This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  Around the same time Melody Maker’s Everett True wrote a more sympathetic account of the state of the Nirvana nation. The final section of his article was given over to Dave Grohl, who seemed to have retained an excellent sense of perspective amid what he would later term as the ‘tornado of insanity’ enveloping the band.

  ‘Any musician would be lying if they said that they didn’t want people to appreciate their music,’ he stated carefully. ‘But something on this scale is just too perverse and too bizarre to accept sometimes, especially for us. We definitely aren’t the ones who wanted this. I just don’t want this fiasco to ruin my life.’

  In the weeks leading up to the Reading festival, Anton Brookes was forced time and again to deny that Kurt Cobain’s ill-health would compel Nirvana to withdraw from the bill. One of Brookes’s Bad Moon press releases testily concluded with the words ‘Nirvana are playing fucking Reading.’ But in truth no one really knew whether or not the gig would happen: not Brookes, not John Silva, not Dave Grohl, and quite possibly not Kurt Cobain himself.

  In the first week of August Cobain and Courtney Love checked into the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in LA; Love to prepare for the imminent arrival of the couple’s first child, her husband to receive treatment for narcotics addiction. At 7:48 a.m. on 18 August Love gave birth to a baby girl, weighing in at 7 pounds and 1 ounce; the couple named her Frances Bean, after Frances McKee of The Vaselines. But even on this happy occasion there were dark clouds overhead. In a 1995 interview with Spin magazine’s Craig Marks, Love claimed that Cobain summoned a drug dealer to the hospital that same day, and had the dealer inject drugs into his morphine drip, after which he OD’d: ‘He like totally died,’ she said. In an interview with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in 1994 Love also claimed that her husband brought a gun to the hospital on 19 August, and the couple weighed up the pros and cons of a suicide pact. Clearly these were troubled times.

  On Friday 28 August Dave Grohl and Chris Novoselic showed up at the Richfield Avenue site to check out John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, and noisy New Yorkers Cop Shoot Cop and The Lunachicks; of Kurt Cobain there was no sign. On the Saturday night, 29 August, the band had a fraught, uncomfortable rehearsal in London, and it slowly dawned on Grohl that this might be the end of the line.

  ‘We rehearsed once, the night before, and it wasn’t good,’ he recalled. ‘I really thought, “This will be a disaster, this will be the end of our career for sure.”’

  Reading 1992 was to be more than just a gig for Nirvana. Not only was it the biggest payday of their career – the trio commanding a $250,000 appearance fee as the final band on the final night of the festival’s 20th anniversary staging – but the entire main stage bill on Sunday 30 August had been built around them, a measure of just how much power and respect they commanded at the time.

  ‘It was just all our friends!’ Grohl recollected. ‘Who’s on first? The Melvins. Who else played that day? L7. Screaming Trees. Teenage Fanclub. Mudhoney. And [Abba tribute band] Bjorn Again playing “Teen Spirit” at 3 in the afternoon? That was fucking awesome …’

  This was not just a gig. This was to be a coronation.

  ‘But we were wracked with nerves,’ Grohl remembered. ‘Before the gig everyone was saying, “Will they make it? Are they in rehab? Are they dead?”

  ‘The hype about us cancelling was so huge that even our friends in other bands were surprised when we turned up. It was a bad time for the band and then we had to step up in front of 40,000 people. And luckily something special happened. We expected it to be the biggest disaster of the year, but it turned out to be one of the greatest things in my life.’

  Just after nine o’clock that evening, as darkness descended on the royal county of Berkshire, Everett True, the journalist who had first propelled Nirvana into the spotlight, pushed a wheelchair carrying a hunched figure in a white hospital gown and blond wig into the middle of the broad festival stage.

  ‘You’re going to make it, man,’ said Chris Novoselic, stooping down for a handshake.

  ‘With the support of his friends and family, he’s going to make it,’ the bassist told the crowd.

  Clinging onto the microphone stand for support, Kurt Cobain pulled himself out of the wheelchair with exaggerated effort and stood before 40,000 expectant faces.

  ‘Some say love it is a river …’ he sang weakly, then toppled backwards onto the stage.

  As cheers, laughter and whirring feedback rang around the site, Dave Grohl hammered out the opening fusillade of ‘Breed’ and the most talked-about gig of Nirvana’s career was underway. Twenty-four songs and 90 minutes later, as Cobain brought ‘Territorial Pissings’ screeching to an end with a strangled, horrendously off-key rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ – a playful nod to another iconic Seattle musician’s most legendary festival performance – Grohl exited to his left with a broad smile splitting his face.

  ‘It was an incredible night,’ remembers photographer Charles Peterson, who had flown over from Seattle especially for the show. ‘You had 40,000 people standing with steam rising from them and you had Kurt standing in front of them in his white smock with the light shining down upon him … he looked like Jesus. Having seen Nirvana in clubs playing to next to no one just a few years previously you can’t even imagine how surreal and special that felt. It felt like a victory.’

  ‘We pulled it off,’ Dave Grohl later noted humbly. ‘We proved we weren’t useless pieces of shit.’

  I hate myself and I want to die

  There are certain people in your life that you just know, they’re not gonna make it. So in the back of your mind you emotionally prepare yourself for something like that to happen … not that it makes it easier, but so that when it does happen your world won’t collapse completely …

  Dave Grohl

  On the morning of 23 July 1993 Courtney Love heard a resounding thud from inside the bathroom of her suite in New York’s Omni Berkshire Place hotel. She opened the bathroom door to find her 26-year-old husband lying on the floor, with his eyes wide open and a syringe sticking out of his arm. Kurt Cobain wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. And, unless his wife acted quickly, he wasn’t going to see the sun rise and fall over the Manhattan skyline ever again.

  Keeping a cool head, Love picked up the phone and called the hotel rooms of Frances Bean’s nanny Michael ‘Cali’ DeWitt and Cobain’s friend, and British press officer, Anton Brookes, asking for assistance. When the pair arrived, they jolted Cobain back into consciousness by throwing water on his face and punching him repeatedly in the stomach. Brookes then dragged the dazed, groggy singer out into the muggy Manhattan morning and forcibly marched him up and down the street until Cobain was able to walk for himself. The PR man then quietly returned to the couple’s suite, picked up Cobain’s heroin baggies off the floor and flushed them down the toilet.

  Courtney Love’s admirable calm under pressure betrayed a grim reality: saving Kurt Cobain’s life had become a depressingly routine affair for Hole’s lead singer. This was her husband’s second overdose in as many months. On 2 May Cobain had returned to the couple’s rented home at 11301 Lakeside Avenue in Seattle after shooting up heroin at a friend’s house; according to the Seattle Police Department Incident Report filed later that evening, he then locked himself in his room, where ‘his physical condition gradually deteriorated to the point that he was shaking, became flushed, delirious and talked incoherently’. Investigating police officer George noted that the singer was conscious but ‘impaired to some degree’. ‘This type of incident had happened before to Cobain,’ his report concluded.

  Cobain’s mother Wendy O’Connor and his sister Kim were in the house with Courtney Love at the time of the incident. And as events unfolded, Love dragged O’Connor upstairs to show her the mess Cobain was in.

  ‘I’m like, “This is your fucking son,”’ Love recalled two years later. ‘He just looked at her and said, “I’m not on drugs, mom, I’m not on drugs.”’

  Twenty-fo
ur hours after his overdose in Manhattan, sitting at a table in the boardroom of the Omni Berkshire, Cobain trotted out the same line to visiting English journalists from Q and Melody Maker, who were blissfully unaware of the drama of the previous day.

  ‘I think people who glamorise drugs are fucking assholes and if there’s a hell they’ll go there,’ the singer told Melody Maker writers the Stud Brothers. ‘It’s really bad karma.’

  If, with the benefit of hindsight, Cobain’s cautionary words rang somewhat hollow, his cynicism was understandable. He himself had learned a harsh life lesson the previous year, in regard to the music industry’s capacity to bury its head and wilfully ignore the inconvenient realities of drug addiction when it suited key players to do so. While Cobain was detoxing in Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, Danny Goldberg was asked if Nirvana might consider playing the MTV Awards in the city on 9 September. Goldberg pointed out that as the band’s lead singer was in rehab, this would be unlikely.

  But Goldberg had been long enough in the game to recognise the risks inherent in making an enemy of a powerful media corporation. Reluctantly, and with a heavy heart, he placed a call to Kurt Cobain in hospital and asked if the singer might discharge himself early, to take one for the team. ‘Kurt agreed right away,’ noted Goldberg in Bumping into Geniuses, ‘but the melancholy in his voice was unmistakable.’ On 9 September Nirvana and their dope-sick singer obediently painted on smiles and performed ‘Lithium’ at MTV’s marquee event; the fact that on that same evening the band was awarded gongs for winning the categories of Best New Artist and Best Alternative Video (for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’) was but a happy coincidence obviously.

  Dave Grohl may have had such corporate chicanery on his mind when he spoke to Q’s Phil Sutcliffe at the Omni Berkshire the following July. Freshly returned from a two-week US club tour with his old friends in Scream, who had reunited to celebrate the long-overdue release of their excellent Fumble album on Dischord, Grohl’s punk rock soul and conscience had been reawakened: ‘Humping our own gear into CBGB’s and sleeping on friends’ floors restored my faith,’ he commented.

  No longer a punk rock naïf, Grohl’s growing distaste for the reality of life within the major-label record industry was evident in his short conversation with Sutcliffe. The music business, he opined, was full of ‘arrogant people, people who have no shame, people without a shred of decency, people who are just out for money, money, money’. Grohl himself had long since taken to removing himself from discussions of Nirvana’s financial or business affairs; his stock response when questions were raised was to shrug, smile and say, ‘I’m only the drummer.’

  ‘I’m fine as long as I can just get up onstage and play drums with Krist and Kurt,’ he told the man from Q.

  In truth, Grohl had not been afforded much opportunity to indulge in the simple pleasure of jamming onstage with his friends in the wake of their triumphant Reading festival headline show. In the 11 months that had passed between that already legendary August night at Richfield Avenue and the band’s appearance at New York’s Roseland Ballroom on 23 July 1993 (in the same week in which Nevermind finally dropped out of the Billboard 200 after 92 weeks in the chart) Nirvana had played a grand total of just eight shows. But at the most recent of these, in April 1993 – a San Francisco benefit concert for Bosnian rape victims organised by Novoselic who had by now reverted to using his Croatian birthname, Krist – the trio had aired no less than eight tracks from the much-anticipated follow-up to their phenomenally successful major-label début. Finally, after months of drama and gossip and bullshit and hype, Nirvana were getting back to the business of being a working, creative rock band once more.

  1993 had started in inglorious circumstances for the trio, with two decidedly lame performances at stadium gigs in Brazil, arranged as part of the inaugural Hollywood Rock Festival. The band were under-rehearsed and Cobain was under-the-weather: after mixing pills with alcohol before the first show, staged on 16 January at the 80,000 capacity Estádio Cícero Pompeu de Toledo in São Paulo, he was barely able to play his guitar, a farcical situation which led Krist Novoselic to walk offstage 30 minutes into the proposed 90 minute set, hurling his bass at Cobain as he exited. When the bassist was persuaded to return by Nirvana’s crew, who were mindful that the band would lose out on a huge pay cheque if they didn’t play for at least 45 minutes as contracted, the trio swapped instruments, with Cobain taking Grohl’s spot on the drum stool, Novoselic switching to guitar and Grohl taking on bass and vocal duties.

  What followed was either punk rock nirvana, or an embarrassing shambles, depending on your point of view, as the world’s most critically respected rock band hamfistedly bashed their way through a succession of bar band cover versions – Iron Maiden’s ‘Run to the Hills’, Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’, Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’ among them – to the utter bemusement and increasing irritation of their audience. Nirvana’s stint as a rock ’n’ roll jukebox climaxed with a shirtless Grohl singing off-key lead vocals on ragged versions of Terry Jack’s syrupy 1974 MOR standard ‘Seasons in the Sun’ and Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’; by this point a sizeable minority of their audience had walked out in disgust. Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, who’d been invited along to Brazil as part of L7’s road crew, remembers the trip being ‘bonkers’: ‘I went along and thought, “Hmmm, well, this is what not to do,”’ he later told me. Speaking to MTV News later in the year, Novoselic likened the show to a ‘mental breakdown’.

  ‘I felt this big,’ Grohl admitted to Phil Sutcliffe, holding his thumb and forefinger one centimetre apart. ‘You just think: “What the fuck are we doing? What is this about?”’

  ‘It was still fun,’ Grohl insisted to me in 2009. ‘It wasn’t as fun as it was when we were on tour with Urge Overkill in 1991, playing places that held 700 people, but we were still the same people; it’s just that everything else around us had changed, our environment had changed. And unfortunately Kurt had a hard time with drugs. I was lucky, I could walk away from each show and disappear. No one fucking knew who I was, I could stand in the front row of one of our shows and people still didn’t know who I was. I was fortunate enough to experience all of the good things and avoid a lot of the bad things. Whether I was smart or it was just dumb luck, that’s how it went.’

  Their brace of shambolic gigs aside, the trip to Brazil did have some positive benefits for Nirvana. As the trio had a free week between the 16 January São Paulo show and the concluding date of the Hollywood Rock festival at Praça da Apoteose in Rio de Janeiro on 23 January, Cobain booked the band into the BMG Ariola Ltda studio in Rio for three days to demo tracks for the eagerly awaited follow-up to Nevermind.

  Nirvana’s last recording session had been a waste of both time and money. Inspired by their no-frills session at Laundry Room in April 1992, Cobain had scheduled a session in Word of Mouth studios in Seattle – better known by its former name Reciprocal Studio – with Bleach producer Jack Endino on 25 and 26 October 1992. Cobain had been stockpiling material for Nirvana’s third album even before the band started recording Nevermind – written in the Pear Street apartment he and Grohl shared, ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ had been premiered at the band’s OK Hotel show on 17 April 1991; rudimentary versions of ‘All Apologies’ (then titled ‘La La La’) and ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ (originally titled ‘Nine Month Media Blackout’) had been demoed with their sound engineer Craig Montgomery at Music Source in Seattle on New Year’s Day, 1991; and ‘Dumb’ was first committed to tape for a John Peel radio session on 3 September 1991 – so the expectation was that the band would demo the lion’s share of their new album in two days with Endino. But on the first scheduled day of recording Cobain simply didn’t show up at all; Grohl and Novoselic’s calm acceptance of this fact told its own story. On day two the singer surfaced without a word of apology, and the band set to recording, completing six basic tracks and one half-hearted vocal take – for the mordant ‘Rape Me’ – before the arrival o
f Courtney Love and two-month-old Frances Bean effectively ended Cobain’s interest in the session. Compared to the industry and focus Nirvana had displayed when recording ‘the Dale demo’ and Bleach, for Endino the session was a disappointing, and indeed troubling, non-event.

  ‘It did seem odd to me that Kurt would show up a day late for a session, and more worrisome that everyone else took this as “expected” behaviour,’ the producer told me in 2010. ‘It seemed to me at the time like “rock-star” behaviour, but clearly in hindsight it was just junkie behaviour. Once he actually showed up, he was as focused as ever, but the whole session was slightly strange to me.’

  In an echo of the garage session that yielded Dain Bramage’s I Scream Not Coming Down, the most memorable incident at Word of Mouth saw the Seattle police department arrive at the studio door following up a noise complaint, as Dave Grohl’s ferocious drumming inside the soundproofed live room was so loud that it could be heard echoing throughout the surrounding neighbourhoods. ‘I said, “You know, I’ve got Nirvana in there, they’re this huge band,”’ Endino recalls. ‘This cop just said, “I don’t care who you’ve got in there, you have to turn it down.” That was the first time that had happened with that particular studio in five or six years.

  ‘But in the end no one from the label or band ever asked me for the tapes or even for rough mixes to listen to,’ the producer admits. ‘It left me wondering why they even bothered with the session.’

  In stark contrast, at BMG Ariola Ltda from 19 to 21 January Nirvana were on point, sharp and focused. With Craig Montgomery manning the mixing console once again, the trio cut seven new tracks – ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, ‘Scentless Apprentice’, ‘Milk It’, ‘Very Ape’, ‘Moist Vagina’, ‘Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip’ and the sarcastically titled ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die’, earmarked by Cobain as the title of the band’s third album) and two playful cover versions (‘Seasons in the Sun’ and a solo Dave Grohl take on cult Swedish underground metal band Unleashed’s ‘Forward into Countless Battles’) in three days. The low-key but productive session fired their drummer’s enthusiasm for the album sessions proper.