by Everett True
Three days later, the emergency services were called to the house once more, and Kurt was thrown into King County jail for three hours for alleged domestic assault. Bail of $950 was posted. The charges were later dropped.
The police report mentioned an argument the couple were having over Kurt’s gun collection. Courtney threw orange juice in Kurt’s face, he pushed her and she pushed him back, someone scratched someone else . . . Kurt later strenuously denied all the allegations. In an interview with Spin, he claimed that all that happened was he and Courtney had been running round the house, screaming and wrestling, having a good time, when, “Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door, and there are five cops outside with their guns drawn.”
He added that the two of them argued over who should go to jail. Domestic dispute law in Washington State demands that police officers arrest someone before they leave the premises. The cops confiscated Kurt’s guns – all three of them – after Courtney revealed their whereabouts.
“I don’t think he assaulted her,” says Cali. “They were arguing really bad and she was picking on him. In a fight, he could be vicious, but she would also pick on him until he exploded.”
Don’t you think Courtney had a tendency to wind people up so she could play the victim?
“Yeah,” the former nanny laughs. “Courtney likes drama. She likes to be yelled at. I think she wants someone to dominate her.”
She’s told me that.
“Me too,” he agrees. “It’s a classic thing. Strong, aggressive people would like someone to dominate them at some point. It’s like CEOs going to a dungeon to get whipped. I know other women who fit her description to a lesser degree and they like an aggressive man in their life. He doesn’t have to be an aggressive asshole in public, but they want to fight and they want to argue, and they want to be slapped occasionally. This time, he was eating Spaghetti-O’s and somehow the plate of them wound up on his face. I think Courtney threw them. He was happy that the cops were there, probably because it meant an end to the fight. It was almost like saying, ‘ Fuck you, the cops are going to arrest me. What are you going to do to get me now?’ And he’s sitting there on the stairs and his whole beard is filled with this awful sweet red sauce and it’s caked in.”
Presumably it was Courtney who called the cops.
“I’m sure it was her,” he agrees. “Probably goading each other into it. One saying, ‘I’m going to call the cops,’ and the other saying, ‘Go ahead; call the fucking cops. I just want to eat my dinner. Send me to fucking jail.’ ”
How would you describe them as a couple?
“I think they were volatile. I think they were bad for each other. Those couples that love each other, they can’t imagine their lives without each other, yet they’re going to kill each other. A couple of more stable people would have seen that and split up, or stayed away from each other. As a couple, it was like two people desperate to make something that can’t work, work. I think he loved her very much and I think he was a lot more naïve than her.”
Do you think his Olympia training clashed with her?
“Probably, but he was someone who liked to say ‘ fuck you’ to everybody. Dating Courtney was his way of saying ‘ fuck you’ to Olympia.”
From what I remember, the management was scared of them.
“They didn’t know what to do with them,” agrees Cali. “They were used to dealing with people who wanted their career steered. At the core, Kurt still had a lot of punk rock ethics. He wanted to be what he was, but he didn’t want his songs used in a Nike commercial. Courtney was more on the management side when it came to selling music. A lot of the fights stemmed from that. That fight where the cops came was by no means the only one.”
Were you aware of Kurt’s gun collection?
“I wasn’t aware that there were more than one or two,” Cali replies, “but I can imagine anyone I know buying guns. It doesn’t always mean suicide.”
It’s America, for god’s sake.
“Yeah, it’s America.”
I remember Kurt telling me about the guns, that each one had a journalist’s name.
“That’s almost like pillow talk,” the ex-nanny counters. “It was definitely said. There was a night that Courtney asked me, and she was serious, if I thought that Rene would kill Lynn Hirschberg’s dog. Because I guess Lynn Hirschberg had this dog that she loved more than anything. For a couple of days Courtney was telling me, ‘You get Rene over here. I’m going to send him to New York; I’ll give him $5,000. I want him to kill that dog.’ I never called Rene because what if he’d done it? I don’t think he would, but I didn’t want to get him involved. A few days later she had forgotten about it.”
I definitely remember having a conversation with Kurt where he said, “If I ever go out, I’m going to kill some of those bastards first.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard him talk angry like that. I’m glad he didn’t. That would have changed everything.”
The dispute over In Utero rumbled on through April and May.
Although Nirvana claimed they were under no pressure from Geffen and their management to tamper with Albini’s recordings, privately it was a different matter. In his journal, Kurt detailed a smart compromise: first release the original version – “an uncompromising vinyl, cassette, eight-track only release” – and follow it up a month later with a remixed version entitled Verse, Chorus, Verse, with an advisory sticker stating ‘ Radio-Friendly, Unit-Shifting, Compromise Version’. Pity it didn’t happen.
The solution was simple – alter the mix when the CD was mastered. Great store is placed on production: few bands realise when they first enter a studio to make a record that mastering is equally as important, and almost as pliable. So someone simply turned the vocals up on Albini’s mix, and added more compression – end of problem. A month later, Geffen brought in R.E.M. producer Scott Litt to remix ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and ‘All Apologies’ (from which he removed a long stream of feedback) at Seattle’s Bad Animals studio – Kurt added an acoustic guitar and some backing vocals to ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, and everyone was happy. Well, perhaps not Albini . . . or me. But we didn’t matter.
“You could put that band in the studio for a year, and I don’t think they could come up with a better record,” Albini told Michael Azerrad, annoyed. “If that doesn’t suit their record company then the record company clearly has problems that go beyond this record. The record company has a problem with the band. The sooner everybody involved recognises this, the easier it will be on everybody.”
Danny Goldberg refutes this: “The stress didn’t come from the band or the record company, but from Steve Albini. Kurt wanted to work with Steve because he liked his work, and also he wanted to work with someone from the independent world to show his core audience he was still one of them. It was recorded quickly. The mixes were very muddy. Both Gary [ Gersh] and I said you can’t hear the vocals, and the words are a big part of the music. Kurt agreed. So we asked Scott Litt to do the singles. Albini later said Geffen was pushing Kurt around, and it was only him who respected his integrity, but Kurt had 100 per cent control on that record. He chose the person who did the remix, and approved the final versions.”
In May, Kurt settled on the In Utero title – taken from some of Courtney’s poetry – and conceptualised the album artwork. The front cover – a full-size model of a see-through woman with all her inner organs showing, holding out her hands in supplication, head slightly bowed – is taken from a classic schoolroom model entitled Brunnhilde: The Transparent Woman used by American children to discover facts about the female anatomy. Kurt added a pair of angel’s wings. The album’s back cover was a disturbing pink wash collage of dolls, intestines, foetuses, umbilical cords and flowers – “Suggesting the aftermath of a massacre,” as the singer put it.
“Late on Sunday afternoon, Kurt called me up and says, ‘I’ve got this thing I want you to photograph for the album,’ ” recalls Charles Peterson. “He’s like, ‘You’ve got to come over i
n an hour; they’re all going to die if you don’t.’ So I cobbled together whatever film I had in my refrigerator and went over. He had set up on his dining room floor this collage of carnations and tulips and plastic body parts.
“There was a big screen television in a sunken living room that was permanently on,” the photographer continues. “The house was kind of a pit, the way Kurt and Courtney lived their lives. While I was photographing this thing – it was difficult because I had to hover over it, and it’s not my forte to do a still-life shot – Kurt played the In Utero recordings from a boom box on the ‘island’ in the middle of the kitchen. It was an actual mix, sequenced and everything. It sounded great. And he was like, ‘What do you think of the mix?’ He was really uncertain. Honestly, if I listen to it now on a good stereo it sounds like shit. You do have to turn up the bass and treble. But listening to it on a boom box then, it sounded like classic Nirvana.”
Life went on as usual. Krist continued to speak out against homophobic and censorious statutes. Break-up rumours continued to surface, Kurt sometimes going public with his desire to form a group with Mark Arm or Mark Lanegan. Dave kept his distance. Kurt carried on taking drugs, not so surreptitiously any more – visitors to the house felt they needed to work their schedules around whether Kurt was high or not, something Kurt resented, figuring he was fully able to function anyway. And Courtney continued to shop, plot her own course for world domination and invite her friends over.
“People were behaving oddly towards me in Minneapolis,” says Jessica Hopper. “So Courtney had Janet [ Billig] buy me a ticket so I could hang out with them in Seattle for a week, under the guise that I was going to look at schools.
“That house was a weirdly inappropriate house for them,” she continues. “It had a beige carpet, this so-called suburban den. Nice, new construction, just normal looking, coffee table and all that. Upstairs, there was a destroyed-looking room with all Kurt’s records and guitars. The kitchen was pretty normal except there were tons of mail and faxes everywhere, and there was a huge collection of medical examples of embryos all over the dining room floor. There were things written all over the walls in markers and lipstick: upstairs, outside Kurt’s art room Courtney had painted something like ‘I fucking love you’ on this nice clean wall and nice clean carpet. They’d punk-ed up this totally nice house, but it was like no one had really moved in. There wasn’t anything on the walls. For a couple of days I was sequestered in the house. Sometimes I’d hang out with Frances and her nanny.2 Kurt and Courtney would be locked in their bedroom: they’d come out and I’d run some errands with Courtney. I took a cab into Capitol Hill and did record shopping.
“One day they had me hold a microphone while they recorded some songs together. They did ‘Pig Meat Papa’ by Leadbelly, and I was holding the mic and Frances at the same time, and she was crying a little. You could hear it in the recording. They were singing it together. Kurt was playing. They did two Leadbelly songs, that other one they ended up doing on MTV Unplugged [‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’] and then she tried to get him to play something else. They were both high. Everything I saw during that time, even though it was very taxing and tiring, was entirely responsible for me never doing drugs – seeing these people that I respected and liked barely communicating, or in their own world together.
“Courtney was the active one,” Jessica continues. “Kurt was the withdrawn one, but he was always really funny. Any time he was around Frances he was really alive: he would talk about weird things he was obsessed with, a documentary about animals or children in another country. He seemed interested in phenomena. He was watching a PBS 40-part series on [Roman emperor] Caligula3, something you’d check out of the library. They were both totally intellectual. They were also intensely private. A friend called me on one of the house lines, and they wanted to know how I knew him. I felt like I’d inadvertently breached their privacy.
“They didn’t leave the house much. It was like a big incubator. Cali and I went out and ran errands for them.”
On July 1, the day Jessica arrived, Hole played a show at the Off Ramp in Seattle – the same day the Seattle Times ran a story about Kurt’s arrest. Courtney was in her usual captivating, sarcastic form, getting into scuffles, playing songs from Live Through This – including ‘Doll Parts’, performed on acoustic guitar4 – and making reference to the newspaper story, saying, “Yeah, my husband is a total wife-beater. NOT!” Kurt and Krist turned up after the show ended, having been to see Leonard Cohen perform. “We hung out with Leonard Cohen’s daughter Lorca, on the day after he played Seattle,” says Earnie Bailey. “She was very sweet.”
“ Cali picks me up from the airport,” recalls Jessica. “We get some food, hang out a little, he brings me to the house and leaves to go to do stuff, before him and Kurt go to see Leonard Cohen. En route to the show, Kurt drives Courtney and me up to Capitol Hill to make a stop at Kat [ Bjelland] and Stu’s [Spasm, singer with Lubricated Goat5]. Kat is not there – she hates me anyways – and sweaty, sweaty Stu in his glitter cowboy shirt answers the door. Immediately, I’m like, ‘OK, I understand: errand . . .’ So I’m deposited in the living room and told it’ll only be a few minutes.
“Twenty minutes later, I’m sitting there reading a magazine and down the hall in the kitchen I can see something weird is going on. They call me in: Kurt is sitting in the invisible chair, nodded way out. Courtney, meanwhile, her arm is swelling up and looking spotty and discoloured – whatever happens when some cotton gets in your blood – and is a total mess and a touch panicky. Stu is sweating, at once totally high and scared. None of them feel they are in any shape to go out in public, so they need me to run a few errands . . .
“I’m a little panicked myself. I’m being told I’ll have to care for them and drive them to the show, even though I couldn’t drive a manually operated car yet. Kurt was like, ‘I’ll guide you through it.’ As soon as I’m out, I stop at every payphone, calling the house, hoping Cali is there to help me. I get to an ATM. Strangely; Mark Arm is behind me in line . . .
“On the way back, I’m crying I’m so freaked out, and finally I get through to Cali, and he comes and fixes everything. That was my first day in Seattle with them.”
“ Stu and Kat were total wing nuts,” laughs Rene Navarette. “They were recently married, with a place on Capitol Hill. Kurt and Courtney would hang out at theirs a lot. Stu was a storyteller. It was always funny whenever he left the room, watching Kurt mimic Stu trying to promote his Crunt album – which I thought was great6 – in his Australian accent. Stu had this pitch he’d do over and over; he’d say about being in Berlin and being stabbed, and being beaten up by 10 men and then ripping off their arms, and go into detail about being mugged for all of $10. It was almost cartoon-ish.
“Kurt being funny would either fall on deaf ears or be the funniest thing in the world. It was so hit and miss. It came from him being the cool kid in the country town. He was still really humble. He was very childish. He would mimic people and it was hilarious when it did hit. ‘Stare hard, retard!’ was one of his favourite sayings.”
Also on July 1, Tim/Kerr records released ‘The ‘Priest’ They Called Him’, a limited edition 10-inch record featuring William S. Burroughs doing a monologue over Kurt’s guitar. It was a one-sided single, with the two performers’ signatures etched into the B-side. Burroughs was a bit of a mentor to Kurt, who had even offered the iconoclast a cameo role in the video for ‘Heart-Shaped Box’. It’s arguable how positive a role model Burroughs was for Kurt: by making his drug use and his junkie friends sound so interesting he made heroin a much more attractive prospect for the singer – something that sadly also happens every time Kurt’s drug use is mentioned. The record was fine, if odd. The guitar part was lifted from the Laundry Room sessions in November 1992.
“He was probably really honoured to be doing something with Burroughs,” comments Earnie. “He was a great hero of his.”
Three days later, Dave Grohl played a reu
nion show with Scream, the start of a 10-date US tour – and Dischord released the Scream back catalogue on CD. Los Angeles Times wrote of the final night, “Dave Grohl supercharged the usual punk rock polka stuff with an extraordinary array of back-beat flams and paradiddles.” No kidding.
Bearing in mind Scream’s predilection for breaking up and re-forming as band members fell in and out of favour with one another, it was tempting to view this as a continuation of the Washington, DC band’s career path. Grohl felt estranged from the Nirvana camp: he’d had a massive row with Courtney during the recording of In Utero , the band had played live just once during the first six months of 1993, and he was trying to release some of his own Laundry Room recordings on a Detroit label.
“Dave never came over to the house,” says Cali. “It was apparent that Dave and Krist didn’t like Courtney, but Krist really loved Kurt and was trying to make an attempt at being a friend, even though it was crazy at the house. Kurt was kind of nasty to Dave, like he was still the new guy.
“If Kurt and I were going out,” the former nanny continues, “like if Kurt and I were going to a P.J. Harvey concert, then Courtney was definitely not in town. And when Courtney was not in town, we had a lot of fun. I’d wind up signing Dave Grohl autographs all night because I had long black hair. Kurt was nervous about the P.J. Harvey concert [Under The Rail, Seattle, July 9] because he liked her so much.”
We all did. P.J. Harvey’s first recordings (Dry, 4 Track Demos) were characterised by their vivacity, viciousness and starkness. The English singer was able to cut to the heart of emotion with a raw incisiveness that set her apart. Polly is also an incredible blues guitarist – her songs feel simple, but the rhythms are original and very complex. Initially influenced by loads of blues guitarists, plus counter-culture heroes like New York poetess Patti Smith and Australian storyteller Nick Cave (whose dissolute Gothic look Polly once drew upon), she soon established herself as the equal of her peers.