Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  Motor-drive photo sequence from the February 1990 Raji’s show, which yielded the back cover photo of “Sliver” (frame 27) and the inside photo from the Bleach CD (frame 31). (© Charles Peterson)

  On April 27, Tracy’s birthday, Kurt called her from Amherst, Massachusetts, to tell her that he didn’t want to live together, but that he still wanted them to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Tracy knew something like that was coming. “Near the end, we started fighting more and more,” she says. “He wanted me to be artistic and I didn’t have the time to be artistic. I was driving an hour to work and an hour back from work. I was supporting him and he wasn’t doing any housework. He’d say ‘Just leave it’ and I’d say ‘I can’t leave it. I can leave it for a week or a few days and then I can’t stand it anymore. I have to clean it because you won’t do it.’ ”

  A few days later in Florida, they met a kid who wanted to be on Sub Pop, and who let them spend the night at his dad’s luxury condo. That night they did a lot of acid and drank a lot of Tom Collins drinks. Among other unspeakably strange and bizarre acts, Chris fried mayonnaise in a pan. The next morning, he found himself walking around the driveway stark naked, bald, and yelling “Cast away your possessions like I have! You’re not worth anything!” Kurt hustled him back into the house, got him dressed, and they scrammed out of there before their still-unconscious host discovered all the damage they’d done.

  Although Sub Pop didn’t promote Bleach as heavily as other albums out at the time, it was a steady seller. It was promoted for two months and then, despite Kurt’s request that the label stay on top of the record, Sub Pop went on to new projects. The label’s relatively low-powered distribution and publicity were beginning to be a problem—their records were hard to find.

  “It’s the typical story of showing up at gigs and ten to twenty kids coming up to the stage and saying we can’t find your record anywhere,” Kurt says. “It got real tiring. We didn’t do any interviews. We felt we deserved a little bit more than what we were getting. I would have been comfortable playing to a thousand people. That was basically our goal—to get up to that size of a club, to be one of the most popular alternative rock bands, like Sonic Youth.” Kurt estimates they did about three interviews while they were on the label.

  Kurt sees the light in an early Michael Lavine portrait. (© Michael Lavine)

  And Sub Pop was on the verge of going under. A distribution venture crashed and burned due to mismanagement, Poneman and Pavitt’s high-rolling promotional style was draining the company dry, band members were raiding the stockroom and walking off with armloads of vinyl; the label was releasing a record a week while trying to keep too many bands on the road, and now that major labels were offering major label-sized advances to Seattle bands, Sub Pop felt compelled to try to match them. Sub Pop nearly went bankrupt. By the summer of 1990, they were bouncing hundred-dollar checks and owed money to everyone in town. “They hit rock bottom,” Chris recalls. “It was just such a mess. They tried really hard to pay us because they really appreciated us and that’s cool but it was just too much of a burden.”

  And further draining the label’s coffers were Sub Pop’s alleged legal negotiations (neither Pavitt nor Poneman will comment on them to this day) for distribution deals with Columbia Records and Hollywood Records. At one point, Nirvana met with Sub Pop’s attorney, who tried to convince them that it was a good arrangement, but the way Kurt and Chris saw it, it simply made more sense for them to choose their own label, instead of someone else choosing it for them. “We decided to cut out the middleman,” says Kurt.

  No indie label could afford to buy Nirvana out of their Sub Pop contract, and besides, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, both bands of impeccable artistry and credibility, had recently signed to majors, so they began looking for a major label deal. When Poneman and Pavitt found out, they were deeply anguished. “I can think of very few things that have happened in my life that have hurt my feelings more,” says Pavitt. “It really fucked with my head for a while.”

  Pavitt says he and Poneman only found out about the group’s plans through the grapevine. “It was so obvious,” Kurt replies. “We wouldn’t return their phone calls for weeks and weeks at a time. Every time I talked to Jonathan, I feel that I made it clear that there was definitely an uncertainty in our relationship. I just don’t understand how you’re expected to come right out and tell someone something like that. I suppose it’s the more adult thing to do, to tell someone that you don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore. It’s a really hard thing to do. I’ve always quit my jobs without any notice. I just quit one day and not show up.”

  Kurt admired Pavitt because he had an uncanny instinct for ferreting out great new underground music. Bearing albums by Daniel Johnston and the Shags as propitiatory offerings, Pavitt went down to Kurt’s apartment in Olympia to try to talk him into a new, stronger contract. “For the first time, Bruce actually seemed like a human being to me,” says Kurt. “Every other time I’d see Bruce, our conversation was always real limited and we never got to talk to each other on a human level. I also felt some kind of resentment because why all of a sudden, at that point, did he decide to treat me like a person instead of this casualty every time I came into his office?”

  They spoke for five tense hours—“There were just beads of sweat on my forehead and everything,” recalls Pavitt—and Kurt couldn’t quite bring himself to tell Pavitt that he was sure he didn’t want to be on Sub Pop anymore. A few days later, Chris gave Sub Pop the definitive word. They were leaving.

  “I felt really bad,” says Kurt. “I felt guilty because I wanted to be on their label still because I knew that these are people who share similar thoughts. I kind of felt like the enemy at the time. But still, there was nothing that [Pavitt] was going to do that would change my mind. They were just too risky.”

  By August, Soundgarden manager Susan Silver had also introduced them to lawyer Alan Mintz of the powerful Ziffren, Brittenham & Branca firm. Mintz had already engineered outstanding deals for Jane’s Addiction and Faith No More. The wining and dining began. Charisma, Slash, and Capitol all wanted the band badly. MCA flew the band down to L.A. and flew a rep up to Seattle. Island A&R man Steve Pross had already been chasing Nirvana, but the band was thoroughly uninterested in Island.

  The labels were all excited about a tape the band had recorded in early April of 1990 at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, the home base of veteran underground producer Butch Vig, an immensely nice man who had become highly regarded for his fierce-sounding but economical production work on albums by Killdozer, the Laughing Hyenas, the Fluid, and Smashing Pumpkins and who had produced records for labels like Touch & Go, Mammoth, Twin/Tone, and Amphetamine Reptile. He’d also produced TAD’s excellent 8 Way Santa album for Sub Pop. Vig started with more pop records but adapted brilliantly to the mid-eighties indie boom with its abrasive sounds and tight recording budgets. Jonathan Poneman had hyped Vig on Nirvana by saying, “These guys are going to be bigger than the Beatles!”

  Kurt was very quiet and let Chris do most of the talking. Chris made it clear that the band wanted to sound very heavy. Vig began to sense a tension between Kurt and Chad, who couldn’t quite do what Kurt wanted him to.

  They had spent a week recording seven songs for what was supposed to be their second Sub Pop album, but which became, in effect, the demo tape they shopped to the major labels. The arrangements are virtually identical to the Nevermind versions—in fact, the version of “Polly” is the one that appears on Nevermind, although remixed. “Breed” was then called “Imodium” (after the antidiarrhea medicine Tad had used on the European tour); “Stay Away” was originally titled “Pay to Play” and featured slightly different lyrics, spectacular feedback, and a screaming kamikaze coda. Also recorded at Smart were “In Bloom,” “Dive,” and “Lithium,” which begins with Kurt playing the same rickety acoustic guitar that features on “Polly” and fades rather than stops. They also made another attempt at the elusive “
Sappy,” a highly catchy tune about romantic entrapment.

  Vig was the perfect producer for the project. He could get nasty sounds, but he was also a self-described “pop geek.” In the indie scene, music as melodic and downright catchy as this was anathema. Almost by definition, underground music wasn’t supposed to be easy to like. The songs on the Smart sessions were a bold step, as bold and experimental as any noisy angst-fest—perhaps a lot more so. “I think of them as pop songs,” Kurt told one U.K. magazine. “There aren’t songs as wild and heavy as ‘Paper Cuts’ or ‘Sifting’ on the new record. That’s just too boring. I’d rather have a good hook.”

  Both the songwriting and the recording weren’t as rushed as Bleach had been, so Kurt had a lot of time to hone and polish the songs. “I had finally gotten to the point where I was mixing pop music and the heavy side of us in the right formula,” says Kurt. “It was working really well, mostly because of the reports from our friends and other bands. Everyone was saying that it was really good. I could tell that it was definitely more advanced than Bleach.”

  But Kurt and Chris were growing more and more unhappy with Chad’s drumming. This time, Kurt had the time to make sure that Chad played the parts that he had taught him—during the low-budget Bleach sessions, Chad would change his parts and there was no time to argue or do another take.

  “I was really hoping to participate more and become part of what was going on,” says Chad, “at least to have a say in how my own drums sounded. I wanted to get more involved in the band and feel like I was actually doing something. I was still happy dealing with the album, but I wanted to be more a part of it. It was then that I realized that it really is Kurt’s show and that what he says goes and that’s it, no questions asked.”

  Chad, who could play guitar, bass, and violin, was also a songwriter and wanted to start contributing material to the band. But even though he was into a lot of the same music that Chris and Kurt were—the Young Marble Giants, the Beatles, Scratch Acid, and the Butthole Surfers—his songwriting style defined the Bainbridge Island sound (which he helped to create before joining Nirvana)—ultra-quirky, pastoral, vaguely prog-rock. “Elfin music,” says Kurt. “You just kind of shudder because it’s so stupid and dorky.” Kurt says they were open to other material, but Chad’s music didn’t fit the band. “It just wasn’t good,” says Kurt, “and there was nothing else to be said about it. It was really sad because he felt like he wasn’t part of the band because he couldn’t really create.” And so Chad wound up living out a time-honored rock-biz joke. “Q: What was the last thing the drummer said before he was fired? A: ‘Hey, guys, I wrote some songs I want us to play!’ ”

  By late May, after the U.S. tour had ended, Nirvana had started to attract the attention of major labels. Bootlegs of the demo circulated around the music industry, and even though they were hardly as polished as the finished Nevermind recordings would be, the buzz was loud. Ironically, Sub Pop had probably helped spread the buzz about Nirvana by touting the band as a valuable property to the labels they wanted to do a distribution agreement with.

  (© Michael Lavine)

  And that’s when Kurt and Chris chose to fire Chad Channing. Nervous and sad, they took the thirty-five-minute ferry ride from Seattle to Chad’s house on Bainbridge Island to give him the news. They told him—Chris did most of the talking—gave him a hug good-bye, and then they left. “I felt like I’d just killed somebody,” says Kurt.

  Chad’s take on the meeting is that he wasn’t fired—he quit. “We talked for a while and I just told them this was how I felt and they knew that,” he says. “It wasn’t like we weren’t getting along—we always got along as human beings. It was strictly along the musical line that it just wasn’t working anymore. That’s where it ended, right there. I never felt like I was totally in the band. I felt like I was just a drummer. I was thinking, why don’t they get a drum machine—get it over with. Then they could program it and do anything they damn well wanted.”

  “Sometimes I just felt sorry for Chad,” says Bruce Pavitt. “You could tell that … I didn’t feel that they treated him with a lot of respect.”

  Even though Kurt thought Chad was a really nice guy, he never got along with him. Kurt suspects Chad didn’t get along with him for some of the same reasons that Jason didn’t. Kurt was still prone to being “volatile”—getting drunk and turning into a negative creep. “I was just trying to be ‘punk rock’ or something,” Kurt admits. “I had this terrible Johnny Rotten complex.” Chad, used to the mellow, quasi-hippie Bainbridge Island scene, couldn’t relate to such a sarcastic pessimist.

  Kurt was still openly judgmental, quick to point out people’s faults, something Chad frowned upon. Kurt knew he had a problem and tried hard to contain it, but couldn’t always, especially when talking about their bête noire, crude Seattle sludge-rockers Blood Circus, whose early success baffled Kurt and Chris. “It was almost impossible for me to get along on any level with Chad because I basically couldn’t say anything without offending him,” says Kurt. “I thought he was judging me for judging other people.” Their mutual animosity grew, although they would never say it was. “What an asshole,” Chad would think to himself. “What a hippie,” Kurt thought.

  Kurt had played drums for years, so he was very picky about drumming. He didn’t think much of Chad’s playing, and that further fueled his animosity. “He really had bad timing and he wasn’t a very powerful drummer,” says Kurt. Kurt liked Chad much better than any other drummer they’d had, so he encouraged him to take lessons so he could improve. Kurt also says that Chad would tire quickly and start to make more and more mistakes as the set wore on; often, there would be interminable delays while Chad retuned his drums, although Kurt insists he was really resting.

  “Sometimes there would be weird things,” says Chris. “He’d go off in space—there wouldn’t even be a drum beat any more. I remember looking over at Kurt and Kurt looking over at me like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ ”

  “That really is how the instrument smashing came about,” says Kurt. “I got so pissed off at Chad that I’d jump into the drum set, then smash my guitar.” Early video tapes of the band show that sets often ended with someone hurling a guitar or a guitar case at Chad, soon followed by Kurt and/or Chris sailing into the drum kit.

  Chris is still slightly evasive when explaining why Chad got the sack. At first, he chalks it up to good old musical differences. “He kind of wanted to do his own thing,” he says, adding that Chad was a “light, jazzy” drummer by nature and had to alter his style in order to play in Nirvana. We needed a real thumper.” But on the Vig demo, Chad hit very hard and truth be told, Dave Grohl virtually duplicated all his parts for Nevermind.

  “We’ve been through a lot with this whole success thing, with all the pressure and stuff,” Chris continues. “I’m just glad [Chad] didn’t have to go through all that, because …” and he trails off. “It was always kind of awkward with Chad. It was weird. I don’t regret it at all, though. He just wanted to do his own thing. He had a different perspective than us. A lot of times he had a way better perspective. Way more objective and way more innocent and really good. We were going to make this big step—sign to a major label—and he wasn’t right for us. It just wasn’t right.”

  “Even when I look at it now,” says Chad. “I don’t regret anything. I’d probably be pretty damn wealthy, but would I be happy? That’s the question mark there.

  “It’s kind of weird,” he continues. “I mean, I could be there—but I’m not. But at the same time, I’m happy for them. I would have been bummed if it just petered out and the band broke up. I hope they’re enjoying themselves and that the pressures aren’t too much.”

  The bad feelings seem to be few. “Overall, I have massive love for that guy,” says Kurt. “I kind of admire him because he’s really satisfied with the way that he is. He seems like a really happy person and he always has been.”

  Chad now plays in a fine band called Fire Ants and ma
de a tidy sum from the royalties of Bleach and Incesticide.

  Without a drummer, they canceled a proposed March 1990, U.K. tour and asked Dale Crover to fill in on a seven-date West Coast tour with Sonic Youth in mid-August. Crover agreed to play, but on one condition. “I told them—whatever you do, do not jump into my drum set. Do not.” Not only did they comply with that request, but they also did not smash one guitar on the tour. “I’m glad they didn’t do that stuff,” says Crover. “I’d seen them do it before and I just thought it was anticlimactic. Kurt trying to break a guitar—it takes him fifteen minutes. By the time it’s over, it’s like, big deal. I think that’s guitar murder. I think guitars have souls. I don’t think any of that stuff’s cool at all. Instruments have souls—why would you want to murder a guitar? I think it’s pointless. Haven’t you ever seen the Who, guys?”

  ***

  Kurt and Tracy continued living together for over a month until Tracy could get enough money to get an apartment in Tacoma, which was closer to work. But Kurt wasn’t at the apartment much. Usually, he was staying over at the home of Tobi Vail, one of only a handful of girlfriends Kurt ever had.

  Kurt says he slept with a total of two women on all of Nirvana’s tours. Perhaps he had learned a lesson from an incident that occurred on the band’s second U.S. tour. After realizing that their audience at a sleazy dive in Iowa was mostly “frat jock people,” Kurt downed a big jug of Long Island Iced Tea during a particularly shambolic set. Afterward, they all stumbled over to someone’s house and spent the night. Kurt met a girl. “We had sex in the van in front of the house and I woke up in the morning to the sound of breaking glass,” Kurt says. “It turned out to be her boyfriend with a hammer, smashing out the windows of the van. We were stark naked, covered in glass, wondering what we should do. He was walking around the van screaming ‘Bitch, bitch! I’m going to kill you!’