by Everett True
“Kurt and Courtney’s relationship was tempestuous,” Goldberg says, carefully. “They definitely loved each other. At times, they definitely hated each other. He had a very romantic sense of his commitment to her, and at the same time she drove him crazy.”
On their return from New York, Kurt and Courtney moved into a two-bedroom apartment in west Hollywood, LA. The city wasn’t Kurt’s choice: he quickly grew to loathe its legendary falseness and isolation, missing his friends in the Northwest and even the rain far more than he expected. He’d never lived outside of Olympia and Aberdeen before – not even in Seattle – and moving to such a massive city felt entirely alien. But initially he welcomed the distance from his peers; especially since all he wanted to do was ‘ fuck and get high’. LA was Courtney’s choice. It tallied with her ambition to succeed on society’s terms, with its surreal juxtaposition of Hollywood glam and a far seedier underbelly. People drive everywhere in LA. Courtney couldn’t drive, but that didn’t faze her – she could get people to drive her anywhere she liked.
“Kurt loved his sisters and he loved kids,” says Carrie Montgomery. “When he started making a little money it was his little [half-]sister Brianne’s birthday8, and Kurt and I went to this art store and bought her a bunch of art supplies and an easel and a mini-drum set. It was almost the happiest I’d seen him. We went down to Aberdeen, gave her all this stuff and spent the night watching movies with her. He doted on her. And he was close to Kim [ Cobain] too – Kim would come over and hang out at Susie [ Tennant]’ s now and again. Once, his mother and his cousins came over and they treated him like a celebrity, which was odd. Maybe she was just happy for him, but the cousins were having him sign stuff.”
The couple moved into 448 North Spaulding, a fairly laidback street situated between Fairfax and Melrose. Rent was $1,000 a month. Kurt kept to pretty much the same routine as when he lived in Olympia: get up, take drugs, listen to music, paint and play guitar. Watch TV late into the night. At this point, Kurt claimed to have had a $100-a-day heroin habit.
It was while Kurtney were in New York that Courtney realised she was pregnant9, unsurprisingly to some cynics who saw it as the fastest way for Courtney to consolidate her position in Kurt’s affections. This was unfair. Kurt was besotted with Courtney, and she with him. Whether it was just the closeness they felt through being drug buddies or their joint paranoia about the outside world, or incredible sex, it hardly mattered. Kurt felt he’d found his soulmate. Courtney likewise.
Kurt became obsessed with the idea the baby might be born deformed because of the couple’s drug use – he’d painted enough pictures of ‘flipper babies’ when he was younger to be able to visualise the full horror. Courtney visited a Beverly Hills specialist in birth defects, who gave her the necessary reassurance that the risks posed by her taking heroin during the first trimester were minimal.
“There was never any concern the baby would turn out malformed,” states Rosemary Carroll firmly. “I hooked Courtney up with my gynaecologist who had delivered both of my children, and he was very clear she would have a normal child. That was a rumour started in the press.”
Even so, Kurtney decided they needed to detox, especially as Nirvana were due to tour Australia and Japan. The couple checked into a Holiday Inn, with tour manager Alex MacLeod stopping by occasionally to make sure they were OK. The process wasn’t pretty: withdrawal can include diarrhoea, vomiting, muscle spasms, mood swings and insomnia.
“Dave and I went to go visit Courtney after she got her first . . . I want to say sound scan,” Jennifer Finch laughs, “but that’s how you sell records. Ultrasound scan. They put it on a videocassette and Kurt was just sitting in front of the television looking at the little video. He won me back over, definitely – cos I hated him at that point. It was very sweet. Then I left her a pound to remind her how fun rock is and how much it was going to suck being a mom. Because I thought she’d have to stay home or cut down on the shenanigans. God, I’m so stupid. Like they’d both somehow get in touch with reality over the whole thing.”
Where did the name Frances Bean come from?
“Bean came from looking at that ultrasound that day, thinking she looked like a tiny little bean,” Jennifer reveals.10 “And she really did. I think biology is scary and disgusting. I can’t believe Courtney even went through that. I understand why she couldn’t stop smoking. There’s so much expectation when you’re pregnant.”
We were all disappointed it wasn’t a freak.
“I think it might be,” the musician laughs. “There’s still a possibility; she’s still young. When you’re forced to be the mommy you tend to grow up quick. Thank god she’s mature and well-rounded. Till she hits 19 and it’s all over.”
It was on January 1911 that Krist and Dave joined their singer in LA to shoot the video for ‘Come As You Are’. His bandmates were shocked by Kurt’s state. “He looked bad. Grey,” Dave stated. “He just looked sad.” The group and management were a little nervous about the choice of single, realising the bass line’s similarities to English proto-industrialists Killing Joke’s 1985 song ‘Eighties’ – the choice was ‘Come As You Are’ or ‘In Bloom’. Goldberg favoured the more obviously commercial song.12 Kevin Kerslake (Hole, Iggy Pop) directed the video, shot on three locations – Wattle Garden Park in Hollywood, Kurtney’s new house and the Van Nuys Airport hangar. The band’s faces were filmed through plastic and running water, so as to be distorted and partly unrecognisable.
On January 23, Nirvana set out for a proposed 12-date tour of Australia.13
Kurt wasn’t in any sort of condition to be touring, what with his stomach problems and going through the final stage of detox. And he was particularly bothered by the prospect of not being able to find any drugs in a strange country. On arriving at his hotel in Sydney, he changed the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on his door to ‘Please Burn Down My Room’.
Immediately, he ran into problems with both Nirvana’s entourage and the local hospital staff when he tried to find relief from his stomach – after Alex took him to one emergency room, he overheard one doctor say to another in an emergency room, “Oh, he’s just a junkie, he’s still coming off drugs.” Kurt later bitterly complained at the way his health problems were confused with his drug use: Shelli Novoselic, in particular, coming in for vitriol when she tried to sympathise with him. “I just wanted to fucking punch her in the face because she, like everyone else, assumed that I was doing drugs,” Kurt complained. (But he was!) A show in Brisbane was cut short, and another one in Fremantle14 was cancelled. In the end, Kurt took methadone – called Physeptone in Australia – which helped with both his detox and stomach.
The first show was at Sydney’s now defunct Phoenician Club, with support from local bands Tumbleweed and The Meanies.15 “We did four gigs with them,” recalls Wally Kempton, Meanies bassist. “The Phoenician was chosen well before Nevermind went through the roof, and the 1,400 tickets sold out in record time. The atmosphere was enormous – the fine line between fear and pure unbridled fun came close to being breached many times. The next day at the first ever Big Day Out16, our set started 15 minutes before Nirvana’s. A huge crowd watched our first few songs, and then we played to people’s backs as they walked away towards Nirvana’s pavilion!”
“Australia was the most fun of that whole tour, even though Kurt was having some trouble, and looked really thin,” enthuses Barrett Jones, who was Dave’s drum tech. “The weather was amazing and the promoter took us camping. The kangaroos were amazing! Most of the shows were tiny, like college cafeterias. We got a week off in Sydney, which was great.”
“It was warm and sunny and I was excited to be there,” says Craig Montgomery. “We went out boogie-boarding and bungee-jumping with Krist and Dave . . . while Kurt was trying to score dope.” Craig sighs. “I guess there was some tension between Krist and Shelli and Kurt, but by then everyone was aware of what was going on and trying to have a good time despite it. Even so, the shows were fantastic. There was a
show in Sydney [at the Big Day Out] in a great big square boxing ring-type arena, and it was as packed as the older club shows. There was way more people outside wanting to get in than you can fit in there. That show was like World War III.”
In the middle of the tour, Kurt agreed to be interviewed by Rolling Stone. He wasn’t a fan of the magazine – both Lester Bangs’ Seventies magazine Creem and the punk bible Maximumrocknroll were far cooler, as was all of the British and most of the European press – but succumbed to pressure from management and bandmates. In protest, the singer showed up for the photo shoot in a handmade T-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Corporate Magazines Still Suck’.
After a gig in Auckland, New Zealand, the band travelled to Singapore for a press day on February 12. A few hundred screaming fans greeted the band at the airport – the record label had placed an announcement in a local paper, specifying the exact time of the flight’s arrival. The same week, preening Kate Bush wannabe Tori Amos released a piano-drenched, wailing version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ that was so risible that Nirvana later used it for their opening music at European festival dates.
After Singapore, it was on to Japan for several dates. In Osaka, the band hooked up with Shonen Knife again. The Japanese trio gave Kurt gifts – toy swords and a new motorised version of his toy monkey Chim Chim. Kurt loved Japan, despite his stomach cramps. Courtney had rejoined him, and the methadone was doing the trick. But who doesn’t love Japan? All those incredible fashions and weird paedophilic dolls on sale next to firearms and Hello Kitty paraphernalia and cartoons. The weather wasn’t as nice as Australia, though. It was cold and snowy, and Nirvana were also taken aback by their audiences, everyone sitting politely in 10 × 10 foot sections and trooping out after the final song – no encore because the concept wasn’t understood back then.17
“I hated Japan, because people were so fucking polite,” Dave Grohl told me later that year. “It pissed me off.”
“I remember being freaked out, flying in and thinking how incredibly dirty it was,” recalls Barrett. “The smog was so thick in the middle of winter. The taxi drivers had little white gloves on, and everyone was way too polite. Dave used to play Tama drums, and at one show the band was smashing up the drum kit, and the president of Tama showed up. He was like, ‘Oh no, he doesn’t like the drums!’ Krist let off a fire extinguisher, one of those white powder kinds, and no one could breathe.”
It was on February 20 – the same day ‘Come As You Are’ was released in the US, and Kurt’s 25th birthday – on a flight to Hawaii that Kurtney decided to get married. The couple had wanted a Valentine’s Day date for their betrothal, but their plans were delayed after John Silva (not Courtney, as was originally claimed) insisted on Kurt working out a pre-nuptial agreement to cover his future earnings. According to Charles Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven, Kurt’s gross income during 1991 was $29,541 (or $27,000 after deductions) – a fair whack for many of his fans (including this author, even now) – but unusually small for someone who had sold more than three million albums on which he’d written the lion’s share of the songs and performed regular paying gigs.
Indeed, Courtney was using her husband’s fame to negotiate herself a record deal with DGC that had both a considerably higher advance and better royalty rate than her husband’s – as did many of the bands who signed to major labels, post- Nevermind . She would frequently boast of this fact to people like myself and Kim Gordon – like we could care one way or another – while simultaneously complaining about how insignificant her husband’s massive success was making her feel. In vain we would try and tell her she should judge herself on her own terms, not on anyone else’s, but the only line she took from us was to play up on the music industry’s innate sexism.
“The only reason they’re treating me so dismissively, Everett, is because I married a rock star,” she wailed. What, like your friends warned you against doing a couple of months ago?
On February 24, Kurtney got married on Waikiki Beach. Dylan Carlson was flown in for the dual purpose of Best Man and to bolster Kurt’s heroin supply – “I just did a teeny bit so I didn’t get sick,” the singer lamely explained. A non-denominational female minister, picked from the phone book, conducted a brief ceremony at sunset on a cliff overlooking a beach: Kurt in his green flannel pyjamas, and Courtney in an antique silk dress. The marriage caused considerable ill feeling amid Kurtney’s close circles. Kurt and Courtney’s paranoia towards their friends’ perceived – and actual – disapproval of their drug usage was running at a new high. Dave Grohl, Alex MacLeod, Dylan and his girlfriend, and two of the road crew were present. Conspicuous by their absence were two of Kurt’s oldest friends – Krist and Shelli Novoselic.
Courtney claimed it was because the pair was being “really shitty” towards Kurtney – and also Shelli disapproved of the marriage. Not surprisingly, Shelli saw it differently. She had a major objection to Courtney taking drugs while pregnant. “Maybe at that point, maybe she was,” she told Michael Azerrad. “Maybe she wasn’t. I don’t know, but we all assumed.”
“That day – it was just sort of sad. I attribute it all to Courtney,” says Barrett. “I was concerned that she was doing drugs when she was pregnant. And I spoke to my girlfriend about that, and my girlfriend and Shelli would talk about that, and I think Courtney found out about that. The day they were married, Kurt called me and was mad about my girlfriend and Shelli talking shit about Courtney. And I said, ‘I don’t care what you guys do to yourselves, but there’s a baby there.’ I think that’s wrong. Whatever. You probably know this story.”
The day after the wedding, Krist and Shelli returned to Seattle devastated by Kurt’s behaviour. It suddenly seemed that there was no way forward for Nirvana from here. Indeed, Krist didn’t see Kurt for another two months – and barely spoke to him for around five months, including rehearsals.
Kurtney stayed on in Hawaii for their honeymoon.
Addenda 1: Cali DeWitt
“I’m from Los Angeles. I was born in Canada but I moved to LA when I was three. I split my time between Canada and LA, mostly LA. I was a music fan from the get-go. When [LA punk film] Decline Of Western Civilization came out in 1981, my dad took me to see it. I was eight.”
You have a cool dad?
“Yeah, I have a cool dad. He took me to see [ Ramones film] Rock’N’ Roll High School and [The Who film] The Kids Are Alright all in that time. He bought me those records and I’d carry them to school. I remember bringing the Ramones to show-and-tell in second grade. We moved a lot. I switched schools like every year. Probably around sixth grade I stopped liking school that much.”
Have you been in bands yourself ?
“No. I sang in a punk band when I was 13 and 14. Luckily, I was friends with people who were really good musicians, even when I was very young. Even when I was 16 I felt that I wanted to be in a band for the wrong reasons. I wasn’t driven to play music and I became comfortable just loving it. I started going to shows really young. I went to see [influential punk band] DOA in 1982 when I was nine. From then on I would try to go to as many shows as I could, all-ages shows and punk shows. When I was in 10th grade in LA, this place called Jabberjaw opened in 1989. I went there the weekend it opened, and dropped out of high school to work there for free.”
What did you do there, bartending?
“Yeah, bartending coffee. There were no drinks. There were 40-ouncers in the backyard. That was when I felt I had arrived. It was an all-ages space downtown with people who seemed to care only about music and art and things that were interesting to me. I hung out there all the time and helped them book shows. I tried to convince them that Sub Pop was really cool. They were like, ‘Whatever.’ The first Sub Pop band that I could get to play there was Swallow who were pretty dreadful, but they quickly started to get into bands like Mudhoney. The history of Jabberjaw was pretty illustrious after that.
“That’s where I met Courtney. I was 16 and had a great relationship with my parents, but I was
in downtown LA all the time now and I was away from home. She seemed like a scary older lady to me. It was about 1990. I was a little bit frightened of her. I knew she had just started this band Hole and she was so gregarious and kind of assaulting to other people verbally that she intimidated me. For whatever reason, she took me under her wing and behaved like my ‘city mom’. She started letting me roadie for her band, and I would roadie for L7 as well. She was cool.”
What was Courtney like when you first met her?
“She seemed like one of the smartest people I’d ever met. She was very funny, very fun to be around. She wasn’t anything like the picture they paint of her now. She was very driven. Remember, this is pre- Nevermind , so the idea of a punk band getting big – a real one – was not on the cards. Her idea that Hole would be a big band was laughable to me, but I liked them.” What was she like on stage?
“Self-conscious. She would ask questions like, ‘How does it look when I do this? Did you see my new move?’ She would talk to me like I was her confidante.”
Was there anybody she was aspiring to be at the time?
“A nemesis would be like Inger Lorre from The Nymphs. As history is written, that doesn’t matter now, but at the time she was a threat. Inger was like the ‘bad girl’ in LA.18 She would talk about Kat [ Bjelland] ripping her off, or L7 being too macho or not being feminine enough. She had a clear vision of what she wanted, and the role of women in music, and changing that. I liked being a part of it. I liked being Hole’s roadie, it was fun for me and I was young enough to work for nothing. I went on the first US tour, and we all got paid $12 a day.”
Can you describe the other three members of the band?