Kurt knew he had to detox for the tour, so he and Courtney decided to detox together. A doctor checked them into a Holiday Inn and prescribed them various drugs to tide them through the three-day withdrawal period. Periodically, trusty Alex Macleod would stop by and make sure they were all right.
Kurt says detoxing was easy. “It wasn’t a heavy drug addiction at all,” Kurt says. “I’d only been doing it for a month straight and I’d just started to get addicted, probably that week that I got off of them. Withdrawals were nothing. I just slept for three days and woke up.”
“I thought, ‘Gee, if this is what detoxing is like, I could do this the rest of my life.’ But once I got into a four-hundred-dollar habit and I detoxed off of that, it was a different story. A very different story.”
But Courtney has a different take. “That was a sick scene because you get diarrhea and lots of sleeping pills and it was just vomiting,” she says. “That was gross. That was a sick scene if ever there was a sick scene.” As Kurt admits, “The bathroom didn’t smell very good.”
By the time of the “Come as You Are” video shoot, Chris and Dave hadn’t seen Kurt since “Saturday Night Live.” They had heard secondhand that Kurt was going through detox. In Dave’s words, “It was not something to be talked about.” It was just two days before they were to leave for Australia.
According to Dave, Kurt looked “Bad. Gray. He just looked sad.” And Kurt wasn’t even using by that time. “That’s why he looked so sad,” says Dave. “Because he wasn’t.”
“I couldn’t understand,” Dave says. “If something like that is destroying somebody … I guess I don’t understand addiction. Along with addiction comes denial or lies or deceit or paranoia, things that I just didn’t understand. I understand them now a little better, but at the time, I didn’t understand addiction and so I just thought, ‘What the fuck are you thinking? Why are you doing this?’ ”
After the unpleasant experience with “Teen Spirit” video director Sam Bayer, Kurt had gone hunting for a new director and discovered Kevin Kerslake, who had done clips for Iggy Pop, Mazzy Star, Soul Asylum, and Sonic Youth. Kerslake’s impressionistic, ethereal style didn’t always suit the major labels, but Kurt now had the clout to choose any director within reason. So Kerslake it was.
Unable to come up with few visual ideas beyond playing off the album cover and including “a lot of purples and reds,” Kurt let Kerslake conceptualize the clip. “I didn’t care at that point,” Kurt says.
The follow-up to the “Teen Spirit” video was crucial—would they go with a similar approach or would they try to redefine themselves?
Besides the color scheme, the only other thing Kurt wanted was for the band’s faces to be obscured. That breaks an unspoken cardinal rule of video, but once again Kurt had the clout to get away with it. With Kurt’s, Chris’s, and Dave’s faces obscured by running water, video effects, or shadows, the “Come as You Are” video pulled off the tricky feat of promoting a song without contributing to the overexposure of the band; Nirvana was seen and not seen. And the clip cemented their fame by exploiting the fact that everyone knew who it was anyway.
It was the beginning of a long series of collaborations with Kerslake. “It turned out fine, it turned out great,” Kurt says. “We finally found someone that shared the same vision as we do.”
Kerslake came up with the idea of using projections of the band members in the background of many of the shots. They shot most of that footage in a park in the Hollywood Hills a few days before the main shoot. Kerslake encouraged the guys to “abuse the camera” and Kurt in particular was more than willing to comply.
The shoot went smoothly, but Kurt was clearly having a bad time of it. “It was strange because here’s Chris and I running around this field having a great time, it’s a sunny day,” says Dave, “and Kurt just wasn’t feeling too good.” “I was on detox pills,” Kurt explains, “so I wasn’t very animated.” Still, Kurt was able to swing on a chandelier for an hour, taking rests on a ladder between takes.
When Kerslake came back to the band with his rough cut, Kurt, Chris, and Dave had surprisingly good suggestions. “They were all valid comments—artistically, they’ve all got really good taste, which is pretty rare for musicians,” Kerslake says. “A lot of musicians hole themselves up in their room with their guitar and they don’t have any feelers out to all the other aesthetic aspects of what is asked of them in this day and age. All the references that they talked about were revered artists, painters, filmmakers, stuff like that, so it was grounded in some artistic savvy.”
One of their suggestions was to cut out the more goofy footage shot for the projections, in favor of more ethereal stuff. “That was the recoil from ‘Teen Spirit,’ ” Kerslake says. The video aired in March and was a huge success, if not quite as successful as “Teen Spirit.”
People in the band’s inner circle began wondering if going on tour at that point was the right thing to do. “Everybody knew that it wasn’t,” says Dave. “Kurt knew that it wasn’t, I knew that it wasn’t, Chris knew that it wasn’t. Maybe we didn’t know within the first two days of the tour, but after a week and a half, sure, everybody knew it wasn’t. Shows were all right, we got through the set every night. But if Kurt wants something, he’ll do anything to get it.”
“It took a lot of courage for him to do that tour,” Dave adds. “He felt like shit, looked like shit, but he got over it. He worked it out.”
During the Australian tour, Kurt’s stomach problem flared up worse than it had in years. The first few days, Kurt felt fine. Then suddenly, he was in intense pain. He was vomiting constantly and couldn’t eat. He would call up Courtney, crying from the pain. At one point, he very nearly took the next plane home.
One day, Kurt says he was sitting on the steps of a hotel, wincing with pain, and Shelli walked up to him and said, “Kurt, I just hate to see you doing this to yourself. I can’t stand to see you hurting your body like this,”
Kurt during the Australian tour. (©Neil Wallace)
“I just wanted to fucking punch her in the face because, just like everyone else, she just assumed that I was doing drugs,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘You fucking people have no clue how much pain I’m in all the time. It’s from a natural thing that’s in my body.’ I couldn’t believe it. I’ll never forget those words because it just defined everyone’s attitude toward me. Every time that I wasn’t even doing drugs, they suspected that I was. They still do.”
Tour manager Alex Macleod worried about Kurt, too. “I didn’t like what I was seeing in someone I had so much respect and love for,” says Macleod, “I was really scared, more than anything else, constantly. Scared of what he was going to do, who he was going to hook up with. It was kind of strange.”
When Kurt suffered a particularly severe stomach pain attack, Macleod took him to a hospital emergency room, but not before mistakenly informing the doctors that Kurt was still detoxing from heroin. While he was on the examination table, Kurt says he heard one doctor snicker and say to another, “Oh, he’s just a junkie, he’s still coming off of drugs.” Disgusted, Kurt walked out of the hospital and simply toughed out the pain.
He finally went to a “rock doctor” who had a picture of himself with the Rolling Stones on his office wall. Kurt told the doctor his stomach history and the doctor replied, “I know what your problem is,” having been filled in by Macleod beforehand. “I think I’m going to get some kind of stomach medicine and the doctor just assumes that I’d just recently gotten off of heroin and I’m going through detox and I’m on tour,” says Kurt, “so I’d better do what Keith Richards would have done and take methadone. It’s called Physeptone in Australia, so I thought they were just stomach pills.”
The Physeptone miraculously took away the stomach pain completely. Kurt couldn’t wait to tell his doctor about these great new pills.
On February 1, after dipping to #4 for a couple of weeks, Nevermind again hit #1.
Kurt giving it some
attitude during Mark Seliger’s Rolling Stone photo shoot in Australia, P.S.—wrong finger. (© Mark Seliger)
Kurt onstage in Australia. (© Mark Seliger)
They finished the tour, then played a show in Auckland, New Zealand, then off to Singapore for a day of press. When they arrived at the Singapore airport, there was a waiting mob of about two hundred and fifty teenaged fans who waved “Welcome to Singapore” banners and chased after the band and grabbed at their hair. It turned out that this was standard practice in Singapore. The label had even printed an announcement of their arrival—including flight number and arrival time—in the newspaper and handed out the banners.
Then it was on to Japan, where Courtney joined the tour, and then Hawaii. By that time, Kurt was hooked on opiates again—without, he claims, even realizing it until he called his doctor and discovered what he was taking.
Kurt and Courtney got married in Waikiki, Hawaii, on February 24, 1992. At Courtney’s insistence, the couple had already worked out a prenuptial agreement. “I didn’t want Kurt running away with all my money,” Courtney jokes (presumably).
Dave and his friend and drum tech Barrett Jones had both brought girlfriends to Hawaii, but Kurt and Courtney didn’t want them there. “They all came from Seattle and they were all going to come back and say ‘We were at Kurt and Courtney’s wedding!’ and lie about things,” says Courtney. Besides, Kurt thought he might cry at the ceremony and wanted it to be as private and small as possible.
“Shelli and Chris were being really shitty to us and they thought I was doing all these drugs and I’m in Japan—how could I be doing any drugs?” says Courtney (then again, Kurt did have some Physeptone). Kurt had a crew member summon Chris up to his hotel room, where Kurt informed Chris that he didn’t want anyone at the wedding who didn’t want them to get married—meaning Shelli. Chris said if his wife wasn’t going, he wasn’t going either. “I don’t regret it, I don’t take it back one bit,” says Courtney. “I can’t see it happening with Shelli there at that point in time.”
“It was our choice,” Shelli insists. “It was weird because I knew what was going on and I knew that she was pregnant and I had a real objection to her doing drugs while she was pregnant,” she says, then catches herself and adds, “Maybe at that point, maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. I don’t know, but we all assumed. I didn’t want to go because I knew if she was pregnant and doing drugs, I didn’t agree with it and I didn’t agree with Kurt being so fucked up all the time and I just decided I wasn’t going to go.” She says somebody talked her into going for the sake of band harmony. “Then we ended up not going because they didn’t want me to go, which hurt my feelings,” Shelli says. “Although things had gotten to a really bad point, I was still thinking that Kurt and I were still friends and that things could be worked out.”
By the time they got to Hawaii, Kurt had run out of Physeptone and convinced a friend to bring him some heroin so he wouldn’t start detoxing while he was there. Kurt was even high on heroin at his own wedding. “I wasn’t very high, though,” he explains. “I just did a little teeny bit just so I didn’t get sick.”
Present at the ceremony, on a cliff overlooking a beach, were Dave, Alex Macleod, soundman Ian Beveridge, Dylan Carlson and his girlfriend, and Nirvana guitar tech Nick Close. The bride wore an antique lace dress that once belonged to Frances Farmer and the groom wore green flannel pajamas. Everyone wore leis. A nondenominational female minister that Courtney found through the Hawaiian wedding bureau performed the brief ceremony. Kurt did cry, Courtney didn’t. “It was very transcendent,” says Courtney. “It was like being on acid. It was great. It was very much different than just being boyfriend and girlfriend. It’s a good thing, I’m glad we did it.”
Afterward, they got very depressed over the Chris and Shelli thing.
And Shelli and Chris got depressed over the Kurt and Courtney thing. “Kurt alienated us, but we alienated him, too,” Shelli says, “just by not being up front. Everybody was talking behind their backs. It was getting nasty and it wasn’t fair. It’s easy to gossip and it’s easy when you have to spend every day with people and she was pregnant, I think, at that point and she wasn’t being nice anymore and Kurt was not being nice anymore. The lines were being drawn and it was really stupid and there was no reason why it should have been like that. Everybody was just, ‘You’re just a bunch of drug addicts.’ You alienate people by doing that.”
Later, when the band was playing in Argentina in October of 1992, Courtney and Shelli finally talked it over. “I told her, ‘Look, I never hated you,’ ” says Shelli. “She thought I hated her, so she treated me like ‘you hate me, so I don’t like you, either.’ Then I started not liking her. It was a big misunderstanding.”
Kurt was back on methadone for the Rolling Stone interview with this writer a day after he returned to the Spaulding apartment. He looked terrible and spoke even more quietly than usual. For most of the interview, he stayed under the bed covers in his pajamas, even though it was a particularly balmy L.A. evening. His complexion was bad, he could barely sit up in bed, and he said he’d been throwing up all day. His pupils weren’t pinned, but it was pretty obvious that the guy had a monkey on his back.
We talked about the heroin rumors and he flatly denied they were true. “I had a responsibility,” Kurt says now. “I had a responsibility to the kids to not let on that I did drugs.”
Even though he was bedridden, Kurt was ecstatic about his life. He was very much in love. “It’s like Evian water and battery acid,” Kurt said of his relationship with Courtney in the Rolling Stone story. And when you mix the two, according to Kurt, “You get love.”
Rolling Stone had asked for an interview for a cover story and Kurt agreed, even though he’s no fan of the magazine. “Every time I’ve ever picked up a Rolling Stone,” he says, “I’ve gotten so disgusted and filled with so much rage that I ended up ripping it up. It’s the epitome of yuppiedom. It’s the perfect example of everything I hate. It’s disgusting.” Later, he got annoyed that the magazine pinched the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” tag for a cover piece on the execrable television series, “Beverly Hills 90210.”
The cover shot Rolling Stone didn’t use. (© Mark Seliger)
Kurt claims he later forgot that he agreed to the story (plausible, considering his chemical state at the time). One morning during the Australian tour, he was awakened and told it was time for the Rolling Stone shoot. At first, Kurt refused, but then everyone from band members to the road crew urged him to go through with it. Then he began to try to think of something clever to put on a T-shirt that would keep the photo from being used. He hastily came up with “Corporate magazines still suck,” a paraphrase of SST Records’ slogan “Corporate rock still sucks.” “It was a stupid little statement to Rolling Stone,” Kurt says, “saying that you’re not a hip magazine now just because you have a supposedly hip band on your cover.
“It wasn’t necessarily to whatever his name is [Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner], like ‘okay, let’s see if you can put this on your cover.’ I wasn’t trying to make any kind of bold statement—it was just a joke. I didn’t even really think about it. It was a decision made ten minutes before we did the photo shoot. It wasn’t like I sat up all night and thought ‘What should I write?’ The funniest reaction to that is people taking it so literally—like I hate anything corporate, yet I’m on a corporate label. No shit. Obviously, I would wish that people would give me the benefit of the doubt to realize that I’m smart enough to understand that.”
Actually, rock’s magazine of record might have taken far more offense at another T-shirt Kurt had prepared just for the occasion. It portrayed a punk rock duck with the inscription “Kill the Grateful Dead.”
For all his iconoclasm, Kurt was well on his way to becoming the cliché of the wasted rocker. The success of Nevermind presented several difficult situations for Kurt. For one thing, a guy who loathed mainstream rock was now de facto making mainstream rock.
And a shy and reclusive man had gone from total obscurity to unwanted worldwide fame in three years. “Famous is the last thing I wanted to be,” Kurt says. As the figurehead of the band, the brunt of the media spotlight shone on Kurt—his personal life and even his psyche were being relentlessly dissected in the media. The cover line on the Rolling Stone cover story read “Inside the heart and mind of Kurt Cobain.”
Kurt openly resented his fame and most of his audience took that as a slap in the face. In turn, Kurt began to resent the prying of the press and his audience even more. “The classic reaction to someone who complains they’re in the limelight is ‘You made your bed, now you have to sleep in it. You’re public domain now and everyone has a right to know everything about you,’ ” he says. “No one has any right to know anything about my personal life. If they want to know about the music and how I try to write it, then that’s fine. Of course, it ties in with my personal life, but not as much as everyone thinks. I just always felt violated and I don’t agree with people who say they have a right to know. I have a right to try to change that perception. I have a right to try to change people’s way of thinking about celebrities. It should be changed. It should be different. They should be treated as human beings and their privacy should be respected.”
Meanwhile, Nevermind was in the Top 3, and it remained there until mid-April.
At the apartment on North Spaulding, Kurt did his best to avoid tempting Courtney by shooting in a locked closet in an extra room down the hallway where he kept his heroin and his needles and his spoons and his rubbing alcohol. “I knew I was tempting her all the time,” says Kurt. “I was high all the time. I just had to keep doing it. I didn’t have it out of my system. I knew if I quit then, I’d end up doing it again for at least the next couple of years all the time. I figured I’d just burn myself out of it because I hadn’t experienced the full junkie feeling yet. I was still healthy.”
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