Their set featured more covers than Nirvana songs. They played Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun,” Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” plus Duran Duran’s “Rio.” For a cover of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Kurt changed the lyrics to “We will fuck you.” Thirty minutes into the set, Krist threw his bass at Kurt and stormed off. “It was this comedy of errors,” remembered guitar tech Earnie Bailey. “Everyone started throwing fruit at them, in this classic vaudeville gesture. We were wondering if we were going to get out of there without getting the van overturned.” Eventually, Krist was located and shoved back onstage by the crew—if the band didn’t play 45 minutes, they would not fulfill their contract, which would mean no paycheck. As it was, even the huge check didn’t cover the costs of the equipment the band destroyed. Krist later described the show as a “mental breakdown,” while a Brazilian magazine was less kind: “They were not the real Nirvana at all; instead it was only a depressing Cobain making noise with his guitar.”
Kurt was depressed and had become suicidal that week. The band had a week before their next show in Rio, and the original plan was to work on the upcoming album. But when they checked into their high-rise hotel in Rio, Kurt, after an argument with Courtney, threatened to leap to his death. “I thought he was going to jump out a window,” remembered Jeff Mason. Finally Mason and Alex MacLeod took him to find another hotel. “We checked into hotel after hotel, but couldn’t stay because we’d walk into a room and there would be a balcony, and he would be ready to jump,” Mason explained. Finally MacLeod found a first-floor room, not an easy task in Rio. While the rest of the band slept in a luxury high-rise, Kurt stayed in a single-story fleabag.
Much of Kurt’s despondency came from drug withdrawal. On tour, with the watchful eyes of the band and crew upon him, he was unable to escape and score, at least without feeling shame. Even when he could slip away from the heightened surveillance, one of his greatest fears in life was that he’d be arrested buying drugs, and it would end up in the papers. It was one thing for rock critics to speculate that he was messed up—he could always deny that or do what he usually did, which was admit in interviews he’d used drugs in the past. But if he were busted, no denial he could fabricate would diminish an arrest. To lessen his heroin craving, he would use whatever intoxicants he could find—pills or booze—but this was a far less reliable formula.
A night in a ground-floor hotel seemed to help, and Kurt showed up at the studio the next day refreshed, wanting to work. Kurt played the first-ever version of “Heart-Shaped Box,” a song that was the result of a collaboration with Courtney. Despite Kurt’s mood earlier in the trip, once he began recording he came out of his melancholia. “There were some moments that were positive musically,” Mason observed. During breaks between Nirvana songs, Courtney and Hole’s new drummer, Patti Schemel, worked on some of Love’s songs.
Their Brazil trip ended with another huge concert, on January 23, in Rio’s Apoetose Stadium. This show was more professional than São Paolo, and they debuted “Heart-Shaped Box” and “Scentless. Apprentice,” which in this form stretched on for seventeen minutes. When they flew home the next day, Kurt and the other band members were once again upbeat about the upcoming sessions for their new album.
Chapter 20
HEART-SHAPED COFFIN
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
JANUARY 1993–AUGUST 1993
I am buried in a heart-shaped coffin for weeks.
—An early version of “Heart-Shaped Box.”
The line “I hate myself and I want to die” had been kicking around Kurt Cobain’s verbal and written repertoire for some time. Like many of his lyrics, or the quips he threw off in interviews, before it appeared publicly it had been auditioned dozens of times in his journal. The line first appeared in his writing around the middle of 1992 in a list of rhyming couplets, and though he didn’t come up with a rhyme to pair it with, like a scientist who had stumbled onto a breakthrough formula, he circled it. By mid-1992, he was fixated on the phrase, telling interviewers and friends it was to be the title of his next record. At best it was gallows humor.
What wasn’t a joke were the expressions of self-hate that continually cropped up in Kurt’s journals, including a poem that sounded similar to his childhood graffiti: “I hate you. I hate them. But I hate myself most of all.” In another Jack Kerouac–styled sentence from this period, he wrote of his stomach pain as if it were a curse: “I’ve violently vomited to the point of my stomach literally turning itself inside out to show you the fine hair-like nerves I’ve kept and raised as my children, garnishing and marinating each one, as if God had fucked me and planted these precious little eggs, and I parade around them in a peacock victory and maternal pride like a whore relieved from the duties of repeated rape and torture, promoted to a more dignified job of just plain old every day, good old, wholesome prostitution.” The remark “As if God had fucked me” came up often, and it was conjured without humor—it was Kurt’s own explanation for his physical and emotional struggles.
It was only after Krist convinced Kurt that Nirvana might be opening themselves up to lawsuits with the title “I Hate Myself and Want to Die” that Kurt considered anything else. He switched titles, first to “Verse, Chorus, Verse,” and then finally to “In Utero,” which was from a poem of Courtney’s.
Many of the songs Kurt had written in 1992 were affected by his marriage. “We feed off each other,” he wrote in “Milk It,” a line that summed up their creative and emotional union. As is common in the marriage of two artists, they began to think alike, share ideas, and use each other as editor. They also shared a journal: Kurt would write a single line, to which Courtney would add a couplet. He read her writings, and she read his, and each was influenced by the other’s musings. Courtney was a more traditional lyricist, crafting tighter and less murky lines, and her sensibility greatly shaped “Heart-Shaped Box” and “Pennyroyal Tea,” among others. She made Kurt a more careful writer, and it is not by accident that these stand as two of Nirvana’s most accomplished works: They were crafted with more intent than Kurt had spent on the entire Nevermind album.
But Courtney’s biggest role in Kurt’s new songs was as a character— just as Nevermind was mostly about Tobi, so In Utero would be shaped by Don, Courtney, and Frances. “Heart-Shaped Box,” of course, referenced Courtney’s initial gift of the silk-and-lace box, but the song’s line “forever in debt to your priceless advice” came from a note he sent her. “I am eternally grateful for your priceless opinions and advice,” he wrote, sounding more sincere in the writing than he did singing the line. The album was his gift to her—he was returning her a “Heart-Shaped Box,” though doing it in a musical form. It was not a Hallmark valentine though: “Heart-Shaped Box” evolved through several drafts, and Kurt had originally titled it “Heart-Shaped Coffin,” including the line “I am buried in a heart-shaped coffin for weeks.” Courtney advised him that was a bit dark. Yet theirs was a relationship where each urged the other to push boundaries, and the artistic risk of these new songs was a matter of pride to her as well as to him.
Prior to entering the studio, Kurt had a list of eighteen songs he was considering; twelve from the list would ultimately end up on the finished album, but with their titles shifted considerably. The song that eventually was called “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” started life as “Nine Month Media Blackout,” Kurt’s not-so-veiled response to the Vanity Fair piece. “All Apologies” was originally titled “La, La, La...La” while “Moist Vagina,” a B-side, began with a far longer and more descriptive name: “Moist vagina, and then she blew him like he’s never been blown, brains stuck all over the wall.”
The band flew to Minnesota on Valentine’s Day to begin the album. Seeking a sparse and raw sound, they had hired Steve Albini to produce—Kurt intended to move as far away as he could from Nevermind. Albini had been in the influential punk band Big Black, and back in 1987 Kurt had traveled to a Seattle
steam plant to witness Big Black’s last performance. As a teenager, Kurt had idolized Albini, though as an adult it was at best a working relationship. Albini got along well with the rest of the band, but later described Courtney as a “psycho hose-beast.” She countered that the only way he would think her attractive would be “if I was from the East Coast, played the cello, had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage, and never said a word.”
Gold Mountain had picked Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, thinking the rural climes would minimize distractions. They did: By the sixth day of the session—February 20, Kurt’s 26th birth-day—the band had finished all basic tracks. When they weren’t working, they made crank phone calls to Eddie Vedder and traveled to Minneapolis, an hour away. There Kurt searched the Mall of America for plastic anatomical models of The Visible Man, his latest collecting obsession. When the record was finished, only twelve days after they began, the band celebrated by setting their pants on fire. “We were listening to the final mixes,” explained Pat Whalen, a friend who stopped by. “Everyone poured solvent on their pants, lit them, and then passed the flame from one pant leg to another, and from one person to the next.” They were wearing their pants when they did this; to avoid burns they had to douse each other with beer the instant the flames shot up their legs.
The finished album had been recorded in half the time of Nevermind. “Things were on the upswing,” Krist recalled. “We left all the personal stuff outside the door. And it was a triumph—it’s my favorite Nirvana record.” Novoselic’s viewpoint was shared by many critics, and by Kurt, who thought it his strongest effort. At first, Kurt saw “Pennyroyal Tea” as the first single: It combined a Beatles-like riff with the slow/fast pacing Nirvana perfected. The title referred to an herbal abortion remedy. Though Courtney’s lyrics had shaped the tune, it ended with a nonfictional description of Kurt’s stomach: “I’m on warm milk and laxatives, cherry-flavored antacids.”
In Utero also had a number of up-tempo rockers, but even these had lyrical depth. “Very Ape” and “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” had the kind of crunchy riffs played during a three-second break in a basketball game, yet featured lyrics convoluted enough to inspire term papers and Internet debates. “Milk It” was a punk rock burner the band had pulled off in one take, yet Kurt spent days fine-tuning the lyrics. “Her milk is my shit / My shit is her milk,” was his twisted way of connecting himself to his wife. The song also hinted at his rehab (“your scent is still here in my place of recovery”), plus he reprised a line that he’d been kicking around in various songs since high school: “Look, on the bright side is suicide.” In his unused liner notes for “Dumb” he described his descent to drug addiction: “All that pot. All that supposedly, unaddictive, harmless, safe reefer that damaged my nerves, and ruined my memory, and made me feel like wanting to blow up the prom. It just wasn’t ever strong enough, so I climbed the ladder to the poppy.”
But no song on the album ranked with “Heart-Shaped Box.” “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black,” Kurt sang in what has to be the most convoluted route any songwriter undertook in pop history to say “I love you.” With the line, “Throw down your umbilical noose, so I can climb right back,” Kurt ended his most transcendent song with a plea that could be to Courtney, to his mother, from his daughter, from himself, or perhaps most likely, to his God. His own explanation in his unpublished liner notes fell completely apart (he crossed most of it out) but touched on The Wizard of Oz, “I Claudius,” Leonardo da Vinci, male seahorses (who carry their young), racism in the Old West, and Camille Paglia. Like all great art, “Heart-Shaped Box” escaped any easy categorization and offered many interpretations to the listener, as apparently it did to its author.
What “Heart-Shaped Box” meant to Kurt is best surmised by the treatment he wrote for the song’s video. Kurt envisioned it starring William S. Burroughs, and he wrote Burroughs begging him to appear in the video. “I realize that stories in the press regarding my drug use may make you think that this request comes from a desire to parallel our lives,” he wrote. “Let me assure you, this is not the case.” But exactly what Kurt hoped to achieve by casting the writer was never clear: In his attempt to convince Burroughs to participate, he had offered to obscure the writer’s face, so that no one other than Kurt would know of his cameo. Burroughs declined the invitation.
Both the In Utero album and “Heart-Shaped Box” video were obsessed with images of birth, death, sexuality, disease, and addiction. There were several versions of the video made, and a battle over who originated the ideas eventually caused Kurt to split with video director Kevin Kerslake, who promptly sued Kurt and Nirvana; Anton Corbijn completed the final cut, which included shots of Kurt’s growing collection of dolls. The released video centered around a junkie-looking elderly Jesus dressed as the Pope, wearing a Santa hat while being crucified in a field of poppies. A fetus hangs from a tree, and reappears crammed inside an IV bottle being fed into Jesus, who has moved to a hospital room. Krist, Dave, and Kurt are shown in a hospital room waiting for Jesus to recover. A giant heart with a crossword puzzle inside it appears, as does the Aryan girl, whose white KKK hat turns to black. And throughout these images, Kurt’s face continues to charge the camera. It is an absolutely striking video, and all the more remarkable because Kurt privately told his friends that many of these images were from his dreams.
The first week of March, Kurt and Courtney moved into a $2,000-a-month house at 11301 Lakeside Avenue NE in Seattle. It was a modern three-story home, just up from Lake Washington, with views of Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains. It was also gigantic, and at over 6,000 square feet of living space, it was bigger than all of Kurt’s previous homes combined. Yet the Cobains quickly filled the house—an entire room became Kurt’s painting space, there were quarters for guests and nannies, and Kurt’s MTV awards decorated the second-floor bathroom. In the two-car garage, next to Kurt’s Valiant, they now had a gray 1986 Volvo 240DL, which Kurt proudly told his friends was the safest family car ever made.
Soon after the move, Kurt and Courtney’s ongoing case with the Department of Children’s Services finally came to an end. Though the Cobains had initially followed the court’s decrees, they still feared Frances would be taken from them. Moving to Seattle was a strategic chess-move in the battle—Courtney knew Interstate Compact law would prevent the Los Angeles judge from having control over them in Seattle. An L.A. social worker named Mary Brown flew to Seattle in early March to observe Frances in her new home. When she recommended the county drop the case, her decision was eventually accepted. “Kurt was ecstatic,” lawyer Neal Hersh recalled. On March 25, just a week after Frances’s seven-month birthday, Frances was legally returned to her parents’ unsupervised care. Their daughter’s return came with a price: They had spent over $240,000 on legal fees.
Frances had remained with her parents throughout the entire investigation, though Jamie or Jackie had been on-site to satisfy the court. Jackie had been a life-saver as a nanny, but by early 1993 she was exhausted. She had only been given a handful of days off during her tenure, though in the new home she had managed to institute stricter parameters on her duty: She insisted that when Frances woke during the night her parents care for her until 7 a.m. But Farry now had to handle many record company calls that Kurt wanted to avoid: “People would call and say, ‘Can you have Kurt call me back?’ And I’d say, ‘I’ll tell him,’ but I knew he wasn’t going to call them back. He just didn’t want to deal with what was being forced upon him in his life. He just wanted to hang out with Courtney and not deal with the world.” Farry announced she was leaving in April.
Jackie interviewed numerous professional nannies as potential replacements, but it was clear that most couldn’t fit with the drama of the Cobain home. “They’d ask, ‘When is feeding time?’ ” Farry said. “I’d have to tell them that things didn’t work exactly like that around their house.” Eventually Courtney decided to
hire Michael “Cali” DeWitt, a twenty-year-old former Hole roadie, as the new nanny. Despite his youth, Cali was an excellent caretaker for Frances, who bonded with him immediately. The Cobains additionally employed Ingrid Bernstein, the mother of their friend Nils Bernstein, on a part-time basis.
April 1993 was a busy month for both Hole and Nirvana. Hole released “Beautiful Son,” a song Courtney wrote about Kurt, and used a childhood picture on the sleeve. Nirvana, meanwhile, traveled to San Francisco’s Cow Palace to play a benefit for Bosnian rape victims, an issue of concern to Novoselic, due to his ethnic heritage. It was Nirvana’s first show in the U.S. in six months, and they used it to showcase their upcoming album, playing eight of the twelve songs on In Utero, many for the first time in concert. Kurt decided to switch from his usual position, stage left, to stage right—it was as if he was attempting to re-craft the band’s show. It worked, and hardcore fans cited this as one of the band’s best live performances.
Though In Utero had been recorded, it was still waiting for release, and a dispute in April over its production overshadowed everything else the band did that spring. The band had solicited Albini because they wanted a rawer sound, but they found his final mixes too stark. News of this got back to the producer, who in April told the Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot, “Geffen and Nirvana’s management hate the record....I have no faith it will be released.” Kurt responded with his own press release: “There has been no pressure from our record label to change the tracks.” But the controversy continued, and Kurt had DGC take out a full-page ad in Billboard denying allegations the label had rejected the album. Despite the denials, most at the label did think the production too raw, and in May, Scott Litt was hired to make “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies” more radio friendly. Once again, when challenged by a problem that might affect the success of his record, Kurt acquiesced to the path of least resistance and greatest sales.
Heavier Than Heaven Page 33