Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  Actually, pressing only one thousand copies was a very canny move—like many other of Sub Pop’s limited releases, the single sold out quickly, making the record an instant collector’s item (it now fetches up to fifty dollars). “It was very effective promotion for the group,” says Pavitt. “I do not regret that at all.” Word of mouth on the single traveled far and wide.

  And significantly, it had won over even the doubting Thomases in the Muzak posse. Pavitt knew something was up when Charles Peterson told him he played the single over and over at his party.

  Except for Kurt’s songwriting, “Love Buzz” had all the elements of classic Nirvana already in place: the mix of passivity and aggression in the way the song went from an almost hypnotic revelry to screaming, all-out frenzy; the sludgy, pounding drums; the grunged-up pop; and the Scream. With its slow, lurching rhythms and dire, barked vocals, “Big Cheese” showed a heavy Melvins influence. The song’s title character is none other than Jonathan Poneman. “I was expressing all the pressures that I felt from him at the time because he was being so judgmental about what we were recording,” says Kurt. Although not his finest songwriting hour, the lyrics were typical of Kurt’s gift for taking a situation specific to him and turning it into a universal—who hasn’t felt resentment at being ordered around by someone else?

  The cover of the “Love Buzz” / “Big Cheese” single.

  During a visit to Seattle, Kurt heard that the hip community radio station KCMU was playing their single. As he and Tracy were driving back to Olympia from Seattle, they listened to the station for “Love Buzz,” but it never appeared. Kurt made Tracy stop the car at a telephone booth, where he called the station and requested the song. They couldn’t drive any further or they’d lose the signal, so they waited twenty minutes until they played the single. Kurt was excited.

  “It was amazing,” says Kurt. “I never thought that I’d get to that point. I just thought I’d be in a band and maybe make a demo, but for them to play it on the radio was just too much to ask for at that time. It was really great. It was instant success and fame beyond my wildest dreams. More than I ever wanted. But once I got a taste of it, I really thought it was cool and I thought I would definitely like to hear my future recordings on the radio. And be able to pay my rent with this band, it would be really great. It made us step up mentally to another level where it was a reality that we could actually live off of this. I didn’t think anywhere past ever being able to afford more than a hundred-dollar apartment. That was going to be the rest of my life—to be in a band and tour and play clubs and hear my songs on the radio once in a while. That was about it. I didn’t think of ever looking forward to anything more than that.”

  Around that time, the so-called alternative rock scene was undergoing one of its periodic sea-changes. Although they wouldn’t have been caught dead admitting it even a year before, people were now quietly admitting that yes, seventies dinosaurs like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and Kiss and Alice Cooper really did rock. But it wasn’t like punk rock never happened, either. A new tide of musicians began synthesizing the hard rock they were raised on in the seventies and the American indie punk rock they had embraced in the eighties.

  Some of the dogmatic barriers within the indie rock scene were falling—for a minute. Between the time of recording the demo and Bleach, Kurt and Chris were going through a crisis of musical identity. The demo had boasted overt Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid sounds, yet they were also into cock-rock, as demonstrated by songs like “Aero Zeppelin.” “There were a lot of real confused messages going on in our brains,” says Kurt. “We just didn’t know what we wanted to do at all. We just didn’t have our own sound at all. Like everyone else, we were just coming to grips with admitting that we liked all different kinds of music. To be a punk rocker and if you were at a Black Flag show and you said you liked R.E.M.… You just couldn’t do it.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EVERYTHING’S GETTIN’ ALL RADICAL

  Nirvana began practicing intensively in preparation for an album, even though Sub Pop, as was their custom for new bands, merely wanted an EP. The rehearsal place had moved from Chris’s basement to the space above Maria’s Hair Design. Chris’s mom didn’t close shop until eight in the evening, so practices started then, lasting into the wee hours of the morning, often breaking for Chinese food around midnight. Chad would travel all the way from Bainbridge Island, picking up Chris in Tacoma and then Kurt in Olympia. This went on for two or three weeks. “We’d practice for hours and then we’d go on some trip,” says Chris. “One day we went out to the beach and walked around and one night we went out to this water tower.” Sometimes they’d just drive around in Chris’s van and listen to Celtic Frost and the Smithereens.

  Nirvana’s first photo session, summer 1989. (© 1993 by Alice wheeler)

  On December 21, 1989, about a week and a half before recording, they played a show at the Hoquiam Eagles Lodge. Chris played in his underpants and Kurt painted his neck red.

  Shortly before he and Shelli broke up, Chris had quit his job in order to devote more time to the band. He had four hundred dollars saved up and blew it all in two weeks. “I’d go to parties and buy four cases of beer and just give out beer,” says Chris. “Once, I gave out a case of beer in two minutes. Next thing I knew, I was broke.”

  “I was in bumland,” says Chris of his bachelor days. “It was awesome.” He moved back in with his mom in Aberdeen and it snowed for two weeks while Chris hung around the house and read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. “I felt like I was in a gulag,” he says.

  Nirvana wanted to record, but Sub Pop, like most indie labels, was having cash flow problems, thanks in part to the exorbitant costs of the cover art for the Rehab Doll EP by Green River, who were by then defunct. They went ahead and booked sessions for an album anyway. They began work on Bleach on December 24, 1988, and did five hours of basic tracks.

  On the twenty-eighth, they played a release party for Sub Pop 200 at the Underground. Legendary Seattle poet Steven Jesse Bernstein introduced them as “the band with the freeze-dried vocals.” The next day, they did another five tracks, then more work on January 24, 1989. When all was said and done, Endino billed them for a total of thirty hours. On the way to recording, Kurt would sit in the front passenger seat, rest a piece of paper on the dashboard, and hastily finish writing down the lyrics to the songs they were about to record.

  Chad had been in the band six months and they’d been playing a lot. Chad was a more straight-ahead drummer than Dale Crover and the tunes were correspondingly straightforward. They attempted “Floyd the Barber” and “Paper Cuts” again, but they didn’t match the Dale Crover versions, so they remixed the Crover tapes and put them on the album. The as yet untitled album was sequenced and edited, but Bruce Pavitt ordered the album completely resequenced. The album was delayed a couple of months, but Sub Pop finally borrowed some money to get it out.

  Kurt was very particular about his singing, and would get very angry if he couldn’t make the sounds he wanted to make. “He’d start smacking his chest and stuff,” says Chad. “Not into it.”

  If the mixes on Bleach sound a little strange, there may be a very good reason. “We were all sick by then,” Chris remembers, “and we had this codeine syrup from the Pierce County Health Department. So we were drinking a lot of that for our sickness but we were really on codeine and we were mixing the record and getting really into it.”

  The album cost $606.17 to record. No one in the band had that kind of money, so a fellow named Jason Everman put up the cash.

  Dylan Carlson had introduced him to Kurt, and it soon turned out that Jason had known Chad since they were in fifth grade. The two had even played in several bands together in high school. Jason had spent the past few summers as a commercial fisherman in Alaska and had piled up a lot of money, so lending his old friend six hundred dollars was no big deal—besides, he had heard the Crover demo and knew that the band was destined for bigger things.
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  He began hanging out with the band.

  Kurt didn’t have much experience with playing guitar and singing (and remembering the words) at the same time—he’d only been playing in a band for a year and a half, after all. And all of a sudden, they had a tour to do. So one day Kurt mentioned to Jason that they were thinking about getting a second guitar player to thicken up the sound. “We basically were ready to take anybody if they could play good guitar,” says Kurt. Jason mentioned that he played, auditioned once, and that was it. “He seemed like a nice enough guy,” says Kurt. “And he had long Sub Pop hair.” And besides, like Kurt, Chris, and Chad, Jason came from a broken home. He had even lived in Aberdeen for a while as a kid.

  Although Jason is credited as a guitarist on Bleach, he didn’t play on it. “We just wanted to make him feel more at home in the band,” says Chris.

  Meet the Nirvanas: Kurt, Jason Everman, Chad, and Chris (© Ian T. Tilton)

  His first gig with Nirvana was a drunken dorm party at Evergreen State College. With another guitar player on stage, Kurt didn’t have to try as hard; consequently, he became a much better player. Soundman Craig Montgomery recalls that he’d turn Kurt’s guitar up much higher than Jason’s. Early on, they began to realize what they had gotten into with Jason. Although Jason said he’d been into punk rock for years, Kurt’s inspection of his record collection revealed, to his horror, little more than speed metal records.

  Chris found a rehearsal space in Seattle, but they didn’t have a place to live in town, so often they’d buy some forty-ouncers and drink in the van until they fell asleep.

  In February of 1989, after the album was completed, they did a quick two-week West Coast tour. By leaps and bounds, the band was gaining confidence as a live act. Bruce Pavitt remembers Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner coming back after his band played with Nirvana in San Jose and raving that “Kurt Cobain played guitar standing on his head!”

  They weathered a devastating flu, visiting the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco. While riding in their van around San Francisco, the band and Poneman and Pavitt noticed there was a major anti-AIDS campaign going on in town, with signs all over the city urging drug users to “bleach your works,” meaning to clean needles with bleach to kill the AIDS virus. There was even a guy dressed up as a bleach bottle walking around downtown handing out bottles of bleach. “We were contemplating how bleach could become the most valuable substance on earth,” says Pavitt. And so Bleach became the title of Nirvana’s as yet unreleased first album.

  A sketch of the band by Kurt, with Chad’s North drums very much on display.

  A cover piece in the March 18, 1989, Melody Maker on the Seattle scene featured a brief blurb on Nirvana. “Basically, this is the real thing,” it began. “No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination. You’re talking about four guys in their early twenties from rural Washington who wanna rock, who if they weren’t doing this, they would be working in a supermarket or lumber yard, or fixing cars.” It was a positive little piece, but you could cut the condescension with a knife.

  Letter from Chad to his mother from the quickie West Coast tour.

  True grunge. Kurt at the HUB. (Both photographs © Charles Peterson)

  Chris and Kurt at the HUB. (© Charles Peterson)

  Chris puts his back into it at the HUB. Note Jason’s Soundgarden T-shirt.

  (© Charles Peterson)

  The band came back from their tour and played a lot of area gigs—the Vogue, the HUB Ballroom at the University of Washington, and the Annex Theater, where the crowd paid Kurt the ultimate compliment by passing him over their heads during “Blew.” Jonathan Poneman remembers that event as a milestone—only the ultra-cool Mark Arm had enjoyed that honor before.

  They played a gig at a community center in Ellensburg, a dead-beat cowtown in rural Washington. In the audience was Steve Fisk, who had already made a name for himself as producer of Soundgarden, Beat Happening, and the first four records by the Screaming Trees.

  “I hated them,” says Fisk. “The P.A. system was set up really bad by this jock guy from Yakima. Kurt had broken a string and was really upset and stood in the corner trying to change his guitar string. They were just clowning off and they were all nervous—except for Chris—and they were playing Ellensburg. Even when it was obvious that Kurt wasn’t playing his guitar they kept playing. Jason started moving his hair, but it wasn’t in time with the music at all. I’m sorry—I’ve seen Black Flag and you move your hair in time with the music or you don’t move it at all.” Fisk walked out during the first song.

  Bleach came out in June of 1989. Kurt disavows any personal relevance in the lyrics of the album. “Not much thought went into them at all,” he says self-deprecatingly. “It’s pretty obvious.” But in truth, many of the songs tell a lot about Kurt and various incidents and situations in his life.

  The night before the sessions, the band stayed over at Jason Everman’s house in Seattle. Kurt still hadn’t written lyrics for most of the songs on the album. “I didn’t care about lyrics at all at that time,” he says. “I didn’t have any appreciation for them. I’d never thought of a song because of its lyrics at that point.” But he had to sing something, so he sat down and wrote into the wee hours.

  One of the remarkable things about Bleach is that the songs often have only one verse, which is repeated two, three, or more times (“School” has only fifteen words). It’s barely noticeable because of Kurt’s wide range of vocal styles and phrasings, and the hugely catchy riffs which constitute the songs. Kurt chalks up his laconic lyric style to short-term memory loss. “I decided to write songs that I would easily remember the lyrics to so I wouldn’t fuck them up during the live show,” he says.

  “Swap Meet” comes straight from Aberdeen. A phenomenon of struggling rural America, swap meets take place in drive-ins or parking lots. People come from miles around to sell baked goods, handicrafts, bric-a-brac and whatever else they can salvage from the darkest recesses of their garages and attics. Some sell their belongings so they can make the rent, others become full-time swap meet merchants. According to Kurt, the latter is usually “a white trash entrepreneur who can’t look further than selling junk because they live in junk. They’re surrounded by it and their whole mentality is based on junk—grease and dirt and poverty.”

  “Mr. Moustache” would help set a trend in alternative rock—the title is found nowhere in the song. “I’ve never had any reason to name any of my songs,” Kurt says. “That’s the only difference between alternative bands and cock-rock bands. Alternative rock bands name their songs with titles that don’t have anything to do with the song or the chorus.”

  “In high school,” explains Matt Lukin, “having a mustache was considered a real metal thing to do. Kids who are like eighteen have a real soft peach-fuzz mustache. That was the metal stoner dude mustache. They’d have the jean jacket with the fake wool lining and a mustache and long hair, feathered and maybe an earring and usually they’d have pot for sale. You’d say, ‘He’s got a mustache’ and you’d know exactly what kind of guy he was.”

  A 1988 cartoon by Kurt illustrating the true meaning of the term “Mr. Moustache.”

  The mustache also symbolized the macho man that Kurt detested so much. But the song, with its refrain of “Yes, I eat cow/ I am not proud,” is a swipe at self-righteous vegetarians (“poop as hard as rock”), who could be found in Olympia in abundant quantities. Of course, Chris was also a vegetarian, but the song is aimed more at the stridently politically correct types in Olympia, the kind who would walk up to a bare-chested guy and ask him to put his shirt back on in solidarity with women. This kind of thing put Kurt’s sarcasm in high gear. “Fill me in on your new vision,” he snarls in the opening verse. “Help me trust your mighty wisdom.”

  For “Blew,” Kurt tuned down to what’s called a “drop-D” tuning, but before recording the song, the band didn’t realize they were already in that tuning and wen
t down a whole step lower than they meant to, which explains the track’s extraordinarily heavy sound. The leaden, distorted guitars ride a drunken rhythm just this side of plodding, producing a different kind of tension. The thick, gray tone of the track suits perfectly the theme of entrapment and control—“If you wouldn’t care I would like to leave/ If you wouldn’t mind I would like to breathe.”

  The genesis of “About a Girl” began when Tracy asked Kurt why he didn’t write a song about her. So he did. The line “I can’t see you every night for free” refers to the fact that Tracy was by then threatening to kick Kurt out of the house if he didn’t get a job. The song was indicative of the pop direction that Kurt wanted to go in. It’s an anomaly on the record and indeed in the entire Sub Pop scene—no one had written anything so unabashedly melodious and Beatlesque for the label yet (Kurt had also written “Polly” by then, but it fit the Sub Pop format even less).

  As the night wore on, Kurt began to make his lyrics simpler and simpler.

  Initially, Kurt and Chris disliked the tight-knit, incestuous Seattle scene; at first glance it resembled the exclusive cliques which they had despised in high school. “I just found Seattle so incestuously small and cliquey and everyone knew one another and they just seemed so stuck up and they’d seen it all,” says Kurt. He had finally escaped abysmal Aberdeen and arrived in the promised land of Seattle, only to find the same situation all over again. No wonder the refrain of “School,” “You’re in high school again,” sounds so desperate.

  When Kurt came up with the basic riff for the song, it sounded so much like a typical Sub Pop grunge-rock riff to them that they considered calling the song “The Seattle Scene.” But given Kurt’s gift for taking a specific situation and making it universal, it got the broader tag of “School.” “We wrote it about Sub Pop,” says Kurt. “If we could have thrown in Soundgarden’s name, we would have.” Still, it’s like one of those late seventies “disco sucks” songs that nevertheless used a disco beat. “It was a joke at first,” says Kurt, “and then it turned out to be a really good song.”