Nirvana

by Everett True

  Everywhere the couple turned, it seemed they were under attack.

  Minor Liverpool pop star Julian Cope – famous for his vegetarianism, his vanities and his dedication to Krautrock – took out an ad in the British music press to vent his spleen on his former fan: “Free us,” he wrote, “(the rock’n’roll fans) from Nancy Spungen-fixated heroin a holes who cling to our greatest rock groups and suck out their brains.” This was risible; sexist, and a charge that had been equally as wrongly made at Yoko Ono 20 years earlier when she started dating John Lennon. Cope fell into the same trap as Axl Rose: assuming that because he’d read about Kurt Cobain a couple of times, it gave him the right to pontificate about his private life.

  Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins, two British-based writers, started work on a semi-authorised biography of Nirvana, Nirvana: Flower Sniffin’, Kitty Pettin’, Baby Kissin’ Corporate Rock Whores – a book named after one of Nirvana’s early T-shirt slogans that quickly became unauthorised after Kurtney learnt they were planning on speaking to Lynn Hirschberg and had already spoken to Falling James. They suspected a stitch-up.

  This assumption led to one of the nastiest incidents of Kurt Cobain’s life, where he – and Courtney, and Dave – left a series of messages on Victoria and Britt’s home phones, threatening to kill them (some from Jack Endino’s studio). They might have got Gold Mountain to deny it and later claimed it was a joke – but it didn’t sound very funny at the time. Kurtney were in a powerful position and quite able to carry out threats if they wanted to: and from the way Kurt talked about it afterwards, it certainly seemed they wanted to. Sure, the two writers were opportunist, but that hasn’t stopped scores of journalists since.

  One night, Kurt called Victoria’s answer machine nine times, his invective ranging from, “If anything comes out in this book which hurts my wife, I’ll fucking hurt you,” to calling the pair “parasitic little cunts” and claiming that, “I could throw out a few hundred thousand dollars to have you snuffed out, but maybe I’ll try the legal way first.” His anger, verging on the misogynistic, was creepy and depressing. Victoria and Britt were being made scapegoats for all the anger and confusion Kurt felt about his life – but he confirmed to his biographer Michael Azerrad in 1993 that he was justified in his actions: “I’m a firm believer in revenge,” he growled.

  Courtney’s messages were just as vitriolic. A couple of months later, there was an incident in an LA club where Courtney was alleged to have hit Clarke with a glass. Victoria filed a complaint with the LA Police Department. Courtney filed a counter-complaint the following day, claiming it was self-defence.

  “I ended up covered in beer on the ground,” Clarke told one Nirvana documentary maker, “and she pulled me along the floor by my hair and tried to get me outside. It was quite scary.”

  Well, I remember the scene at Melody Maker when the story broke: my news department yelling at me to get a statement – while in my other ear, Courtney is excitedly talking down the telephone, howling with laughter about the event, as I try to tell her: first, this really isn’t the time or the place to talk about this, and second, I can’t condone this sort of behaviour ever, especially considering how many threats had been made against me.

  Gold Mountain filed a suit against the pair if they ever published the book, after having obtained an advance copy of part of the manuscript. An Irish magazine published Gold Mountain’s complaints in full: I can’t remember the other 29 or so, but I do recall that one of them was that, “Courtney Love does not believe Everett True is an asshole.” Well . . . it was nice to know!

  “Courtney used to call me up all the time,” comments Slim Moon. “She’d send me and Mary Lou faxes. There was one fax that was reportedly from Kurt, but seemed to be from Courtney about how, ‘I never liked you and I’d rather see your head stuck in an oven.’ Time passed and she took on this whole new tactic where she would say, ‘Kurt needs friends who are a better influence. Your friends all suck, but I like you, so you should come have dinner with us.’ I didn’t feel comfortable doing that. If the invitation had come from Kurt, I’d have gone, but it didn’t.”

  That autumn, Nirvana made a handful of secret appearances.

  Kurt joined Sonic Youth and Mudhoney on stage in Valencia, California on September 26, where he performed the harrowing Leadbelly song, ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ and played guitar on Mudhoney’s cover of ‘The Money Will Roll Right In’.

  On October 3–4, Nirvana opened for Mudhoney. The first show was at Western Washington University in Bellingham, two hours drive from Seattle. “That was a lot of fun,” says Earnie, “because it was genuinely a surprise. At the end of Mudhoney’s set Matt Lukin brought these kids up out of the crowd, and one wound up with Krist’s bass, and he was going to smash it. I thought it was pretty funny, but Krist was looking at me like, ‘No, don’t let him smash that bass,’ but he didn’t want to be the one to stop it . . .”

  Charles Peterson attended both shows – the final shows at which he’d photograph Nirvana. “Bellingham was really good,” he told Goldmine. “There were all these student photographers down in the pit, and there was this one guy, he’s got his camera, and he’s dancing around, but he’s right in front of where Kurt is. I’m like, ‘If you’re not going to take pictures, get out of the way.’ And he was like, ‘I’ve only got one shot left and I’m waiting for the destruction!’

  “And the brilliant thing was, that night they didn’t destroy their instruments,” Peterson added. “These two kids came on stage and Kurt draped his guitar around one of them, and Krist draped his guitar around the other kid’s neck. And everyone was like ‘Smash it! Smash it!’ And somehow this kid hauled Krist’s bass over his head and smashed it on to the stage. Alex, their tour manager, is back there with his head in his hands, cos Krist never smashed his basses. It was the perfect ending.”

  “That was the show I gave Kurt that sunburst Univox guitar,” Earnie continues. “I felt like he was in this weird frame of mind, and wanted to give him a guitar like he used to play. He really liked it, and played the Univox on the 1993 Saturday Night Live show and In Utero . It was a pretty important instrument.”

  The next night, Nirvana played support to Mudhoney once more – this time at Seattle’s Crocodile Café: Kurt’s happiness at being in a small club again was infectious. He stagedived during Mudhoney’s set, and jammed on a few punk rock numbers. Gillian G. Gaar, who was interviewing Courtney for The Rocket the same day, picks up the story: “The phone rings, and it’s Patti [ Schemel, ex-Seattle band Kill Sybil and Hole’s new drummer],” says Gillian. “She says, can you meet and talk with Courtney in an hour’s time? So I go down to the Four Seasons [the fancy five-star downtown hotel where the Kurtney camp stayed for two months] and Courtney comes down – on time. She brings Frances with her. I really liked her. I’d ask her a question and she’d go off on this long spiel and eventually circle in and answer the question. She just had a huge amount of context to set up her answer. But she was funny and had a lot of great anecdotes. She’d been in Hollywood and the music scene. She was self-deprecating, too. I came away thinking she had been given a bad rep.

  “Later, I saw the Crocodile show and it was great,” the journalist continues. “Word got out, so it was full. They did a lot of unfamiliar material and were having a good time. During the set Kurt asked if there were any requests, so Krist leant over and in a funny voice goes, ‘Play “Teen Spirit”. Play “Teen Spirit”.’ But they didn’t.

  “Then I got word that Courtney’s management had said she didn’t want to do the interview – which was my first clue to how there was a disconnection between Kurt and Courtney and her management.”

  Why do you think Courtney got a bad rep?

  “She doesn’t hold back, does she?” Gillian laughs. “She has no idea what self-censorship means. She doesn’t restrain herself, like if she’s mad at someone she’ll just blurt it out and attack him or her. It’s like she doesn’t care, so that rubs people the wrong
way. Maybe part of it was there were a lot of rumours going on about Nirvana, and no one knew what the true story was. And whenever Kurt was in the hospital, it was always, oh, the stomach thing.

  “Oh yeah, she was going to break up Nirvana, when it fact it was her band that fell apart in that period. She put everything on hold to be with Kurt, and have Frances. So she’s not only a bad mother, she’s ruining Nirvana.”

  On October 15, Nirvana filmed a video for the new British single, ‘In Bloom’. It was the fourth track to be released off Nevermind as a single in the UK, and it seemed that Geffen were milking the album a little too much – even for the most diehard Nirvana fans.

  “Nirvana have a new single out,” I wrote in Melody Maker, relegating the single to an also-ran the same week I made Christina Kelly’s caustic, feminist Chia Pet Single Of The Week. “Pop those corks. Hang high your washing. Feed the cat, and don’t stint on the servings. Whoop whoop bloody whoop. Forgive me if I don’t sound too thrilled. This release is stretching even my credulity beyond repair. Like, milking a still-breathing (sacred) cow, or what? Badly inferior live versions of ‘Polly’ and ‘Sliver’ on the flip don’t help matters either. I know ‘In Bloom’ is an awesome double-edged terrace anthem and the video’s cool, but . . . Save your money for the Incesticide , kids. Now, that’s worth buying.”

  The video for ‘In Bloom’ certainly was cool. Directed by Kevin Kerslake, three versions were made – all shot on Kinescope, parodying the classic US Sixties variety programme, The Ed Sullivan Show. One featured the band in dresses, one in Beach Boys-style suits and dresses, and the other in the suits alone. Imagine Ritchie Cunningham’s achingly square band in Happy Days, or The Monkees on prime-time kids’ TV, and you’ll get a good idea of the feel: Nirvana appear un-hip with their short hair and geeky glasses next to all the manic grunge kids watching them in the video audience – a smart satire of the manufactured, carefully marketed bands they were competing alongside for MTV’s attention – but I knew which side I’d rather be on.

  “Let’s hear it for these three nice, decent, clean-cut young men,” the announcer says at the video’s end, as the band suddenly appeared into drag and started destroying their equipment. “I really can’t say enough nice things about them!”

  ET: Why did you wear a dress in the new video for ‘In Bloom’?

  KC: “I don’t know. I like to wear dresses because they’re comfortable. If I could wear a sheet, I would. I don’t know what to say . . . If I said we do it to be subversive then that would be a load of shit because men in bands wearing dresses aren’t controversial any more. Basically we wanted to make the video with as little fuss as possible, in as short a time as possible, for a few thousand dollars. There was no hidden agenda. The dresses only came about at the last minute. We wanted to be like The Beatles – no, The Dave Clark Five, I was wearing glasses – we would never make fun of The Beatles. There’s nothing more comfortable than a cosy flower pattern.”

  ET: In your particular context, an MTV hard rock band that sells millions of records, surely it’s a subversive act?

  KC: “It may be subversive as far as a very small amount of people go, who’ve never seen men in dresses before or who aren’t comfortable with the concept, but I don’t give a shit about those people anyway. It’s not subversive. There’s no point in being subversive in rock any more. There’s no way you can be, unless you ram a stick of dynamite up your ass. Queen dressed in drag. Male bands do it all the time. It just feels comfortable, sexy and free wearing a dress. It’s fun.”

  ET: How do you feel about the suggestion some of your fans are called ‘fags’ for liking such a presumably effeminate hard rock band?

  KC: “I love it. Knowing that gives me as much pleasure as when I used to dress up as a punk at high school, and rednecks driving by in trucks would yell ‘ Devo!’ at me. It’s good to have a nice, healthy battle going on in high school between the Guns N’ Roses jocks and the Nirvana fans. It vibes up the kids who are more intelligent, and at least it brings the whole subject of homosexuality into debate. It’s very flattering our fans are thought of as ‘fags’. I’ve heard stories about kids being beaten up for wearing Nirvana T-shirts. It reminds me of when I used to support strange or weird bands who were that little bit more dangerous because they weren’t accepted by the mainstream. Devo were a great example – a Top 10 act that were far more off-the-wall than us.”

  ET: Do you approve of cross-dressing?

  KC: “Of course. Men shouldn’t wear a dress because it’s feminist, but because it’s comfortable. Sometimes my penis will literally fall asleep or feel like it’s dropped right off because it’s been constricted by tight Levi’s, and I’ll have to wear baggy pants or a dress instead.”

  ET: How about men wearing make-up?

  KC: “Sure. If it’s applied in a real gaudy fashion, really thick and makes you look like a TV evangelist’s wife. I go through an eyeliner phase about one month every year. Pete Townshend did too, but it didn’t last very long. I know all about rock stars who use eyeliner. It never lasts very long. Supposedly it burns into the eyes during shows under the bright lights. Maybe you should tattoo it on. Cross-dressing is cool. I’m sorry I can’t come up with any better reasons for why we wore dresses for our video shoot, it’s just that I wear them all the time, round the house, wherever. I’d just as soon wear a bathrobe or sheet with a hole in it. It’s not particularly because I want to wear a woman’s dress.”

  (Melody Maker ‘Sex’ issue, December 12, 1992)

  On October 24, Nirvana returned to Reciprocal – now called Word Of Mouth – to record demos for their next album. The trio didn’t have many songs worked out, and certainly no lyrics. It wasn’t a good session.

  “For the In Utero demos, I brought a bunch of oddball pedals around and some odd sound effect devices,” remembers Earnie Bailey. “Kurt plugged in everything – all 12 pedals – and I told him his guitar would sound a lot better if he took the ones he wasn’t using out of the effect chain, because they were bogging down his signal and making his guitar sound terrible, and he said, ‘Well, that’s what I want.’ I thought, ‘Well, your ideas have gotten us this far, so you’re either fucking with me, or . . .’”

  He could have been serious. There’s supposed to be a frequency that blows out speakers: I remember Kurt telling me he wanted it at the start of In Utero , but preferably one that only worked on really expensive hi-fi systems.

  “Dave was the loudest drummer I’ve ever recorded,” Jack Endino comments. “While we were doing the demos, the cops came by. It was the only noise complaint we’d had at that studio in five years. It’s an old building, with triple walls. It’s soundproofed. And yet Dave was so loud there was a noise complaint from a house three doors away. I was out in front talking to the police. The cops said, ‘You guys need to turn it down.’ I was telling them, ‘You guys know who Nirvana is?’ I’m trying to explain to the cops that I’ve got Nirvana in here, and I’m trying to explain to Nirvana that I’ve got the cops outside. I’m going, ‘What a time for the cops to show up, I’m doing demos for Nirvana, Jesus Christ, I’m going crazy!’ What am I going to tell the band? We have to stop? It’s a studio! The studio’s been there since the Seventies.

  “Nirvana called up and said they wanted to do some quick recordings on the old eight-track,” the producer recalls. “They booked the time and cancelled it because that was the weekend Frances appeared in the world. They cancelled a couple of times. Finally, the band showed up. We set up the drums and amps, and waited for Kurt. He never showed. The next day he showed up, and they did six songs, exactly the same as they are on In Utero . It was very tense. There was something dark in the air. Just the idea of Kurt showing up 12 hours late – it wasn’t like a band. People were not communicating with each other. Kurt was in a different reality from everybody else.”

  I know from conversations I had with Kurt at the time, he was concerned that Nevermind had gone way too far in the production, and he wanted t
o get back to basics.

  “Right,” agrees Jack. “They wanted to feel like they were doing something opposite again, go in and record in one day. At no time did I think I was doing the next Nirvana album. In fact, while they were there they said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re probably going to go and do the next record with Steve Albini.’ I was sitting there thinking, ‘OK, thank you very much!’

  “The closest you get to my version of Nevermind 2 is that version of ‘Rape Me’, because that’s the only song we finished,” he continues. “It’s not a bad version. It’s all right. Having Frances on there was a little weird. Courtney came down with the baby and they held her up to the microphone – ‘Hey, let’s record Frances here and put her on the song!’ It wasn’t a sample we dropped in. She was like a week old or something, two weeks old.”

  None of the songs had any vocals, except for ‘Rape Me’, but Kurt’s singing lacks the cynical venom that characterises the song. “No one ever called back to finish them,” sighs Jack. “It was like someone had talked them into doing ‘demos’. The band had no interest in it, and Kurt acted like he didn’t even want to be there.” All the other numbers were instrumental tracks: run-throughs of songs that appeared on the third album proper, the helpless and affecting ‘Dumb’, the all-out frenzied metal attack of ‘ tourette’s’, ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ . . .

  “Courtney came down at the end of the sessions, right when Kurt was doing vocals for ‘Rape Me’,” continues Jack. “The song dated all the way back to ’90, ’91, but it didn’t have a bridge, so he had to come up with some words. I think Courtney helped Kurt with his lyrics, because after he met Courtney his lyrics all changed.”