Nirvana

by Everett True

  “It was such a change,” Debbi Shane remarks, “from pooling together our food stamps [August 1991], to Shelli calling me and saying, ‘ Debbi, we just bought a house and we have a room for you!’ They had a bar in the games room downstairs, with plants and flowers. They had a TV room with all the videos and records and stereos. They even had their old bed from Tacoma, and then they finally found a bed that Krist could fit his whole body on.”

  In the second week of October, Kurt flew out to Triclops Studios in Atlanta, Georgia to lend support to Hole’s recording sessions for the band’s second album Live Through This. Courtney wanted him to sing backup, but he was either unwilling or unable – a couple of numbers are said to feature his voice, but mixed so low as to be inaudible. Kurt was looking to expand his musical brief, however: every now and then, he’d jam with Eric Erlandson in the house. He felt frustrated at having to conform to the Nirvana template. It wasn’t a comment on his bandmates, more at the expectations placed upon the three of them when they got together.

  Kurt never did collaborate with Stipe – but really, Stipe was just another in a list of potential suitors that Kurt had shown interest in, interest that was more daydream than reality. More than anything, he wanted to play in the equivalent of Calvin and Tobi’s ‘project’ bands . . . but whenever friends suggested doing anything like that, he’d grow suspicious, figuring they only wanted to join forces to exploit his fame. This may have been one of the reasons why he didn’t sing on Live Through This.

  “I never thought he was disenchanted with being in Nirvana,” argues Danny Goldberg, “but as an artist he wanted to play with other musicians. He wanted to stay alive creatively. He was going through a restless questioning period.”

  Oddly, almost all my memories of Nirvana live in 1993 are happy ones.

  Much of this is down to Nirvana’s road crew, a great bunch of people. Also, it helped that the band had a new collection of songs to tour, once they’d overcome their almost morbid fear of bootleggers. (Hey! There’s nothing wrong with the odd live recording. It keeps money away from the record industry, and ensures the fans are happy. It doesn’t stop anyone from buying the actual releases, either.) The fact that Geffen couldn’t sell as many copies of In Utero must have pleased Kurt. Plus, Pat Smear had joined the band . . . and it’s almost impossible to stay miserable while Pat’s around.

  There’s no denying the situation wasn’t ideal during Nirvana’s final US tour, however. There was an obvious rift between Kurtney and everyone else: and also a developing rift between Kurt and Courtney themselves. Kurt’s relationship with his management had deteriorated to such an extent that John Silva openly referred to Kurt as ‘the junkie’, while it was hardly a secret that Kurt hated Silva, and for most business dealings went through his assistant Michael Meisel. What didn’t Kurt argue with his management about? The recording of In Utero , his home arrangements, his riders, his bandmates, his royalties, his drug use, his personal appearances, his press . . . he’d even stated categorically he wanted to take 1993 off from touring – and yet, here he was, embarking on the lengthiest Nirvana tour of all. On top of this, Kurt put down Dave in interviews; and his friendship with Krist had certainly seen better days.

  “There was an incident where Kurt went crazy,” recalls Rene. “We weren’t sure if he’d got some ecstasy, because me and him had done some speed in secret. Round the back of the house someone had set up a load of little toy soldiers with some sticks tied together. He was super-paranoid. I confronted him about it – it was round the time he painted on the wall in red paint, ‘You will never understand my real intentions’ – because it seemed like he was trying to fit the ‘crazy rock star’ role. I’d tease him about it, which was part of the reason he liked having me around. Most people would stand back in awe: ‘Oh, no one understands you, you’re so complicated.’ He really wasn’t like that – he was a pretty simple, right-on guy, a little bit of a baby. In retrospect, you need to have a certain amount of self-pity to kill yourself.”

  Kurt’s disgust with celebrity culture was growing unchecked, not helped in the least by Courtney’s blatant love for it. Long gone were the days when he might have relished the idea of becoming a star, or looked forward to climbing into a van with Krist and Chad en route to another tiny club. Indeed, for the In Utero tour, two tour buses were hired – one for Kurt and Pat Smear, the other for the remainder of the band and crew members.10

  “There was definitely a change,” says Rene. “Courtney was finding her place among that higher level of fame, whereas the pressure got to Kurt a lot more. I went along to New York for SNL , and as soon as we got there, Cali and I claimed our vacation. They wanted us to stay at the Paramount, but we wanted to stay at St Mark’s and do drugs with G.G. Allin; and we did, we woke up on the floor, covered with roaches . . . with G.G.’s brother, but that’s still pretty good. Kurt OD’d while we were there – and they were mad with us because they couldn’t find Cali or me. It wasn’t a problem. We’d make fun of Kurt – ‘Oh, did you OD on the body-bag?’ – that’s the different brands of heroin they sell in NY – ‘Oh, you thought that was a really good idea, to buy a bunch of body-bag’ – and he did, it was a joke most of the time. With his weird Pacific Northwestern twang, he’d tell us he liked the way it was working out, being a rich heroin addict. It seemed to bring him some happiness.”

  “Celebrity culture is so repulsive,” comments Rosemary Carroll. “Kurt hated it. To see it like that, and then suddenly become it, must have been terrible for him. Courtney’s response to it was different, she exploited and manipulated it and ran towards it. Left to his own devices, Kurt would have escaped it completely. It didn’t bring him very much joy. He was convinced to tour by everyone who wanted him to tour – from his wife, to his managers, to his record company, to his band, to his fans. It wasn’t an evil conspiracy. There was simply a tremendous demand to see Nirvana.”

  “There was a lot of tension and I didn’t feel Nirvana were going to last much longer,” Earnie says. “I didn’t want to go on the In Utero tour. I felt it would be a nightmare. There was a lot of stress, combined with Kurt’s escalating negativity towards Dave, which I felt was unjust. So I used my restaurant as an excuse to try and get out of it.

  “Then Kurt put me in an awkward situation,” he continues. “He said, ‘Let me hire a manager for your restaurant so you don’t have to work there any more.’ I hemmed and hawed and said I couldn’t do that. That’s when he realised I was quitting Nirvana: and nobody had ever quit Nirvana, everyone had been sacked or whatever. Pat later said to me that Kurt thought it was amazing – that I could just walk away and say, ‘ Fuck it,’ because he had wanted to, so many times. So they went out on the In Utero tour, and after a couple of days I got a call from Krist. Much to my surprise, he said it was going well. Once they got away from the outside distractions, they were having fun again.”

  The feeling was more upbeat than anyone expected. Most insiders attributed it to the fact Courtney was barely around: she was busy with other commitments, recording Live Through This and playing the occasional Hole live show. It was also rumoured she was sleeping with other men, particularly Lemonheads singer Evan Dando and old flame Billy Corgan.

  “If Courtney was on the tour, the tour was not very much fun,” states Cali. “The tension would be pretty thick. When she was gone, it would be back to everyone having a good time. But mostly it was fun. Alex [ MacLeod] travelled with me and Pat and Kurt a lot. He was doing the best he could, tour-managing a madhouse. The shows were much bigger, and the audiences were not always the people they wanted to be playing to.”

  I didn’t take notes on the dates I attended. The main condition Kurt placed on me when travelling in his tour bus was that I shouldn’t write about Nirvana for Melody Maker. “You’re always doing that,” he complained. “Why can’t you just come along as a friend? I don’t mind if you want to do a book at some point in the future, but please no interviews or reviews.” Of course, I complied with his
wishes.

  The In Utero tour started on October 18.

  For support acts, Kurt chose several of his favourite bands – notably The Breeders, Half Japanese and The Meat Puppets – and consulted Cali on the others.

  As both a solo artist and in Half Japanese, the astonishingly prolific Jad Fair has released countless albums of naïve, charming music: two types of songs – monster songs and love songs. I love Jad for his warmth, his spectacles, the way he cuts away the bullshit and strips music back to its essentials – humanity, a cracking good story and melody line. I love him for his boundless enthusiasm and shy genius. Maybe it’s wrong to call Jad naïve because he certainly knows what he’s doing, but he has a purity that to me is at the core of virtually any great music you might want to name.

  Jad never tunes a guitar, believing such an action to be the antithesis of what rock’n’roll is about: spontaneity. He’s never bought a guitar in his life: the ones other musicians throw away are fine. The guitar he played during a 1991 UK tour with The Pastels he picked up in a Glasgow junk shop for £28 the day after he arrived. He sings out of key, sometimes gratingly, always expressively. In his hooded parka and thick-rimmed spectacles he looks like an eccentric uncle. I’ve seen Jad play concerts with a rolled-up newspaper and upturned wastepaper basket for rhythm, with just his voice for colour. I’ve heard Jad improvise songs on the spot, songs that are heart-rending in their direct pleasure and emotion. And I’ve seen Half Japanese play stadiums in precisely the same fashion.

  “With my headphones on, Jad and I share our little secret walking through shopping malls and airports,” Kurt once wrote in a note to me.

  “I like to listen to Jad Fair and Half Japanese in the heart of American culture,” he explained. “It makes me feel like an alien, like I’m not actually walking, but floating like a dream. I just think that, if these people could hear this music right now, they’d melt, they wouldn’t know what to do, they’d start bouncing off the walls and hyperventilating. So I need to hear that music really loud and pretend it’s blasting through the speakers in the malls.”

  What can I tell you about The Meat Puppets? There are four early Eighties American hardcore albums you should own: the debuts from Flipper, The Minutemen, Minor Threat – and the taut, wired, explosive and downright funny 1981 self-titled album from the long-haired Kirkwood Brothers, Curt and Cris. Rarely have vocals sounded so skewed and manic, rarely have guitars seemed so hemmed-in and angular. Hardcore fans loved the Puppets for their breakneck speed – but there was more to the Phoenix, Arizona trio than intricate three-chord thrash. Curt’s dislocated guitar style veered between hillbilly, heavy metal, psychedelic and Fifties country/gospel group The Oak Ridge Boys. His brother’s bass sound was endearingly fallible. Their two mid-Eighties albums, Meat Puppets II and Up In The Sun, influenced a generation of musicians, from J. Mascis and Kurt Cobain onwards.

  The Breeders, meanwhile, were the finest rock’n’roll band of their day. Kim Deal dressed like a mechanic and sang like a drowsy angel. Her voice oozed lasciviousness and smouldered , while her hedonistic bent rivalled Keith Richards. All I know is that there was something about the way she used to stand there on stage, cigarette hanging from her lips as she bent down to change another string. The former Mrs John Murphy wrote the finest pop songs of her generation, never pandered, did things by her rules – could turn out a mean country song, too – and got into bar brawls with Ohio truckers. And she never once apologised for her drug taking.

  “Kurt let me pick a number of the opening bands,” Cali says. “I picked Jawbreaker11 and Chokebore. Having Jawbreaker on that tour caused huge drama in the punk rock world. People were like, ‘Have they sold out or not? Can I still like them?’ I enjoyed the freedom I had on the In Utero tour. Kurt would laugh because I’d go find the real punk kids and give them all-access passes, which infuriated Courtney when she was around. Sometimes I would go home because the argument ran that Frances couldn’t be on the tour the whole time.

  “Frances really liked being there,” her former nanny continues. “She knew her dad’s music and as soon as he started playing, she wanted to stand on the stage. She was only a little over one, so she wouldn’t wear the earphones and she couldn’t stay for the whole show. But she loved to be around.”

  The opening night was at the 15,000-seat Veterans Memorial Coliseum in the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, with Mudhoney in support. The stage set was noticeably different – ornate, even: two full-size reproductions of The Transparent Woman from the cover of In Utero , angel wings intact, plus some odd-looking fake trees.

  It wasn’t as fancy as it might’ve been: “At the rehearsals at the sound-stage in LA, they projected Dante’s Inferno on a huge white screen behind the band,” reveals Earnie. “It was so dramatic and powerful to watch them playing in front of that Twenties silent film. But someone calculated that it would cost too much to hire a crew and take it on the road, so they scratched the idea. They were uneasy about how well the tour would sell.”

  It was Nirvana’s first major arena tour, and the musicians had difficulty adjusting to the size of the stages: “I felt like the bass-player from Aerosmith when they brought all the lighters out that first night,” Krist commented to MTV news. In the same interview, Kurt lamented how he could no longer play in small clubs and stagedive with impunity; and also how he recoiled in horror from kids “trying to rip my flesh off for souvenirs”. In response to their belligerent fans, the band would sometimes break into sarcastic refrains from stadium rock songs – in Phoenix, it was Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’. In Albuquerque, New Mexico it was 4 Non-Blondes’ ‘What’s Up’ and a medley of Led Zeppelin riffs.12

  “Before, we were just vagabonds in a van, doing our thing,” Krist told Musician in October 1993. “Now we’ve got a tour manager and a crew and it’s a production. We’ve got schedules and shit. It used to be an adventure. And now it’s a circus.”

  Nevertheless, the first night went well – building to a climax with a storming version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ before finishing in mellow mood, with the cello-textured ‘All Apologies’.13 Not that you’d know it from the review that appeared in USA Today: “Creative anarchy deteriorated into bad performance art as the band overindulged a tendency towards willful chaos.”

  “Wow,” Pat Smear remarked as everyone fell into an immense depression over the critique. “That journalist totally nailed us.”

  Before the gig in Kansas City on October 21, Alex MacLeod drove Kurt over to nearby Lawrence to meet his junkie idol William S. Burroughs. The 10-inch record the pair made together had been recorded separately. “Meeting Burroughs was a real big deal for Kurt,” MacLeod commented. The two men chatted for a while before Kurt had to leave to go play his show: Burroughs later claimed the conversation didn’t touch once on drugs. “There’s something wrong with that boy,” the literary giant remarked as Kurt drove away. “He frowns for no good reason.”

  The next night, in Davenport, Iowa, the crowd started slam dancing before Nirvana even took the stage. Afterwards, Kurt stopped at a taco place, two blocks from the venue, for a bite to eat. “Taco day was my favourite day at school,” he told Geffen rep Jim Merlis as kids stood and stared at him, disbelief all over their faces.

  In Chicago, Illinois, on October 23, the first of two nights at the Aragon Ballroom, the band played a previously unheard song – ‘You Know You’re Right’14 – and Kurt waltzed off with one of the angels. The show was, by all accounts, a corker – certainly far superior to the second night there, where the band refused to play ‘Teen Spirit’ and Kurt lost his temper at fans throwing wet T-shirts on to the stage and shorting out his effects pedals board.

  “Tonight’s concert – Nirvana’s second of two nights at the Aragon – is a real stinker,” wrote Rolling Stone. “The venue’s cavernous sound turns even corrosive torpedoes like ‘Breed’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’ into riff pudding, and Cobain is bedevilled all night by guitar and vocal monitor problems. There a
re moments of prickly brilliance: Cobain’s sandpaper howl cutting through the Aragon’s canyon-like echo in the tense, explosive chorus of ‘Heart-Shaped Box’; a short, stunning ‘Sliver’ with torrid power strumming by guest touring guitarist Pat Smear. But there is no ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and when the house lights go up, so does a loud chorus of boos.”

  “Chicago was bad because Bobcat [ Goldthwait – American comedian, best known for appearing in the Police Academy series] made that joke,” recalls Lori. “A friend was backstage with me, she was an actress, she was really on alert, and she made me pull myself away and look at it from the outside. The news story was Michael Jordan’s father had got murdered, something like that. And Bobcat was opening, and he made a crass joke about it. The audience wanted to kill him. Things didn’t pick up. Sitting backstage, people just didn’t say anything for a really long time. The sound was bad.”

  Chicago was the nadir – not that it seemed to bother Kurt too much, who could be observed backstage happily playing with Frances. It was almost as if Nirvana had to get a truly bad gig out of their systems before they could start enjoying themselves. Certainly, the mood lifted after that night and the tour soon settled down into a comfortable routine: drive, hotel, soundcheck, hotel, gig, hotel, drive, hotel, soundcheck, hotel, gig, drive . . . with a few interviews thrown in, when Gold Mountain could convince the band it was necessary.

  Nirvana would normally play 20–25 songs in 95 minutes, including the ‘acoustic’ section (‘Dumb’, ‘All Apologies’, ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’15, ‘Something In The Way’ et al. with Goldston on cello), and follow it with one encore usually ending on a noise/destruction sequence.16