Unfortunately, the MTV “alternative” show “120 Minutes” insisted on debuting the video, and Kurt doubted they’d get the humor of the all-pop idol version, so they went with a third version, which was all dresses and destruction, thereby killing the gag (the planned first version never did air).
On December 15, Incesticide was released. Ever since the Nevermind sessions, the band had planned to issue an “odds and sods” album of live tracks, B-sides, and selections from the Crover demo, basically to beat the bootleggers and to give fans good sound quality for less money than a bootlegger would charge. Then Sub Pop announced that they were planning a Nirvana rarities album, too. With typical Sub Pop candor, it was tentatively titled Cash Cow. Having two Nirvana rarities albums was a bit much, and pooling the material would produce a definitive collection, so Gary Gersh made a deal with Sub Pop. This way, the band would have more control over the final product—from music to artwork—and distribution would be far superior to what Sub Pop could muster.
The album shows off the extremes the band has been through; from the grinding, nearly tuneless chain of riffs called “Aero Zeppelin” to the fully realized pop of “Sliver,” from the Gang of Four-ish sounds of “Hairspray Queen” to the cover of Devo’s “Turnaround,” the collection contains all the elements of the Nirvana sound. It’s all there—Nirvana synthesized seventies hard rock, punk-pop, new wave like Devo and the Knack, and what Kurt calls “new wave” (Butthole Surfers, Saccharine Trust, Big Black), etc., into a unique voice. “It does explain what kind of a band we were when we first started—obviously a Gang of Four and Scratch Acid rip-off,” Kurt says.
The final track, the mighty “Aneurysm,” demonstrates how Dave’s juggernautic beats helped turn Nirvana from an interesting indie group into a world-class rock and roll band. The track also points the way toward the more experimental elements of the next album.
“Turnaround” and the Vaselines covers “Son of a Gun” and “Molly’s Lips” had all been broadcast on John Peel’s BBC-1 radio show in October of 1990. All three had been included on Hormoaning, a much sought-after Japan and Australia-only EP released to coincide with the early 1992 tour there. “Stain” hailed from the Blew EP and “Been a Son,” “(New Wave) Polly” and “Aneurysm” from a 1991 session for Mark Goodier’s show on BBC (a better version of “Aneurysm,” recorded by Nirvana soundman Craig Montgomery, appeared on Hormoaning and as an extra track on the “Teen Spirit” CD single).
The cover, a painting by Kurt, is incredibly revealing. In it, a damaged baby clings to a skeletal parental figure which seems to be ignoring the baby. It looks longingly at some flowers. They are poppies. Typically, Kurt denies the tableaux has any significance. “It’s just the image I came up with,” he says. The poppies, he says, came from a postcard that just happened to be lying on his floor.
The painting well fits Kurt’s friend Dylan Carlson’s learned assessment of the major theme of Kurt’s paintings: “Innocence and authentic vision beset upon by a cruel and uncaring universe. Artists continuously attempting to extract beauty from the world and being unable to because of being denied a beatific relationship with the world.” A bit academic, but right on the mark.
Kurt’s original liner notes included a strongly worded broadside directed at Lynn Hirschberg, but the brass at Geffen/DGC deemed them “pretty harsh” and asked him to tone them down. “I just went into the Vanity Fair and media scam,” Kurt explains. “It was really negative, although it was very truthful. It came straight from my heart and I really felt that and I still do. Anyone looking back on it would see complaining. No one has enough empathy for me or Courtney to look beyond that and realize that it should be a legitimate complaint.”
The notes are typical of Kurt’s two-fold nature. They begin in a celebratory mode, plugging favorite bands like the Raincoats in an extended anecdote, then Shonen Knife, the Vaselines, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, the Breeders, Jad Fair, Fits of Depression, etc. The tone shifts as Kurt launches a brief defense of Courtney, “the supreme example of dignity, ethics and honesty.” Soon, he is sending “a big ‘fuck you’ to those of you who have the audacity to claim that I’m so naive and stupid that I would allow myself to be taken advantage of and manipulated” and telling the homophobes, racists, and sexists in their audience to “leave us the fuck alone!”
Added to the broadsides against his generation in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and remarks made in virtually every interview he’d done, the missive seemed to cement Kurt’s reputation as man who held a nearly bottomless disdain for his own audience. “He needs a PR makeover,” Courtney says of Kurt. “It’s like he’s a snob and he’s too good for everybody. If I was a kid, I’d spend my twenty dollars on Alice in Chains and the Chili Peppers because they like me—I’m not good enough for Kurt.”
Of course, Incesticide is not a complete anthology of Nirvana’s non-LP output. Left off the album were the excellent “Token Eastern Song,” an outtake from the Blew sessions, a staggering cover of the Wipers’ “D-7,” which rounded out Hormoaning, “Even in His Youth,” a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now” done for the Community label, the remaining two tracks from the Crover demo, “Pen Cap Chew” and “If You Must” and the “Lithium” B-side “Curmudgeon,” not to mention any number of live tracks recorded at the Halloween 1991 show at the Paramount in Seattle.
With the “In Bloom” video still on MTV and the possibility of Nirvana burnout quite real—Nevermind had been out for fifteen months by that point—Geffen/DGC elected not to push Incesticide, merely letting fans discover it for themselves. Vague plans for a single and video of “Sliver” were lofted and shot down. The album went gold the following February.
Meanwhile, Gold Mountain’s Nirvana hype machine managed to get a story in Spin magazine, a fluffy interview with Kurt and Courtney by Sub Pop’s Jonathan Poneman which neglected to reveal that Poneman had a substantial financial stake in his subject’s latest release (as the last remnant of the buyout deal, Sub Pop got a cut of Incesticide). Of course, the real point of the story was the cover shot. Although the headline trumpeted “Nirvana: Artist of the Year,” the cover featured a heavily airbrushed Cobain family portrait with Mom and Dad proudly cradling a perfectly normal-looking baby. It was aimed directly at Children’s Services.
The popularity of the lighthearted “In Bloom” video couldn’t have been better timed to take the edge off the controversies swirling around Kurt and Courtney. Newspapers all over the country reported that on December 29, Courtney had filed a suit regarding the leak of her medical records to L.A. Weekly. Many papers reported that she was merely suing Cedars-Sinai hospital for releasing the records, but according to a published report in the L.A. Times, the suit also named Courtney’s physician and alleged medical fraud and negligence, invasion of privacy, wrongful disclosure of medical information, and negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit was settled out of court in April of 1993.
The public didn’t know it, but the battle to have free and clear custody of Frances still raged on. Frances now lived with Kurt and Courtney, but the couple had to submit to regular urine tests and a social worker had to check up on them periodically to make sure they were raising their child in an acceptable manner.
Kurt says he and Courtney spent a million dollars in 1992—$80,000 went to personal expenses, $380,000 went to the taxman; they also bought a relatively modest house for $300,000. “The rest of it was because of Lynn Hirschberg,” he says, referring to the legal bills they piled up in their efforts to keep Frances and defend their name. “That bitch owes me something.”
Kurt onstage at the Seattle Center Arena. (© Charles Peterson)
CHAPTER X
IT’S ANGER, IT’S DEATH, AND ABSOLUTE TOTAL BLISS
After all that’s happened, it’s not surprising to hear that Kurt has found that being a professional rock musician is not quite what he imagined back when he was banging out his raunchy punk rock songs all alone in his be
droom in Aberdeen. “It’s become a job, whether I like it or not,” he says. “It’s something that I love doing and would always want to do, but I have to be honest—I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as I used to when I was practicing every night, imagining what it would be like. It’s nothing like what it was like the first couple of years of actually playing in front of a few people, loading up the van and going to a rock show to actually play. The privilege of that just can’t be reproduced after doing it for ten years. The same feeling is not there.”
“I’m surprised to get as excited about it as I do still,” he continues. “Sometimes I’m just blown away that I can enjoy it as much as I do when we have a really good show. I’m feeling really good and loose, it really doesn’t matter if the crowd is into it or not. I don’t judge it by that at all because usually the crowd is the same wherever we go. It has to do with my mood usually—if I feel relaxed and I really want to play, it just happens to be that time of day when I would have wanted to play if I didn’t have to play a show, then it usually goes really well and I appreciate it a lot.”
What goes through Kurt’s mind as he performs on stage? “It’s just a mixture of every emotion that I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “It’s anger, it’s death, and absolute total bliss, as happy as I’ve ever been when I was a carefree child running around throwing rocks at cops. It’s just everything. Every song feels different.”
So all the wailing and flailing and intense, distorted volume are not quite what they seem. “People see energy like that and screaming, people see it as a negative release, like we’ve got to get it out of us or we’re going to kill somebody,” Dave says. “But I’m happy when I play this music. It makes me really happy. Maybe when I was thirteen or fourteen I was mad at Springfield, Virginia, and things just rubbed me the wrong way. It’s just fun to make noise and the bigger the noise, the funner it is. So the more noise you’ve got going, the better you feel.”
The only times Kurt feels real anger on stage is when the monitors aren’t working well, which often precipitates instrument smashing or abrupt stage exits. “If I can’t hear myself, I cannot have a good show,” he says. “I can’t fake it. I feel like a fool. The audience doesn’t deserve to be witnessing this when I can’t hear myself because I’m not giving it 100 percent. I can’t stand there and pretend I’m having a good time when I’m not. So I feel like I’m cheating the audience when that happens.” Nowadays, the band can demand and receive whatever they want in terms of sound equipment.
Despite what he said before, Kurt is very aware of the vibe from the audience. “A lot of times I’ll be going through the motions and I’ll look up at the audience and realize that they’re really enjoying themselves and that makes me happy,” he says. “It’s quite a sight to see that many people pogoing at once. Definitely one of the only things that our band has introduced to rock and roll is gathering that many people in one place to pogo.”
There’s a reason the band has lasted through all the trials and tribulations, and at the very core of it is the solid relationship between Kurt and Chris. Just as it’s tempting to fit Kurt and Courtney’s relationship into a stereotypical framework, the same could be said for Kurt and Chris. To be sure, there are elements of Mutt and Jeff—the short, high-strung one and the big, steady sidekick. Chris usually is more level-headed about business decisions. It’s Chris who calms Kurt down when he gets flustered by anything from a belligerent bouncer to a lousy monitor mix.
But they complement each other perfectly. “Sometimes Kurt will be quiet and Chris will be loud, other times Kurt will be loud and Chris will be the one trying to keep things in control,” says Tracy Marander. “It’s almost yin and yang in a way.”
“We’ve always had enough respect for each other to figure out what irks one another beforehand, what little personality defects that bother each other, and try to stop them before it turns into a fight,” Kurt says. “We’ve never spoken mean words to each other. It’s really weird. It’s not because we love each other so much—we both think of each other as hypocrites and there are things about each other that I’m sure we despise—but there’s no point. We just have this common knowledge that there’s no point in fighting with one another because for the sake of the band, it’s an irrelevant thing.”
The one complaint Kurt has about Chris is that Chris’s sense of humor drowns his out. “He’s really a funny person,” Kurt allows. “He’s real clever in an almost inane way—the things that he says are just so asinine at times that they’re hilarious. They make me laugh. But I feel like he restrains me from joining in on this sense of humor and actually contributing to it. I’m allowed to laugh at things that he says, but for some reason, I’m not allowed to be funny on the same level as he is.”
Then again, with Kurt getting so much of the attention, it’s only fair that Chris grab some of the limelight with his easy sense of humor. “Yeah,” Kurt says, “but it sucks to have to be around somebody where you can’t be yourself 100 percent. When me and Dave are together and Chris isn’t around, it’s totally hilarious. We’re just playing off one another and it’s really fun and I enjoy it. But when all three of us get together, Chris is in the middle and Dave and I are on the side. I take all the serious questions and Chris makes all the smarmy comments and funny things. And Dave is in the middle of both of us. You don’t know where he stands.”
But of course Kurt is usually too shy to be funny around large groups of people. “Everybody knows if Kurt smiles, it lights up the fucking room, because he usually doesn’t,” says Dave. “I don’t know if he’s really unhappy or if he’s always been unhappy or if he just doesn’t know how to be happy. When we’d shoot BB guns in the backyard or throw rocks at cars from the roof of the house or shoot out the windows at the lottery building with a BB gun when we were trying to quit smoking and we had nothing better to do, you’d see the laughing, funny, ha-ha-ha Kurt come into play, which a lot of people don’t see.”
Most people have never seen that side of Kurt, except the “In Bloom” video or perhaps a few choice scenes in 1991: The Year That Punk Broke. “A lot of people think he’s always the quiet-bitter-angry-confused little pixie, but he’s not,” Dave says. “I don’t even know him that well and I know that much.”
Kurt isn’t the only one who’s felt overwhelmed. “For the first year of me being in the band, there was just no reason at all for me to be at interviews,” Dave says. “Chris is really politically motivated and really bright. He has a lot to say even though he sometimes gets spasms of the brain and can’t spit out what he means to say. He really was the king of the interview and Kurt always had the beyond-clever snaps of wit. And I was like a paperweight.”
Although Dave is much more socially integral to the band than any other drummer has ever been, Nirvana is still not exactly the Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. “Chris and Kurt are unlike any people I’ve ever met before,” Dave says. “They’re hard to understand and they’re hard to really feel like you’re getting along with them, like you can really sit down and talk to them. Some people you can hit it off with immediately and you can talk about anything. With Chris and Kurt, I always felt so different from them. They’d known each other for a long time and sort of had the same sense of humor. Only recently—and this is just barely—did I feel like I really know them more and really felt like I was in the band.”
“I don’t feel like the new guy anymore, but I don’t really know if I feel vital to the band,” Dave continues. “You’re joining a band that’s had five drummers before—you might as well be on an hourly wage.”
“It was kind of strange—and it still is, too,” he says. “It’s weird because I’ve always felt expendable. If they were tired of me being in the band they could always find another drummer, so I’ve always had that in the back of my mind. It’s understandable—I don’t think that drums in the band are of such importance that one person’s style would really make a difference. A drummer like Dale Crover, you can tell
when Dale is playing in Nirvana because he’s the best drummer in the world. I’ve always thought if things didn’t work out, they could always get Dale.
“It’s not an apocalyptic thing, but I’ve never had a feeling of real security.
“Playing with Chris and Kurt is really great and we really do have something that nobody else has and I realize that,” Dave says. “When I say that they could get any other drummer, it’s true, but there is a chemistry between the three of us. I hate flattering myself by saying that the band wouldn’t be the same without me, but deep down I know it’s true—it would be different. Sure, someone else could play the stuff that I’m playing and someone could play as hard as I play. Anybody could do what I do—it’s no big deal, but there is a chemistry that clicks sometimes.
“With Chris and Kurt, there’s never really any reassurance,” Dave says. “It’s never like, ‘Wow, that was great!’ It’s like, you just do it.” On the other hand, he feels that part of the magic of their collaboration lies precisely in the fact that they don’t communicate with each other very well. “No one really says anything,” he says, “so when we write a song, the arrangement just falls together—it’s not so conscious. We don’t decide ‘We need a bridge here.’ It just sort of happens.”
Success has driven the three apart to a certain extent. “We get along well, the three of US, and at times it was sort of palsy-walsy, but never too much,” Dave says. “Kurt and I used to spend every minute of the day with each other. We became really close, as close as we could get, I suppose, when we lived in Olympia. Then after that, we kind of got distant again. Things get crazy and you kind of want to get away from it all.”
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