Nirvana

by Everett True

  They became understandable.

  “Yeah, exactly,” the producer nods. ‘On In Utero , the lyrics are much more concrete. He was literally writing the words in the studio, and running them by Courtney – he’d read her a line and she’d be like, ‘That’s cool, but what about that other line you used to sing?’ I thought, ‘Ah, the verbal one and the introspective one are bouncing off each other.’ Courtney may not be able to carry a tune, but she’s an explosion of words. She’s a crazy lyricist. I’m sure she helped him focus on his lyrics. I don’t think she wrote any of them, but she raised the bar as far as what he made himself try to do.”

  Presumably if Courtney was at the studio, the dynamics of the band were very different to before.

  “The other members left about then,” replies Jack. “Once the bass and drums were done, everybody else went home and it was just Kurt and Courtney in the studio with me finishing it up. The dynamics were all right. It seemed like Krist was a little uneasy around Courtney; Dave and Courtney were getting along fine. They were horsing around and being goofy. I remember them making these weird calls from the studio phone and then coming out and laughing hysterically. They were making threatening phone calls to these journalists, but in a jocular way. It was Dave and Kurt and Courtney. The three of them were egging each other on. I’m not sure how seriously they were taking these phone calls while they were doing them. I think maybe they were taken very seriously by some of the recipients.”

  On October 30, Nirvana played another sub-standard show – this time in front of one of the largest crowds of their career: nearly 50,000 at the Velez Sarsfield Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The band hadn’t bothered rehearsing, their spirits were low, and when the partisan crowd started heckling Calamity Jane – simply because they were female (or so Nirvana surmised) – everything really went downhill.

  “The entire crowd were throwing mud and rocks, just pelting them,” Kurt told Request in November ’93. “Eventually, the girls stormed off crying. It was terrible, just a mass of sexism all at once.”

  “That’s my most vivid memory of while we were there,” recalls Earnie Bailey. “There was some profanity towards the fact they were women, which was not the right thing to do with Nirvana headlining. They didn’t play ‘Teen Spirit’. Kurt started playing the intro at the beginning of almost every song, and stopped. You could tell he was really pissed off. But there was an amazing destruction sequence at the end [where the band played ‘Endless, Nameless’]. Dave and Krist got into a great spontaneous jam and Kurt was pulling down some incredible sounds, so that kind of saved that show.” Nirvana started the 40-minute set with a noise jam, and played mostly songs from Incesticide – much to the annoyance of the audience.

  “It’s funny,” Earnie comments, “because I’d had little interaction with Courtney up until that point, and somebody came backstage and announced that Calamity Jane were having a terrible time out front. Courtney blew up at me, saying, ‘Why aren’t you out there taking care of their stuff ?’ I can’t remember what I said, but I lashed back viciously. The whole room was silent. Nobody could believe I did that, because people were kind of afraid of her. Even Kurt was like, ‘Holy shit!’ People were looking at me like, ‘There goes your job.’ But she seemed to respect the fact I was nasty back to her. After that, we got along fine.

  “My other main memory was looking out of the hotel window and seeing people camped on the grass, day and night,” the guitar tech continues. “We landed in the airport and had to go past this checkpoint where they had soldiers with rifles. It was this strange feeling of, where the hell are we? And then once you roll into traffic, you notice these 1963 Ford Falcons everywhere. The taxis and the police cars were all Falcons and yet they had modern hubcaps on them and digital dashboards. Dave and Krist and I were into Ford Falcons . . . I know Kurt liked Darts, but we thought this was hilarious. Were they pimping out these Falcons here? So we asked our bus driver, why are there so many Falcons? He told us, after the body style went out of production they sent the stamps down there and they’ve been producing them ever since. So either Dave or Krist was hot to buy one of those Falcons and get it shipped back to Seattle, but it was too expensive considering the cost to ship and then modify to suit US emissions.”

  By mid-November, Kurtney and their management finally convinced the Los Angeles court to allow them guardianship of Frances Bean – so Jamie left the travelling entourage. Jackie Farry stayed, and kept up Jamie’s strict tutorage, not allowing Kurtney to go near their daughter when they were high and taking care of all the usual humdrum parental duties, such as changing nappies and bottle-feeding.

  She reported, however, that both parents doted on their daughter.

  “Kurt always loved children,” confirms Rosemary Carroll. “He told me that his favourite job he’d ever held was helping kids learn to swim. My daughter was born in 1990 and he was always very sweet and playful to her – and he sure loved Frances. He was delighted to have a child.”

  “I think fatherhood suited Kurt,” says Danny Goldberg. “He doted on his daughter. He was a great father when he was alive, and I think he would have continued to be one. It wasn’t enough to overcome his inner demons, but it gave him a great deal of joy.”

  Kurt returned to Word Of Mouth on November 8–10 – this time to help his wife record a new single for European label City Slang, as Hole were still missing a bass-player. The three songs recorded were ‘Beautiful Son’, ‘20 Years In The Dakota’6 and ‘Old Age’.

  “I actually played bass on ‘Beautiful Son’,” reveals Endino. “Their new drummer Patti [ Schemel] was very, very good. She rocked. She was like the female Keith Moon. That was my first experience of being in the studio with Courtney as a recording artist, and my last. It was quite negative. She was very civil to me, but she was shouting at the other members of the band. ‘You’re fucking up my song!’ And then she’d be on the phone, right behind the control room, calling up and screaming at people and slamming the phone down. It was really strange, cognitive dissonance.”

  She would have been aware that you could make her sound awful.

  “Yeah, she’s not stupid.” Jack laughs. “I always respected that she treated me civilly, but I didn’t enjoy being around her. It was like fingernails on a blackboard.”

  Did she actually play guitar on the single?

  “Yes, a little bit. It was mostly Eric and Patti, and Courtney directing. She played bass on one of the songs. Supposedly Kurt was going to come down and do the bass, but it got around to 11 p.m. and Kurt still hadn’t shown. I said, ‘Look, I still have to mix all three of these songs and I’m getting tired. Just give me the bass. I don’t want to stay here till 5 a.m. mixing these three songs.’ When Kurt finally showed up, he just said, ‘Oh, you played bass, cool’ [ Jack played bass on ‘Beautiful Son’; Courtney on ‘Dakota’]. He didn’t give a shit. He was fine, hanging out.

  “Once Kurt was there things were mellow. The two of them together were always relaxed. Kurt was very funny with her, because she sort of bossed him around, but he would have a smirk on his face like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ He was playing along. The weird thing about ‘Beautiful Son’ is that the riff on it sounds exactly like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Eric [ Erlandson] pointed it out, because he was trying to strum it a different way, but Courtney was like, ‘No, this is how it should sound.’ There was no indication that Kurt might have written the song. I’m sure he didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I love rock’n’roll.

  When you’re at your lowest, when everything comes crashing through on top of you, when gloom has overpowered your life and it seems there’s no way out . . . hey! Slap on that stereo and turn the volume up a notch even higher. Doesn’t matter what it is, virtually anything will do the trick . . . Buzzcocks’ ‘Something’s Gone Wrong Again’, Dexys Midnight Runners’ ‘Plan B’, The Raincoats’ ‘In Love’, The Records’ ‘Starry Eyes’, The Ronettes’ ‘I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine’ . . . Ni
na Simone’s ‘Trouble In Mind’ – Love’s ‘Alone Again Or’, even. When I was in my twenties, I used to put Hüsker Dü’s desperate, guitar-saturated version of The Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’ on my Dansette portable mono record player, turn the volume up full, turn all the lights off and set the dial to ‘repeat’. It was either that or Otis Redding’s ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’. When I was sent a copy of Nirvana’s ‘Love Buzz’, I played it on that same Dansette, carving a groove into the floor with my head for hours on end. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in having a passion for music, although for years after Kurt’s death I tried to convince myself otherwise.

  So Nirvana in concert during 1992, aside from the Reading Festival headline slot, weren’t much cop. You think that was an end to it? Of course it wasn’t. As Kurt reassured me several times afterwards, he still loved to make music with Krist and Dave. Forget the rumours and speculation and whatever may have been happening in their private lives. All the band needed was to return to the studio. They did so, with Steve Albini at the start of ’93, in Chicago. The resultant sessions may not have set the world alight like Nevermind , but the band never intended them to. All they wanted to create was great music, and they did so with In Utero , the album that proved to be their epitaph.

  Is that such a crime: creating music with no concern for sales?

  Rock’n’roll won’t save your mortal soul, but fuck me. I can’t help thinking that yes, Neil Young and Kurt Cobain are right: it is better to burn out than to fade away.

  Addenda 1: Cali DeWitt

  “I moved to New York after that first Hole tour. I had romanticised drugs and alcohol from as far back as I can remember, but New York was the first time where I got strung out. I remember thinking, ‘Ooh, I’m in another town, I know where to get drugs, I can do this every day and I’m not going to feel any guilt.’ I was gone for less than a year. Vanity Fair was right around the time I left LA. I remember her venom over that.”

  The problem was that the journalist didn’t understand Courtney’s humour. She printed it straight.

  “Courtney’s humour is viciously sarcastic and very, very funny. I was raised on that kind of humour, so I thought she was funny right away, but I wasn’t surprised when other people didn’t. She could lash out just as hard as she could do anything, obviously.”

  Did you encounter Nirvana while you were in New York?

  “No. I was a little bit ashamed of what was going on with me. The closest I had was talking to Courtney a lot, especially when she was furious about this Lynn Hirschberg situation, and she started to ask me to come and help with the baby. Which, if I was 18, turning 19 soon, sounded not good to me. Taking care of a baby and I’m having this trouble with drugs and everything, so . . .”

  Did choosing you to be the nanny strike you as a good decision?

  “I kind of understood it, because she felt really close to me and I’m someone she can trust. I hadn’t hung out with Kurt nearly as much as her, but he liked me and she had a problem getting people around who he liked. So, it didn’t strike me as that weird. Now, I think they lied to themselves, even on their own. Just because I’m their friend, and because they trust me, and they know that I’m not going to run to the Enquirer every time there’s some drama. They’re denying the fact that I’m a 19-, 20, 21-year-old kid who is an addict or an alcoholic.

  “That’s the thing about drugs and alcohol; if you’re doing them, you deny they have any lasting effect. For years I was like, ‘Drink has no effect on me.’ Now I’m just like, what? I can’t remember most of four years, and I’m saying it didn’t have any effect on me!

  “Also, when I was younger, it was a lot more fun. It didn’t really start to get dark – it got dark fast for me – but it got dark in New York, so I left New York. So, to me, the problem was solved. Again, I said, ‘Why can’t Jackie do it?’ They said, ‘Why don’t you come do it?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ This was while they were in LA.”

  Was that the house with the elevator?

  “Yes.

  Can you describe it?

  “It’s an old, high ceiling-ed house with a view in the Hollywood Hills. There was a kind of a mezzanine area – the front room was really big with windows overlooking the Hollywood freeway and Capitol Records. You go up the stairs and there’s a hallway that overlooks the living room, and behind that there’s two bathrooms and two bedrooms.”

  What kind of stuff was around? Were there records or posters?

  “There were records, the current crop of indie records at the time. There were Vaselines singles, Sebadoh singles, anything on AmRep. At this point Nevermind was huge, huge and I’m sure any cool label was sending them their whole catalogue to check out. You know, ‘Take my bands on tour’. ‘What do you think of this?’ ”

  ‘What Which posters?

  “There weren’t many posters, but there were paintings that Kurt was doing. One of them was the Incesticide record cover. There was a steel-floored kitchen by the entrance. It was also the house where I think Victoria Clarke and them had been coming up to and going through the garbage or something. At least that’s what Courtney told me. Again, I was young and naïve to a few things, and I was still doing drugs and drinking. It wasn’t as habitual as it became later, but at any given moment, if I was offered anything, I would do it. There was a rock doctor in LA named Dr Mark and he was giving out this drug called Buprenex in these glass vials. It was a synthetic opiate to stave off heroin withdrawal. They [Kurt and Courtney] had a lot of that around. I just remember these bottles of this clear liquid, and you’d inject it and you wouldn’t be sick from heroin withdrawal. They weren’t there for long [in LA] when I got there. I got there with my best friend who was with me through most of this, Rene Navarette. We didn’t come and do drugs or party or anything, I came to see the baby, I came to hang out.”

  From what I remember, they were pretty lonely. Kurt especially was lonely because he’d just moved away from the region he’d spent his whole life in. Six months earlier hardly anyone had heard of them, then all of a sudden, they’re the most famous couple in the world, and they were lonely. They were looking for people to hang out with.

  “That was more of what it was, just hanging out. They were planning on moving out of that house soon.”

  Kurt hated it in LA.

  “Yeah, he did not like it in LA. That’s why that house was good, because you had to take an elevator up the side of the mountain to get to it.”

  It was hard to find as well.

  “So it was a nice hiding place, but it was miserable. It was where we did the photo shoot that wound up being that picture of me on the actual CD for In Utero [ Cali is in drag]. It was just us fucking around with Polaroids and markers.”

  So how old was Frances at the time?

  “Four, five, six months . . .”

  Addenda 2: Jessica Hopper

  “Someone in Huggy Bear got a copy of my fanzine Hit It Or Quit It and passed it on to you. Courtney came to know about me through you, but I’d also sent her a copy. There was a Hole review in there and it was really positive. It was the first issue. I was 15, in Minneapolis and just started working at a record store. I’d discovered punk rock and I wanted to write and no one would let me, so I started my own fanzine.

  “A few weeks later I got this oversized package with a Hole T-shirt and stickers. Then Courtney sent me a 16-page letter she wrote the day after she had Frances, whacked out on birthing drugs. The letter was all about Minneapolis, and how I should start a band with Michelle Leon [original Babes In Toyland bassist], and how her life had got so weird, and how all she ever wanted in Minneapolis was to work at [record store] Northern Lights. She wanted to know how I was so young and cool – I was totally making fun of the Minneapolis cognoscenti, saying sarky things about [bad local rock band] Run Westy Run and Soul Asylum, all these older dudes.

  “I insinuated myself into the cool people circle, in a tangential way. It was such an anomaly. I was alienated from
most girls my own age, and most guys were intimidated by me. I was pretty sharp. I wasn’t into getting high and getting laid like most people in high school. I was into feminism and bands Don Fleming produced [Gumball, Hole, Sonic Youth, B.A.L.L.7], and into Riot Grrrl, all at the same time. There was overlap between me getting to know Courtney and discovering kill rock stars, that was when they were putting out the Wordcore singles [Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill was the first to contribute to the spoken word series].

  “I got the letter and was like, whoa. She really craved a certain amount of attention and notoriety. She’d started to become notorious. There was not a person in town that had a kind word to say about her, and I identified with her over that. Opinions were divided about me. However badly behaved she had been while she lived here, I knew how Minneapolis could be; it was a real boys town, and so I suspected there was really something to her – that she wasn’t just this crazy bitch who was fucked up on drugs, like people said. Any woman who is that demonised, there has to be more to her than people just being angry that she had supposedly introduced people to drugs.

  “Her letter was funny and strange and encouraging. She wrote about how becoming a mum was impacting on her and her life. It was clear she was struggling with how gross and bloated and disgusting everything had become – the Vanity Fair story had just come out. She was talking about not having an identity of her own and just being this signifier. Shortly after she sent the letter she tried calling me. I called her back, and I think we talked every day for about a year and a half.

  “Her and Kurt had paid for the printing for my fanzine, cos I’d run out of money. So they sent me 300 bucks to have as many fanzines as I could. Also, Courtney had given me this box of the first two issues of Pretty On The Inside to put out in Hit It Or Quit It. Her fanzine within my fanzine: I was also given a photo of Kurt, Mark Lanegan and Dylan dressed like Babes In Toyland for Halloween and I put them on 50 copies but it was a weird thing to put even in the fanzine, cos people wanted to know how I was connected with Nirvana. I was going through all this Riot Grrrl stuff and had a falling out with all these Riot Grrrl people, and she’d had a similar thing – it was the beginning of her falling out with Tobi and Kathleen who’d written her fan letters and then written letters behind her back to Kurt.8