Nirvana

by Everett True

  Right from the opening line of the album, “Teenage angst has paid off well/ Now I’m bored and old” (‘Serve The Servants’), it was clear that Kurt had grown as a lyricist and songwriter. Marrying Courtney had clearly helped him. Witness the powerful, moving couplet from the same song: “I tried hard to have a father/ But instead I had a dad” – sentiments that echoed John Lennon’s exorcism, “Mother, you had me but I never had you” on his first post-Beatles solo album, 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

  “Initially, the song was about coming of age during a time where you’re old enough to support yourself without the aid of your parents,” Kurt wrote in an early version of his unused sleeve notes. “I’ve always felt that a person doesn’t necessarily have to force themselves to love their parents simply because of blood.”

  “Oh lord,” he wrote in another version, “the guilt of success. During the past two years I have slowly come to the conclusion that I do not want to die. I am now no more of a recluse than I used to be. I lived in the K [circled with a shield, in the style of the label’s logo] kingdom for a few years hiding in a little apartment. And now I stand in my room without a sandbox.”

  One major way that the album differed from the previous two was in how the drums were recorded. Kurt wanted live ambience, something he felt could only be achieved by placing microphones around the drum kit. Albini felt the same way. Thirty mics were used for the drums alone.

  Albini had a certain reputation among the indie rock cognoscenti – a reputation the former Big Black frontman partly encouraged. He was known as a straight talker, possibly misanthropic – verging on misogynistic – an incredibly hard worker, but one who didn’t tolerate either the music industry’s bullshit or fools lightly. The misogyny charge was a little dubious: Albini just liked to wind other folk up big time – especially people he perceived as being too far up their own ass. Hence the name of his post-Big Black hardcore band, Rapeman: a name that brought any amount of controversy with it.

  He was dubious about working with Geffen, but intrigued by the idea of recording Nirvana, and by Kurt’s reassurance that the last thing he was looking for was another hit single. Albini even claimed he wasn’t a fan: “This will sound stupid,” he said shortly afterwards, “but I felt sorry for them. The position they were in, there was a bunch of bigwig music industry scum whose fortunes depended on Nirvana making hit records. It seemed obvious to me that fundamentally they were the same sort of people as all the small-fry bands I deal with.”

  The studio complex itself was situated at a big, modern house filled with Sixties kitsch. In the centre of the house, where the band all stayed, was a big, sunken living room: “Mike Brady [fictional architect dad of TV’s The Brady Bunch] meets Frank Lloyd Wright [famous American architect, noted for his innovative use of light and space],” as Krist put it to Impact. The recording studio was situated 100 yards away, through the woods: it was spacious, wood-panelled and in immaculate condition. The room where the drums were set up looked out on to a picturesque Minnesota winter scene.

  Although the band wanted to make a do-it-yourself punk rock record, they had difficulty readjusting: the first three days were mostly wasted after it was discovered they hadn’t bothered to bring their equipment with them, and had to have it shipped out. Albini was appalled at the waste of money: “They wanted to Fed Ex a boom box in,” he remarked disgusted, “instead of buying a new one. They wanted to fly their guitar tech in just because Kurt was having difficulty tuning his guitar.”

  “There was some debate about whether they should have taken me along,” confirms Earnie. “The first day they were there, I got a phone call saying, ‘Pack your bags, we can’t get anything in tune.’ Then Krist called, like a day later, and told me not to bother because the record was finished.”

  If Kurt and Nirvana had been allowed to release the original version of In Utero as mixed by Albini – the engineer claimed he had a spoken agreement with the band that no one was allowed to touch the recording after him – then rock would have been revolutionised. I swear it. Primal screaming was matched only in intensity by Dave Grohl’s drumming. Tunes were partly subverted to Kurt’s need to release the anguish he felt at his role as Spokesman for Generation X. All his hatred, all his drug-fuelled paranoia and disgust – it poured out with a bleak fury that was unnerving to listen to. Fuck Unplugged being the way forward for Nirvana. In Utero was the real shit, the one where they paid homage to the underground.

  I can still remember Courtney’s anguished phone call now.

  “Jerry!” she cried. (Courtney frequently used my real name.) “What’s your address? I need to send you a copy of Kurt’s new album. His record company, his management, everyone is telling him there aren’t any tunes on it. They want him to re-record it. You have to defend him, he’s totally depressed about it all.”

  A few days later I received the tape: it sounded great. More importantly, it sounded like a more honest representation of Nirvana than anything since ‘Sliver’. So there weren’t any tunes present? Christ! What about the traumatic, almost bruised-beaten ‘Rape Me’? Kurt started writing its caustic lyrics while the band were still mixing Nevermind – the sweet guitar motif merely served to add poignancy to the song’s dark message to all the fans, the record industry people, the media who Kurt perceived as wanting a part of him. “I was trying to write an anti-rape song in a very bold way,” he told Melody Maker’s Stud Brothers. “What I’ve realised is that in order to get your point across, you have to be obvious. That’s how most people want songs to be. They need it thrown right in their face.”

  No tunes? Christ! What about the album’s first single, the cancerous ‘Heart-Shaped Box’? The song starts slow, menacingly; Kurt’s voice rarely sounding so powerful, in control, reminiscent of his friend Mark Lanegan in the way it cracks over certain consonants – before it suddenly explodes into a frenzy of contrition, guitar buzzing plaintive and pleading. This was pure, primetime Nirvana, as commercial as they ever got. Or, as Kurt put it in his journals: “[Feminist author] Camille [ Paglia]’ s vagina/flower theory bleeding and spreading into the fabric that Leonardo [da Vinci] would have used to improve his hang-glider, but he died before he could change the course of history.”

  “It can’t be coincidental that In Utero is full of images relating to babies and childbirth from the title onwards?” the MM journalists asked. “This must be an album about Kurt Cobain becoming a father.”

  “No, it is coincidental,” the singer replied. “I’ve always been fascinated by reproduction and birth. I’ve been painting foetuses for years and making foetus dolls out of clay. There’s just something glorious about pregnancy. I’ve got so much respect for women because they bear children. They seem the more sacred humans to me. Sea horses interest me. The female carries the babies first then transfers them to the male who actually gives birth. Shared pregnancy.”

  No tunes? The album didn’t get changed that much.

  Listen to the plaintive, gentle ‘Dumb’, a tune busting all over with plangent guitar chords. When I first met Kurt, he told me that he acted according to how people treated him. So if they thought of him as a dumb-ass punk rocker, he was more than willing to act like a dumb-ass punk rocker. “That [song] is just about people who’re easily amused,” he told the Studs, “people who not only aren’t capable of progressing their intelligence but are totally happy watching 10 hours of television. I’ve met a lot of dumb people. They have a shitty job, they may be totally lonely, they don’t have a girlfriend, they don’t have much of a social life, and yet, for some reason, they’re happy.”

  Listen to the moving sorry note ‘All Apologies’ and try denying its effect all these years down the line. “I wish I was like you,” sings a jaded Kurt, wanting nothing more than an end to all the shit. “Easily amused. Everything is my fault. I’ll take all the blame.” God, he tried so desperately to believe in Love.

  Even now, I sit here and listen to ‘Pennyroyal Tea’12 and my glasses clou
d over with tears again. Is this the effect that music that is supposed to have no resonance has on me? Is this what music means to you?

  “Sometimes,” Kurt remarked, “I wish I could take a pill that would allow me to be amused by television and enjoy the simple things instead of being so judgmental and expecting real good quality instead of shit.”

  There were songs that rocked out, hard and long – ‘Very Ape’ (originally known as ‘Perky Or Punky New Wave Number’), ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ (previously entitled ‘Nine Month Media Blackout’, in response to the Vanity Fair article) – with squalls of feedback and grungy guitars, but these were more than offset by Kurt’s tendency to shove in an aching melody when you least expected it. Plus, the band’s fondness for mischief was still apparent. On the European version of the album, ‘Rubbing Alcohol’ repeats the same trick as ‘Endless, Nameless’ on Nevermind , coming in after several minutes of silence.

  The brilliantly titled ‘Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle’ – inspired by the celebrated story of the Thirties film star, institutionalised after she rebelled against her studio’s star system, and subjected to electroshock treatment – boasts an opening bass line that unconsciously echoed the minimal, spooked sound of Young Marble Giants. It’s an uncomfortable song. Kurt saw parallels between the way the actress was demonised by the mainstream press13, and the media’s treatment of his wife. “The conspirators are still alive and well in their comfortable, safe homes,” Kurt wrote in his journal. “Gag on her ashes. Jag on her gash. Uh, God is a woman and she’s Back in Black.”14

  “[Frances Farmer] was institutionalised numerous times and, in the place in Washington where she ended up, the custodians had people lining up all the way through the halls, waiting to rape her,” Kurt told the Stud Brothers, quoting the popular version of the actress’ story.15 “She’d been beaten up and brutally raped for years, every day. She didn’t even have clothes most of the time.

  “[It] was a massive conspiracy involving the bourgeois and powerful people in Seattle, especially this one judge who still lives in Seattle to this day. He led this crusade to so humiliate her that she would go insane. In the beginning, she was hospitalised – totally against her will – and she wasn’t even crazy. She got picked up on a drunk driving charge and got committed. It was a very scary time to be confrontational.”

  Courtney’s call to me in the middle of March confirmed a story that was shortly to break in the Chicago Tribune. Two days before the album was mastered (on April 21, at Gateway Studios by Bob Ludwig), the paper published an interview with Albini in which he stated, “ Geffen and the band’s management hate the record. They considered it an indulgence when Nirvana asked to record with me. I have no faith the record will be released.” Dave Grohl later reported that Gary Gersh, the band’s A& R man, was ‘freaking out’ at the prospect of the band recording such an important album (for DGC, leastways) in such a punk rock fashion. “It was like, go ahead, have your fun – and then we’ll find you another producer,” he told Q in September ’93.

  At the time, though, the band and management strongly denied Albini’s statement, even going so far as to take out a full-page ad in Billboard on May 17 to rubbish some of the claims made in follow-up stories in Billboard, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and elsewhere.

  “There has been no pressure from our record label to change the tracks we did with Albini,” stated Kurt in a DGC press release – directly contradicting what Courtney told me. “We have 100 per cent control of our music. We – the band – felt the vocals were not loud enough on a few of the tracks. We want to change that.” Geffen also issued bland assurances that they had no intention of messing with their cash cow.

  Later, Kurt even claimed that he realised as soon as he got back to Seattle that there were problems with the mix: “The whole first week I wasn’t interested in listening to it and that usually doesn’t happen,” he told Circus. Again, this directly contradicts Courtney’s phone call, where she was attempting to get friends and industry allies of Kurt’s to rally round the recording to place pressure back on to DGC so they would realise it was a great record.

  Whatever. Seemed like a storm in a teacup, really. I wasn’t going to deny that overall the album made for heavy listening, but wasn’t that the thrill? The album wasn’t revamped that much, actually. Nirvana ended up dropping several of the noisier tracks from the finished version, the vocals got brought forward a little more in the mix during mastering, and the management brought in R.E.M. producer Scott Litt to ‘tidy up’ a couple of songs for US radio. A sell-out? Not really. If you want to view it that way, Nirvana ‘sold out’ the day they signed to Geffen . . . and they wouldn’t have sold millions of records, and you wouldn’t be reading this book either.

  “ Krist was really excited about it,” recalls Earnie Bailey. “We listened to the album on his boom box the second he got back. It was cool, yet I remember thinking, ‘Are you going to release it like this, because it sounds like a practise tape?’ It was really raw, it sounded like it had been recorded in 45 minutes – and Kurt’s vocal tracks were very dry. It just wasn’t as clean as Nevermind . But they knew it was the perfect follow-up. It was a really bitchin’ ‘ fuck you’ to all the pressure they were facing. But then it really got strange: all of a sudden they were getting beat up [by the record company], and it became stressful, with talk about Kurt quitting.”

  “I saw the whole thing before it happened,” sighs Jack Endino. “I said Steve is going to get all this crap because he’s not going to turn the vocals up loud enough or something – and you know how Steve is, he doesn’t give a shit about major labels. I didn’t want to be in Steve Albini’s shoes, being the guy with all those expectations piled on him to make Nevermind 2 – because that’s what the rest of the world wanted. Meaning all the fans, the record company, the managers, the lawyers, all the slime and the business people – the people writing the cheques.”

  “Kurt wanted to do something different,” comments Carrie Montgomery. “He wanted to write different types of songs but I think that he didn’t think he knew how. He only knew how to write Nirvana songs. How do you teach yourself how to write a different type of song? Listen to a different Beatles record for a month and figure out a different pattern?”

  Kurt wanted to destroy the monster he’d created, that was obvious. Somewhere along the line – the constant press attention, having to deal with crap like MTV and tabloid and Rolling Stone journalists, Olympia and the punk rock kids turning their back on him – it turned sour. When Kurt formed Nirvana, he and Krist had been as close as brothers. By the time 1993 was over, he would be travelling in a different van to the rest of the band. What’s the point of that? Why be in a band when you don’t even want to speak to your fellow members? Are contractual obligations that powerful?

  I kept the tape safe the only way I knew how. I threw it unmarked into a pile of thousands and tried to forget I even knew the band existed after Kurt died. It remains there to this day, but I have a feeling someone else released the original version to a bootlegger, figuring something that awesome shouldn’t stay hidden forever.

  Courtney flew in to Pachyderm, a week into the recording. Steve Albini wasn’t impressed by her belligerent attitude, calling her with a “psycho hose-beast.” Courtney, in return, added further fuel to the ‘ Albini is a misogynist’ faction by coming up with a great line about how, “The only way Steve Albini would think I was a perfect girlfriend would be if I was from the East Coast, played the cello, had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage and never said a word.”

  “Courtney called me and said they were making In Utero , 40 minutes outside of Minneapolis,” recalls Jessica Hopper. “I was old enough to drive but I didn’t, so I had to find someone safe enough to the Nirvana camp to bring me – and that was Pat Whalen who was Hole’s booking agent.16 They were mixing the record, and we were all having dinner. Steve’s girlfriend was cooking. Steve was making jo
kes the whole time we were eating, much to everyone’s discomfort, about how Dave was going to wake up in the middle of the night with Steve’s cock down Dave’s throat. Everyone was chewing in silence, laughing nervously. Pat was like, ‘So, how’s . . .?’, trying to make some sort of conversation. Steve was making these real macho, homophobe jokes – dude locker room jokes. Afterwards, they were mixing and played stuff for us in the studio, and Courtney surreptitiously, but not quite, made a tape of the P.J. Harvey record that Steve had just done, and some of the rough mixes of Nirvana tracks.

  Was Steve wearing his hat?17

  “I don’t remember,” Jessica laughs. “I remember his girlfriend didn’t talk. She just cooked. I don’t know if she even ate with us. It was more like she served us. Steve Albini seemed like what you’d think Steve Albini would be like – cracking all these weird jokes and making people feel vaguely uncomfortable. [According to Kurt, Steve also had a habit of pouring rubbing alcohol on his ass, and setting it on fire – but one once again suspects a certain liberty with the truth.] We sat on the coach and listened to ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, and a song that Dave had done, ‘Marigold’ [originally recorded back in DC with Barrett Jones] – it sounded like R.E.M. to me.”

  While the band were in the studio, they helped fill the downtime by watching David Attenborough nature videos and making prank phone calls – Albini called Eddie Vedder, pretending to be legendary David Bowie/Marc Bolan producer Tony Visconti and telling him he’d be happy to work with him, if only he ditched the band. The engineer also called up dopey Lemonheads singer Evan Dando18, pretending to be Madonna’s assistant – and then shoved him on hold when Dando started salivating at the prospect of speaking to the megastar. Dave Grohl phoned John Silva, pretending to be in a state of panic, claiming that Krist had been throwing up blood the night before. It was the usual hi-jinx of a rock band in a studio.