Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  The Chim-Chim sticker that Kurt gave to Courtney at the Satyricon.

  She sang in an early incarnation of Faith No More in San Francisco and later moved to Minneapolis and formed a short-lived band with Jennifer Finch and Kat Bjelland called Sugar Baby Doll (Finch went on to form L7, Bjelland now leads Babes in Toyland). She landed a bit part in Sid And Nancy and later co-starred in the abysmal 1987 post-punk spaghetti western Straight to Hell, which featured the Pogues, Joe Strummer, and Elvis Costello. She founded the band Hole in March of 1990. She was already well known—some would say notorious—on the indie circuit.

  Around December of 1990, Courtney and Dave became friendly through Dave’s former girlfriend, Jennifer Finch. “She was fun to talk to because if you were bored, you could spend three hours on the phone,” Dave says of Courtney. “It was funny because I’d never talked to anyone who was so entertainment business-wise or L.A.-wise as Courtney. It was kind of neat to have a conversation with someone who you could picture being behind a desk at US magazine or something.”

  After Courtney revealed to Dave that she had a crush on Kurt, Dave told Courtney that Kurt liked her, too, but she didn’t quite believe it. Still, she gave Dave a package to give to Kurt—little sea shells and pine cones and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box. Courtney swears that if she hadn’t forgotten that he never replied, she wouldn’t have bothered chasing him anymore.

  Kurt and Courtney met again at a Butthole Surfers/Redd Kross/L7 show at the Palladium in Los Angeles in May of 1991, shortly before the band began recording Nevermind. They were instantly attracted to each other. Courtney chose to express her attraction by punching Kurt in the stomach. He punched her back, then he leaped on her and they began wrestling. After a little while, Courtney got up, kicked Kurt, and walked away. “It was a mating ritual for dysfunctional people,” Courtney cracks.

  In three months, Hole would release its debut album, Pretty on the Inside. A harrowing, confrontational, and fearless dissection of childhood damage and feminine self-hatred, the record began with Courtney snarling, “When I was a teenage whore …” and went on from there. The English music press were already raving about the band and Courtney in particular; journalists fell all over themselves for an interview with this brash, outspoken, and devastatingly witty American. The album was a longtime U.K. indie chart entry after its debut in August of 1991.

  Although many would soon come to believe—and still do—that Courtney was a gold-digger, she insists she didn’t think Kurt would ever be anything more than a revered cult figure when she began chasing him. “I thought I was going to be more famous than him,” says Courtney. “That was pretty obvious to me.” The way she looks at it now, marrying Kurt Cobain was a bad career move.

  There is no doubt that Courtney likes attention. But much of her grandstanding can be seen as an effort to assert herself, to avoid getting outshone by Kurt’s brilliant star. Imagine the situation where the spouse who wants to be famous is overtaken by the spouse who never wanted to be. Of course, Courtney would eventually achieve her own kind of fame—or infamy—her name becoming a household synonym for a delinquent mother.

  Courtney happened to live only a block away from the Oakwood and she stopped by a few times. Chris didn’t pay her much mind. “She was some loud girl,” he says. “I’d never heard of her before.”

  But Kurt was interested. “We bonded over pharmaceuticals,” Courtney says. “I had Vicodin extra-strength, which was pills, and he had Hycomine cough syrup. I said ‘You’re a pussy, you shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach.’ ”

  Kurt called her up at five in the morning on the pretense of asking if she had any drugs. Courtney said no and made a date with Kurt for the next day. He stood her up and then kept his phone off the hook so she couldn’t call. “I couldn’t decide if I actually wanted to consummate our relationship,” he explains, smiling.

  “She seemed like poison because I’d just gotten out of the last relationship that I didn’t even want to be in,” says Kurt. “I was determined to be a bachelor for a few months. I just had to be. But I knew that I liked Courtney so much right away that it was a really hard struggle to stay away from her for so many months. It was harder than shit. During that time that I attempted to be a bachelor and sow my oats and live the bachelor rock and roll lifestyle, I didn’t end up fucking anybody or having a good time at all.” He decided to concentrate on making the album.

  They recorded in May and June of 1991 at Sound City Studios in suburban Van Nuys, California. The studio had seen better days in the seventies, when Fleetwood Mac had recorded Rumours there. Other previous clients included Ronnie James Dio, Tom Petty, Foreigner, the Jackson 5, Rick Springfield, Crazy Horse, Ratt, and even Kurt’s childhood hero, Evel Knievel. It had a big drum room, a great old Neve mixing board, and the rates were reasonable. The original budget was about sixty-five thousand dollars including Butch Vig’s services—a mere pittance in major label terms. For that amount of money, they could afford to scrap the whole thing if it didn’t work out and start all over again.

  Kurt gives part of the credit for the quality of the album to the fact that they were back in sunny L.A. “It was really nice to all of a sudden find yourself in a totally warm, tropical climate,” he says. “I don’t think it would have turned out nearly as well if we did it in Washington.”

  Vig would make them comfortable by just hanging with them in the studio and not pushing them into the recording booth as soon as they walked through the door. And he tried to keep them out of the control room.

  They’d work eight to ten hours a day, sometimes blowing off steam by playing covers of old seventies favorites such as Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith—the musical equivalent of comfort food.

  Dave hit the drums so hard that they had to change the heads every other song. Although they’re played with vastly more power and precision, Dave’s drum parts on songs that appeared on the Smart sessions are very close to what Chad had played. “Chad wasn’t the most solid drummer and he wasn’t the most consistent drummer but he came up with really really cool stuff,” Dave says. “I like the way he plays—the stuff on Bleach, it’s almost drunken.”

  Kurt’s punk ethic was even stronger than Vig’s, apparently, because Kurt would often refuse to do a second take. Vig had to figure out how to get him to do a second take and often would roll tape even when Kurt was warming up, just in case he got something usable.

  Producer Butch Vig tuning Dave’s drums during the Nevermind sessions.

  Kurt had worked out his vocals so well that they barely varied in phrasing and intensity from one take to the next, so Vig would often take advantage of this consistency and mix the two takes together, especially on choruses for that extra sing-along effect. (That’s Dave singing the high harmonies on “In Bloom,” however. He had trouble hitting those stratospheric notes, but if he’d blow a take, he’d just take a drag on his cigarette and try again. Many takes later, Vig got what he wanted.)

  With instrumental takes, if they didn’t get something right away, they’d just move onto something else—after two or three tries, it was often a matter of diminishing returns. “I wanted him to double his guitars on some of the songs, especially on choruses,” says Vig, “and he didn’t really want to do that. My logic was, ‘When you guys play live, it’s just so incredibly loud and intense—it’s larger than life and I’m trying to use some of these things I know in the studio to make you guys come across that way on record.’ A lot of times, he’d go, ‘I don’t feel like doing that right now,’ but for the most part, when I asked him to do stuff, he’d eventually do it. There weren’t any major arguments or anything, but I could tell when I was pushing him a little far and he didn’t want to do something. A couple of times, he just put his guitar down or walked away from the mike and said, ‘I don’t want to do it anymore.’ And I knew I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him.”

  On “Territorial
Pissings,” Kurt ignored Vig’s protests and plugged his guitar directly into the mixing board—no amplifier—in the style of countless low-budget punk records of the late seventies and early eighties. The song was recorded in one take. In the intro, Chris sang a bit of the chorus to the Youngbloods’ altruistic late sixties hippie hit, “Get Together.” “They just said ‘Sing something,’ ” says Chris, “so I did it in one take. It just kind of happened. I wanted to put some kind of corny hippie idealism in it. But it wasn’t really that thought into. I like that Youngbloods song.

  “Maybe it was about lost ideals,” Chris says. “Like, what happened to those ideals? ‘Everybody get together, try to love one another.’ And then there’s ‘Territorial Pissings.’ Maybe some baby boomer will hear that and wonder, ‘Hey, what happened to those ideals?’ ”

  Vig says that “Something in the Way”—written just a week before it was recorded—was probably the most difficult song on the album to record. They tried it a few times with the rest of the band playing along, but it didn’t work. Finally, Vig called Kurt into the control room and asked how he thought the song should go. Kurt sat down on the couch with his nylon-string acoustic guitar and sang the song in a barely audible whisper. “Stay right there,” Vig said as he dashed out to the office and told them to turn off every phone and every fan and every other machine in the whole place. Vig recorded the song that way, with the levels cranked up as high as they could go to catch Kurt’s voice—it’s so quiet that you can practically hear Kurt’s tongue sliding over his teeth as he sings. Later, they added bass, more vocals, and drums. “We had to keep yelling at Dave to play wimpy,” says Vig. “He’d start playing the song lightly and halfway through the first verse he’d be playing pretty hard. His natural inclination is to attack the drum kit. He finally got it, but I think it almost killed him to just tap his way through.”

  Some of the lyrics were completely finished, but many others weren’t, and Kurt would ask the others which line they liked best—sometimes, the lines would give the song widely different meanings, like when “Pay to Play” became “Stay Away.” He’d also try different melodies.

  Just a few weeks before recording was to start, Kurt showed a riff to the band and they jammed on it for the better part of an hour, playing with dynamics and different arrangements until it became a song, which Kurt titled “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Chris didn’t especially like the song at first. “It was just one of the songs we did for the record,” Chris says. “I remember when we first did it, it was nothing special. But after it was recorded, I thought, ‘Hey, this is really good. It really rocks.’ ” Right away, both Chris and Kurt heard one of their influences in the song. “The Pixies,” says Chris. “We saw it right away. Both of us said, ‘This really sounds like the Pixies. People are really going to nail us for it.’ ”

  Although they almost threw away the song, no one ever did nail them for sounding like the Pixies, although much comment was later made that the song bore more than a passing resemblance to Boston’s 1976 hit “More Than a Feeling.”

  Once Chris and Dave had finished their basic tracks—which was a matter of days—they were done. Kurt was kept busy doing vocals, playing guitar overdubs, and writing lyrics, sometimes delaying production for precious hours until he found the right words. Kurt wrote most of the words for “On a Plain” minutes before he sang them. The “Don’t quote me on that” line came from a dumb little running joke they had that week. “Someone would say something like ‘Where’s the mayonnaise?’ ” Dave recalls, “and someone else would answer, ‘It’s in the fridge, but don’t quote me on that.’ ”

  It was more important to Vig that Kurt sing the songs with conviction rather than good diction. That wasn’t a problem, however—once Kurt decided on finished lyrics, he sang so hard that he could often do only one or two vocals before his voice gave out and he’d be done for the day. His voice audibly goes to pieces on “Territorial Pissings.”

  Kurt didn’t know any dealers in L.A., so instead of doing heroin, he drank codeine cough syrup constantly during the sessions, not to mention a half of a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. He wanted the cough syrup for the opiate, but it also helped preserve his voice. Unfortunately, he ran out of it by the time he was to start doing vocal tracks. There were a few days when he could do only one or two takes before his throat gave out entirely, which upset Kurt a lot. (He still takes cough syrup on tour for his chronic bronchitis. “It’s the only thing that saves me,” Kurt claims.)

  Ten minutes and three seconds after the last chord of “Something in the Way” faded away came a surprise track. Although it never had an official name other than perhaps “The Noise Jam,” the track has come to be known as “Endless, Nameless.” They’d been playing variations on “Endless, Nameless” for months before the Nevermind sessions. At the end of practice, Kurt would tune his guitar way down and they’d just bang away, making caterwauling feedback noise and occasionally drifting into the song’s main riff.

  The guitar Kurt smashed during “Endless, Nameless.”

  When the session for “Lithium” began going awry, Kurt asked Vig to keep the tape rolling while the band tried an experiment. He went out into the studio and began flailing his guitar and screaming into a microphone as the band followed suit. Even Kurt isn’t sure what’s he’s screaming, but he believes it’s along the lines of “I think I can, I know I can.” Audible on the track (right around 19:32 on the CD) is the sound of Kurt smashing his guitar. Afterward, they realized that was the only left-handed guitar he had that fit the track, so the sessions were over for the day. They did a quick mix of the song and figured they’d find a place for it. Due to a technical error, “Endless, Nameless” didn’t make the initial pressing of Nevermind.

  The ten minutes of silence after “Something in the Way” was the band’s way of playing with the new CD format, just like the Beatles put inscrutable messages in the run-out groove of Sgt. Pepper or put “Her Majesty” at the end of Abbey Road. Kurt had done something similar before. When he and his buddy Jesse Reed shared their studio apartment back in Aberdeen, Kurt took a ninety-minute blank cassette tape, wound it forward to nearly the end and recorded himself saying in a scary voice, “Jesse … Jesse … I’m coming to get yoooooo …” As they were getting ready to go to bed he popped the tape into the stereo, hit “play” and turned the volume down low. Forty minutes later, a voice said “Jesse …” and Reed sat up startled. “Hey, did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Kurt replied, smirking to himself in the dark.

  One night during the sessions, Chris got picked up on a driving while intoxicated charge in Los Angeles. He guzzled the last bit of liquor just as the cop was walking toward his car. With no money in their pockets, Kurt and Dave walked several miles back home, while the police took Chris to the city jail and then the county jail. When he was put in the holding tank, he tried to look as tough as he could so no one would hassle him. “There was fifty guys crammed in this cell,” Chris says. “You open the cell door and boom—the heat hits you from all the people in there.”

  Immediately, a small, dapper black man with a withered arm and an unlit cigarette strode up to Chris and rasped, “Heymanyougotanymatches?”

  “What?”

  “Yougotanymatches?”

  “No,” Chris replied.

  “There’s like fifty guys in there with these cigarettes and nobody has a fuckin’ match!” Chris chuckles. “It was totally quiet, except when somebody would walk in and that little guy would say, ‘Yougotanymatches?’ Finally this guy walked in with matches and they all just lit up like crazy, smoke is filling the room.”

  After sixteen hours in stir, Chris was bailed out by John Silva. Chris eventually got off with a fine and had to attend a series of seminars where victims of drunk drivers told their horrific stories.

  Vig had started to sense something was going to happen with the record. All sorts of people had somehow gotten wind of the project and were asking him for tapes.


  Kurt had three or four untitled songs and song fragments that were very melodic and not as heavy as most of the other material. A&R executive Gary Gersh remembers a conversation he had with Kurt where “We thought, let’s not put it on this record because we don’t want to make this record look like—they weren’t finished, first of all—but the jump from an independent label to a major was like some big huge commercial sell-out or something,” Gersh says. “Let’s make the artistic jump as gradual as you feel comfortable with.” Which is A&R-speak for “It’s going to look like you’re selling out if you put these pop songs on the record.” So, once again, as he had on Bleach, Kurt had to adjust his recordings to the tastes of the marketplace.

  Although Gersh says he “always” stopped by the studio and was “a little bit therapist, a little bit referee,” both Chris and Kurt say he barely showed up at all. In fact, Dave got so worried that Gersh wasn’t around that he thought Gersh had lost his enthusiasm for the project. He even went so far as to place a worried phone call to John Silva, who assured him that most bands would kill for such a handsoff A&R person.

  By everyone else’s account, Gersh would often stop by the studio after the band had gone home, and Vig would play him rough mixes. Astutely, Gersh had chosen not to meddle, and by doing so, he had built up enough credibility with the band that when he had to step in and take charge at a certain very delicate moment in the recording, the band respected his ideas.

  Vig was going to mix the record, too, but because the recording had gone behind schedule, the four or five days that were supposed to elapse between recording and mixing so that Vig and the band could rest their ears had evaporated. Vig finished recording and went straight into mixing, but the mixes didn’t turn out well—they were flat and lacked power, especially in the drums.