This inability to control the momentum around Nirvana may have been exhilarating for the suits at Geffen, but soon enough the three young men in the eye of the hurricane began to feel like their lives were no longer their own. Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of Nirvana – an autograph, an interview, a photograph, a handshake, an endorsement, an outrageous quote, a punk rock gesture. And Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl were expected to comply with every request, every demand.
For a dispiriting insight into the realities of the major label promotional treadmill, one could do worse than check out footage of Royal Trux – a band formed from the ashes of Pussy Galore, the DC outfit that so terrified Barrett Jones at Laundry Room in the autumn of 1985 – recording idents for ‘alternative’ cable TV rock shows during their brief period as an underground buzz band on Virgin Records in the mid 1990s. As co-vocalists Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema drawl their way through dedications to 101 different programmes – ‘We’re Royal Trux and you’re watching our latest video on Over The Edge … on Outrageous … on Bohemia After Dark … on Notes from the Underground … on Rock ’n’ Roll Circus Show … on Subculture …’ – you can actually see the blood drain from their faces and their will to live slowly ebbing away. Multiply Royal Trux’s promotional commitments by a factor of one hundred and you will have a rough idea of Nirvana’s schedule as their major label début climbed the charts.
In April 1984, shortly after their début album reached number two in the UK charts, The Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr and vocalist Morrissey were cajoled by their record company into appearing on children’s TV show Charlie’s Bus. The programme saw the two punk-inspired musicians travel around London on an open-top bus with a group of kids, who were primed to ask questions of the duo; Morrissey and Marr’s discomfort, and frustration at being talked into this embarrassing promotional chore, is written all over their faces. ‘Where are we going?’ one young lady enquires of the singer at one point. ‘We’re all going mad,’ is Morrissey’s pained, pithy reply. The first indications that the pressures engendered by the unexpected success of Nevermind might be having a similar effect on the mental health of the three musicians behind it came during Nirvana’s winter ’91 European tour.
In the UK, Geffen’s decision to press up only 6,000 copies of Nevermind had ensured that the album barely scraped into the Top 40 after selling out completely in just two days – it actually débuted at number 36, two places lower than the chart début of Mudhoney’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge one month previously – but with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ firmly ensconced in the Top Ten, the buzz around the band was building daily. On 2 December 1991 journalist John Aizlewood from the strait-laced, earnest monthly music mag Q was dispatched to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Nirvana were due to play a sold-out show at the Mayfair club, to file an introductory feature on the band. When Aizlewood introduced himself to Cobain pre-show, the singer ignored the journalist’s outstretched hand and stared at him in silence. Keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the writer, Cobain then climbed onto the table in his dressing room and began calmly and methodically throwing sandwiches from the band’s rider onto the carpet beneath him. He followed this by scattering breakfast cereal atop the sandwiches, before pouring a carton of orange juice onto the mess. The singer then dived off the table top, executed a forward roll through the gunk on the carpet, and stood facing Aizlewood in silence, with sandwich spread, salad leaves and cold meat slices dripping from his clothes and hair. No one in the dressing room spoke a word as Q’s journalist and photographer slunk away in embarrassment. The interview never did take place.
Nirvana did not want for media attention during their time back in the UK, however, thanks largely to a trio of unforgettable TV appearances. On 8 November, on late night youth entertainment show The Word, Cobain prefaced an incendiary version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ with the declaration that Courtney Love, ‘lead singer of the sensational pop group Hole’, was ‘the best fuck in the world’. On 27 November, booked to perform their Top Ten single on British TV institution Top of the Pops, Nirvana gleefully mocked the show’s mimed performance format, with Grohl and Novoselic hamming up their out-of-sync performances and Cobain delivering his live vocals in a deadpan gothic drawl he later claimed was a tribute to Morrissey: ‘Would you mind doing that again?’ the show’s unimpressed producers asked the singer afterwards. ‘No, I’m quite happy with that, thank you …’ Cobain answered. On 6 December, on Channel 4’s Jonathan Ross Show, there was further mischief from the band, as they ditched their agreed performance of ‘Lithium’ in favour of a screeching, feedback-laced blast through ‘Territorial Pissings’. As the trio set about destroying their equipment, the usually quick-witted Ross made a churlish quip about the band’s availability for ‘children’s birthday parties and Bar Mitzvahs’, making himself sound every bit as out-of-touch and uptight as Bill Grundy had appeared in haranguing the Sex Pistols on prime-time British TV 15 years previously. Above the whining feedback in the Channel 4 studio, one could hear the creak of a generation gap yawning.
The band’s European tour ended on 7 December with a show at the TransMusicale Festival in Rennes, France. The set began with Dave Grohl taking lead vocals on an endearingly ramshackle cover of The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ – during which he changed the words to sing ‘It’s only a major label wasteland’ – and ended with the trio trashing every piece of equipment on the stage. Shows in Ireland and Scandinavia were immediately cancelled as the band flew home to Seattle tired, stressed-out and utterly bewildered at their changing fortunes. Their descent into what Grohl would later call ‘a tornado of insanity’ had begun.
‘On that European tour I remember the introduction of anxiety into my life,’ says Grohl. ‘I had this fear of being alone, because I was so surrounded: I was being pushed and pulled to go do interviews, and go do TV and go say hello to these people and those people. We had no idea what it all meant then. I didn’t have my own hotel room, I was sharing with Alex MacLeod, and when I got back home it became really hard to go to sleep at night if I was in a room by myself. I was so used to being surrounded by chaos that silence or solitude kinda flipped me out.
‘But was I comfortable selling 10 million records and buying a house and finally being able to support myself playing music? Absolutely. I never had a problem with that, I have never, ever wished for less.’
‘It was unbelievable,’ Grohl told Rolling Stone in 2001. ‘We went from selling amp heads and Love Buzz singles for food to having millions of dollars. Coming from Springfield, Virginia, I went from having no money at all and working at Tower Records to being set up for the rest of my life. I remember the first time we got a thousand-dollar check. We were so excited. I went out and bought a BB gun and a Nintendo – the things that I always wanted as a kid.’
‘I was fortunate in that band that I wasn’t the focal point, I was practically anonymous so I got to enjoy a lot of the good things without the hassle,’ Grohl told me the following year. ‘I’d go home to Virginia or back to Seattle and hang out with Barrett and watch TV and everything was absolutely normal.
‘I didn’t live an extravagant, decadent lifestyle, but shit, it was great. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t get depressed; I saw the whole thing as a blessing. Being the person that wasn’t in the spotlight I was left alone so I could live a normal life. But I could see how other people would have trouble with it.’
‘One day we were this virtually unknown band who happened to have signed a major label record deal, the next everyone was telling us that we were the best band in the world,’ recalled Chris Novoselic. ‘I mean, how are you supposed to deal with that?’
It might have been prudent for Gold Mountain to pull Nirvana off the road at this point, to give the trio time to adjust to their new reality. But the company had already accepted a $10,000 per show offer for the band to support the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the West Coast leg of the Californian funk-rockers BloodSugarSexMajik arena tour, so on 27 December Cobain, Novoseli
c and Grohl were pushed back onstage once more. Though the reception afforded Nirvana each night bordered on hysteria – ‘I remember getting shivers every night from the whole place going crazy,’ says Barrett Jones, on the tour as Grohl’s drum tech. ‘It was the first time I’d ever seen an entire arena jumping up and down in sync’ – the tour was not one Dave Grohl remembers fondly.
‘That US club tour and the European tour that followed were Nirvana at our best,’ he says. ‘We were fucking smoking then, we were a jamming band at that time, way more so than later on. But the Chili Peppers tour was a strange one. Kurt was not in a good place on that trip, and we wouldn’t see each other pretty much until the house lights went out every night. So that was kinda weird. And being in arenas was definitely like putting on some clothes that didn’t fit yet. To be honest, it didn’t ever really fit. And I always put that down to losing my concert virginity to Naked Raygun in a tiny club. It took me a long time to appreciate the grand gestures required for stadium rock: knowing what it felt like to play the old 9:30 Club or some of the closets we were playing in, and the intensity of a room that small with music that loud, is something that I don’t think you can recreate in a building that holds 20,000 people. I don’t think any of us were entirely comfortable with it.’
The strained atmosphere around the dates was exacerbated by the fact that the opening band on the tour was Stone Gossard’s new band Pearl Jam, a band Cobain was constantly criticising in interviews for having what he perceived as a ‘careerist’ attitude, unacceptable in punk rock circles.
‘That was a little weird,’ admits Gossard. ‘It was like hanging out with your ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend who hates your guts.’
The rivalry between the two bands added an edge to the tour. In San Diego, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder’s hometown, the singer climbed 100 feet above the stage on a lighting rig during his band’s set, as a watching Dave Grohl held his breath in genuine terror: ‘We were playing before Nirvana, you had to do something,’ reasoned Vedder a decade later. ‘Our first record was good, but theirs was better.’ In San Francisco, on NewYear’s Eve, Pearl Jam played the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ during their set, as Vedder told the crowd, ‘Don’t forget, we played it first.’ The Nirvana camp were not amused. But they would have reason to smile soon enough. Later that evening a record industry associate walked onto Pearl Jam’s bus to inform them that Nevermind was destined for the top of the Billboard chart.
On 11 January 1992 Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album from the top of the Billboard 200. Nirvana were now the nation’s favourite, and most bewildered, new pop stars. That same weekend the band were in New York City to perform on Saturday Night Live, America’s highest-rating TV programme, and the show on which Dave Grohl had first stumbled upon the existence of punk rock twelve years previously. It was a weekend no one in the Nirvana camp would ever forget.
On the morning of 11 January, Danny Goldberg received a phone call at home from Courtney Love, asking if he could deliver $5,000 in cash to her at the Omni Hotel in midtown Manhattan, as she and Cobain were of a mind to do some shopping before the SNL taping. Nirvana’s manager dropped off the money in $100 bills later that morning. That afternoon Love and Cobain strolled down to ‘Alphabet City’ on Manhattan’s scuzzy Lower East Side and scored a quantity of China White heroin, returned to their hotel suite and locked the door.
According to Come As You Are, Cobain and Love first did heroin together in Amsterdam during Nirvana’s winter ’91 European tour. Both had dabbled with the drug previously – Cobain started using on a casual basis in Olympia, while Love later claimed to have first shot up at a party at actor Charlie Sheen’s house – but using together helped the couple spin their own little cocoon in which to shelter from an increasingly turbulent outside world. The next time they took drugs together, one week later in London, the pair decided to get engaged. Cobain would later maintain that he used heroin only as a painkiller to cope with debilitating stomach pains, but even his closest drug buddy could see that he was in denial about his habit.
‘He was an oblivion seeker, a fucking lotus eater,’ Courtney stated in 2010. ‘I never wanted that. I was the kind of drug addict that just wanted to be comfortable in my skin. Escapism once in a blue moon, but it wasn’t for me. Kurt would just go on until he dropped.’
As discreet as Cobain initially was about his drug habit, he wasn’t always able to disguise the symptoms associated with heroin use. On 10 January 1992 the Californian music paper Bam ran an interview with the singer, conducted backstage at the Los Angeles Sports Arena two weeks previously, which alluded to the possibility that Cobain was using heroin. Writer Jerry McCulley noted that Cobain was ‘nodding off occasionally in mid-sentence …’ and wrote, ‘He’s had but an hour’s sleep, he says blearily. But the pinned pupils, sunken cheeks and scabbed, sallow skin suggest something more serious than mere fatigue. The haggard visage and frail frame make him appear more like 40 than 24.’
Nirvana’s ‘people’ initially dismissed McCulley’s story as tawdry gossip-mongering, but events in New York City that weekend were less easy to ignore.
In the early hours of 12 January, as Dave Grohl and his mother Virginia bonded with Wendy O’Connor at the Saturday Night Live aftershow party, Courtney Love woke up alone in her bed in the Omni Hotel. She had returned to the suite without her fiancé, as Cobain had a late-night interview scheduled with Kurt St Thomas at another Manhattan hotel, but the singer was now due back. Squinting into the darkness, to her horror Love found her husband-to-be lying face down on the hotel room floor, apparently lifeless. As Love slept, Cobain had returned to the suite, shot up heroin and overdosed. Keeping a remarkably cool head, Love attempted to resuscitate her lover, throwing water over his prone body and repeatedly punching him in the stomach until she heard a gasp of breath. Her actions saved Cobain’s life.
Dave Grohl would not be told about the incident until the band returned home to Seattle.
‘There were a lot of those … incidents that you just found out about later,’ he told me hesitantly in 2009. ‘In a weird way, it just became this thing that nobody knew what to do about. If you’ve ever known someone who’s battled something like that you just know that there’s nothing you can do.’
It was in New York that weekend that Grohl woke up to the fact that his bandmate was a heroin addict. In one of the most powerful, graphic and affecting passages in Come As You Are the drummer recalled walking into the couple’s suite at the Omni to be confronted with the grim reality of heroin use.
‘I remember walking into their hotel room and for the first time really realising that these two are fucked,’ he stated. ‘They were just nodding out in bed, just wasted. It was so disgusting and gross. It doesn’t make me angry at them, it makes me angry that they would be so pathetic as to do something like that. I think it’s pathetic for anyone to do something to make themselves that functionless and a drooling fucking baby. It’s like, “Hey, let’s do a drug that knocks us out and makes us look stupid.” It’s stupid and gross and pathetic for anyone to take it to that point.
‘I don’t know when Kurt started doing it, but evidently he was doing it while we lived together,’ Grohl told me in 2009. ‘But I was oblivious to this. The way life was in the apartment, we would go up to Tacoma and rehearse in the barn until about midnight, then drive back down to Olympia. There was no TV, so we’d either go to a friend’s house to listen to records and smoke, or we’d come back to the apartment and Kurt would go into his room, close the door and write all those journals that have been published. And I would sit on the other side of that door, on my couch, which was also my bed, and play guitar and write songs. There was a four-track in the room so sometimes I’d record, but I’d have to do it really quietly, so as not to wake him up. And I think that’s maybe when he was starting to do some drugs.
‘I joined the band on 23 September 1990, and we left to make Nevermind in April, so it wasn’t until after Neve
rmind that Kurt started getting fucked up. I almost want to say that it was in Europe that it started happening, but I don’t know, I just don’t know, because honestly at that time I had no idea, you could be on heroin right now and I wouldn’t know. Now I know, but then I had no idea.
‘I was a kid. I didn’t know anything about heroin. I barely knew anything about cocaine. My drug career was limited to heavy hallucinogenics and mountains of weed. I never did coke, I never did heroin, I didn’t fucking need speed … But also, in Virginia, none of us had any fucking money to buy drugs anyway. It was like, “How am I gonna get high?” “You got any lighter fluid? Okay, put that on a fucking rag …” That kind of shit. Even if we could have afforded heroin I can’t imagine us affording the fucking needles.
‘So around Saturday Night Live was a bad time. And then Kurt moved down to Los Angeles. And when he moved down here that’s when it got bad …’
Cobain’s overdose in New York meant that Gold Mountain could no longer ignore the fact that their prime asset was using heroin. Goldberg and Silva contacted the William Morris booking agency to tell them to book no further Nirvana shows until they figured out how to deal with the problem, scuppering a proposed US arena run. While they fretted as to how to address the issue, a spate of distracting legal issues surfaced.
The first involved the use of the name ‘Nirvana’ itself. Unbeknown to Cobain, a band called Nirvana already existed. The original Nirvana were a British psychedelic/progressive rock band who recorded for Island Records in the late 1960s; still touring under that name in the early ’90s, the band undeniably had just cause to sue their Seattle namesakes. The case was settled out of court when Gold Mountain agreed to pay the British group $100,000, a settlement which enabled both bands to continue trading under the Nirvana name.
The second case involved a face from Dave Grohl’s past. Shortly after Nirvana signed their record contract with Geffen, Glen E. Friedman got in touch with Gold Mountain to remind them that he still had Grohl under contract as a member of Scream. Friedman claimed that he had put $10,000 of his own money into financing the final Scream demo – essentially the tape that became 1993’s Fumble album – and he wished to reclaim his investment. Gold Mountain initially dismissed Friedman’s claim upon their artist and the dispute raged on for months.
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