Nirvana

by Everett True

  “There was this one guy who found me through my brother, came at me with this whole conspiracy theory – the idea that Kurt was killed. It’s ridiculous. He himself had told me a couple of times that if he was going to kill himself that would be the way he’d do it, exactly that way. We’d joke about it. We’d joke about the process, doing such a big enough issue of dope that we could get the gun to our heads and that was what happened. That was the humour we kept with him, later – childishly making fun of people or things.”

  Part Three: Earnie Bailey

  “In early 1994, Kurt had a second Telecaster, a Sunburst model that I modified by putting two humbucker [pickups] in it and several hardware upgrades. I overhauled it for him, thinking the Tele could be the next place for him to go, guitar-wise. Krist took it to him and said, ‘God, he just loves that guitar.’

  “When Krist came by to take him to the airport that day, Kurt grabbed his coat and his guitar without the case, and left. Things turned pretty sour at the airport, they got into a scuffle and Kurt threw the guitar at him. He made it clear the band was over. So Krist came over to my place afterwards and he said, ‘ Fuck him, I’m done with that guy.’ He explained what happened and said, ‘We should work out some songs.’ I said sure. I figured we would stay busy until they made up, but it did seem like he was relieved and that the break-up was final . . .

  “ Krist and I were at a show the night Kurt died, but we left about halfway through. We were really fidgety and uneasy. MTV had leaked that the band had broken up, or word was getting around that the group was over, and we felt uncomfortable every place we went. We headed down the street to the Crocodile and stayed there for a bit, but called it an early night. He took off for the farm [ Krist and Shelli had purchased another property by this point] to go clear his head, and Shelli stayed back at the house in Seattle.

  “I was working one morning at the restaurant, and the phone rang, and it was Krist. He said, ‘Hey, guess what? Kurt’s dead. Do you want to go up to the house and hang out with Shelli until I get home?’ I assumed he’d overdosed. I said OK, so Brenda [ Earnie’s wife] and I locked the place up and went up there. We were sitting with Shelli watching CNN and MTV news and the reports started coming in that Kurt had been found at his house – and about an hour later, they began reporting it was a suicide. And it was just unbelievable, because you couldn’t even imagine that. I couldn’t process it.

  “It was really difficult after that. There was the memorial and Krist had asked me to put together a tape to play after the service, so I put together a list of songs I thought Kurt would like. There was a Vaselines song on there. And I think The Beatles’ ‘In My Life’ was the first song on the cassette.

  “ Krist, Dave, our partners and I all rode down to the service in Krist’s Toyota. The toughest part was walking in, and on the pews was this picture of Kurt, the photo of when he was a boy, with the dates of his birth and passing on it. It’s almost like you black out at that point. You can see your shoes and that’s about it. We walked over to our seats and sat down, Lanegan was sitting behind me and he had his head down, and I started sobbing, and I don’t think I stopped until it was over. I was quiet, almost frozen, but I couldn’t stop. I looked over across the aisle from me and there was a man who was in the same position, hunched over and crying, and I realised it was Kurt’s dad.

  “The next day, or whenever, Seattle Times ran a photo of Kurt lying in the greenhouse on their cover and it was so horrible to see. What if that was the editor’s son laying there, how would they feel? I put in a quarter and threw every single one in the dumpster.”

  Addenda: Everett True

  I was in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 8, 1994 with Steve Gullick when I first heard the rumour that Kurt Cobain had killed himself.

  We were in town to interview Beck, then one of Gold Mountain’s rising stars with his slacker anthem ‘Loser’. I’d got to town the previous night, in time to catch Tacoma, WA skate-grunge band Seaweed at a local venue that also served as a Laundromat. Despite two members being down with the flu, the ex-Sub Pop act were in fine thrashing form, reminding me of all the energy and massive power hooks that first attracted me to the Seattle sound. Steve had flown in the following morning and we were sitting around waiting for his room to become ready. It was one of those days you sometimes get while travelling: grey, dull and stretching on forever. We were looking forward to hooking up with the Cheap Trick-loving Guided By Voices in neighbouring city Dayton later that week, though.

  Already, we’d been informed that Beck also had the flu, and might have to pull out of both that night’s show (at the Laundromat, with skewed LA female pop band That Dog in support) and our interview. So we were sitting around in my hotel room, relaxing, watching MTV and CNN, looking at magazines. Hole’s album Live Through This was about to come out and Steve, being faintly prudish, was shocked at some of the photographs of Courtney. “I wonder what Kurt would think of this?” he asked me a couple of times. Despite the weather, though, we were happy; bringing each other up-to-date on the last few hectic weeks, when the phone suddenly rings. It’s about 11 a.m.

  Steve picks it up. It’s Paul Lester, my features editor from Melody Maker – not always the most sensitive of fellows. “So what’s all this about Kurt Cobain being dead then?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steve replies. “You better speak to Everett.”

  I look at Steve. There’s obviously something wrong, I can tell by his manner.

  “It’s Lester,” he says. “He says there’s a rumour going round that Kurt has killed himself.”

  I speak to Paul and tell him that neither of us knows anything but that I’d ring around, find out and ring him back as soon as I could. He asks me to hurry, as there’s a whole load of Maker journalists waiting in the office late in case the story is true. Steve and I look at each other: it’s about then that the façade crumbles and . . . don’t ask me how . . . but we both know it’s true. Kurt has killed himself.

  I don’t know what made us feel so certain. It wasn’t as if either of us had realised up to that point that Kurt was suicidal. Both of us had thought the Rome incident had been a genuine accident. I thought this despite the fact Courtney had called me up shortly afterwards, asking whether I thought that treating Kurt to a ‘tough love’ session to help him kick his heroin addiction was a good idea. I had no idea what such a session entailed but I figured anything that helped Kurt sort his life out had to be worth trying. Also, Courtney’s personal manager, Janet Billig from Gold Mountain, had phoned me up personally after Rome to reassure me there was nothing mentally wrong with Kurt.

  The next 30 minutes were spent in a bad haze of uncertainty as I phoned every number I could think of – Gold Mountain, Bad Moon (Nirvana’s UK press agents), my contacts at Geffen, Kurtney’s house – to no avail. Eventually I was forced to call Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad in New York City. I didn’t want to. I didn’t like the man. I felt he’d been chosen to write the Nirvana book by Kurt’s management simply because he had a ‘safe pair of hands’.

  “Yes, it’s true,” he told me. “We’re all on our way out to Seattle. I’d advise you to do the same.”

  It struck me then as an odd statement. It still does. What earthly good could I do by going to Seattle? Perhaps Michael was making reference to that selfsame job description I’d had screamed at me on a Brighton–London train all those years ago and that I’d vehemently denied: “You’re just a fucking music journalist.” Is that all it came down to after years of passion: I had a job to carry out?

  I told Steve the news.

  I threw the remnants of my bottle of Maker’s Mark down the sink, figuring that the worst possible thing I could do at that stage was to get trashed. Steve asked me to inform Melody Maker he didn’t want any of his photos used in the inevitable tribute that would follow . . . I think that when I called back up I must have spoken to my editor, Allan Jones. He told me that I should just go and do whatever I needed to do,
“Plane tickets, whatever, it doesn’t matter, we’ll cover the cost, you don’t have to write anything if you don’t feel like it.” It’s a conversation I’ll remember with gratitude forever.

  I can’t remember accurately what followed. It wasn’t real. We sat there dazed. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I didn’t want to fly to Seattle to confront a future that I knew would come crashing down around me as soon as I arrived. For the last five years of my life I’d managed to leave my past behind and not deal with the bad side. I wanted to be anywhere but in America, in Seattle, in Ohio . . . I started thinking of all those times I’d refused to call Kurt or Courtney, thinking that famous people didn’t need friends, not when they had so many managers around them. I knew that if Kurt had just managed to hang out with Steve and I, see a band like Guided By Voices a few times, get trashed with Kim Deal, he’d never have been driven to such an extreme . . .

  Yeah, right.

  The phone rang again. It was my friend Eric Erlandson, calling from an airport. “Courtney wants you to come to Seattle.” So it was I found myself walking through the sterile, anaemic aisles of Cincinnati airport with Steve, clutching a bag full of vinyl albums that I’d bought only the day before. We didn’t know what to say to each other. I gave Steve the records to take back to England with him.

  So it was that I came to be flying into Seattle on the afternoon that Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered, tears streaming down my face, the refrain to a Hole song spiralling crazily round inside my head. “Live through this with me,” the lady sang. “And I swear that I will die for you.”

  Eric had informed me that when I arrived at Seattle, if I called the house they would arrange for a limousine to pick me up from the airport. It was necessary. By the time the car had got to the gates of the Cobain residence in Lake Washington it was crazy outside. Police tape and small scrums of reporters and the curious lined the secluded road. No one was being allowed in unless they’d been expressly invited. I couldn’t help feeling I was being allowed access to the rock journalist’s ultimate dream: a guest list to die for. Sorry about the black humour, but you fucking know we liked it that way.

  Inside the house, it was curiously silent. Mark Lanegan was standing in one corner, not speaking to anyone. He looked alone and I felt alone, both of us separated from everyone else by our natures and the situation. It seemed natural we should hang out together.

  There was virtually no one else there until Krist and Dave turned up with a few friends and family and went and stood on the other side of the room. Courtney and Eric’s camp turned up a little later . . . or perhaps it was earlier. I remember some record company types briefly having a fit at my presence there – I was a journalist – and thinking, “You stupid, stupid fuckheads. I’m not the one being paid to pretend I’m a fucking friend.”

  At one stage, Krist came over and asked if I wanted to come to a wake being held for Kurt that evening by a few of his old Seattle friends. I declined because . . .well . . . I was in Courtney’s camp that day, and there was no getting round it. My loyalties had been sorted out a while before. Even though I wanted to speak to Krist, I couldn’t because of the politics around Nirvana that didn’t die away for one second upon Kurt’s suicide, only intensified.

  Mark and I stuck around the house after almost everyone else had departed. There were some terrible arguments going on between Courtney and Eric, and the nanny Cali, but that was nothing unusual. Some of the people there wanted to take drugs to hide the terrible sudden pain, and others equally as vehemently didn’t want them reintroduced into the house. We were introduced to Kurt’s mom, Wendy, by Courtney the following way, Courtney using my real name – “This is Kurt’s friend Mark and this is my friend Jerry.” Both of us were shown and read the suicide note.

  And that’s almost all I’m going to tell of that terribly sad weekend. Mark and I stayed in the whole time at his apartment, somewhere near the start of the Monorail, downtown. We didn’t go out except for perhaps one cup of coffee round the corner. We barely spoke. I was mostly concerned with making sure Mark was all right, and I’m sure he was the same back. We turned on the television once: there was talk of Nirvana and the fans’ vigil, and we turned it off again straight away. Some Sub Pop hipsters were holding their annual party, which had turned into a wake at the Crocodile Club. Fair enough, but Kurt hadn’t exactly got along with his former peers in recent years. We played a few records, walked around the house, tried to pretend to each other that we hadn’t been crying. Mostly, however, we just sat there and waited for Courtney to call, in case she needed us.

  When it came to the day of the funeral service, we realised that I had no appropriate clothes to wear. My only pair of jeans had holes in their knees. We knew that Kurt wouldn’t have given a fuck but I still didn’t want to look disrespectful. So I borrowed a pair of Mark’s black drainpipes and turned up to the service with the top three buttons undone.

  It was a gloriously sunny day as we left Mark’s apartment to go down to the church – the sort of day when Seattle becomes the most beautiful city in the world, bar none, with Mount Rainier and the Olympics in shimmering crisp detail behind the skyscrapers and Space Needle. It had been raining the whole of the previous week, as is the Pacific Northwest’s wont.

  “I swear that Kurt would never have killed himself if the weather had been this nice last week,” Mark remarked thoughtfully.

  Initially, I felt a sense of betrayal at Kurt’s suicide. That rapidly disappeared over the following months. People say that suicide is the ultimate act of cowardice, but you know what? It’s far more cowardly to let your life disappear into nameless years of drinking and drugs, whiling away the days of your life in a bleak TV-satiated depression because you’re too scared to make a change. Sure, I blamed his management for placing too many demands on him while he was feeling so fragile. I soon outgrew that, though. They didn’t mean to kill him! They were only trying their best to accommodate everyone, do what Courtney and Kurt and Krist and Dave were asking of them.

  Kurt’s death was such a shame, such a shame. At one point it had really felt we could’ve changed things, but with his suicide it was finally proved to me, irrevocably, this is what happens when you try to fuck with the system. There it was in plain black and white. The system kills you.

  I know others that the system has killed also: people with fragile, unique voices that became overpowered by the boorish chants of the grey masses – friends and acquaintances and others even closer. They too were unable to cope with the demands placed upon them of everyday life. Maybe someone they loved left them, perhaps they never managed to adjust to everyone else’s normalcy. Who knows? It’s not difficult to imagine nothing when you sink into such total depression. Anything is preferable to loneliness: especially death. Kurt happened to be the most famous friend who’d killed himself. He was also the hardest to mourn. Who could I call? Who could I speak to about his death? Anyone I knew that might be able to relate was thousands of miles away and had sorrows of their own. I already felt bad enough about the contradictions of my position as part of the voyeuristic rock press. Had I somehow contributed to Kurt’s death? Maybe the only reason we hung out together was because his glory reflected upon me and gave me that illusion of glamour I’d been searching for all my life.

  We had talked about changing things with Nirvana. What would we have replaced the old order with, though? We wanted something better. What did that mean? We wanted something less macho, more female-led, more sensitive and spontaneous and fun and exciting: Jad Fair and Courtney Love and Kim Deal, Kathleen Hanna, Daniel Johnston and Dan Treacy. We wanted our friends, our peers, our dreams and our heroes in positions of authority; is that such a crime? We wanted a place where bullies and braggarts didn’t automatically rule. We wanted a place where women aren’t automatically second-class citizens because they – we – are already part of us. A place where commercial radio counted for shit.

  What did we want? Not much: just Nirvana.

/>   I returned to England after a couple of days.

  Danny Goldberg had given a speech at Kurt’s funeral service that had made me realise precisely why the singer had finally given up. This speech had no grounding in reality, no relation to any man I’ve known. In it, Kurt was referred to as, “An angel that came to earth in human form, as someone who was too good for this life and that was why he was only here for such a short time.” Bull-fucking-shit! Kurt was as pissy and moody and belligerent and naughty and funny and dull as the rest of us, it just so happened he was a little too sensitive for the situation he found himself in, too. After the service I left the church and started walking – to anywhere, anywhere but where all these self-righteous prigs revelling in their own fame and importance were sitting.

  I forced myself to return, remembered there were people like Lanegan there, and Calvin Johnson, and Jon and Bruce from Sub Pop, and The Breeders . . . people I loved dearly. Yet in all the days that followed, I only ever found one other person who had been equally as upset by that speech: Kristen Pfaff, bassist with Courtney’s band and formerly bassist with great Minneapolis hardcore trio Janitor Joe. (I’m sure there were others, but I wasn’t in communication with many people right then.)

  We chatted about Nirvana that summer as Kristen rejoined her old band for a tour across Eastern Europe alongside fellow Amphetamine Reptile act, Hammerhead. There were nine or so of us all crammed into a dirty old van, talking of love and laughter and life and those small, but so significant, details in between. Everything seemed so right again: punk rock like I’d always loved it, practised by two bands for whom it was their natural birthright. The venues were tiny, sweating, crammed with enthusiastic faces and blistering power chords. At night, we would all sleep together in a dormitory, enlivened by whatever cheap alcohol we could lay our hands on. It was like being born again: Kristen was so lively and full of optimism about the future and music and life.