by Everett True
Kurt recovered sufficiently to hold his newborn baby shortly afterwards.
Frances wasn’t a flipper baby at all: not that you’d have known it from all the attention she was receiving. Tabloid reporters from The Enquirer and The Globe were hounding Courtney’s hospital room at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and reporters were going through her garbage and faxes. According to a 1994 interview Courtney gave to Rolling Stone after Kurt’s death, Kurt went out the following day, bought heroin and returned with a loaded .38 revolver, handing it to Courtney where she sat holding Frances Bean as a reminder of a pledge they’d made to commit joint suicide if anything should ever happen to their baby.
Myth becomes difficult to separate from reality again: is this one more example of Courtney’s fondness for embellishment? I only ask because Courtney mentioned the idea of a ‘joint suicide pact’ to me in the dismal months after Kurt’s death. It makes for a lurid tale, but perhaps Courtney had confused facts – which she had a tenuous grasp on, at best, in late ’94 – with emotion. “I can’t remember,” comments Eric Erlandson, who was also present at the birth. “I was delirious from looking after both of them in the hospital, and witnessing a live birth which was pretty intense. Not sleeping. Trying to keep two troubled souls in their hospital rooms long enough for a baby to get born.”
“I’ve never heard that story about the gun,” comments Rosemary Carroll. “In all the confusion and unhappiness that was going on, the focus was not, ‘How do we get ourselves out of this mess?’ It was, ‘How do we get Frances out of this mess?’ ”
Of course, it’s possible it happened – Kurt had a fondness for drugs and guns. And there was no denying his fearsome anger.
“We were totally suicidal. I just decided that, ‘ Fuck it, I don’t want to be in a band any more,’ ” the singer told Michael Azerrad for Musician. “ ‘I want to kill her [ Hirschberg]. As soon as I get out of this fucking hospital I’m going to kill this woman with my bare hands: I’m going to stab her to death. First, I’m going to take her dog and slit its guts out in front of her and then shit all over her and stab her to death.’ ”
There was undoubtedly hysteria surrounding Frances Bean’s birth; two days on, a social worker turned up at the bedside, brandishing a copy of the Vanity Fair article that appeared on August 11 with references to Courtney constantly smoking, Kurt and Courtney being the Nineties version of Sid and Nancy, and Courtney being, “A train-wreck personality: she may be awful, but you can’t take your eyes off her.” Among other exaggerations, Courtney told Hirschberg that she first met Kurt eight years previously in Portland – an obvious lie, as that would have made Kurt about 16.1
Lynn made damning references to Courtney’s drug taking, reporting ‘close friends’ as saying, “It is appalling to think that she would be taking drugs when she knew she was pregnant. We’re all worried about that baby.” Even worse, Courtney told Lynn the couple had been on a binge while they were in New York for Saturday Night Live. “We did a lot of drugs. We got pills, and then we went down to Alphabet City and we copped some dope. Then we got high and went to SNL. After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.”
Courtney later vehemently denied saying any of this. But would Lynn have made the quotes up? She may have got several fundamental details wrong – for instance, the prevalent belief that Courtney turned Kurt on to heroin, and that the UK music press had been interested in Courtney only because of her husband – but misquoting an artist is pretty serious, and Hirschberg was a pro. Whatever the truth, the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services chose to believe the Hirschberg version and successfully petitioned on August 24 to have Frances Bean turned over to the custody of Courtney’s half-sister Jamie Rodriguez until Kurt completed a 30-day detox. Courtney wasn’t even allowed to take Frances Bean with her when she returned home after three days.
“The Vanity Fair article was devastating to Courtney,” says Carroll. “Courtney spent a lot of time with Lynn Hirschberg and believed she’d won her over – that Lynn liked her and spent a lot of time with Courtney because she enjoyed being in her company. That she would write a glowing piece. Of course, she did what many journalists do, wormed her way into her inner circle and then eviscerated her in print in the worst possible way. Many things were true, but many weren’t or were terribly exaggerated, and the whole thing was so bitter and jealous and sarcastic. It was a hateful piece. Hole was still punk rock at that time – and punk rock doesn’t do the front cover of Vanity Fair. I thought the very idea of doing the interview was ridiculous but Courtney was ambitious. She always saw herself moving into mainstream, like Madonna. She wanted to be Madonna basically.”
Danny Goldberg rented Jamie a place to live right next door to the couple – before the hearing she’d barely even spoken to Courtney – and the pair hired their first nanny – tour manager and friend of Janet Billig – Jackie Farry. Jackie looked after Frances for the next eight months, moving into the Oakwood Apartments complex that Nirvana had stayed in while they were recording Nevermind .
“Jackie wanted to make a change in her life,” reveals Janet Billig. “She was working in the promotion department at Epic and she was one of my best friends. Things just worked. They had to have a nanny and Jackie was someone everyone could trust, because everyone knew her and she was great with babies.”
Courtney argued that she’d been clean ever since she discovered she’d been pregnant – but her pleas fell on deaf ears. The authorities were on a roll, able to take the higher moral ground and proselytise about the dangers of drug use. Kurt and Courtney were high profile – they didn’t come much higher profile – and the state was determined to make an example of them, despite having little evidence to go on beyond the Vanity Fair piece, and a couple of scummy tabloid articles that appeared a few weeks later (sample: “Rock Star’s Baby Is Born A Junkie,” as published by The Globe on September 8).
There was a voice of reason in the Vanity Fair article, but unfortunately no one chose to listen to it. “Only about a quarter of what Courtney says is true,” Kat Bjelland told Hirschberg. “But nobody usually bothers to decipher which are the lies. She’s all about image. And that’s interesting. Irritating, but interesting.”
The pair attempted damage limitation – authorising joint interviews to run with trusted friends in the music press – but it was far too little, too late.
“We went to Steve Fisk’s apartment in the Scud building,” remembers Jonathan Poneman. “The idea was that they wanted a puff piece. I didn’t go in there with a particular agenda. It was just, ‘Hey, I’m psyched, these are my friends, what’s going on, tell me your side of the story,’ and that was it. Spin published it. In retrospect, I was played for a fool.”
I had a similar experience. Poneman did the second joint interview (after Sassy earlier in the year, which was nothing to do with Vanity Fair). I did the third. Both were damage limitation. I wasn’t aware of what was going on with regards to the kid. I knew that most of the Vanity Fair article was true because Courtney would call me up straight after she had spoken to Lynn Hirschberg and tell me what she’d just said, laughing, saying what a great person Lynn was, how understanding she was, how this article would help with her acceptance into mainstream America. And then she’d be telling me how she’d posed semi-naked smoking a cigarette, how candid she’d been over her drug use and emotional problems, how she’d basically opened her heart to her and how much Lynn appreciated it.
And I’d be like, “You know, you probably shouldn’t be saying that stuff to a professional journalist. It’s one thing to tell me – I totally get your sense of humour, the sarcasm, the self-deprecation, the goofiness and aggressiveness, and I also have an inbuilt switch where I won’t repeat some of the stuff you tell me, I understand it’s said in confidence and not meant for popular consumption, between friends – but you shouldn’t judge all journalists by me, or even by my colleagues at the UK music press. We’re amateurs, enthusiasts, fans: we aren’t hard-nosed
, there to get the story at any cost. How do you know you can trust this woman? You don’t know her, she isn’t from Olympia or Portland or Minneapolis, she didn’t grow up loving punk rock and freaked out by the outside world – she’s mainstream. It’s one thing to tell me all your scurrilous, hilarious, outrageous stories. It’s another to tell a total stranger, however ingratiating she is.”
Courtney would simply brush away my objections – indeed, view them as so insignificant as to not even notice them, just race on to the next ribald anecdote she’d told Lynn.2
At the height of all this madness, four days after the court hearing to decide Frances Bean’s fate, Nirvana flew into England to headline the 1992 Reading Festival. It was the largest show they ever played in the UK, and also the last.
Reading Festival, Part One: Everett True
First, let me tell you about the wig.
It was a present from my sister Alison. The previous year at Reading I’d been threatened several times by Melody Maker readers: two with knives. I had a very visible presence, the most visible of the UK music press at the time. A pair had wandered up to where I was chatting with John Silva, and asked in a threatening fashion if he was Everett True. He reassured them that he wasn’t. “Well, how can we find him then?” the dastardly duo demanded. “Oh, he’s ugly; very, very ugly,” said John, laughing. “In fact, he’s the ugliest person on the site. In fact, I have a feeling I just saw him go into that backstage area over there.” With a gruff thank you, the pair went over to stalk the exit that John had pointed to. I told my sister the story, and a week before the 1992 Reading I received the wig in the post: “So you can dance unrecognised,” she wrote. So I took it along, danced in the rain to Teenage Fanclub and got recognised anyway. Whatever.
Later on, I was hanging around backstage in Nirvana’s dressing room. It was Sunday, August 30. All day long the rumours had been flying around the site that Nirvana wouldn’t show. Kurt had OD’d on the heroin he was rumoured to be taking. Kurt was with his wife and proud new mother back in the States. Kurt was pissed off with the security arrangements. It didn’t look that way to me where I was slumped against a wall, but who knows? Someone had passed me a bottle of vodka – Mudhoney, perhaps – and I’d drunk it. Willingly, and with an alacrity that indicated there would be trouble to come. The rumours keep increasing, wilder and wilder. Maybe Kurt was refusing to show up because of the caustic reception his wife Courtney Love was receiving in certain sections of the British press? I knew that one wasn’t true, because I’d spoken to Courtney the previous night in America – where she was resting with the newly born Frances Bean. There were also stories that it was to be Nirvana’s final show: something the band strenuously denied on stage.
The mud. That’s all anyone remembers of that Reading. The mud. There were great seeping pools of it, making entire areas of the site unpassable to all but the most foolhardy. When inspirational political rap outfit Public Enemy headlined the Saturday night, the skies opened and drenched the entire crowd with the contents of a minor-sized ocean. Kids slithered around the grounds, bodies and faces and legs and trousers and New Model Army3 T-shirts absolutely saturated by mud: the few desultory fires flickering in sheltered spots, fuelled by plastic cups and Kurt Cobain posters, not helping the cold one jot. During the Sunday, bands got pelted with tons of the stuff. Artists reacted in different ways. Mudhoney downed their instruments and started pelting the audience back. “You guys can’t throw,” taunted Mark Arm. “You’re used to playing soccer and kicking balls with your feet.” Just then a sizeable lump of Berkshire hit him smack in the face. “That’ll learn me,” he remarked afterwards. “Never taunt an armed audience.” Baggy Labour cheerleaders The Farm tried to chin offenders. L7’ s singer Donita Sparks topped everyone, however, by reaching into her shorts and lobbing her tampon at the worst offenders.4
You could have heard a used tampon drop.
Backstage, it seemed unreal. The rain and mud had managed to keep the usual teeming array of liggers down to a bare dedicated minimum, certainly early on5 – plus there was a ban on any non-personal friends of Nirvana wandering around backstage proper. This suited me fine. It meant I was one of the very few with access to decent toilet facilities that day – mega-important at any festival – and upped the availability of alcohol.
Nick Cave was on shortly before Nirvana, and I can remember a handful of us – Fannies (Teenage Fanclub), roadies, the odd tour manager – all stepping outside Nirvana’s Portacabin to listen to the Aussie singer serenade the battered, splattered crowd with ‘The Weeping Song’ and ‘Deanna’, and thinking how hugely inappropriate it was. This was Grunge Day – Nirvana had cherry-picked the artists (ace Abba tribute band Bjorn Again, L7, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Melvins, Pavement6, Beastie Boys and Teenage Fanclub), and Cave seemed so out-of-place, so cerebral. Up went the cry: where’s the Mud, honey?
Nirvana showed up late: maybe they’d just flown in from another festival in Europe. I can’t recall. I don’t think they’d been hanging around the Ramada, though – notorious hotel haunt of bands, post-festival time. Suddenly, the tiny dressing room was all hustle and bustle and managers and promoters running every which way: in one corner, Tony, the band’s personal idiot savant dancer, was slapping on layers of make-up, checking his reflection in the mirror. Plates of curling cheese and ham lay untouched on the side among the peanuts and Smarties, the bottles of beer under the tables in their coolers. It was hard to know what was going on. Kurt came over and made sure I had enough to drink: checked the name of my girlfriend. Someone was shouting something about a wheelchair: “Where did you put that fucking wheelchair?” they roared. Someone – Nirvana’s tour manager, Alex MacLeod probably – poured me whiskey as someone else started to unfold the seat. Hey, what gives? My confusion turned to befuddlement.
“They’re going to wheel me on stage in that,” Kurt explained. “It’s like a joke on all the people who’ve been having a go at us, saying that I’m in hospital, OD’d. Do you like my smock?”
“Oh, I see,” I said, not understanding one bit. “Well, why don’t you wear this wig my sister sent me as well, it will make you look a little bit more like Courtney and confuse everyone further.” Kurt tried the wig on (he already had hair extensions) and approved. Alex fed me more whiskey in a futile attempt to make me unconscious. Fat chance. It was almost time to go on stage: someone dimly asked someone else whether Kurt should wheel himself on stage or . . . “Hey!” I shouted, pissed off my head. “Let me push that! I can push that! Let me push Kurt on to the stage. It’d be way funnier.”
No one could think of a good enough excuse to stop me.
Thus we found ourselves hurried along up the side of the stage while in the distance a mighty crowd clapped and cheered. I have little memory of what happened next. There was a drunken wheelchair chase where I pushed Kurt round in ever-increasing circles in hot pursuit of the L7 girls on the side of the stage, while 20-foot drops waited invitingly and managerial types muttered among themselves about how they were going to, “Kill this fucking drunken English asshole journalist.” Neither of us knew where the stage’s edge was: we could easily have gone over. Charles Peterson, the photographer who defined the look of Seattle grunge, snapped us while we spun around laughing, framed in the spotlight. We waited a few minutes in the wings while Krist did his whole introduction thing – and then came the moment . . .
The lights. That’s all I can remember. The lights. You can’t see a single face. The crowd is invisible, and all that you feel is this incredible euphoric roar that increases every step you make towards the microphone.
“He’ll be OK,” Krist Novoselic reassured the crowd, pointing out to the wings, where we slowly materialised: “With the help of his friends and his family, he’ll survive.” We started walking up to the right hand microphone and halfway across the stage Kurt reached up and grappled my neck. “Great,” I thought to myself in my drunken stupor. “Kurt wants to start a mock-fight like we used to have on stag
e with Nirvana.” I started to wrestle him back. “No, you asshole,” he whispered furiously. “You’re wheeling me to the wrong mic.”
It was a goof, a cocked pair of fingers at all the press reports of the singer being sick, unable to play with his band. Kurt climbed out of the wheelchair, unsteadily, dressed in hospital smock and wig, sang one line of a song . . . and collapsed. The crowd laughed and cheered, relieved. It was obvious the band were out to have a good time. And fuck, so they did – in fact, the show was so superior to any others they played during 1992, it was like another band altogether. It was like it was 1990 again, and the Olympia trio didn’t have a care in the world.
Twelve songs in, the band deliberately cocked up the intro to ‘Teen Spirit’, Dave Grohl bellowing out the words to Boston’s ‘More Than A Feeling’ over a false start. Kurt wrecked all the guitar breaks too, but it hardly mattered – the entire world had gone ballistic. With the exception of ‘Something In The Way’, Nevermind was played in its entirety: including a typically over-the-top encore of the traditional instrument-baiting ‘Territorial Pissings’ – Dave Grohl hurled a cymbal at a bass drum he’d carefully balanced on top of some speakers, seeing the entire stack collapse very pleasingly. Guitars got trashed, and the audience’s throats went raw singing along with ‘Negative Creep’, ‘Aneurysm’ et al. It was like Nirvana were mocking their own importance up there and reaffirming their own mortality – not rock Gods, but three ordinary dudes out to have a fucking blast. This was the last truly great show I saw them play as a trio. We might have had mud on our soles (and in our hair, and on our faces and trousers and underwear) but fuck we were happy.