Nirvana

by Everett True

  “The rhythm that you hear is the pounding of our hearts,” as one poet put it.

  A couple of weeks later, Kristen was found dead in the bath in her Seattle apartment. Strangely, that evening was the first time I’d spoken to Courtney since leaving Seattle. She thought I’d heard the news somehow when I called. It wasn’t that. It was just that I’d had another premonition of death, similar to the time an Angel of Death had visited me while driving down the freeway between Boston and New York after I’d been out drinking the night before with NYC musician, Charlie Ondras from Unsane – and he died the exact same time I saw it.

  The craziness didn’t stop there.

  I still travelled to America and Australia and Europe, drinking even harder. What else could I do? It wasn’t real, was it? I was sure that somewhere along the line I’d receive a phone call from Anton or Janet telling me that it had all been a ghastly Dwarves-style joke. (Sub Pop’s scum rock band Dwarves once put out a press release stating that their bass-player had been murdered in a back ally in Middle America. The outrage was considerable when it transpired the whole story was made up.) It was absurd to feel that way, especially as Courtney had taken me into the garage where Kurt’s body was found, where she had lit some candles in homage, but sometimes the massive events are the hardest to come to terms with. So I continued out-drinking bands and PRs and passers-by in vain attempts to regain my feeling for life; so I became even more desperate in my writing, searching for replacement bands.

  It wasn’t until my passport got stolen from my hotel room in Chicago while I lay comatose on the floor on the other side of the bed, vomit dripping from my mouth, that I finally stopped travelling to America. Instead, I continued beating myself up on the other side of the Atlantic, reverting to the bleak acceptance of being down the pub beyond chucking out time every night of the week, not even bothering to attend shows.

  Music had failed me.

  NOTES

  1 Lizzy Borden was a New England woman tried and acquitted for the brutal axe murders of her father and stepmother in the late 19th century. Her trial inspired a children’s skipping rope chant: “ Lizzie Borden took an axe/ And gave her mother 40 whacks/ When she saw what she had done/ She gave her father 41.”

  2 Narcane is a drug used by paramedics to counteract the effects of heroin overdose: “It’s like an adrenalin shot; very uncomfortable but a potential lifesaver,” comments Cali. “That particular shot was stolen from a parked ambulance.”

  CHAPTER 30

  The Aftermath

  “THE last time I saw Courtney in person was when she was up here for the Rockrgrl Music Conference in 2000,” says Gillian G. Gaar. “She was with Kurt’s sisters, Brianne and Kim. It was eerie how much Kim looked like Kurt. What really got me was she smoked a cigarette the same way he did, just sitting there. It was like watching his double. And she had the same quiet way of talking. We went up to a hotel room and we were passing around beers from the mini-bar. Kim opened her beer and she took a sip and she just muttered, sort of an aside to herself, like, ‘ Ahhhh . . . that takes me back to high school.’ ”

  What are your feelings on Nirvana now?

  “It was a pretty cool thing that happened,” replies Chad Channing. “It’s nice to say that I had a hand in bringing that kind of music to the public. It was definitely enjoyable to be able to play with Krist and Kurt, and we built a really good friendship.”

  Do you find this whole myth making . . .?

  “Bullshit?” interrupts the drummer. “Yes I do. It is bullshit. Why people want to put people on stands, like gods, it’s just a joke. It’s wrong. Why in the world would you put anybody so high up like that anyway? Kurt was a regular guy who just wrote music, wrote good songs and was in the right place at the right time. If we’d done it five years earlier, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  January 2005

  “I feel now like if he could have lived two more months, he’d still be alive,” says Cali DeWitt. “I think of Kurt now as someone who was in the early stages of bad drug addiction. I’ve known so many people in the first two or three years of drug addiction who let it overtake them and committed suicide. I’ve also known so many who got past that. It’s one of those silly, tragic things. It was early drug addiction coupled with rampant, lovesick craziness. He was too smart to have died this way.

  “Kurt’s been made into this miserable person in the history books, and he wasn’t,” the former nanny continues. “A sick part of myself, one of the first things I thought when I found out how he killed himself was, ‘You really said what you wanted to say. There’s really no stronger way to say “ fuck you” than what you did.’ I wish he hadn’t, but I was proud that he was able to do what he wanted to do. It was a very confusing feeling for me. My friend, who was also my hero, had killed himself and there’s all this press . . . I didn’t know how to digest it.”

  What did you do?

  “I went back to LA and my parents were really, really afraid,” Cali replies. “They said, ‘Look, we’ve denied it to ourselves, but you’re obviously on drugs.’ My parents were so supportive. That’s probably what saved my life. I stopped doing drugs for a little while, but I couldn’t deal with it. I went out again and I was running around. I didn’t have access to the kind of money I had when I was with Kurt and Courtney. It was a different game – back to hustling in LA. I ran into this girl who I was obsessed with when I was a teenager. She was 35 and I was 21, and she was [a famous rock star’s] wife. I saw in her eyes a beautiful, self-destructive person. She had $50,000 and we spent it in six weeks. Both of us were trying our damnedest to die. I wound up in a Scientologist rehab in Oklahoma. When that didn’t kill me, the rest was easy. There was a moment five or six years later where I woke up and I felt like, ‘I’m starting to digest what happened when I was 20.’ I got sober just before I turned 28, so it’ll be four years in March.

  “I followed it in the press,” Cali continues. “It was kind of a big deal. There’s a lot of big ‘I don’t knows’. All I’ve been able to digest is he had a lot of heartache and he was pretty new to drugs and he didn’t know how to digest that kind of depression. That part of him that wanted to say ‘ fuck you’ to the world succeeded. I don’t think that was him at his core. Most of the people that I was hanging out with back then are dead.

  “As for Courtney, I slowly stopped calling her. As a drug user, I was lazy and I slowly tore myself away from the idea that she would dangle in front of me: if you stay with me as my employed friend, you’ll be fine. I just had to look into the future: when I’m 30, do I want to be Courtney’s live-in friend? Living with someone who yells at waitresses all the time, I can’t handle it. She feels like I abandoned her, and in a way I did. I care about her; I want her to be OK. I couldn’t live with that weird, ‘I’m going to be a Hollywood actress’ life. I definitely feel like she lost her way, or maybe she was never going the way I imagined she was.”

  Me too.

  “I don’t think about it an awful lot any more. I’d like to have spent more time with Frances in the last 10 years, but I would have been useless for most of it. Over the years it became more difficult to call. Whoever the new assistant would be on the phone like, ‘Yeah, I’ll tell Frances you called.’ But I saw her on her birthday about a year and a half ago. It was great and I hung out with her all day and I hadn’t seen her in awhile and she had pictures of me on the wall. I wish that I was a little closer to the way that I am now than I was in my early twenties so I could have been with her all of the time.”

  I’m thinking of starting off the book with a copy of the fax that was sent out the day after Kurt’s memorial, lampooning Danny Goldberg’s speech, because I think it draws a line in the sand. I’m trying to reclaim Nirvana for the punk rock kids, away from the industry.

  “Which is good,” nods Candice Pedersen. “That’s an interesting, relevant path to go down, but it wasn’t accidental that Kurt was with the people he was with. He chose them because he was very ambitious an
d those people didn’t do anything to him that he didn’t wish. He made adult choices. What I will say is that he recognised he was in a situation he couldn’t get out of.”

  I still haven’t seen the fax. I wonder that if I had, it would have made me feel less alone.

  “I only read the fax at the time,” says Rich Jensen, “but it made an impression on me. It referred to the fact Danny Goldberg – being the professional that he is – understood Kurt’s interests better than Kurt did. The best example, and this comes from the fax, was the time that Kurt didn’t understand how important it would be to his career to attend the MTV Music Awards [September 1992]. He thought that perhaps he should stay in the hospital. Instead, he was convinced to sign a waiver to release himself from the hospital to attend the awards. It was only with the kind of professional advice that Danny Goldberg could provide that Kurt could see where his true interests lay. The fax was very critical and very angry and cutting, but precise. It was very impressive. We talked before about the complication of Nirvana as being both a participant in, and antagonistic to, the major label music business that was really part of what made Nirvana interesting and compelling socially. That fax was one case where a voice seemed to get inside that complication and open it up emotionally in an impressive way.

  “It went to a number of different places,” continues Rich. “It came into the fax machine at Sub Pop anonymously. [To this day, it’s never been made clear who sent the fax – but the finger of suspicion rests on one of Kurt’s former Olympia friends present at the memorial service.] It caused a stir, we all looked at it. People were calling each other all day to figure out who did it. But in fairness to Danny Goldberg, it’s a difficult thing to be a music business executive. For example, when Kurt died, I had a position of some responsibility at Sub Pop. That day I was out of town and I took the bus from the airport and I was carrying my bags to work. I was about a block away from the offices when I heard the news. We had a little shop – the Sub Pop Mega Mart on 2nd Ave – and I called and said, ‘Shut the shop.’ I knew that it would be a place where cameras would go. It wasn’t anything that anyone should have to be paid eight dollars an hour to be responsible for.

  “Then what happened was everything Kurt Cobain touched became 10 times more valuable. All the records start selling like crazy and the companies who put out their records become valuable commodities. You find yourself sickeningly attached to the destruction of the possibility of the creative process that drew you there. It’s the most evil, most ironic success possible. So I offer that in defence of Danny Goldberg. Kurt wasn’t the only one. Danny Goldberg is a smart, articulate guy who means well and who’s done well. Not only has he done well personally – he’s made a lot of money – but he’s done good things for a lot of people. It is a complicated situation to be in.

  “So when we’re talking about this fax . . . I probably would have reacted exactly the way the person who prepared this fax reacted to Danny’s speech, but you need to bear all that in mind.”

  “I always had this feeling I would talk to him again – why wouldn’t I?” asks Carrie Montgomery. “I figured I’d wait it out. Two years later, I felt I had waited it out long enough, so I called their house . . . the day before they found his body. It was bizarre, because I called Dylan out of the blue, like, ‘I was thinking about calling Kurt today,’ and he’s like, ‘Why? Do you know where he is?’ So I started calling his house and left two or three messages. Then I find out the next day that he was laying there dead while the phone was ringing.

  “After he died,” she continues, “I felt like I had lost my husband. He was so adamant that he didn’t want to be famous forever, he didn’t want to be in the public eye and I was like, ‘Go buy a castle in Scotland and paint and write a book, I mean, shit, it’s not like you’re going to have to earn a living.’ But he always had this insane fear of being poor.”

  “I thought Kurt was going to start his own record label, or do a lot more creative type things,” says Debbi Shane. “He didn’t. He got married; he had a baby. I remember this happy-go-lucky kid. He was a really funny, goofy kid who liked Kraft Macaroni and cheese and Kool-Aid and Cheez Whiz, and Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch.”

  Do you think Nirvana were better than 10,000 other bands?

  “I don’t know,” says Tobi Vail. “Billy Childish says, ‘Music is about sound and performance as well as good songs. If it wasn’t, every time someone played The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”, it would sound good.’

  “Nirvana not only had the songs, they had the sound and the performance aspects down. Even from the beginning – playing dorm rooms or makeshift halls with inadequate vocal PAs – they had the sound figured out and they gave 100 per cent, even if there were only 10 people there. Sonically, they were generally the best band on the bill of any show they played, and most crowds they played to could see that immediately. When they opened for Sonic Youth with Dale drumming it was clear to everyone who saw them that they had the potential to be huge. That’s when the songwriting started matching their sound and performance level. There are bands that I personally like better, but they were an objectively good band on all fronts.”

  Here’s something that confuses me. People say that Nirvana changed everything; but precisely what did Nirvana change? They made it easier for Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, Pearl Jam, Silverchair and a bunch of crap bands to sell a load of records. They made Courtney Love rich.

  “That’s how it always is,” Slim Moon agrees. “Look at all the emo bands that we can blame Rites Of Spring for, and all the straight edge bands that we could blame Minor Threat for, or all the hideous, jangly indie rock bands that we can blame Pavement for. The main legacy that great bands have is a whole bunch of shitty bands. The reason people talk about Nirvana with a crazy gleam in their eye, different from other bands, is that there’s no glitch in Nirvana that makes people feel like they were fed something that wasn’t real. There’s still a fantasy that a great rock’n’roll band should be able to just set up over in the corner of your living room and blow your mind. Most people know that on some level Nine Inch Nails can’t do that. And when people think of Kurt’s expression – his songwriting and his interviews – they see him as being completely honest and not contrived. Even our favourite rock stars, we usually suspect of a certain amount of contrived-ness.”

  There’s an obvious reason for that. People are surprised I never liked The Smiths. The reason for that is because if Morrissey actually meant what he was singing about in the early Eighties, he wouldn’t have been on stage. Kurt, you can’t ever doubt because he fucking killed himself.

  “There’s no later days or cheesy records,” assents Slim.

  It doesn’t have to take suicide for validation, though. I would point to Neil Young as a musician who always came across as someone who stayed true to himself.

  “Maybe 30 years from now, Neil Young will still be seen as big of an influence on the history of rock as Nirvana, but right now Nirvana’s presence is so . . .”

  People say they’re a big influence, and I don’t see it. Show me any influence at all.

  “Certain people started changing their voices to sing like him, certain people started researching their songs. In particular, Stone Temple Pilots and Bush . . .”

  I don’t mean in the really obvious, musical, way.

  “If the thing that was special about them was their genuineness, it is really remarkable how much genuineness is missing,” Slim agrees. “That’s not carried over as an influence. You don’t now see legions of bands trying to be totally real. It seems like bands are more contrived now than they were.”

  Why do you think Nirvana have such resonance now? – I mean with teenage kids.

  “Easy answer,” replies Bruce Pavitt. “Because it’s good. It’s timeless music. Same way that Neil Young still sounds great. Nirvana’s music has emotional integrity, I would say, as much as style.”

  Do you think it’s partly because Kurt never grew past that stage of b
eing incredibly confused about life?

  “That’s a good point, yeah,” agrees Bruce. “He does express a lot of angst and confusion, which is what being a teenager is all about. I agree. I have nephews and nieces that are all listening to Nirvana and totally connecting with it.”

  Why are people still talking about Nevermind in 2005?

  “Because everything that’s come since then is half as good and completely derived from Nevermind ,” retorts Steve Fisk.

  How so?

  “The form,” explains the Seattle producer. “The lyrics. The loud/soft/ loud. The rasp in the voice. It’s really embarrassing, but there haven’t been any new ideas since Nirvana. Puddle Of Mud, ‘She Hates Me’. Play that next to ‘Rape Me’. It’s the same beats per minute, it’s the same chords, the same phonics.”

  “I’ll tell you three things,” says former Thrown-Ups guitarist Leighton Beezer. “One of them is, I bet we had the same impression and another one, I bet we don’t have the same impression. Did you see the Time magazine cover [October 25, 1993] with Eddie Vedder on it that said ‘Grunge: All The Rage’? When I saw that I was like, ‘. . . Oh, GAWD!!! Somebody completely missed the boat on this one!’ Grunge was all tongue-in-cheek. I mean, ma-a-a-aybe Eddie did have some issues to express to the masses, but . . . people were not ‘angry’ here in Seattle. There was no violence or anger or angst involved in grunge at all.”

  Which is where Nirvana went wrong. They got too serious . . .

  “OK, but that’s my . . . oh, wait now, OK, this is, then I’m right, you won’t agree with my second statement,” Leighton laughs. “My second statement was that Kurt’s suicide was the ultimate punchline. On the order of, ‘Ha ha! Made you look!’ Yeah! He set it up that he had to keep topping himself, in this style, and he had gone as far as he could go without doing that. In fact, he had long since gone as far as he could go without doing that. So it was, do you want to move forward and take this to its logical conclusion or not?”