What was different about the music business then? Was it more about music than about business?
I don’t think so. But in those days there were lots of young entrepreneurs—Chris Blackwell had Island Records; Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert had A&M Records; Herb Cohen had Bizarre Records. Today, except for Ahmet, all the entrepreneurs are gone. All the small record companies are gone. The costs are incredible today. What it costs to make one record today by an unknown artist—$300,000—would equal the entire recording budget for Asylum Records in 1972. In those days, people were, for the most part, self-contained. Joni Mitchell performed with a guitar, Laura Nyro with a piano. Today everyone has a big band, and it’s very expensive to keep that kind of organization going.
You and Joni Mitchell lived together for three years—as roommates, not as lovers. You said you two were like the Odd Couple. What did you mean?
I was doing business. Joni was painting and creating. She would try out new songs all the time. She wrote a song about me—“Free Man in Paris.” I was embarrassed when she first wrote it. I felt it was an exposure of some kind. It was like “Oh, my God . . .” It seemed so personal. I knew exactly what she meant: “He said you just can’t win. Everybody’s in it for their own game.” It was very deep and very right. That’s why she’s such a great songwriter. Her stuff is extraordinarily revealing, both about herself and about others. Of course, today I’m extraordinarily proud of it.
You don’t have anyone quite like Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan on your label today, but you do have Guns n’ Roses. How did you first meet them?
Tom Zutaut had signed the band, and they were camped out in the reception room of our record company, looking like they were sleeping in the street. And I remember going upstairs and saying, “Who is that in the reception area?” And they said, “It’s Guns n’ Roses.” And I said, “My God, these guys look like they haven’t got a nickel.” And Tom Zutaut said, “They don’t.”
So looking back, which artists’ careers do you think you really had an impact on, in the sense that you helped them reach certain artistic achievements?
I felt I had a big impact on Jackson Browne’s career, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. But if I didn’t exist, they still would have been successful. The only thing I’m sure of is that Joni Mitchell wouldn’t have written “Free Man in Paris.”
KURT COBAIN
by David Fricke
January 27, 1994
Along with everything else that went wrong onstage tonight [at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom], you left without playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Why?
That would have been the icing on the cake [smiles grimly]. That would have made everything twice as worse.
I don’t even remember the guitar solo on “Teen Spirit.” It would take me five minutes to sit in the catering room and learn the solo. But I’m not interested in that kind of stuff. I don’t know if that’s so lazy that I don’t care anymore or what. I still like playing “Teen Spirit,” but it’s almost an embarrassment to play it.
In what way? Does the enormity of its success still bug you?
Yeah. Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It’s been pounded into their brains. But I think there are so many other songs that I’ve written that are as good, if not better, than that song, like “Drain You.” That’s definitely as good as “Teen Spirit.” I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it. Maybe if it was as big as “Teen Spirit,” I wouldn’t like it as much.
But I can barely, especially on a bad night like tonight, get through “Teen Spirit.” I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can’t pretend to have a good time playing it.
But you must have had a good time writing it.
We’d been practicing for about three months. We were waiting to sign to DGC, and Dave [Grohl] and I were living in Olympia [Washington], and Krist [Novoselic] was living in Tacoma [Washington]. We were driving up to Tacoma every night for practice, trying to write songs. I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it [smiles]. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band—or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.
“Teen Spirit” was such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or “Louie, Louie.” When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, “That is so ridiculous.” I made the band play it for an hour and a half.
Where did the line “Here we are now, entertain us” come from?
That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was, “Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here.”
How did it feel to watch something you’d written in fun, in homage to one of your favorite bands, become the grunge national anthem, not to mention a defining moment in youth marketing?
Actually, we did have our own thing for a while. For a few years in Seattle, it was the Summer of Love, and it was so great. To be able to just jump out on top of the crowd with my guitar and be held up and pushed to the back of the room, and then brought back with no harm done to me—it was a celebration of something that no one could put their finger on.
But once it got into the mainstream, it was over. I’m just tired of being embarrassed by it. I’m beyond that.
This is the first U.S. tour you’ve done since the fall of ’91, just before ‘Nevermind’ exploded. Why did you stay off the road for so long?
I needed time to collect my thoughts and readjust. It hit me so hard, and I was under the impression that I didn’t really need to go on tour, because I was making a whole bunch of money. Millions of dollars. Eight million to 10 million records sold—that sounded like a lot of money to me. So I thought I would sit back and enjoy it.
I don’t want to use this as an excuse, and it’s come up so many times, but my stomach ailment has been one of the biggest barriers that stopped us from touring. I was dealing with it for a long time. But after a person experiences chronic pain for five years, by the time that fifth year ends, you’re literally insane. I couldn’t cope with anything. I was as schizophrenic as a wet cat that’s been beaten.
How much of that physical pain do you think you channeled into your songwriting?
That’s a scary question, because obviously if a person is having some kind of turmoil in their lives, it’s usually reflected in the music, and sometimes it’s pretty beneficial. I think it probably helped. But I would give up everything to have good health. I wanted to do this interview after we’d been on tour for a while, and so far, this has been the most enjoyable tour I’ve ever had. Honestly.
It has nothing to do with the larger venues or people kissing our asses more. It’s just that my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore. I’m eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice to be able to do that. And it just raises my spirits. But then again, I was always afraid that if I lost the stomach problem, I wouldn’t be as creative. Who knows? [Pauses] I don’t have any new songs right now.
Every album we’ve done so far, we’ve always had one to three songs left over from the sessions. And they usually have been pretty good, ones that we really liked, so we always had something to rely on—a hit or something that was above average. So this next record is going to be really interesting, because I have absolutely nothing left. I’m starting from scratch for the first time. I don’t know what we’re going to do.
One of the songs that you cut from ‘In Utero’ at the last minute was “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” How literally did you mean it?
As literal as a joke can be. Nothing more than a joke. And that had a bit to do with why we decided to take it off. We knew people wouldn’t get it
; they’d take it too seriously. It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves. I’m thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. “He isn’t satisfied with anything.” And I thought it was a funny title. I wanted it to be the title of the album for a long time. But I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand it.
Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?
For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in twenty minutes. I would sing and cough up blood.
This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.
Even as satire, though, a song like that can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal.
That pretty much defines our band. It’s both those contradictions. It’s satirical, and it’s serious at the same time.
What kind of mail do you get from your fans these days?
[Long pause] I used to read the mail a lot, and I used to be really involved with it. But I’ve been so busy with this record, the video, the tour, that I haven’t even bothered to look at a single letter, and I feel really bad about it. I haven’t even been able to come up with enough energy to put out our fanzine, which was one of the things we were going to do to combat all the bad press, just to be able to show a more realistic side of the band.
But it’s really hard. I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.
I feel very, very lucky to be able to go out to a club. Just the other night, we had a night off in Kansas City, Missouri, and Pat [Smear, Nirvana’s touring guitarist] and I had no idea where we were or where to go. So we called up the local college radio station and asked them what was going on. And they didn’t know! So we happened to call this bar, and the Treepeople from Seattle were playing.
And it turns out I met three really, really nice people there, totally cool kids that were in bands. I really had a good time with them, all night. I invited them back to the hotel. They stayed there. I ordered room service for them. I probably went overboard, trying to be accommodating. But it was really great to know that I can still do that, that I can still find friends.
And I didn’t think that would be possible. A few years ago, we were in Detroit, playing at this club, and about ten people showed up. And next door, there was this bar, and Axl Rose came in with ten or fifteen bodyguards. It was this huge extravaganza; all these people were fawning over him. If he’d just walked in by himself, it would have been no big deal. But he wanted that. You create attention to attract attention.
Where do you stand on Pearl Jam now? There were rumors that you and Eddie Vedder were supposed to be on that ‘Time’ magazine cover together.
I don’t want to get into that. One of the things I’ve learned is that slagging off people just doesn’t do me any good. It’s too bad, because the whole problem with the feud between Pearl Jam and Nirvana had been going on for so long and has come so close to being fixed.
It’s never been entirely clear what this feud with Vedder was about.
There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed—not probably against their will—but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.
Don’t you feel any empathy with them? They’ve been under the same intense follow-up-album pressure as you have.
Yeah, I do. Except I’m pretty sure that they didn’t go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They’re a safe rock band. They’re a pleasant rock band that everyone likes. [Laughs] God, I’ve had much better quotes in my head about this.
It just kind of pisses me off to know that we work really hard to make an entire album’s worth of songs that are as good as we can make them. I’m gonna stroke my ego by saying that we’re better than a lot of bands out there. What I’ve realized is that you only need a couple of catchy songs on an album, and the rest can be bullshit Bad Company rip-offs, and it doesn’t matter. If I was smart, I would have saved most of the songs off Nevermind and spread them out over a fifteen-year period. But I can’t do that. All the albums I ever liked were albums that delivered a great song, one after another: Aerosmith’s Rocks, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks . . . , Led Zeppelin II, Back in Black, by AC/DC.
You’ve also gone on record as being a big Beatles fan.
Oh, yeah. John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down. I don’t know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed [laughs]. So I could relate to that.
And from the books I’ve read—and I’m so skeptical of anything I read, especially in rock books—I just felt really sorry for him. To be locked up in that apartment. Although he was totally in love with Yoko and his child, his life was a prison. He was imprisoned. It’s not fair. That’s the crux of the problem that I’ve had with becoming a celebrity—the way people deal with celebrities. It needs to be changed; it really does.
No matter how hard you try, it only comes out like you’re bitching about it. I can understand how a person can feel that way and almost become obsessed with it. But it’s so hard to convince people to mellow out. Just take it easy, have a little bit of respect. We all shit [laughs].
Let’s talk about your songwriting. Your best songs—“Teen Spirit,” “Come As You Are,” “Rape Me,” “Penny Royal Tea”—all open with the verse in a low, moody style. Then the chorus comes in at full volume and nails you. So which comes first, the verse or the killer chorus?
[Long pause, then he smiles.] I don’t know. I really don’t know. I guess I start with the verse and then go into the chorus. But I’m getting so tired of that formula. And it is formula. And there’s not much you can do with it. We’ve mastered that—for our band. We’re all growing pretty tired of it.
It is a dynamic style. But I’m only using two of the dynamics. There are a lot more I could be using. 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. It’s like, “Okay, 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.
Songs like “Dumb” and “All Apologies” do suggest that you’re looking for a way to get to people without resorting to the big-bang guitar effect.
Absolutely. I wish we could have written a few more songs like those on all the other albums. Even to put “About a Girl” on Bleach was a risk. I was heavily into pop, I really liked R.E.M., and I was into all kinds of old Sixties stuff. But there was a lot of pressure within that social scene, the underground—like the kind of thing you get in high school. And to put a jangly R.E.M. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky.
We have failed in showing the lighter, more dynamic side of our band. The big guitar sound is what the kids want to hear. We like playing that stuff, but I don’t know how much longer I can scream at the top of my lungs every night, for an entire year on tour. Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and
sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.
In “Serve the Servants,” you sing, “I tried hard to have a father/But instead I had a dad.” Are you concerned about making the same mistakes as a father that might have been made when you were growing up?
No. I’m not worried about that at all. My father and I are completely different people. I know that I’m capable of showing a lot more affection than my dad was. Even if Courtney and I were to get divorced, I would never allow us to be in a situation where there are bad vibes between us in front of her. That kind of stuff can screw up a kid, but the reason those things happen is because the parents are not very bright.
I don’t think Courtney and I are that fucked up. We have lacked love all our lives, and we need it so much that if there’s any goal that we have, it’s to give Frances as much love as we can, as much support as we can. That’s the one thing that I know is not going to turn out bad.
With all of your reservations about playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and writing the same kind of song over and over, do you envision a time when there is no Nirvana? That you’ll try to make it alone?
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 35