Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  Eventually, the band came back and played another half-hour. Someone had placed a wooden loading palette over the monitor board in case Kurt got any more wild ideas.

  After the show, the bouncer was waiting outside for the band with a couple of his friends. “They all happened to be wearing Carcass and S.O.D. T-shirts,” Kurt says, “like speed metal meatheads.” “He was totally violent and macho,” Kurt continues. “He was screaming, beet red with blood all over himself. ‘I’m gonna kill you!’ ” The band took off in a cab, only to get caught in a traffic jam right in front of the club, like some nightmare version of A Hard Day’s Night. The bouncer and his friends began thumping on the cab and eventually one of them kicked in a window and tried to grab Kurt just as the cab pulled away.

  A little later, the cabdriver pulled over, took a joint down from his sun visor, and they all took a few tokes to calm down.

  In the meantime, Nevermind had jumped thirty-five places to #109.

  Courtney had been popping up sporadically along the way. She seemed to have a positive influence on Kurt’s mood. Even the crew noticed it. “I think that helped him deal with it a lot,” says Miles Kennedy. “I think it gave him someone to talk to and someone to deal with it with—someone who wasn’t in the band or the crew.”

  As the tour wore on, the van became more and more crammed with all manner of broken equipment and accumulated garbage. After a while, there was barely any room for people. During one drive, Wilkes remembers being forced to sit on the edge of a seat for hours on end. “I look in the back and there’s Courtney and Kurt,” says Wilkes, “curled up amid empty bags of chips and spilled beers and everything else.”

  “It was pathetic.”

  ***

  On the morning of October 25, Kurt and Chris taped an interview for MTV’s heavy metal show, “Headbanger’s Ball,” where “Teen Spirit” was the “#5 Skullcrusher of the Week.” Kurt wasn’t feeling too chipper—he hadn’t had much sleep the night before and he was hung over as well. “I was sleeping just seconds before we aired,” he explains. “Courtney and I had just stayed up all night drinking and fucking, so I had about two hours of sleep. It was during our romantic period.”

  Chris wore his usual duds—including nerdy deck sneakers—but Kurt donned a striking yellow organza dress and dark sunglasses. Although Chris did most of the talking, it was hard to take one’s eyes off Kurt. “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown,” Kurt explained. “Chris wouldn’t wear his tux. He didn’t give me a corsage, either.”

  “At least I asked you out,” Chris replied just a tad too effeminately, enough to prompt a nervous little laugh from metalhead host Riki Rachtman. “This thing has gotten pretty wild,” Rachtman said, recovering nicely. “Everywhere you go, in all different types of the music scene, people really seem to be getting into Nirvana.”

  “Everyone wants to be hip,” Kurt cracked softly.

  “Maybe they like the record,” Chris offered.

  By the time they got to the October 29 show in Portland, Susie Tennant took the band aside and told them, “Congratulations! Your record went gold today!” No one in the band cared all that much. “I didn’t give a shit, really,” Chris says. “Yeah, I was happy about it. It was pretty cool. It was kind of neat. But I don’t give a shit about some kind of achievement like that. It’s cool—I guess.”

  Monty Lee Wilkes says he had turned down a lucrative tour with another band after Nirvana invited him to go on their upcoming European tour. “We really want you to go, man,” Wilkes says Chris told him. “You’re the best road manager we’ve ever had and we want to keep you forever.” Then, the night of the Portland show, three days before they were to leave for Europe, Wilkes was told he wouldn’t be going.

  There was no love lost there. “Chris is basically a drunken hippie,” says Wilkes. “Kurt, he just doesn’t say much—never did say much unless he wanted something.” Wilkes feels a lot kindlier toward Dave, though. “Dave is the greatest,” he says. “I just totally dig Dave. Great fuckin’ guy, great guy.”

  A legendary homecoming show on Halloween at the Paramount in Seattle was filmed by DGC. Parts of it can be seen in the “Lithium” video and it may one day be edited into a full-length film. Opening were Mudhoney and Tobi Vail’s band, Bikini Kill, who hit the stage draped in lingerie, with words like “slut” and “whore” written all over their bodies.

  The band got one day’s rest before setting off for a European tour on November 2, the day that Nevermind first entered the Top 40 at #35. The record was now selling at an amazing rate, certainly far exceeding the expectations of anyone at Geffen/DGC or Gold Mountain.

  They played their first date of the European leg of the Nevermind tour at the Bierkeller in Bristol, England.

  Every time they’d check into a hotel room, they’d switch on the TV and see the “Teen Spirit” video. The radio seemingly played nothing but “Teen Spirit.” The press had gotten out of hand—they were doing between ten and fifteen interviews a day and every show was sold out. In Italy, a thousand kids who couldn’t get a ticket simply rushed the doors and barged their way in.

  At every step of the way, the shows were dangerously oversold, the stage cluttered with TV crews pointing cameras in Kurt’s face as he tried to sing. “We resented it, so we turned into assholes,” says Kurt. “We got drunk a lot and wrecked more equipment than we needed to. We just decided to be real abusive pricks and give interviewers a hard time. We weren’t taking it seriously. We felt we needed to start averting the whole thing before it got out of hand. We wanted to make life miserable for people.”

  And after all, life was miserable for them, too. To begin with, the tour bus wasn’t a sleeper; it was a sightseeing bus. There were no bunks, just seats, and the oversized windows let in light and noise. Their driver only made matters worse. In Europe, bus drivers must take breaks after a certain amount of time or distance, as measured by a device called a tachograph. The driver was very strict about this, earning him the nickname Tacho Bill. Tacho Bill would also get lost a lot, and soundman Craig Montgomery often wound up doing the navigating. Meanwhile, Bill would tap the accelerator instead of just cruising, so the bus lurched nauseatingly throughout the month-long tour.

  For comic relief on the bus, they’d play a legendary prank phone call tape in which a man with a piercing New York accent verbally abuses everyone from florists to auto mechanics. After a while, it became the constant in joke of the tour, and guests would be shocked as the members of the tour entourage would call each other “jerky” and “fuckface” for no apparent reason.

  Touring in Europe is always more exhausting because of the disorienting and rapid-fire changes in time zones, food, and language, not to mention the fact that bands have to deal with a different record company in every country. And there’s more media—with every new country came a whole new set of TV stations, newspapers, and magazines. Often, the band couldn’t refuse to do press because that would mean that, for instance, the entire nation of Denmark wouldn’t have a television interview with Nirvana.

  And sometimes it was just a matter of temperament. “This was a punk rock band,” Danny Goldberg of Gold Mountain observes. “This was not a band of choirboys. Their moodiness got covered by the press this time, but it was nothing new.”

  Back in the States, Nirvanamania was rampant. The album was ascending the Billboard chart by leaps and bounds, going from #35 to #17 to #9 (Top 10!) to #4 and hovering around the Top 10 throughout most of November and December. People were flocking to the stores to buy it, critics debated the ambiguities and profundities of Kurt’s lyrics, the underground scene began to talk of an indie revolution, you couldn’t switch on MTV without seeing the “Teen Spirit” video, you couldn’t go anywhere in Seattle without overhearing a conversation about the band’s success, and everywhere, anyone who cared a whit about rock and roll was pondering what it all meant.

  Kurt couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge to himself what the hubbub wa
s all about. “Obviously, I wouldn’t want to allow my ego to admit that we’re that great of a band, that we deserve that much attention, but I knew that it was better than 99 percent of anything else on a commercial level,” he says. “I knew we were a hundred times better than fucking Guns n’ Roses or Whitesnake or any of that shit. It just made me feel stupid because there are so many other bands in the underground that are as good or better than we are and we’re the only ones getting any attention. It just made me feel sorry for everybody that was freaking out about it because it just seemed sad that we’re one of the only bands like us that are being exposed to the mainstream.”

  Then they hit on the idea of using their fame to promote bands that they thought were just as deserving. “We were pretty excited about it at first—we actually thought we could make a dent,” says Kurt. “But the only thing that’s happened since we became popular is the Lemonheads, a fucking alternative cover band, are now one of David Letterman’s favorite groups.”

  Actually, many bands who have appeared in Nirvana’s T-shirt collection have at least landed major label contracts: Flipper, Daniel Johnston, Eugenius, the Melvins, Wool, and Shonen Knife, among others. “But it’s not so the bands can get signed,” Kurt says. “It’s so some idiot out in suburbia will try to look for their album.”

  In Mezzago, near Milan, Shelli and Urge Overkill’s Ed “King” Roeser had figured out a way to break into the hotel wine cellar by taking the service elevator. “They came up with a case of all these different kinds of wine and we drank just about every bottle,” Urge’s Nash Kato recalls. “The hotel, the next morning, it was like a vomitorium. You could hear it up and down the hall. I went into Chris and Shelli’s room and they were hurling together, like as man and wife.”

  A couple of days later, Nevermind went platinum in the United States. Says Chris, “It goes platinum and we’re all over MTV and it’s like weird, like, now what? Where do we go from here? Are we going to be Led Zeppelin and the big band of the nineties or are we just going to fall apart or what?”

  Since both were on tour in Europe at the same time, Kurt and Courtney renewed their telephone romance. “That’s when we started really falling in love—on the phone,” says Kurt. “We called each other almost every night and faxed each other every other day. I had like a three thousand dollar phone bill.” Courtney skipped out on a Hole show just to hang out with Kurt in Amsterdam.

  Despite the riot of excitement going on in Nirvana’s honor, Kurt still felt he led a humdrum existence and that Courtney was a way out. “Initially, I just wanted to add some excitement in my life,” says Kurt. “I’d never met anyone so outspoken and charismatic. It seems like she is a magnet for exciting things to happen. If I just happened to walk down the street with her, someone might attack us with a knife for no reason, just because she seems like the kind of person that attracts things like that. And I just wanted to piss people off, basically.”

  Kurt would often get bored on tour. “The highlight of the tour usually ends up with Chris being really drunk and obnoxious and standing on a table and taking his clothes off,” Kurt says. “Or we’ll shoot off a fire extinguisher or something like that. I just wanted to do something that was really exciting. I wanted to try to start having an exciting life. I figured Courtney was the best option. I knew that there wouldn’t be a single person in the Nirvana camp that would approve of it. Because they’re all so fucking boring. Their lives are so normal. I hate to say it, but that’s just the way I feel. Everyone that I know that we work with, there’s not much punk rock going on. There’s no one willing to take risks, like ‘let’s just take off.’ It’s always such a strict regimen—‘Let’s get to the show, let’s play, let’s eat dinner and go to sleep.’ I just got tired of it.”

  Courtney suited Kurt’s image of himself as the “black sheep” of the band. “I was going off with Courtney and we were scoring drugs and we were fucking up against a wall outside and stuff and causing scenes just to do it,” he says. “It was fun to be with someone who would stand up all of a sudden and smash a glass on the table and scream at me and throw me down. It was just really fun.”

  A powerful personality such as Courtney had an equally powerful effect on the entourage. “I think everyone was taken aback a bit at first,” says tour manager Alex Macleod, chuckling. “She would appear and it was like a tornado coming. Everyone was tired and laid back and she would arrive and she would talk your ears off—she had so much energy, God knows how she did it. But she was good fun. She was amusing.”

  Dave, who is not a “morning person,” began rooming with Macleod. But as the tour went on, Macleod acted more and more annoyed at Dave. Finally Dave couldn’t stand it anymore and confronted him.

  “What’s your problem? What’s wrong?” Dave asked.

  “Fuck you!” Macleod shot back.

  Apparently, whenever Macleod would try to wake Dave up in the morning, Dave would yell in his sleep, “FUCK YOU! LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! THIS IS BULLSHIT!” then settle peacefully back into his pillow. Later, he’d go down to breakfast and wonder why Macleod was scowling at him.

  The stress of the tour began taking its toll and by Thanksgiving, the band was starting to send S.O.S. calls to John Silva at Gold Mountain. “We were all tired,” Chris says. “I’d be drunk. I got on this kick where I’d drink about three bottles of wine a night. I was all sick and coughing. I was pale, I had blue lips. Smoke hash, cigarettes, and fuckin’ drink Bordeaux. ‘Where’s my Bordeaux?’ I drank like three bottles a night. First bottle, that would be a primer. A few shows I barely remember playing.”

  Chris has a one-word explanation for his drinking. “Stress,” he says. “I was stressed out. That was the only way I could cope with it.”

  “It felt as if we couldn’t be stopped—or we didn’t know where it was taking us and we were just sort of along for the ride,” Dave says.

  Kurt’s stomach had started acting up on the American tour. A chronic flu that lasted throughout the European tour brought on bronchitis and Kurt couldn’t stop smoking his hand-rolled cigarettes. “I just remember being real miserable and starving and sick all the time,” says Kurt. “I was constantly drinking cough syrup and drinking. My bronchitis acted up so bad that I was vomiting while I was coughing before shows a few times. I remember in Edinburgh, we called this doctor. I was vomiting and coughing into this garbage can and he couldn’t do shit for me.”

  Even steady Dave was starting to crack. “I started getting afraid of flying, really bad,” he says. “Weird things started freaking me out, like all of a sudden I became claustrophobic and I’d never been claustrophobic before.

  “I was insane,” Dave says. “I was out of my fucking mind. I was sick of playing, sick of it. I would get so freaked out during shows—and I still do. While we’re playing, I will just get freaked out that I’m going to freak out and go insane and puke and vomit and faint and then a hundred thousand people will have to go home and I’ll be personally responsible. That happens to me every time we play. I can’t explain it—it’s this weird thing that’s been with me all my life—a bad, bad anxiety thing all my life. One time, somebody told me you could hypnotize yourself if you stare in the mirror for hours on end and I did and I did kind of hypnotize myself and it freaked me out for the rest of my life really bad, and it still does. I was like thirteen or fourteen.

  “I don’t know how to explain it and it’s not as insane as it sounds,” he continues. “All it is is an impending fear of going insane every minute of the day. It’s not something you get scared of for five minutes and then it goes away. You’re constantly thinking about how do you know when you’ve gone insane? Where is the point where you just snap and you’re completely out of your mind? So on that tour, everything was so completely insane, everything was just going at a hundred miles an hour and it was intensified tenfold.”

  On December 5, the night before Nirvana played the Trans-Musicale Festival in Rennes, France, Kurt and Courtney were lying in bed and the
y decided to get married.

  The next day in Rennes, while Kurt stayed in his hotel room, Chris downed an entire bottle of wine at a press conference. Dave couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  Needless to say, it came as a huge relief when the band decided to cancel the rest of the tour before they hit the stage at the Trans-Musicale. “We were going to go to Scandinavia and it was going to be below zero and every flight was at six in the morning,” says Chris. “It would have been a disaster, it would have been a fucking disaster. We would have fell apart, we would have freaked out. There would have been freak outs. It was better to go home and rest.”

  Before the nine-thousand-person capacity crowd, they opened with a silly, over-the-top version of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” with Dave on lead vocals. “I walked out there blitzed out of my fuckin’ mind,” Chris says. “And then I went home and had feverish delusions all night long. Laying in bed, thinking there was a ghost in the room or something. I just sweated all night long.”

  After the tour, Kurt, Chris, and Dave went their separate ways. Chris and Shelli went house shopping and found a place. At first they were going to put down a modest down payment. Then the royalty checks started to come in and they decided they could put up half the money. Then the royalty checks really started coming and they simply bought their $265,000 home outright.

  “Three days after it was over, you were in withdrawal from not playing and then you start wanting to play again,” Dave says.