There were other songs inspired by Tobi, sometimes not as clearly connected, but all haunted by her ghost. “ ‘Lounge Act’ is about Tobi,” Krist observed. One line in the song references Kurt’s tattoo: “I’ll arrest myself, I’ll wear a shield.” Another sums up how their relationship was more about learning than love: “We’ve made a pact to learn from whoever we want without new rules.” In an earlier, unrecorded lyric of “Lounge Act,” Kurt more directly addressed his former paramour: “I hate you because you are so much like me.” “Lithium” was written before Tobi, but the lyrics changed over time and eventually reflected her. Kurt later told Chris Morris of Musician that the song included “some of my personal experiences, like breaking up with girlfriends and having bad relationships, feeling that death void that the person in the song is feeling—very lonely, sick.”
Though Kurt never specifically addressed it, his most famous song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” could not have been about anyone else, with the lyrics “She’s over-bored and self-assured.” “Teen Spirit” was a song influenced by many things—his anger at his parents, his boredom, his eternal cynicism—yet several individual lines resonate with Tobi’s presence. He wrote the song soon after their split, and the first draft included a line edited from the final version: “Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?” The answer, at one point in his imagination, had been Kurt Cobain and Tobi Vail.
His songs were the most fruitful aspect of the breakup; his writings and artwork showed a more enraged and pathological outcome. One drawing shows an alien with his skin being slowly ripped off; in another a woman with a Ku Klux Klan hat lifts up her skirt and flashes her vagina; another depicts a man stabbing a woman with his penis; and yet one more shows a man and a woman having sex above the caption, “Rape, Rape.” There were dozens of such depictions, and pages and pages of stories with tragic endings and disturbing imagery. Not atypical is the following screed:
When I grow up I want to be a faggot, nigger, cunt, whore, jew, spic, kraut, wop, sissie, whitey hippie, greedy, money-making, healthy, sweaty, hairy, masculine, quirky new waver, right wing, left wing, chicken wing, chicken shit, ass kickin, dumb fuck, nuclear physicist, Alcoholics Anonymous Counselor, psychiatrist, journalist, stink fist, romance novelist, gay, black, cripple, junkie, HIV positive, hermaphrodite, flipper baby, overweight, anorexic, king, queen, pawnbroker, stock broker, pot smoker, (all is swell, less is more, God is gay, harpoon a catch) journalist, rock journalist, stuffy, cranky, middle-aged, bitter, little, scrawny, opinionated, old, booking agent and editor of a fanzine that segregates the small percent into even a smaller percent. Keep em divided, Ghettoize, united we stand, do not respect others sensitivities. Kill yourself kill yourself kill kill kill kill kill kill rape rape rape rape rape rape is good, rape is good, rape kill rape greed greed good greed good rape yes kill.
Most of the rage was turned inward, though. If there was one central theme to his writing that fall, it was self-hatred. He imagined himself as “bad,” “faulty,” “diseased.” One page told a crazy tale—completely fantastical—of how he enjoyed kicking elderly women’s legs because “these ankles have a plastic bottle full of urine strapped on them and a tube running up into the old worn-out muscled vagina; the yellow stain goes flying everywhere.” Next, he sought out “50-year-old fags who have the same muscle malfunction but in a different cavity....I kick their rubber underwear and the brown stuff soaks into their beige slacks.” But this disturbing story eventually turned the violence toward the writer: “Then people with no particular fetishes kick me all over the body and head and watch the red shit splat and run and soak my blue jeans and white shirt.” The story ended with him writing repeatedly, “I am bad,” and then, twenty times in big characters, the size of the letters he used to spray-paint on the walls of Aberdeen, “ME, ME, ME,” until he finally ran out of space, having filled every inch of the page. He wrote this with so much pressure the pen went through the paper. He made no effort to hide these stories, and instead, his journals would lie open around the apartment. Jennifer Finch began dating Grohl, and she read some of the writings left on the kitchen table and noticed his torment. “I was worried about Kurt,” she remembered. “He was just out of control.”
The hatred he had for others was mild compared to the violence he described against himself. Suicide came up as a topic repeatedly. One diatribe detailed how he might turn himself into “Helen Keller, by puncturing my ears with a knife, then cutting my voice box out.” He repeatedly fantasized about heaven and hell, both embracing the idea of spirituality as an escape after death, but just as often wholeheartedly rejecting it. “If you want to know what the afterlife feels like,” he speculated, “then put on a parachute, go up in a plane, shoot a good amount of heroine into your veins, and immediately follow that with a hit of nitrous oxide, then jump or set yourself on fire.”
By the second week of November 1990, a new character had begun to spring forth in Kurt’s journal writing, and this figure would soon make its way into almost every image, song, or story. He intentionally misspelled its name, and in doing so he was granting it a life of its own. Oddly, he gave it a female persona, but since it became his great love that fall—and even made him throw up, just like Tobi—there was a fairness in this gender choice. He called it “heroine.”
Chapter 13
THE RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY
OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON
NOVEMBER 1990–MAY 1991
It might be time for the Betty Ford Clinic or the Richard Nixon Library to save me from abusing my anemic rodent-like body any longer.
—From a letter to Tobi Vail, May 1991.
“Heroine,” Kurt’s own bastardization of the word heroin, had first appeared back in his rude cartoons in eighth grade. Having grown up fascinated by rock ’n’ roll, he was well aware that many of the musicians he idolized had succumbed to drug abuse. And though he had addictively smoked pot, frequently drank too much, and was known to huff inhalant from the bottoms of shaving cream cans, he pledged that he would never suffer a similar fate. In 1987, during one of Kurt’s sober purging periods, he chastised Jesse Reed when his friend suggested they try heroin. “Kurt wouldn’t hang out with me after that,” Jesse remembered. “I was trying to find heroin, a drug I’d never tried, and he’d never tried, and he would lecture me: ‘Why do you want to kill yourself? Why do you want to die so badly?’ ” In a personal drug history constructed later in life, Kurt wrote that he first had used heroin in Aberdeen in the late eighties; his friends contest this, since he had a fear of needles at the time and there was no heroin to be found in his circle. He did occasionally take Percodan in Aberdeen, a prescription narcotic; he may have romanticized and exaggerated this opiate when recalling it later.
By the fall of 1990, brokenhearted over Tobi, the same questions Kurt asked of Jesse earlier could have been put to him. In early November he overcame his fear of needles and first injected heroin with a friend in Olympia. He found that the drug’s euphoric effects helped him temporarily escape his heartache and his stomach pain.
The next day, Kurt phoned Krist. “Hey, Krist I did heroin,” Kurt told his friend. “Wow! What was that like?” Krist asked. Kurt said, “Oh, it was all right.” Krist then told him, “You shouldn’t do it. Look at Andy Wood.” Wood was the lead singer of Mother Love Bone, an upand-coming Seattle band, who died of a heroin overdose in March 1990. Novoselic cited other Olympia friends who had died of heroin addiction. Kurt’s reply: “Yeah, I know.” Novoselic, playing the role of older brother, warned Kurt that heroin wasn’t like the other drugs he’d done: “I remember literally telling him that he was playing with dynamite.”
But the warning fell on deaf ears. Though Kurt promised Krist he wouldn’t try the drug again, he broke this promise. To avoid Krist’s or Grohl’s finding out, Kurt used the drug at friends’ houses. He found a dealer named José, who was selling to many of the Greeners in Olympia. Coincidentally, Dylan Carlson had experimented with heroin for the firs
t time that fall, though not with Kurt. But soon their bonding also extended to heroin—usually done only once a week, owing to several factors including their poverty and their desire to not become addicts. But they would go on occasional binges, like the time they rented a cheap hotel room in Seattle to nod off in private without alarming their friends or roommates.
But Kurt’s friends were alarmed by his drug use. Tracy had finally forgiven Kurt, and they were occasionally hanging out. When Shelli told her Kurt was doing heroin, she couldn’t believe her ears. That week, Kurt phoned Tracy late at night, obviously high, and she challenged him directly: “He told me he’d done it a few times. He said he really liked it, and that it made him more sociable. But he said he wasn’t going to do it all the time. I tried to walk the fine line by telling him he shouldn’t do it, without making him feel bad for having done it.” A week later, they spent an evening together attending several parties. In between events, Kurt insisted they stop by his place so he could use the toilet. When he didn’t return, Tracy went looking and found him on the floor, with a bottle of bleach sitting next to him and a needle in his arm. She was furious: Kurt had turned into something Tracy couldn’t have imagined in her worst nightmare. The joke of Nirvana’s first album title no longer seemed funny to anyone. But heroin was only a small part of 1990 for Kurt, and for the most part, he kept his promise to use it only occasionally. He was distracted from all else by the fact that his career was taking off like never before. He signed a contract in the fall with Virgin Publishing, which brought him his first big check. Kaz Utsunomiya, president of Virgin, flew to the Northwest to ink the deal. Though Kaz was a longtime industry veteran and had worked with everyone from the Clash to Queen, he was shocked to see the squalor of Kurt’s apartment. They talked about Kurt’s influences, particularly the Clash; Kurt said Sandinista! was one of the first records he owned that was remotely punk.
Kurt’s initial share of the publishing deal came in the form of a check for $3,000. He paid his rent, and then drove to South Sound Mall with Mikey Nelson and Joe Preston. Kurt spent almost $1,000 in Toys “R” Us on a Nintendo system, two Pixelvision video cameras, two automatic BB guns that looked like M16 rifles, and several Evel Knievel plastic models. He also bought fake dog feces, fake vomit, and rubber severed hands. “He threw it all into a basket,” remembered Preston. “It was just a bunch of junk he could destroy.” It was as if an eight-year-old boy had been set loose in the store and told he could have anything he wanted. Kurt used the BB gun to immediately shoot out the windows on the Washington State Lottery building across the street. He also bought, for $20, a used child’s Swinger bicycle, a style that at the time was remarkably unhip: It was so tiny that pedaling it required him to scrunch over with his knees to his shoulders. Kurt gleefully rode the bike until it was dark.
He was still riding the bike a few days later in the midst of what at the time was the most important business meeting he’d ever had. On Thurston Moore’s recommendation, the band had contacted Gold Mountain Management. The firm was run by Danny Goldberg and John Silva. Silva, as the younger manager, was assigned the job of negotiating with Nirvana. It was an easy task—because of his connection with Sonic Youth, he already had Kurt’s stamp of approval. Silva and his girlfriend Lisa Fancher came to Seattle to meet the band face-to-face and take them to dinner. Kurt loved being taken to dinner by music industry honchos because it was the only way he could guarantee eating a decent meal. But this night, Silva and the rest of the band sat around for hours while Kurt rode his Swinger bike in a circle in the Lottery parking lot. “We all decided he was going to break a limb,” recalled Fancher. Though the long delay seemed like just another childish pastime, a more cynical observer might have suggested it was Kurt’s first move in what would become a battle of wills with his soon-to-be manager.
Kurt put his bicycle down to go to dinner, but afterwards announced Beat Happening was playing across town. It was a test of Silva’s interest, and like any good businessman, Silva acted enthused and went to the show with Kurt. Silva protested to Fancher later that he detested Calvin’s band (she also remembered he initially hated Sonic Youth, complaining about their “major egos”). Yet he’d passed Kurt’s acid test, and within the week, Nirvana had signed with Gold Mountain.
On November 25, Nirvana played a show at Seattle’s Off Ramp that attracted more A&R representatives than any concert in Northwest history. Representatives from Columbia, Capitol, Slash, RCA, and several other labels were bumping into each other. “The A&R guys were in full-court press,” observed Sony’s Damon Stewart. The sheer number of A&R reps altered the way the band was perceived in Seattle. “By that time,” explained Susan Silver, “there was a competitive feeding frenzy going on around them.”
The show itself was remarkable—Kurt later told a friend it was his favorite Nirvana performance. During an eighteen-song set, the band played twelve unreleased tunes. They opened with the powerful “Aneurysm,” the first time it was played in public, and the crowd slam-danced and body-surfed until they broke the light bulbs on the ceiling. “I thought the show was amazing,” recalled Kim Thayil of Sound-garden. “They did a cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Here She Comes Now’ that I thought it was brilliant. And then, when I heard ‘Lithium,’ it stuck in my mind. Ben, our bass player, came up to me and said, ‘That’s the hit. That’s a Top 40 hit right there.’ ”
The A&R men were just as impressed. As the set ended—after a break for a fire alarm—Jeff Fenster of Charisma Records managed to convince the band his label was the best choice. Two days later, Nirvana’s lawyer, Alan Mintz, called and said the band was going to sign with Charisma. The deal was for $200,000, a healthy but not outrageous advance. But before Fenster could have a contract prepared, the band decided, at the last minute, to sign instead with DGC, an imprint of Geffen Records. Though DGC’s A&R rep Gary Gersh had not been one of the early bidders, the endorsement of Sonic Youth ultimately proved to be the deciding factor. Geffen also had a strong promotion department, headed by Mark Kates, and Gold Mountain knew promotion was the key to breaking the band. The Geffen deal called for Nirvana to be paid $287,000, at the time one of the largest advances for a Northwest band. Mintz extricated the band from the vestiges of their Sub Pop contract: As part of the Geffen agreement, Sub Pop would be paid $75,000 and get 2 percent of sales from the next two albums.
Though Kurt had read music industry books, even he wasn’t prepared for how long the deal took to be finalized—the contract wasn’t signed until April—and how little money it initially meant for him. By the time fees for lawyers, managers, taxes, and debt were deducted, Gold Mountain put him on a retainer of $1,000 per month. He immediately got behind on his bills, and complained he could only afford corn dogs—the floor of the apartment was now littered with their sticks.
Grohl had gone back east for most of December, and minus his roommate, Kurt sought to relieve his boredom by any means necessary. He hung out a lot with Dylan, and soon broke another barrier he’d sworn never to cross. Dylan was a gun nut, and Kurt consistently preached that guns were barbaric. A few times Kurt agreed to go into the woods with Dylan, but he wouldn’t touch the guns, and on one occasion even refused to leave the car. But eventually Kurt began to let Dylan show him how to aim and fire. It was harmless stuff: putting holes in cans with shotguns, or shooting up art projects Kurt had decided to sacrifice.
Kurt also began to hang out a lot with Mikey Nelson to shop at thrift stores. “There was always some record he was hoping to track down,” said Nelson. “One of his favorites had a bunch of truckers talking over the CB radio. He had the Charles Manson record Lie. And he was a huge fan of ‘H. R. Pufnstuf.’ ” Even in late 1990, Kurt was still pushing the merits of the Knack’s Get the Knack. “He told me all the great songs on that record were the ones people hadn’t heard of.”
John Purkey stopped by the apartment that month and helped Kurt shop for Christmas presents. Kurt’s biggest purchase that year was a large custom aqu
arium for his turtles. They smoked marijuana before shopping, but Purkey was surprised when Kurt asked, “Do you know where I can get some heroin?” Purkey replied, “You’re not shooting up are you?” “Oh, no,” Kurt lied. “I’ll just smoke anything.” In many ways, his meager budget helped curb his addictive desires: He simply couldn’t afford to become a drug addict.
On December 11 Kurt again sought medical help for his stomach condition, seeing a doctor in Tacoma. This time the diagnosis was irritable bowel syndrome, and Kurt was prescribed Lidox, a form of clidinium. The drug didn’t seem to help his pain, and he discontinued it two weeks later when he got bronchitis.
The year ended with a New Year’s Eve show in Portland at the Satyricon. Slim traveled down with the band and saw what he remembered as a knockout show, despite the fact that Kurt was drunk on whiskey and Coke, against his doctor’s orders. It was now noticeable that Kurt was attracting groupies. Slim watched one young woman locking eyes on him for the whole show: “Her demeanor said, ‘I’m the girl in the audience who wants to fuck you tonight.’ ” Kurt however, didn’t notice and, like most nights, went home alone.
They began 1991 with the three-hour late-night drive from Portland since they had a studio session scheduled the next day. They finished two songs, “Aneurysm” and a re-recording of “Even in His Youth.” They also worked up several songs Kurt had just written, including an early “All Apologies.” “They had a bunch of ideas they wanted to throw down,” remembered Craig Montgomery, who produced the tracks. “But their gear was in horrible shape, and they were all pretty fried.”
Heavier Than Heaven Page 21