This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  On 17 April 1991 Nirvana booked a last-minute afternoon show at the tiny OK Hotel club in Seattle with Bikini Kill and Dave Grohl’s friends Fitz of Depression. Kurt Cobain’s first words to the packed room were ‘Hello, we’re major-label corporate rock sell-outs.’ Behind his kit, Dave Grohl couldn’t help but laugh: the show had been arranged solely for the purpose of raising petrol money for the hard-up band’s imminent trip to Los Angeles to record their new album.

  Forty-five minutes into his band’s set, Cobain introduced a new song. ‘This song,’ he said, ‘is called “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.’

  The song clearly wasn’t quite finished. Cobain sang the same lyric (‘Come out and play, make up the rules …’) at the beginning of each of the three verses and fumbled his way inelegantly through an awkward guitar solo based on the song’s melody line. But the manner in which ‘Teen Spirit’ switched from lilting nursery rhyme verses into its explosive, widescreen choruses sucked the air right out of the room. Before the song’s second chorus had kicked in, crowd surfers were launching themselves at the stage from every corner of the room.

  ‘The audience,’ Dave Grohl recalls succinctly, ‘went nuts. I don’t know if it was the rhythm or the melody but people got caught on it pretty quick.’

  Standing at the back of the club, Sub Pop’s Jonathan Poneman looked on in disbelief at the force of nature his band had become.

  ‘I remember going, “This is a really good song,”’ Poneman told journalist Carrie Borzillo. ‘And it’s just cruising along and it’s like, “Wow, this is a really catchy verse.” And then it comes to the chorus and everyone went, “Oh my God, this is one of the greatest choruses of any song I’ve ever heard in my life!” I remember standing in the back of the room and looking around and there was this feeling of “What is this?”’

  Sub Pop’s publicist Nils Bernstein was also present that afternoon. Interviewed in 2004 for the Classic Albums series, he remembered the gig as a landmark in Nirvana’s career to date, and a thrilling glimpse into their future.

  ‘It was a huge show,’ he noted. ‘I remember seeing it, and it was like, “Okay, now it’s all over, now they’re actually writing huge, amazing songs.”’

  The man tasked with committing those ‘huge, amazing’ songs to tape, much to his own surprise, was Butch Vig. The producer was finishing up work on Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish album in Madison when he received a call from Cobain asking if he was free to produce Nirvana’s new album. As Cobain had crossed out every name on his shortlist of potential ‘name’ producers, his call to Vig was less a request than a demand: Geffen had already booked a studio – Sound City, in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, an area better known for churning out pornographic movies – and the band was due to begin tracking in just five days. After accepting the commission, Vig asked to hear the band’s most recent material, and Cobain duly sent over a boombox recording Nirvana had made during one of their rehearsal sessions in a Tacoma barn.

  ‘It sounded terrible because it was just completely distorted,’ Vig recalls. ‘But in the middle of all the white noise I could hear the “Hello hello hello” part of “Teen Spirit” and I could hear “Come As You Are” and it sounded great. After the first song I remember Kurt yelling into the boombox, “We have a new drummer, he’s the best fucking drummer in the world!” and then there was a cymbal crash. I laughed … but as it turned out, he was right.’

  In the final week of April, Grohl and Cobain left Olympia for the eighteen-hour drive down the I-5 highway to Los Angeles in Cobain’s Datsun B210; Chris and Shelli went ahead of them in their Volkswagen van. Within twenty minutes Grohl and Cobain were forced to pull over as the Datsun’s engine was overheating. Ten minutes later they were on the side of the highway again, refilling the radiator. This process was repeated approximately every fifteen minutes. After five hours on the road, the pair had made it only as far as Oregon: ‘It was like a nightmare where you’re running but getting further away,’ Grohl recalled. After calling Novoselic from a payphone, they made the decision to go back to Tacoma to get their Dodge van from outside the bassist’s home. The journey back took just as long.

  ‘We were so pissed off we pulled into a quarry and stoned the fucking car for half an hour,’ Grohl recalled in his interview segment for the Classic Albums series. ‘We busted out the windows … left it in front of Chris’s house and then got the van and drove down.’

  The band were booked into the Oakwood apartments, near Sound City, for the duration of their stay in Los Angeles: ‘We called it “The Cokewoods”,’ recalls Vig, ‘because it’s where all the wannabe actors and rock bands stayed.’ Fellow residents included the Swedish rock band Europe – in LA to record their Prisoners in Paradise album – and much amusement was had by Nirvana in the days ahead as they sat drinking cheap beer by the complex’s pool, watching the big-haired, Speedos-clad Swedes frolicking with actresses in barely-there bikinis. But there was work to be done too. Before decamping to Sound City Vig booked the band into a rehearsal space in North Hollywood so he could hear the new songs properly and work on honing arrangements. The first song Nirvana chose to air for the producer was ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.

  ‘I remember pacing around the room going, “Holy shit, this sounds so fucking good.”’ recalls Vig. ‘I said, “Wow, that sounded great, can you play it again?” Dave didn’t have any mics on his kit, and Kurt and Chris had their amps at stun volume, but it just still sounded perfect. I called their manager and said, “I think we only need like two or three days of rehearsal, I don’t want to burn them out.” It was one of those things where you get out of the way, don’t overthink it, go in and record now.

  ‘That was the first chance I had to meet Dave. Chris had told me his name but I didn’t know who he was or who Scream were; I didn’t meet him until the day I flew into LA. But he just took those songs completely over the top. He was rock solid time-wise and he just hit the drums like a motherfucker. He’s the best rock drummer I know, hands down. He really locked Chris and Kurt together; those songs are really powerful and a lot of that has to do with his drumming because he’s just on it.’

  Nirvana began recording at Sound City on 2 May 1991. The studio had a rich history: Fleetwood Mac had recorded tracks for their 1977 album Rumours there, and gold and platinum discs from the Jackson 5, Dio, Cheap Trick, Foreigner and legendary stunt king Evel Knievel lined its walls. It had a big live room, a vintage Neve mixing desk and its rates, by Hollywood standards, were cheap: the band were charged $500 a day from the album’s allocated $65,000 budget.

  Grohl opted to rent a drum kit for the recording session. On 2 May he hired a Tama Artstar II kit with a 16 by 24 inch bass drum, a 12 by 15 inch rack tom and a 16 by 18 floor tom from Drum Doctors on Sherman Way in North Hollywood. He also snapped up a brass Black Beauty snare drum, the heaviest snare drum in the shop, nicknamed ‘The Terminator’. Metallica’s Lars Ulrich had used a Black Beauty on Master of Puppets and Def Leppard’s Rick Allen had used one on Pyromania: for Grohl, this was very much a luxury item.

  Kurt Cobain’s sole instruction to Butch Vig as the band began the session was crystal clear: ‘I want to sound heavy,’ he told the producer. The band would warm up for takes by hammering through versions of Zeppelin and Aerosmith standards; Grohl hit the drums so hard that he had to change the skins every other song. But the recording process was largely quick and painless. Vig would arrive at Sound City around lunchtime, and the band would bowl in around three in the afternoon; recording bass and drums first, they’d nail the basic tracks for two or three songs per day, and exit the studio around 11 p.m., leaving Vig to patch up the occasional bum note. Cobain was initially reluctant to lay down more than one guitar track or vocal per song – as with his very first recording session at his aunt Mari’s house he was keen to keep things ‘pure’ – but Vig cajoled him into doubling up on parts by pointing out that John Lennon double-tracked his parts on The Beatles’ albums.

  ‘It was really fun making that record
,’ the producer says. ‘There was no pressure. They’d just got an advance, so they finally had some money to go out and buy some records or buy another guitar … and they liked to party. Sometimes after the session they’d go out to Venice Beach in Santa Monica and take mushrooms or sit up and drink beer and listen to Beatles records and watch the sun come up. They were having fun, man. I could still see that Kurt would slip into these manic depressive moments where he would just sit in the corner and shut down for a while, and that happened at least once a day at some point: he would fall into this black hole and eventually he’d pull himself out. Sometimes he’d be recording and he’d just put his guitar down and leave and walk into the other room, and then an hour and a half later he’d walk back in and go, “Okay, cool, let’s play,” and they’d start playing again. So I had to sorta deal with those mood swings, but for the most part they were having a gas. Dave was very funny, he cracked up all the time.’

  Recording at Sound City gave Grohl a new perspective on Los Angeles. He bought his first motorbike from a guy called Jeff for $800, and rode it around the Hollywood Hills at night, taking in the beauty of the city and dreaming of being in a successful band. Being back in LA also gave him the opportunity to reconnect with the Stahl brothers. Pete Stahl dropped by Sound City one afternoon and was blown away by the rough mixes he heard. Franz Stahl meanwhile assisted the band in their pursuit of ‘fun’: in an unsent letter in his journals Cobain wrote of scoring drugs at the Tropicana with Grohl and Stahl and almost stumbling upon a confrontation between the LAPD and local gangbangers. ‘I don’t remember that incident,’ Stahl laughed when I mentioned it to him in 2010. ‘I remember other incidents at the French Cottage in Hollywood, which was a real crack hotel. Had I been with Kurt at the Tropicana scoring drugs I was obviously very drunk and high …’

  On the afternoon of 18 May, Vig found himself sitting alone at Sound City. When he called John Silva to enquire about the whereabouts of his band, he was informed that Novoselic had just been released from jail. The previous evening the producer had called time on the session early so that he and the band could attend a Butthole Surfers/Red Kross/L7 show at the Hollywood Palladium. Novoselic, who had celebrated his 26th birthday the previous evening, had driven the band to the show in his Volkswagen van, chugging from a bottle of Jack Daniels as he drove. After losing his friends at the show, Vig took a taxi back to his hotel; the Nirvana boys were not so smart. At around 2 a.m. that morning the LAPD pulled Novoselic’s van over as he attempted to drive back over Laurel Canyon; the bassist was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and taken to jail. High on mushrooms, drunk and disorientated, Grohl and Cobain were left to walk seven miles back to their apartment. ‘They were pretty wasted that night,’ Vig recalls. ‘Thank God nobody was hurt.’

  The night was significant for another reason: it was the first real opportunity Kurt Cobain had to hang out with his new crush, Courtney Love, the 26-year-old lead singer and guitarist of LA-based alternative rock band Hole. Love, born Courtney Michelle Harrison, was best friends with Dave Grohl’s girlfriend Jennifer Finch – the two had played together in a band called Sugar Baby Doll in the mid ’80s – and a rising star on the indie rock scene: Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon had just recently finished recording the band’s ferocious début album Pretty on the Inside. Love and Cobain had met before, when Nirvana played Portland’s Satyricon club in January 1990, and there was a mutual attraction between the pair. Upon spotting Cobain at the Hollywood Palladium, Love punched him in the stomach and wrestled him to the floor, a primitive, but strangely effective, courtship ritual. Cobain, high on mushrooms and self-medicating with cough syrup, stayed under her spell for the remainder of the night.

  Courtney Love was not an easy woman to ignore. Loud-mouthed, confrontational, sharp and sassy, the 26-year-old singer was, quite simply, a force of nature. Like Cobain, Love was the product of a broken home and an itinerant childhood. The daughter of former Grateful Dead tour manager Hank Harrison and therapist Linda Carroll, Love had bounced around between Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon and New Zealand in her early childhood, finally settling down with a friend of her mother’s in Eugene, Oregon. There she fell in with a crowd of tough teenage girls and cultivated a reputation as a troublemaker, a reputation she has yet to shed.

  ‘I found my inner bitch and ran with her,’ she cheerfully informed Spin magazine in 1995.

  Love and her ‘inner bitch’ clocked up some serious air miles. She worked as a stripper in Japan, studied at Dublin’s prestigious Trinity College, hung out with Julian Cope and Echo and the Bunnymen in Liverpool, fronted an early version of Faith No More in San Francisco (‘She caused a whirlwind of shit,’ bassist Bill Gould once told me approvingly. ‘She was a magnet for chaos’) and landed a bit part in British film director Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy in New York, all before her 22nd birthday. In 1989 she wound up back in Los Angeles on a mission to put together a band influenced by Sonic Youth, Big Black and Fleetwood Mac; as Nirvana were extricating themselves from their Sub Pop contract the label were making plans to release Hole’s second single, the typically abrasive Dicknail. After hanging out with Love at the Palladium, Cobain began telling his friends that he had just met the coolest girl in the world. Five months would pass before the pair crossed paths again; from that day forth, their lives would be forever intertwined.

  By the beginning of June, Nirvana’s album, now titled Nevermind, was in the can. The recording budget had doubled from Geffen’s original $65,000 estimate to over $120,000, but in everyone’s opinion this was money well spent. As Geffen executives began to appear in the studio to hear Butch Vig’s rough mixes of the album, word was already spreading around Los Angeles that Nirvana had created a monster. Grohl’s old friend Barrett Jones was among those who heard early mixes of the record: he left Sound City ‘blown away’ by what he had heard.

  ‘I remember getting chills just listening to playbacks in the studio,’ he says. ‘I thought it sounded so good. I told Kurt in the studio that they’d be on the cover of Rolling Stone before the year was out … and I was right.’

  ‘John Silva and I went to the studio to hear it when the mixing was finished at Scream in the Valley,’ says Mark Kates. ‘And it sounded like a really great, powerful, complete album. You’re never going to get any of us to say that we could foresee what was going to happen – anyone who says that would not be telling the truth – but we felt they had accomplished the absolute maximum of what could have been expected from them.’

  ‘As we were mixing the album, Chris and Kurt and I would take a tape of the songs and just drive around the Hollywood Hills listening to it,’ Grohl recalled a decade on. ‘That was something else. Like when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” first came through the speakers: the only demos we’d done of that song were on a boombox – we were used to hearing it sound like a shitty bootleg … all of a sudden you have Butch Vig making it sound like Led Zeppelin IV.’

  Amid all the positivity surrounding the recording there was but one dissenting voice. Somewhat awkwardly for Dave Grohl, that voice belonged to his girlfriend.

  ‘When I was in the studio hearing how those songs were represented I didn’t like it,’ admits Jennifer Finch. ‘I thought the songs had got very watered down and very commercial. Dave and Kurt and I went to the first Lollapolooza festival together and we listened to the first version of the album together, Butch’s mix of the record, and I was like, “Wow!” I don’t think I said anything negative, but I was like, “Wow, this is really, really different,” with that weird smile on my face. It’s hard when you’re dating somebody, you don’t wanna be “the girlfriend that has the opinion”, you know? But I wasn’t a big fan of it at all, and I couldn’t totally hide that. I thought that maybe they’d gone too commercial too quickly.’

  ‘But, of course, at that point we didn’t think anything was going to happen with the record,’ says Grohl. ‘It was like releasing a Jesus Lizard record or something. I thought “Teen Spirit” was an
other good song, and it might get on 120 Minutes and allow us to tour with Sonic Youth or maybe headline Brixton Academy, but no one thought it was a hit single because a hit single was just unimaginable. There was no world domination ambition. Because that just couldn’t happen. That wasn’t allowed to happen.’

  Smells like teen spirit

  The promoter said, ‘That guy is gonna come back with his friends and he’s going to fucking kill you, so stay in here, and when I give you the secret knock, I’m gonna get you the fuck outta here and into a cab.’ So we run outside: Kurt gets into the cab, Chris gets into the cab … and here comes the guy with all his friends so the cab pulls off …

  Dave Grohl

  Dave Grohl stands on the stage of Boston’s Venus de Milo nightclub, choking back laughter as he watches Kurt Cobain smear thick white lard onto his best friend’s bare ass. Standing on a plastic Twister mat, Chris Novoselic tugs his tiny black briefs back up over his skinny hips, and attempts to regain his dignity, or as much dignity as a six foot seven inch man wearing only his pants, a pair of white tube socks, half a tub of unctuous vegetable oil fat and a broad smile can hope to muster. Waiting to interview Nirvana for their first ever TV appearance, the nice lady from MTV isn’t quite sure where to look.

  ‘So what’s going on here?’ she asks breezily, as Novoselic begins massaging the Crisco vegetable fat into his nipples. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’re playing Crisco Twister,’ says Nirvana’s bassist, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if this were standard practice for new bands being interviewed on MTV.