by Everett True
“After the show,” Earnie continues, “ Krist and I went down to the North Beach area, the City Lights bookstore. We were chasing [ Jack] Kerouac’s ghost, visiting his old stomping grounds, trying to find some of the old rooms he used to read in. There was a closed liquor store right across from the hotel and we got in pretty late, but we paid a couple of hundred dollars to the man vacuuming for a bottle of Wild Turkey, which kept things going for a lot longer.
“Another time, Krist and Dave and I drove up to Vancouver to see Wool [Washington, DC rock band, ex-Scream] play a show. Beforehand, Krist and I went to a sports bar and got into this funny conversation about money and how the world might be a better place without it. So we took all the cash out of our pockets and threw it on the ashtray on the table and lit it on fire. These massive jock guys physically threw us out because we burned our cash in the ashtray.”
Addenda: Cali DeWitt
“So time goes on and I’m spinning my wheels in LA and doing drugs and I want to get out of that lifestyle. Courtney was continuing to pressure me to work for them, and live with them. She said, ‘Just do it for a couple of months.’ She said, ‘There’s a show at the Cow Palace, we’ll meet you there.’
“So they fly me to San Francisco to meet them for this show. It was a great show and I felt pretty good. I was excited. From there, we drove to Seattle. Officially, all of a sudden, I’m the nanny. I don’t realise what that means until I start. I get to the hotel room, and Frances is put on my lap to see how she likes me. She likes me; we get along great. I spent a lot of time now with that baby under my arm. On the drive to Seattle it took a while because Courtney wanted to stop and shop at antique stores. They both were injecting the Buprenex still. It made me uncomfortable. It shouldn’t have because I’d seen far worse things, but someone sitting next to you in the car injecting this Buprenex into their leg . . . I didn’t say anything. Why would I? I’m not the type. People always say, ‘You should have said something,’ but it’s like, hold on a second. The only reason you’re in that situation in the first place is because you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t say anything.
“It hadn’t come to the point for me where friends were dying. It didn’t seem real. Now, 10 or 15 years later, I look at people who are still heroin addicts, and they don’t have any teeth and they’re having hip replacement surgeries and they’re only 34 years old. People really do die. You really do destroy yourself completely. But at that point, it wasn’t a reality. So it dawned on me the first day that I’ve basically got two people who are my friends. I get along really well with Kurt and Courtney. We can shit-talk about music all day long and it’s funny and we feel comfortable.”
That’s an important point; there weren’t that many people who got along with Kurt and Courtney.
“Yeah, I don’t know why it was me . . .”
I can guess. You were a punk rock kid and you were young.
“I was also cool enough to keep it internalised. I didn’t run around and tell everyone what I was doing. They were my friends, but they were older than me and I looked up to them, so I listened. Halfway to Seattle, I turned 20. The next day, we got to Seattle. I remember on the drive thinking, ‘This is great, but I’m in for it here.’ These people obviously needed taking care of. I felt like I needed taking care of, and I’ve got this baby.”
Who was driving?
“I was.”
Were you aware of the vast, almost mythical, management machine that surrounded them?
“No, not yet. I didn’t understand the level of manipulation going on until much later.”
Presumably you weren’t even aware of the rest of Nirvana . . .
“Yeah, for better or for worse. It wasn’t like I tried to make it happen, but all of a sudden I was in the secret circle. I was a kid with no money who had a backpack and a skateboard who had some incredible friends who gave me incredible opportunities. In New York and LA, I was running around like a squatter punk kid. I was certainly excited to live in Seattle, I’d never lived in Seattle; I was excited to go on tour outside of a van; I was excited about all of these things.
“There was a major thing that happened two days into being in Seattle. It was this big, brand new house they had rented on Lake Washington. I had the bottom floor and I thought it was cool. About two days in, I asked Courtney to keep drugs away from me. This is not to blame her because I would have found drugs anyway, but she tended to dumb things down and try to pull one over on people. She did this a lot, but you can’t pull a drug thing over on someone who likes drugs; it’s just too obvious. She introduced me to their friend Dylan who came over. At first I didn’t like Dylan that much because he was a junkie. I had this image that I was not going to do that and I was naïve enough to think that Kurt and Courtney were not going to do that because they had Buprenex, and everything was going to be fine. Then I saw him and I knew.
“She said that she needed me to get some money out of the bank and go with Dylan to pick something up for the house. I knew right away. I got a stomach ache and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t do this,’ but I go along with it. I’m sitting in the car with this guy Dylan. He has me park in this shitty neighbourhood. He goes and he comes back and he goes, ‘I got it.’ I knew it was drugs and the obsession to use drugs came over me, which was always what brought me down. When we got back to the house, I was yelling at Courtney. I go, ‘You can’t! I’m a drug addict. I’m younger than you in this.’ Probably one of the reasons that I could get on with Courtney as much as I did was for whatever reason, where other people were afraid of her, I yelled at her all the time. She needed it. She was like, ‘I’m sorry, fine. You should do some.’ It was this thing that went on all day, this fight. We were both really loaded and we were both trying to hide it from each other, and Eric [ Erlandson]’ s there. I’m holding the baby, and it scared me. I’m like, I can’t do this, be in this situation. This was April 15, two days after we got there.”
What was Eric’s role in this?
“Eric would often show up and try to fix things. Courtney was in some kind of turmoil and she had a last resort. Eric was always on Courtney’s side and would come take care of things and clean up messes.”
Did Eric do drugs?
“Eric was one of these amazing people who could take it or leave it. Eric was someone who didn’t mind experimenting with drugs, but wasn’t really interested in them. But it was a bad day, and I remember fighting with her for long enough where at some point I was crying and just saying, ‘I can’t be in this environment and do this for you.’ ”
Was Kurt around?
“No, I don’t know where he was. He might have gone away with the band for a couple of days. When he wasn’t around and she was, drugs were in the house – and vice versa. But that sort of changed it for me. I went there with a real strong . . . it would have failed sooner or later anyway. But I had to try to be a sober nanny – and on my nights off, I could go off and party and do drugs and be a 20-year-old.”
What did your nanny duties entail?
“They were supposed to entail taking care of Frances. Courtney immediately tried to take advantage of that, and have me send faxes and answer phones and stuff. I told her pretty quickly that I wouldn’t do anything else. She would say, ‘God, don’t yell at me.’ She would always say, ‘God, don’t yell at me!’ ”
That’s weird, that’s how I was with Courtney for quite a while as well. I remember Courtney saying to me early on that one of the reasons she liked hanging out with me was because I was one of the few people who could make her cry.
“It’s good if you can beat her at that. She likes to tell people what to do, and she likes it even more when they say, ‘No.’ I had the kid a lot, sometimes for a week. I didn’t mind. I actually, much to my surprise, liked it a lot. I liked Frances and I was good with her and I had fun with her.”
What would Kurt eat?
“Mostly junk food: frozen dinners, frozen pizzas. He had a favourite pizza place in Pioneer Square
and sometimes I’d go pick up pizzas there. He and I shared a junkie love of food that was cookies and Lucky Charms. He found out what my favourite cookies were and bought me a case of them as a surprise. Around the same time, she came home with two bowls. She’d spend all this money that wasn’t hers on expensive things. Some part of her, probably the part of her that wanted to get into a fight, couldn’t resist telling him how much they were. They just looked like fancy bowls to us, but they were $600 each, there was real gold leaf on them. He was pissed off and yelled at her. He said, ‘The money spent on those bowls could have paid my rent for three months, five years ago.’ So he sat in my room in the basement and watched TV with Frances and me. He was fuming over these bowls and he went upstairs and asked me if I was hungry. He poured two bowls of Coco Puffs into these expensive bowls, brought them downstairs and said, ‘Well, this is the best use we’re going to get out of these bowls, isn’t it?’ ”
He had some X-ray specs down there, didn’t he?
“Yeah, all those cheap, shitty magic tricks and fake body parts. What he spent his money on was like what you see on the back of the In Utero record: expensive medical dolls. That’s another thing. All these books talk about how tortured and unhappy Kurt was. I don’t think he was that unhappy. I think he was very funny. He was everything people say about tortured and unhappy, but I also think he had a lot of joy at times. He used to make me laugh the same way she made me laugh, all the time.”
Did Kurt ever mention his old girlfriends?
“No, not to me.”
Did Courtney?
“Yeah, she’d bring it up and he’d shrug it off. I started a rule between them pretty quickly, probably in the first month I was in the house. I said, ‘Look, this is not normal. I don’t want you to bring me into the middle of your fights. Don’t ask me who’s right; don’t yell to me in the middle of it’ – because they would do that and I didn’t need that.”
NOTES
1 Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin – both bands were considered beyond the pale to the punk rock librarians of Olympia, although some hipsters grudgingly admitted that Zeppelin, at least, could rock.
2 There were five in total lifted from the Dale demo: ‘Mexican Seafood’ as originally featured on the C/Z compilation EP Teriyaki Asthma, Vol 1, and ‘Beeswax’ from kill rock stars.
3 ‘Sliver’ later got released in the US as a single to promote Incesticide . A video was shot in Kurt’s garage, directed by Kevin Kerslake, filmed on grainy Super-8, featuring Frances Bean among others as the band played live against a backdrop of Kurt’s collection of weird objects.
4 Daniel Johnston’s felt-tip drawings are full of disconcerting, sometimes misogynistic, imagery: women with their heads missing, skulls, many-headed creatures and his alter ego Casper the Friendly Ghost. A former art student, Daniel was inspired by US comic book artists from the Sixties, particularly Marvel Comics stalwart Jack Kirby’s larger-than-life visualisations.
5 The Stinky Puffs were a brilliantly elemental band formed by the Half Japanese singer’s son – released an album on Shimmydisc, 1995’s A Little Tiny Smelly Bit Of . . ., full of simple, scratchy pop songs.
6 A generation of indie kids lost their hearts to Mazzy Star singer Hope Sandoval’s dispassionate, dreamtime croon: the LA duo’s debut album, 1990’s She Hangs Brightly is crystalline post-Velvet Underground perfection. Even better is guitarist David Roback’s psychedelic pre-Mazzy Star outfit, Opal.
7 It was an interview Kurt arranged by himself, much to the annoyance of Geffen’s press department.
8 The Pacific Northwest also has strong ties with The Simpsons . The first time I visited Sub Pop, I noticed a signed Matt Groening print on Bruce Pavitt’s office wall. The Simpsons creator studied at Evergreen State College.
9 The inspiration behind ‘Scentless Apprentice’ was the Patrick Süskind book Perfume (1986), written about a maniac perfumer in pre-revolutionary France who has no scent, but whose advanced sense of smell means he is alienated from society.
10 No Pearl Jam – because “Pearl Jam, like, suck, heh heh,” as Butt-head, the more intelligent of the pair put it.
11 “On the hotel itineraries,” recalls Earnie, “Kurt and Courtney were often Mr And Mrs Simon Ritchie, while Dave went by Roy Rogers.”
12 The title of ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ refers to a herbal abortifacient – “It doesn’t work, you hippie,” Kurt caustically remarked in his journal.
13 Frances Farmer’s supporters felt she was demonised mainly because she wrote a poem entitled ‘God is Dead’ when she was 17 and thence visited the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
14 Probably a reference to the AC/DC album Back In Black.
15 Drawn from her ghost-written autobiography Will There Really Be A Morning? In recent years, doubt has been cast on its authenticity.
16 Pat made up a great story about how the band set their pants on fire to celebrate the record’s completion, a line that one journalist swallowed whole. Perhaps he should have remembered the old playground chant: “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
17 The engineer was renowned for walking around the streets of Chicago in a big 10-gallon Stetson.
18 Many people loved Evan Dando, particularly for his lazy and beautiful way round a pop/country cover, but his continued use of acid did make him very dopey. Kurt, on the other hand, found Dando’s glad-handing irritating in the extreme.
19 Leslie Hardy has her picture on the EP, but doesn’t play on it.
20 The Alice In Chains singer died from a heroin overdose in 2002.
21 Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were an excellent politically motivated and witty San Francisco hip hop band, fronted by Michael Franti.
22 It’s easy to underestimate the power of the media: Amnesty International, for example, benefits greatly when a band like U2 prints its address on their album sleeves.
23 It was the vogue for MTV to invite rock bands into a large studio and get them to perform acoustically, supposedly without amplification – but usually just a little quieter. With a few exceptions – Neil Young springs to mind – the format failed dismally, serving instead as one more smug, backslapping, industry exercise.
24 Madder Rose were a somnambulist, drug-tinted, Velvet Underground-inspired, pop band from New York – none of their albums really did their live shows justice, but 1993’s debut Bring It Down is pretty gorgeous.
CHAPTER 25
Eyes Wide Open
William recites a poem all about some kid, see, out on the street, see, meets up with a drug dealer, see, in a hotel room, see, there’s a chopped-up body in a suitcase, see, he needs to score a hit of smack, see, he’s only got three dollars, see, it’s Christmas, see, the wind is grey outside, see, the kid grows ill, see, the images grow blurry, see . . .
. . . and a guitar destroys ‘Silent Night’, right, howls like it’s the wind whipping along the street, right, coils in on itself like it’s the kid himself hooked in the hotel room, right, lets burst with a scream of feedback like it’s the ‘priest’ arguing with the bastard, right . . .
This pairing works remarkably well.
Whether you’re prepared to listen to Burroughs’ almost deathly monotone speaking of decay and distraction over Kurt Cobain’s tortured guitar musings more than once is up to you.
There’s something morbidly fascinating about the thought, though.
(Review of ‘The ‘Priest’ They Called Him’, Melody Maker, September 11, 1993)
ON May 2, 1993, the King County emergency services received a phone call from 11301 Lakeside Ave NE. The police report stated that Kurt Cobain had been, “At a friend’s house two hours earlier, where he’d injected himself with $30–$40 worth of heroin. He then drove home to the address of the incident and stayed in his room.” After Kurt refused to unlock the door, Courtney dialled Wendy and Kim, who immediately set out from Aberdeen to try and help, but by the time they arrived his condition had worsened, and Kurt was vomiting and in shock.
It wasn�
�t the first time this had happened – it’s been rumoured Kurt overdosed several times during 1993. Courtney tried throwing cold water over her husband, and giving him various drugs – Valium, Buprenex, Benadryl, codeine – to counter the effects, but nothing worked. Eventually, the paramedics were called when Kurt started to turn blue. He was rushed to Harborview Hospital where he drifted in and out of consciousness, intermittently quoting Shakespeare to his sister.
“That time, he had cotton fever,” explains Cali DeWitt. “When you shoot drugs you rinse it through cotton. If the tiniest strand of cotton gets on to the needle and into your bloodstream, it’s not so much of an overdose as your body reacting to the cotton. You get really flushed and shaky and hot. It’s physically uglier than an overdose.”
But it’s not so dangerous . . .
“Not compared to a real overdose,” Cali agrees. “There was another overdose at that house around this time. Jackie [ Farry] was visiting and I think Nils Bernstein [president of the Nirvana fan club] was at the house too. I carried Kurt upstairs and threw him into the Jacuzzi bathtub and turned the cold water on and that woke him up. I just wanted to get him walking around, but then Courtney cooked him food, and fed him in there. I was definitely starting to see how volatile this home life was going to be.”
On June 1, Courtney staged a small intervention/rehab session in the house: she called in Krist, Janet Billig, Nils, Wendy and Kurt’s stepfather Pat O’Connor. His friends and relatives all went through a number of reasons why Kurt should quit doing drugs – his own health and the welfare of his daughter being paramount among them. Courtney pointed out that she’d started attending Narcotics Anonymous, and was trying to quit smoking cigarettes.1 He refused to listen, and stormed upstairs: this was the cue for his peers to start bickering among themselves over who was to blame.