“I didn’t find myself just sitting in the house and nodding off and sleeping,” Kurt says. “I was always doing something artistic. I got a lot of paintings done and wrote a lot of songs.
“It was a lot less turbulent than everyone thinks,” says Kurt. “It was pretty boring.”
Artistically, it was a fertile time for Kurt—he painted a lot and wrote many of the songs which appeared on In Utero. “I did all my best songs on heroin this year,” he says. But he was falling out of touch with the band and Gold Mountain and he and Courtney were quickly falling into sweet oblivion. “Those guys went off into their own world and they were kind of thought of as vampires because they’d be gone and sleep all day,” says Chris.
They barely spoke for five months, even at rehearsals.
But Chris was very upset about what was happening to his old friend. He would rant at Dave or Shelli, “Kurt’s a fucking junkie asshole and I hate him!” Chris was angry with Kurt, he says, “Probably because I felt like he left me. I was really concerned and worried about him and there was nothing I could do about it. I was just taking my anger out on him.
“It was hard to understand,” says Chris. “I couldn’t get over the whole hurdle of heroin.”
Part of the problem was that as usual, Chris didn’t confront the problem with Kurt directly. “We’ve never really communicated very well when there’s been a problem between us,” Kurt says. “We never talk about it, we just let it pass. We’ve never confronted one another about things that piss each other off. During the time that I was doing drugs, I did notice that people weren’t calling as much but I also made it clear to everyone that I wanted to take a break. I remember Dave called up one day real hostile and asking me if I wanted to even be in the band anymore because we were getting pressure from everyone to go on tour and I decided I didn’t want to be on tour this year because I needed a break.”
“I don’t know how much heroin Kurt was doing because I never saw him,” Chris says. “I never saw Kurt fucked up on heroin. I never went to his house. I saw him high a few times, but never really a fuckin’ mess. I never saw that. That’s just what I heard or what I assumed. He was down in L.A. I’d never go down to L.A., I’d never go to his house. I didn’t want to go. Because I was afraid of what I might see. A lot of my perspective was secondhand.”
Dave wasn’t as affected as Chris was by it all. “We do depend on each other for certain things, but for the most part, we’re really removed from each other—far removed,” Dave says. “As close as we may seem sometimes, it’s not like bosom buddies. It’s not like a business thing where we talk to each other because we’re in the same band—we’re friends but we’re not best friends or even great friends. So I don’t know if it let me down or not because I didn’t feel like I’d invested so much in the relationship anyway that I was being robbed.
“As far as us getting together and playing music, it never really affected the band,” Dave says. “When it started affecting the band’s reputation, I got a little more upset.”
Because he didn’t feel close enough to Kurt, Dave didn’t feel it was his place to step in. “With something as touchy as that, if you see someone doing something like that to themselves, the first thing you want to do is tell them, ‘Look—stop.’ But how do you go to someone you’re friends with but at the same time, you don’t feel as close to. You don’t feel like it’s your place.”
Dave, even more than Chris, managed to stay out of the fray. “It’s weird, because there are so many people that work with the band that don’t really have anything to do with me,” Dave says. “Basically, all I do is I walk up on stage and I play drums. And then afterward, I go home. There’s just so much that goes on that I don’t even know about. In a lot of ways that can be a blessing, but on the other hand it makes you wonder about your importance.”
Kurt didn’t want to go out on tour again and have his stomach act up again, and besides, he wanted to be with Courtney throughout her pregnancy. Career-wise, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. If Nirvana had toured the United States that spring—and an extensive U.S. arena tour was planned for April and May—Nevermind would have stayed at the top of the charts for even longer than it did.
Chris, for one, didn’t care. “We toured for three years,” he says. “The tour just seemed like a lot more pressure, anyway. Before, we were just vagabonds in a van, doing our thing. Now you’ve got a tour manager and a crew and it’s a production. You’ve got schedules and shit. It used to be, ‘Stage time’s at six o’clock.’ And we could say, ‘Fuck it, we’re going to buy records.’ We’d be on an adventure. And now it’s a circus.”
Gradually, the ice broke between Kurt and Chris. “Kurt and I would have these cool talks,” says Chris. “Every once in a while we’d call and talk about things and I’d really feel better about a lot of things, just through talking. You don’t talk for a while and you just sit around and all these ideas pop into your head and you start believing them.”
Later, a video sonogram revealed a normally developing baby (a picture of Frances in utero graces the insert of the “Lithium” single). “Oh God, it was incredible,” Kurt says, suddenly aglow. “It was one of the most amazing things. It wasn’t just a picture—it was a video, so you could see her moving around. It was the first time we realized she was a living thing. You could see her heart beating.” While he was watching the footage, Kurt swears he saw Frances give heavy metal’s familiar forefinger-and-pinky Satan salute.
In March, pretentious pop thrush Tori Amos released a piano version of “Teen Spirit” on an EP. “Every morning when [Courtney and I] woke up we’d turn it up as loud as we could and dance around like a Solid Gold dancer,” says Kurt, wearing his best poker face. “It felt really weird because the neighbors were listening. Maybe they thought I was an egomaniac, but I was really just miming the song and dancing around. It’s a great breakfast cereal version.”
Then came a bitter dispute over publishing royalties that came the closest to breaking up the band as anything ever has. Like everyone else, Kurt didn’t expect that the band would sell millions of records. To avoid a potentially divisive situation in which he would have gotten an overwhelming slice of a very small pie, leaving the other two rather poor, he agreed to split royalties for music writing equally with Chris and Dave, even though he writes, by his estimate, 90 percent of the music.
“I write the songs, I come up with the basic idea, and then we work on it as a band,” says Kurt. “Most of the time that I’m asking Chris and Dave their opinion, it’s just to make them feel a part of the band. I always have the ultimate decision.”
But once the album took off so phenomenally, Kurt changed his mind and asked for a more representative publishing split—not, he says, because of the money, which is relatively negligible (Kurt says the difference comes to about $150,000). “I realized how much more pressures are on me and how I deserve a little bit more because I’m the lead singer, all these perspectives are being written about me, I have to take all that pressure,” says Kurt. “And I have to deal with the pressure of writing the songs. I don’t care if someone else gets the credit for it but I should at least be financially compensated for it.”
Dave and Chris had no qualms with that, and it does seem reasonable—Chris and Dave would still make plenty of money. But when Kurt asked for the new arrangement to be retroactive to the release of Nevermind, they erupted. Kurt, they argued, was virtually taking money out of their pockets. The uproar lasted only one week in March, but it nearly split the band.
“Chris and I were just like, ‘If this is any indication of how much of a dick Kurt is going to be, then I don’t want to be in a band with someone like that,’ ” Dave says. Meanwhile, everyone with a vested interest in the band was urging Chris and Dave to back down. “Everybody was saying ‘Let him have this one because the band will break up. You guys could make fifteen million dollars next year. Just let him have this one,’ ” Dave says.
On the phone on
e day, Kurt said to Dave, “I can’t believe you guys are being so greedy.”
“Whatever,” Dave replied disgustedly, and Kurt hung up on him.
“At the time, I was ready to fucking quit the band over it,” says Kurt. “I couldn’t believe that [they were] giving me so much shit about this.” Kurt eventually got his retroactive split—75 percent of the music writing royalties. The bad feelings still simmer.
Kurt checked into Exodus, a rehab program favored by rock stars. “It was disgusting,” says Kurt. “Right away, these forty-year-old hippie long-term-junkie-type counselors would come in and try to talk to me on a rock and roll level, like, ‘I know where you’re at, man. Drugs are real prevalent in rock and roll and I’ve seen it all in the seventies. Would you mind if David Crosby came in and said hello? Or Steven Tyler?’ Rattling off these rock stars’ names. I was like, ‘Fuck that. I don’t have any respect for these people at all.’ ”
Kurt stayed for four days in his tacky, hospital-like room, reading in his uncomfortable bed. Then he abruptly left before his treatment was completed. “I was feeling all right,” he says. “I thought it was over and then I ended up trying to detox at home because it wasn’t quite over like I thought it was.” He sweated it out for a few more days. Then he and Courtney went up to Seattle and Kurt got high. By the time they returned to L.A., he had a habit again.
Courtney spent more time with her guitarist Eric Erlandson in order to stay away from Kurt. She would occasionally go to the nursery at Cedars-Sinai and look at the babies to strengthen her resolve to stay clean.
In July, the “Lithium” single was released, with the B-side containing a live version of “Been A Son” and a previously unreleased track called “Curmudgeon.” It also contained, at long last, all the lyrics to Nevermind. Soon after, the “Lithium” video aired. A fairly routine collage of footage from the big homecoming concert at the Paramount the previous Halloween and footage from the film 1991: The Year That Punk Broke (the shot of Kurt taking a running leap at the drum set is from the 1991 Reading Festival; he dislocated his arm). Although it was enlivened by Kerslake’s neat trick of using the more violent footage during the quiet parts of the songs and vice versa, it was something of a disappointment from a band and a song that promised so much. Some of the problem might have been that due to his drug habit, Kurt was simply not up to the job of helping to conceptualize a video, but he and Kerslake had actually been brainstorming for a much more ambitious project.
Kerslake says it was to be an animated film about a girl named Prego who lives in a house in a forest. One day, she finds a big pile of eggs in her closet and puts them in a train of three wagons that she wheels through the forest until she comes to a king’s castle. By that time, all the eggs but one have cracked and she takes that egg and carries it up to the king’s throne and places it on a large book that’s on his lap. He’s asleep, but when he awakes, he opens his legs and the book slides between them and closes on the egg. When Kurt and Kerslake discovered that the animation would take four months to do, they went with the easily produced live collage.
Meanwhile, the band had set out on a two-week tour to make up the dates they had canceled the previous December in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scandinavia, as well visit France and Spain. “It was pretty insane,” says Dave of the tour, “and there was a lot of crazy shit going on and it was bad and it was not fun.”
Part of the problem was the fact that the band had grown to dislike outdoor festivals, where they would often play in daylight, with the open air eating up the sound from the monitors and the wind blowing the P.A. sound all over the place. “I think the whole band realized we weren’t having a good time anymore,” Kurt says. Dave remarked to NME writer Keith Cameron that for the first time, he didn’t even know the names of the crew members. The major label shit was hitting the punk rock fan.
But that was the least of it. Kurt was still using and worse still, his stomach was erupting again. To make it through the tour, Kurt skirted miles of red tape by getting some methadone pills from a “quack doctor” and then got some more from an AIDS patient that another doctor hooked him up with.
The morning after a June 22 Belfast show, Kurt collapsed in convulsions over breakfast. “I forgot to take my methadone pills that night before I went to bed,” Kurt says. “I woke up with withdrawals. My stomach was so bad that I decided if I took methadone then I would just puke it up so I had them take me to a hospital so I could get some morphine.” Allegedly the ambulance driver had phoned all the tabloids and the rumor started that Kurt had OD’d, despite the fact that, as Kurt points out, it’s pretty tough to get heroin in Belfast. The official word from the Nirvana camp was that Kurt had a bleeding ulcer brought on by “junk food.”
After that, Kurt got the hairy eyeball from nearly everybody on the tour. “I didn’t do anything but forget to take my methadone pills the night before and had to be rushed to the hospital—big deal,” Kurt says. “Dave could have hurt himself in a fucking jock accident. Chris could have fallen off the stage drunk that night.” The specter of the incident hung over the rest of the tour. The band had been stonewalling on the heroin issue for months; now, it was obvious that word was going to get out sooner or later.
Bad vibes rattled around the entourage. For one thing, Courtney was six months pregnant and in full hormonal swing. For another, “Everybody was tired of me doing drugs,” Kurt says, “even though I wasn’t doing drugs, I was on methadone. I couldn’t do anything but ignore it. All I could do was say fuck you to everyone. It’s my problem and they shouldn’t be so concerned with it. I could point fingers at everybody else and tell them that they’re drunks. They’ve bought the same drug hysteria propaganda that has been going on in the United States since the Reagan years. They don’t understand it, they’ve never done it, and so they’re afraid and it creates bad vibes.”
It wasn’t like Kurt and Courtney didn’t have a sense of humor about it all—they would check into hotels as “Mr. and Mrs. Simon Ritchie,” the real name of Sid Vicious.
Gold Mountain hired a couple of professional “minders” to keep an eye on Kurt and Courtney. The day after the incident in Belfast, the band was in Paris for a show at Le Zenith. Kurt walked out of his hotel room to get some food and noticed one of the minders sitting in the room right next to his, facing his open door, just waiting for Kurt to try to leave. “I was being monitored by two goons,” Kurt says, “and I was going out to have some fish. I wasn’t looking for drugs at all. I had methadone, I was fine. I had absolutely no desire to do drugs but I was being treated like a fucking baby. They were turning this band into everything it wasn’t supposed to be.”
Indignant, Kurt and Courtney packed up their belongings, sneaked out of the hotel, and checked into another without telling anyone where they were until the next day. “They were eating their shit, they were so afraid of what was going to happen,” Kurt says.
Food was also a problem, although Kurt had long ago learned to bring his own cereal and canned goods. “There’s never any good food in Europe,” he claims, raising eyebrows all the way from Paris to Rome.
“During the time that everyone thought we were on massive drugs and Courtney was injecting turkey basters full of heroin straight into her stomach,” Kurt says, “the whole thing was no one knew anything and they were so spineless and afraid to ask us anything.”
Seeing as “Dave at least listens and he’s not very judgmental,” Kurt opened up to him about what was really going on. “Dave’s practically the only person I’ve ever really talked to about any of this shit,” Kurt says. “Chris was massively judgmental—all he did was give me bad vibes all the time and dirty looks.”
Fans like to think that their favorite bands are like the Monkees—living together, sharing good times and bad, and generally knowing everything about each other. But the fact of the matter was that Nirvana wasn’t such an intimate, tight-knit group anymore. Granted, it may have been for his own good, but once Shelli began going on
tour, Chris didn’t hang out with the band as much anymore, then Courtney came along with Kurt. “We weren’t doing things together anymore,” Kurt says. “Before, we were going out and hanging around every night because we were best friends and we didn’t know anybody else. Slowly, everybody started getting a mate and we wouldn’t be in the same hotel rooms and everything like that. Before, we stayed in the same hotel room.”
Because no one directly asked Kurt what was going on, even the inner circle thrived on rumor, infuriating Kurt and alienating everyone else even further. “I can’t stand people who don’t confront anyone,” Kurt says, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he himself is a prime offender in this regard. “If you have a problem with somebody, you should just flat out ask them. They would never do that. They would just get on the bus and it was bad vibes—you could just see it radiating off of them. It just festered in my mind how spineless these people are, how they don’t know what the fuck is going on at all but they’re all assuming and they’re in my own fucking band.”
Chris feels it was a vicious cycle fed by both sides. “When he isolated himself, people would react to it, but he isolated himself to react to people’s reactions,” says Chris. “It just degenerates into bullshit.”
“I was way more miserable during all the tours that I was vomiting every night and not eating and being totally straight,” Kurt says. “I was way more of a bastard and a negative person. They couldn’t be around me half the time. I was just looking straight ahead and concentrating on not puking all the time that it was hard for anyone to communicate with me. But when I started doing drugs, I was feeling fine—and happy for the first time in a long time. I was hoping that everything would be fine with them, but simply because I was doing drugs, it created more problems even though I was finally relieved.”
In Spain, Courtney experienced some mild contractions and became terrified that she might give birth prematurely. “Of course,” says Kurt, “she had them right before we had to play a show so I had to play a show wondering if Courtney’s going to die or if she’s going to have a baby.” After the concert, Kurt raced to the hospital. “It was the most groaty, disgusting hospital I’ve ever seen—dirt on the walls, the nurses were screaming in Spanish at Courtney, telling her to stay down,” Kurt says. They moved her to a clinic, where they called their obstetrician, who believed there was no serious problem, but advised them to take the next plane home, just in case. “We had to buy two seats in first class so Courtney could lay down,” Kurt says. “Of course, it got reported as two rows.”
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