Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  One way of solving the height problem. (© Charles Peterson)

  They started to win fans with their live show, too. “There was always people who came up afterward and said ‘Wow, I thought you guys were pretty cool,’ ” says Chad, “but it’s not like people got completely out of hand. There were some people who got like that, but they were drunk.”

  Chris was in charge of getting paid and keeping the books. It was a lot simpler then. “We’d go to a record store and we’d all buy these records,” says Chris. “Maybe I could buy six records, Kurt would buy four records, Chad would buy three, and that was fine. It was ‘All together, brothers.’ And at the end of the tour, whoever got dropped off first, we’d count out all the money—a third for you, a third for you …”

  Not that Chris would just fritter away the band’s money. In fact, he became such a tightwad that he wouldn’t let anyone turn on the air conditioning in the van—even in Texas in July—because it used up too much fuel.

  Back home in Washington, Kurt and Chris often went a separate way from Chad socially—Chad stuck with his hippyish Bainbridge Island crowd—but being on tour was different. “When we were in that van, it was way closer,” Chad says. “It wasn’t like us against each other, it was like us against whatever’s outside of the van.”

  Inside the van, they’d listen to a tuneful but twisted Scottish band called the Vaselines, as well as everything from the teenaged English pop band Tallulah Gosh to the aged headbangers in Motorhead. And they’d listen to the Beatles. Chris and Kurt made compilation tapes. Shelli had even made some, too.

  Chris was hitting the bottle pretty hard. “He’d get pretty crazy, trashing things and stuff,” Chad recalls. “When he’d first get wasted, he’d be all, ‘Everybody’s great! I love everybody!’ and then the next moment he’s telling everybody, ‘You don’t know anything about love! You just don’t care! You don’t understand!’ And he’d pick up a chair and maybe toss it a half mile. Then he’d wake up and he’d say to me, ‘Don’t talk to me, Mr. Sunshine, I don’t want to deal with you.’ He’d always wake up looking and feeling like shit all the time.”

  Kurt was more amused than disturbed by Chris’s drinking. “It never seemed like a big deal to me at all,” he says. “Everyone gets drunk and he didn’t get drunk every single night, it was just every other night. When he drinks, he drinks to the point of oblivion—he turns into literally a retard. He can’t speak, all he can do is gesture and knock things over. I just never thought of it as a problem, although I’m probably more sympathetic to it now, over the last few years. But I’ve known so many people that drink that it seems like an ordinary thing.”

  At a tour stop in Minneapolis, the band stayed with Babes in Toyland drummer Lori Barbero, a famed hostess of indie bands who were traveling through the Twin Cities. Apparently, Chris thought Barbero had shot him a look and he hollered “Quit yer gawkin’!” flailed his arms, and fell backward into a cabinet full of plates, which all went crashing to the floor.

  “He never meant any harm or anything,” says Chad. “If he was in his right mind, he never would have done some of the shit he did. I think drinking brought out some things that he didn’t think about much or things he’d like to say to people that he wouldn’t when he wasn’t wasted.”

  Poster from Nirvana’s first U.S. tour.

  Pressed for specific incidents, Chad replies, “It’s all blurring together now. When I think about it, I just see him wasted, and then something getting broken.”

  ® Charles Peterson

  Kurt would do some pretty weird stuff himself. In Chicago he bought a large crucifix at a garage sale. Out on the road, he’d roll down the window of the van, stick out the crucifix at some unsuspecting victim and snap his picture just to get the expression on his face. Yes, life on the road was pretty good. “We were totally poor,” says Kurt, “but, God, we were seeing the United States for the first time. And we were in a band and we were making enough money to survive. It was awesome. It was just great. And if Jason wasn’t such a prick, it would have been even better.”

  Chris had noticed Jason’s dissatisfaction early in the tour and mentioned it to Chad and Kurt. “We tried to talk to him about it and he wouldn’t talk,” says Chris. “He got totally introverted.”

  Chris and Kurt would often go for long strolls and talk. During a stroll around Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, Chris asked, “Do you think the band is kind of weird ever since Jason joined? It’s not the same band anymore.” The band was looking and sounding more “rock,” as Bruce Pavitt would say. They blamed it on Jason. Jason’s stage style was more show-biz than the rest of the band—he posed, swinging his hair in the classic Sub Pop style, doing a rockist rooster strut around his side of the stage. “He was like a peacock on amphetamines,” says Kurt. “He was so posey I couldn’t believe it. It was embarrassing. It was so contrived and sexual. It was gross.”

  Kurt and Chris at the Halloween party at Evergreen. (Tracy Marander)

  The first time Kurt smashed his guitar: during a Halloween party at Evergeen State College, October 30, 1988. (Tracy Marander)

  Actually, Jason’s incompatibility had been plain from the start. “It was weird because he didn’t even want to rehearse any new numbers,” says Chris. “He’d go through the set but he didn’t want to jam or anything. He’d set his guitar down.” (Jason denies this, saying that since the band was so far-flung, they only rehearsed a handful of times before touring and that jamming was out of the question since their time was completely occupied by learning songs that Kurt had already written.)

  “We just kind of noticed that yeah, Jason’s kind of weird,” says Chris, who also sensed a rockist tendency in Jason early on. “The first day we practiced, he brought these girls over, to kind of hang out. That kind of tells you something.”

  Neither Kurt nor Chris hung out with Jason much socially, and their alienation was only magnified by the rigors of the road. “Things started getting weird,” says Chris. “And then he started getting weird.” The band played a great show at the Sonic Temple in Pittsburgh, so great that Kurt smashed one of his favorite guitars, a sunburst Fender Mustang. Jason got really mad about that. “We said, ‘What? It’s rock and roll!’ ” says Chris, who concedes that “we were broke and he was kind of financing the show.”

  The band had begun trashing their instruments a few months before. If it was a bad show, they’d get angry and smash everything up. If it was a really good show, they’d smash out of pure glee. There were few merely average shows, so equipment got smashed often.

  It all started on October 30, 1988, at a show at a dorm of Evergreen State College. “It just started,” says Chris. “It was fun. It seemed like you couldn’t end a show without doing something spectacular or sensational. No matter how good you played, it seemed like you didn’t give it enough. So if you smashed all the gear and had this big gala ending, we could say, ‘There, we did it.’ We couldn’t just walk off the stage.”

  On tour, they’d find cheap guitars at pawnshops—sometimes fans would just give them a guitar or in a pinch Jonathan Poneman would Fed Ex one out to them—and string them left-handed and smash them that night. “It was fun, and if you were doing a shitty show, it kind of made it spectacular,” says Chris. “Then it became addictive.”

  ***

  Chris had recently scrawled the phrase NIRVANA: FUDGE PACKIN, CRACK SMOKIN, SATAN WORSHIPIN MOTHERFUCKERS on a wall and was so pleased with the slogan that he told Kurt about it. Kurt put it on the back of a T-shirt design he had been working on. On the front was a reproduction of an engraving of one of the circles of Hell from Dante’s Inferno, a book Kurt had discovered during his days passing the time in the Aberdeen library. Jason had all the T-shirts printed up, paid for them, and then sold them after every show. They quickly became a staple of indie-rock fashion. Jason probably made a mint.

  They were supposed to go up into Canada, but made it only as far as New York City, where they played a lousy show on the ei
ghteenth of July during the New Music Seminar at the Pyramid Club in the East Village. It was Jason’s last show with Nirvana. “I don’t think Jason really took the pressure of being on tour and being cooped up with us very well,” says Chris. “I don’t think he was happy with our band because he kind of wanted us to be more rock and we were more punk.”

  “We started making it toward New York and that’s when Jason started getting really quiet,” Chris continues. “He wouldn’t even talk to us anymore. That’s when we first met Anton Brookes, our publicist in the U.K. He was like, ‘Who’s this Jason? Why is he so quiet?’ The Mudhoney guys were in New York: ‘Why is this Jason so quiet?’ We played this show at Maxwell’s [in nearby Hoboken, New Jersey]. It was a good show. Still, Jason was quiet. We spent about four days in New York. The New Music Seminar. We watched Sonic Youth and Mudhoney and Laughing Hyenas at the Ritz. Jason went to see the speed metal band Prong at CBGB’s. You know what I mean? That said a lot.”

  “That’s when Chad and I and Kurt got really together,” says Chris. “We bonded. We’d go out to eat together, all three, and pitch in for the meal with band money. Without Jason. He would not hang around with us.”

  They stayed a few days at the Alphabet City apartment of Janet Billig, a factotum at Caroline Records who knew Pavitt and Poneman, and like Babes in Toyland’s Lori Barbero in Minneapolis, made her apartment a way station for needy bands coming through town. One night, Chris and Kurt went down to the street and bought some cocaine. The two of them drank some booze and snorted the coke off Billig’s toilet seat. And they decided they were going home and that Jason was out of the band. “We were happy,” says Chris. “It was a relief.”

  © Charles Peterson

  “So we went up to him, ‘Jason, what’s wrong? Is there a problem?’ He’d say ‘No, no. Nothing. I’m over it.’ We’re like, ‘What’s it? Why is there a problem?’ ”

  Kurt wouldn’t confront Jason about it. “He was never in your face,” says Chad. “Things would pile up for him underneath and finally it would be ‘Man, I can’t take this anymore.’ When we were dealing with Jason, because we were all wondering what was up with him, Kurt was always silent about it. Then out of the blue he’d say, ‘Man, I can’t take this anymore.’ It was like, ‘Whoah, Kurt’s going to say something!’ I think it’s because he’s afraid of talking to the person. He doesn’t want to bum them out. He doesn’t want to be the one to say, ‘This isn’t working out and you’re out of the band.’ He hates that kind of confrontation. He doesn’t want to be the executioner or the mean guy.”

  “I always felt kind of peripheral,” says Jason. “I don’t remember ever being asked for input on songs in that band, which is ultimately why I left.” Kurt does concede that Jason may also have taken exception to Kurt’s alcohol-fueled “volatile personality” at the time. Kurt also thinks Jason mistook the metallic ring of Bleach for the band’s true direction instead of the compromise that it was. Even Jason acknowledges that he preferred ponderous songs like “Paper Cuts,” “Sifting,” and “Big Long Now” to the more melodic material Kurt was getting into. Jason never was afraid to declare that he liked metal. “That was always kind of a burr in Kurt and Chris’s side because it wasn’t exactly cool,” Jason says. “But if there’s a band with a cool song and a cool guitar riff I’d listen to it.”

  Jason, who was also a songwriter, wanted to have more input into the music. “I probably wanted to do things that were not simple enough for them, ideas that were mine as opposed to Kurt’s,” says Jason. “There wasn’t a tremendous musical difference—maybe it was just a control thing.

  “Basically, anybody besides Kurt or Chris is kind of disposable,” Jason continues. “At the end of the day, Kurt could get in front of any bass player and any drummer and play his songs and it’s not going to sound that much different.”

  They abruptly canceled the remaining seven shows of the tour—mostly Midwest dates—and drove home to Washington in fifty hours, not stopping for anything except to get gas, eat a doughnut, or go to the bathroom. The whole time, nobody said a word. Nobody even told Jason that he was out of the band. Jason claims he actually quit. “No, we were just too maladjusted to tell him to his face,” Chris says. “We just didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings and that just compounded the problem. I think we’re better at it now, more direct, more mature than back then.”

  “If I would have been in the band when they got huge, I’m sure I would have took my money and said, ‘See ya later!’ ” says Jason. “I would have done whatever I wanted to do. I’d bail and just do whatever.

  “Artistically, I think it was totally the right thing for me to do,” says Jason of his departure from the band. “Economically, maybe not.” Two weeks later, Jason got a call from Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, asking him to play bass in the band. He lasted a few months before being replaced by Ben Shepherd and now plays guitar in Mindfunk, a band on Megaforce Records. He says he has no hard feelings about his exit from Nirvana. “Each band is a weird, twisted family,” Jason says. “I think I was more the retarded stepchild twice removed.”

  The band never did repay Jason the six hundred dollars he lent them for Bleach. “Mental damages,” claims Kurt.

  Kurt had become obsessed with the great Leadbelly, the black folk troubadour of the thirties and forties whose enduring musical legacy includes “Rock Island Line,” “Midnight Special,” and “Good Night, Irene.” Kurt had gotten into Leadbelly after reading an article by William Burroughs which said something like “To hell with modern-day rock & roll. If you want to hear real passion, listen to Leadbelly.” Kurt’s next-door neighbor, Slim Moon, happened to have Leadbelly’s Last Sessions and played it for Kurt. He was completely taken. Then he started buying all the Leadbelly records he could find. “It’s so raw and sincere,” he says. “It’s something that I hold really sacred to me. Leadbelly is one of the most important things in my life. I’m totally obsessed with him.”

  He went out and bought every Leadbelly record he could find, learned how to play his music, and even decorated an entire wall of the apartment with Leadbelly pictures. It’s easy to see Kurt’s attraction to the blues—an exorcism of psychic pain—but it’s also easy to see why he was especially attracted to Leadbelly, whose work transcended any category, an elegant songwriter who crafted sturdy but melodic music that synthesized several different genres, whose passionate music spoke volumes about the human experience. From Leadbelly and the blues, Kurt got the idea of using recognizable imagery to produce an original, almost mystical, vision.

  Kurt had befriended Mark Lanegan, whose band, the Screaming Trees, played in Olympia often. In August 1989, Kurt and Lanegan decided to collaborate on some songs for Lanegan’s solo album. Unfortunately Kurt couldn’t write very well with someone else—he kept worrying that he would come up with something that he’d want to use for Nirvana instead—so they decided to record some songs by Leadbelly with Chris on bass and Screaming Trees’ Mark Pickerel on drums.

  The group wound up recording but two Leadbelly songs. “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” wound up on Lanegan’s magnificent solo album, The Winding Sheet. Kurt sang Leadbelly’s “Ain’t It a Shame.” Both songs were to make up a single, but that fell through and “Ain’t It a Shame” was never released. Jonathan Poneman calls it “one of Kurt’s greatest vocal performances.”

  Eventually, the four turned into an informal blues band. Pickerel wanted to call it the Jury; Kurt wanted to call it Lithium. Poneman had big plans for an album, but somehow it never happened. Kurt concentrated on guitar, leaving Lanegan to do most of the vocals. Dylan Carlson remembers their best song was “Grey Goose,” which they did in a heavy, dirge-blues style. “It was almost like watching one of the great English blues rock bands getting its feet,” says Carlson. “It was pretty incredible.” Kurt says he’d like to try a blues band again sometime.

  Nirvana rehearsed and played a few shows in Seattle that summer as their following began to swell—strictly by
word of mouth, since Sub Pop had long ago ceased directly promoting the album. They regularly sold out the Vogue and went on a two-week Midwest tour starting in late September to make up the dates they had missed by coming home prematurely with Jason. Along for the ride was roadie Ben Shepherd, who had been in a couple of bands (Mind Circus and Tick Dolly Row) with Chad.

  Nirvana was thinking about getting Shepherd in the band, but once word got around that they were thinking about a new second guitarist, members of Screaming Trees, TAD, and Mudhoney all strenuously advised them to stay a three-piece—another guitarist just cluttered up the sound. “I still kind of regret that because I like that guy a lot—he would have added to the band, definitely,” Kurt says of Shepherd. “He was kind of crazy sometimes, but that’s okay—I’d rather have that than some moody metalhead.” Shepherd later replaced Jason in Soundgarden.

  The bigger the city, the bigger the crowd. The best show was at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “Everybody was totally into it,” says Chad. “They were raging and it was great.” It’s still one of the band’s favorite places to play. In Ann Arbor, they also interviewed comedian Bobcat Goldthwaite on a radio show. All Kurt had to do was mention Sylvester Stallone and Goldthwaite went on a half-hour riff about why the man who played Rambo fled to Switzerland to avoid the Vietnam War draft.

  In Minneapolis, right at the start of the tour, Kurt had collapsed from stomach pain. Chris was frightened. “His stomach—God, he had nothing to throw up and he was still throwing up,” he says. “His stomach hurt so bad. Took him to the hospital and they could do nothing for him.”