What’s it like to be famous? “The only thing I can think of is paranoia—it makes you feel like someone’s watching you,” Kurt says. “It really isn’t as hard as I thought it would be—or as hard as it seemed like it was at first. I used to resent people for recognizing me. I’d blame them. ‘Don’t fuckin’ look at me. What the hell are you looking at?’ You can’t blame them for looking. But it is annoying.”
Yet for all his outspoken abhorrence of fame, Kurt now wants to have another crack at it. “It’s not that I like it any more, it’s just that I’m getting familiar with it,” he says. “I know how to react when people stare at me. I don’t feel quite as paranoid as I did. I could probably learn to live with being famous. It doesn’t mean that I’ve given in and I actually enjoy it, I just have a better attitude toward it than I did before.”
Although Chris and Dave do it all the time, going out in public is a somewhat different proposition for Kurt. Because he is the frontman, because he is reclusive, because of the drugs, and because of the formidable mystique around his music, a Kurt spotting, even in Seattle, is the talk of the town. He’s learning how to deal with getting ogled.
“Most of the time I’ll smile and let them know that I understand that they recognize me, because I’d do the same thing if I recognized a star,” he says. “If they keep staring and they’re being obnoxious or if they snicker or something like that, I give them a dirty look or ask them what their problem is or confront them about it. Lots of times, people have just laughed in my face when they recognize me. I couldn’t believe it. I can understand it now. Like a sarcastic thing—‘Look at that fucking idiot!’ ‘It’s him! Ha-ha!’ Those are the people that I really like to deal with because I’ll walk right up to them and start drilling them with questions, like what’s their problem. They are just amazed because they think of me as someone who wouldn’t confront them and when I do, they clam up and turn beet red and run away sometimes.”
(© Charles Peterson)
People expect celebrities to brim with a constant supply of good cheer, something that Kurt rarely seems to do. It can make for some awkward situations. “Most people think if I look at them and I don’t smile, that I’m pissed off, so I go out of my way to make it look like I’m enjoying myself,” Kurt says. “I usually am enjoying myself. I’m hardly ever depressed any more, so it’s a lot easier to be able to do that.”
Kurt also has to fight another perception. Rock stars just aren’t supposed to have chronic health problems. Many believed that Kurt’s stomach problem was merely a “stomach problem”—a euphemism for a heroin habit (and occasionally it was). But he really does have intense, chronic stomach pain. “I’ve seen it, I’ve been there,” says Chris. “I’ve been there when he’s had his major episodes and it’s terrible because there’s nothing you can do.”
Kurt has seen countless specialists for his stomach—nine in the first part of 1993 alone—who remain baffled as to what his problem might be. Ulcers have been ruled out. The latest theory is that a kink in Kurt’s spine due to his scoliosis is pinching a nerve which leads to his stomach. Besides opiate-derived analgesics, the only effective cure Kurt has found is performing on stage, when a massive endorphin rush kills the pain.
Ironically, Kurt’s condition may have something to do with his agonized wail. Or vice versa. Asked to pinpoint the source of the pain, he indicates a spot just below his breastbone—it also happens to be exactly where he says his scream originates.
“There’s been so many times when I’ll be sitting there eating and having massive pain and no one even realizes it,” Kurt says. “I’m so tired of complaining about it. It hurts on tour so often, I have no choice but to go about my business. After a show, I have to try to force myself to eat. I’m sitting in my hotel room, forcing myself to eat, taking a bite, and drinking water and doubling up and puking. Halfway through the European tour, I remember saying I’ll never go on tour again until I have this fixed because I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to fucking blow my head off, I was so tired of it. There’s no way I’m going to live like that. It turned me into a neurotic freak. I was psychologically fucked up. I was having a lot of mental problems because I was having chronic pain every single day.”
Heroin was one way of killing the pain, although Kurt subsequently found a legal and relatively safe remedy for his condition—Buprenex, a mild synthetic opiate which he injected directly into his stomach during an attack. Often he would go a week without resorting to the drug, but when he did something stressful, like playing a show or shooting a video, he’d do it several times a day. Recently, a doctor diagnosed his stomach pain as a result of a pinched nerve in his spine, brought on by his scoliosis. The physical therapy he’s getting for his back seems to be working and Kurt says he’s glad that he isn’t dependent on a chemical for his well-being anymore. Nowadays, he eats better food and even does push-ups and sit-ups before going to bed. He actually looks forward to touring again.
Another stumbling block for Kurt is the public’s perception that he is a frail, passive person who has little idea what he is doing. “In addition to everything else, he is a literal genius about what it is to be a rock artist,” says Gold Mountain’s Danny Goldberg. “It’s not something that he has not thought about.” Goldberg tells a story about Kurt at the MTV taping back in January 1992, while he and Courtney were binging on heroin.
“Kurt’s just wiped out and he looks terrible and he says, ‘I want to see it back,’ ” he recalls. “So they play back about fifteen different takes of four or five different songs. He just sat there and said, ‘That’s no good.’ ‘That one’s no good.’ ‘That one you can put in “The Year in Rock” but I don’t want it on regularly.’ ‘That one is the one you put on 120 Minutes.’ ‘After a week I only want this one repeated.’ He could barely walk across the room, but they were all exactly the right decisions and it was not like anyone else’s opinion mattered. When it comes to the professional product of what Nirvana is, he makes all of those decisions and he makes them from a place of tremendous consciousness.”
Kurt is also savvy about publicity. Everybody who was anybody was backstage at the 1991 Rock for Choice benefit in L.A.; Perry Farrell was there, even Axl Rose was there. In a crowded hallway, Kurt mentioned to Danny Goldberg that journalists had been asking the band a lot of political questions and missing the band’s sense of humor. Kurt had figured out that they were being prompted by a specific paragraph in the band’s bio and asked Goldberg if it could be removed. Goldberg was very impressed. “I’ve never had an artist—or a manager or a publicist—pick up within a month the effect of a bio on the types of questions being asked and then figure out how to edit it to skew it slightly differently,” he says, marveling.
Goldberg likens Kurt’s savvy to John Lennon’s, recalling a celebrated 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Lennon in which he revealed things like the fact that the Beatles always took care not to release a record at the same time as the Stones. At the time, fans were shocked by such conscious manipulation, but, as Goldberg says, “You don’t become the Beatles by accident. And you don’t become Nirvana by accident, either.”
The John Lennon comparisons trouble the Cobains, if only because of what that makes Courtney. She once greeted a visitor to the Cobains’ hotel room by saying, “Okay, you want to see Yoko Ono? Here goes.” Whereupon she proceeded to pick up the phone, call Gold Mountain on Nirvana business, and positively excoriate whatever hapless person was on the other end of the line.
“Sometimes Kurt just doesn’t feel like saying stuff, so he has her say it for him,” says Goldberg. “When Courtney does that, it’s because he has asked her to do it. It’s a terrible mistake if anyone ever thinks that she does things on her own. Sometimes, he just would rather not talk, so he’ll have her call. But the idea that she could make him do anything that he doesn’t want to do is just so absurd. You can’t get this guy to drink a glass of water or walk across a room to turn over a cassette or do anything he doesn’t want
to do. He is one of the most willful people I’ve ever met in my life. Sometimes I think he’ll just ask her to be the bad guy.”
Many wonder why Courtney should be involved in her husband’s business affairs at all. “Because I’m too lazy to deal with it,” Kurt replies. “I’ll just bend over and help them slip it in my ass. I forget about things all the time and everyone takes advantage of that. If it wasn’t for Courtney going out of her way to just take care of things without even asking me sometimes—obviously I would allow her to do it anyway—it’s mainly for the benefit of our baby so we can make sure we have some money in the next ten years. I’m just too lazy. I decided a couple of years ago that I wasn’t going to deal with the business side of it. Now I have to. I’m getting better at it. I’m learning from her.”
Goldberg cites his experience as a publicist with Led Zeppelin. Although Jimmy Page was a quiet man, he ran Led Zeppelin with an iron fist—it just wasn’t his fist. When he didn’t like something that was going on, he’d just mention it to manager Peter Grant and Grant would do whatever yelling was necessary. “I’m not saying that Courtney has got the same relationship that Peter had to Jimmy,” Goldberg says, “I’m just saying that people who are quiet are not necessarily passive.”
Often, Courtney is simply looking out for the man who is her husband. “If they’re on tour and he’s got a terrible stomach and there’s a certain kind of food that doesn’t give him stomachaches and they go into a dressing room somewhere and that food’s not there and he’s going to be doubled over in pain, she does make a big scene,” Goldberg says. “But she has nothing to do with things like who’s producing the record or what the songs are or whether they tour or don’t tour.”
“Honestly, she’s not very involved,” Goldberg continues. “She’s just very visible—you can’t miss her when she’s in a room. She’s loud and she’s forceful and she’s flamboyant.”
Even Kurt admits his wife can sometimes be a social liability. “She’ll confront people even when there’s no point in confronting them,” Kurt says. “There’ll be someone who’s obviously a sexist jerk but you have to be around this person because you’re working with them at this time and there’s really no penetrating this person, you know they’re a lost cause, but she’ll go out of her way to confront him and make a bad scene in front of all these people just to let him know, ‘Don’t fuckin’ bullshit me at all.’ She didn’t make a dent in this person at all. But still, it’s her duty to do things like that. Even though it doesn’t make anything better, it still needs to be done. I’ll just leave the person alone. That’s the difference between her and me—she’s definitely a fighter.”
Naturally, Courtney makes for a formidable business adversary. “I will ask my management to do something for me twenty times,” Kurt says, “and finally Courtney calls up and screams at them and it finally sticks in their brain. They get off the phone and they go, ‘What a cunt!’ But the thing gets done.” Of course, the question is, at what cost?
Courtney is extremely intelligent and does not suffer fools gladly. The slightest misstep, even in the most casual of conversations, is often rewarded with a withering comment—or worse. But Kurt is no fool, either. He readily acknowledges that his wife’s brusque personal style hurts far more often than it helps. “She’s totally abusive to people and she doesn’t even realize it, she’s so used to talking that way,” Kurt says. “And a lot of times she unnecessarily jumps to conclusions. And that’s her downfall. That’s why she doesn’t get taken seriously.” Even he admits they fight nearly every day.
It’s been said that if Courtney were a man, her extreme forwardness and caustic manner wouldn’t earn her any flak at all. But even Kurt agrees she’d get it no matter what sex she was. “I remind her of that almost every day,” he says with a sly chuckle, their latest spat probably still fresh in his mind. “She admits it and she tries really hard but there’s this chemical in her mind that just won’t allow her to think before she freaks out on people. A lot of times, someone deserves it, though.”
It’s an interesting situation for such a sensitive person as Kurt. “Well, I’m not as sensitive as most people probably think,” he says, defensively. “There are so many positive qualities about her that it doesn’t even matter. She’s already getting a lot better at it. It just takes people a long time to change their ways. It’s the only character flaw she has is that she jumps the gun too fast.”
Although tension still flares between Courtney and the other members of the band, things are definitely looking up. Many say Courtney has been changing for the better, especially after Frances was born. “She has definitely become a person who admits she’s wrong,” Kurt says. “It usually takes two or three examples before she will admit it, but she does. She isn’t that pigheaded.”
The Courtney factor still dogs the band. The idea persists that Courtney controls Kurt, that she is sapping his talent, that she will break up the band. Call it the Delilah Complex. But she simply is not the monster that much of her recent press has painted her to be. It wasn’t for nothing that Kurt said “Don’t believe everything you read.” But thanks to the ripple effect of the Vanity Fair profile, it has become increasingly difficult to portray Courtney Love as anything but a horror without seeming to be a stooge or a liar. And while Courtney isn’t above reproach, it’s obvious that there’s a considerable sexist force behind the attacks on her character.
Kurt is hardly optimistic about the future. “No matter what we do or how clean we live our lives, we’re not going to survive this because there are too many enemies and we threaten too many people,” he says. “Everyone wants to see us die. We might just keep going just to spite those fuckheads. They’ve already treaded past the most offensive part, which is attacking my family, and that could go on for years, but there’s going to be a time when I’m not going to be able to deal with it anymore, when my daughter is old enough to realize what’s going on. She’s already going to be twelve years old and start reading all this old press and ask, ‘Hey, did you really take drugs when I was a baby?’ It’s going to be a hard thing to convince her of all the things that aren’t true.”
“There are some amazing things that have happened that I’m so blessed with, but there are so many damaging things at the same time,” Kurt says. “I should be completely rehabilitated as far as my bad attitude—at this point, if everything had gone fine, I would be so much of a happier person, my humor would have started to come out more.
“I used to be a pretty funny person, always going out of my way to look on the funnier side of life, but I’ve withdrawn back into a bad attitude. I’m sure it will just be a matter of time because the positive things—the baby and the wife—are so great, they’re so etched in my life as being positive things that I’m blessed with and grateful for that if people just keep their fucking mouths shut and stop the accusations, in a couple of years, I’ll probably be okay. But I just don’t see it ending. Just yesterday, another fucking article came out …”
Dave is more than happy to be the least visible member of Nirvana. He doesn’t even want to do interviews anymore. “One,” he says, “because I’m too lazy and two, because why does everyone want to know what I have to say? What’s the big deal? It’s like one-two-three-four, I play drums and that’s about it. I’ll put my face on the record and go home at night and clean the house. I just want to lead a normal life. I don’t want to be the drummer of Nirvana for the rest of my life, so I lay low.
“It’s such a blessing to play in the band and see and do everything that we’ve done, and not pay the price that a lot of people have to pay,” says Dave. “I take pride in leading the most simple life of anybody in the band because I don’t do much, other than be happy. There’s so much that goes on with Kurt and Courtney that I can’t keep up with.”
Kurt and close personal friend Ren Hoek at the Advocate shoot. (© Charles Peterson)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THINGS THAT PISS ME OFF
In 1993
, Nirvana began to return to business as usual.
In January, the band played two huge shows with their old friends L7 in Brazil early in the year, the first on the sixteenth at Morumbi Stadium in São Paulo and another show a week later at the seventy-thousand-seat Apoetose Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
The band was in peak form. The Sao Paulo show, according to Alex Macleod, was “punk rock heaven, baby.” Just for the occasion, they played “Rio” by Duran Duran, with Dave on bass and vocals, Chris playing guitar, and Kurt behind the drums. Later, they played a seemingly endless version of Terry Jacks’s insipid 1974 bubblegum hit “Seasons in the Sun.” Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers played the “Teen Spirit” solo on trumpet.
Back home, Kurt became his own publicist and personally arranged for interviews with the Advocate, a national gay magazine, and Monk, a roving magazine written by two guys in a Winnebago who travel around America and focus on a different city in each issue.
The Advocate piece was a master stroke. It encouraged Nirvana fans to buy a gay-oriented magazine. And it exposed the band to an audience that doesn’t tend to go for rock bands like Nirvana.
In the interview, Kurt mentioned that he had thought he was gay for a brief time in high school, and added “I’m definitely gay in spirit, and I probably could be bisexual.” Somehow that got translated by several major newspapers, as well as the entire Gannett newspaper chain, into a statement that he was a “practicing bisexual” and that “this was just fine with his wife.”
In February, Kurt designed a custom guitar for Fender—a cross between a Jaguar and a Mustang. A limited run for his use only was planned, but in the spring of 1993, a consumer edition was being considered.
Come As You Are Page 33