by Everett True
CHAPTER 26
We Had Joy, We Had Fun
I HATE rock’n’roll.
How can I feel any other way? Look what it did to Nirvana. One moment they’re cruising along happily, struggling to make the most commercial album they can to reach as many people as they can. The next, they’ve achieved their goal and realised that there’s no way back, this is their life whether they want it or not.
No one ever tells you about the downside of hedonism: all the nagging headaches and colds and feelings of paranoia that exist for years afterwards.
In September 1993, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, backed with ‘Milk It’ and the Dave Grohl composition ‘Marigold’1, became the first UK single to be lifted from In Utero – it entered the charts at number five. The front cover was a shot of one of Courtney’s heart-shaped boxes of confectionary, framed by flowers on silver foil: the back was another Charles Peterson photograph of Kurt’s montage of foetus-like dolls, petals and general debris, tinted blue. It was released to radio in the US, with accompanying video – but not as a single. Geffen, concerned that In Utero was uncom-mercial, refused to allow any singles to be lifted from the album for fear they’d detract from sales.
The video – directed by renowned Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, but not without some controversy after director Kevin Kerslake filed suit in 1994, claiming it ripped off ideas from his original treatment – was littered with evocative, dark imagery: a little girl dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, a crucified Jesus figure dressed as Father Christmas or perhaps the Pope, a field of poppies, a black crow, foetuses hanging from trees . . .
“I’ve always painted abstracts,” Kurt explained to Melody Maker. “I love dreams that don’t make sense. I’d much rather watch a film that doesn’t have a plot. Most of my lyrics don’t connect because I’ve taken lines from lots of different poems of mine and put them together. I’ll make up a theme well after the fact, oftentimes while I’m being interviewed.”
The situation with Kerslake dragged on through September: the director submitted several treatments before being informed his services were not required, despite the fact Nirvana were proceeding with a video that bore a marked similarity to his versions. It was an odd decision – Kerslake had directed four Nirvana videos (‘In Bloom’, ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Sliver’, ‘Lithium’) and helped Kurt sift through hours and hours of live footage and Super-8 movies of Nirvana for use in a full-length compilation video (released after Kurt’s death as Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!). Kurt’s decision not to use him and not tell him either, though, was classic Cobain passive/aggressive behaviour. (One detects the hand of Courtney in there, as well, not least because Anton Corbijn was a rock photographer of considerable prestige, who had worked closely with both David Bowie and U2.) Kerslake was even invited by the singer to attend the MTV Music Video Awards with him on September 2, because the ‘In Bloom’ video was up for an award.
“I went to the ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ video shoot,” says Cali. “That was another interesting day as far as arguing goes. We were in LA at the Four Seasons. I think they’d been fighting a lot and Kurt had a vibe like, ‘I wish Courtney would leave me alone.’ She was picking at him in a Gold Mountain sort of way. She kept telling him, ‘This is an important video for you, so don’t fuck it up. You have to look good.’ Him going, ‘Shut the fuck up. I’ll look how I look. I’ll look like myself. Quit telling me how important this is.’
“That fight escalated over hours,” he continues. “It was always a slow build. In a classic Kurt way of saying ‘ fuck you’, he put a cigarette out in the middle of his forehead. There was a huge burn there and it looked really nasty. He goes, ‘There, are you happy? Am I going to look fucking good enough for you now?’ It took the wind out of her sails a little. If you watch the video, there’s a lot of make-up on his forehead because it was a really bad scab, big and in the centre. In the close-ups, there’s a strip of hair that never seems to move from the middle of his forehead. They had to paste some hair over it.”
‘In Bloom’ won Best Alternative Video at the MTV Awards. The band attended, Courtney dressed like a minor Hollywood starlet in a low-cut white dress and perfectly tousled hair, clutching Frances Bean, waving to the media, almost unrecognisable from the way she looked when she first met Kurt two years previously. There was no controversy, aside from the van containing the band showing up late, and Krist nearly running over Jeff Ament from Pearl Jam in his haste to be there on time.
Six days later, on September 8, Kurt and Courtney played together for the first – and last – time on stage, at Club Lingerie in Hollywood. It was at a Rock Against Rape benefit, also featuring all-girl punk band 7 Year Bitch and [X singer] Exene Cervenka. Courtney played ‘Doll Parts’ and ‘Miss World’ solo before calling for her “husband Yoko”, at which point Kurt got up on stage and the pair played together on ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ and ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ (a staple of Hole’s live set).
Nirvana were no longer the biggest rock band in the world – that dubious honour now belonged to Pearl Jam, whose new album Vs broke all records when it was released, going in at number one on Billboard and selling 950,000 copies in America, first week. In comparison, In Utero sold 180,000 in its first week when it was released on September 212– although it too went in at number one. But those figures were affected by the refusal of two of America’s largest chains, Wal-Mart and Kmart, to stock the album because of the foetuses on the back cover. They also objected to the title of ‘Rape Me’. Geffen later revised the artwork so the fans could buy it at those shops – they deleted the foetuses, and altered the title of ‘Rape Me’ to ‘Waif Me’.
“One of the main reasons I signed to a major label,” Kurt explained, “was so people would be able to buy our records at Kmart. In some towns, that’s the only place kids can buy records.”
“The MTV Awards was the first of Courtney’s ‘trying to be somebody else’ dresses,” Cali comments. “That was around the time where the part of her personality that she already didn’t like was turning into someone who would say, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ to waiters and stewardesses. She introduced me to Danny Goldberg and something about him epitomised everything I didn’t like about the idea of a music-business person. Something about him epitomised something in that to Kurt too, and I think that Courtney liked that about him. Courtney liked the power she imagined Danny had. She would endlessly lecture us about why we were wrong about Danny.”
I remember Courtney introducing me to Danny. He shook my hand but it was obvious he was thinking, “Why are you wasting my time with this person?”3 A saying I really like is, “You judge a person not by the way they treat their equals or betters, but by the way they treat people who are in a less fortunate situation than themselves.” Most record industry people wouldn’t even begin to understand that.
“That’s a good saying,” Cali agrees. “I didn’t like Danny Goldberg. I may have been only 21, but my immediate reaction to him was, this is one of the bad guys. I had the same feeling about John Silva. It was more real with Danny. My love for Courtney – and I did love her – started to come into question around the ‘Danny is great’ time. That was around the time she started to yell at waitresses.”
That’s the biggest problem I have with Courtney. If I apply what I just said to Courtney, I can’t defend her. I always used to judge people by the way they treated me. Well, Courtney’s done some pretty bad things by me on occasion, but on the whole she’s been fine. We had a lot of fun. But if I apply that criteria . . .
“There’s not much grey area,” nods Cali. “With Danny I was like, ‘Oh look, the devil’s come over for tea.’ I felt a kinship with Kurt about his dislike of industry people. I would order my Bikini Kill records through the mail and he’d be really excited when they came. He’d be like, ‘I opened your package because I knew it would be some kind of awesome home-made records,’ and we’d sit around and talk shit about people like that. His management made him uncomfortable. Courtney w
as always trying to tell him that he was one of them: ‘You are one of the big boys now, and the losers you like are just that, losers.’ That was commonly one of the things they fought about.”
Cali’s view of Kurt’s relationship with his management may well have been influenced by Kurt’s desire to appear punk rock in front of his younger, cool buddy. While objecting to the demands that Danny placed upon him and getting Dylan Carlson to look over Nirvana’s accounts, Kurt clearly had faith in his manager. He drafted a will stating that if Courtney was to die, he and Rosemary Carroll should become Frances Bean’s guardians.4
Or maybe he just needed a surrogate father figure . . .
“We were older people he knew that he felt had a relatively healthy family,” explains Goldberg. “There weren’t that many people who were married and had a kid that he felt comfortable with. I guess he didn’t feel anyone in his direct family was appropriate in that scenario. We loved him. It was a thrill to be around someone who was so clearly a genius.”
Nirvana’s line-up at Roseland was a trial run for the forthcoming In Utero tour.
Kurt decided the time was ripe to feature another guitarist in the live show, and that the ‘acoustic’ middle section, with the addition of cello, was a step in the right direction. He began to look up old punk rock guitarists, but – he complained, seemingly heedless of the irony – “Most of them were junkies.” Then Cali suggested he give Pat Smear a ring.
Pat was perfect. He was born and raised in western Los Angeles – real name Georg Ruthenberg – to mixed race parentage (an African-American/ Cherokee opera singer mother and German/Jewish immigrant inventor father). In 1962, at the age of three, he ran away to a Jesus commune. As a teen, he attended the Innovative Program School in Santa Monica, a school designed for students who couldn’t fit into the regular educational curriculum, where he met future singer Darby Crash. The pair formed The Germs in 1976.5 Ruthenberg renamed himself Pat Smear after learning about pap smears in high school – because he thought they were so disgusting.
As a member of The Germs (and, later, as a solo artist and musician with artists like extrovert German singer Nina Hagen) Pat had impeccable punk credentials. Sonic Youth used Pat’s name as the chorus of their 1994 song ‘Screaming Skull’. The Germs’ 1977 single, ‘Forming’/‘ Sexboy (live)’, is generally regarded as the first punk record from Los Angeles, and their debut 1979 album GI, produced by Joan Jett, is a highpoint of late Seventies US hardcore.
Pat had acted in films (Blade Runner, Howard The Duck), appeared on mainstream TV shows as an atypical punk and already been through a major junkie drama with Darby Crash, who killed himself in 1980 at the age of 22. Penelope Spheeris’ cult LA punk documentary Decline Of Western Civilization – featuring performances from Black Flag, X, The Germs, Alice Bag Band and Circle Jerks – was filmed shortly before Darby’s death.
Pat had a marked peculiarity on stage with Nirvana, of taking his shoes off just before playing, so he’d be standing in his socks. More importantly, he had a great sense of humour.
“There was a lot of painting our nails and putting on dresses – it wasn’t like we’d go out and buy records or even leave the house,” Rene Navarette says. “When you added Pat Smear to the mix, we were a real pile of pansies. We were pretty flamboyant. We liked drawing. We were having our glam period, and that’s why Pat fitted in so perfectly. He was this punk icon who wanted to do the same as us, get loaded, put on make-up and tell jokes about it. When I found out Pat wasn’t gay it made me feel more comfortable. It felt better to behave feminine and fool around with notions of sexuality, especially as it seemed to make the people we didn’t like feel uncomfortable. As a group of guys, we were not promiscuous. As much as we’d joke about body parts, Kurt wasn’t a pervert of any sort.”
“Pat had been poor and living with his girlfriend for 10 years,” says Cali. “Bands as big as Red Hot Chili Peppers had offered him a guitar-playing position [in early 1993], and he’d turned them down. He said the only new band he would play in was Nirvana. Pat was nervous and excited, and an excellent injection of fun and good times to the band. Kurt loved him.”
“Pat was fun because he was an outsider coming into a stressful situation,” explains Earnie Bailey. “He had the ability to not get drawn in – and I’m not sure if it was so much his personality or that he realised we were a bit in awe of him. I used to go see Decline Of Western Civilization at the midnight movies in Spokane, and one of my favourite sequences was The Germs part.”
The first time Pat played with Nirvana was on Saturday Night Live, September 25, 1993. In marked contrast to January 1992, the show passed off without incident – apart from actor Adam Sandler threatening to do his Eddie Vedder impersonation, and Courtney throwing a fit because she thought Kurt would be blamed for it. The band turned in a couple of fine, soulful performances – ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and ‘Rape Me’ – the two guitars tempered neatly by Lori Goldston’s sweeping cello.
“They really had fun,” comments Cali. “Pat’s energy on stage was so different to what they were used to. He was nervous, but once it started he was going ape-shit like none of them ever did. They were all watching him – ‘Look at this great guy having so much fun playing our music.’ They all looked up to Pat because of his history in The Germs.”
“Was that when The Breeders were playing upstairs with Conan O’Brien, and J. Mascis came backstage?” asks Earnie. “We saw Mike Myers come down the hall dressed for the first time as the coffee talk lady, and nobody recognised him. I remember thinking, ‘Who is this woman with this really outlandish dress?’ [Feted East Coast drag queen] RuPaul was a lot of fun; we hit it off with her instantly. John Silva had Converse hook us up with new shoes. Pat, Dave, Kurt and I all got Converse one stars, and Krist got low tops.
“Pat showed up with this Charvel Stratocaster [as used by poodle rocker Eddie Van Halen],” continues Nirvana’s guitar tech. “It had a natural wood finish and a locking tremolo set-up – definitely not what Nirvana were at, guitar-wise. When he popped the case open there was this great silence. We were all just getting to know Pat, and we didn’t know how to tell him he couldn’t play that guitar. Kurt had this blue Mosrite [as used by Johnny Ramone – far cooler] with him that was one of the guitars damaged in his bathtub. I cleaned it up a little and got it working again, and we offered that to Pat to play instead.”
What ran through your head when Kurt asked you to join Nirvana?
“At first I thought it was my friend Carlos ‘Cake’ Nunez playing a joke on me, but Courtney6 had called me a couple of days earlier and told me Kurt was gonna call and ask me – so I was pretty prepared. Of course I accepted immediately! They were my favourite band at the time and ‘Cake’ was already trying to track down Kurt’s phone number for me because I’d read an interview where he’d said that Nirvana was meant to be a four-piece. And I knew there was a new album and tour coming up. Anyway, I later heard that Michael ‘ Cali’ DeWitt had suggested me, and it all worked out the way I’d hoped.”
What were the first couple of weeks like?
“It was pretty intimidating. It took a while to get over the feeling that I didn’t deserve it. But Kurt and Courtney invited me into their home and treated me like family and we sounded great at rehearsal, so I got comfortable real fast.”
What are some of your favourite guitarists and greatest inspirations?
“I knew I wanted to play guitar when I was 12 and got Alice Cooper’s Love It To Death. Not just because of the playing, but also because of that photo on the back of the white SG custom. Soon after, Bowie released Ziggy Stardust and had the coolest guitarist ever, Mick Ronson, who’s equally great at rhythm and lead. And then Yes’ Fragile came out, featuring Steve Howe, who is the best guitarist ever. A couple of years later, Queen released their first album that showcased Brian May who instantly became – and still is – my favourite guitarist. Joan Jett of The Runaways, Brian James of The Damned and Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols were the guita
rists who inspired me to learn to play well enough to start a band. My parents forced piano lessons on me and it was really easy for me to play by ear, so I did the same thing with the guitar, learning the parts from my favourite albums.”
Favourite guitars?
“ Hagstrom! I never had my own guitar in The Germs but for some reason I decided to buy one for our farewell show. It was a red Hagstrom HIIN that set me back $125 and I’ve played it in every band I’ve been in. My second favourite brand is Gibson. I also love Japanese copies and counterfeits from the Seventies and other off-brand stuff.”
Can you tell us more about your activities in the music world in between the end of The Germs and the joining of Nirvana?
“After Darby died I retired from music but was back soon enough. I played in lots of local bands and probably never took my career seriously enough, but I was able to have one without selling out. I’ve never been signed to a major label, never had a record ‘advance’ – so I’ve never owed ‘The Man’ anything – and I had never been on a full tour until I hooked up with Nirvana.”
(Interview by Rasmus Holmen, www.nirvanaclub.com, September 2002)
It was around this time the idea of Kurt collaborating with Michael Stipe7 started to take hold. The pair met at a party at Krist and Shelli’s house at 2253 N 54 St, Greenlake.
“The Fugazi guys were there as well,” recalls Earnie. “We were down in the basement playing pinball with Michael when Kurt and Courtney arrived. You could hear Courtney upstairs asking, ‘Where’s Michael Stipe? I want to meet him.’ We were nervous at first and being polite – and then she falls down the stairs into the room! I can still remember the look on Michael’s face. It was an amazing entrance.
“ Krist and Shelli lived in a great house, with a garage on the side,” he continues. “In the basement, they had several pinball machines [Kiss, The Addams Family] and a jukebox, with records by [Sixties beat groups] The Count Five8 and The Zombies9, and ‘Sex Bomb Baby’ by Flipper. We would ride motorbikes to Second Time Around, this used record store in the U District, scouring for big hole 45s.”