He had never smashed a guitar before, probably never even thought about such an act, since guitars were expensive. “He never explained why he freaked out,” recalled John Purkey, “but he was smiling. There was a finality to it—it was like his own little private celebration. No one got hurt, but when he smashed the guitar, it was as if he didn’t really care if he hurt anyone. It was completely out of the blue. I was talking to him after the show and the guitar was laying there on the floor, and people kept grabbing pieces of it.” The Greeners now couldn’t get enough of Nirvana.
Three weeks later Kurt got a call from Sub Pop telling him the “Love Buzz” single was finally ready. He and Krist drove to Seattle to pick it up, and Sub Pop’s Daniel House recalled he insisted on hearing it on the office stereo: “We played it for them and I don’t think I ever saw Kurt happier.” Both Kurt and Krist were particularly happy about the inside jokes on the release: Kurt’s name was spelled “Kurdt,” forever confusing reviewers and fans, and there was a tiny message scratched into the run-on groove of the vinyl that read, “Why don’t you trade those guitars for shovels?” This was a line Krist’s father would frequently yell at them, in his broken Croat-inflected English, during their Aberdeen practices.
Guitars for shovels, guns for guitars, from Aberdeen to Sub Pop. It seemed like a blur, now that Kurt was holding his very own record in his hand. Here was the final tangible proof he was a real musician. Like his guitar that he used to take to school in Montesano even when it was broken, the outcome or success of the single mattered little: Its very physical existence was what he had strived for over many years.
The band kept almost 100 of the edition of 1,000 “Love Buzz” singles, and while still in Seattle, Kurt dropped a copy off at the college radio station KCMU. He had high hopes for the single, describing it to the station as “a beautifully soft and mellow, crooning, sleep jingle. Incredibly commercial.” He expected KCMU to immediately add the track to rotation, so he kept listening all day. Tracy had come up to Seattle to drive Kurt back to Olympia, and as they prepared to go home, the song still had not come on. As they drove south and reached the outer range of KCMU’s signal, Kurt simply couldn’t wait any longer: He ordered Tracy to pull over at a gas station. There he used a pay phone to call in and request his own single. As to whether the station’s DJ thought this odd—getting a single from a band and then having an apparently random listener request it two hours later—isn’t known. Kurt waited more than a half hour in the car, and then finally the station played “Love Buzz.” “He sat there hearing himself coming out of the radio,” Tracy remembered, “with a big smile on his face.”
Kurt began December 1988 in some of the best spirits of his life. The single had buoyed his mood and people were still talking about the KDorm show. When he’d go to the Smithfield Café or the Spar coffee shop, college kids would whisper to themselves when he walked in. People started to ask him to play their parties; they still weren’t offering to pay him, but they were asking. And The Rocket had given the band their first review, calling the single “one hell of a first effort.” The Rocket piece was laudatory but warned that with all the attention other Sub Pop bands were getting, Nirvana could be overshadowed, both in the scene and within their label. “Serious traces of musicianship leak through,” Grant Alden wrote. “Nirvana sit sort of at the edge of the current Northwest sound—too clean for thrash, too pure for metal, too good to ignore.” It was the first evidence of something Kurt suspected but couldn’t confirm without outside validation: The band was getting better.
Inside Sub Pop, where label-mates Soundgarden and Mudhoney were clearly the favorites, Nirvana’s stock went up. The “Singles Club” had turned out to be a smart marketing move after all—the first pressing of “Love Buzz” sold out, and though the band didn’t make a dime off it, it sounded impressive. There was other good news: Poneman and Pavitt had slated a remixed version of “Spank Thru” for the three-EP collection Sub Pop 200, the label’s highest-profile release so far. And Sub Pop now were interested in talking to Kurt about a full-length album. There was one big caveat: Since the label was broke, Nirvana would have to pay the upfront costs for the recording. This was contrary to the way most record labels worked, and contrary to the way Sub Pop operated with their other bands. Though Kurt never sent one of his “we’re willing to pay you to put out our record” letters to Sub Pop, his combination of hunger and ignorance was apparent to the more savvy Poneman. Checkbook in hand, the band excitedly made plans to go back into the studio with Jack Endino again at the end of December.
Once Kurt had an album to focus on, he immediately began to distance himself from the “Love Buzz” single, which only two weeks before had been his most precious possession in the world. He talked about it with Slim Moon, who said he was left with the impression that “Kurt didn’t like anything about it, except the fact that they now had something that was out.” Kurt sent a copy of the single to John Purkey and included the following note: “Here’s our very commercialized rock star/stupid, fuzzy, Sub Pop picture sleeve, limited edition single, featuring Kurdt Kobain on front and back. I’m glad only 1000 were printed. The LP will be different. Very different. A rawer production and raunchier songs.” Even writing to a friend, he spoke of himself in the third person. His love/hate relationship with the single mirrored his approach to all his work. Nothing the band ever did, either in the studio or onstage, matched the way it sounded in his head. He loved the idea of a record until it came out, and then immediately he had to find something wrong with it. It was part of a larger dissatisfaction.
This was most evident in his relationship with Tracy. She loved him completely, yet he rejected her sentimentality and told her she shouldn’t love him so much. Note exchanges continued as their main method of communicating, and her to-do lists for him grew longer, since he rarely did anything she asked, even though he was unemployed and living off her. In December 1988 she left him the following note: “Hi Kurt! I’ll be home at 2:30 or 3. Before you turn on the TV, could you straighten up the bedroom? You could fold my clothes and put them in my drawer or just inside the closet on the left. 1) Put fresh newspapers down, 2) Shake rugs in bathroom and kitchen, 3) Clean tub, sink, and toilet. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry I’m a nag and a bitch lately. I love you, let’s get drunk (semi) and fuck tonight. Love you.”
Kurt and Tracy struggled with the messy breakup between Krist and Shelli. From Kurt’s perspective, it gave Krist more time for the band, but for Tracy the split had removed their best couple buddies: It was as if Lucy and Ricky had to watch Ethel and Fred divorce. Tracy found herself frequently worrying whether she and Kurt were next, if only because she knew a breakup would allow him to devote every waking hour to the band. She decided to test his commitment by threatening to break up. She didn’t really want to split; she just wanted him to tell her he was committed. But any test of wills with Kurt was a mistake. Obstinate, he responded practically when she told him he had to move out. “If you want me to move out, I’ll go live in my car,” he said. He’d lived in cars before, and he would again. She, of course, told him this was nonsense. But Tracy had mistakenly begun a game of “Who will blink first?” with the reigning Grays Harbor champion.
Even with the band finally happening, life for Kurt went on much as it had before: He rose late and spent all day writing songs or playing his guitar while watching television. One afternoon, Tracy complained that he’d written songs about almost everything in his world—from masturbation to characters on “Mayberry R.F.D.” (“Floyd the Barber”)—except her. He laughed at the suggestion, but pondered it in his journal: “I would love to write a pretty song for her, even though I have no right to speak for her.” On the same page, he was less romantic when he portrayed himself as a character with no arms: “I gesture and grunt for your affection, wielding my flippers in a windmill circle; my bib is soiled with lost attempts to contact you through saliva communication, drivel drying to my chest.” One of his many obsessions was “flipper bab
ies,” infants born without arms; he wrote about the topic regularly and drew freakish illustrations of what he imagined they looked like.
A week later, he wrote a song about his girlfriend. The chorus went, “I can’t see you every night for free,” a direct reference to their argument. Strangely, though he rehearsed and played the song in front of her, he never admitted it was about her. Instead he told her, “I just write what comes in my head, and I don’t write anything about you or anyone else.” He was lying, of course, but the fact that he would create this gift for her, but not be willing to risk the intimacy of presenting it, says much about their relationship and his commitment to it. It was like a junior-high-school boy who leaves a valentine for a girl but doesn’t have the courage to sign his name. When he played the song for Chad and Krist, they liked it immediately and asked its name. “I have no idea,” Kurt said. “What’s it about?” Chad asked. “It’s about a girl,” Kurt said, and they decided that would do for a title. Most of Kurt’s titles had only a minor relationship to the lyrics anyway.
“About a Girl” was an important song in Kurt’s development as a writer—it was his first straight-ahead love song, and even if the lyrics were twisted, it was so unabashedly melodic that in Nirvana’s early live performances, audiences mistook it as a Beatles’ cover. Kurt told Steve Shillinger that on the day he wrote “About a Girl,” he played Meet the Beatles for three hours straight to get in the mood. This was hardly necessary: Ever since he was a toddler he’d studied their work, even though they were considered passé in punk circles.
By the end of 1988 Kurt’s musical influences were a strange potpourri of the punk he’d learned at Buzz Osborne’s knee, the heavy metal he listened to as a teenager, and the pop he’d discovered in his early childhood, with little rhyme or reason to their grouping. There were huge hunks of music history he’d missed simply because he hadn’t been exposed to them (he still hadn’t heard Patti Smith or the New York Dolls), yet in other small pockets, like when it came to Scratch Acid, he was the sort of expert who could tell you every track they released. He had a tendency to fall in love with a group and embrace their music above all others, proselytizing to his friends like a doorstep preacher. Krist had a better grasp of the larger rock oeuvre, one reason Krist remained essential to the band—Krist knew what was kitsch, while Kurt sometimes erred in this category. In late 1988 Kurt summoned his friend Damon Romero to his apartment by telling him, “There’s this great record I’ve discovered that you have to hear.” When Romero arrived, Kurt pulled out the Knack’s album Get the Knack, and moved toward the turntable with it. Romero, who was well familiar with this 1979 release, which couldn’t have been considered more mainstream, thought Kurt was being sarcastic, and inquired, “Are you serious?” “No, you’ve got to listen to this—it’s an awesome pop album,” was Kurt’s deadpan reply. Kurt put the record on, and Romero uncomfortably sat through both sides of the disc, wondering the whole while if there was some sort of punch line yet to come. But Kurt closed his eyes and was silent as it spun, playing air drums with his hands in a quiet homage.
Shortly after “Love Buzz” was released, Kurt made a mixed tape for his friend Tam Orhmund that displayed his favorite current music. Side A included songs from Redd Kross, Ozzy Osbourne, Queen, the Bay City Rollers, Sweet, Saccharine Trust, the Velvet Underground, Venom, the Beatles, and the Knack; he retitled the Knack’s “My Sharona,” as “My Scrotum.” Side B included tracks from such dissimilar bands as Soundgarden, Blondie, Psychedelic Furs, Metallica, Jefferson Airplane, the Melvins, and “AC-Fucking-DC,” as he wrote the name. It took hours to make a tape like this, but Kurt had nothing but time.
With the gift he was hoping to interest Orhmund in managing Nirvana. Realizing that Sub Pop wasn’t looking out for his interests, he thought Ohrmund, who had no prior experience but was outgoing, might better represent them. At one point he and Tracy considered moving to Tacoma with Tam. After looking at several houses, Kurt nixed the idea when he saw a bullet hole in a wall.
Orhmund had instead moved to Seattle, which to Kurt seemed to be the only qualification needed to be the band’s manager. On the day they picked up the “Love Buzz” single, they stopped by her place and Kurt announced she was their new manager. He gave her a stack of records and asked her to send them to Touch and Go and anyone else she might think would be interested. She put together a crude press kit, which included pictures from the K-Dorm show and their paltry press clippings. Even on the day the single came out, Ohrmund remembered, “Kurt acted like he hated Sub Pop.”
That fall Kurt had ordered Donald Passman’s book “All You Need to Know About the Music Business” from the library. After reading it and sharing the information with Krist, he became more suspicious of his label and decided they needed a contract. The next week, Krist drove to Seattle and drunkenly pounded on Bruce Pavitt’s door, yelling, “You fuckers, we want a contract!” Sub Pop drafted a short contract that went into effect on January 1, 1989. It called for three albums over three years—a schedule Kurt thought too slow—and the label was to pay the band $6,000 for the first year, $12,000 for the second, and $24,000 for the third.
The band spent most of December rehearsing for the upcoming session. Since their practice space was in Aberdeen, travel could take up most of the day. Chad only occasionally had a car, and Kurt’s vehicle was hardly dependable. Most days, Krist would drive his van from Aberdeen to Olympia to pick up Kurt; head north to Seattle to pick up Chad, who would take the ferry in from Bainbridge; and then they’d all drive back to Aberdeen. At the end of the day, the route would be reversed. Some days they’d drive as many as 400 miles to accomplish a three-hour practice. Still, there were benefits to this commuting: It began to foster a sense of togetherness, and gave them uninterrupted time to listen to music. “We listened to Mudhoney, Tad, Coffin Break, the Pixies, and the Sugarcubes,” remembered Chad. The list of bands they listened to is as good a description of Nirvana’s sound in 1988 as any. They managed to sound both derivative and original, at times within the same song. But Kurt was learning, and learning quickly.
On December 21, 1988, the band returned for their first official home-town show in Grays Harbor as Nirvana. Though they were starting to draw crowds in Olympia and Seattle, for this appearance they played to an audience of twenty, mostly “Cling-Ons.” The venue was the Hoquiam Eagles hall, just two blocks away from the Chevron station where Kurt’s father had once worked. Krist stripped down to his underwear and again poured blood on himself. They played Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” for the first and only time in concert, and the cover elicited a bigger response than any of Kurt’s originals. The show marked the first time Kurt’s sister, who was still in high school, had seen her brother in concert. “I sat on the edge of the stage, singing along,” Kim recalled. “I lost my voice. I was supposed to get up the next day in class and give a book report, but I couldn’t.”
That week Kurt sent his grandparents Leland and Iris a Hallmark Christmas card. Inside the card, he included a note, updating them on his professional progress:
Dear long lost grandparents: I miss you very much. Which is no excuse for my not visiting. I’m very busy living in Olympia when I’m not on tour with my band. We put out a single just recently and it has sold-out already. We are recording for a debut LP this Monday, which will be released in March. In February we are going on tour again in California and then we will be back in April only to take a break. Then on the road again. I’m happier than I ever have been. It would be nice to hear from you as well. Merry Christmas, love Kurt.
Kurt exaggerated the band’s touring schedule—their shows were still infrequent, but increasing in pace. But he wasn’t exaggerating when he described himself as “happier than I ever have been.” The anticipation of an upcoming career milestone was always more joyous to him than the actual event, and the idea of having his own full-length album— something far more significant than a single he presumed—filled him with enough levity that he unchar
acteristically talked about his inner emotions. It was rare for him to acknowledge how he felt about himself—rarer still for him to describe himself as happy.
Two days after the Hoquiam gig the band drove to Seattle to record their album. It was Christmas Eve. “We had nothing else to do,” explained Krist. They spent the night before at Jason Everman’s house, a friend of Chad and Dylan’s. As typical for Kurt, he’d written the melodies but few lyrics, so he stayed up most of the night finalizing his words. He told his bandmates he couldn’t sleep anyway.
They arrived at the studio the next afternoon and worked deep into the night. During this session they laid down basic tracks for ten songs, but Kurt didn’t like his vocal takes. The only track he fancied was “Blew,” which had been the victim of a bit of serendipity: Krist had forgotten which key he was in, and had mistakenly tuned down one notch below the Drop-D tuning the song was written in. The result was a sound that was heavier and deeper than anything they’d done before, a perfect mistake. Like many of the early songs Kurt wrote, the lyrics to “Blew” didn’t make sense—they were, as Kurt later explained, simply “cool things to sing”—but the melody and lyrics effectively communicated hopelessness and despair, themes that were prevalent through most of Kurt’s songs.
About midnight the band called it quits and headed back to Aberdeen. On the long drive home they listened to the session six times in a row. Krist dropped Kurt back in Aberdeen at Wendy’s house at 1:30 in the morning on Christmas Day, 1988. He had planned to spend the holiday there before heading back to see Tracy. On the surface, Kurt and Wendy’s relationship seemed improved. That fall, he wrote in his journal: “We get along great now that I’ve moved out. I’ve done what my mother wants. She thinks I have a respectable job, a girlfriend, a car, a house. I need to retrieve some old stuff that I left at home, my old home, my real home, now simply my mother’s home.”
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