Don surveyed the typical backstage scene—the bleak cinder-block walls, the sycophantic hangers-on, the depressed and dissipated post-concert vibe. “I felt sorry for him,” says Don. “What a life. Didn’t look that glamorous to me.”
“Well, it’s been a long time,” said Don. It had been seven years.
“Jeez, you look old,” Kurt replied.
“It was really hard,” says Don of the meeting. “Really, really hard.
“I asked him if he was happy and stuff,” Don says, “and he said he was happy and he said he didn’t have much money and I said ‘Well, are you having fun?’ He said he was and I said ‘Well, okay then.’ I didn’t know what to say because it was real hard. We hugged a couple of times and I said to just keep in contact.” Don hasn’t heard from Kurt since. “I guess he’s been busy and stuff.”
Some say Don just came out of the woodwork because his son suddenly became rich. “That’s the feeling I got from his mom and different people,” he says, “but I don’t give a shit. I haven’t got any money, I don’t give a shit about money. I wish I could do something for him, because really, I don’t think I ever have. I just want to wish him well. If he can make something of himself, then go for it. I just keep waiting and waiting for him to come around.”
Kurt officially ended all the speculation about his drug use by admitting in a September 21 profile by veteran Los Angeles Times pop critic Robert Hilburn that yes, he had done heroin for “three weeks” earlier that year. After the Physeptone episode, he went into detox again, took a month to straighten himself out, “and that was it.” Of course, that wasn’t quite it, but it was still a major admission which went oddly unnoticed in the mainstream music press, perhaps because everybody was already sure it was true.
Kurt told Hilburn, “The biggest thing that affected me was all the insane rumors, the heroin rumors … all this speculation going on. I felt totally violated. I never realized that my private life would be such an issue.”
The Globe article.
The raft of hostile press had only begun with the Vanity Fair article—it continued with things like a horrendous article in the Globe, a supermarket tabloid, which ran a story with the headline “ROCK STAR’S BABY BORN A JUNKIE,” along with a disturbing picture of a crack baby. “THEY’VE GOT MONEY & FAME BUT NO DAMN HEART,” the subheadline added. After a few more articles like that, Chris, Shelli, and Dave dropped their resentments and fears and supported Kurt, Courtney, and their newborn baby. “We all rallied together and it was cool,” says Chris. “That’s when things really turned around. Things hit rock bottom and they rebounded.”
“I think they appreciated that people came to their side,” Chris adds, his voice breaking with emotion.
Kurt is anxious not to appear to endorse heroin. “At the end of the last couple of months when I was doing four hundred dollars’ worth every day, I was definitely noticing things about my memory and I knew that eventually my health would start getting a lot worse,” he says. “It sounds like I don’t regret it and I don’t, but that’s because I used it as a tool. I used it as a medication to get rid of a pain. And that’s the biggest reason why I did it. In that sense, I don’t regret it, but anybody else who’s going to get addicted to drugs are obviously going to fuck up their lives eventually. If it doesn’t take a year, it will be next year. I’ve seen it happen with every person that gets strung out. Drugs are bad for you. They will fuck you up.
“I just knew that I would eventually stop doing them and being married and having a baby is a really good incentive but most people don’t even have that and also I’m a rich, millionaire rock star and I have a lot of things to keep right now. I have a lot of reasons to not do drugs. But try telling that to a person that feels like they don’t have anything. When you’re on a poverty level and you’re addicted to drugs, you’ll start turning tricks and you’ll start ripping people off and find yourself in jail—those are all the negative things that go along with drug addiction.
“When you have more than four hundred dollars to spend a day, and you’re pretty much pampered by living in this place that you know you don’t have to worry about rent, you have a car that runs well and all that stuff, it’s really easy to be a successful drug addict,” he says. “But most people who are going to be influenced by the fact that I did drugs are going to be average people who have a job and can barely make ends meet.”
Kurt realizes how all this sounds—that it was okay for him to do drugs, but nobody else. “But I’m saying that eventually, if I would have kept doing drugs, I would have lost everything, just like anyone else would have,” he says. “I was able to be a successful junkie for a year, but if I kept going, I would eventually completely fuck my body up and ruin every relationship that I had and lose everything. I’d lose my friends and my family and all my money, everything—if I kept doing it. And I always knew that, too.”
Courtney is also penitent. “I lived out my little rock and roll fantasy,” she says. “I just wish I hadn’t gotten into so much trouble for it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THREE NICE, DECENT, CLEAN-CUT YOUNG MEN
The rest of 1992 found Kurt and Courtney still jousting with their detractors while the band tried to resume business as usual.
In October, Courtney’s old Liverpool friend Julian Cope took out an ad in the music press, ostensibly to promote his new single. At one point in a lengthy rant, he declared, “Free Us (The Rock ’n’ Roll Fans) From Nancy Spungen-Fixated Heroin A-Holes Who Cling To Our Greatest Rock Groups And Suck Out Their Brains …” Cope, like everyone else, had assumed he knew exactly what the story was; it was also a rather sexist attack from the otherwise self-righteously feminist Cope, who later said of Courtney in Britain’s Select magazine, “She needs shooting and I’ll shoot her.”
Kurt smiles again! (© Charles Peterson)
The Cobains also felt under fire from a planned Nirvana biography by two British writers, Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins. Kurt and Courtney allege that Clarke and Collins allowed interview subjects to believe they were working with the band’s approval, claimed to have slept with Dave or Kurt, and even interviewed James Moreland, Courtney’s first husband (the marriage lasted a matter of days); the way they see it, the book was shaping up as an excuse for a tawdry hatchet job on Courtney. Gold Mountain tried to put the kibosh on the book by sending out a letter to prospective interviewees asking them not to talk to Clarke or Collins. According to Gold Mountain, the pair apparently did not succeed in formally interviewing anyone even remotely connected with the band.
Clarke did get some media mileage from some threatening messages that she said Kurt and Courtney had left on her answering machine in late October. Clarke said the first calls came late one night from Courtney, but they were comparatively civil compared to Kurt’s. The next night, he began a message, then hit the machine’s two-minute limit and called back—nine times. “If anything comes out in this book which hurts my wife, I’ll fucking hurt you,” Kurt said, sounding, as Select euphemistically put it, “tired, confused, very upset.” “I love to be fucked, I love to be blackmailed, I’ll give you anything you want, I’m begging you, I’m on my knees and my mouth is wide open. You have absolutely no fucking idea what you are doing …”
Kurt went on to call the two writers “parasitic little cunts,” adding, “At this point I don’t give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I’m threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few hundred thousand dollars to have you snuffed out, but maybe I’ll try it the legal way first.”
The New York Times quoted Gold Mountain’s Danny Goldberg as saying, “Kurt absolutely denies the notion that he or any other member of the band made any such phone calls.”
“In my opinion, either this is a prank that someone has played on these women,” Goldberg added, “or this is something they are fabricating to publicize an unauthorized biography.”
Kurt, however, doesn’t deny that it was his voice on the tapes. He sounded homic
idal, he says, “Because I want to kill them.” By the truly terrifying look on his face—jaw muscles visibly knotted, eyes darkened—one gets the idea that he really means it. “Obviously, I have a lot to lose right now so I won’t be able to do it,” he says, “But I have all the rest of my life. If I ever find myself destitute and I’ve lost my family, I won’t hesitate to get revenge on people who have fucked with me. I’ve always been capable of that. I’ve tried killing people before in a fit of rage when I’ve gotten in fights with people. It’s definitely a character flaw, to say the least, but I feel so strongly about people unnecessarily causing negative things to happen to people for no reason.
Kurt at an early October show at the University of Washington at Bellingham, opening for Mudhoney. (© Charles Peterson)
Chris at the Bellingham show. (© Charles Peterson)
“I don’t enjoy people fucking with my family and carrying on the tradition of lies and slander,” he continues. “I don’t deserve it. No one deserves it. We’ve been scapegoated more than any fucking band I can think of in the history of rock, to my knowledge. People fuck with us and they want dirt and they want to lie about us and I just don’t understand it. I’ve never really tried to do anything scandalous in my life. When people unnecessarily fuck with me, I just can’t help but want to beat them to death.”
The undeniable creepiness of the answering machine tapes reveals that despite the great happiness he’s gained with his wife and baby, Kurt still harbors a dark and seemingly bottomless well of anger and alienation. It’s not as if Kurt is a complete pacificist. He says that when he was living with the Shillingers, he got in a fight with a guy who was picking on him at a party. “I picked up a stick and started beating him with it and I couldn’t stop,” he says. “It was disgusting. It was a really scary reminder of how violent I can be when I really want to hurt somebody. It actually felt good, I was actually laughing about it.” His victim got a concussion and lapsed into a brief coma. “I was really upset about it afterward, for a long time,” Kurt says. “Especially after I saw him when he got out of the hospital.”
The hypocrisy of the phone calls—the sexism, even misogyny—is profoundly disillusioning. When Kurt rails against sexism and rape, it now begins to seem like a desperate attempt to stifle something ugly within himself, rather than merely standing up for what’s right. It looks very, very bad. “I don’t care,” Kurt says. “I’m a firm believer in revenge.”
When it’s revealed that at the time, Kurt and Courtney were still fighting for custody of Frances and that any unflattering press that came out about them might jeopardize the proceedings, the phone calls do begin to make a little more sense. But only a little more. On the whole, the answering machine tapes—along with Kurt’s defense of them—present a very disturbing side of Kurt. “Fine,” he says. “I don’t care. I guess I am unbalanced in that part of my psyche. I wouldn’t hesitate and if I ever do see [Collins or Clarke] in public, I’m going to beat the fucking shit out of either one of them. If they can get away with doing that much damage to me and my family, then I can sit in jail for a few months for battery. I don’t really care at this point.”
A few weeks later, Kurt had simmered down. “I don’t ever talk like that,” he maintained. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been so vicious and so sexist and weird. I just wanted to seem as extreme and irrational as possible to scare them. For all I care, they are exactly those things. I don’t feel bad about saying any of that stuff because they are cunts. Men can be cunts, too.”
Kurt believes their scare tactics worked by scaring Collins and Clarke into toning down their book. Ironically, though, publishing industry scuttlebutt has it that discreet legal pressure from Gold Mountain could have gotten publisher Hyperion Books to shelve the project quietly—but after Collins and Clarke made the answering machine tapes public, Hyperion could not be seen as having backed down under pressure. Ironically, as of this writing, the book had not reached the stores in the U.S.
On October 30, four years to the day after Kurt first smashed a guitar at a modest dorm party at Evergreen State College, the band played a nearly sold-out show at the fifty-thousand-seat Velez Sarsfield Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They had hardly practiced, their enthusiasm was low, and they played badly. They had done it for the money and it showed. They vowed never to make the same mistake again.
Part of the agreement was that Nirvana could choose their opening act. They went with Calamity Jane, a virtually unknown all-female band from Portland, Oregon. The overwhelmingly male crowd hated them. From a seat in the highest tier at the far end of the stadium, Kurt watched in disgust as within a minute’s time, virtually the entire crowd was chanting “Puta madre!” at the band and throwing lighters, beer cans, dirt clods, coins and whatever else they could find onto the stage. “It was the largest display of sexism I’ve ever seen at once,” Kurt says.
Chris knew what Kurt was going to do and tried to calm him down. But Kurt was determined to sabotage the show. The first thing they played was an improvised jam, which deteriorated into a fifteen-minute feedback fest from Kurt, with brief breaks when he would stop to glare at the crowd. Between songs, Kurt would tease the crowd by beginning to play “Teen Spirit” and then stopping. After a perfunctory set, they played a definitive version of “Endless, Nameless.” “It was so intense,” Kurt says. “There was so much emotion in it and feedback was coming out of my guitar just perfectly. I was manipulating it better than I ever had. It was really a great experience. It was really fun.” They never did play “Teen Spirit.”
Kurt Jams with Mudhoney at an early October show at the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle. Singer Mark Arm does the swim. (© Charles Peterson)
***
The “In Bloom” video reached MTV in late November, about a month after it was shot. At first, Kurt had an idea for another film, this time a surrealistic fable about a little girl who is born into a Ku Klux Klan family and one day realizes how evil her parents are. Like the aborted “Lithium” concept, it was too ambitious, so Kurt came up with the idea of parodying an appearance on an early sixties TV variety program à la the “Ed Sullivan Show,” which was essentially the dawn of rock video. He asked Kevin Kerslake to find authentic cameras from the period. Kerslake dug up some old Kinescopes to shoot the video with.
Spontaneity was key, and there was no script. Kurt aimed to keep it simple. “That’s how things should happen,” Kurt says. “Just do whatever you can instead of some long, drawn-out script, acting and practicing your moves.” The philosophy would carry over into the making of the band’s next album. Unlike most video shoots, even the most low-budget, they ran through the song only five times. Despite the feeling that they are performing in front of a huge television studio audience, there were only a handful of people on the modest soundstage.
Dave at the Crocodile. (© Charles Petereon)
That’s Doug Llewelyn, the “People’s Court” post-trial interviewer, as the host (coincidentally, Llewelyn’s first job was on “The Ed Sullivan Show”).
They dressed up in ridiculous Beach Boys-style suits, although Kurt thoughtfully brought along some dresses for himself and the band, just in case. Chris cut his hair for the occasion and he liked it so much he kept it that way. The glasses Kurt wore made him dizzy. They also made him look very much like his father did at his age.
The cuts to the amped-up kids in the audience make them look like conformist freaks—they’re so “normal” they’re weird. The great mainstream masses look weird to the band, instead of vice versa. It’s quite a leap from the “Teen Spirit” video, where the audience members were the band’s peers and even went so far as to dance and mingle with the band. In “In Bloom,” the audience is separated from the band not only by space but also time.
Of course, the kids in those early sixties audiences would become the baby boomers of today. The “audience as freaks” idea, says Kurt, “was kind of an attack on what those kids turned into. I’m sure the majority of them turned
into yuppies. It was kind of a dis on their generation, the whole Rolling Stone generation. There was nothing wrong with those kids at the time—they were totally innocent and into rock and roll. Now they’re in control of the media and the corporations and they’re cranking out the very same shit that they used to despise. There are still Fabians and the Monkees, but at least the Monkees had good songs, instead of New Kids on the Block.”
The video lampooned the idea of manufactured pop idols like Fabian and the Monkees; it was also an ironic comment on the fact that Nirvana had attained similar status. “These three fine young men from Seattle,” the announcer declares, “are thoroughly all right and decent fellas.” The slicked-back hair, the nerdy suits, and the band’s stiff, repressed movements highlighted the absurdity of the notion of squeaky-clean pop idols and the uncompromising moral standard they were expected to live up to. By wearing dresses and destroying the set, they are literally trashing that idea. “Let’s hear it for these three nice, decent, clean-cut young men!” Lewellyn says to the audience at the end of the clip. “I really can’t say enough nice things about them!”
The humor of the clip was also quite strategic. With all the rumors about the band over the previous year, a few laughs were simply good PR. “I’d just been so tired for the last year of people taking us so seriously and being so concerned with what we do and what we say that I wanted to fuck off and show them that we have a humorous side to us,” Kurt says. “It’s always been there, but a lot of people have misread it, not understood it.”
The original plan was to first send MTV a cut of the video with the sixties pop idol motif all the way through. The highlight came when the camera came in for a close-up for Kurt’s guitar solo—instead of the guitar, the shot shows the top of Kurt’s bobbing head the whole time, only to cut to the guitar just as the solo ends. After that version ran awhile, they planned to release the version where the band changes into dresses halfway through, which would have made for a neat surprise.
Come As You Are Page 31