by Everett True
Do you hate Christmas?
“No,” replies Kurt. “It holds good memories. I’ve always had really good Christmases with my family – I have a very large family. Everyone has always gotten together and had a great blowout, at least until my grandfather died. He was usually the highlight of the ceremonies. He’d get really drunk, put on wacky hats and sing for everyone.”
Kim wants to know how many brothers and sisters Kurt has.
“I only have one real sister [Kim Cobain], and one half-sister [ Brianne O’Connor],” he informs her.4 “The rest of them are on my mom’s side of the family. My mother had seven brothers and sisters and they all have children.”
Do you find Christmas at all depressing, Kim?
“Nope!” she responds, perkily. “Everett, c’mon you can talk to us. You find it depressing, don’t you?”
Yes, I do.
Kurt asks why.
Bad memories. But you don’t want to interview me.
“Yeah, we do,” he laughs. “That was the agreement, right? One question each!”
OK. I hate Christmas because it exaggerates all the emotions that are around. If you’re lonely most of the time – as most people are – but can just about get by, it rubs it in. You don’t need it. It’s no coincidence the suicide rate goes up over the festive season.
“That’s very true,” Kim agrees, soberly.
“It’s too bad that every lonely person can’t have a good deed done to them on that day, although it would probably be kind of patronising,” Kurt muses. “But there’s always someone who gets left out – someone who doesn’t get a free meal, or a present, or have someone say hello to them. Everyone’s so extra-conscious.”
Also, Christmas reinforces the traditional values that Western Civilisation was built upon. I don’t like those values. I find them hypocritical. I don’t see anything good in the family structure.
“I do,” Kurt disagrees, “if it’s a good family.”
“You don’t believe that, Everett!” Kim laughs in disbelief.
Sure I do. Fine, if it’s a good family. But you wander out on to the street any day, and you can see for yourself that most families aren’t good families – mothers whacking their kids because they’re too tired to cope, fathers being men. Most of it is shit. Most of the people in the world shouldn’t be alive today. Stupid people shouldn’t breed.
A stunned silence follows.
“God!” exclaims Kurt, “didn’t I once say that to you?”
“I thought I had a bad outlook!” exclaims Kim. “Man, I feel just like [US actress] Sally Field next to you! Jeez! Everett!”
Well, it just annoys me sometimes.
“I don’t see any reason why a person should pretend to like their family,” demurs Kurt. “You should not go and spend Christmas with your parents if you don’t like them.”
But that’s what it does to you. It forces you into certain situations.
“I know,” he replies, sombre now. “It does that to a lot of people.”
There’s a pregnant silence.
“Merry Christmas everyone!” Kurt suddenly roars.
“I have a really interesting question,” announces Kim.
Go ahead.
“Kurt, do you smoke menthols?”
“Yes, I do,” he replies. “I smoke Benson & Hedge’s Deluxe Ultra-Light Menthols.”
“Oh my god! I can’t believe that you do that. That’s so funny!”
“But it tastes good,” he argues. “And it fools me into thinking that I’m smoking less, or taking more vitamins, or something. And my breath smells good.”
Kim. Is there anything you really want to know about Kurt?
“Are you going to finish the rest of your meat?” she asks him, looking pointedly at his platter, sitting unfinished and cold on the side of the bed.
“Yeah!” he exclaims.
“What was that?” she wants to know. “A steak? Medium rare, medium medium, medium well? Well done. I see.”
Do you have any favourite people in common? Name a few of your favourite people.
“OK,” begins Kurt. “Let me think . . . I like Shabba-Doo, the breakdancer.”
“Katrina Weiss,” Kim states, firmly. “The Soviet Union ice-skater. That’s her name, right?”
Yeah. You mentioned her to me earlier. You said she was your ideal woman, and we said that was because you didn’t want to grow hairy and old, and that you have a little girl fixation.
“Hey, hold on,” she stops me. “Aren’t we supposed to ask you the questions? Why do you feel so depressed around Christmas time, Everett?”
Because it heightens the emotions – hey, I already answered that.
Kurt yawns. Closes eyes. Wakes up again.
“Hey brother,” he jokes. “Can’t you just remember the good times?”
Is there anything you really want to know about Kim?
“Yeah,” he replies, “but I don’t want to ask her in an interview.”
We switch the tape off.
Across the room, Courtney is discussing her album with her manager and someone from Geffen. Over on this side, both Kim and Kurt are looking weary. I don’t believe I’ve felt so tired in years. It must be time to leave.
OK. Finally. Could I have a Christmas message for our readers?
“I hate you!” laughs Kim.
What me, personally – or the kids?
“Whatever,” she replies, confused.
“She hates something!” gloats Kurt, softly.
“Did I ever say that I didn’t?” she asks, surprised. “Oh, really? Well, you [points at me] would be the correct answer, wouldn’t it?”
OK. Kim. What would you give Kurt for Christmas?
“I don’t know.” She pauses. “Something home-made. Maybe a napkin – a crocheted napkin.”
How about you, Kurt?
“A certificate to a hair salon, so she can get a perm,” he jokes.
“I just want a good Christmas,” he continues. “A nice, quiet, casual Christmas with Frances and Courtney.”
“What do I want for Christmas?” Kim asks herself. “You know those reindeers that you can hang on shower-stalls and you have a radio while you’re taking a shower? That’s what I want for Christmas.”
(Melody Maker, December 25, 1993)
The In Utero tour rumbled on through November and December; four shows in Florida5, Georgia, Alabama, New Orleans, two shows in Texas . . .
On November 23, while the band were recovering from Unplugged, the soundtrack album to the Beavis And Butt-head Experience was released, featuring Nirvana’s ‘I Hate Myself And I Want To Die’ – Kurt was a fan of the show, figuring it was truer to life than any caricature had the right to be.
“I wasn’t really aware of the business side of Nirvana,” says Cali. “Sometimes Kurt would ask me questions – ‘We’ve been offered $60,000 to have a song in the Beavis And Butt-head movie. I’m uncomfortable with the idea, but why do I feel that way? Do you think I should do it?’ Discussions like that, where he was confused as to his punk idealism and the reality.
“We loved Beavis And Butt-head,” Cali continues. “It was funny. We’d watch that more than we watched anything. When we were in Athens, Georgia [November 29] hanging out with Michael Stipe, the biggest score was when we found Beavis And Butt-head dolls. A month later they were everywhere.”
Kurt was a fan of all the same TV shows everyone loved back then – Beavis And Butt-head, Ren And Stimpy , Married With Children, Mr Rogers, Roseanne , Wayne’s World, The Simpsons . . .
“We were watching the premiere of a Wayne’s World special where they were playing their favourite new videos and they played ‘ Heart-Shaped Box’,” recalls Cali. “It zoomed in on the part when Kurt says, ‘Hey wait.’ The video stopped and Wayne goes, ‘Did he just say, hey Wayne?’ Kurt just fell off the couch laughing. Wayne goes, ‘Kurt, buddy, you don’t have to write a song, just call me. I’ll talk to you any time.’ ”
Boston band Come joined the tour on Novemb
er 26, in Jacksonville, Florida – replacing Half Japanese as the second support. A lot more shoes were thrown that night.
Like Screaming Trees, Come touched upon a deep wellspring of Americana. In their raw, churning grind you could hear traces of the backwater Delta blues, maybe the ruthless poignancy of Patti Smith. Like the first few Hole singles, like Babes In Toyland, like those traumatic post-Beatles songs that John Lennon formulated out of primal scream therapy, you knew singer Thalia Zedek was giving all of herself. The art becomes the life.
It was the voice, mainly. The way it seemed dragged down by layers of hopelessness, the way it reached up to the heavens only to spiral down again into darkness, the way it cried “I don’t remember being born” on ‘Fast Piss Blues’ and scared the life out of you. It was the rasp within the voice, its nakedness, the way it echoed those youthful moments when life spun crazily on its head and you were running wild and free, only for some shit-head to glass your mate in the face. It killed me the way Thalia sang a line like “Just relax/ Just relax/ Just relax” (from the opening track on 1992’s debut album Eleven: Eleven, ‘Submerge’) with such urgency, knowing it was the one thing she’d never be able to do, unless she was sunk within a narcotic haze.
Kurt and Cali stopped over at Michael Stipe’s house for a couple of days in Athens after Nirvana played Atlanta, Georgia. “We brought Frances along,” recalls Cali. “That was a good time. Kurt was a bigger R.E.M. fan than you’d think. He liked Michael Stipe and got along with him. We hung around Michael Stipe’s house and went walking around Athens, which is a great town – or was. I think they’ve built a highway to it from Atlanta, so it’s a little more accessible now.
“There was a musician in Athens named Vic Chestnutt6 who Kurt liked, critically acclaimed, but not that famous,” the ex-nanny continues. “Michael was like, ‘Let’s go over and surprise visit Vic Chestnutt.’ Vic Chestnutt is in a wheelchair. He answers the door and there’s Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain. He just went, ‘Woo-wee, party, party,’ and started spinning around. Athens had a nice small-town feeling. Kurt was like, ‘I would like to live here.’ We slept on the floor of Michael Stipe’s other house, which was an unfurnished cool shack. We relaxed. Michael Stipe took a ton of photographs those two days. He sent some to Courtney and they get lost in a pile of shit by her bed and probably ended up getting burned.”
Shonen Knife replaced Come on December 3 in New Orleans. It was noticeable the enthusiasm that had characterised many of the earlier dates had dissipated, Nirvana interacting with neither each other nor the audience. “At the most,” wrote one reviewer, “ Cobain would give a quick glance at his bandmates to see if they were ready before he plunged from one tune to the next.”
Two days later, in Dallas, crap early Nineties pop star Vanilla Ice got turned away from the show: “Everyone was like, ‘ Shit! Go get him!’ ” laughs Lori Goldston, “but he was gone.”
And the shows continued: Oklahoma, Nebraska, Minnesota . . . Kurt would sometimes ask his audience what they thought of the new Pearl Jam album, or stick a cord into his mouth and pretend he’d been electrocuted, or Krist would jump around so much he’d momentarily unplug his own lead mid-song, or there’d be problems over Krist’s accordion on ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’, or Kurt would invite some kid up on stage to smash his guitar, or tell another kid off mid-song for groping a girl’s breasts . . . but there was little to distinguish one show from the next. This was corporate entertainment, a well-oiled touring machine whose only discernible purpose was to help the record company shift product – Nirvana certainly weren’t playing these shows out of pleasure.
As Kurt’s Aunt Mari sagely put it to Gillian G. Gaar, “When Kurt became famous, music no longer was an escape for him. It was a nightmare of scheduled ‘creativity’ and harried performances. It was almost like he became a caricature of himself. Kurt’s success only reinforced my suspicions of how the music business operates. By that, I mean the artist becomes a commodity, a can of beans if you will, merely a saleable product? Can anything drain the human spirit more?”
How about hooking up with MTV once more?
The taping of Live And Loud, on December 13, would be the last time I saw Nirvana play live. It wasn’t the best of nights, although Nirvana’s startling performance belied the thick mood of apprehension.
“I went down to the Pier 48 abortion,” recalls Charles Peterson, “and I was on the list, but I wasn’t on the list for cameras. I was so pissed because I had to go back and put my camera stuff in the car. I left two-thirds of the way through. I thought, ‘This is not Nirvana.’ It felt like they were going to break into an intermission during their set for television commercials. I hated the weird angel figures on the stage.”
A close friend of Nirvana’s stole Krist and Shelli’s wallets from their dressing room to sell for his heroin fix. I sat around and waited for an eternity, sworn off alcohol again, while a girl I’d had a crush on for years suddenly indicated she might be interested in me. I never had the chance to find out. But Nirvana were superb: even though Kurt refused to allow me to run on stage wearing an Eddie Vedder face mask, the band seemed absolutely driven. One of the angels got decapitated during the final encore of ‘Endless, Nameless’ – wherein Kurt also invited a frenzy of kids up and the band entirely destroyed their equipment. And I mean entirely: monitors, amplifiers, guitars, mic stands, parts of the stage, leads, everything. Kurt was howling with fury through ‘Serve The Servants’ and ‘Rape Me’, and sounded almost otherworldly on the Bowie cover. ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ had never seemed so appropriate. Who knows what arguments he’d had with Courtney upon her return earlier that day (by this point, Kurt was convinced his wife was sleeping with Billy Corgan, especially when Billy offered to take Courtney away on vacation), who knows what drugs he consumed and dark thoughts he brooded upon, but for once they transferred into a vivid, brutal approximation of his old energy, his old fire. Such a shame it had to be at an MTV screening . . .
“That was the last one I enjoyed,” says Rob Kader. “It wasn’t like the old days, but it was better than the arenas. If you look at that last tour they were playing the same effin’ set list every night. In the early days Kurt gave every ounce of his energy. By In Utero it was gone. It wasn’t Nirvana any more. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the band had broken up.”
“Live And Loud was bad,” remarks Cali. “It was a great show, but Kurt was really fucked up. Courtney was really fucked up; I was really fucked up. I don’t know what they were doing, but I’d been shooting speed and heroin for three days. I came there with a bunch of really scraggly people. The show was good, but I felt all this tension building in my life and in my house and with them. In the last four, five, six months, it was like being inside of a beehive – the energy was really intense and their fighting was really intense. He suspected her a lot of cheating at that point. There was tension all around that night. There was something powerful about the show, but it was more like a dark power. The way he was clapping [sarcastically] at the audience at the end. Things had started to turn weirder. They were apart a lot. He didn’t want her to be on tour all the time, but it was also that desperate, ‘I love you so much I feel like I’ll die without you,’ kind of feeling. It was a dark and tense night. All this negativity was based and directed at Courtney – from the whole band. If she was there, it was bad. If she wasn’t, it was a lot lighter.”
“That was the best time I ever saw them, aside from the Marquee in NYC,” states Steve Gullick. “It was a short set, and short sets are generally better. They were on fire. Kurt seemed to have found some energy from somewhere again – the energy he’d lost at the end of 1991.”
When it came to the photo shoot for the MM cover, Gullick set up a temporary Santa grotto at the side of the band’s bus, draped a feather boa of Courtney’s around the pair, and Kim and Kurt counted him down from an allotted 24 shots. Kim got bored and fucked off after four. “You see a lot of those shots around,” comment
s Charles Peterson. “I really don’t like the thing with the boa and sunglasses. It reeks of sadness. I’m glad now that my photo pass got rejected.”
I waited 15 hours straight for that interview; Kim tried to walk out several times, and each time Courtney talked her out of it. So the interview was finally happening, the three of us sprawled out across Kurt’s bed, 20 or 25 minutes in – and we were enjoying ourselves. Then I looked down and noticed I hadn’t turned the tape on. Shit. Double shit. But Kim and Kurt thought it was hilarious. “Oh, that’s just Everett, let’s start again.” So they did; I was lucky to get away with it.
“Do you remember?” asks Gullick. “We were drinking with The Breeders afterwards, and singing Bee Gees songs, and you were French-kissing Alex [ MacLeod]. The band weren’t around much because they had to watch the footage. That was the first time I saw one of those kids’ vibrating toy balls, like a sea mine. Frances had one.”
Melvins moved into the second support slot on the day after Live And Loud, and the tour continued.
Salem, Oregon. Tad’s home town of Boise, Idaho. Ogden, Utah. (“Utah was really miserable,” remarks Lori. “Creepy rednecks. The venue smelled like shit, like some rodeo thing.”) Denver, Colorado. Sacramento, California – where The Breeders finally bowed out of the tour, as the entire machine took a short Christmas break. When it returned on December 29, in San Diego, Gibby Haynes’ acid-fried Texas freaks Butthole Surfers were the main support, with AmRep band Chokebore7 the openers. The two bands played the rest of the tour.
The next night, in Inglewood, California, speed-wank guitarist Eddie Van Halen turned up inebriated before the show, and was down on his knees trying to convince Krist and Kurt that he should jam with Nirvana on the encore. “No, you can’t,” Kurt said flatly. “We don’t have any extra guitars.”
“Well then,” Eddie shouted, pointing at Pat Smear. “Let me use the Mexican’s guitar. What is he, a Mexican? Is he a nigger? A black?” It was sad and deeply offensive: Eddie had picked on entirely the wrong person. Kurt probably found his mere presence in Nirvana’s dressing room abhorrent, but Eddie had actually been one of Pat’s musical influences. Kurt was disgusted. “Tell you what,” he said. “You can go on stage after our encore and jam by yourself.” Meanwhile, Courtney was next door, complaining to John Silva that her husband was treating Eddie Van Halen – Eddie Van Halen , for fuck’s sake – meanly.