Nirvana

by Everett True

  “It was during the [P.J. Harvey’s third album] Rid Of Me tour, and the place was half-full,” continues Cali. “She was so great. He wanted to ask her to go on tour with Nirvana. So after the show, we went backstage and I know it took a lot for him to ask her. She was polite, but she turned him down. I think that made him love her even more.”

  “I heard that Courtney was very bothered by Kurt’s interest in P.J. Harvey,” comments Earnie.

  Courtney was very bothered by any female in whom Kurt showed even the vaguest of interest – but right enough, as on the surface Polly fell right within the Olympia stereotype to which Kurt was attracted: dark-haired, soulful, moody, a musician and highly intelligent.

  On July 17, Nevermind finally dropped out of the Billboard Top 200, after 92 weeks.

  Six days later, Nirvana played their second gig of the year at the 4,000-capacity Roseland Ballroom in New York, as part of the annual industry bun-fest, the New Music Seminar. A queue snaked round the block as frustrated seminar attendees flashed their badges and tried to gain entry: no dice. Inside, support act The Jesus Lizard turned in a typically anarchic set of their voodoo blues: singer David Yow stagediving before even a note was played.

  “The place was huge with a white linen VIP area, and my punk rock self hated it,” notes German promoter Christof Ellinghaus. “I thought it was gross. It was full of jocks, the people Kurt was scared of, sports buffs.” “

  It was a secret show, but everyone knows about secret shows,” recalls Cali. “They were going to try playing with another guitarist [Kurt’s other guitar tech, Big John Duncan] and a cello player [Lori Goldston].”

  Big John was previously noted for appearing on Top Of The Pops sporting a flamboyant Mohican haircut back in 1980, playing guitar with postcard punks The Exploited. Big John – a lovely fellow, but built like a barrel and not someone you’d want to cross – also had played guitar in dire Scottish band Goodbye Mr McKenzie alongside future Garbage singer Shirley Manson.

  Lori was a classically trained cellist, a mainstay of Seattle’s moody, jazz-influenced The Black Cat Orchestra – Nirvana came to know of her after she took part in a performance inspired by events in Sarajevo. “They said they were looking for a cellist to tour with them and do MTV Unplugged,” Goldston recalls. “Kurt wanted to expand his parameters. He didn’t think his way of singing was very sustainable. He thought his voice would get destroyed. His solution was to set his sights on being quieter, playing weird chamber music. He wanted an oboe. Kurt was very subtle. He would indicate the next song by just moving around. He liked talking in abbreviated ways. Coming from Long Island where everything was explicit, it was like everyone talked in codes.

  “I was so nervous at that first show, I started smoking,” she continues. “It was a great show. It was a little surreal.”

  It certainly was. Nirvana started with ‘Serve The Servants’ and ‘Scentless Apprentice’ from In Utero – two songs the audience was unfamiliar with, but massive surges of adrenalin – before stepping up a gear into ‘Breed’ and ‘Lithium’, the place going crazy, the rampant singalong not spoiled one bit by over-enthusiasm. Kurt wore a pair of Devo shades and his trademark, red striped bumblebee jersey. (“But I have to wear this, I have fans out there,” he pleaded when Courtney attempted to smarten him up pre-show.) Krist looked spruce and dapper in a stiff-collared black shirt and short hair. Dave drummed furiously, grinning like the Cheshire cat.

  ‘Rape Me’ followed, tantalising and strangely apposite. Big John took the stage with his dark hair and trimmed blond beard to add firepower to the next four songs: ‘Aneurysm’, ‘Territorial Pissings’, an elegiac ‘ Heart-Shaped Box’ and equally as beautiful ‘All Apologies’, Goldston’s sweeping cello adding layers of texture.

  “These are the sounds taking the music industry by storm,” Krist called out. “It’s called . . . alternative rock!”

  The crowd was buzzing after ‘All Apologies’, expectant; eager to break into a riot of moshing like they’d seen on MTV. Instead they got . . . acoustic Nirvana! Nirvana Unplugged. Talk about confusion. Some folk laughed, some clapped, some grew disinterested exceedingly fast and started talking loudly – you wouldn’t have thought these were the same rabid fans so eager to see the sainted Kurt Cobain only minutes before. It was a shame, because the middle section was both moving and a brave experiment on Kurt’s part to move his band’s sound on.

  “It was awkward because the first part of the show was so powerful,” Earnie suggests. “ Krist was airborne. I couldn’t get over how amazing the rhythm section sounded. The ending was almost anticlimactic, if only because I could hear people talking during the acoustic set. I couldn’t tell if they were distracted or in awe. There were a lot of industry people in an alcove along the side wall that was formerly the stage where big bands used to play, and it sounded like that was where some of the noise was coming from.”7

  It was almost the reverse of Bob Dylan going electric in 1967: the kids hated the idea of their heroes changing tack. Haunting versions of ‘Polly’, ‘Dumb’ and ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ followed, but all one could hear halfway back were scenesters loudly ordering drinks. Meanwhile, a handful of hardy dancers exercised their right to positive sarcasm, stagediving frenziedly during the softest moments.

  And then . . . Nirvana stopped playing, packed up their instruments and left the stage. Gone. No one knew what to do. No one clapped or cheered. Silence. Muted talking. Eventually, the band returned for a perfunctory run-through of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and a noise fest, Kurt dropped to his knees in front of his effects board.

  Afterwards, the mood backstage was oddly restrained. I made a joke to Courtney about Nirvana’s new acoustic middle section sounding like U2 – I’d recently seen a live show wherein the pompous Irish band performed an acoustic set on a smaller stage. She nearly thumped me before she realised I was winding her up.

  Bumping into Kurt, I started telling him about this great new rock band I’d seen the night before, Dayton, Ohio’s Guided By Voices: “They’re like a cross between Sebadoh, Swell Maps8, Cheap Trick and Eddie And The Hot Rods9,” I babbled. He barely feigned interest.

  That seminar was eventful.

  Later that night, Cali tried to convince the Nirvana entourage to accompany him to legendary Bowery club CBGBs where an unknown punk band called Rancid was playing. No deal. Anyone left standing wanted to check out the debut of Pavement’s new drummer at the Matador records showcase – far hipper.

  “They all made fun of me,” Cali sighs.

  The night after, I was sharing a taxi with Cali, also to CBGBs, to catch the Amphetamine Reptile showcase. Cali asked, “Can I smoke?” and when the driver replied no, he asked, “What the fuck is this doing in here then?”, ripped the ashtray straight off the door and threw it out the window. I offered the driver 20 bucks, and prayed he wasn’t packing a gun.

  “If I’d done that now I’d be embarrassed,” Cali laughs, “but then I was just excited because you’d mentioned some band or other. The same night Tom Hazelmyer [ AmRep boss] picked me up over his head and threw me on to the roof of a car in front of CBGBs. He liked to do that. [Indeed he did. The same week, he threw Thurston Moore into a dumpster.] He said, ‘Stay away from my wife.’ I said, ‘Well, she shouldn’t be dressed that way.’ We’ve been friends ever since. He liked the stupidity of my young, arrogant mind.”

  Another night, several of the Nirvana entourage caught a ‘grunge’ covers band playing live, much to our delight. All the songs were performed faithfully – Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Spin Doctors, Red Hot Chili Peppers, etc – until it came to Nirvana. These were sung in a high-pitched squeal, the singer camping it up like he was a TV gay. The obvious inference was that Nirvana weren’t real ‘men’ at all. Not like their peers. Krist and Dave were stoked when they found out.

  “It all sounds so familiar,” laughs Earnie.

  At the same convention, Kurt and Courtney took a cab across town to Wetlands at the unfas
hionable end of Hudson Street, to see TV Personalities play live. It was the usual mixture of desultory humour and bittersweet pop. Arriving at the venue, Kurtney espied Steve Malkmus, singer of Pavement. Not brooking any arguments, they placed themselves either side of Malkmus at the back of the club, remaining deep in conversation all night.

  Later, I saw Kurt walking along the street dishevelled and distracted, on his own, having just argued with Courtney and been thrown out of the cab.

  I said the mood backstage at Roseland seemed oddly restrained.

  There was a reason for that: as Courtney explained when she grabbed me pre-gig from the increasingly crowded VIP area where I was rubbing shoulders with Sonic Youth, Beck, The Beastie Boys, Girls Against Boys, Urge Overkill, Babes In Toyland, Melvins . . . (and they were just the ones still speaking to me) – only a few hours before Nirvana played, she’d discovered her husband, dead, on the floor of their hotel room.

  “Got to New York, got to the hotels,” says Cali. “Of course, everyone being drug addicts, everyone wanted to get heroin. You know there’s white heroin in New York as opposed to the brown heroin on the West Coast. It’s black tar here on the West Coast and on the East Coast it’s China White. Actually, if you’re a drug user here and you do black tar all the time you kind of feel like you’re almost not doing drugs if you do white heroin. It feels more innocuous. It’s not the sticky stuff that you have to cook. It’s in this nice little bag.

  “We all had our hotel rooms on the same floor, but probably a good eight or nine rooms away from each other. The day of the show I could hear Courtney screaming for me across the floor. I ran down the hall and opened the door and Kurt was lying by the door in his underwear with the needle in his arm and his eyes wide open, not breathing. Basically dead with his eyes open. He was, as is well documented, very small, so I pulled the needle out of his arm and picked him up and started slapping him and punching his chest right in the sternum pretty hard. The second or third punch he blew out all of his air and started breathing again. He closed his eyes and opened his eyes and looked around, confused. The screaming had alerted a lot of people on the floor and we could hear other people running down going, ‘What’s going on?’ – and security. I just said, ‘Let’s get him dressed.’ He’s asking what’s going on, and she was like, ‘You were dead, you were dead!’ I took him out past everyone and got him some food, and we walked around Times Square a bit. Afterwards I was really shaken. I’m not trained in any kind of CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation], so it was a freak I hit him in the right place.”

  That’s interesting because Anton Brookes has said how shocked he felt when he saw you and Courtney spring into action like “experienced medical aids”. He was left with the impression you must have done it fairly often.

  “If you do hard narcotics all the time, you wind up doing this fairly often,” explains Cali. “By fairly often, I mean once a month. I don’t mean just to Kurt, I can count eight or nine people I’ve been in that situation with. As far as ‘experienced medical aids’, I always chalk it up to like if a car falls on someone and someone gets superhuman strength. Your adrenalin goes and there’s no time for fear. Images get burned in your mind. The image of a friend of yours in his underwear with a needle in his arm and his eyes open, but blue, and not breathing, is like a flash stain on your psyche. Kurt played a show that night to all these people and he did a really good job, but I remember thinking the whole time, ‘He was dead four hours ago and none of these people know that.’ It was scary. I think it scared him too.”

  That was the first time?

  “It happened before in Seattle.”

  Do you remember anything else from the show?

  “It was good,” Cali smiles, “but Big John didn’t belong on stage with them.”

  A couple of weeks after the New Music Seminar show, Nirvana played another secret gig. This time, it was a benefit for the Mia Zapata Investigation Fund at the King Theater in Seattle, on August 6. Tad and Patti Schemel’s former band Kill Sybil also played. Zapata was a popular local figure, a singer with an astonishingly emotive voice, who fronted local punk band The Gits – she’d been found raped and strangled in Seattle’s Central District neighbourhood in the early hours of July 7.

  “Nirvana was the last-minute headliner,” recalls Gillian G. Gaar. “So last-minute, that no one was sure if they were going to play or not. They started with ‘Seasons In The Sun’, Kurt’s voice sounding all raw and scraped – and played the entire song. It was great.”

  There was a massive fight backstage between Courtney and Tad’s wife, Barbara Beymer – rumoured to be as large as Tad Doyle himself. “She was someone Courtney shouldn’t have been fucking with,” commented Page Hamilton. “She could have ripped her limb from limb.”

  “It’s pretty safe to say that a lot of people who lived in Seattle for a long time didn’t like Courtney,” comments Cali sagely.

  I don’t think you’re giving away any secrets there, Cali.

  “Courtney’s ego didn’t like to get beaten,” he suggests. “I feel like Kurt was mad at Tad because of it. More like a husband’s anger towards his assaulted wife.”

  The way he told it to me, he said Tad had been booked to play some of the In Utero tour, and they got dropped because of that incident. I remember him saying, “What can I do? Tad’s my friend, but his wife attacked my wife. Am I supposed to just ignore it?”

  “It was a reluctant anger, like, ‘I’m supposed to stand up for my wife,’ right?” Cali asks. “Even if he knows she’s not in the right. She probably had it coming. When you’re with someone who all your friends hate, it’s a very uncomfortable situation. You want your friends to be your friends but if they’re bad-mouthing your wife, you have to do something. It definitely contributed to his loneliness.”

  Addenda: Frances Bean’s first birthday

  “My second visit to Seattle coincided with Frances’ birthday [August 18],” recalls Jessica Hopper. “Me and Cali [the pair were an item by then] were listening to Bad Brains and jumping on the couch with Frances like punk rockers. Kurt was on the next half-floor going through his records. He commented, ‘I wish I could be this excited about music.’ Frances was very much in our care: we’d given her a little Mohawk with Kool Aid and tinted her hair, and the next day we were reprimanded and told that a baby is not a dog – ‘You guys. C’mon. She’s a baby’ – despite the fact she was a baby with a teeny tiny bomber jacket with a blue Germs circle on the back.

  “I met Michael Azerrad during that visit: he’d come out to finish his book [Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana, sanctioned by Gold Mountain in a futile attempt to stop some of the more scurrilous reportage on the band]. Everyone thought Michael was safe because he was a dorky, jovial rock journalist – a nerd. He was there for a day or two doing interviews. There was a real air of secrecy and I was told, ‘Don’t look at papers.’ They were strewn everywhere.”

  “Frances had her first birthday party in that house,” says Charles Peterson. “It was a fairly good-sized affair. I took a couple of handfuls of Polaroids and gave them to Kurt at the end of the day. Everyone gathered in the sunken living room and was giving presents for this one-year-old. Somebody gave her a big red tricycle with a white anarchy symbol painted on the seat. There were tons and tons of gifts. I was sitting next to Kurt, and I’ve never seen anyone so sad and overwhelmed. It’s supposedly this big, joyous moment, his daughter’s first birthday, but I think a set of wooden building blocks would have been enough. It reminded me of the picture I took of him outside the record store where he’s got his head in his hands. It was that same, ‘My god, what is this monster?’ ”

  “I remember the birthday party differently,” comments Jessica. “The weirdness of the day was having people in the house – granted, it was like family, the closest thing they had to family: Nils, his brothers, Charles, Cali, Patti, maybe 10 people. I have picture after picture of Courtney and Frances smiling and playing, everyone smiling. Kurt was reclusive at b
est and the two of them together, they were in such isolation, they might of well have been on an ice floe. Paranoia was a huge part of the everyday. They were suspicious of even the closest people around them; no one came over except employees or one or two people here or there. I would say he was overwhelmed, not with Frances or her birthday, but merely from being around people.”

  NOTES

  1 Unsuccessfully. The claim Courtney later made that she was into ‘juicing’ (drinking freshly squeezed juice every day) can be taken with a pinch of salt. She didn’t discover that fad until around 1997.

  2 Cali would double up on duties with Nils Bernstein’s mum Sigrid Solheim.

  3 It was probably I, Claudius, the utterly brilliant 13-part UK TV series starring Derek Jacobi and John Hurt, made in 1976.

  4 Acoustic guitar was a rarity in Hole songs – but that was how Courtney played ‘Doll Parts’ to me shortly after composing it, down the phone at 4 a.m., drunk and alone at a party. I told her the song was beautiful, and she shouldn’t change it.

  5 Lubricated Goat were an abrasive, nasty Australian grunge band from the late Eighties.

  6 It was pretty damn good – heavy and mean. Crunt came out in February 1994, featuring Blues Explosion drummer Russell Simins.

  7 On one bootleg recording of this show, Courtney can be clearly heard during this section, talking about Dave Grohl, and how her husband would be better off without the drummer.

  8 Swell Maps were a killer ramshackle lo-fi band from the UK, who released some of the earliest independent post-punk singles, and were a major influence on Sonic Youth and Pavement, among others. The 1979 Rough Trade album A Trip To Marineville is the place to start.

  9 Eddie And The Hot Rods were pre-punk pub rockers, best known for their 1976 call to arms, ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’.