by Everett True
“The thing I started to notice was, people were starting to pull. People would pull you to an interview, or pull you to the dressing room, and people would push you on stage. And that’s when I thought, OK, this is getting a little weird. It didn’t bum me out, but there were times where I’d excuse myself from an interview to have a piss, and have an extreme anxiety attack, saying why am I so stressed, so nervous? I was really happy, I didn’t feel down or depressed, I felt elated. But I was pretty overwhelmed. And if you think about it, I was only in that band for three and a half years, so everything happened over such a short period of time. A lot of it is a blur.”
The three of you had no chance to prepare for what happened . . .
“That’s a cop-out. Anyone can handle what I do. It’s a fucking luxury. I never not wanted it. I never expected it. We never had that world domination career ambition because our kind of music made it impossible that we could be the biggest band in the world. It was the same with Scream, same with Mission Impossible, same with Dain Bramage. When I joined Nirvana, it was for the same reason I joined Scream, and that’s where people get fucked up, when you have that insane ambition and expectation. If music’s not enough, not its own reward, don’t do it. When I worked at Furniture Warehouse and only played music at the weekends, that was my vacation; those weekends meant so much to me.”
You still felt that way . . .?
“I still feel that way. It’s a much different scenario now, but I do it for the same reasons. There’s no way I’d let a guitar sit around and gather dust, there’s no way. It’s so much a part of my life. The most embarrassing question I could be asked is, what do you do other than music? I don’t have any interests outside music. Nirvana was the same. Even at the height of the insanity, it was a place I’d rather be than anywhere else.”
(Interview with Dave Grohl by Mojo journalist Stevie Chick, 2005)
On January 9, 1992, Nirvana arrived in New York to run through rehearsals for Saturday Night Live. It was a big deal. The late night comedy show was – and is – an institution because of its huge influence on American popular culture, if for no other reason than for the way its stars like Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase and Dan Ackroyd have gone on to have long and glorious (too long and glorious, in some cases) movie careers.
“Seeing Nirvana play that show felt like such an odd validation,” exclaims Jonathan Poneman. “It was like, ‘Hello, Middle America!’ They were already huge, but you knew there was going to be a whole bunch of people who would have a new appreciation of the band because Saturday Night Live had established itself as being an arbiter of hip.”
“I had a crush on Keanu Reeves,” laughs Carrie Montgomery. “He used to go to Nirvana shows and Kurt would call me afterwards like, ‘Guess who’s here?’ So, as a Christmas gift for doing his laundry this one time, he flew me to New York for Saturday Night Live so I could meet Keanu because he was supposed to be hosting the show. I flew there with Wendy [Kurt paid for both flights]. She had never flown before, so we got on the same flight and shared a hotel room. Keanu never showed.”
On January 10, Nirvana recorded a live nine-song set for MTV’s 120 Minutes alternative rock show, with Courtney, Wendy and Dave’s mom and sister present; and attended to bits and pieces of press. This was the first time many of Nirvana’s crew had met Wendy, and they kept complimenting Kurt on his ‘hot mom’ – something that irritated the singer considerably.
The hip, Riot Grrrl-associated magazine for teenage girls, Sassy, had asked to feature Kurt and Courtney on their cover as some sort of ideal of true love, and the pair agreed. “Kurt and Courtney sitting in a tree/ K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” ran the headline on the smart Christina Kelly article. The magazine was far cooler than stuffy magazines such as Rolling Stone and New York Times – two papers that they’d rejected interview requests from, on the correct basis that they were out-of-touch. Sassy had sizeable music content, and featured Olympian bands like Bratmobile, Bikini Kill and Nation Of Ulysses – something that Rolling Stone singularly failed to do. Unlike 99 per cent of rock magazines, it was also aimed at females, something that particularly appealed to Kurt.
“Sassy was the first cool magazine for tweens,” explains Janet Billig. “It was a cooler version of 17 or Cosmo Girl. It spoke to young girls like adults and approached music with the passion of a fan. I set that interview up – I was friendly with Christina, and I was a publicist at the time. It wasn’t initially going to be a cover, but with everything heating up for Nirvana they made it a cover. Kurt absolutely loved the magazine. He wouldn’t have done the interview and photo shoot if he hadn’t. Everyone loved Sassy. It was snarky and smart and they were music fans.”
Later, it was back to the rehearsal studio for a run-through of the planned SNL songs – ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’. Neither the show’s producers nor Nirvana’s management wanted the second song played, preferring the more radio-friendly ‘Come As You Are’, but Nirvana didn’t care. The band also refused to rehearse their regular instrument destruction, much to the displeasure of SNL ’s crew, who preferred to have everything worked out in advance – great for camera angles, but anathema to the idea of rock music being spur-of-the-moment.
On January 11, the day of the show, Michael Lavine took photographs of Nirvana at his apartment as Kurt nodded in and out of consciousness. The shoot took place in complete silence – Krist and Dave disgusted by their singer’s behaviour, and his obvious drugged-out state. “I asked Kurt why he was doing this,” Lavine says. “He told me it was the only thing that helped his stomach. I was like, ‘Dude, that’s the one thing that’s guaranteed to make your stomach worse.’
“They hung out at my house the whole day,” Lavine adds. “Kurt was so fucked up he could barely keep his eyes open or stand up. The tension in that room was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Kurt was like, ‘ Gimme the Flipper album, gimme the Flipper album,’ so I passed him over a copy and he took out a pen and drew the cover of the album [a crudely stencilled fish] on to his T-shirt.”
When the time came to go over to NBC, the band refused to get into the show’s transport – a large limousine – preferring to travel in a small van. Once there, Kurt was throwing up outside and being studiously rude to the show’s host Rob Morrow4, and any corporate types in suits.
This might seem like obvious punk rock behaviour to you and me, but it is frowned upon by the elite, who like to consider themselves as ‘with it’ as the people they’re exploiting.
It was while the band was in New York that the remainder of the Nirvana camp woke up to the fact their meal ticket was on smack. The same day the Sassy interview took place, the BAM article with its heroin innuendo appeared. Even if no one bothered to read the piece (the ads-led magazine was scorned by music fans) the evidence was there for all to see. Mysterious hour-long visits to the bathroom while everyone else was waiting to go on stage: pallid faces and unexplained blackouts.
“The dressing rooms at the SNL studios are not large rooms at all,” states Craig Montgomery. “You’re in a space about 10 by 12 feet with a bathroom off it, and there’s about six or eight of us – band, wives, management, crew – in there. So Kurt and Courtney go into the bathroom and they’re in there for what seemed like hours . . . I was naïve, I didn’t know what they were doing there. Later it dawned on me – and by then the people that handled Kurt just handled Kurt, and the rest of us just did our jobs and tried to have a good time. Because you couldn’t run the tour and the production and try to get Kurt from the hotel to the show, you know?”
“I’d known enough people in my life that had this glassy-eyed look and kept nodding,” says Danny Goldberg. “There had been a request to find a bunch of cash. Courtney wanted to go shopping. It obviously didn’t happen overnight, but it was an overnight realisation. Kurt was a nice person and incredibly considerate, so he rarely uttered a harsh word, but a lot of us became extremely worried about him and we did some sort of an intervention in LA around the
time Courtney became aware she was pregnant. After that, there were times he cleaned up and times he didn’t . . .”
Danny sighs.
“But he was still a genius, playing great shows, making great records, creating great art and doing great interviews,” the manager continues. “He was not a junkie in terms of being constantly out of it. Inwardly he was affected, but outwardly he had great periods of clarity, lucidity and so on. Like a lot of addictive people, a large majority of the time Kurt denied he was doing drugs – and some of the time it seemed credible because of his behaviour.”
“I remember Jonathan [ Poneman] phoning me up one night and saying, ‘Anton, I’ve got a serious problem,’ ” recalls Anton Brookes. “ ‘A friend of yours is on heroin.’ And I said, ‘What, Kurt?’ And he said, ‘You think Kurt’s on heroin?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ and he says, ‘No, Mark – Mark Arm.’ I’m like . . . fuck . I wouldn’t say Kurt was on heroin when he first came over to the UK but I’m sure he flirted with it once or twice. I got the impression that they all dropped E and smoked enough weed to knock out a whale. They drank and everything, but they were just teenagers. I always thought his stomach problems were genuine. When the heroin problem became known people started thinking that if Kurt ever cancelled a gig or an interview it wasn’t because he was ill or tired, it was because he was smashed out of his tits, which was never the case. Sure, he could be late for an interview – there was rock’n’roll time, which is late, and then there was Kurt Cobain time, which was like having jetlag.”
Kurt and Courtney’s hotel rooms were a mess. They were too paranoid to allow anyone inside to clean up – being petty larcenists themselves they figured everyone else was the same – so everything lay where they discarded it: pizza cartons and empty make-up containers, dirty linen and brimming ashtrays, deli trays and unused room carts, clothes strewn all over the floor . . . The pair could turn a pristine five-star room into a run-down Olympia apartment in less than a minute.
Dave and Krist thought Kurt was being pathetic: “I remember walking into their hotel room,” the drummer told Michael Azerrad, “and for the first time realising that these two are really fucked up. They were nodding out in bed, just wasted. It was disgusting and gross.”
“The camps were starting to separate,” Carrie explains. “Kurt and Courtney against everybody else. That episode of Saturday Night Live was not good. It was not funny and I was sitting right next to Rob Morrow’s mother, the guy who ended up hosting, and I was pissed and resentful that Keanu wasn’t there. So we didn’t go to the after-party – me and Kurt and Courtney just went home. We weren’t part of the crowd. I was in the ‘bad camp’. People would get pissed at us for behaving foolishly. I couldn’t understand it. Everybody participating in those extracurricular activities was a willing participant. Kurt was bankrolling the whole thing, so why was I the bad guy? But I was and that’s fine. Livelihoods depended on him. The band and the management and the record label and everybody needed Kurt to be healthy, and he wasn’t. I understand now. And you don’t want that person to die. I mean, it’s not safe to participate in those sorts of activities . . .”
For the show itself Kurt wore his home-made Flipper T-shirt and a bearded Krist wore a Melvins T-shirt. Grohl was topless, hammering metal mayhem out of his reinforced drums. Despite the singer’s state, the performance of ‘Teen Spirit’ was riveting, inspired – although Kurt noticeably wasn’t looking at the camera. His hair was dyed a disgusting red-pink, a last-minute change of colour after Courtney objected to Carrie’s dye job of red, white and blue.5 ‘Territorial Pissings’ finished with its ritual destruction; at the end, as the cast milled around the band, Krist pretended to make out with Dave before grabbing Kurt and French-kissing him, an obvious two-fingered salute to the more homophobic elements of the metal/Nirvana crossover audience. SNL refused to show the kiss on repeats.
“That was so spontaneous,” Krist told me. “And on the rerun, they showed a different ending. I know why – two guys kissing on TV, that’s ‘offensive’. Whatever. There are so many more urgent problems than two people’s sexual orientation.”
In Charles Cross’ biography, the Seattle journalist paints a powerful picture of Kurt OD-ing a few hours after the SNL performance. Courtney woke up at 7 a.m. to find the other half of the bed empty and her lover sprawled out on the floor, his skin a pallid green, not breathing. If she’d woken up minutes later, he’d have been dead. She revived him by throwing water over his face and punching him in the solar plexus. Poignancy is added to the incident by the fact that Nevermind was due to hit number one the very next week. By this point, the album had sold two million copies. Here Kurt was at the very pinnacle of his success, and here he was lying dead on the floor.
The writer takes great pains to describe the scene of depravity and squalor: “Half-eaten rolls and rancid slices of cheese littered the tray tops,” he writes, allowing perhaps for some artistic licence. “A handful of fruit flies hovered over some wilted lettuce.” How very touching and ironic – especially the timing of the incident.
The only problem is: I don’t think any of this actually happened – certainly not at the point when Courtney claimed it did. The reason I think Courtney told Charles that it did occur the evening of SNL is partly for dramatic effect and partly for the same reason she told Michael that she and Kurt met earlier than they actually did – to remove her culpability from the situation. If Kurt really did OD that early into their relationship, then it meant it had little to do with her influence – it’s just because that’s the way he was.
And in the same way Courtney lifted the actual details of her first meeting with Kurt to a fake, earlier time to lend the incident authenticity, so she has with this reported OD – probably from the time of Nirvana’s Roseland Ballroom appearance in 1993, where I can recall Courtney telling me, almost word-for-word, of a similar occurrence.6
“Technically, it’s possible,” says Lavine, who took the Sassy cover photographs later the same day, “but they seemed fine when they showed up, if a little fried. I also think the incident happened at the Roseland show.”
I interviewed Kurt (by phone) the day of the Sassy photo shoot – he was in an excitable mood, telling me how he’d switched on MTV News, only to find them announcing his engagement to Courtney, and that Nirvana had just recorded a live version of ‘Territorial Pissings’, with the express intention of getting it on heavy rotation on 120 Minutes. “How does it feel to be number one on Billboard?” Kurt repeated my question, laconically. “It’s like being number 16, only even more people kiss your ass.” He was playful, friendly. He certainly wasn’t behaving like someone who’d been technically dead only a few hours before.
But who knows? Memory plays tricks on the clearest of minds.
Drug use increased the pair’s paranoia. Kurtney moved to another hotel – the brand new Omni Park Central – but their distrust of outsiders wasn’t helped by their own actions. I recall Courtney calling me up from the lobby of the Omni, beside herself with anger, clearly off her head7, recounting some garbled story about how she’d been accused of being a prostitute and a thief and how she was being refused re-entry to her husband’s hotel room because she’d wandered down to the gift shop in the lobby to buy cigarettes in her underwear (which was always ripped and had holes in, as was her wont). She wanted me to call up reception and talk to them on her behalf.
“They wanted to arrest her,” agrees Carrie – who was present. “They thought she was a hooker. She was all like, ‘ Caaaarriiiiiiieeee!!!!!’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God. I don’t know her, I swear to God.’ Kurt wouldn’t go down and get her. I had to go down and get her. And she was so pissed at these hotel people, there was a little concierge stand by the elevator banks and every time she went by there she’d steal the flowers off of it.”
Scenes like this were common when Courtney was around: the mayhem her lover created on stage was far outstripped by her everyday life. It’s rare for people like Courtney to exist, e
ven rarer that they’re allowed to get away with such behaviour.
“Kurt was so sweet in New York, he gave us money to go shopping. ‘I know you guys probably want to go buy some expensive cosmetics, so here’s some money,’ ” Carrie says, imitating Kurt’s voice. While Courtney and Carrie and Wendy shopped for clothes, Kurt went down to Avenue C to score heroin. “People wait in a line,” he told Michael Azerrad. “Lawyers, business people in three-piece suits, junkies, low-lifes, all different kinds of people.”
“How does he know we want expensive cosmetics?” continues Carrie. “Of course we do! But then Courtney got pissed. She didn’t want him to buy me anything. She just wanted him to buy her stuff, like he was going to run out of money. The end of that New York trip was the last time I ever talked to Kurt. It’s so stupid, it’s embarrassing to even say it . . .”
Carrie lowers her voice.
“Kurt and Courtney started telling people in their closest circle they were pregnant, and Wendy got freaked out. It was all a bit much for her to take. So when I got back from New York I got a phone call from Courtney where she says, ‘Wendy tells me that you said that I love Kurt for his money and you love him for his heart.’ And I say, ‘I would never say something that stupid. Can I talk to Kurt please?’ ‘He can’t talk to you right now. He’s too upset. You better call Wendy and get this straightened out.’ ‘I’m not playing this bullshit game, Courtney. I’m not calling Wendy and talking about some shit that didn’t happen. Let me talk to Kurt.’ ‘No. You can’t talk to Kurt.’ So that was how I got kicked out of the deal, just like Ian [ Dickson] and – well, maybe not Dylan so much – but most everybody else got systematically taken out of the equation.”