by Everett True
“Everyone was friendly, but maybe a little studio stir-crazy,” comments Hopper. “I remember thinking ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ was the best song they’d ever done. It was really dark and there was part of me that wondered if it would be as big as ‘Teen Spirit’. There seemed so much more depth to it. It was really, really beautiful.
“One night, Nirvana wanted to go out and see a show,” Jessica continues. “So they went to see [local all-female band] The Blue Up. It was an ID show at the 7th St Entry, and I was under age, but they let me in because I was with Nirvana. Kurt sat at the back and tried not to have people look at him. We were only there a little bit. Another time, we went to some weird medical supply store in the Mall Of America [reputed to be the world’s largest covered shopping mall]. Kurt dressed up a little so he wouldn’t be recognised – not that anyone noticed him anyway.
“Once word had gotten around that I’d gone to the studio and taken Nirvana to a show . . .” She laughs. “Well, people already treated me weird but after that they really treated me weird. Everyone’s favourite band was hanging out with someone who was 16 – it was so comical.”
The same month that Nirvana was in the studio, the split Nirvana/Jesus Lizard single, ‘Oh, The Guilt’ was released – and Incesticide was certified gold (500,000 copies) in the US. The band were also awarded a whole bunch of music awards, or at least nominated for same – Grammys, Brits, NARMs, what-have-you’s – but punk rock kids like Jessica knew such industry backslapping exercises were a crock of shit. Maybe that’s why Kurtney liked hanging out with her, and not her ‘cooler’, older, male record-collecting peers.
On March 19, Hole played a secret show at the Crocodile Café where they premiered songs from their forthcoming album Live Through This. It was their first concert with bassist Kristen Pfaff, then playing in the unrelenting Amphetamine Reptile three-piece, Janitor Joe. Kristen was dark and intelligent, and a knowledgeable champion of independent music. Winona Ryder, as she acted in Night On Earth, would have been perfect to play her. Many from the Minneapolis hardcore scene held Courtney as the Devil, and were aghast when Kristen left her home town for Seattle.
“Hole still needed a bass-player,” says Rene Navarette. “The previous year, they’d tried out this girl, Leslie Hardy, but she couldn’t play – so they moved her up to Seattle [from LA] and I was trying to teach her, all the while hoping they’d ask me. She didn’t work out. That’s when they got Kristen. She was amazing.”
“Courtney wanted me to play bass in Hole but of course my parents wouldn’t let me,” Jessica laments. It was actually me who suggested Jessica to Courtney: a sassy 16-year-old with an unusual fixation on underground rock – who could be better? Jessica had also appeared in national US magazines as a typical Riot Grrrl, an act that led to the Olympia and DC Riot Grrrls disassociating themselves from her, as the movement was anti-assimilation.
Jessica continues: “She was like, ‘You, me and Kurt have to get together and record a demo and [LA punk fanzine] Flipside will be all over it,’ but of course it never happened. At the time, it was just her and Eric. My parents were totally frightened by the prospect but in my head it was awesome: I’m glad now I didn’t. So Courtney was asking me who she could get, and I told her about Kristen.
“But I got to visit Courtney in LA,” the fanzine writer continues. “This was when they were in the middle of a fax war with Albini. The house was a total mess and there were magazines everywhere. We went shopping and Patti [ Schemel, Hole drummer] was around some, she ended up driving us. Courtney was shopping for clothes. She was trying to teach me about what cuts and styles of dresses would be cute on me. Things were pretty whacked out but it was really nice. Kurt was withdrawn. It was a lot of chaos. She was very smart, very funny, always entertaining – totally a mile a minute.
“She wanted me to help her clip articles about her and Kurt out of magazines. I remember her dropping them over the balcony into the living room to Patti. I’m surprised they didn’t make a hole in the floor. On the way home to drop me off at my dad’s house, someone had to either pick up drugs or drop off drugs. I asked Patti, ‘Is that what’s going on? Come on, I’m not stupid. Why are we driving to Echo Park at one in the morning to run an errand?’ She denied it. I think Kurt was frequently overcharged for drugs by his friends. Cali once remarked to me how those two would be getting charged $600 for $100 worth of drugs, naturally. It made them think they were doing a lot more than they were.
“I felt very trusted. They treated me like I was an adult and not like I was a weird kid. They welcomed me into their house and gave me real tea. There was a real air of domesticity underneath all the chaos, like ‘Jessica is visiting.’
“I remember these weird skull and babies and limbs paintings: art that would show up in collections later. A dress being nailed up to the wall: collections of little doll heads and perfume bottles. I’d hang out on the couch while they played with Frances. They were still very much parents in the middle of all this weirdness. I definitely felt like they were trying to have a normal life somehow. Courtney made Kurt give me some of Eric’s collection of Nirvana bootleg singles and a copy of ‘Dive’.”
In early March, shortly after Jessica’s visit, Kurtney moved into their new home – at 11301 Lakeside Ave NE in Seattle, overlooking Lake Washington, with views of Mount Rainier and the Cascade mountain range. The house cost $2,000 a month to rent, and had three levels.
“Kurt had his MTV award, The Astronaut, in the bathroom,” recalls Earnie Bailey. “You could either piss in the toilet or on the award. It was hilarious and appropriate. He had the broken K arch-top acoustic guitar from the start of the ‘Come As You Are’ video on his front door. I offered to fix it up for him.”
In the garage sat two cars: Kurt’s trusty Valiant, and a grey 1986 Volvo.
“One of his cars was held together by moss,” laughs Earnie. “There was this cool classic car lot on Denny that had hip, oddball Sixties cars – and they had a pale blue Dart identical to Kurt’s old rotten one. I think Kurt paid 4,000 bucks for the restored one, so he could have the pair.”
By this point, Jackie Farry had had enough of nanny-ing. It wasn’t so much looking after Frances Bean, whom she adored – it was more Courtney’s habit of treating anyone around her as a menial. Frequently, Jackie would be asked to take business phone calls that Kurt wanted to avoid – also, she’d barely been given a day off since she started. Cali DeWitt took over. This changeover coincided with Frances being returned to her parents’ unsupervised care on March 25 – which happened mainly because the LA court had no real jurisdiction in Washington State.
“They were like, ‘We’ve made a decision to take Cali as our full-time nanny and you can follow us up to Seattle with Eric,’ ” says Rene. “So I became Eric’s flatmate in Seattle. We went out a lot there – me, Courtney, Eric and Cali. It was a lot of fun. I was able to get the drug situation handled pretty quickly. I had a large amount of doctors from whom I could get any of the drugs needed for stabilising our habits. Then I moved into Lakeside Ave with them, and Cali and I assumed all domestic responsibilities. It was a little sketchy to have me with any sort of a title. Everyone mistook me for Cali. We both had coloured hair. We didn’t talk about me too much. I kept around the house. They spoke through me a lot when they were cutting themselves off from the world. I did a lot of speaking with [ John Silva’s assistant] Michael Meisel trying to explain what was going on.”
In April, Courtney flew to the UK to promote Hole’s new City Slang single, ‘Beautiful Son’19, a song partway inspired by Kurt: he featured as a young child on the cover, and played bass wearing one of Courtney’s dresses in the video (filmed before Kristen joined the band) – thus confirming the lyric, “You look good in my dress/ My beautiful son”. She played a solo acoustic gig at London’s Rough Trade records where she chain-smoked, and Hole appeared on The Word.
“When Courtney went to England, that was the first time me, Kurt, Dylan and Cali had a few days to mess
around without her,” reveals Rene. “We had so much fun. We would go into town, walk into a drug dealer’s living room: Kurt, Dylan, Mark Lanegan and Layne Staley20 coincidentally walking into the same basement at the same time. It was pretty amazing. Everyone had mutual admiration for each other. Now, looking back on it, there were all these great talented guys who were tainted forever because of their drug use.”
On her visit, Courtney stopped by Melody Maker to help me edit the letters page. The look on our editor Allan Jones’ face when I showed him her unexpurgated 1,000-word viewpoint was a joy to behold. Disbelief at her complete lack of grammar was followed by bemusement at the idea we should be giving over space to her ridiculous ideas, followed by anger.
“Everett, we are not printing this crap and that’s final,” he shouted at me. Allan was an unrequited old school music journalist. He comes from the era of Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and Lester Bangs. By and large, though, he was remarkably tolerant of my escapades at Melody Maker. He loved the rock stuff I was championing, but wasn’t so convinced by my infatuation with Grrrl-style feminism. Courtney editing a section of his beloved MM was pretty much the final straw.
Jones eventually relented. Courtney’s letters page and editorial appeared in MM, with several explanatory interjections from myself. She used the opportunity to talk about two of her favourite topics of 1993, the Riot Grrrls and feminism. The singer had recently fallen in love with Susan Faludi’s powerful feminist screed Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
“When Riot Grrrl began, I was very supportive of it,” she wrote. “It seemed as though things were getting better . . . I gave a Bikini Kill fanzine to Everett, Kim [Gordon] and Thurston [Moore] and Spin, and I would have done anything to promote it, to help it.”
That wasn’t strictly true. I obtained my fanzine from Calvin Johnson, and probably passed it along to Courtney, but whatever. It is true that Courtney initially aligned herself with my flatmates Huggy Bear and Kurt’s old girlfriend Tobi Vail. Hearing about the all-girl concerts that Huggy Bear had been organising in England during 1992, she demanded that Hole should be allowed to play one.
By all accounts, it wasn’t that well attended. Courtney, never one to bask in the glow of political correctness, called a female critic ‘fat’ from on stage. She talked about how weird it was to play a London show without me there. Indeed, she found it so odd that she took a £130 taxi ride back to my Brighton house afterwards. She soon tired of her new allies, however; especially when it became apparent that they weren’t prepared to court fame the way she’d been trained to. Also, her attempts to ingratiate herself within the suspicious and closed world of Olympia, to seek approval from her husband’s former peers, failed miserably.
This change of heart was reflected in her hastily written MM column.
“I feel plunged back into the Dark Ages,” she complained. “Riot Grrrl celebrates the anarchy but also the clumsiness and incompetence of femme musicians. That’s like giving women high-level corporate jobs even if they can’t do the job correctly. I am not assimilationist. I am a populist. I believe that everyone, not just people that know Fugazi personally, has a right to revolution, but I’m not going to be dumb about it. I’m going to understand the mechanics of the Empire that I am going to fuck with. I am going to insinuate myself with the best of them.”
Courtney’s mistake here is rudimentary. She assumes there is only one way to write songs and judge ‘competence’ (her word) and storm the Empire. There are few parallels to be drawn between women making exploratory music and women holding down high-powered jobs. Maybe the fact Courtney thinks music equates with business might explain her musical direction in the late Nineties/the new century.
“I’ve worked too hard to put up with too much to be dragged down by the incompetence of a few spoilt elitists,” she continued. “Most of us aren’t rich and spoilt, drinking gourmet coffee with soymilk and dreaming up daily manifestos for the few. Most of us feel ugly and are lonely, and want to be pretty (or handsome). Maybe some of us want to be pretty because it was, and always will be, powerful. Maybe some of us want to feel good about ourselves, and negotiate the world and have children and even give the Patriarchal Empire a run for its money.”
Enough. What Courtney is talking about in the above paragraph is peer approval, not beauty. The ‘pretty’ she is referring to can never exist because it is a false value placed upon the individual by an inconsistent society. The only ‘pretty’ that truly exists is on the Inside. So ‘pretty always will be powerful’? Surely then, the way forward is to re-educate not reinforce stereotypes. What about wanting to be informed, intelligent, funny, wise, smart, sassy, crafty . . . a goddess in other words, Courtney?
Or is buying yourself a new nose really that important?
On April 9, Nirvana played a benefit show for Bosnian rape victims at San Francisco’s cavernous Cow Palace – support came from The Breeders, L7 and Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy.21 ( Krist reverted back to the original spelling of his name around this time.) I remember sitting up top among the pigeons with Kim Deal and Jo Wiggs from The Breeders looking down on Kurt while the achingly poignant ‘All Apologies’ played.
Kurt looked so fragile, so vulnerable, one speck of humanity against a whole generation of curiosity-seekers, fans, the cynical, the bored and a whole bunch of cheerleaders – no tattoos – in butt-hugging sportswear. By the door, Shelli Novoselic was handing out leaflets, trying to make people think about why they were there. Some hope! The kids were there because MTV had told them to be there. Still, it’s always better to attempt than accept: maybe one or two of the audience went away and thought about the Bosnian crisis because their favourite stars had asked them to. It’s possible. After all, didn’t Clinton ascend to the Presidency because of MTV’s Rock The Vote campaign?22
“Let’s go back a few years,” I wrote in my review. “Rock, as an innovative and thus creative form, is dead. I’ll temper that. Rock, as created by men, is dead. Women? I think there’s still some potential . . . There’s nowhere left for rock music to go, no new barriers for it to cross, it’s been too assimilated, too categorised, too absorbed. It has been a minority interest for years, like jazz, like soul . . .
“So let’s go with the theory that Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was the last glorious death knell of a once vibrant art form and be done with it. (Although ‘In Bloom’ is a far better song, anyway.) But if rock’s over and they killed it, why do I still love Nirvana? The free drinks? The kudos? The unlimited backstage access to arena shows like this? The payola?
“No. Nirvana reach too deep inside me for theories. My only explanation is that they play the type of music I grew up loving and which I will always love. I love Nirvana for ‘Rape Me’, tonight’s opener, a song as battle-scarred and shredding as any OV Wright soul-stirrer. I love them for putting on tonight’s show (only about their sixth since Reading), the humanity at the core. Yeah, the humanity at the core . . . that’s a pretty good reason to love a band. Guess that would explain Sebadoh – The Pastels, too.
“I love Nirvana, for Kurt’s peerless way with a pop melody. For the way the new album can sound like R.E.M. serenading MTV Unplugged23 with acoustic guitars. Heaven forbid I should compare that gang of maudlin retro doomsters with such shimmering pop stars as Nirvana, but both recordings have the same dryness, naturalness and unadorned quality about them. But don’t equate dryness with a lack of emotion here.
“Why love them? For their encore, which is longer than their set used to be, for songs like ‘Breed’, ‘Territorial Pissings’ and ‘Floyd The Barber’, which still roar and buzz as they did before. For the way they don’t play ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Polly’, thus avoiding the two songs that have the most potential for horrendous lighter-waving and clap-alongs, but still play ‘Lithium’ and ‘Teen Spirit’, because to have done otherwise would have been childishly churlish. For the way they have another 20 songs on standby, which are just as plangent, just as exquisit
e as the aforementioned.”
“At the very end [during ‘Endless, Nameless’] Kurt climbed up on top of his amplifier cabinets,” recalls Earnie Bailey. “All of a sudden, he jumped up and arced, and came down on top of Dave, who turned this weird red colour as he had the wind knocked out of him. Kurt fell on this drum kit with all these cymbal stands sticking out, and I’m thinking, ‘How is he not going to impale himself ?’ – but he walks off without a scratch.”
After the show, I ended up at Kurt and Courtney’s rented apartment writing a strange joint article with Kurt about arena rock shows and being beaten up by bouncers. He’d tell me a paragraph or two to write, then I’d detail how I thought Nirvana’s new songs shone, “As blue and battered as anything from the devastating, forthcoming debut album by Madder Rose24, as raw and trembling as any Daniel Johnston live tape.” Although of course I didn’t say it aloud: more probably we both yawned and stretched our limbs as Courtney sat by the fire, reading feminist literature. As soon as I’d finished writing the promised 3,000 words on the couple’s typewriter, we went to bed. We were tired.
“Word started to spread that I had a copy of In Utero ,” recalls Earnie Bailey. “People that I didn’t know at all well – like Eddie Vedder – would call, asking if they could hang out and listen to the album. I told Eddie I’d loaned it out. You can’t leak it to the other side.
“Dale Crover stopped by my hotel room at the Phoenix, and asked if he could hear the album,” the tech adds. “I had a cassette copy, so I put it on. I was nervous when ‘Milk It’ came on, because it was very derivative of the Melvins’ song ‘It’s Shoved’. When it started, I saw this puzzled look come across Dale’s face, which gradually changed as he realised it was a compliment, ultimately.