Nirvana

by Everett True

  “Courtney’s had some bad things written about her in the press recently,” her doting hubby announced. “And now she thinks everybody hates her. I know this concert is being recorded, so I’d like to send a message to her. I’d like you all to say, ‘Courtney, we love you . . .’ ”

  The audience shouted the fucking site down.

  “I remember Kurt calling Courtney on the cell phone from on stage,” laughs Jennifer Finch. “I’d never seen a cell phone before. Yes, there were many people yelling, ‘We love you Courtney,’ yet I was sitting there transfixed on this cell phone. She’d just given birth, right? That was when I got to take back the pound I’d given her [see chapter 19].”

  So I pushed Kurt Cobain on stage in a wheelchair for what turned out to be his final UK concert. Big deal. He’d have done the same for me.

  After the furore from Reading had died down, Melody Maker ran a competition to, “Win the wig that Kurt Cobain wore at Reading”. (I ran on after the show’s end, and grabbed the wig as a keepsake. I thought that perhaps my sister might need it back. I wasn’t sure how much wigs cost.) No one wrote in. They didn’t believe it. So we trailed the competition even bigger the following week, writing something like, “Listen you dunderheads! This is for real! The first person to write in with the best reason why they couldn’t actually get to Reading to see Nirvana wins the wig, and we’ll print the winning entry.”

  This time, we were deluged with entries. We printed the winning one: it was a pithy, witty, beautifully structured and reasoned piece of writing. We congratulated the winner, commiserated with them for missing Nirvana and informed them that they were by far and away the finest entry we received.

  Trouble was, by this point I’d decided I wanted to keep the wig for myself.

  Part Two: Charles Peterson

  “I’d seen Kurt earlier in the day, but I hadn’t been in on the joke. Just for a minute there, when I saw the wheelchair, I thought, ‘ Fuck, what’s wrong with Kurt?’ Then I realised what you guys were up to. So I took the picture of Kurt in the wheelchair, smoking, and you standing behind him. You pushed him out on to the stage and left him there. He got up to grab the microphone and fell over, and I think the wheelchair fell over. It was eerie because there were like 60,000 people present, and they were deathly quiet. You could hear a pin drop. Nobody had any idea what was going on.

  “Anton got me out to the side of the stage – the only two photographers allowed there were me and [Melody Maker photographer] Kevin Westen-berg on the other side. Eric Erlandson sat next to me for a while doing some videotaping, but for the most part I was sitting there alone; Nirvana in front of me, and a fucking 20-foot drop to the other side, and then 60,000 people. It was epic, to say the least.

  “I was mostly used to being in a club where one minute you’re drinking at the bar with the band and the next they’re on stage. I recall going to the press tent and seeing a list of photographers, just unbelievable: 70 or 80 photographers. I went out to photograph Mudhoney, and because the women running the press tent knew how far I’d come, they let me out there longer than everyone else. I was there with Kevin – whom I’d known from when he lived in Seattle. Kevin’s really tall and he was wearing all white for some reason. During Mudhoney this huge mud fight started. I turned around to my side and I’m kind of watching Kevin and he’s hunkered down a little, his shoulders are lowered, he’s looking over his shoulder. All of a sudden this, boom, boom, boom, he gets hit three or four times – his white jean jacket and pants. He’s done for.

  “I walked backstage at the bar to get a drink with Mark Lanegan, and Mark’s walking along and talking as he does, and not paying attention. All of a sudden his foot caught one of those guide wires for a tent. He didn’t even put out his arms, he just went, face first into the mud. His whole body was horizontal with the ground. He got up and there’s this one long mud stripe covering the entire front of his body.”

  Part Three: Mudhoney

  Do you remember the mud fight in ’92?

  “Oh yeah,” laughs Steve Turner. “We have footage of that. That was pretty funny. It was muddy. We knew we were in for it. We were like, ‘ Geez, man. Our name’s Mudhoney. We’re doomed.’ It was fun. Whatever.”

  “I knew we were in trouble because L7 played early on, and mud was being slung up at them . . . and we were then, as we are now, known as Mudhoney,” comments Mark Arm laconically. “I had this brand new white SG shaped Les Paul – it got totally pelted with mud. Pretty sad. We didn’t handle it very well. Donita threw a tampon at the crowd, so we couldn’t top that. I know we started flinging mud back at a certain point. The mud kept coming on stage and it wasn’t really hitting us. So I said, ‘You know, in America, we have this game called baseball, and we know how to aim!’ Right as I was saying that, this fucking mud-ball hit me in the face! That hurt – that mud had rocks in it! I lost my cool a little bit after that.”

  “Every time we played Reading was nothing but a pure gas,” enthuses Dan Peters. “It was so much fun because it was like you were hanging out with a bunch of your friends. We all would look around at each other and go like, “What the fuck are we doing here, how did this happen?” My favourite Reading Festival was the one with Sonic Youth, the Bad Seeds, The Cramps . . . All the bands were cool and they were all hanging out. Nobody was playing the rock star.”

  Part Four: Earnie Bailey

  So you didn’t see the Reading show?

  “No, there was a lot of argument about that,” replies Kurt’s former guitar tech. “How the fuck can Nirvana play Reading with one tech? Festivals typically are stressful because you don’t have all day to sound-check and make sure everything is tops. In 1992, Big John would work the European shows, and I would work the US shows. And we’d be doing these shows single-handedly, which was difficult because they were a huge band and gear-wise they were very high maintenance. When they returned [from Reading] they said that Krist’s bass had been stolen off the stage after that show, as Big John could only be on one side at a time. Essentially, he had to set up his guitar station and tune a spare bass for Krist and set it over by his amp – and nobody was watching it. I was always puzzled with that. Was there no security around? It was a big festival! How could somebody walk off with Krist’s bass and nobody find it? It was the Gibson RD he’d played throughout the Nevermind tour, a heavy favourite. I think he was a little bit broken-hearted about it, but . . .

  “Dave apologised to me because they smashed a lot of guitars. Dave was grabbing them off the rack and just throwing them. One of them had videotaped it, and as soon as they got back to Seattle we watched it on Krist’s television. Dave looked over to me and said, ‘I’m really sorry for what you’re about to see,’ as he ran over to Kurt’s rack, took a guitar off and gratuitously smashed it. Meanwhile, Kurt was up there smashing his drums. It was actually hilarious – oh, if you’re going to smash my drums, I’m going to smash your guitar. But Dave knew that I worked hard on those guitars, getting them right.

  “I thought Krist’s leather jacket looked odd. It was an unusual outfit for him. I think he had leather pants on as well. I could be wrong. When we were down in Argentina, he and Big John set out to buy some leather pants, and that was odd because Krist was heavy on the vegetarian cause. I think the story they got down there was that cattle was such a big industry that leather was really not a consequential part. It wasn’t why the cows are killed, it’s a leftover thing.”

  Addenda: Everett True (reprise)

  Understand this: I’ve always despised rock music. For me, it’s the language of the braggarts, the fools – those boys at public school who liked to go around sneering at others for no reason except it gave their own pathetic lives some purpose. It’s the music of the playground bullies, the fake revolutionaries, the kids whose idea of rebellion is sneaking out at lunchtime to have a quick fag behind the bike shed, the conformists. It’s music for people who admire James Dean’s vacant, clueless rebel stance and leather jacket, desiring style over
content. It’s music for the thugs, the beer-boys, the ones who were good at gym and on the sports field, the ones who weren’t but always dreamed of being macho somehow. It’s music for the proles, the hopeless, hapless masses who like to pretend they’re different and daring for a couple of years before growing up to be precisely the same, precisely as conservative as the generation before them and the generation before that.

  For me, rock music is about rules, peer pressure, conformity, misogyny, sexism, ageism, hatred of outsiders, mob rule, anti-style as fascism. It’s dictated to and ruled by people like Guns N’ Roses, Slipknot and Jim Morrison, eternally re-treading the path of those who came before. It’s about looking backwards, never to the future. It’s retrogressive, searching out the lowest common denominator. Rock music leads to exploitation, degradation, segregation of any freethinking, revolutionary outsiders. Always.

  Understand this: not only do I not believe in utopian ideals (the concept of paradise seems to cancel out that most basic of human instincts – the need to struggle), I don’t even believe in rock music . . . if that doesn’t sound too stupid. In terms of vibrancy or potency or potential for change or anything, rock was supplanted at the end of the Eighties by acid house, rave, dance, electronica and their kin. One of the best ways to judge the effectiveness of an artistic medium to alter or help shape popular opinion is to observe the establishment’s reaction to it. In the UK, the government has been trying to bring dance music under its control for an eternity now. Contrast this with pop and rock music where members of the ruling elite hobnob with the rock hierarchy, primetime TV programmes are devoted to rock musical knowledge, and rock awards ceremonies take on absurd levels of pomposity. Rock sometimes proudly boasts that it can bridge generations: it should not be so proud of that claim, not at all. The vital music, or art, has always been that which creates sociological divides.

  Rock music was founded on a lie: white men usurping the black man’s heritage, pretty boy Elvis setting all the teenage kids a-squealing with a wiggle of his white boy hips. It was also exclusively male, created for and by men with a compulsive need to strut their cocks once they were no longer in the army. Gold help you if you were female, wanting in: rock’s attitudes towards what it perceives as ‘the opposite sex’ are still mainly stuck in the decade it sprang from – the Fifties. Rock revels in its lack of options – unless you think stars like Perry Farrell and Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan with their merciless selling of US ‘counterculture’ events such as Lollapalooza and the all-female Lilith Fair during the Nineties were providing alternatives. Sure, they were. It’s always alternative to be compartmentalised.

  Nirvana knew all this. But it sometimes seemed like the sheer weight of rock history threatened to outweigh any small advances they might have made in trying to disturb the status quo. Very quickly, whether Kurt liked it or not, Nirvana became co-opted by the very art form they were trying to subvert and came to represent the entire pantheon of rock music – at least in the eyes of thousands of stupid boys going on in school playgrounds about how ‘Kurt is God’ and that girls (still!) couldn’t play music.

  In the sleeve notes to Incesticide , the Nirvana ‘rarities’ collection released in December 1992, Kurt sent a ‘ fuck you’ to those he felt thought he was naïve and stupid enough to be manipulated by his wife. He ended up by writing: “I don’t feel the least bit guilty for commercially exploiting a completely exhausted Rock youth Culture because, at this point in rock history, Punk Rock (while still sacred to some) is, to me, dead and gone. We just wanted to pay tribute to something that helped us to feel as though we had crawled out of the dung heap of conformity, to pay tribute like an Elvis or Jimi Hendrix impersonator in the tradition of a bar band. I’ll be the first to admit that we’re the Nineties version of Cheap Trick or The Knack, but the last to admit that it hasn’t been rewarding – Kurdt (the blond one).”

  Well, he said it.

  NOTES

  1 But one that has since been extensively reported as fact, with only the year date changed.

  2 The interaction between myself and Courtney over the Vanity Fair article got reported in Melissa Rossi’s entertainingly trashy book Courtney Love: Queen Of Noise: “Before the interview sessions with reporter Lynn Hirschberg, who was known for well-crafted fluff pieces, Courtney ran into Melody Maker’s Everett True; as always, he fawned over her. She asked him how she should act for the interview, and he told her she should be herself. The next time Courtney saw Everett, she said, ‘You gave me bad advice.’ ”

  3 New Model Army were a mid-Eighties British agit-punk band, popular with ‘the kids’.

  4 Donita was also notorious for pulling down her trousers and exposing herself live on British youth TV programme The Word.

  5 It might also have been the year that the Mean Fiddler tent struggled free of its moorings and flew off into the sunset.

  6 I initially compared NYC band Pavement to abrasive, caustic post-punks The Fall, but that was like comparing mountain streams to icebergs. Like every great rock band since The Sex Pistols, Pavement sought to destroy rock while reinvesting the form with meaning. They wrote great pop songs, songs that drew heavily from the mid-Seventies (Cheap Trick, Steely Dan, Badfinger), yet retained enough of a twist and overflowing love for music to keep them away from the traps of their forebears. You could draw parallels between singer Stephen Malkmus’ smart, sassy music and that of arch chameleon David Bowie, but Steve never struck me as cynical. Disturbed, maybe, but cynical, no. Pavement’s 1992 debut album, the still-glistening Slanted And Enchanted, rocked with an urbane freshness reminiscent of Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers.

  CHAPTER 22

  Shut Your Bitch Up

  IT happened too fast.

  Somewhere along the line, our dreams came true and we never had a chance to reconcile them with our ideals. Nothing untoward happened for Nirvana that hadn’t happened to a thousand other bands, so what was it that felt so bad? Perhaps we were too naïve. We didn’t realise that people could take and twist our words and actions into any shapes they desired. The demonising of Courtney was a symptom, not the cause, of all that followed. It’s very likely that no one twisted her words in any highfalutin’ publication, all that was different was the focus applied.

  Life is all about context and perception. We were used to existing in our own tiny insular worlds where everyone knew everyone and everyone behaved in a roughly similar fashion on roughly the same level. In rock, there’s nothing unusual or odd about taking drugs, being outspoken or having opinions that fluctuate from day to day. Indeed, it’s expected. The world of musicians and the music press is different to the world of the mainstream press. Music critics have no real power. There’s far more hypocrisy in the ‘real’ press than in what to all intents and purposes is still a ‘fan’ press: celebrities go to extraordinary lengths to make sure their actual characters are never exposed. This was a lesson that Courtney, for one, learned too late.

  Nirvana’s 1992 Reading performance was an aberration, chronologically speaking. It was obvious the trio were enjoying themselves, but as a creative unit Nirvana were almost spent. Krist and Dave – and later, extra musicians such as Pat Smear – were still an incredible musical force to be reckoned with, and without them, Kurt would have had real trouble fulfilling his visions. By the end of 1992, though, he seemed intent on reducing their role to that of backing musicians.

  Some time between the end of ’91 and summer ’92, everything changed. Kurt’s paranoia and drug taking became more intense; he became separated from his close friends and in particular Krist when he moved down to LA; Courtney became pregnant. The one focus in Kurt’s life became his love for Courtney. Look at the lyrics to In Utero ; almost every song deals with his wife and/or her vilification in the press. It’s possible, too, that after having been on almost constant tour for over 18 months, Kurt was never given a chance to return to normality. For him, the old normality didn’t exist any more. Contrast this with his bandma
tes who both had a chance to readjust to life. Krist returned to Shelli in Seattle, and immersed himself in good causes, trying to make use of his fame. And Dave?

  Dave was saving for the future, enjoying the ride.

  By the time the echoes from Nevermind had died down, Nirvana barely meant anything to Kurt any more: certainly not within the context of being a ‘radio friendly unit shifter’.1 Even worse than that, the group found themselves unable to play the small clubs they and their punk heroes cherished. You create music because you feel a primal urge – right? If you want to make money, there are far easier ways than to prostitute your soul.

  I stayed in contact with Kurt and Courtney over this period. I was probably one of the few who spoke to both sides of the marriage. Yes, it was sudden, so sudden that when the idea was first suggested, Courtney realised she hadn’t actually divorced Falling James. I was told that Kurtney had tried to get married secretly a few months earlier in Seattle, only for Courtney to realise she needed an annulment first.

  I know what I haven’t asked any of you. When are you going back into the studio?

  “Next month, as soon as we get home,” replies Kurt. “When I move into my tree house we’ll become a band again because we’ll all be in the same place. I live in a tree house.”

  So you’re planning to record on an eight-track.

  “I think that’s what we’d like to do,” the singer nods. “I’ve mentioned it to Chris and Dave a couple of times but we haven’t decided on anything concrete. The idea is to go into Reciprocal with Jack Endino and rent exactly the same equipment as was there when we recorded Bleach. We record all the songs there with Jack on an eight-track, record them somewhere else again on a 24-track with Steve Albini 2, and then pick the best.”