Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  At one point during the shoot Bayer shouted, “All right, I’m going to lose my audience right now if everybody doesn’t shut up!” And everybody in the audience went, “Oooooo,” openly laughing at Bayer and heckling him. “It was just like we were in school,” says Kurt, smiling. “He was the mean teacher.”

  “But by the end of the day,” Kurt says, a mischievous sparkle in his eye, “we were having fun.”

  Kurt wanted everyone to come down from the bleachers and mosh. Bayer didn’t like the idea but Kurt eventually talked him into it. And anarchy did eventually reign on the set. “Nobody knock anything over until I tell you because I want to get good close-up shots of it,” Bayer told the assembled crowd, which had gathered after the band had announced just the day before on KXLU, a local college radio station, that they needed an audience for their video shoot. But after hours and hours of sitting around just watching the tedious goings-on, the audience was ready to explode. When they finally got to come down out of the bleachers, everybody started flipping out and knocking things over and running amok. People were mobbing Kurt and stealing Chris’s guitar and Dave’s cymbals. “Once the kids came out dancing they just said ‘Fuck you,’ because they were so tired of his shit throughout the day,” Kurt says. The video’s sense of joyous rebellion was for real.

  Chris was having fun the whole time. He had brought a liter of Jim Beam to the set and had that and some pot with his friends during the lengthy waits between takes. Halfway through the shoot he passed out, then woke up just in time for the next take.

  Kurt didn’t like the edit Bayer had done, so he personally oversaw a new cut of the video. Over Bayer’s protests, he added the next-to-last shot, a close-up of Kurt’s face. It was a brilliant move—throughout the video, Kurt had come off as an intense but shy character, hiding behind his hair. It amounted to a tease, and the close-up was the payoff—he was not bad-looking (if he would only wash his hair).

  For all its “alternative” overtones, “Teen Spirit” has all the classic elements of video: pretty girls in revealing clothes, kids dancing the latest dance and flaunting the latest fashions, the requisite dry-ice fog, guys with long hair playing guitars—kids getting off on kids’ music. The point was that for the first time, the trappings were updated for a new generation—the flannel shirts, the moshing, the tattoos and anarchy symbols. The correlation with Nirvana’s music—not stylistically trailblazing yet powerful and classic—is clear.

  Then came the infamous Nevermind release party, September 13, 1991, at Seattle’s trendy Re-bar club. The band was told it would be a low-key affair and that they could invite their friends. They arrived to find the walls of the club plastered with Nirvana posters. They had to schmooze with all kinds of dull music biz types and endure hearing their album played twice in a row. Kurt especially found all the attention embarrassing, especially in front of his Olympia friends.

  Because of Washington state’s harsh alcohol laws, there wasn’t any hard liquor available, so someone smuggled in a half gallon bottle of whiskey and hid it in the photo booth, where those in the know retired for a quick snort of Jim Beam. Soon everyone was quite plowed. They got DJ Bruce Pavitt to ditch Nevermind and play the trashiest new wave and disco music they could find. After the band finished ripping all the posters off the walls, Chris heaved a tamale at Kurt and Dylan Carlson. Kurt remembers retaliating with a salvo of guacamole. (“Actually, it was a Green Goddess herb dip,” corrects Nirvana fan club president Nils Bernstein, who catered the party.) Soon, food was flying everywhere, with no regard for the industry geeks whose suits were getting splattered with food. And that was when Nirvana got kicked out of their own record release party.

  They all piled into a Cadillac that Geffen/DGC Northwest promo woman Susie Tennant had rented for the occasion and the party raged on into the wee hours of the morning at her house. As everyone was leaving, Bruce Pavitt was down on the street, sitting on the curb and puking into the gutter as he waited for a cab. Kurt took this opportunity to lean out the window and pelt him with eggs.

  Everyone knew they had a good album, but the plan was that if the management worked really, really hard and the label worked really, really hard and the band worked really, really hard, then maybe—just maybe—they could have a gold record by September of 1992.

  The band got an inkling of things to come at an in-store appearance at Beehive Records in Seattle’s University District. The band played a set to a packed house and afterward were besieged by autograph seekers. “There were all these weird, fawning people,” recalls Dylan Carlson, who happened to work there. “These three guys from the Green River Community College radio station, Kurt was talking to them and telling them about Bikini Kill and how they should listen to them. These three guys didn’t want to hear that. They just wanted to talk to Kurt and to touch Kurt and get an autograph.” Then a couple of geeks Kurt remembered from Montesano showed up. “I realized that if people you went to high school with—especially in Montesano—were aware that I was a rock star in Seattle, then it was getting kind of big,” Kurt says. Afterward, Chris, Kurt, Dave, and a small group of friends retreated to a bar and got promptly and thoroughly trashed.

  Then it was off to Toronto to begin a headlining tour, which kicked off September 20, four days before Nevermind was released. Along for the ride on different legs of the tour were opening bands the Melvins on the East Coast and Canada, Das Damen and Urge Overkill in the south and Midwest and Sister Double Happiness on the West Coast. For the occasion, Kurt put a sticker on his guitar that read “VANDALISM: BEAUTIFUL AS A ROCK IN A COP’S FACE” (“Corn on the cops! Corn on the cops!”).

  As he watched Kurt get off the plane, tour manager Monty Lee Wilkes remembers thinking to himself, “There’s something not right about this guy.”

  And it’s very likely that Kurt thought the same. Right off the bat, Wilkes’s “rock dude” poodle haircut marked him as something of an outsider. “I don’t fit into that whole scene,” Wilkes says. “I’m organized, I’m clean, I wear clean clothes every day, I take a bath once a day. They don’t like me.”

  Chris rocking the Beehive record store. Looking on are Susie Tennant (white shorts) and Dylan Carlson (to her left). (© Charles Peterson)

  There seems to be little doubt that the guys in the band delighted in giving Wilkes a hard time. “Everything you fix,” says Wilkes, “a guy like Kurt goes and deliberately unfixes it because he’s a cutie pie, you know?” The running joke among the crew was to see whether Wilkes was wearing the same shirt he was the previous day, because that meant he’d been up all night taking care of all the screw-ups the band had created. Furthermore, the beleaguered Wilkes was not only the tour manager of an extremely chaotic tour, he was also the tour accountant and production manager, besides being the soundman for the first half of the tour and the lighting designer for the second. “Toward the end of that tour,” he says, “I was throwing up blood from being stressed out.”

  Wilkes carried around a road case which unfolded into a portable office, complete with Macintosh desktop and laptop computers, fax, modem, printer (“always loaded with paper,” he boasts), office supplies, books, forms, and a telephone. Wilkes denies claims of color-coded paper clips. “Funny joke,” he sneers. “That’s completely untrue.” He does, however, cop to the color-coded pens. “I’m a very organized person,” he explains.

  One of the things that had made Kurt and Chris unhappy with Sub Pop was the fact they did only a handful of interviews the whole time they were on the label. They mentioned this to the Geffen/DGC publicity department, who proceeded to arrange up to a half-dozen interviews a day for each member of the band while they were on tour. After two months of journalists asking things like “Why did you sign to a major?” or “Why did you put a baby on the cover of the record?” it became a grind.

  “We did so many interviews blindly, just walking into radio stations and doing unnecessary interviews with metal magazines, anything,” says Kurt. “It was a nice education to
make us realize we have to know what magazine we’re doing an interview for before we just blindly do it.” Two months later, all those magazines came out at once, producing a gigantic Nirvana media blitz. “We thought that most of these interviews would just die off into obscurity,” Kurt says. “We thought we needed to do all these interviews to maybe sell a hundred thousand records.”

  They’d ferret out which interviewers were on the ball by seeing who fell for the bogus stories about Kurt and Chris meeting in arts and crafts class. Once they found a sucker, they’d go to town.

  Kurt and Dave roomed together during the tour and one night, Dave was in bed watching TV when he heard Kurt giggling and giggling in the bathroom. Finally, Dave asked, “What are you doing?” Kurt had shaved off all of his goatee except for the mustache. When he walked out of the bathroom to show Dave, he was still giggling, but he stopped long enough to share the joke. “I look like my father!”

  Early in the tour, an MTV News crew showed up to do a shoot on the band before soundcheck in a bar adjacent to the Axis club in Boston. To help things along, someone had provided a Twister game and a can of Crisco vegetable shortening. Chris got into it the most, stripping down to his jockey shorts (dark blue) and slathering himself with the Crisco before starting the game. They had just started when Chris suddenly pulled up the Twister board and threw it away, then wiped the grease off his body with an American flag that happened to be hanging on a nearby wall—some of the gook had found its way down the crack of his butt and so he wiped it from there, too. An ex-Marine and his beefy buddies who happened to be looking on took exception to Chris’s taste in toilet paper and began screaming at him and Chris had to be escorted out of the club.

  Kurt and Chris at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey. (© Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock)

  On that day, September 24, 1991, Nevermind was released and 46,251 copies were shipped to stores around the country.

  After a Pittsburgh show, there was a dispute about T-shirt sales with the promoter. The band trashed their dressing room—nothing new—and left. Later, in the wee hours of the morning, two agents of the city arson squad banged on Monty Lee Wilkes’s door and began questioning him. It seems someone had set a couch on fire backstage at the club and they seemed to think a member of Nirvana bad done it. After a long conversation, Wilkes convinced the agents that the band had left the club by the time the fire was set. “It gave me a whole new outlook on the whole goddamn thing and it made me wonder just what the fuck I’d gotten myself into,” says Wilkes.

  After a show at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, the band staged a little mutiny. They were supposed to drive to Atlanta so they could do a press day, but instead refused Wilkes’s pleas and partied at R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck’s house all night. Of course, it was Wilkes who got the brunt of John Silva’s wrath.

  By this time, the tour had picked up opening band Urge Overkill, a much beloved indie band from Chicago. The guys in Urge Overkill were blown away by the force of Nirvana’s music, but also by their unstated yet clear message. “It was fuck the government, fuck the status quo and the stupid people,” says the band’s Ed “King” Roeser. “And you can extend the whole philosophy to antiracism, antisexism, antifascism, anticensorship, etc. Somehow that message got across to the people at these shows.”

  Courtney heard from the manager of the 40 Watt Club that Kurt couldn’t stop talking about her. This was too good to believe. So she began calling Dave on tour. When they finished talking, she’d ask to speak to Kurt. After a couple of days, they began to really hit it off and eventually, Courtney wouldn’t even bother talking to Dave first.

  Monitor man and drum tech Miles Kennedy was astounded by the force of Dave’s playing. “Just by playing so hard, he’d break drum thrones,” he says. “There were just piles of sawdust on the drum riser from his drumsticks. He was just an animal.” Dave’s drum set lasted about halfway through the tour, until an October 12 gig at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago when the band destroyed it after a particularly good set. “There was nothing left any bigger than a six-inch circle of wood from the kick drum,” says Wilkes.

  Kurt audience-surfing at the Marquee in New York. (© Kristin Callahan/London Features)

  Dave at the Marquee. (© Kristin Callahan/London Features)

  “That’s just what happened when they got so much energy and emotion worked up playing their set that it was the only way they could come to a good close,” says Miles Kennedy.

  It also happened to be the day that Nevermind debuted on the Billboard album charts at a respectable #144.

  That night, Courtney showed up at a party after the gig. Legend has it that she and Kurt had sex up against the bar. “God,” Kurt says with a laugh, “that’s so disgusting. Right—everyone was around in a circle, watching us fuck. You’ve got to put it in the book that we didn’t fuck.” They did kiss for the first time and Courtney ran out to a pay phone to tell a friend in L.A. The rest of the night, they wrestled on the floor and threw glasses at each other. Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents. They got kicked out of the place twice.

  Dave was asleep by the time Kurt and Courtney shambled drunkenly into Kurt and Dave’s hotel room and started making loud and passionate love on the bed next to Dave’s. “I tried to ignore it but I couldn’t,” Dave says. “I had. To leave. The room.” He wound up knocking on soundman Craig Montgomery’s door and sleeping there for the night.

  Nevermind had begun blowing out of the stores immediately, but out on the road, no one in the band really realized what was going on. Weeks went by before someone told Kurt that the album was selling and MTV was playing “Teen Spirit” constantly. Kurt remembers an almost out of body experience when he first saw himself on television. “Jeez, do I really belong there?” he thought to himself. “I just looked so familiar to myself,” he says.

  As the tour wound through places like Providence and Memphis and St. Louis, gradually, the promo people who would show up backstage at shows changed from the alternative marketing people to AOR (Album Oriented Rock) and even CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio, or Top 40). Radio was picking up in a big way and MTV was playing “Teen Spirit” during the day—not just on the channel’s alternative ghetto, 120 Minutes. The channel had even begun running the words to “Teen Spirit” across the screen as the video played.

  Meanwhile, a Christian-oriented L.A. band that had been called Nirvana since 1983 had issued cease-and-desist orders to radio and TV stations who were playing Nirvana’s music and videos. Both bands can use the name. When Nirvana sued the local band for two million dollars for issuing the order, the matter came before a federal court in L.A. in mid-October. The L.A. Nirvana agreed to sell its trademark to Nirvana for fifty thousand dollars and to retract the cease-and-desist order.

  With each copy of Nevermind sold, the band began to have less of an idea of who their audience was. With the college/indie crowd, they had a pretty good clue—people who were fairly intelligent, politically progressive, nonsexist, non-macho, and very much musically discerning. Now their shows were filling with jock numbskulls, frat boys, and metal kids. Their skyrocketing sales meant only one thing to Kurt, Chris, and Dave—they were losing their community.

  The band was less then thrilled with their newfound audience, and they weren’t shy about letting anyone know. As Chris told Rolling Stone, “When we went to make this record, I had such a feeling of us versus them. All those people waving the flag and being brainwashed. I really hated them. And all of a sudden, they’re all buying our record, and I just think, ‘You don’t get it at all.’ ”

  “I found myself being overly obnoxious during the Nevermind tour because I noticed that there were more average people coming into our shows and I didn’t want them there,” Kurt says. “They started to get on my nerves.”

  Accordingly, instrument-smashing reached an all-time high, and not just because they could finally afford it. “We were feeling so weird because we were being
treated like kings,” says Kurt, “so we had to destroy everything.

  “I was obnoxious and showing my weenie and acting like a fag and dancing around and wearing dresses and just being drunk,” Kurt continues. “I would say things like ‘All right! Frat rock! Look at all these frat geeks out here!’ I’m usually not very vocal on stage, but during that tour, I was a jerk. We were out of control.”

  Kurt’s particular high point came at an October 19 show at the Trees club in Dallas. His bronchitis has been acting up for the past week and he was quite ill. That day, a doctor visited the hotel and gave Kurt some potent antibiotic shots, but neglected to warn him not to drink that night. “I started drinking and I just felt insane,” he says, “like I did a whole bunch of speed or something. I just wasn’t very rational at all.”

  Kurt had been complaining all along the tour that he couldn’t hear himself in the monitors, but no one seemed to be doing anything about it. He was losing his voice and it made performing miserable. “That night I just decided to do something about it,” Kurt says. “I decided to throw a star fit.”

  The club was alarmingly overcrowded; people could barely breathe, let alone move. In the middle of a song, Kurt suddenly took off his guitar and started tomahawking the monitor board by the side of the stage. He broke his favorite Mustang guitar, but he also broke the monitor board. After a long delay as the crowd chanted “bullSHIT! bullSHIT!” they got the monitor to work again through one speaker and the band resumed the set.

  Unfortunately, the monitor system belonged to the best friend of one of the bouncers at the show, a heavily tattooed, mohawked gentleman with the regulation butt-crack peering above the back of his jeans. During “Love Buzz” Kurt jumped into the audience and although the bouncer made it seem as if he was trying to pull Kurt out of the audience he was actually holding him by the hair and hitting him. “I decided to get one good blow in before he beat me up after the show,” Kurt says. “So I smacked him in the face with my guitar. He got a big gash on his forehead.” The bouncer punched Kurt in the back of the head while his back was turned and Kurt crumpled; then he kicked him while he was down. In a flash, Dave vaulted over the front of his drum set; two roadies held the bouncer, rivulets of blood streaming down his face, while Chris stood between him and Kurt and told him to cool out.