Later on in the week, Dave rejoined the band in New York as they continued their whirlwind tour of the various labels. Kurt was so quiet and Chris was so talkative that many label execs assumed that Chris was the frontman of the band. This turned out to be an excellent way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Dave thought the whole thing was pretty silly. “Basically, all I did was try to figure out how you become an A&R person,” he says. “Each one of them, I would ask, ‘So what did you do before you became an A&R person?’ Every one of them had worked at Tower Records.”
The band visited one major label where a loudmouth exec bellowed across his vast desk, “What do you guys want?”
“We want to be the biggest fucking band in the world,” Kurt deadpanned.
“Now that’s what I like to hear!” boomed the suit. “None of this dickin’ around! None of this building from building blocks, brick by brick! Fuck it! That’s great!”
“The best thing about the major label hunt was the collection of A&R people’s business cards that you got,” says Dave. “So when you went into shitty little lounges or taverns, you kind of drop it to the person that’s performing there and give them the impression that you’re an A&R person from a major label and you’re interested in their act. You kind of slide it to them and say ‘Give me a call.’ So all those A&R men we dealt with are probably still getting calls from lounge bands all over Tacoma.”
With Alan Mintz as their legal seeing-eye dog, they visited several other labels, where their music would mysteriously be playing in nearly every office. At Capitol in L.A., they met a promotion man. “He’s this good old boy from Texas, looks like he would like to beat my mom up,” says Kurt. “I just wanted to dance on top of his desk with a dress on and piss all over the place.”
“He asked me, ‘So on that song “Polly,” are you beatin’ that bitch?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ Then two other big jock radio programmers walked into his office and said, ‘Hey, we got two tickets to the Lakers game!’ And they all stood up and started cheering. We knew this wasn’t the label for us.”
Still, they went out to dinner with another Capitol label exec that night. “Just bring us some food, just bring us all the food you have,” he ordered the waitress impatiently. “Put it on this table. I don’t care what it is.” He began talking about spending a million dollars to get Nirvana out of the Sub Pop contract.
A million dollars. For a week, Kurt was seriously thinking of pulling the Great Rock and Roll Swindle—sign the contract, take the million dollars, and then break up. The Sex Pistols had achieved a similar feat not once but twice. Kurt would rant about the idea to Chris. “We’ve got to—it would be such a cool thing to do,” he’d say. “It would be so rock and roll.” Unsure whether this was even possible, Kurt broached the subject with Mintz, who just thought he was kidding.
The way Gold Mountain saw it, it had come down to two labels: Geffen and Charisma. The way Nirvana saw it, it came down to two labels, too: Geffen and K. “We were really close to signing with K Records,” Kurt reveals. “Those were the two we were choosing.” The idea was, they’d pull the swindle, break up, change their name, and go to K. “I thought a million dollars was more money than anyone could ever have,” says Kurt. “I thought a million dollars would support us and the record label for the rest of our lives, which isn’t the case at all, now that I made a million dollars and spent a million dollars in a year.”
Eventually, the Great Rock and Roll Swindle fantasy subsided. Because so many labels were interested in Nirvana, they were in a good bargaining position when it came to negotiating a contract. Geffen wasn’t offering the most money of any of the band’s suitors, but Geffen already had Sonic Youth, and Kim Gordon was urging them to sign with Geffen. And all along, Gold Mountain had been steering the band toward Geffen because they knew the label would work hard at the surely long, hard task of breaking Nirvana—the label had already done well with Sonic Youth, selling 250,000 copies of their major label debut, Goo. Geffen also had two key players: director of alternative music promotion Mark Kates and marketing exec Ray Farrell, both of whom had spent years in the indie world before moving to a major label.
So they went to Geffen. “We just figured it was all just a crap shoot anyway,” says Chris. Sonic Youth’s A&R man, Gary Gersh, signed the band. Gersh had first seen the band with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore at the April 1990 Pyramid show in New York. He had been sufficiently impressed to give them a call later. After talking with them and hearing the Smart sessions tape Gersh was even more impressed. In Nirvana, he heard “the energy and the simplicity and the aggressiveness of the Who.” In Kurt, he saw a gifted songwriter with impeccable instincts about the direction he wanted his band to go. Gersh was savvy enough to be able to explain the band to the label, and just as importantly, hip enough to explain the label to the band.
The band got a $287,000 advance, which was swiftly decimated by taxes, legal fees, the management’s cut, and debts. Instead of the big dough, they had gone for the strong contract, including full mechanical royalties if and after the album hit gold. No one could have guessed it at the time, but in retrospect, abandoning a higher advance in favor of an elevated royalty rate was a brilliant move, making the band millions of dollars they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Then there was the matter of that darned Sub Pop contract. The then-struggling indie label received an initial $75,000 buyout fee (half of which came out of Nirvana’s advance), a reported two points (2 percent of sales) on the next two records, and even got the Sub Pop logo on the back cover of every copy of Nevermind. The arrangement took a bite out of the band’s income, but it also almost single-handedly resuscitated Sub Pop. “I don’t necessarily regret it now because I enjoy knowing that I’m helping Sub Pop put out some really good music,” says Kurt.
“I don’t doubt that for a minute,” says Poneman, “had we not had that agreement, Bruce and I would probably be washing dishes at this moment.”
Sub Pop released one last Nirvana record, a split single featuring Nirvana and the Fluid. Kurt felt Nirvana’s version of the Vaseline’s “Molly’s Lips” was ragged and called up Jonathan Poneman and asked him not to release it, but it was part of the buyout deal. Etched into the run-out groove of the record was a single word—“Later.”
While the band members waited for their advance money to come through, Gold Mountain doled out a thousand dollars a month for each band member, barely minimum wage. Still they had to pawn instruments just to keep themselves fed. Sometimes they’d go down to the Positively 4th Street record store in Olympia and sell T-shirts. “You get thirty-five bucks and you’re so happy,” says Dave, “because you don’t have to eat corn dogs that night—you can have a Hungry Man Dinner!” The band didn’t formally sign a contract until just before recording Nevermind.
In November 1990, Dave was down in Los Angeles sitting in with L7 at a Rock for Choice benefit. He called Chris to ask him to wire some money and they were just about to hang up when Chris suddenly said, “Wait a minute. I gotta tell you something. Kurt’s been doing heroin.”
“What?” said Dave, shocked. “How did you find out?”
“He told me,” Chris said. “Don’t tell him that I told you.”
When Dave came back home, Kurt mentioned he’d done heroin and Dave tried to stay cool about it and just asked what it was like. “It sucked, it’s stupid,” Kurt replied. “It makes you feel gross and bad. I just wanted to try it.”
“Kurt said he wouldn’t do it again and I believed him,” Dave says. “It seemed so innocent. It seemed like a kid sticking a firecracker in a cat’s butt and lighting it off for the hell of it. It didn’t seem like anything at all.”
“The whole winter that Dave and I spent together in that little apartment was the most depressing time I’d had in years,” Kurt recalls. “It was so fucking small and dirty and cold and gray every fucking day. I almost went insane at one point. I just couldn’t handle it. I was so bored and so po
or. We were signed to Geffen for months and we didn’t have any money. We ended up having to pawn our amps and our TV, all kinds of stuff, just to get money to eat corn dogs. It just felt really weird to be signed to this multimillion-dollar corporation and be totally dirt poor. All we did was practice. It was the only thing that saved us. Even that got repetitious after a while.”
And so Kurt had sought refuge in heroin. He had been wanting to do it again and finally found a dealer in Olympia. He did it about once a week, not often enough to get a habit. Not even Dave knew he was doing it. “It’s weird, because with someone like Kurt, who’s a sloth anyway, how are you to know?” he says.
No one in the band knew until the night that Kurt called Chris. Chris had gotten extremely worried and hung up. A little while later, he and Shelli called back and told Kurt that they loved him and they didn’t want him to do drugs. “It was nice,” Kurt says, the tone of his voice implying that he appreciated the gesture, but it wasn’t enough to get him to stop.
“I told him he was playing with dynamite,” says Chris. “It bummed me out. It was shocking. I didn’t like it at all. I just don’t see anything in that shit. I just told him that’s the way I feel.” After that, Kurt tried to hide his drug use, but Chris always knew. “I knew he’d hang around these certain people and it was ‘Oh, Kurt’s getting high,’ ” Chris says.
By that time, Kurt and Tracy had gotten back in touch and they went together to see Tobi Vail’s Riot Grrl band Bikini Kill at a party in Olympia. “He kept nodding off and whatnot in the car on the way there,” says Tracy. “He used to fall asleep, but he’d never fall asleep that fast.” On the way to another party that night, Kurt asked if they could stop at his house so he could go to the bathroom. After a while Tracy went up so she could go, too. After fifteen minutes she heard a big crash in the bathroom. “So I go in the bathroom and he’s kind of passed out on the toilet with one sleeve rolled up and I pick him up and he starts laughing and then he nods off instantly and then he laughs again. I said, ‘Kurt, what the hell are you doing?’ ”
“How did you know I did it?”
“Look at you, Kurt,” Tracy said. “You’ve got one sleeve rolled up, there’s a spoon in the sink, you’re passed out on the toilet, and there’s a bottle of bleach on the floor. You never clean anything—why else would you have a bottle of bleach if it wasn’t for your needle?”
“At that time,” says Tracy, “I didn’t know it was going to go as far as it did. I don’t think he did it when we were going out, as far as I know.” Kurt told Tracy that heroin made him really social. “He felt like he could go out and have a good time and talk to people and not feel uncomfortable,” she says.
“The funny thing is, when he was getting all these tests for his stomach, he actually came home one time from the hospital and he said, ‘They tried to give me another blood test and they already gave me four tests.’ He walked out of there because he said he would almost faint when they tried to draw blood because he couldn’t stand the needle in his arm.”
On New Year’s Day of 1991, the band went back to the Music Source, where they had done the Blew EP sessions and recorded several tracks with soundman Craig Montgomery, completing two, “Aneurysm” and “Even in His Youth,” both of which later appeared as B-sides and on Incesticide.
Gersh thought the band should rerecord the seven songs from the Smart sessions and suggested several relatively fancy producers, including Scott Litt, who had worked on R.E.M.’s breakthrough records, long-time Neil Young producer David Briggs, and Don Dixon, who had produced R.E.M., the Reivers, the Smithereens, and many others.
Chris at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, April 1991. (© Charles Peterson)
Chris and Kurt demonstrate their onstage chemistry at the Commodore Ballroom. (© Charles Peterson)
At one point, Kurt told the Seattle music paper Backlash that Vig would be the main producer, but they’d use other producers for the songs the band deemed “commercial.”
Briggs and Dixon actually flew up to Seattle to meet the band. Dixon made the final cut, and tentative plans were made for him to produce and Vig to engineer. But then something fell through. Some say that rumors that the band had received an astronomical advance had fooled some producers into pricing themselves out of the job, but the band was really holding out for Vig all along. Vig, a supremely nice guy, simply knew where they were coming from, musically and philosophically, better than anyone else.
Vig had never done a major label project and Gersh initially bridled, but came around to the idea after figuring that even if Vig didn’t get the right sounds during recording, they could do the time-honored thing and fix it in the mix. So Nirvana got their way—this time. Vig got the call just a couple of weeks before recording was to begin.
The band sent him some rehearsal tapes they made on a boom box. The band played so loud that the sound was wildly distorted, but Vig could make out some great tunes. Vig already knew most of the songs from the Smart sessions, but there were a few new ones, too, like “Come as You Are” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that sounded like they had a lot of promise.
“We knew that the stuff we were coming up with was catchy and cool and just good strong songs,” Dave says. “We kind of could tell that they were really great. We didn’t expect what happened to happen, but we knew it was going to be a really good record.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
VERSE, CHORUS, VERSE, CHORUS, SOLO, BAD SOLO
The band formally signed with Geffen on April 30, 1991. Soon after, Kurt called his father out of the blue and told him the big news. He said he was going to go down to Los Angeles to record in a few days, and that he was very excited about everything that was happening. They talked for over an hour, just catching up. Finally, Don told Kurt to stay in touch, they said good-bye, and hung up the phone. And then Don Cobain cried.
Chris and Shelli drove their Volkswagen van with all the band’s equipment in it down to L.A. Kurt and Dave had decided they were going to drive down, too, in order to experience the romance of the open road. They took off a few days early in a beat-up old Datsun, looking forward to the adventures ahead. But the car overheated every fifteen minutes or so and it took them three hours to go a hundred miles. So they limped back to Tacoma, parked the car in a quarry, and pelted it with rocks for half an hour before driving it to Chris’s house, where they picked up their trusty white Dodge tour van. They stopped in San Francisco and stayed at Dale Crover’s house for a few days before setting off for L.A., going straight to the Universal Studios tour as soon as they arrived.
In the days before the sessions began, Vig and the band fine-tuned some of the arrangements at a rehearsal studio. All the new material was very promising, but the first time they played “Teen Spirit,” the normally low-key Vig began pacing around the room with excitement. One night, Chris got a little plastered and commandeered the studio-wide intercom system and broadcast heartfelt words of encouragement to his fellow musicians throughout the rehearsal complex, including people like Lenny Kravitz and Belinda Carlisle. “Okay, you motherfuckers!” Chris hollered. “Get your ass in gear!”
Next, they went to a drum rental place and selected a brass snare for Dave. It was the loudest one they had. The employees had nicknamed it “the Terminator.”
They stayed in furnished apartments in a nearby building called the Oakwood—“It was so gross with this mauve and powder blue,” sniffs Chris. Naturally, they trashed the place, breaking a coffee table and a framed painting of flowers. “We were just in L.A. and for lack of anything to do,” Chris explains. “It’s fun having a party—there doesn’t have to be any reason or any kind of anxiety or anything. It’s just fun to go crazy.”
Soon, a woman with the improbable name of Courtney Love began stopping by the Oakwood to see Kurt.
Courtney had seen Nirvana open for the Dharma Bums at the Satyricon club in Portland, Oregon, in 1989. Watching Kurt on stage, she thought to herself, “He’s got Dave Pirner damage, but he’
s way cuter.” She thought he was “hot in a Sub Pop rock god sort of way.” After the set, as was his custom, Kurt wandered away from the stage area in order to get out of packing up gear. He walked by Courtney’s table, sat down, poured himself a beer from her pitcher, and glared at her. She glared back.
“I thought she looked like Nancy Spungen,” Kurt says, chuckling. “She looked like a classic punk rock chick. I did feel kind of attracted to her. Probably wanted to fuck her that night, but she left.” They talked for a little bit and he gave her a few stickers he had made that had Chim-Chim and the Nirvana logo. “I put them all on my suitcase,” says Courtney, “and I didn’t even like his band.”
Courtney had had a crush on Kurt ever since. Asked to describe her attraction to Kurt, something rare happens—Courtney Love is at a loss for words. “I don’t know,” she says, suddenly girlish, almost blushing. “I feel embarrassed. I just thought he was really beautiful. He was really cool and he had really beautiful hands. He was really beautiful. I can’t explain it.”
Courtney Love. (© Charles Peterson)
A couple of years older than Kurt, Courtney was also the product of a broken home, and like Kurt had an itinerant childhood, although while Kurt had bounced around tiny Grays Harbor County, Courtney’s travels had spanned several continents. Her mother took her from L.A. to New Zealand to work on a farm, then they moved to Australia and back to the States, where Courtney eventually wound up in an Oregon reform school. She supported herself as a stripper during her teens, traveling from Portland to Japan to Ireland; by 1981, she was hanging out in the then-explosive Liverpool scene with post-punk luminaries like Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes and members of Echo and the Bunnymen.
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