Nirvana

by Everett True

  “ Krist and Shelli bought a home close to where we lived in Greenlake. We used to go up to this bakery called The Honey Bear for coffee in the morning. It was close to their house and we’d walk by Krist and Shelli working on their yard. We were talking one time and I asked him, ‘Who fixes all the stuff that you smash up?’ And he rolled his eyes and he said, ‘Oh god, nobody,’ and he was complaining that the local repair shops would never call him back about it. I thought that was funny because I used to go around to the guitar stores and they would be blasting Soundgarden and Pearl Jam through the speakers, but never play Nirvana. Punk was really not cool in those places. I had been doing guitar and amp repair work for a decade and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t be treating this band like they were important, so I told Krist, ‘If you want, I’ll round up all this stuff and have it fixed by tomorrow morning.’ I think he said, ‘You’re nuts, but OK!’ So I did: I got in my car and drove around to all these places picking up their broken gear and stayed up all night doing repairs.

  “I waited until what time I thought he’d be up and called him. He was surprised I’d done it all, and after that we started to hang out. They were vegetarians and new to the neighbourhood, and we ran this vegetarian café. On top of that we could talk about politics, rock groups and electric guitars until you could hear the morning commuters leaving their driveways. Krist and I fixed about everything in their house that wasn’t working. At one point we were driving across the Wallingford bridge in Krist’s Volkswagen bus, and he says, ‘Hey man, how about it? You know, you go on the road with us and fix our stuff ?’ I said, ‘OK,’ and he said, ‘Right on, we should go get some Wild Turkey.’ That was the extent of my interview process.”

  NOTES

  1 He’s hardly going to mention one girlfriend to another when they’re sleeping together, is he?

  2 Janet Billig has managed both Courtney and Billy Corgan.

  3 Yoko Ono is held in far higher regard in the counter-culture than in the mainstream.

  4 Mainly Courtney, actually – during the first round of UK press interviews, Courtney slagged me off as ‘sexist’ incessantly, for claiming that Hole’s third single, ‘Teenage Whore’, was autobiographical. She soon realised she was better off with me on her side.

  5 Sister Lovers was the Memphis band Big Star’s legendary third album, recorded in 1974 and released four years later – darkly confessional and brimming over with gorgeous, cracked, melancholy, Beatles/ Byrds-influenced melodies.

  6 The ongoing minor ménage à trois between Courtney, Kurt and myself became a source of fascination for my fellow Melody Maker writers, and was parodied hilariously in the paper’s back pages.

  7 This is the only report I’ve ever seen of Krist behaving thus, so it can perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

  8 Scalpers and bootleggers are a constant problem for any touring rock band, especially as they often come armed and belligerent. Eric Erlandson and I almost got beaten to a pulp one time outside a Hole show when we attempted to give away a couple of free tickets right in front of the touts’ noses.

  9 Julie Cafritz was ex-Pussy Galore, also in Kim’s Sonic Youth spin-off band, the virulent free noise Free Kitten.

  10 There was a famous incident where Eddie Vedder, singer with Pearl Jam, stormed out of a rival magazine’s cover photo shoot, and refused to come back, after catching sight of a review I’d written of their live show in MM the week before – where I compared his voice to that of Phil Collins with a backache. In the movie Singles, the fake rock band Pearl Jam were moonlighting and shrugged off a bad review as inconsequential. Not in real life.

  11 The Who were not bloated rock gods like the Stones/Led Zeppelin/ Aerosmith, etc, with their own planes and six limousines in a line and drugs and groupies galore. They didn’t like being remote from their fans, especially Pete Townshend. However, it was obvious why Kurt felt that way – because that’s how the media portrayed all bands that played stadiums. Drummer Keith Moon’s escapades didn’t help, because it often seemed like he was lording it up, but he was actually quite similar to Kurt in his own way – didn’t give a shit about property or propriety, drank like a fish and took loads of drugs, blew all his money, and deep down inside loved rock’n’roll and believed it should be spontaneous. He might have had a Rolls-Royce, but he’d be just as likely to smash it for fun as he would smash a bass drum.

  PART III

  DOWN

  CHAPTER 19

  Dirty Linen And Brimming Ashtrays

  THE grunge explosion was nothing like the way MTV later chose to portray it.

  It wasn’t just testosterone-driven, bare-chested rock gods, whining about how hard their life was because they had to walk 100 yards to the tour van1, nor was it the easy-going alterno-Friends lifestyle as so revoltingly portrayed in films like Singles and Sleepless In Seattle. Nor was it Courtney ‘ Axl Rose’ Love and her loser husband. No. It was loud music, and rain. It was vomit and laughter and not knowing where you’d wake up the next morning. It was countless hours of tedium, waiting for another crappy band to soundcheck down the OK Hotel and The Vogue. It was shared mattresses and Greyhound coach journeys, wired partners who’d as soon smash you over the head with a beer mug as fuck you. It was house parties and Mexican beer, sweet coffee and lumberjack shirts. And it was a healthy dose of cynicism to carry you through it all.

  It’s even misleading to talk of a grunge ‘explosion’, singular.

  There were actually two.

  The first happened shortly after I wrote the initial series of articles in Melody Maker, and lasted through 1989 into the first few months of 1991. Other critics and fanzine writers and hip radio DJs enthusiastically championed a form of music based in Seattle – firmly rooted in punk rock, not suburban metal – that in actual fact was being played in countless bars and garages and damp-infested practice rooms across America. Not just the Pacific Northwest. Local musicians complained about the attention but secretly they mostly relished it. It was exciting, fun and even helped a handful of bands to find work. Few outside groups had moved to town yet, because – as hip and cool as the writers were making Seattle sound – there was little else going on. Lovely scenery, but that isn’t usually conducive to rock explosions. Microsoft hadn’t broken big, neither had Amazon.

  About the biggest thing happening in 1990 was the sales of Sub Pop affiliated T-shirts – but man, there were some good T-shirts! In particular, the word LOSER emblazoned across a thousand music fans’ chests, a good couple of years before Bart ‘proud to be an underachiever’ Simpson, and the slacker lifestyle, grabbed the popular imagination. In Seattle, at least in the rock clubs frequented by Mudhoney and Nirvana and their pals, it was not good enough to aspire to being a macho sports fan or rock’n’roll dude. It was incredibly un-hip to be seen chasing success, especially as success was perceived as coming with too many strings attached. Far better to give up before you’ve even started: “No one likes us and we don’t care,” runs the chant of London’s deadbeat football club Millwall. That’s how grunge musicians and fans felt about the outside world: ‘punk’ was originally an insult, a put-down, a term of abuse towards gays. Mum and dad think you’re a total waster, a disgrace? Feel rejected by those flash kids at school, with their big American cars and trust-fund degrees? Don’t sweat it. Parade it.

  You’re a LOSER and proud of it.

  The word was originally popularised by a T-shirt designed by Green River’s Jeff Ament. “Sub Pop wouldn’t have been Sub Pop without Jeff,” remarks Julianne Anderson. “That whole ‘it’s cool to be un-cool’ thing, the glorification of a geek – that’s all Jeff Ament.”

  “ ‘Loser’ was more [ Mudhoney manager] Bob Whittaker than Jeff,” suggests Jonathan Poneman. “The idea of doing the shirts was Bruce’s and mine. Jeff Ament came up with these Green River shirts that had Green River on the cover and said ‘Ride the fucking six-pack’, and before we did the ‘Loser’ shirts those were far and away our most popular shirts. We discuss
to this day reprinting those shirts. Such a great slogan! The idea of doing a bald-faced ‘Loser’ slogan . . . if anyone looks at the fanzines that Bruce Pavitt has been involved with, you can see his stamp on that shirt. It has that elegance, that kind of in-your-face quality.”

  “We should give some credit to Tad,” adds Megan Jasper, “because Tad would wear that shirt on tour all the time.”

  “Yeah, and he had a song called ‘Loser’ as well,” Poneman agrees. “But that concept, the idea of embracing loser-dom, has been around for a long time. I think Tad wore that shirt for a long time for rather depressing reasons, actually.”

  Sure, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains and Screaming Trees and Pearl Jam had signed to major labels. Sure, Sub Pop was attracting undue attention – but you could find parallels happening in other cities in America; Dinosaur Jr and Pixies in Boston, Amphetamine Reptile in Minneapolis, Merge records in Chapel Hill, Touch And Go’s fierce and hard rocking Chicago roster, Sonic Youth and the loft kids of Manhattan . . . The centre of the music industry was still LA and New York. The grunge ‘explosion’ was relatively low-level, comparatively innocent – confined to tens of thousands of music enthusiasts across Britain and Europe, and increasingly America. It would blow over. These things always do.

  Not this time. The feeding frenzy around Nirvana in late 1990 precipitated an explosion of interest in the city and its bands and lifestyle that hadn’t been seen on such a scale, in such a localised fashion, since the Summer Of Love hippies in San Francisco in the late Sixties. As Sonic Youth famously claimed in their documentary film title, 1991 really was the year punk rock broke . . . if by punk rock one means the disdain Olympia musicians like Calvin Johnson and Al Larsen, Kurt Cobain and Tobi Vail, Nikki McClure and Lois Maffeo felt towards ‘adult’ interference, their determination not to be suckered in by the same old industry tricks and their desire to follow self-made paths.

  Of course, using this definition as a basis, one could argue that punk rock never broke big at all – these people are barely known outside of their immediate peer groups. But why else did people call Nirvana ‘punk’ if it wasn’t for the influence of Olympia? For, as Jack Endino argues in chapter 11, the music Nirvana became best known for playing was in no way punk rock in its traditional form, but an update on prime Seventies hard rock with all the glossy production and radio-friendly chord changes that made it so commercial.

  Still, once Nirvana via Sub Pop started to stir up industry interest – not hindered in the slightest by Kurt’s devilish charm, his smouldering blue eyes, his way around a lyric of such impassioned alienation it couldn’t but help appeal to millions of others like him – and especially once Nirvana via DGC released the super-polished cry of rage that was Nevermind , it lit the touchpaper for a thousand other labels and magazines and TV programmes to try to suck the city dry.

  “I didn’t let it bother me,” says Chad Channing. “Someone was going to have to come up with something to call it. You couldn’t just call it hard rock music. I began to think it was silly after a while, when I’d see clothing stores selling ‘Grunge Wear’.”

  “I didn’t see how it pertained to them at all,” says Nirvana guitar tech Earnie Bailey. “Kurt wore flannel for a really short period of time, for a month or two maybe in 1990. You never saw him wear flannel after that, unless it was for a joke.”

  Almost without exception, these industry-appointed arbiters of taste ended up pushing all the bands that had little to do with Nirvana – and certainly nothing to do with their adopted home city of Olympia.

  But then, they had come to the wrong place.

  Or maybe they hadn’t. John Silva, Nirvana’s manager, loved Sonic Youth and The Beastie Boys but he didn’t like Beat Happening because he didn’t understand the appeal of such a deliberately childish band without a bassist and, worse, any appreciable (traditional) musical talent.2 Would Beat Happening have broken big given the same exposure? Doubtful. Daniel Johnston’s one major label album, 1995’s Fun, sold less than 20,000 copies.3

  In the early Nineties, the record industry wasn’t geared up to sell truly alternative music. Punk rock sold and popularised by post-Nirvana bands such as Green Day and The Offspring, Rancid and Blink 182 is trad rock by another name, dumbed down even more. It is entirely misleading to call Nirvana punk – grunge is a much better description, if only because it was a term invented to describe a specific time, place and music: theirs. Grunge; as in dirty, scuzzy hard rock played slow, with the amps turned to 11. Of course, the reason people shy away from using the word is that it became devalued through familiarity. It came to mean any musician who might once have listened to a Nirvana or Soundgarden record and passed by a thrift store window: it certainly never meant cock rock, which is what it became synonymous with.

  Post- Nevermind , the mainstream media – even notoriously slow US media outlets like Rolling Stone, Spin and MTV– wanted to know all about Seattle. Their interest didn’t stop at the music. Thrift store shopping became the height of popular culture, fashion models falling over one another to prove how ‘street’ they were, TV cameras lurking outside the Comet Tavern.

  “Maybe the reason people got resentful was because the hype was so all-encompassing,” suggests former Rocket journalist Gillian G. Gaar. “The mainstream press didn’t write about Seattle the way they wrote about Atlanta or Minneapolis. It wasn’t just about the music. It was this whole lifestyle thing where everyone drinks coffee and microbrews, and wears flannel. It was everywhere, it was insane – K-mart ads were stamped with the word ‘grunge’ for their back-to-school line. Some people were horrified. I thought it was funny. There would be [US gossip columnist] Liz Smith in her brand new Converse sneakers in Vanity Fair . . . no one wore brand new Converse!”

  “It was the best,” smirks Fastbacks bassist Kim Warnick. “Finally people knew that Seattle wasn’t in Alaska. I was psyched. Yeah, there were a lot of shitty bands that got started because they wanted to be signed. All these A& R guys were flying here to sign what they thought would be the next ‘that’ – but it didn’t matter to me, and if nothing else, maybe Fastbacks could have a record deal and not have to move to LA. Before all that stuff started happening, you pretty much had to move to LA or New York to make your career. Here they were coming to my backyard and that was fine with me.”

  Besides you, were there any girls in Seattle playing music?

  “Not really,” the bassist replies. “I’m sure there were, but none who really liked rock’n’roll. They were either too arty, or . . . we liked Deep Purple, we liked butt rock. We liked The Archies and Queen, Elton John. I came from seeing rock shows like Kiss, which a lot of people might say this whole genre was a backlash to. To me, it was all the same. I liked it as much as I liked Led Zeppelin. I didn’t give a shit. My theory is those people just didn’t get to see their first Kiss concert, motherfuckers. I did. I got to see them the first time they came through. First Ramones, first Kiss show.”

  A lexicon of grunge sprung up, directly from the fevered imagination of Sub Pop receptionist Megan Jasper: ‘swinging on the flippety-flop’ (talking on the telephone), ‘bound-and-hagged’ (staying in at the weekend), ‘ lamestain’ (an un-cool person), ‘ wack slacks’ (old torn jeans), ‘harsh realm’ (bummer), ‘big bag of blotation’ (drunk) and ‘k-ching!’ (another of your mates gets signed to a major label).

  “I jotted down a bunch of words while I was chatting to one of those douche bag reporters,” recalls Jasper. “It was a case of, ‘I drank too much coffee and I’d much rather not be doing my job right now. Sure, I’ll talk to this kid on the phone!’ It was beyond ridiculous. It was ridiculous in 1990 – and that was like a year and a half later. The whole thing was retarded. I remember the guys from Tad coming into the office and using the word grunge as a joke. Kurt would say, ‘The next record, we got it all figured out. It’s going to be grunge.’ And everyone would laugh like it was the funniest thing they’d heard in their lives. I remember thinking, ‘This shit has got
to end. I hope this is the peak.’ But it wasn’t.”

  The second grunge ‘explosion’ happened the instant Nevermind hit Billb oard number one at the start of 1992. You could almost taste the sweat on a thousand ‘hair metal’ [soft rock] bands’ brows as they feverishly packed up their brand new Converse sneakers and $100 lumberjack shirts, and hopped on a plane from LA to Seattle.

  At what point did the speed of Nirvana’s success exceed your expectations?

  “It got really crazy around January of 1992; the album was at number one, we were playing on Saturday Night Live. That’s when I knew it was nuts. We’d gone to Europe the previous year, and played the Reading Festival main stage, and I realised that was pretty crazy – but we were on the bill with Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, Iggy Pop was headlining, we were on at midday. I didn’t really know what any of that meant. I just thought, wow, these people are fucking insane, they must do this for every band. It wasn’t until I came home and had a gold record and we were on SNL that I realised OK, now this is fuckin’ crazy. But it still seemed somewhat natural at that point, because we weren’t playing stadiums, we were still playing places that held 2,000 people. It hadn’t gotten to that Monsters Of Rock, four-seconds-before-the-snare-hits-the-audience level yet. The music was the same, and the people were the same. As we played these shows, the audience didn’t seem like the Monsters Of Rock audience, it just seemed like more Nirvana fans.