This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  ‘I don’t harbour any bad feelings towards the band,’ Albini insists. ‘It was people external to the band who were pulling this bullshit. I’ve said this before, and I still think this, the three guys in the band were perfectly reasonable and easy for me to deal with, but literally every other person involved in that record was an asshole.’

  Asked in 2007 how the recordings that Nirvana took from Pachyderm compared to the version of In Utero that hit record stores worldwide on 13/14 September, Dave Grohl said the two were ‘pretty similar’. This both is, and isn’t, true, as can clearly be heard when the Albini mixes (later released unofficially on the Small Clone label) are played alongside Geffen’s version of the album. While ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ and ‘All Apologies’ were the only two tracks remixed – with Scott Litt doubling Cobain’s vocals, cleaning out some of the distortion and feedback, compressing the guitar lines and adding reverb to Grohl’s snare – the mastering of the album served to put an entirely new sheen on Albini’s natural, atmospheric recordings.

  And it’s arguably Grohl’s drum sound which suffers most, most noticeably on the album’s heavier tracks – ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’, ‘Milk It’, ‘Scentless Apprentice’, ‘Serve the Servants’ – where the drums are backed off to allow Cobain’s vocals more space to breathe. While Albini didn’t bury Cobain’s vocals as deeply as he customarily buried David Yow’s vocals on The Jesus Lizard’s albums (where Yow yelps, slobbers and moans like a man being strangled while drowning in quicksand), on his original mixes Cobain sounds more desperate, urgent and anguished as he struggles to be heard above the instrumental swamp; on the mastered version there’s more clarity, more separation and less audible distress.

  It would be too simplistic to say that, with the final version of In Utero, Nirvana bowed to commercial forces – ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ and ‘Tourette’s’ in particular are no one’s idea of crossover hits – but the fact remains that given the opportunity to deconstruct the radio-friendly sheen of Nevermind, as Cobain always maintained was his intention, the band took a conscious decision to step back from the raw ambience captured by Albini to present a more conventional, less challenging version of the recordings to the world. Just as Cobain was careful not to tip the album too far into noise territory – the ‘pop’ moments outweigh the more abrasive ‘punk’ tantrums seven to five – so the final version of In Utero offers a sound knowingly compromised for public consumption. Given the constant conflicts and contradictions in Cobain’s attitude to success, such a stance could hardly have surprised those who knew him best.

  Beyond the specifics of mixing and mastering, however, In Utero ultimately stands or falls upon the strength of its songs, and in terms of craft and composition Cobain’s songwriting here eclipses anything in his past. Knowing just how much scrutiny would be placed upon the opening track of the follow-up to Nevermind, his decision to introduce In Utero with the lyric ‘Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old’ is truly fearless. ‘Serve the Servants’ also packs Cobain’s thoughts on the media’s demonisation of his wife, his memories of childhood neglect and his reflections upon his new-found celebrity status into four scathing minutes: it is a bravura performance. ‘Scentless Apprentice’, based on Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume and built around a gnarled, ascending Dave Grohl-authored guitar riff and earthquake drumbeat, is the album’s second undeniable moment, and although Cobain later haughtily dismissed the central riff as ‘a cliché grunge Tad riff ’ it’s the most memorable guitar line on the whole album. But it’s ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ that is the album’s undisputed artistic highpoint: the darkest of love songs, it incorporates familiar Cobain lyrical themes – entrapment, dependency, addiction – into an achingly beautiful meditation upon obsessive, consumptive love.

  In truth, In Utero is a profoundly confused and conflicted album which is neither the unlistenable career suicide note many feared nor in truth a set of songs leaving grunge formulas in the dust. As writer John Mulvey noted in his superb analysis of the album in NME, In Utero sounds like the work of a band looking for a direction they can psychologically deal with. For every petulant punk rock hissy fit – the lyrics of the scouring ‘Tourette’s’ are listed simply in anagram form as ‘Cufk Tish Sips’ – there’s a moment of sublime, delicate beauty, from Cobain’s cracked, tender vocals on ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ through to the gorgeous simplicity of ‘Dumb’. Amid the dark, brooding anger there are moments of levity: ‘Very Ape’ is a wonderful swipe at the competitive one-upmanship found within indie rock circles – and ushering in the scabrous ‘Rape Me’ with the chords of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is brilliantly knowing. But overall a pervasive sense of ennui and listlessness weighs heavily. It was an album that raised more questions than it answered about Cobain’s state of mind.

  Reviews for the album were mixed. Melody Maker noted that ‘Nirvana’s hungrily awaited third album is not quite the rubbed-raw, confrontational, fan-alienating catharsis it’s been talked up to be’, but concluded, ‘we still need people who can speak the truth like this’. NME said the album was ‘a mess, but a bloody entertaining one’. Writing in Rolling Stone, David Fricke said, ‘In Utero is a lot of things – brilliant, corrosive, enraged and thoughtful, most of them all at once,’ while observing, ‘None of this unrepentantly self-obsessed rant & roll would be half as compelling or convincing if Nirvana weren’t such master blasters.’ As anticipated, In Utero débuted at Number One in both the UK and US album charts, but the band’s management, record label, music critics and fans alike were fully aware that this was but a prelude to the real story: the world was waiting to see how Kurt Cobain would cope with operating in the spotlight once again.

  Autumn 1993 found Nirvana doing something they hadn’t done in two years – a US tour. When the band stepped onto the stage of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona on 18 October they did so as a four-piece, with former Germs guitarist Pat Smear newly installed in the line-up. By then Dave Grohl had already declared – and withdrawn – his intention to leave the band.

  Amid the many dark, disturbing images in Anton Corbijn’s acclaimed, arty video for In Utero’s lead-off single ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ there’s a tender human moment which went largely unnoticed that autumn. Three minutes into the promo clip, Krist Novoselic gently wraps his right arm around Dave Grohl’s shoulder and draws the drummer closer; Grohl reaches up and clasps the bassist’s hand in his own. The sickness at the heart of Nirvana was taking its toll upon both men. The elation Grohl and Novoselic felt as they left Pachyderm with the masters of their new album had long since dissipated. The summer months had been filled with drama – overdoses, allegations of domestic violence (charges that both Cobain and Love flatly denied), band arguments and veiled threats – and tensions within the band were mounting: that Pat Smear was recruited as Nirvana’s second guitarist without Cobain bothering to flag his decision up with the band’s rhythm section was symptomatic of the lack of communication within the unit at the time. And even as preparations for the tour got underway Grohl became aware that his position in the band was under review. On a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles the drummer made up his mind to walk away from the madness.

  ‘We got on a plane,’ he recalls, ‘and Kurt was kinda fucked up. And I heard him talking about how shitty a drummer I was. He was two rows back from me and I overheard him and I got off the plane and said to Krist, “Hey, what was that all about?” He was like, “Oh man, it’s nothing, he was just saying he thinks you should get a smaller drum set and play more like Danny [Peters] or something.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah? Okay.” I mean at this point the two camps had done this …’ here Grohl spreads his arms wide to indicate the widening gulf between Cobain and Love on one side and Novoselic and himself on the other ‘… and back at the hotel I called our tour manager Alex and said, “You know what? I’m out, dude … that’s it. Stop booking shows. I’ll finish the shows, but I’m out, I don’t want
to fucking do this any more, I don’t need this, people are insane. I just want to fucking play music, I don’t want to have to deal with any of this craziness.” It was not fun. But then he talked me back into it.

  ‘We were the most dysfunctional fucking band you could possibly imagine. We were all so terribly passive. Kurt was not a confrontational person. If he had a problem with you, you could feel the vibe, but it’s not like he would scream at you for doing something wrong. I don’t remember ever seeing him do that, once, to anyone, ever. And Krist and I were sorta the same way. It was eggshells, for sure. So a lot of those conflicts were just either ignored, or resolved quietly. There wasn’t a whole lot of band meetings. It was very weird.

  ‘But I stayed. And that was my own decision. My responsibility was to Krist and Kurt, my job was to be there for them. There was never anyone telling me “You have to …” anything. Everybody else worked for me, I knew that, right out the gate. I knew that the first time I tried to quit. “Fuck you people, don’t you fucking tell me what to do! Fuck you! I need to do this? I don’t need to do this. I like working at Furniture Warehouse … ”You feel a responsibility to your audience and your fans, but not so much that it would fucking kill me.’

  Nirvana’s new guitarist did much to improve the atmosphere in the camp. Born Georg Ruthenberg on 5 August 1959, Pat Smear was a punk rock lifer, with a wry sense of humour honed on the early Hollywood punk scene with his band The Germs, a band Dave Grohl remembers as ‘the baddest motherfuckers in the world’. Formed in 1977 by Queen/Alice Cooper/Runaways fan Ruthenberg and his teenage best friend, the brash, bold and provocative Paul Beahm, aka Darby Crash, The Germs set out to be Los Angeles’ most notorious, controversial and talked-about band: after just one show at the Orpheum on Sunset Boulevard they’d pretty much achieved their aim, with Raw Power fanzine dismissing them as ‘the biggest joke of the year’.

  ‘None of the Germs could play their instruments whatsoever,’ the fanzine noted. ‘They took an hour to get set up and then played for two minutes. The lead singer smeared peanut butter all over his face and everybody’s in the group, and they were all spitting on each other until they were kicked off. You can bet they won’t be back either.’

  ‘We went out of our way to say things and do things that most people would never say or do,’ recalled Smear to rock writer/Hollywood punk rock man-about-town Brendan Mullen for his superb, highly recommended Germs biography Lexicon Devil. ‘It was like, “We’re gonna fucking start a band, and we’re gonna change our names, and we’re gonna fucking be this thing – we’re gonna really be like that, 24 – 7, we’re not going to fake it! … and we’re never gonna puss out! Whatever it is we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be the most – if we’re gonna be punk, then we’re gonna out-punk the Sex Pistols! If we’re gonna be the worst band ever, then we’re fucking gonna be the worst band ever!’

  Smear’s first appearance with Nirvana came at the band’s Saturday Night Live taping on 25 September 1993. By Hallowe’en his effervescent personality had raised morale in the camp to the extent that Nirvana took to the stage of the University of Akron on 31 October in fancy dress – Cobain dressed as the kids TV dinosaur Barney, Smear dressed as Slash, Grohl appearing as a mummy and Novoselic as a black-faced Ted Danson, a reference to a controversial appearance by the comedian at a ‘roast’ dedicated to his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg.

  The following week Nevermind passed the five million sales mark in America. Danny Goldberg told Newsweek that credit for pushing album sales to this landmark figure should go to MTV: Gold Mountain had already accepted the network’s invitation to have Nirvana play on its high-rating Unplugged show.

  The band taped their Unplugged performance at Sony Studios in New York on 18 November 1993: their 14-song set was filmed in a single take. Shunning his best-known songs – ‘Come As You Are’ was the only Nevermind-era single aired – Cobain opted instead to flesh out the set with cover versions from David Bowie (‘The Man Who Sold the World’), The Vaselines (‘Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam’), Leadbelly (‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’) and no less than three songs by SST’s Meat Puppets (‘Plateau’, ‘Oh Me’ and ‘Lake of Fire’). Augmented by cellist Lori Goldston, Nirvana had never sounded more desolate, desperate or chilling: this was a punk rock performance in the same way that Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is a punk rock record. On a stage resembling a funeral rest home, Cobain sang of death, deliverance, betrayal and rejection; when the set emerged as MTV Unplugged in New York one year later every word would carry an additional emotional charge.

  ‘1994 was a bad year right out of the gate,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘Things had changed a lot. Kurt had struggled through a lot of stuff and we were trying to come to terms with being this enormous band, I guess. That whole year is blurry for me because of how lost I was the whole time.’

  The year started with Kurt Cobain on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. In an open, emotional interview, sensitively handled by David Fricke, Cobain addressed the nature of fame, marriage and fatherhood, and spoke of his ongoing battle with drugs and the future of his band in stark, unflinching terms. He admitted that his drug use had caused problems between himself, Novoselic and Grohl and stated his belief that, creatively, Nirvana were ‘stuck in a rut’.

  ‘Krist, Dave and I have been working on this formula – this thing of going from quiet to loud – for so long that it’s literally becoming boring for us,’ he admitted. ‘It’s like, “OK, I have this riff. I’ll play it quiet, without a distortion box, while I’m singing the verse. And now let’s turn on the distortion box and hit the drums harder.” I want to learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way but with a lot more structure. It’s a really hard thing to do, and I don’t know if we’re capable of it – as musicians.’

  Yet even as Cobain was decrying the use of this songwriting formula, he was working on a new song, ‘You Know You’re Right’, that stuck rigidly to the template. From 28 to 30 January, just prior to the first leg of the band’s European arena tour, Gold Mountain booked the band into Robert Lang Studios in Shoreline, Seattle – a facility ten minutes’ walk from Dave Grohl’s home – to record the song. Once again, Cobain failed to turn up for the first scheduled day in the studio. There was no sign of the singer on 29 January either. But on the afternoon of 30 January he finally appeared … minus his guitars and amps. It was not a good omen. But in just three takes, the song – classic whisper-scream purgative punk with a brutally succinct one-word chorus – ‘Pain’ – was committed to two-inch tape. The band promised to return to the studio after the European tour to complete the session. Circumstances would conspire to break this promise.

  ‘The last time we’d toured Europe we were still Nirvana, from Seattle, now we were NIRVANA!’ says Dave Grohl. ‘Things had changed. We had the Buzzcocks and then Melvins out with us and I was really excited about that, and we were having good shows, but by the time we got to Germany I don’t think Kurt wanted to be there any more. I remember on that tour, I think it was the first time I felt depression, one of the only times I’ve ever felt depression, like “can’t get out of fucking bed” depression. It was in Milan, and I so badly wanted to be home. I’d never felt that way. I don’t think I’d ever missed something where it just makes you collapse. I couldn’t get out of bed. And that was a pretty good indication that I wasn’t happy and didn’t want to be there. But I had made the commitment of doing it and I didn’t want to let anyone down. But it wasn’t long after that until I think Kurt felt the same way …’

  On 1 March 1994 Nirvana played their final show at Terminal Einz in Munich, Germany. There was no place for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in the band’s 23-song set. When he walked offstage, Cobain asked the band’s agent Don Muller to cancel the remaining dates as he was too sick to perform.

  ‘Kurt wanted to go home,’ says Grohl, ‘so I think he intentionally blew his voice out, so that any doctor in his right mind would look at his
throat and go, “It’s kinda inflamed.” He intentionally blew his voice out so that we could all go home. I had to stay another day to make a video for the Backbeat soundtrack and then the next day I flew home, via Heathrow and San Francisco. So finally I get home, put the bags down, and collapse in bed. And I wake up at five in the morning to an emergency phone call.

  ‘And it’s some guy, going, “Dave? Is this really Dave Grohl?” And I’m like, “Yeah, who is this?” And he’s like, “I’m John, I live in Boston and I’m a huge fucking fan, and I just wanted to say you guys are great.” So I’m like, “How did you get my phone number?” and he said, “I just told the operator it was an emergency.” So I’m like, “Okay, that’s cool, just don’t phone back …” Five minutes later the phone rings again and someone goes, “Dude, turn on CNN …” And I see Kurt, in Rome. So, that’s when I knew, “Oh no, it’s over …”’

  It was 4 March 1994, and Kurt Cobain was in a coma in Rome’s Policlinico Umberto Primo hospital after swallowing 50 to 60 Rohypnol pills in the suite he was sharing with his wife at the Hotel Excelsior.

  ‘I woke up at, like, four in the morning to reach for him, basically to fuck him, ’cause I hadn’t seen him in so long,’ Courtney Love later told Spin magazine. ‘And he wasn’t there. And I always get alarmed when Kurt’s not there, ’cause I figure he’s in the corner somewhere, doing something bad. And he’s on the floor, and he’s dead.’