Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Kurt’s friend Jesse Reed returned to the Northwest for the holiday, and the day after the recording session they went to Aberdeen to visit Jesse’s parents. On the drive, Kurt found himself talking about his future with his old friend, and as the car entered Grays Harbor County, he admitted his love for this landscape and the people, contradicting all he said in interviews. As they passed some of the farms outside of Satsop— an idyllic valley, despite an abandoned nuclear plant—Kurt told Jesse his dream was to use his label advance to buy a farm. He saw a large ranch house and pointed to it: “What do you think of that house over there? If I buy that, then we can play as loud as we want, have big parties, have people over, and no one will care.” The house wasn’t for sale, and Kurt had no money yet, but he swore to Jesse that if he ever did hit the big time, he’d come back to the harbor and buy a ranch, “just like Neil Young has in California.”

  Early in 1991 Kurt made a telephone call he’d been putting off for years: He phoned his father. Since moving to Olympia, most of his contact with Don had been through his grandparents.

  The conversation—as was typical of communication between two stoic Cobain men—was short. Kurt mostly talked about the band, telling Don he’d signed a major label deal; Don wasn’t sure what that meant, but when he asked Kurt if he had enough money, his son said yes. Kurt inquired of Don’s other children, and they briefly chatted about Don’s latest job, working as an investigator with the Washington State Patrol. Kurt told his father he’d been performing a lot; Don said he’d enjoy going to see him some time. The conversation lasted only a few minutes and was remarkable more for what the two men didn’t say than what they did. Don wasn’t able to talk about the hurt he felt that his firstborn had drifted away, and Kurt wasn’t able to talk about any of the hurts he felt: not the divorce, the remarriage, or their many other struggles.

  Kurt had stayed in better touch with his mother; her interest in his career, and her acceptance of him as a musician, seemed to increase as his fame did. Kurt and Wendy were drawn closer yet that year when another family tragedy struck on January 2, 1991—Wendy’s brother Patrick died of AIDS in California, at 46. Patrick’s homosexuality had always been a deep secret within the Fradenburg family; he was so good-looking and popular with girls, his parents seemed unable to believe it when he announced he was gay. Even prior to his diagnosis, he had suffered from clinical depression, but when he developed full-blown AIDS, it sent him into an emotional tailspin. His anger at his parents was so great he planned to write a treatise on his lifelong sexual history— which included that he’d been sexually abused by his Uncle Delbert— and send it to the Aberdeen Daily World to embarrass his family. As it was, the family decided to leave the cause of death out of his obituary and to list his domestic partner as “a special friend.” Kurt was invited to the memorial ceremony, but he did not attend, citing his need to work on his upcoming album.

  For once, Kurt wasn’t lying to get out of a family commitment. He was indeed preparing for his album, and as 1991 began he was fastidiously working. Nirvana had rented a new practice space in Tacoma, and every day they rehearsed for hours. Some of their playing was to teach Grohl the songs in their catalog, but much of it was honing new material Kurt was writing. In January, Sub Pop released their last official Nirvana single, a live recording of the Vaselines’ “Molly’s Lips.” In the run-on groove the label had etched a one-word farewell: “Later.”

  In February Kurt turned 24, and for the occasion he sat down and began to write the story of his life, one of dozens of short attempts he undertook over the years. This version ran three pages before petering out. “Hi, I’m 24 years old,” he wrote. “I was born a white, lower-middle-class male off the coast of Washington State. My parents owned a compact stereo component system molded in simulated wood grain and a four-record box set featuring AM radio’s contemporary hits of the early seventies called Good Vibrations by Ronco. It had such hits as Tony Orlando and Dawn’s ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and Jim Croce’s ‘Time in a Bottle.’ After years of my begging, they finally bought me a tin drum set with paper heads out of the back of a Sears catalog. Within the first week, my sister poked holes in the heads with a screwdriver.”

  Kurt’s history went on to note that he remembered his mother playing Chicago songs on the piano and that he’d forever be grateful to his Aunt Mari for giving him three Beatles albums. He wrote that one of his first disappointments was when he found out, in 1976, that the Beatles had dissolved six years earlier. His parents’ divorce seemed to have less of an effect: “My parents got a divorce so I moved in with my dad into a trailer park in an even smaller logging community. My dad’s friends talked him into joining the Columbia Record Club and soon records showed up at my trailer once a week, accumulating quite a large collection.” And with that, this attempt at telling his life story ended. He went back to his favorite journal subject at the time: writing liner notes for the upcoming album. He wrote many different versions—the album ultimately didn’t include any—but one draft of a dedication for the record said more about his childhood than his attempt at biography: “Thanks to unencouraging parents everywhere,” he wrote, “for giving their children the will to show them up.”

  In March Nirvana played a four-date Canadian tour, and then immediately went back into rehearsals. After much debate with their managers and label bosses, they settled on Butch Vig again as producer, using Sound City, a studio outside of Los Angeles. The label would be picking up the expenses, though these would come out of Nirvana’s advance.

  Before they headed for California, the band had one more Seattle show, on April 17, at the O.K. Hotel. Kurt organized it after hearing his friend Mikey Nelson had so many unpaid traffic citations he was in danger of going to jail. The line-up included Bikini Kill and Fitz of Depression, and Kurt insisted all proceeds go to Nelson. The show did not completely sell out, owing to a party for the movie Singles the same night. Nirvana’s set included covers of Devo’s “Turnaround,” the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” and the Wipers’ “D7,” but the surprise came when the band played a new composition. Kurt slurred the vocals, perhaps not even knowing all the words, but the guitar part was already in place, as was the tremendous driving drum beat. “I didn’t know what they were playing,” recalled Susie Tennant, DGC promotion rep, “but I knew it was amazing. I remember jumping up and down and asking everyone next to me, ‘What is this song?’ ”

  Tennant’s words mimicked what Novoselic and Grohl had said just three weeks earlier, when Kurt brought a new riff into rehearsal. “It’s called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ ” Kurt announced to his bandmates, stealing the Kathleen Hanna graffiti. At the time, no one in the band knew of the deodorant, and it wasn’t until the song was recorded and mastered that anyone pointed out it had the name of a product in it. When Kurt first brought the song into the studio, it had a faster beat and less focus on the bridge. “Kurt was playing just the chorus,” Krist remembered. It was Krist’s idea to slow the tune down, and Grohl instinctively added a powerful beat.

  At the O.K. Hotel, Kurt just hummed a couple of the verses. He was changing the lyrics to all his songs during this period, and “Teen Spirit” had about a dozen drafts. One of the first drafts featured the chorus: “A denial and from strangers / A revival and from favors / Here we are now, we’re so famous / We’re so stupid and from Vegas.” Another began with: “Come out and play, make up the rules / Have lots of fun, we know we’ll lose.” Later in the same version was a line that had no rhyming couplet: “The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came.”

  A week later the band headed to Los Angeles. On the drive down, Kurt stopped by Universal Studios, and went on the same rides he’d taken with his grandparents fifteen years before. The group moved into the Oakwood Apartments for the next six weeks, not far from Sound City Studios. Vig visited them during pre-production and found chaos. “There was graffiti on the walls,” he remembered, “and the couches were upside down. They would stay up every night and g
o down to Venice Beach until six in the morning.” The nervousness the band felt about recording was alleviated by drinking, which all three members did to excess. One night, Krist was arrested for driving while intoxicated; John Silva had to scramble to bail him out and get him back in the studio.

  Most of the sessions began at three in the afternoon and ran until midnight. During breaks, Kurt wandered the halls of the studio and stared at gold records for albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes, though he was most impressed by the Evel Knievel record cut there. The lite-metal band Warrant had rented the studio before Nirvana; when the group came back to pick up gear during Nirvana’s session, Kurt grabbed the studio’s paging system and started screaming “Bring me some ‘Cherry Pie,’ ” the title of Warrant’s hit. One night Kurt stole the original master tapes to the Evel Knievel album and took them home to Olympia.

  They spent that first week trying to get basic tracks down, mostly concentrating on the drum sound, which was Vig’s specialty. After two weeks, they’d laid down ten songs, though most had no more than three takes because Kurt’s voice would wear out after so much screaming. Many of the songs were ones they cut previously during the Smart Studio sessions, and it was more technical work than creative.

  Compared to the band’s other sessions, there were few problems. During the recording of “Lithium” Kurt struggled to get his guitar parts right and became progressively more frustrated, eventually smashing his guitar on the studio floor. In the end, Vig decided to use the take recorded during Kurt’s meltdown; it was titled “Endless, Nameless” and put on the compact disc as a hidden track.

  The biggest problem of the session was Kurt’s own procrastination: He still hadn’t settled on lyrics for many of the songs, though a few tunes, like “Polly” and “Breed,” the band had been playing for years. When he did finish a lyric, most were as paradoxical as they were revelatory. Many lines left the listener unclear as to whether he was singing about external or internal circumstances, defying explanation though communicating an emotional tone. In his journals, Kurt wrote a letter to the long-dead critic Lester Bangs, complaining about the state of rock journalism—a profession that both fascinated and repulsed him—by asking, “Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second-rate Freudian evaluation of my lyrics, when 90 percent of the time they’ve transcribed them incorrectly?” Despite the wisdom in Kurt’s question, he spent hours trying to figure out the songs of his idols. He also labored over his own compositions, variably inserting messages or editing himself when he thought he had been too revealing.

  Such was the case with “Something in the Way,” the last song recorded during the sessions. The lyrics recounted Kurt’s mythical period living under the bridge. He had written this song a year earlier, but he had kept it hidden from his bandmates. In his first imagining of the album, Kurt had wanted a “Girl”-side (composed of all the songs about Tobi) and a “Boy”-side (to include “Sliver,” “Sappy,” and “Polly” among others, all the songs about his family or his inner world). He had always planned to end the album with “Something in the Way,” though he never mentioned this to his producer. Instead, he brought forth the song during the Sound City sessions as a last-minute surprise and wrote the lyrics out in the studio, making it appear to all as if he were crafting them on the spot, when he had worked on them for years. Despite his letter to Lester Bangs, no single individual analyzed the Freudian implications of his lyrics more than Kurt himself, and he knew very well that releasing a song implying he lived under a bridge would cause much pain for his family.

  As they finished up the sessions, a friend of Grohl’s visited and offered to bet Kurt he’d be on the cover of Rolling Stone within six months. Kurt replied, “Ah, forget it.” Mikey Nelson and his bandmates from Fitz of Depression also showed up and stayed with Nirvana at the Oakwood, as did the Melvins—during one weekend there were 22 people sleeping in their two-bedroom apartment. The Fitz had run into more bad luck: A club had promised a much-needed show but cancelled at the last minute. “Call him back,” Kurt insisted, “and tell him we’ll play, too.” Two days after finishing their record, Nirvana played a tiny Los Angeles club called Jabberjaw and debuted “On a Plain” and “Come As You Are” in front of an astonished audience. They insisted that all the door money go to Nelson. Kurt described the show in a letter to Tobi as “indescribably fucked-up on booze and drugs, out of tune, and rather, uh, sloppy. It took me over fifteen minutes to change my guitar string while people heckled me and called me drunk. After the show, I ran outside and vomited.” At the club, Kurt noticed Iggy Pop in the audience, and this time Kurt wasn’t wearing an embarrassing shirt. “It was probably the most flattering moment of my life,” he observed.

  Yet the most revealing part of Kurt’s letter was his admission of increasing drug abuse, including Quaaludes, which he’d been ingesting like candy. “I’ve been taking a lot of drugs lately,” he wrote Tobi. “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. I can’t wait to be back home (wherever that is) in bed, neurotic and malnourished and complaining how the weather sucks and it’s the whole reason for my misery. I miss you Bikini Kill. I totally love you.” He signed it “Kurdt.”

  This letter—like so many others he wrote—went unsent, perhaps because of a woman he had run into two weeks before the Jabberjaw show. She would play a far larger role in his life than Betty Ford, Richard Nixon, or Tobi Vail. He remembered her from her small part in Straight to Hell.

  Chapter 14

  BURN AMERICAN FLAGS

  OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON

  MAY 1991–SEPTEMBER 1991

  Maybe we can tour together in the States and burn American flags on stage?

  —From a letter to Eugene Kelly, September 1991.

  Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love first locked eyes on each other at eleven in the evening on Friday, January 12, 1990, and within 30 seconds they were tussling on the floor. The setting was the Satyricon, a small, dimly lit nightclub in Portland, Oregon. Kurt was there for a Nirvana gig; Courtney had come with a friend who was dating a member of the opening band, the wonderfully named Oily Bloodmen. Already an infamous character in Portland, Love was holding court in a booth when she saw Kurt walk by a few minutes before his band was set to appear onstage. Courtney was wearing a red polka-dot dress. “You look like Dave Pirner,” she said to him, meaning the remark to sound like a small insult, but also a flirt. Kurt did look a bit like Pirner, the lead singer of Soul Asylum, as his hair had grown long and tangled—he washed it just once a week, and then only with bar soap. Kurt responded with a flirt of his own: He grabbed Courtney and wrestled her to the ground. “It was in front of the jukebox,” Courtney remembered, “which was playing my favorite song by Living Color. There was beer on the floor.” She was glad her comment had gotten attention, but she hadn’t expected to be pinned to the floor by this little waif of a boy. For his part, Kurt hadn’t counted on his opponent being so tough: She was three inches taller than he was, and stronger. Without his high-school wrestling experience, she might have won the tussle. But the roll on the floor was all in jest, and he pulled her up with his arms and gave her a peace offering—a sticker of Chim Chim, the “Speed Racer” monkey he had made his mascot.

  As Kurt later told the story to Michael Azerrad, he had an immediate attraction to Courtney: “I thought she looked liked Nancy Spungen. She looked liked a classic punk rock chick. I did feel kind of attracted to her. Probably wanted to fuck her that night, but she left.” Kurt’s suggestions were no doubt apocryphal—Tracy was with him in Portland, and despite his enchantment, it would have been unlike him to cheat. But the connection between Kurt and Courtney was sexual: Wrestling was a fetish of Kurt’s, and an opponent as worthy as Courtney was a major turn-on.

  They parted that night but Courtney followed Nirvana’s career the way a baseball pitcher in the American League might follow the exploit
s of a National League player. She read Nirvana’s clips in the rock press, and she put Kurt’s Chim Chim sticker on her guitar case, even though she remained unconvinced about the band—their early material was too metal for her. Like most rock critics at the time, she preferred Mudhoney, and after listening to “Love Buzz” in a record store, she passed on buying the single. Seeing the band in concert later, she was more struck by their strange physical appearance: “Krist was really, really big,” she observed, “and he dwarfed Kurt to the point where you couldn’t see how cute Kurt was because he looked like a tiny boy.”

  Her opinion of Nirvana, and the tiny boy, changed entirely when she bought the “Sliver” single in October 1990. “When I played it,” she recalled, “I was like, ‘Oh, my God—I missed this!’ ” On the B-side was “Dive,” which became her favorite Nirvana song. “It is so sexy, and sexual, and strange, and haunting,” she noted. “I thought it was genius.”

  When Courtney’s friend Jennifer Finch became involved with Dave Grohl in late 1990, Nirvana and Kurt became a frequent topic of their girl talk. They nicknamed Kurt “Pixie Meat,” because of both his diminutive size and Kurt’s worship of the Pixies. Courtney confessed to Grohl that she had a crush on Kurt, and when Dave told her Kurt was suddenly single, Courtney sent Kurt a gift meant to move their wrestling match to a different arena. It was a heart-shaped box filled with a tiny porcelain doll, three dried roses, a miniature teacup, and shellac-covered seashells. She had purchased the silk-and-lace box at Gerald Katz Antiques in New Orleans, and before sending it she rubbed her perfume on it like a magical charm. When the fragrant box arrived in Olympia, it was the best-smelling thing in the Pear Street apartment, though this distinction wasn’t difficult to achieve. Kurt was impressed with the doll; by 1990 dolls were one of the many mediums he used for his art projects. He would repaint their faces and glue human hair onto their heads. The resulting creatures were both beautiful and grotesque, looking as much like child corpses as dolls.