by Everett True
“Just before we moved out of the Lakeside Ave house, the Northridge earthquake happened in LA [pre-dawn, January 17, 1994],” adds Rene. “ Cali and I and Frances were asleep in our room downstairs. Kurt and Courtney came down and woke me up, brought me upstairs and said, ‘Look dude, we just want to tell you we love you and everything’s going to be OK, but everyone you know in LA is dead’ – and they turn the TV on and it’s showing fire and water shooting everywhere like Armageddon. Then they follow me downstairs to go fetch Cali. I start to shake him, and he’s like, ‘Look, there’s a baby here, and if the baby wakes up there’s going to be Armageddon right here, right now. If there are people dead they will be dead in the morning. Now turn off the light and go back to sleep.’ It was a sweet gesture because they said we could live with them forever. It was like we were the kids they would take care of.”
In the middle of all this turbulence, Nirvana returned to the studio for what would be their final recording session – at Robert Lang’s in North Seattle on January 28–30.
“I did the session at Bob Lang’s with them,” says Earnie Bailey. “ Krist and Dave and I showed up . . . Dave brought his drums down, I think he was driving a black suburban around that time, Krist brought his bass and a Marshall amp. We got set up, and started waiting . . .”
Kurt didn’t show up that day or the next. On the Sunday, he materialised and started playing around with a few ideas – the first time Nirvana had been in a formal recording setting for almost a year, since In Utero . Basics for 11 songs were recorded in 10 hours, but only one was finished, the stunning ‘You Know You’re Right’. It was a deeply sarcastic and mesmerising summation of Kurt’s situation; pointed lyrics sniped sharply at Courtney in a passive/aggressive manner, while a bell-like guitar chimed and feedback and drums swirled round in a maddening eddy of emotion and frustration. It followed the quiet/loud Nirvana template, but weirdly so: caught in a middle ground between In Utero and something even more disturbing.
“Nothing really bothers her/ She just wants to love herself,” Kurt intones, anguished, before bursting into one last mighty sarcastic roar: “Things have never been so swell/ I have never felt so well.”
“On the first day, we took this lengthy tour of the studio,” Earnie continues. “On the second day there was more waiting, but then it got busy recording some of Dave’s material. The third day, Kurt finally showed up towards the evening, wearing his corduroy jacket, and he hadn’t bothered to bring a guitar or amp. He assumed we’d go get it for him, and we thought he would be bringing it, as there was no phone call or contact from him regarding what he would use. Krist and Dave were pissed that Kurt hadn’t been around for the last couple of days, and now he was upset at them for not tracking down his guitar and his amp! It wasn’t a good situation. Kurt was pretty down when he showed up.
“He wound up using my pedal board, a recently modified Univox guitar that was out in my car, and an amplifier that belonged to the studio. After getting things worked out, we all went out for pizza. We were laughing and relaxed; we had a great time. But when we got back to the studio, all of a sudden Kurt became quiet again and it felt tense. They recorded the instrument tracks quickly, and then it came time to do vocals . . .
“So I left and went to my car. I was about to turn the ignition over when I had this creepy feeling that this was it. It was terrible. So I thought: I need to break that. I walked back inside and started to pick up cables or something. I didn’t say anything to Kurt because I didn’t want to disturb him, but I looked at him as he was playing guitar with his back turned and thought, no, that’s ridiculous, that’s nothing. I went out and got into the car and left, and that was it. That was the last time I saw him.”
On February 2, Nirvana flew out to Europe.
With them was Melora Creager, from the gothic NYC-based cello trio Rasputina, who’d been recommended to Nirvana by Michael Lavine as a replacement for Lori Goldston. Creager’s band had a predilection for playing their instruments while dressed in Victorian corsets and bloomers. The other main change was that Pat Smear was singing back-up harmonies, not Dave Grohl.
For the first performance – three songs on a variety TV show in Paris – the entire band dressed in open black waistcoats over white shirts, in homage to late Seventies pop band The Knack.3 The effect was somewhat disorientating: whereas the other three musicians had short, neat, cropped hair, Kurt had an unruly blond mop – and taken altogether, it looked like a bad version of the glorious style exhibited during the ‘In Bloom’ video. Kurt looked supremely disinterested, while Krist was mugging it up a little too much during ‘Pennyroyal Tea’. Halfway through the final song, ‘Drain You’, Kurt threw his guitar to the floor and – grasping the mic stand – stood there screaming into the microphone, looking uncannily like a miniature version of Mark Arm.
Both Dave and Krist’s partners were on the tour. Not Courtney, though – throughout the entire European tour it seemed like she was on the verge of flying out, but she never did. There wasn’t a chance of recapturing the camaraderie on the American dates a few months back: Kurt was in a deep depression, resenting being dragged away from his house and his drugs and his wife. Once again, he was in withdrawal – and on morphine. “He looked so worn out,” Shelli Novoselic commented. “It was so sad.”
The tour opened in Cascais, Portugal on February 6 with Buzzcocks in support.4 Buzzcocks were a genius art-punk band from Manchester who mixed lovelorn, spiteful lyrics with jagged guitar riffs and rampantly incestuous pop hooks as they stormed the British charts during the late Seventies. They split up following three, wonderful albums and then – after singer Pete Shelley spent an unsuccessful stint pursuing a solo career – re-formed in 1989, a pale shell of their former energy. Kurt was in love with Seventies punk rock as championed by magazines such as Creem and NME , though – and it was enough for him to have his former heroes playing on the same bill. Buzzcocks continued on the tour until February 18.
Kurt was missing Courtney badly, but consumed with jealousy at the thought she might be sleeping with someone else. He called her after Nirvana’s second show in Madrid; crying, telling her how much he hated everyone, everything, wanting to cancel the remaining dates. Courtney later claimed in Rolling Stone that Kurt had told her that he’d walked through the audience and his fans were smoking heroin off tinfoil, crying out ‘Kurt! Smack!’, giving him the thumbs up – like he was their junkie idol. It’s very possible someone is guilty of embellishment here, but what is fairly certain is that – as ever – the conversation disintegrated into violent argument. Courtney later claimed the quarrelling was caused by her concerns about his drug use. It’s possible. But it’s much, much more likely the fighting was caused by his worries about her fidelity, and Courtney placing constant pressure on Kurt to play ball with Gold Mountain and go along with whatever they ‘suggested’.
“I think he suspected her of cheating on him with Evan Dando and Billy Corgan,” sighs Cali. “Was she? I think so. I mean, define cheating. Did they get fucked up and make out one night? That counts to a husband who’s wondering. Was it a real affair? No, maybe not. The one intense moment, and we’re jumping ahead here, is he called me from Italy, and I was in London with Courtney. We were late to see him. We were three weeks late. He was really serious and really calm and he was like, ‘I know that you don’t get in the middle of our stuff and I know you don’t take sides, but can I ask you something as your friend?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Is she cheating on me?’ It was serious, no nonsense. I remember thinking, ‘I think that she is,’ but I didn’t say that. I said, ‘I don’t think so, and if she is, I don’t know it.’ I didn’t know for sure and what if I had said, ‘I think, maybe?’ I don’t think I could have saved him from anything if I did say yes.
“We had been putting off going to Europe,” he continues. “We came down to LA for a couple of days because she had to do something. She immediately got two bungalows at the Chateau [ Marmont, very highfalutin hotel in Ho
llywood] – one for me and Frances, and one for her. She rented a car for me the second day and all this stuff. After what felt like a couple of weeks, I stopped asking when we were leaving every day. She kept putting it off and I was like, ‘Well, tell me when you want to go.’ I don’t remember how long we were there, but I remember he was calling going, ‘Are you coming or what?’ I’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m coming. When Courtney’s ready to come, I’m coming.’ I don’t remember how long we were there, but I do know that I saw the bill when we did leave, and it was $37,000.”
For the record I think Billy, yes, Evan, no.
“I think Evan was always a friend to her, but a real affair, probably not,” agrees Cali. “Billy, yes. So I didn’t know what she was doing. I shacked up in the hotel and I had a fine time. I had Rene with me a lot during this time. It was me, Rene and Frances. By the time we finally got there [to Europe], Nirvana were on break on tour and he was in Rome waiting for us. He asked me if she was cheating on him and I said no.”
Kurt tried to cancel the tour, asking production manager Jeff Mason what the consequences of such an action would be. The answer came back that Nirvana were liable for all costs, hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the tour ground on, Kurt barely speaking to Krist and Dave – lost in a defeatist, sullen daze.
While the band were in Paris on February 13, Kurt posed for a series of shots with a French photographer, messing around with a sports pistol – in one of them, Kurt, high on drugs, posed with a rifle in his mouth, the barrel pointing upwards. If it was a joke, it was in pretty bad taste. It was around this time that Kurt started losing his voice: years of screaming and drug and alcohol abuse were taking their toll. Throat spray was purchased, but it only alleviated the problem temporarily, and so Alex MacLeod would take Kurt along to see doctors at whatever city Nirvana was playing – Barcelona (February 9), Toulouse and Toulon, France (February 10 and 12), Paris (February 14–15), Rennes and Grenoble, France (February 16 and 18). That didn’t help either. The doctors would simply advise Kurt to lay off singing altogether for two months and learn to sing ‘properly’. Kurt’s response was typically punk rock – “ Fuck that.”
On February 19, Nirvana played Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where the audience threw toilet paper rolls at the stage. Support came from Sub Pop’s French hardcore group Les Thugs (who, coincidentally, sounded enormously influenced by the Buzzcocks). Before the show, Krist and Dave and their respective partners, along with Melora and some of the crew, went ice-skating at a rink adjacent to the venue. “Kurt didn’t go,” Melora remarked to journalist Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna, “because he was, you know, kind of depressed.” The next day was Kurt’s 27th birthday. His manager John Silva gave him a packet of cigarettes.
And so the tour ground on. On February 21, in Modena, Italy, Melvins took over as the opening act. Someone threw a drawing of Kurt’s face on to the stage during ‘In Bloom’ and he briefly pretended to wear it as a mask. But his spirit had pretty much gone: it was apparent to everyone his heart wasn’t in it, that he was going through the motions and yet everyone seemed unwilling or unable to do anything about it: “People acted like nothing was wrong,” Melora told Borzillo-Vrenna. “It was weird. They talked around him, or through him. I didn’t know what the details were, but I felt like, ‘Excuse me, this guy is miserable.’ The band didn’t talk much. I felt like Krist cared a lot about Kurt, but whatever happened over the years that I wasn’t privy to . . . he just seemed sad about Kurt’s state.”
Kurt looked like shit – skin a mess of craters and pockmarks, skin tone a ghastly pallor, eyes barely focused – during Nirvana’s performance on the Italian TV show The Tunnel on February 23 in Rome. The band played just two numbers, ‘Serve The Servants’ and ‘Dumb’, but it was clear his voice could barely cope. The first song was sung in a weird baroque undertone recalling the infamous Top Of The Pops appearance.
The following day was Kurt and Courtney’s second wedding anniversary. The couple celebrated apart, Courtney in LA hanging out with Cali (not in London, as she later claimed), still promising to fly out any moment, Kurt alone in Milan: just him and a few thousand rabid fans singing along with every miserable word. Afterwards, everyone was hanging out in the Melvins’ dressing room having a good time . . . everyone except Kurt, who just lay there on the couch, not saying a word.
The second night in Milan, Kurt tellingly played the riff to The Cars’ monster New Wave smash ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ in the middle of the intro to ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ – the song may seem upbeat, but its sentiments are very dark, depressed, concerning a girl that the narrator is in love with, but who has been seen walking around town with his friend. Kurt spoke to Krist after the set, and told him he wanted to cancel the tour right there, there was no point continuing – but the next date, on February 27, was in Ljubljana, Slovenia and many of Krist’s relatives would be attending. So he played a few more shows.
“He hung on there for me,” Krist told Charles Cross. “But I think his mind was made up.” Kurt spent the entire three days in Slovenia closeted in his room while his bandmates went out and explored the countryside.
Nirvana’s final show took place in Munich, Germany on March 1, at Terminal Einz, a small (3,050-capacity) airport hangar. There was a deep sense of foreboding hanging over the day. None of the band liked the acoustics of the club – too echo-y – and Kurt’s depression had deepened. He skipped out after soundcheck having asked for an advance on his per diems from Jeff Mason. On his return, he phoned Courtney, got into a fight, and immediately called his lawyer Rosemary Carroll to tell her he wanted a divorce.
“Did he ever say that to me?” asks Rosemary. “Yes he did, but I don’t know how serious he was. He loved her very much. He was besotted with her, but at the same time it was very difficult for him. In any relationship, there’s a honeymoon period of excitement and wonder and joy, and then you’re left with a period where the two people have to figure out if they’re companionable and can coexist together, and Kurt was maybe figuring out that Courtney was not companionable. The defining moment of Kurt’s life was his parents’ divorce, and he would have done anything to avoid that same situation rather than put Frances through it – and to the degree he thought divorce was inevitable, the pain of that was unbearable, unbearable.”
“He was lovesick and crazy, and he didn’t know what to do with all the emotions going on,” says Cali. “I didn’t know anything about a prospective divorce. I just knew that he was done fighting and he believed she was cheating on him. He didn’t want to believe those things, but they were eating him up.”
On top of all this, Kurt was extremely ill. The next day, a doctor diagnosed him as having severe laryngitis and bronchitis.
“Kurt was sick,” Melora told Borzillo-Vrenna. “He didn’t want to play. They were looking for herbal cures and doctors. They didn’t seem to be getting along with management either.”
The show started with a full, deeply sarcastic version of ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’, which segued straight into ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’, Kurt sounding absolutely tormented as he screamed out the refrain of “What is wrong with me?” The set finished with ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, the love song Kurt had written for Courtney, back before he had been so thoroughly disabused of all his notions of romance.
The following day, Nirvana cancelled the rest of the first leg of the European tour (two more shows in Germany). Dave stayed on in Germany to work on the soundtrack to Backbeat , the Beatles/Stuart Sutcliffe movie. Krist and Shelli flew home to Seattle. And Kurt and Pat Smear flew to Rome, where they checked into the sumptuous Excelsior Hotel and awaited Courtney, Frances and Cali’s arrival.
“So we went to London for a couple of days,” says Cali. “We were supposed to stop in London at the airport on the way from LA and go directly to Rome, but Courtney had to get out and go shopping – and maybe do a little press [for Hole’s second album, Live Through This, which was due out at the start of April] – which turned into a
two day thing.”
Yeah, you visited me. You came to the Melody Maker offices, and Courtney helped me review the singles. Among the records was Lou Barlow’s solo Sub Pop seven-inch, the stark ‘I’m Not Mocking You’: “He’s the kind of guy you’d fuck and the next day would be hanging from a tree in your backyard,” commented Courtney. “Lou Barlow and Steve Malkmus [Pavement singer] . . . which one is hotter? Which one would you marry and which one would you fuck on the side?”
She projectile vomited into bins while you changed Frances Bean’s nappy on our art editor’s desk. The baby pissed on the page layouts.
Cali laughs: “The night before, I went to see Pavement by myself. You were the only person that I could possibly have known who’d be there, but you weren’t around. So the next day we went to Rome. We were spoiled. We’d been staying in the nicest hotels in America, but this hotel in Rome, the Excelsior, was the most palatial thing any of us had ever seen. We get there and Kurt’s approach . . . he’s not angry or anything . . . he really tried to make it a romantic thing for him and Courtney. Their room [room 541] was all set up and there were flowers [red roses] everywhere and these giant $500 candlesticks. [Kurt also purchased some three-carat diamond earrings.] They had champagne sent up. [Kurt didn’t drink any.] He was like, ‘I missed you so much,’ but she just took some pills and went to sleep. He was visibly unhappy and bummed.”
Kurt had wanted to make up and make love. That much was apparent to the most insensitive of observers – but not to Courtney. She later admitted to Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke, “Even if I wasn’t in the mood I should have just laid there for him. All he needed was to get laid.”