Nirvana

by Everett True

  “One time we were up in Vancouver [October 30] sharing a hotel room,” she continues, “and he was really complaining about his back, so I tried these chiropractic moves on him. I had him on the floor with all kinds of pillows around him and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, no. I’ve had that done before . . .’ like totally not impressed. We were in these two double beds in the same room like [I Love Lucy stars] Lucy and Ricky, and we had one cigarette that we were passing back and forth, and he was like, ‘ Shit, what are we gonna do for cigarettes?’ ”

  On October 26, the album jumped another 44 places to number 65. According to one report, Kurt seemed disinterested at that night’s show in San Francisco. The band dressed in red and black terry robes with the Nirvana logo on the back, as a mark of respect to Bill Graham, the legendary San Francisco music promoter who’d died the night before and who’d given them the robes. Kurt spent much of the evening falling over mic stands. The next night, Hole and The Wipers supported Nirvana at The Palace in LA.

  On October 29, Nevermind went gold (US sales of 500,000 copies) – something Nirvana only found out by chance from Susie Tennant at their Fox Theatre show in Portland. “She thought they knew, and they didn’t,” explains Kim Warnick. “She was quite offhand about it, but she didn’t mean to be. She went up to Krist and congratulated him. He wanted to know why. He was very excited when he found out.”14

  For the next three dates Nirvana were supposed to be supporting Mudhoney – but with the buzz around Nevermind the way it was, the headline slot clearly needed to be switched.

  “When Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge came out and Nevermind was coming out, we both went off on separate tours,” recalls Dan Peters. “We had this plan to come back in Portland and Seattle to do a couple of shows together. We head off on our tour and everything’s great. Every fucking club we get to is like . . . [imitates ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ riff ]. I mean every fucking club. We were like, ‘Whoa!’ It was obvious something was up.”

  How did you feel about that?

  “It was pretty cool actually,” laughs the Mudhoney drummer. “We were psyched for them. By the time we got back to Portland, we realised. Mudhoney will not be headlining.”

  Many regard the Seattle show – at the Paramount on October 31, with Mudhoney and Bikini Kill in support – as the end of an era. Incontrovertibly, Nirvana was now big news. The second grunge explosion was beginning. John Silva hired a video crew to film proceedings:15 in partial retaliation, Bikini Kill scrawled words like SLUT and WHORE over their bodies with thick marker pen – and Kurt, on a whim, asked his Olympia friends Ian [ Dickson] and Nikki [ McClure] if they’d care to dance on stage with Nirvana.

  “More evidence about Nirvana being a feminist band,” comments Rich Jensen. “Ian and Nikki were just indie kids, a boy and girl, from Olympia. They danced like hell, I mean with spirit, but they weren’t like strippers. Nirvana wasn’t macho, so they had anti-go-go dancers.”

  The pair must have looked a strange sight: Ian with his dark glasses and skinny frame aping Sixties moves, Nikki lost in her own private world, dancing without fear. Nikki got Ian to wear a T-shirt with the word ‘boy’ written large on it, while she wore one boasting ‘girl’. Gold Mountain made sure the cameras were kept away as much as possible from the pair.

  “John Silva comes up to me as we were getting up to go on stage and says, ‘I didn’t spend a quarter of a million dollars on this video for you to fuck it up!’ ” exclaims Ian. “He had, like, towels around his neck and was ready to hand the guys towels when they came off stage, that whole business. I’m like, ‘ Fuck you John. I don’t work for you. Kurt asked me to do this.’ ”

  “The record label, unbeknown to Nirvana, had set up a big film shoot,” recalls Charles Peterson. “There were six guys all clad in black running around with compact 35mm movie cameras and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the beginning of the end.’ It was so unfair to their home audience because it stilted the performance. It reeked of money.”

  Before the show, Kurt went out for a stroll with Carrie Montgomery, to purchase some new socks and underwear16 from Bon Marché, where the singer deposited his old shoes on the counter, trying to find enough cash to buy his purchases with. “He started unfolding the money really slowly,” Carrie laughs, “taking forever to count it out, with great deposits of fluff next to the dollar bills. The salesman was looking at him like he’s a homeless person.

  “The same evening,” she continues, “we walked downtown to go shopping for his Halloween costume. And there was a record store in the Westlake mall that was full of Nirvana posters. He was shocked. Then we went to the bank machine and he got out some money and he got the receipt and again he was shocked. He had no idea how much money he had. We went down to the sex store and got a blow-up doll, and he got inside of it and wore it. We stayed at Kurt’s hotel downtown. Me and my girlfriend were staying there and Tobi [Vail] was there. They wanted to go talk, and got another room. So we had the MTV on all night, and it was Nirvana all night long. I kept waking up and thinking, ‘This is insane.’ We teased him about it. It was very surreal and very strange.”

  “The Portland show was fun,” states Dan Peters, “but when we got to Seattle it became evident how out-of-control events were getting. There was this huge-ass film crew present, these corporate goons hanging about, and we couldn’t even stand on the side of the stage and watch. I don’t blame the band for that. I blame the people they let hang around them.”

  “I hated that Paramount show,” comments Rob Kader, before adding mistakenly, “The End17 fucking put these dancers on the side, and I thought, ‘How cheesy is that?’ That threw the whole thing off, like, ‘These guys are fucking rock stars.’ The tone of it disappointed me.”

  The following day, Tobi moved to Washington, DC.

  Two days after the Paramount show, Nirvana departed for Europe. Nevermind was now at number 36 in the Billboard Top 40.

  Addenda 1: Courtney Love and Hole

  On my first trip to LA, I visited Disneyland. There’s something fascinating in the sight of Americans revelling in their own excess. I was there for 18 hours and had to invent a plane crash to get to ‘the happiest place on earth’. I returned at least twice afterwards, once with Hole and once with the Melvins. Taking a band as screwed up as Hole to Disneyland seemed a brilliant juxtaposition.

  “I remember this whole weird thing where Courtney insisted on sitting next to you on all the rides, even though she was going out with me at the time,” Eric Erlandson says. “I was convinced that she’d fucked you, too – during that first interview when she changed into your dressing gown. She told me to keep quiet about our relationship to you. We kept it quiet for a year, and then we had a huge fight during which Courtney threw a trashcan through my car window. So it was hard to keep it a secret after that.

  “She moved in with me the day we fell in love, on St Patrick’s Day 1990,” he continues. ‘It was while we were recording ‘Retard Girl’. She phoned up her husband James and said she wasn’t coming home. When we met you that was the beginning of the end. As soon as it became serious like that, with her sitting down and talking to journalists, there was a whole new set of rules. I remember that during the first interview, you kept asking me odd, disjointed questions, like, ‘How do you feel about aeroplane flights?’ and I wanted to kill you. I was really taken aback by the way she was using her womanhood on you to get what she wanted.”

  Eric was working at Capitol Records at the time. It was from there he posted the first two Hole singles to me.

  “When I first met Courtney, I was in awe of how fucked up she was,” the guitarist recalls, “and almost irresistibly embarrassed by the way she was acting. She used to pick on me for having one foot in her apartment and one in the hallway, because my car was always double-parked when I’d visit her. I was totally into hanging out with her but not fully committed, thinking of my escape the whole time. I used to think that was a great metaphor for our relationship – yours, too. Except, of c
ourse, both of us eventually put both feet irretrievably in her apartment.”

  I don’t want to sound too cynical. Everything that involved Courtney was a raucous good time certainly up to the end of ’91, and many times after. That held true even when she phoned me up to boast about punching enemies out. I shouted at her then. After all, I was a target for violence myself, with my photo in Melody Maker almost every week.

  The memories blur into one, me drunk and her whatever. We meet outside the Dominion Theatre in London; she sends her personal manager out into the crowd at the Phoenix Festival to find me; storming off before shows to go score drugs and turning up hours late; curled up in bed on drugs; arguing and screaming at the top of our voices. Hanging out in LA, shopping in unrelenting sunshine, hours wasted in dusty vintage dress shops.

  The first time Hole played England, they headlined at the Camden Underworld where the belligerent crowd, tanked up on hype and alcohol, molested Courtney. She leapt off stage after Eric had jumped in still playing his guitar, and had her dress ripped from her body. Tiny Delia kicked at the ankles of louts twice her size; Courtney screamed my real name from on stage like it was my fault; friends wandered around afterwards in tears of anger. Post-show, the two of us hid beneath the dressing room table as her friend Bill (the one with the monstrous moustache) fended off the curious. Courtney gave me a ring from her fingers as a bond. I wore it faithfully for months afterwards until it broke. It was a Crackerjack ring.

  Why did I hang out with Courtney? What, are you going to resist gossip-dripping phone calls lasting three hours, five days a week, usually at 4 a.m., sometimes with songs attached? Once, the singer left a message where she was boasting to Kurt how I had made her a star and introduced the couple. So I put it on my answer machine. The first person to leave a message afterwards was, of course, Courtney. There was a stunned silence, and then she continued talking oblivious.

  Are you going to resist the temptation to create mischief and upset and scandal at every turn? You’re a duller person than I thought then. When I drank, I drank without fear of the consequences because I had low self-worth. I partied like it was my last evening because it could well have been.

  At the Zap Club in Brighton on the first Mudhoney/ Hole tour I felt frightened but irresistibly drawn towards the emotion directed straight at me from the stage. Courtney was in her usual confrontational stance; feet on speakers, dress riding over the audience. London, the same tour, and Courtney ad-libs between songs with Morrissey references that I’d instructed her to say. Backstage, she hurls a solid glass ashtray at Eric’s head. It misses him by inches. This was one of many concerts where security tried to restrain us.

  I hung out with Courtney because she was fun to be with. I didn’t even know what she looked like when I fell in love with her music.

  Addenda 2: Kurt on The Breeders and feminism

  The following is taken from the transcript of an interview conducted in Kurt’s temporary LA home, 2002 – just down the street from where the Rodney King LA riots were taking place. The interview was partly structured around Kurt’s favourite 10 records. The list started off with The Breeders’ debut Pod – Kurt had meticulously written down notes in his journal about each record. His line on The Breeders read, “It’s an epic that will never let you forget your ex-girlfriend” . . .

  “By that, I don’t necessarily mean that the record reminds me of my last girlfriend,” Kurt explained. “It seems that when the girls in The Breeders get together, they give off this air of . . . their ex-boyfriends.”

  The Breeders are one of your favourite bands. What is it you like about them?

  “The number one reason is their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric. I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song, and Kim wrote it. I love their attitude. ‘Doe’, the [Breeders] song about where a girl gives a boy head and he pats her on the head like a doe, is very funny. They’re strong women, but it’s not that obvious. They’re not militant about it at all. You can sense they really like men at the same time.”

  But you’re attracted more to feminine people? Is that because you’ve been through the phase of liking masculine . . .?

  “Yeah, I went through that stage about five years ago. I went through most of my adolescent life being a male and not being aware of feminism, but I was always more of a feminine person. I always felt more inclined to hang out with girls, and I appreciated softer pop music during most of my childhood, until I became a teenager when I started smoking pot. That was the time that my hormones started swinging around in my testicles and I started getting facial hair. I had to let off my male steam somewhere so I started listening to Black Sabbath.”

  I often felt that the problem with early punk was that it excluded women mainly. It was meant to be right-on, but it excluded half its potential audience.

  “Yeah, definitely. And that was only something I realised later because I didn’t get to see the punk movement in the Seventies. Like, on that live Dead Boys record, Night Of The Living Dead Boys, the singer was spewing off about how some girl was sucking his cock while he was on stage – that was the common accepted thing in punk rock.”

  It seems now, switching on MTV, that the metal world is still stuck with the same tired values.

  “It might be getting a little bit better because of bands like Soundgarden. They have a good image and a healthy feminist attitude as far as metal goes. Maybe others will follow them. Even Pearl Jam, who were obviously cock rock poseurs down on Sunset Strip last year, are preferable.”

  What does feminism mean to you?

  “What does it mean to you?”

  I asked you first!

  “It’s not so much of an ideal as so much of a sense I have to be politically feminist by talking about feminism structurally, supporting it. I don’t want to preach about it. I don’t think there’s such a thing as feminism any more, not in the sense of it being a movement like it used to be during the Seventies – but there does seem to be a collective awareness nowadays, because people are taking it up individually.”

  What would you say the main effect of having a feminist outlook on your life is?

  “Um, just everyday living, being aware of not offending women and not supporting sexist acts, you know. Just be aware of it all the time, not so wary that you become so anal, so paranoid of offending women that you can’t feel comfortable. There are lots of sexist jokes that I laugh at and it’s harmless, up to a point. But I know these people who pride themselves on being bohemian, who put on this act all the time, 24 hours a day, of pretending to be a macho redneck. Their excuse is that they’re trying to remind you that that is the way of the redneck, but I noticed that after someone talks like that for a while they usually turn into a redneck.”

  I definitely agree with that. That was one of the main reasons I fell out with Sub Pop a couple of years ago.

  “Absolutely. That’s the main reason why I never get along with very many people at Sub Pop.”

  It was funny for a while, and then you started to wonder whether they meant it or not – or if it even mattered whether they meant it or not. Dwarves are a great example of that: the singer is smart, funny, but you’d never guess it from his stage act.

  “That’s also kind of a statement within itself, which I kind of respect. People that go out of their way to act like an asshole or an imbecile all of the time when they’re really intelligent. The statement is that literally there’s no point. It’s a really nihilistic way of living your life. There’s no point in trying to be human any more because things have gotten so out of hand. It’s still a very punk rock attitude, but I just think it’d be really boring to be Johnny Rotten after all these years. I’m not saying Johnny Rotten has ever been sexist . . . I mean that negative attitude, not appreciating passion at all or not admitting that things are beautiful.”

  Yeah, that’s the problem. You cut off so much if you cut off enth
usiasm. Feminism, as far as I’m concerned, is women taking matters into their own hands and me not standing in their way. It’s women controlling their own lives, not men.

  “I really agree with that.”

  NOTES

  1 At one point, Das Damen – sweet Beatles/metal-loving SST rockers – were considered the equals of Soundgarden. 1991’s Triskaidekaphobe is the one to buy. Das Damen also played on the Sub Pop Legend! B-side.

  2 Urge Overkill played a hard, shiny kitschadelic power pop that assimilated both the bell-bottomed past and ‘cool jam’ present, most notably on their taut, Cheap Trick-influenced, 1993 Geffen album Saturation.

  3 Sister Double Happiness were a very ordinary Austin, Texas rock band – presumably booked because a couple of members had been in legendary Eighties punks, The Dicks.

  4 The songwriter part is questionable, as Mary Lou Lord normally covers other people’s songs, singing with a babyish lisp.

  5 WFNX DJ Kurt St Thomas was the first person to premiere Nevermind in its entirety, on August 29, 7 p.m. EST.

  6 Not actually true. Frances Bean was born prematurely.

  7 Carpal tunnel syndrome is a condition that occurs when there is an inflammation of the median nerve that runs through the carpal tunnel. The tunnel itself is made up of bones and ligaments in the wrist area – ie: it’s a common complaint for guitarists and typists.

  8 It would have been OK the other way round.

  9 Patti Smith is a rightly revered NYC poet: her early work from the Seventies includes the venomous ‘Piss Factory’ and the seminal albums Horses and Radio Ethiopia. Kim Deal, Kim Gordon and Courtney all owe a debt to Patti’s fearless live performances.