by Everett True
Several of Kurt’s friends – such as Krist and Dylan – were beginning to wonder if Kurt’s lengthy coma in Rome hadn’t caused some adverse effects. They were concerned he may have been left with brain damage. “He didn’t seem as alive,” Dylan commented to Charles Cross. “After Rome, he seemed monochromatic.”
“He seemed a little bit more himself while we were away,” continues Rene. “We had an opportunity to have some ‘bro’ time. I’d joke with him how he never got to sleep with any of his favourite girls, and how he could probably do that, and how Courtney would probably enjoy it.
“It was strange. I’d never seen him walk very much before – or be physical – except for when he was on stage. Sometimes he’d get dispirited about how he was spending so much money on crap, or he’d make fun of Courtney for doing that – like somehow they’d end up broke. He never really grasped how wealthy he was. We tried not to be too serious, and there were a lot of times when we were out of it. Courtney had rules there was no drugs in the house – no cocaine or speed, no white drugs – and I’d go, ‘What about your pills?’ So we were trying to find crack, because we never did it. We smoked some speed out of a light bulb instead, and thought it was funny, irreverent.
“I wasn’t expecting the credit cards to be stopped. It was Courtney’s way of forcing his hand. She was good at that. She knew we needed money and that I didn’t have any, and she wanted him to come back because she’d heard he was out enjoying himself and that hurt her feelings. The way Courtney dealt with having hurt feelings was by unleashing this tornado of frustration on you. I remember being shocked by her cancelling the cards, but I wasn’t surprised by the severity of the action. Kurt and I said to each other, ‘That’s your money,’ but we were scared at the idea of going into a bank to deal with it ourselves. We didn’t want to create a big situation. I was under 20 and felt illegitimate, and Kurt didn’t feel much more legitimate.
“The morning that Courtney cancelled the cards, he’d picked up a paper that had a story about Nirvana cancelling something he didn’t even know about. He made a phone call; he wasn’t shocked, but he was pissed off. He made phone calls the whole time we were gone, most likely to Courtney. I didn’t understand why he did it because he’d complain about her to me, and go on about how he didn’t care what she thought, but then he’d call her and talk sweetly.
“Kurt OD’d pretty bad at the Marco Polo. It happened from time to time. One reason they kept me around was because I was good at reviving people. My job description was ‘personal assistant’ but it was more like to make sure he didn’t die, or that somebody didn’t rob him, or he didn’t OD. It took me 20 minutes that day to get him up and on his feet: it was the first time in a while I felt that scared. I didn’t tell anyone, but it was a bad number.
“The next day was when he found that paper and got upset. The day ended with him calling Rosemary Carroll to specifically change some things about his will. That freaked me out, because there was always the underlying fear he would try and kill himself. We’d joke about it: how he’d take all the money from Courtney’s name and leave it to Frances, and leave Cali and me some money.
“I got him to call Krist, and Krist came by. He was going to take Kurt out to some cabin of his so he could withdraw – his van was full of sleeping bags and instruments. But when we were on our way, Kurt started shifting his story, that maybe he should go back to the house. I found out later that Krist was supposed to be taking Kurt back for an intervention, but he was trying to be a double agent – it would have been so fun if we’d gone to his cabin. Maybe it would have changed everything. But we were pretty tired, having been out all those days.”
This last paragraph doesn’t quite tally with other versions of the events. One story has Krist meeting Kurt for the first time that week at the Marco Polo on March 21 – three days after the incident with the guns – so Kurt and Rene couldn’t have been missing at that point. Apart from that, the stories are fairly close. There was a ‘tough love’ intervention planned on March 21, but it got cancelled after Krist tipped Kurt off. Krist felt that, far from helping Kurt, such a course of action would merely have added to his paranoia and sense of alienation.
At the Marco Polo, Krist reported Kurt as being delusional – and that he wanted to buy a motorcycle. He didn’t understand what Kurt was on about, and suggested that the two of them should go away on holiday together (presumably without Rene). First, though, Kurt was hungry – Krist wanted to take him to a fancy restaurant, but Kurt suggested Jack In The Box. It was only when the car was halfway to Capitol Hill that Krist realised what Kurt was up to. His dealer’s flat was right next door to the burger joint. The two friends yelled at each other, and Kurt left.
NOTES
1 Amazon, Microsoft and Starbucks are all based in Seattle, or nearby. The original Starbucks is down in Pike Place Market, a couple of blocks from Sub Pop.
2 As in Home Alone star, Macaulay Culkin.
3 That night, the riff at the start of the opening song, ‘Rape Me’, even sounded a little like the stuttering guitar on The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’.
4 Nirvana’s set list ran: ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’, ‘Drain You’, ‘Breed’, ‘Serve The Servants’, ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Sliver’, ‘Dumb’, ‘In Bloom’, ‘About A Girl’, ‘Lithium’, ‘Pennyroyal Tea’, ‘School’, ‘Polly’, ‘Very Ape’, ‘Sappy’, ‘Rape Me’, ‘Territorial Pissings’, ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’, ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, ‘All Apologies’, ‘On A Plain’, ‘Scentless Apprentice’, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, ‘Blew’.
5 Rohypnol is a drug used to treat severe insomnia, and also an aid for heroin withdrawal. Courtney always used to refer to it as a ‘baby sedative’ to me. I took a couple once, for a flight to Japan, and they knocked me out for the entire 27-hour duration.
6 An acoustic demo of ‘Do, Re, Mi,’ surfaced on 2004’s With The Lights Out box set. It sounds oddly like a Paul McCartney song – or perhaps something Kurt would have sung on KAOS radio in Olympia – the voice cracking and soaring off into the stratosphere. It’s very poppy, and heart-rending.
7 Elastica, a female-led, mid-Nineties, Britpop band, owed more than a passing debt to old school angular art-punks Wire.
CHAPTER 29
Spring Rain
“PEOPLE were always muttering about Kurt’s heroin use,” says Rosemary Carroll. “I heard rumours, maybe from the first time I was aware of him. I don’t know. Towards the end, it affected his relationship with everybody: it gave people something to pin their own anger on; their frustration and inability to deal with a genius, because he was a drug addict. That’s what angered me most [about his death], he had so much more to do and say and create – but he was also under a huge amount of pressure. And more than what the heroin may have done to him physiologically, it was the way it gave everybody an excuse to dismiss him that was so wrong. His legitimate grievances were dismissed as the ravings of a junkie.
“There was that big intervention,” Kurt’s former lawyer continues. “I did not go to that. During the last weeks of his life, he did call me two or three times. I tried to tell him he had options – and the pressures he was feeling that were unbearable could be alleviated. That all the paths facing him that were horrible could be avoided. He could have altered his life. He didn’t have to stay in Nirvana. He didn’t have to stay in any relationship that was paining him. But I told him that to get out of these situations he had to be straight, because as long as he was a junkie he was providing an alibi for everyone that was controlling him.
“The only times I’d talk to him was when he’d call me, because he was not reachable. One time, he talked to my daughter who he really liked and she asked him to come down and visit us. I wanted to get into a room with him and tell him he could be protected. It all seemed so unbearable to him and so enormous. I wish we’d all done a better job of protecting him.”
So there was an intervention planned for Ma
rch 21, but Kurt got tipped off . . .
“. . . and left,” adds Cali.
Krist Novoselic told him, because he thought it was a stupid idea.
“ Krist was sensible throughout the whole thing, the best he could be,” says Cali. “Kurt said cruel things to Krist, but he didn’t mean them. He was just full of misery and wanted everyone to get away from him. You don’t want people who really love you there, trying to help you. Or people like the people who were at the actual intervention [Friday, March 25] – a few friends and a lot of business people.”
Assembled in the Lake Washington house that day for a ‘tough love’ session were Courtney, Danny Goldberg, John Silva and Janet Billig from Gold Mountain, Pat Smear, Cali, Dylan Carlson, Mark Kates and Gary Gersh from DGC, and a presiding counsellor, David Burr. Wendy was absent, looking after Frances in Aberdeen.
‘Tough love’ sessions are supposed to wake the user up to the reality surrounding them: each person present was told to confront Kurt with the consequences of what would happen if he didn’t stop taking heroin. Geffen would drop Nirvana; Nirvana would split up; Courtney would divorce Kurt; Gold Mountain would refuse to work with Nirvana. Kurt must have known most of the speeches were bullshit. Most of those present didn’t feel they had the authority to confront the individual upon whom a large proportion of their livelihoods depended. “He had such an aura around him that day,” remarks Goldberg, “that it felt like we were walking on eggshells.”
“When I arrived and saw Dylan was there,” recalls Rene Navarette, “I knew something weird was going on because Courtney had recently exorcised him from the house. But by that point Kurt wasn’t listening to me. I was saying we needed to get out of there, but Dylan was already making him high and there was no talking to him. I was concerned for Kurt’s state of mind. I knew it would be a mess – plus, Courtney was using dope to keep him there. I knew that Kurt’s attitude was that he didn’t care if he died. Any change that was going to happen wouldn’t happen by having his hand forced.
“Dylan had dope so we all got loaded together,” Rene continues, “but I knew something was going to go down. Soon as I saw Eric, I told him, I’ve got to get out of here – that’s when Eric lent me money for a plane ticket to LA. Before I left, I went to Kurt and told him I was leaving, and told him it was my birthday soon – and that if he was going to rehab, he’d be there for my birthday on March 30. I called the house that night. Pat Smear gave me a play by play. He told me the intervention was ridiculous.”
Courtney was the only one who spoke for any length of time: she implored Kurt to go to treatment at the Exodus Recovery, a drug rehabilitation centre in Marina del Rey, CA. She threw at him the one threat she knew he couldn’t shrug off: that if she divorced him he wouldn’t be able to see Frances very often.
Kurt listened to all his peers in silence, and then in venomous terms pointed out the hypocrisy and faults of many of those present.
“In my memory, it feels like there were like 20 business people there,” says Cali. “There was probably more like eight. There was Danny Goldberg and people from Gold Mountain – all these people who don’t really have anything to do with what was going on and hadn’t been friends to him on a personal level. What were they doing here? He was acting really, really fucked up. He was acting too fucked up to stand. It wasn’t my place, but I was getting annoyed, it was bothering me. It was this weird attention everyone was giving him. Courtney or someone kept saying, ‘ Cali, walk him around.’ I was walking him around the backyard and it dawned on me how stupid it was. We were out on the lawn and I was like, ‘Buddy, you don’t really need me to walk you around.’ I dropped him and he fell down to the floor. He smiled and looked up at me in a way, like, ‘You understand that I don’t need you to walk me around. I could totally walk.’ It was almost like he thanked me with his eyes for dropping him.”
It’s been written that Dylan refused to take part . . .
“Dylan was there,” Cali replies. “Dylan tried to appeal to Kurt as a friend. This is the other instance of Kurt throwing it into the faces of people he cared about. He started yelling at Dylan. Dylan was too fragile to handle it. He was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You’re just as bad as all these other people!’ He threw a recycling bin at Dylan, filled with glass, and all this glass broke and Dylan started crying and left. At that point Courtney had been picking on Kurt for so long and so much, he felt trapped. And now she had brought basically what he considered the enemy into the house to tell him what he was doing wrong.
“The only reason to have an intervention is to show someone that you’re hurting people you care about, and not in a tough love way,” Cali explains. “A few close friends of mine, and my dad, did an intervention on me and it had an effect because they were all people I respected. They weren’t yelling at me. An intervention that would have been successful would have been like Tracy and Tobi, people Kurt had known for years – Ian Dickson – people who don’t have a vested interest in his success. I feel like I can remember them talking about, ‘You need to clean up and do Lollapalooza,’ at the intervention. That was missing the point completely. It should have been, ‘Why don’t you not go on tour for a year, never record again, just get together with your daughter and leave this all behind?’ ”
Courtney tried to convince Kurt to fly with her to LA – where she was checking into the $500-a-night Peninsula Hotel to detox herself – but he refused, flipping through the Yellow Pages instead, trying to find a ‘proper’ psychiatrist, so she left the house in a car with Janet Billig. It was the last time she saw her husband alive. One by one, the others followed . . .
“Yeah, it happened and they all left,” says Cali. “We were left in the house like, ‘What the fuck? What just happened?’ ”
Kurt retreated to the basement, and played around with a few ideas on guitar with Pat and Eric. The following day, Jackie Farry came by and took Frances away to LA to be near Courtney.
“Jackie had to take Frances at this point,” Cali says. “I was like, ‘Will you come take Frances because my drugs have gotten out of hand in the face of this madness in the house right now.’ I’ve got Courtney saying, ‘You have to stick to Kurt like glue right now. Don’t let him do anything.’ She wants me to shadow him and call her and tell her what he’s doing. I’m really in the middle of this thing now.”
Having turned his back on the intervention, Kurt had no one to hold him in check – and the inevitable happened once more. He OD’d, alone on the back seat of his Valiant, where he’d been placed by other users scared that if a famous rock star died in their apartment, they’d be in trouble with the police.
He didn’t die. He woke up the next day, aching all over. He returned home, ignored any phone messages from Courtney, and called Rosemary. She convinced him that he should try treatment one more time, and so reservations were made for Kurt to fly out to LA on Tuesday, March 29. Krist was asked to drive Kurt to Sea-Tac Airport, but on the way there Kurt once again changed his mind. He attempted to leap from Krist’s car while it was driving along the Interstate 5 and, once at the terminal, he punched Krist in the face. The pair grappled and Kurt broke loose, sprinting away across the concourse.
It would be the last time Krist saw him.
On Wednesday, March 30, Kurt had a change of heart again. He would get treatment, after all.
Before he left, he got loaded and drove over to Dylan Carlson’s condominium where he asked his old friend to do him a favour. He wanted Dylan to buy him a rifle, “For protection and because of prowlers” – the police had taken away all his other guns. So the pair drove over to Stan Baker Sports on 10,000 Lake City Way NE, and purchased a six-pound Remington M-11 20-gauge shotgun and a box of ammunition for $308.37, cash. “Kurt seemed normal,” Dylan remarked. “Plus, I’d loaned him guns before. If he was suicidal, he sure hid it from me.” Dylan offered to hold on to the gun for Kurt, knowing he was on his way to Exodus, but Kurt insisted on keeping the gun himself.
; At LAX, Kurt was met by Pat Smear and John Silva’s assistant, Michael Meisel, who drove him to the centre. The singer checked into room 206 and enrolled in a 28-day programme. During the next couple of days, several psychologists visited Kurt, none of whom suspected he was suicidal. He voiced his concerns about the forthcoming Kevin Kerslake lawsuit (over the ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ video), fearing it could bankrupt him – and when Jackie Farry came to visit with Frances, told her about the arguments he’d been having with Courtney over Lollapalooza. But generally he seemed in good spirits, and when Jackie and Frances came back the following morning, he was in an upbeat mood, showering Jackie with compliments and playing with his daughter, throwing her up in the air.
It was April 1 – the same day that the second leg of Nirvana’s European tour, due to restart in Birmingham, England on April 12, was officially postponed.
Later that day, Kurt was sitting outside in the smoking area joking with Butthole Surfers singer Gibby Haynes about one of Gibby’s friends who had escaped Exodus by jumping over the six-foot rear wall. Such an action wasn’t necessary as the front gates were always left unlocked, but there was a certain romance to it. “What a dumb ass,” the two musicians laughed. ( Gibby was also going through rehab at Exodus. It was that kind of place.) Later, Pat Smear dropped by with a friend, Joe ‘Mama’ Nitzburg. The three men walked out to the back patio and sat and chatted for an hour with Gibby.
At some point in the afternoon, Courtney managed to call Kurt – she’d already tried several times to reach him – and had a brief conversation. “No matter what happens,” she claimed he told her, “I want you to know that you’ve made a really good record [Hole’s album, Live Through This].” She asked him what he meant.
“Just remember, no matter what, I love you.”
At 7.25 p.m., Kurt walked out of the back door of Exodus and scaled the wall. A couple of hours later, he boarded Delta flight 788 to Seattle – arriving at Sea-Tac at one in the morning. He was now officially missing: as soon as she heard the news that he’d left Exodus, Courtney started scouring LA for him, calling drug dealers and friends, convinced he would overdose.