reason, lying comatose in a corner, barricading me in toilets so we . . . oh no, I’mnot telling everything. And everywhere, a constant stream of scurrilous and outrageously entertaining gossip and questions about music and other musicians and life.
It was Kurt who encouraged Courtney to take heroin again. He wrote in his journals about how he decided to start using heroin on a daily basis following the Sonic Youth tour, to alleviate his stomach pains. “There were many times that I found myself literally incapacitated, in bed for weeks, vomiting and starving,” he wrote, concerning his stomach. “So I decided, if I felt like a junkie, I may as well be one.”
Courtney used heroin as a social drug – and she was able (or so she told people) to control it, not have it control her. For Kurt, it was much more of a private matter: a shutting away from the world.
Were you aware of Kurt’s medical problems? Like his stomach . . .
“The stomach thing was so non-specific,” Carrie Montgomery complains. “It was just, ‘My stomach burns and I’m gonna throw up.’ Whatever. He threw up before every show, but a lot of people did. Mark [Arm] used to throw up sometimes. It didn’t seem that unusual to me. One time I was talking to Kurt at a club and I was like, ‘God, dude, you have bad breath, did you just throw up or what?’ And then I was teasing him about being on tour: ‘It’s probably kinda hard to get laid on tour when you have puke breath.’ He was like, ‘What?!’
“He couldn’t believe I said that to him,” she laughs. “Because he was not that guy, he was not the ‘I’m Gonna Get Laid On Tour’ guy. None of them were. It felt like he had a fragile system. He was thin and sickly and he was never the picture of health and he was never the picture of happiness either, not that he was horrid to be around.