Nirvana

by Everett True

  10 Courtney was good at raising money from allies: when I first met her in LA, I needed money to stay on another few days so I could catch Hole playing live with Melvins. Courtney contacted Janet Billig, then working at Caroline in NYC, and Janet wired me 200 bucks. It was probably the wisest 200 bucks Janet ever spent.

  11 Of course Rosemary could be correct, but by Courtney’s own recent admission she was there to continue her pursuit of Corgan.

  12 Metallica were the metal band most similar (musically) to Nirvana and their Seattle peers: the ‘Enter Sandman’ band would later tour extensively with Soundgarden. Nirvana didn’t dig their pompous attitude, however.

  13 Although how this tallies with Courtney’s well-documented drug use is not explained.

  14 Here, the account contradicts Krist’s attitude in Come As You Are, where the band were trying to appear cool and uncaring about success.

  15 Some of the footage later ended up being used in the ‘Lithium’ video.

  16 Boxer shorts; he’d been admonished for his tiger-print Y-fronts by Courtney.

  17 The End is Seattle’s own alternative commercial radio station.

  CHAPTER 18

  Territorial Pissings

  NIRVANA were based round the very Olympian belief of spontaneity being at the heart of great rock music. Sure, Kurt could spend weeks – years even – crafting a chord change or set of lyrics, but it was only a base from which to explode. Spontaneity is something rock’n’ roll frequently aspires to, or pretends to embrace, but rarely achieves. Most rock shows are as polite and pedantic as a Sunday morning Anglican Church service or sports meeting – especially when the shows are over a certain size. There are so many factors to take into consideration: ticket sales, and lighting rigs, and outside recording units, and smoke machines . . . even the encores are scripted out. Normally.

  Yet why get up on stage if you’re not going to present something special each time? This is a dilemma that doesn’t seem to bother 99 per cent of rock musicians – who prize ‘professionalism’ above anything, the ability to deliver the goods in a manner so slick and glib that they’re indistinguishable from a thousand other nights, a thousand other bands. All that concerns them is making sure the lighting engineer knows precisely when to flash the lights to ‘strobe’ during the extended drum solo, second from last number; and that the stage crew out front and side know precisely how many encores are being played, and for how long. Touring arena rock bands take a travelling entourage with them the size of a small community, and within well-oiled ‘machines’ like that there’s very little scope for spontaneity. Why worry about that, when you’re raking in £100,000 or more a show? It bothered Kurt, though. And this confusion he felt towards the constraints of success is what set his band apart.

  Courtney Love was a perfect foil for Kurt, prematurely jaded with an industry he never liked in the first place. She was entirely spontaneous. There was no safety switch in her head for when things got out of hand. She took a delight in fucking shit up, didn’t care whose feelings she trampled over, even her handful of friends whom she loved with a passion as fierce as hate. Kurt liked to instigate trouble, anything to shake up complacency – he’d leapt on the backs of enough bouncers, and let off enough fire extinguishers in his time – but he also liked to sit back and watch, be the voyeur. That was where Courtney came in. She didn’t care. Not back then.

  “Kathleen had a big influence on him too,” argues Ian Dickson, referring to the equally volatile Bikini Kill singer. Between ’91 and ’93, while Courtney was pretending to be a feminist, she imagined Kathleen Hanna to be a rival, culminating in an infamous incident where she punched Hanna.

  “Imagine if you had two superheroes, one ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’,” Ian suggests. “That’s Kathleen and Courtney. Kathleen embodies all these feminist ideas and has always been very consistent. Courtney adopted a lot of her agenda and used it to become famous. Kurt was tremendously attracted to [Kathleen’s ideas] because he loved the underdog. He had a belief in, and tremendous feeling for, women and gays and people that were underpowered and underprivileged. He saw that in Courtney, but it was all twisted.”

  The burgeoning relationship between Kurt and Courtney began to overshadow Nirvana’s success. Kurt’s declaration on November 8, live on crap UK youth culture programme The Word, that “Courtney Love is the best fuck in the world” – a rather dismal, bragging rock’n’roll statement much more suited to Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee or one of his ilk – attracted enormous attention. Nirvana switched from being a rock phenomenon to front-page tabloid news: success and controversy is a potent combination.

  Mary Lou Lord may remember Kurt still being enamoured of her when she turned up in England, and that he didn’t mention Courtney’s name at all1, but there’s no doubting that Courtney’s wild, unfocused and dazzling barrage of phone calls and faxes over the couple of weeks he was in Europe soon worked their magic.

  “I’d never met anyone so outspoken and charismatic,” Kurt said, mirroring the way several of us felt. “She’s like a magnet for exciting things to happen.” He claimed the pair of them would fuck standing up against the walls of rock venues.

  Their romance blossomed through November: Courtney sent faxes telling Kurt he smelt of “waffles and milk”. He would reply with stream-of-consciousness notes that betrayed his continuing fascination for excrement, babies, needles and punk rock.

  “Kurt was attracted to Courtney because she was who he wanted to be,” suggests Janet Billig. “It’s that Jerry Hall thing: she could be a maid in the living room and a slut in the bedroom. He loved that she was controversial. Drugs weren’t a part of it. That was an activity that each liked separately before they met.

  “They made a great couple . . . better than Courtney and Billy Corgan certainly!” Janet laughs.2 “They complemented each other so well: Courtney said everything that Kurt was thinking. Kurt was quiet, but he wished he was a loudmouth. People were obsessed with him as a musician and her as a character. There was equality at one point: his was as the rock star, and hers was that she was crazy. Really, they were both crazy – but in an artistic way. She’s one of the greatest poets of her generation. She said a lot of things girls needed to hear and maybe some things they didn’t.”

  Courtney was aggressive and running rampant, now she’d been given another chance at the spotlight. Another chance? Let’s backtrack a moment. She’d tried to become a film star via Alex Cox in the Eighties – Straight To Hell, Sid And Nancy – the maverick English filmmaker simultaneously charmed and wary of her naked, ranting ambition. But it was taking too long. She’d tried pushing her male friends into the spotlight – livewire boyfriend Rozz Rezabek-Wright in Portland, Falling James in LA – but she didn’t have the patience to wait for either of them to live up to her expectations. Despite having joined Faith No More briefly as a singer, and forming Sugar Baby Doll, she lacked the necessary self-belief to push herself as the rock star – but thought she’d give it another try when she saw Eric Erlandson’s advert for a singer in a LA paper. Through sheer annoyance factor and charm she managed to talk a couple of labels – Sympathy For The Record Industry, Sub Pop – into releasing her singles, and befriended Janet Billig over at Caroline.

  She still wasn’t a star, however. Then I appeared on the scene – a name journalist in a position of power. I was totally blown away, bewildered by and enamoured of her, helped by my love of her Sonic Youth/ Mudhoney-influenced music. My task was easy. All I had to do was quote what she had to say, and capture her personality in print. I came back to the UK, and turned this peripheral figure into a minor celebrity. I also introduced her to Kurt Cobain, but that was an accident.

  She did the rest.

  She made a mistake, though – or so her champions like myself, and Kim Gordon, and Jennifer Finch felt. We warned her against hitching herself to the Cobain bandwagon. We thought that her undoubted personality and artistic talent would become secondary, marginalised, in comparison to
Kurt – because the music industry is fundamentally sexist, and she would be viewed as a gold-digging girlfriend.

  So it proved.

  How much did meeting Courtney change you?

  “Totally,” Kurt says, emphatically. “I’m not as much of a neurotic, unstable person as I was. I used to feel I was always alone, even though I had lots of friends and a band that I really enjoyed being with. Now I’ve found someone I’m close to, who’s interested in the things I do, and I really don’t have many other aspirations.”

  Did you know who she was before you met her?

  “Not really, no,” he replies. “I’d heard about her, though – some nasty rumours, that she was this perfect replica of Nancy Spungen.”

  Kurt laughs.

  “That got my attention,” he remarks, maliciously. “Like everyone else, I loved Sid [Vicious] cos he was such a likeable, dopey guy. I’ve often felt that many people think of me as a stupid, impressionable person, so I thought that maybe going out with someone who was meant to be like Nancy would stick a thorn in everyone’s side, cos it’s the exact opposite of what they would want me to do – they would want me to go out with some little troll girl.”

  I always thought you were more John and Yoko than Sid and Nancy.3

  “Yeah, sure, OK. Maybe you should put that.”

  Kurt starts flicking through a Nirvana comic, and pauses, struck by a sudden thought.

  “Courtney helped me to put Nirvana in perspective,” he adds, “to realise that my reality doesn’t entirely revolve around the band, that I can deal without it if I have to. Which doesn’t mean I’m planning on breaking up the band or anything, but that the minimal amount of success I strived for isn’t of much importance any more.

  “I’m so far beyond thinking about the band,” he continues, “that I can’t let it bother me any more. It’s so exhausting. I feel so raped that I have to just have fun now. I don’t mean to take it so seriously. I know that that comes across in interviews but that has a lot to do with the questions that they ask of me all the time. People think I’m a moody person, and I think it’s lame that there are only two kinds of male lead singer. You can either be a moody visionary like Michael Stipe, or a mindless heavy metal party guy like Sammy Hagar.”

  I tried to portray you as a mindless party animal type and you got annoyed.

  “Oh, OK,” Kurt laughs. “I guess it is better to be called a moody visionary than a mindless party animal. Alcoholism is totally acceptable, though. People just laugh about it.”

  It’s because people don’t feel threatened by it.

  “I tried to become an alcoholic. Didn’t you, too? It didn’t work, did it?”

  No, I kind of took it a bit far but . . .

  “I remember that.”

  We wander through to Kurt and Courtney’s bedroom, to see if Courtney’s awake yet. Just. The box in the corner is still dribbling out MTV. Talk drifts on to how MTV controls the American rock world.

  “I want to get rid of my cable,” Kurt declares. “I’ve done that so many times in my life, where I decide I’m not going to have television, become celibate. It usually lasts for about four months.”

  I was just going to ask you about your fondness for smashing up guitars. Don’t you ever get bored with that?

  “No,” replies Kurt. “I don’t do it nearly as much as everyone thinks I do. I just wait for a good time to do it – like when I’m pissed off, or if I want to show off in front of Courtney. Or if I’m appearing on TV, just to piss the TV people off. I have my guitar-smashing room in the back, where I practise four hours a day.”

  Pause. Kurt’s building up for a rant.

  “You know what I hate about rock?” he asks me. “Cartoons and horns. I hate Phil Collins, all of that white male soul. I hate tie-dyed T-shirts, too. You know there are bootleg tie-dyed T-shirts of Nirvana? I hate that. I wouldn’t wear a tie-dyed T-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia.”

  Courtney overhears this last comment from her bedroom.

  “Oh God, Kurt, how long have you been thinking about that one?” she castigates him, annoyed.

  “Well, fuck,” he whines. “No one ever prints it.”

  “It’s fifth grade!” Courtney yells. “It’s so boy!”

  “Well ex-ker-use me!” Kurt shouts back, sarcastically.

  (Melody Maker, July 18, 1992)

  Ask anyone about what was happening to Nirvana around this time, and they’ll all tell you a different story.

  Some will focus in on Nevermind ’s continued race up the US charts – from number 35 to number 17 to number nine through November and December. You couldn’t switch on MTV for more than a couple of minutes without seeing ‘Teen Spirit’. Not that the band cared by this point – matters were too out of hand for that.

  Some will focus in on the ever more climactic smashing of instruments, the goofing off on European TV shows, the drunken capers and ribald excitement. A favourite tour bus tape at the time was The Jerky Boys’ album of inane and downright nasty prank phone calls: the words ‘jerky’ and ‘ fuckface’ soon passed into common usage. In Italy, Shelli and Ed ‘King’ Roeser from Urge Overkill broke into the hotel’s wine cellar: a discovery that led to formation vomiting, Krist and Shelli winning hands down in the husband-and-wife stakes.

  Krist got to the stage where he was downing three bottles of Bordeaux a night, plus any amount of cigarettes and hash. Kurt’s stomach was playing up again, his condition made worse by the singer’s insistence on smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. He’d drink cough syrup constantly and vomited before several shows. Even Dave – young, fresh and definitely up for the ride – was starting to feel claustrophobic.

  “We resented the success so we turned into assholes,” Kurt explained to Michael Azerrad. “We got drunk a lot and wrecked more equipment than we needed to. We just decided to be real abusive pricks. We wanted to make life miserable for people.”

  Some focus in on the shows: the band played extensively over this period – England (November 4–9), Germany (November 10–13), a one-off in Vienna, Austria with Jack Endino’s Skin Yard, Italy with Urge Overkill – but it’s so difficult to separate one show from the next, one crazed live band from another, especially in 1991 when everything was spinning so fast it felt like the only way to stand still was to party even faster.

  “Corey Rusk from Touch And Go called me up,” says Christof Ellinghaus, “and said, ‘Nirvana have invited Urge Overkill to go on tour with them, can you help us put this together?’ So I quickly got Urge a van and a back line, and they stayed on my kitchen floor and so I got to see another Nirvana show. That was at The Loft [November 10], it was sold out, 650-capacity in Berlin. I don’t remember much from the show, it was so busy and you couldn’t move around. To me, it was more remote. There wasn’t the warmth of before.”

  Kids walked around London shows with T-shirts spouting lines written about me by famous rock stars4 . . . who were queuing up to brag about how they’d punch me out next time we met. None of them ever did, except for Kat Bjelland and Jennifer Finch – and Kat could hit hard! A few poured beer over me, but I poured more back over them. Billy Corgan dressed up in a clown suit for an entire UK tour’s worth of encores after I’d called him a clown in print, and came looking for me with security in tow at Reading. But I can move fast when I want. Oh, and I once had a screaming manager hold a glass to my throat for 10 minutes . . .

  Growing up in Aberdeen: Kurt, April 1969. (COURTESY OF EARNIE BAILY)

  The Cobain family (Wendy, Don, Kim, Kurt) 1974. ( TDY/ REX)

  Early Nirvana, with Dave Foster (left), 1988. “Dave was a lot closer to what they wanted, because he was a Dale Crover wannabe. Me and Dylan referred to him as Anger Problem Dave because he would blow up and scream at Kurt or Krist” – Slim Moon (RICH HANSEN)

  “Kurt was schooled in Olympia. Kurt made money in Seattle. And Kurt probably partied in Tacoma” – Bruce Pavitt at the

  Slim Moon, fou
nder of Olympia Riot Grrrl

  “I know I’m going to sound like a complete country bumpkin… but to have a real live British music journalist in our midst! I was in awe” – Jonathan Poneman with Everett True, Seattle, 1991 (CHARLES PETERSON)

  Nirvana, Seattle 1989 with temporary extra guitarist Jason Everman (third left) and Bleach drummer Chad Channing (first left). What do you think Jason brought to

  Krist Novoselic, London Astoria (‘ Lamefest’), December 3, 1989. “ Krist was swinging his bass around, when all of a sudden it got loose and I fucking had to put my hand up. If I’d been any slower it would totally have gotten me” – Dan Peters (STEVE DOUBLE/SIN)

  Kurt Cobain airborne at the ‘ Lamefest’. (STEVE DOUBLE/ RETNA)

  Nirvana, London Astoria, December 3, 1989. “Remember Lamefest? The show scarred me. Mudhoney headlined, but Nirvana stole the show.

  Grunge takes Seattle: “Gritty vocals, roaring Marshall amps, ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation” – early Sub Pop press release describing pre-Mudhoney band Green River. Top: Soundgarden, Seattle, 1987 (from l-r: Kim Thayil, Hiro Yamamoto, Chris Cornell, Matt Cameron). Bottom: Mudhoney, 1987

  Tad Doyle proudly sporting his ‘Loser’ T-shirt, 1989. “We discuss to this day

  Kurt, Krist, Chad, New York, 1990. “ Krist was the joker of the pack. He was about 8’ 2”, while if Chad had been any smaller he’d have been

  Tad and Nirvana on tour in Europe, October/November 1989. “The first European tour was gruelling and cold. You’re up late every night, and you’re sleeping somewhere that’s probably cold and there’s a shared bathroom down the hall. And in the van, the seats don’t recline and every seat is occupied” – Craig Montgomery, soundman. Above: the two bands pose with some border guards – Craig is