by Everett True
Krist started 1993 by visiting his ancestral home of Bosnia and Herzegovina – then caught up in the middle of a terrible civil war, as the former country of Yugoslavia ripped itself into several different sections following the break-up of the Soviet Union. He met up with members of the Tresnjevka Women’s Group, a volunteer organisation offering support to female refugees, and learnt of the horrific torment suffered by numerous women – Bosnian, Muslim, Croatian – who’d been raped by the marauding Serbian army. On his return, he started organising a benefit concert to take place in San Francisco in April 1993. The bassist also wrote an article for the US music press, highlighting the troubles.
Back in Seattle, the post-Nirvana hype machine was still going crazy: Gap and Next started featuring ‘grunge’ sections in their clothes shops, LA Times ran a ridiculous feature entitled ‘Grunge-A-Go-Go’, the highfalutin Vogue topped even that with its 10-page fashion spread on ‘grunge-wear’. The gist of all these articles seemed to be an emaciated, anorexic, childlike look as typified by models such as Kate Moss, draped in $500 silk flannel shirts and carefully ripped jeans, often smoking a cigarette, with editorials pontificating about how the young people of the day were growing tired of ‘high’ fashion and wanted a return to something more organic, more ‘street’ . . .
Oh, and ‘layering’ was in – the style first invented out of necessity by impoverished 20-year-olds purely as a means to counter the cold. The fact that this style wasn’t unique to Seattle – and that its most visible practitioners, Nirvana, weren’t even from that city – seemed to pass most of the writers and fashion editors by.
‘Grunge’ films were released – some excellent (the lo-fi, laconic Clerks, Richard Linklater’s self-fulfilling Slacker), some downright crap (Singles, Sleepless In Seattle). TV stations decamped to Seattle and started making sitcoms based in the city – most notably, the evergreen Cheers spin-off, Frasier.8 And still the recording industry signing frenzy went on – anyone in a band from Seattle, anyone sporting long unkempt hair and ill-fitting flannel, anyone who vaguely used Nirvana and the Pixies’ loud/soft dynamics and screamed in a certain ‘soulful’ way, anyone connected with Sub Pop in any way at all . . . Stone Temple Plagiarists, Alice In Chains, Spin Doctors, Helmet, Crackerbash, The Posies . . . a thousand mediocre bands.
Then there were all the acts championed by Nirvana – Pavement, Sebadoh, Melvins, Daniel Johnston, Mudhoney, L7, Babes In Toyland, Hole, Tad, et al. Some retained their independence. Some got swallowed whole. Heedless, they all got lumped together and cast as one – and dropped the second that ‘grunge’ was deemed out of fashion.
Crazy as it seemed on the outside, on the inside it was even crazier. Halfway through January, Nirvana played two ‘Hollywood Rocks’ shows in Brazil, alongside L7, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alice In Chains.
“ L7 brought along this guitar tech named Ian,” recalls Earnie Bailey, “and he and I became friends. Kurt kept asking me questions about him and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I discovered it was [ Fugazi/ Minor Threat singer, and founder of Dischord records] Ian MacKaye . . . !”
The first concert was at the massive Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo on January 16. Estimates of the arena’s size vary, from 80,000 to 110,000. Either way, it was the largest gig Nirvana ever played – in a place that most of them had barely heard of, despite it being the world’s fifth largest city. Before the show, some of the band and crew went out walking through the shanty town communities that surrounded the venue: “ São Paulo is a little bit like Pacific Rim,” explains Earnie. “It goes on and on forever. The dividing line between rich and poor is very thin. They had food stands set up in villages of plywood and corrugated tin houses.”
Unsurprisingly, the band had a minor nervous breakdown on stage. Beforehand, they decided to play a ‘secret set’, where they’d switch instruments and cover Terry Jacks’ lightweight, yet strangely affecting tearjerker, 1974 smash ‘Seasons In The Sun’ – the song that Krist had told Dan Treacy was one of Kurt’s favourites ever (listen to the lyrics: it’s scarily prescient) – and play snippets of other cheesy pop hits, including Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids In America’, a brief burst of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and the horrendous Duran Duran single ‘Rio’, with Kurt on drums and Dave on vocals.
“That had to be the worst show Nirvana ever played,” comments Earnie. “The secret set was a reaction to the slick TV the kids have to endure down there, where the shows are all like Donny And Marie. They kicked into that set, and there were 90,000 people – silent. It felt like a drunken party, something you would see in the basement. Certainly not an arena rock show.” Forty minutes in, Krist hurled his bass at Kurt and walked off . . . but the band were under contract to play for 90 minutes, so off went Alex MacLeod and Earnie in search of the errant bassist.
“ Krist walked back on stage, grabbing the tossed bass from the floor and didn’t retune it or swap it out. So I grabbed a cantaloupe and rolled it on stage like a bowling ball,” the tech laughs. “Kurt picks it up and starts smashing it on his strings, playing his Jaguar with the cantaloupe, and the juice and seeds ran all the way down inside his pickup cavities.”
The following month, Kurt designed a guitar for Fender, half-Jaguar, half-Mustang. “I think he literally cut a photo of a Jaguar and a Mustang in half and stuck the two pieces together, and they produced that with little refinement,” recalls Earnie. “The first time they sent it over, it looked like a wood shop project.
“That show, they destroyed everything in sight,” he continues. “We had a lot of trashed speakers. But where were we going to find more of these British-made speakers? We had to overnight them from Los Angeles, and that cost us a bundle. I remember being stressed out about it. Krist pulled me aside and said, ‘You don’t need to worry about that stuff any more. We can afford it. You should relax and come to the beach with us.’ ”
The tension on stage was mirrored by the tension off: both Kurt and Courtney’s moods were swinging wildly. After a particularly violent argument with his wife, Kurt threatened to jump out of his high-rise hotel room window. So the two tour managers – Jeff Mason and Alex MacLeod – wandered the streets of São Paulo, trying to find another hotel for Kurt to stay in, one without any balconies.
“I’ve actually got a funny memory of that hotel,” says Earnie. “All the balconies overhung the interior – so if you looked down, you could see 20 floors down to the bar. I was awakened at 3 a.m. by someone playing the trumpet just outside my door. It turned out to be Flea [Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist], wearing a pork pie hat and playing to the stragglers at the bar. I looked down and saw hotel security looking up trying to count what floor we were on. So I yelled to Flea and he had this look of ‘Oh fuck’ and dashed into his room. The security guards never found him.”
The following day, Nirvana and entourage flew into Rio de Janeiro: “We were all on it – the Chili Peppers, L7, Nirvana, Ian MacKaye, maybe even Alice In Chains,” recalls Earnie. “When we came in for the landing, the plane suddenly flipped up and stalled in the air, then came back down and veered off the runway. The pilot slammed it down hard and hard and hard and finally got all the wheels on the ground. It was brutal. Flea was sitting next to me, and was in a trance after the plane stopped. As we were walking off the plane, he put a hole in the cockpit door, he kicked it so hard.”
In Rio, the band stayed for a week at the Intercontinental Hotel on the Atlantic Ocean: “We went a few miles down to the beach, and there was a little shack selling home-made liquor,” remarks the ubiquitous guitar tech. “It was powerful stuff.” The following day, everyone went hang-gliding. “Kurt went first,” Earnie continues. “You fly way out, over these trees and a freeway, then you fly over our hotel and the tops of the city buildings, then you fly over the ocean, come back in and land on the sand. Dave said it was the best experience of his life. Kurt said the same thing; he said he’d never done anything that he enjoyed so much.”
On January 23, Nirvana performed in front of 70,
000 people at Rio’s Apotoese Stadium. Flea played trumpet during ‘Teen Spirit’, tackling the guitar solo with considerable aplomb, and the band played an ad hoc 17-minute version of a new song, the full-on scream-fest of ‘Scentless Apprentice’9 – both, much to the crowd’s growing mystification. For the encore Kurt wore one of Courtney’s black, low-cut, lacy dresses – “I think he had lemons in his bra,” says Earnie – while Dave sported a Jennifer Finch bra. According to some accounts, this show was even more lacklustre than São Paulo.
“They didn’t even break a string,” comments the guitar tech, sounding oddly cheated. “I was expecting everything to be wiped out, because we were leaving the next day and had all the time in the world to fix stuff when we got home. They weren’t horrible. They were just bad. Oh, I take it back. Kurt smashed his blue ‘Courtney’ Telecaster at the end, and she ran out and tried to stop him, but Jennifer Finch helped him drop a Marshall cabinet on top of it. I think they’d had a fight.”
The band looks tired on the video.
“The problem might have been that everybody stayed out too late the night before,” suggests Earnie. “The promoter took us out to a club where they had this entire section roped off for us, with food and drinks and a private bartender. It felt like we were being over-accommodated, plus the music was not to our liking, so we asked if we could go somewhere else. So they hustled us into the van and raced us across town to another place. By the time we got there, everything had been set up exactly the same. It was like, ‘ Yikes, they’re going to do this all night.’ So we decided we might as well hang out: there was an alternative rock band playing, and Krist and Courtney got up and played. Kurt wasn’t there.
“On the way home, we went by this area with something that looked like a scaled-down version of the Washington Monument in it. Someone screamed, ‘Pull over,’ and we all jumped out to check this thing out, and there was a wrestling match on the lawn. It might have been Courtney and me. I’m not sure. Somebody threw a drink and it hit the monument and we all started laughing hysterically.
“Within moments, we had Brazilian police pull up and surround us. It was very sobering – we had no idea what they’d do. It wasn’t like we were in Seattle any more. Our driver scuttled us back into the van, and he was shouting at the police officers through the windows and we couldn’t understand a word of it, and it went on and on and on. We were all completely silent. Eventually, we were driving again – and we could see the driver was rattled. He looked back at us and said, ‘Don’t ever do anything like that again. You’re lucky tomorrow night is the concert. If they were to arrest you now, a lot of revenue would be lost. But if the concert had already happened, you wouldn’t have been let off this way.’ That was scary.”
On January 19–22, halfway through their stay in Brazil, the band recorded some songs at BMG’s Ariola Studios with Craig Montgomery producing: “We went into this very major studio in Rio that was owned by the Brazilian division of their record company,” recalls Craig. “Their A-room was very modern and slick, but the B-room looked like it hadn’t been touched since about 1976. It had this great sounding old Neve desk, a beautiful Studer tape machine and all these big old vintage tube Neumann microphones. I knew a little more about recording than I had in ’91, but again it was just a situation where the band wanted to throw down ideas on tape so they’d have something for Steve Albini to listen to.”
Among other songs recorded was a warped distortion fest entitled ‘I Hate Myself And I Want To Die’ that had an extended intro of noise plus suitably jaded, disinterested vocals from Kurt. It showed up on The Beavis And Butt-head Experience compilation of the two MTV cartoon couch potato critics’ favourite rock bands10, a slightly pointless jam. Far better was the recording of ‘Milk It’ – also a song that seemed to be made up as it went along, but with a good meaty guitar sound and inspired use of the loud/soft dynamic, the lyric itself a depressed look at cohabitation and Kurt’s stomach problems. “I have my own pet virus,” Kurt sang, bitter-wise. “Her milk is my shit, my shit is her milk.” Also totally excellent was ‘ MV’ (Moist Vagina), a future B-side and a song that revelled in its own anguish and Kurt’s unmatchable scream.
Then there was the equally engaging and mischievous ‘Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip’, an improvised number that owed more than a passing nod to the Melvins’ more reflective moments, Kurt spewing out seemingly random lyrics lifted from his journal: “Even though we haven’t had sex for a week” . . . “She is tied up in chains” . . . “I haven’t had a date forever”. The mood is playful, the instruments engaging in a game of cat and mouse, almost daring one another to explode in fury. Kurt laughs evilly a few minutes before the end, before asking, “One more solo?” The band responded accordingly.
“They wanted to goof around,” Craig explains. “They did a song that Kurt had written in his head and they did a cover of ‘Seasons In The Sun’, and a full version of ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ with vocals. Everything else was guide-vocals. By this point, the band weren’t having much fun together as people at all, but the mood in the studio was light.”
This was evinced by the video of ‘Seasons In The Sun’ that showed up on the DVD part of With The Lights Out. Although the band didn’t treat the song too seriously – something that’s obvious from Krist’s goofy expression while he plucks out the guitar line – it still retained a certain pathos in Kurt’s warbled vocals and tentative drumming. You could tell it was a song he really liked.
‘Heart-Shaped Box’ (or, as it was then called, ‘Heart-Shaped Coffin’) was the standout: brimming over with rasping guitars and despair, and Kurt’s own realisation of the situation he had placed himself in with Courtney. The title was inspired by Courtney’s habit of laying out her collection of heart-shaped candy boxes in the living room of the couple’s apartment on North Spaulding in LA: and was, in part, a love song – although clearly lines such as “I am buried in a heart-shaped coffin for weeks” indicated a bleakness that isn’t present in most relationships. The stop-start chorus of “Hey wait/ I got a new complaint” is an obvious reference to the fact Kurt was all too aware that sections of the press saw him as a whiny, spoilt rock star – and also sent a passing nod in tribute to the Ramones’ famed chant “Hey ho/ Let’s go”.
To temper its dark sentiments, Kurtney made up a story about Courtney sending Kurt a heart-shaped box while she was courting him, but of course this was as much a part of the homespun Nirvana myth as the bridge in Aberdeen, referenced in ‘Something In The Way’.
“As long as they were making music they were OK,” comments Craig. “As unhappy as Kurt was, he had a lot of respect for the other guys in the band.”
The day after the Rio concert, they all flew back to Seattle.
“. . . so we messed around the house in LA, and then they [Kurt and Courtney] decided they were definitely moving back to Seattle,” recalls Cali DeWitt. “They hired movers to pack everything up. It was like the third or something, and the rent was paid until the end of the month. Courtney said, ‘Why don’t you and Rene stay here because all our furniture is here and they’re not packing it up until the end of the month and then you guys will have a place to stay for the next few weeks.’ This was because I still didn’t want to go and be the nanny. So this sounded good to us. We were like, ‘Oh, we have a swanky place to stay for three weeks.’ ” “We’d been pretty much destitute in LA, living hand-to-mouth, before the call came from Kurt and Courtney,” says Rene Navarette. “They called us because they were having trust issues with some people. They needed to get out of LA quick. When I walked into the house I saw Kurt on the floor with brand new Frances in his lap, playing the advance of the new Butthole Surfers record for her. He was so excited about it. There was some goofy conspiracy stuff going on. There was a Chihuahua, an enemy Vanity Fair writer, and a few trash cans full of syringes they wanted to get rid of – they gave me a BB gun and told me to shoot any photographers I saw lurking round the house. Cali and I were real ex
cited to help them move: two teenagers helping pack up two rock stars and a baby and getting them sent off to Seattle.”
What date are we up to right now?
“Let’s say January or February. [It was probably February: Courtney was in an LA court on February 1, giving evidence about the incident involving Victoria Clarke and the cocktail glass. The case was later dropped.] I wasn’t in LA much longer after that,” Cali replies. “Rene and I stayed on, and acted like it was our house. We had a fine time. I remember the day the movers came. Rene was directing them. I didn’t want to wake up, so I was sleeping on the couch, waiting for it to be the last thing in the whole house for them to move. When they moved the bed in the master bedroom, one of the movers pricked himself on a needle that was stuck in the mattress. He freaked out. He’s like, ‘I’m going to the police and I’m going to go to the newspaper. What if I get a disease and what if I get AIDS from that needle?’ Rene talked him out of it by giving him my Nirvana 12-inch and telling him it was very rare. I remember listening to Rene go into this long spiel about how much the [not rare at all] ‘Come As You Are’ 12-inch was worth.”
On February 14, Nirvana checked in as the Simon Ritchie Group11 at Pachyderm Studios, in the tiny township of Cannon Falls, Minnesota, 40 miles south-east of Minneapolis, to begin recording their third album with Steve Albini. The trio spent a total of 14 days in the studio, laying down the basic tracks in six days (they completed recording on Kurt’s 26th birthday) – at a total cost of $24,000 for the studio and a one-off $100,000 fee for Albini. The entire album was done live.
“When we went in,” Kurt told Dutch magazine Oor , “only half the compositions were ready. The rest originated from messing around in the studio. We restricted ourselves to a deadline and a recording budget. I like to work that way.” Kurt later remarked that he’d wanted Nirvana to sound like In Utero ever since the group began: understandably so. In Utero is an amazing album, easily Nirvana’s finest moment in the studio: the production suits the band suits the songs suits the sentiments suits the melodies suits the noise segments suits the time it appeared in. And it still sounds fresh even today – long after the production on Nevermind fades into early Nineties territory. Nirvana sound totally on top of their game: fuelled by all the controversy and rumours and hype, burning in their desire to cleanse themselves of everything, everything except the music itself.