Nirvana

by Everett True

  “Caroline [Rue] was the whipping boy. She didn’t fit Courtney’s vision of what the band should be. She was too clumsy and self-conscious. Courtney was a little threatened by Jill [Emery]. Jill began to get attention because she was mastering this [Black] Sabbath feel people liked. After a show at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go [February 11, 1992]19, a bunch of people was talking about how great Jill was. That was the end of her.20 Eric [ Erlandson] was the manager, the one who knew what was going on. Hole opened a show in 1991 [ June 14] that Nirvana played at the Hollywood Palladium, with Dinosaur Jr. That was the first time I met Kurt.”

  Were you around when Courtney started dating Kurt?

  “I was talking to her. New York had a big effect on me when we got there on tour. I came home and saved up $200 and moved there. I lived in a meat locker. But before I did that, Nevermind came out. The way people say they remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, I remember where I was when they played the video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ on MTV. I called everyone into the room and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ It was unreal. This network of people and you sleep on each other’s floors and now someone has done this. I loved Bleach, but I couldn’t believe how good Nevermind was. So this guy who I’d met a few times, and was friendly with, became a bit of a hero.”

  Addenda 2: Nirvana’s influence on Olympia

  “Unwound used to have a drinking song,” recalls Slim Moon, “where they would raise their cups and sing, ‘Thank you Nirvana for buying us beer, thank you Nirvana for letting us practise here.’ After Nevermind , instead of it being the neighbours calling the cops and banging on your practice space walls saying, ‘What’s that racket?’ they’d say, ‘Are you in a band? Do you know Kurt Cobain? Can I buy you a beer?’ Regular people would see your grunge haircut and think you were cool instead of spit on you. Even though it did sometimes lead to someone buying you a beer, mostly it was embarrassing. We didn’t want everyone in America to know our secret.”

  One of Olympia’s greatest achievements is the way it managed to retain its underground culture, despite the attention it got.

  “Nirvana got famous,” Slim concurs, “but it never happened in a way that put a spotlight on us.”

  Is that because Nirvana were marketed as a Seattle band?

  “Exactly. The spotlight ended up on Seattle. And all of the duo bands and bands that break all of the rules nowadays that we used to get so ridiculed for breaking . . . they owe a big debt to our scene. The Riot Grrrl thing got a ton of attention and Nirvana got a ton of attention, but neither of them in ways that ruined Olympia. Olympia has slowly dissipated, but it never got killed by being in the spotlight. A lot of the things that influenced Olympia bands in ’88 – early Rough Trade singles, post-punk – are influencing bands in 2006.”

  So, Nirvana’s influence on Olympia . . .

  “In the Eighties, there were not a lot of big rock bands in Olympia. In the Nineties there were a lot of big rock bands in Olympia. Nirvana influenced that, but Melvins influenced it more. Before, it had been just Beat Happening, Some Velvet Sidewalk and Nirvana that made records and toured. Now we had Unwound and Bikini Kill and Karp21 who were all making records and touring. Everything became plausible, from getting signed to K, to being the next Nirvana. The reason why you start your band totally affects what you do musically. If the height of what you think you could achieve is that you could play a party and 20 of your friends bounce up and down, you do a totally different thing musically than if you think you might be able to ‘make it’. Nirvana was part of a change that occurred throughout the start of the Nineties. That change was not all bad. It made some people try harder and think of it as art instead of fun. In Olympia in the Eighties, Calvin Johnson was considered a visionary for believing you could put out your own seven-inch.”

  NOTES

  1 No disrespect to Soundgarden intended.

  2 Deliberately childish . . . no bass . . . no talent . . . Hang on! Haven’t I just described Beastie Boys?

  3 The Daniel Johnston album was released by Atlantic. The same man responsible for the awesome Led Zeppelin remasters signed Daniel.

  4 Rob Morrow was American actor and director who starred in a popular, quirky cult show of the time called Northern Exposure.

  5 The following Monday, schools across America were witness to the sight of kids with Kool-Aid pink hairdos. Imagine the scenes if Kurt’s original hair colour had survived Courtney’s wrath!

  6 Or possibly from the time of Nirvana’s second SNL appearance in September 1993, when buddy Rene Navarette recalls being told Kurt had OD’d on his hotel room floor.

  7 Although, being even more naïve about heroin than almost anyone featured in this book, I didn’t cotton on to Kurt and Courtney’s use until halfway through 1992 when Courtney told me direct. Or perhaps I didn’t care, figuring it was none of my business. I drank heavily. They did drugs. Who was I to judge?

  8 Brianne O’Connor was born to Wendy O’Connor and Lamont Shillinger, just before Christmas Day 1985.

  9 “You were probably present in a closet when Frances Bean was conceived,” Courtney remarked to Carrie Montgomery when I reintroduced the pair in Seattle in 1999.

  10 Frances was after Frances McKee of The Vaselines, who by this point was a schoolteacher.

  11 Five days after Dave Grohl’s 23rd birthday, and a couple of days after Dave and Krist had joined Melvins on stage at the Crocodile.

  12 ‘Come As You Are’ was later threatened with litigation, but the case never came to court.

  13 To tie in with the tour, the six-song Hormoaning EP was released in Australia and Japan – ‘Even In His Youth’ and ‘Aneurysm’ from the B-side of ‘Teen Spirit’, and the four covers, including The Vaselines, from the 1990 John Peel Session.

  14 Fremantle is a beautiful port city next to Perth in Western Australia.

  15 The Meanies are a good solid old-fashioned punk band – with tunes!

  16 The Big Day Out is Australia’s massive annual outdoor travelling rock festival – sort of the equivalent of America’s Lollapalooza, only far cooler because it’s Australian.

  17 Japan was a whole other culture: I recall playing one show with Soundgarden in Osaka in the mid-Nineties that took place on the second floor of a shopping mall. People danced, but were very careful not to bash into each other.

  18 There’s a legendary story about when Ms Lorre dropped her knickers and pissed on the desk of a record company executive who was refusing to play ball.

  19 Courtney played a drug-ravaged version of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and dedicated it to an absent Kurt, while outside a storm-lashed sky changed colour every few minutes. It was a cracking show: Eric and Courtney pretended to swing their guitars at me, down the front. There were more industry people than paying customers. The fiercely independent Superchunk played support. Before the show Courtney walked up to the ’Chunk’s singer Mac and, pointing to me, announced, “You should pay attention, because this man is going to make you a star.”

  20 Indeed it was. Jill and Caroline were out of the band after that show, after which Hole went on hiatus for several months.

  21 Karp were a full-on Olympia rock band that – as one critic put it – “Possess the kind of energy that most metal bands have wet dreams about.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Adult-oriented Grunge

  “I have to hear rumours about me all the time,” the singer growls. “I’m totally sick of it. If I’m going to take drugs that’s my own fucking prerogative, and if I don’t take drugs it’s my own fucking prerogative. It’s nobody’s business, and I don’t care if people take drugs and I don’t care if people don’t take drugs.

  “It all started with just one article in one of the shittiest, cock rock-orientated LA magazines,” he continues, “where this guy assumed I was on heroin because he noticed that I was tired. Since then, the rumours have spread like wildfire. I can’t deny that I have taken drugs and I still do, every once in a
while. But I’m not a fucking heroin addict, and I’m not going to . . .”

  He trails off, momentarily wordless.

  “It’s impossible to be on tour and to be on heroin,” he begins again. “I don’t know any band that could do it, unless you’re Keith Richards and you’re being given blood transfusions every three days, and you have runners going out and scoring drugs for you.”

  Kurt glowers with anger.

  “I never realised that mainstream audiences react towards mainstream rock stars in this manner, because I’ve never paid attention before,” he rails. “I don’t mean to complain as much as I do, but it’s a load of shit. I’ve had days where I’ve considered this to be a job, and I never thought that would happen. It makes me question the point of it all. I’m only gonna bitch about it for another year and, if I can’t handle it after that, we’re gonna have to make some drastic changes.”

  (Melody Maker, July 18, 1992)

  SO Kurt returned to LA at the start of March 1992 and took a bunch of heroin. He tried to hide his usage from Courtney by shooting up in a locked cupboard where he kept his supplies: the heroin, the needles, the spoons and the rubbing alcohol. Courtney got mad at Kurt when she discovered what he was doing – going as far as to break his syringes. Or so she claimed: mindful perhaps of the later controversy that engulfed the couple when she admitted to doing heroin during the first weeks of pregnancy (i.e.: before she actually knew she was pregnant).

  Kurt wrote several of the songs that appeared on In Utero during these months, but he later admitted in a 1992 interview with The Advocate that during 1991, “I haven’t been very prolific at all.” He also painted, Goya-influenced paintings of strange angels and skeletal torsos, scarlet splurges and distended aliens, and wallowed in his hatred for the outside world and his inability to come to terms with it. The working title for Nirvana’s next album was I Hate Myself And I Want To Die.

  I recall Kurt showing me a bootleg video of the Pennsylvania State Official who’d blown his brains out live on air during an otherwise innocuous political news segment after inserting a gun into his mouth. Someone had put the 20-second clip on repeat, simultaneously desensitising the viewer and making the act even grosser. Kurt watched it with me a couple of times.

  Meanwhile, Krist was back in Seattle, fuming over his singer’s self-immolation and distressed by the apparent ease with which he’d shrugged aside years of friendship for the sake of a girl and some drugs.

  “Kurt’s a fucking junkie asshole and I hate him!” he complained.

  “I needed time to readjust,” Kurt told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in October 1993. “[The fame] hit me so hard, and I was under the impression I didn’t need to go on tour because I was making a whole bunch of money. Eight to 10 million records sold – that sounded like a lot of money to me. [Also] my stomach ailment stopped us from touring. After a person experiences chronic pain for five years, you’re literally insane.”1

  Even Gold Mountain were scared of their star’s volatile temper and mood swings: a projected US tour in the spring was shelved when it became overwhelmingly apparent that the entire band – not just Kurt – was suffering from tour burnout. Instead, Kurt’s management attempted their first intervention: Kurt checked into a rehab programme at the Exodus Recovery Center, at the Cedars-Sinai hospital in LA. Trouble was, his counsellor was star-struck and hence Kurt didn’t have any respect for him, ending the treatment after four days.

  Dave wasn’t so bothered by his singer’s behaviour, having known him for a comparatively short time. He used the down time from Nirvana to write his own songs, which he’d record on Barrett Jones’ eight-track Laundry Room studio in their shared West Seattle house. These songs later materialised on Foo Fighters’ debut album, 1995’s Foo Fighters.

  Nevermind remained in the Billboard Top Three through March and early April. On March 1, ‘Come As You Are’ was released in the US – it entered the UK charts at number nine, the same week as the reissued Bleach entered the British albums chart at number 33.

  Nirvana mania continued to surge across America. Los Angeles Times reported that a British band called Nirvana from the Sixties was taking the newer version to court over name rights. Gold Mountain ended up paying them $100,000 in an out-of-court settlement.2 A record store in Ventura, CA received a complaint for featuring a baby’s penis on the cover of Nevermind in a window display: it never became an issue, although Geffen did have a contingency plan to airbrush the offending appendage out, or cover it up with a sticker if one of the big chains complained.

  Bootlegs were rife: both of live shows and the ubiquitous demos. Kurtney took it upon themselves to confiscate any copies they saw: bootlegging is a harmless enough pursuit on the whole, but musicians and record companies are obsessed with tracking down miscreants. Courtney claimed it took food directly out of her baby’s mouth, a somewhat distorted view for a woman who was clearly about to become a millionaire many, many times over.

  After a bidding war, Hole signed to Geffen for a reputed one million dollars, despite Courtney’s pregnancy meaning the band had to drop out of playing a projected Reading Festival slot, and despite the fact Hole only consisted of herself and Eric Erlandson at the time. As one record company executive remarked: “Sleeping with Kurt Cobain is worth half a million.”

  “Courtney used to get a lot of flak for going after the famous guy,” says Michael Lavine, “but people forget – or perhaps didn’t know in the first place. She was obsessed with him before he was famous, months and months before. I hung out with Nirvana in LA at the Raji’s show [February 15, 1990]: that was the day I met Courtney. She was in line to see that show. When I photographed Courtney in July 1991, round the time of Nevermind , she was like, ‘Let me see the Kurt pictures. Let me see the Kurt pictures.’ She was crazy for him – and he was crazy for her. Kurt once told me, ‘I like Courtney because she’s the kind of girl who’ll stand up in the middle of the room and smash a glass and then knock the table over for no reason at all.’

  “Great,” Michael laughs. “That’s a great reason to like someone!”

  “In one version of ‘Teen Spirit’, Kurt sang the line ‘Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?’ ” Courtney told me in 1999.3 “Glamour aside, there could be no more perfect couple at the time. We were so right for each other because we were the most antisocial people in our entire area. I was the adventuress who’d gone out, and he was the one who stayed under the bridge, literally. It was great . . . and it was horrible because of all the drugs and the pain and the fear. Kurt was a sweet, sweet guy. People think I look upon that relationship as dysfunctional, and I am a bit disdainful in public because it’s not my job to hold that goddamn flame. I will honour and adore that person because I loved him, but he was grumpy and I am grumpy. It wasn’t a big surprise us getting together, anyone around Seattle knows it was the most normal coupling. It was almost like the Captain and the Cheerleader, in the converse.

  “The mainstream British press was like, ‘She got herself a really good deal,’ ” Courtney continued. “That’s so absurd that I can’t even get defensive about it. It’s like, ‘Huh?’ and it’s been a shock ever since.”

  Kurtney were so private during 1992 that most of Kurt’s Olympia friends were excluded from his life – Ian Dickson, Calvin Johnson, Nikki McClure, Slim Moon, Tobi Vail . . . Most of the people Kurtney would communicate with as a couple would either be management ( Janet Billig, Danny Goldberg), musician friends (Eric Erlandson, Mark Lanegan4), drug buddies (Dylan Carlson, Cali DeWitt) and his family occasionally. On one visit to Aberdeen in April ’92, Kurt’s sister Kim admitted she was gay: something Kurt had already guessed. It still came as a shock to their mother Wendy, though.

  Kurt composed letters to some of his former friends that he never posted. He’d even call them up on the odd occasion. But by choosing to marry Courtney and move to LA, he’d crossed the line.

  “One time Kurt and Mark Lanegan and Courtney came to Olympia and hung out a
t Nikki [ McClure]’ s house for a day,” remembers Slim Moon. “Me and Lanegan walked around and talked, and that was when I met Courtney. It was all very weird. Bratmobile was all down the hall trying to decide whether to do some sabotage or something. There had been this whole thing about Sassy5 where they said that Kurt and Courtney were junkies and Courtney accused Bratmobile of planting that, because Erin [Smith] from Bratmobile was an intern there – like it wasn’t common public knowledge already!”

  I can’t even imagine Courtney meeting Nikki. They seem such disparate personalities: one all artifice and confusion, the other all naïve joy. It’d be like the universe imploding.

  “Kurt didn’t talk,” Slim recalls. “If you directly addressed him, he’d give you a one or two word answer. But when Courtney wasn’t in the bathroom – which she was most of the time – she talked a fucking hundred miles an hour. She was really stuck on this thing how girl bands only write songs in the key of E. She kept repeating the same theory over and over for hours, and then they left. There was really no interaction between the two of them.”

  At the start of April, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was officially declared platinum (sales of one million) in the US, and Nirvana returned to the studio – well, Barrett’s eight-track – to record a couple more songs.

  “I had my studio sent out, and set it up in the basement, which was kind of inadequate, but that’s where I recorded the King Buzzo record6, and the three Nirvana songs,” reveals Barrett Jones. “One was slated for The Wipers’ tribute record [‘Return Of The Rat’], one was slated for The Jesus Lizard split single on Touch And Go [‘Oh, The Guilt’], and one ended up on the B-side of ‘Lithium’ [‘Curmudgeon’]. We did them all in one or two takes. They hadn’t even played the songs before.”

  The songs were devastatingly heavy: it was Grohl’s first opportunity to show what he could really contribute to Nirvana in the studio7, and it seemed like the recording was centred around his churning animal force. ‘Oh, The Guilt’ threatened to disintegrate under a slew of feedback and wrenched guitar strings, Kurt howling out the chorus over and over again, incisive. It was far closer to the Soundgarden-influenced sludge of Bleach than any tuneful Sixties inflexions from Nevermind . Indeed, the recordings were clearly a reaction to the cleaned-up sound on the latter. ‘Curmudgeon’, likewise: although it was nearly ruined by a Hawkwind-esque tunnel effect. This was relentless, heads flailing music. “I think they were trying to be a little more punk rock about the whole thing,” Jones confirms. “They wanted to be as low budget as possible.”