Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  That was about to change. Crover had recommended Dave Foster, a hard-pounding, and hard-living, Aberdeen drummer. Though having a drummer back in Grays Harbor remained a logistical problem, by this time Kurt had his Datsun to help. When it was running, which was infrequently, he would drive to Aberdeen, pick Foster up, take him to Tacoma for practice, and then reverse the whole route later that night or morning, putting in hours of driving.

  Their first show with Foster was a party at an Olympia house nicknamed the Caddyshack. One of Olympia’s eccentricities was that every student household in the eighties had some kind of nickname—the Caddyshack was near a golf course. Other than their radio show on KAOS and the Brown Cow show at Gessco, this was Kurt’s first public performance in Olympia, and it would be part of a painful growth curve. Playing to a living room full of college students, it was culture shock. Kurt had attempted to dress the part—he wore his ripped-up jean jacket with a tapestry of “The Last Supper” sewed on the back and a plastic monkey, Chim Chim, from the “Speed Racer” cartoon, glued to the epaulet. Foster wore a T-shirt, stone-washed jeans, and a mustache. Before the band even had a chance to begin, a kid with a Mohawk haircut grabbed the microphone and yelled, “Drummers from Aberdeen sure look weird.” Though it was Foster the kid was criticizing, the comment cut into Kurt as well: He wanted nothing more than to be thought of as an Olympia sophisticate, not an Aberdeen hick. Classism would be a fight he would struggle with his entire life, because no matter how far away he got from Grays Harbor, he felt branded as a hillbilly. Most of the Greeners were from big cities—like many privileged college kids, their prejudice toward people from rural communities was in marked contrast to the liberalism that they professed toward different races. The Caddyshack gig was almost one year to the day after the Raymond party, and it found Kurt in a paradigm he hadn’t expected: His band was too hip for Raymond, but here in Olympia, they weren’t hip enough.

  He discussed this with his bandmates, hoping that if they looked more sophisticated, they would be taken more seriously. Kurt ordered Foster to cut his drum kit down from twelve pieces to six, and then he started on Foster’s appearance: “You’ve got to get with it Dave.” Foster angrily replied: “It’s not fair to make fun of me as the short-haired guy— I’ve got a job. We could have green hair and we’d still look like hicks.” Despite the fact that he’d say the exact opposite in interviews, Kurt cared very much what people thought of him. If that meant getting rid of his stone-washed jean jacket with the white fleece collar, which now sat in the closet of his apartment, so be it. Foster’s dress, other than the mustache, was no different from Kurt’s two years before, which may be why Kurt took the criticism so personally. Kurt had discovered that punk rock, despite being billed as a liberating genre of music, came with its own social mores and styles and that these were many times more constricting than the conventions they were supposedly in rebellion against. There was a dress code.

  Perhaps in some small attempt to leave behind his past and the associations the band had with Aberdeen, Kurt came up with one final name for the group. Foster first heard about the new name when he saw a flyer at Kurt’s house for “Nirvana.” “Who’s that?” he asked. “That’s us,” replied Kurt. “It means attainment of perfection.” In Buddhism, nirvana is the place reached when one transcends the endless cycle of rebirth and human suffering. By renouncing desire, following the Eight-fold Path and through meditation and spiritual practice, worshippers work to achieve nirvana and thus gain release from the pain of life. Kurt considered himself a Buddhist at the time, though his only practice of this faith was having watched a late-night television program.

  It would be under the name Nirvana that the band would first gain attention in Seattle, a city with a population of a half million, where Kurt was convinced his Last Supper jacket would fit right in. Jack Endino had remixed the January 23 session on a cassette that he’d passed on to a few of his friends. One went to Dawn Anderson, who wrote for The Rocket and ran the fanzine Backlash; another to Shirley Carlson, who was a volunteer DJ on KCMU, the University of Washington radio station; and a third he passed on to Jonathan Poneman, co-owner of Sub Pop, a Northwest independent record label. All three cassettes would impact Nirvana’s future. Anderson liked the cassette enough that she planned an article; Carlson aired “Floyd the Barber” on KCMU, their first airplay; and Poneman got Kurt’s number from Endino. When he phoned, Kurt was there with a visiting Dale Crover.

  It was a conversation Kurt had been waiting for his whole life. Later he would recast these events to suggest that fame came without any prodding on his part, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The instant he received the demo, he began dubbing off copies and mailing them to record labels around the country, shopping for a deal. He sent long, handwritten letters to every label he could think of; the fact that he hadn’t thought of Sub Pop was only an indication of the label’s lowly status. Kurt was most interested in being on SST or Touch and Go. Greg Ginn, one of the owners of SST and a member of the band Black Flag, remembered getting that early demo tape in the mail: “My opinion on them was that they were not that original, that they were by-the-numbers alternative. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either.” Though Kurt sent dozens of demos to Touch and Go during 1988, and he’d even gone as far as to title these songs “The Touch and Go Demos” in his notebook, the tape made so little impression that no one at the label remembered receiving them.

  The tape made a bigger splash with Poneman, who took the cassette to his partner Bruce Pavitt at his day job—at the Muzak Corporation, the elevator music company. The Muzak tape-duplicating room was, strangely, the day job of choice for many of the members of the Seattle rock elite, and Poneman auditioned the tape for those present, including Mark Arm of Mudhoney. They gave it the thumbs down, with Arm dismissing it as “similar to Skin Yard but not as good.” Still, Poneman was able to schedule Nirvana on the bottom of a bill at a small Seattle club called the Vogue for one of the label’s monthly “Sub Pop Sunday” showcases. These $2-cover showcases featured three bands, though the beer specials were as big a part of the draw as the music. Poneman asked if Nirvana could play the Vogue on the last Sunday of April. Kurt, trying not to sound too enthusiastic, quickly said yes.

  The Vogue was a tiny club on Seattle’s First Avenue, best known for its transvestite bartender. In a previous life, it had briefly been a new wave club, and before that a gay biker bar. In 1988 the biggest draw was disco night and the lure of beer specials like three bottles of “Beer Beer” for three dollars. In this regard, the Vogue was reflective of the generally poor state of the Seattle club scene at the time, where there were few places for original bands to play. As Pavitt wrote in The Rocket in December 1987: “Despite the desperate lack of a good club, Seattle has rarely seen so many bands.” The Vogue didn’t have as strong a pee-smell as the Community World, but it did have a faint odor of vanilla, a remnant from the many amyl nitrite poppers smashed on the floor during dance night.

  Nonetheless, Kurt Cobain couldn’t wait to get on that stage. Like senior citizens going to a dentist’s appointment, the band made sure they were early for this all-important show—arriving four hours before showtime. Having nothing to do and knowing few people in the city, they drove around aimlessly. Before soundcheck, Kurt puked in the parking lot next to the venue. “It was only because he was nervous,” remembered Foster. “He wasn’t drinking.” Before their call they had to wait in their van, since Foster was underage.

  When it came time for them to play, Kurt had become, by Foster’s description, “pretty uptight.” When they got onstage, they were surprised to see an audience just as small as their usual CWT shows. “There was hardly anyone there,” remembered DJ Shirley Carlson. “The few people there all knew Tracy or Kurt from parties, or had heard the tape. We didn’t even know who sang.”

  At best, it was a lackluster performance. “We didn’t really fuck up,” Foster recalled, “like, we didn’t have to stop in the middl
e of the song. But it was very intimidating, because we knew it was for getting a record deal.” They played fourteen songs with no encore, beginning with “Love Buzz,” which was unusual at the time. Kurt thought it wise to put their best material first, in case people left.

  Some of the audience did leave, and Carlson was one of the few who had anything good to say about the band, comparing them to Cheap Trick: “I remember thinking that not only could Kurt sing and play guitar, though together not very well, but he had a remarkably Robin Zander–like voice.” Most of the members of the Seattle rock establishment thought the band stank. Photographer Charles Peterson was so unimpressed he didn’t waste any film on them and questioned Poneman about the wisdom of signing the group.

  Perhaps the harshest critic of the band’s performance, as always, was Kurt himself. When photographer Rich Hansen photographed the band after the show, Kurt, now nursing a drink, shouted, “We sucked!” “They were very self-critical of their set,” Hansen recalled. “There seemed to be some discussion of them missing some chords. I was struck by how very green they were. There was an absolute naiveness about them.”

  Hansen’s pictures from that night give much insight into the freak-show appearance of the group. Krist, at six-foot seven, appears as a giant next to Kurt and Foster; he has long sideburns and curly, medium-length hair. Foster, at only five-foot five, reaches to Krist’s breast and wears the kind of outfit you can imagine Kurt lecturing him on: stone-washed jeans, a white T-shirt with a mountain silhouette silkscreen, and a backward baseball cap with a Corona Beer logo. He is looking off into the distance, perhaps remembering that he has to be at work by seven that morning. Kurt, who Hansen convinced to sit on Krist’s knee for some frames, wears jeans, a gray sweatshirt turned inside out, and a dark sweater. His blond hair had grown to a length three inches below his shoulder. With his five-day beard growth, he bears a striking resemblance to some portrayals of Jesus Christ. Even Kurt’s expression in one of the photos—a pained and faraway look, as if he is marking this moment in time—is similar to the image of Christ in Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

  On the ride home, Kurt discussed the show as their first real setback and vowed they’d never be so embarrassed again. It was four in the morning before they would reach their homes, and on the long drive Kurt pledged to his bandmates, and himself, that he would practice more, write new songs, and they’d no longer suck. But when Poneman called him a couple of days later and suggested they do a record together, suddenly Kurt’s own recollections of the show shifted. Two weeks later, Kurt wrote a letter to Dale Crover, titling it, “Oh, and our final name is Nirvana.” The purpose of the letter was both to brag and to seek advice. It was one of many letters he wrote but never sent, and its contents describe in detail the parts of the night he was choosing to remember and the parts he had chosen to forget or reconstruct to his own liking. He wrote in full:

  So within the last couple of months our demo has been pirated, recorded, and discussed between all the Seattle Scene luminaries. And the Dude, Jonathan Poneman (remember the guy who called me when you were over the last day?) Mr. Big-money inheritance, right hand man of Bruce Pavitt, and also Sub Pop Records financial investor, got us a show at the Vogue on a Sub Pop Sunday. Big Deal. But I guess hype and regularly being played on KCMU probably helped. The amount of people who came to JUDGE us, not be at a bar, get drunk, watch some bands and have fun, but just watch the showcase event. 1 hr. There was a representative from every Seattle band there just watching, we felt like they should have had score cards. And so after the set, Bruce excitedly shakes our hands and says, “wow good job, let’s do a record” then flashes of cameras go off and this girl from Backlash says “gee can we do an interview,” yeah sure why not. And then people say good job, you guys are great and now we’re expected to be total socialites, meeting people, introducing etc. FUCK, I’M IN HIGH SCHOOL AGAIN! I want to move back to Aberdeen. Nah, Olympia is just as boring and I can proudly say I’ve only been in the Smithfield [Café] about 5 times this year. And so because of this zoo-event we’ve at least gotten a contract for a 3-song single to be put out by the end of August and an EP out in Sept. or Oct. We’re gonna try to talk them into an LP. Now Jonathan is our manager, he gets us shows remotely in Oregon and Vancouver. He’s paying for all recording and distribution costs and now we don’t have to have outrageous phone bills. Dave is working out okay. Sometime next year, Sub Pop is going to have a caravan of 2 or 3 Seattle bands go on a tour. Yeah we’ll see. Thru your past experiences do you think it would be wise to demand receipts for recording, pressing costs? Enough about records. Oh except this one night last month, Chris and I dropped acid and we were watching the late show (rip off of Johnny Carson) and Paul Revere and the Raiders were on there. They were so fucking stupid! Dancing around with moustaches trying to act comical and goofy. It really pissed us off and I asked Chris, Do you have any Paul Revere and the Raiders albums?

  Even in this early stage of his career, Kurt had already begun the process of retelling his own story in a manner that formed a separate self. He was commencing the creation of his greatest character, the mythical “Kurdt Kobain,” as he had begun to misspell his name. He would bring out this carefully refined phantom when he needed to distance himself from his own actions or circumstances. He exaggerated every aspect of a show that by his own admission sucked: The crowd was too small for “a representative from every Seattle band” to be there; the camera flashes were mostly metaphorical, since Hansen only shot a couple of frames. In describing the Sub Pop honchos coming up to him, Kurt even attempts to portray himself as an unwilling participant in his own success. But he was a novice actor at this point, and he admits that he planned “to talk [Sub Pop] into” a full-length record. It is worth noting that virtually every business expectation Kurt had of Sub Pop, at least in the short term, went unfulfilled.

  Chapter 9

  TOO MANY HUMANS

  OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON

  MAY 1988–FEBRUARY 1989

  Too Many Humans

  —The original title of Bleach.

  Sub Pop Records had begun in the fall of 1987, issuing records from Green River and Soundgarden among their first releases. Twenty-eight-year-old co-owner Jonathan Poneman looked like a younger and more heavy-lidded version of Reuben Kincaid, the manager on “The Partridge Family” TV show, and his promotional schemes sounded straight out of Kincaid’s business plan, particularly his idea to send out groups in a Sub Pop van. Most bands on the label noted his shifty nature, and he was widely mistrusted. He had used a small inheritance to start the label, fantasizing it would be the Northwest equivalent of Stax or Motown. He had many strengths as a promoter— thinking small and operating within a budget were not among them.

  Poneman’s partner, Bruce Pavitt, was a long-time fixture in the Northwest scene who had gone to Evergreen. In Olympia, Pavitt befriended many bands, started a fanzine called Subterranean Pop (later shortened to Sub Pop), and began to release cassette compilations. He discontinued the fanzine but between 1983 and 1988 wrote a widely read column in The Rocket, which Kurt studied with the rapt attention most boys only gave to the baseball box scores. Pavitt was the artistic visionary of Sub Pop, and he looked the part: With his crazy-man eyes, spooked expression, and penchant for unusual beards, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the mad Russian monk, Grigori Rasputin.

  By 1988 Sub Pop was issuing a handful of singles and EPs every quarter, mostly by Northwest bands. These projects made little business sense, since the production costs of a single were almost as high as a full-length album, yet they retailed for much less. Sub Pop had little choice with a number of their bands—many were so green they hadn’t written enough material to fill a full-length album. From their inception the label was burning through their capital like an Internet startup, yet they had stumbled onto a small market niche: Indie singles appealed to record-collecting elitists, and in punk rock these connoisseurs were the taste-makers. By developing a cachet t
o their label—and by coming up with a consistent design identity for all their releases—they had bands clamoring to be on Sub Pop, if only to impress their friends. Like hundreds of other young musicians who were bad at math, Kurt had a grandly romantic concept of what it meant to record for the label.

  Kurt’s youthful illusions were quickly dashed. The band’s first face-to-face business meeting with Poneman—at the Café Roma in Seattle— was just short of disastrous. Krist showed up swigging from a bottle of wine he hid under the table; Kurt started off shy, but became angry when he realized Poneman was offering them far less than the band wanted. It wasn’t so much a question of money—everyone knew there was little of that—but Kurt hoped to jumpstart the band by issuing a slew of albums, EPs, and singles. Poneman suggested they begin with a single of “Love Buzz” and see how it went from there. Kurt admitted “Love Buzz” was their strongest live song, but as a songwriter he felt it disingenuous for a cover to be his initial release. Nevertheless, at the end of the meeting, all parties agreed Nirvana would record a single with Endino producing and Sub Pop picking up the recording costs. To Kurt, the idea of having his own single out was the fulfillment of a dream.

  Back in Grays Harbor, events transpired that threatened to derail that dream. Not long after the Vogue show, Dave Foster had the misfortune to beat up the son of the mayor of Cosmopolis. He spent two weeks in jail, lost his driver’s license, and had to pay thousands of dollars in medical bills. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for Nirvana, who were rehearsing for the upcoming recording session, so Kurt decided to fire Foster. How he handled this dismissal says much about how he dealt with conflict, which is to say he didn’t. Kurt had always been a bit afraid of Foster, who was shorter than Kurt but muscled like Popeye. Initially, the band brought back Aaron Burckhard, but when he ended up with a DWI in Kurt’s car, they again advertised for drummers. When they found one, Kurt wrote a letter to Foster: “A band needs to practice, in our opinion, at least five times a week if the band ever expects to accomplish anything.... Instead of lying to you by saying we’re breaking up, or letting this go any further, we have to admit that we’ve got another drummer. His name is Chad...and he can make it to practice every night. Most importantly, we can relate to him. Let’s face it, you are from a totally different culture. And we feel really shitty that we don’t have the guts to tell you in person, but we don’t know how mad you’d get.” Apparently, Kurt didn’t have the guts to mail the letter: It went unsent. Foster, of course, wasn’t from a “to-tally different culture” from Kurt’s—he was from the same culture, though it was a past Kurt sought to escape. Foster found out he was canned when he saw an ad in The Rocket for an upcoming Nirvana gig.