Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  SUSIE TENNANT: We made a cool, super-long maze [of CDs] — like a domino maze — because I had this huge apartment. We’d stack them up really high and start running from one end … [makes crashing noise]. I had some gold records — we had fun defacing the ones that we thought were silly. Goofy stuff — what happens if we put CDs in the oven? A lot of times, everyone would end up going into my closet and trying on all the different clothes.

  ROBERT ROTH: I remember that morning [after], hanging out and trying to turn Kurt onto the Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight, which he’d never heard. Dylan was coming to pick him up. They were going to go out someplace in the woods with guns, and shoot the hell out of this pot roast [laughs]. I don’t think he lived anywhere — I think he was living out of his car. He’d just edited the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, which he played for us that morning. He seemed really focused and really together — which is funny, because then when the Courtney stuff started happening, things seemed like they went in a different direction. He seemed ready to take on the world at that point.

  STEVE MANNING: Nobody had the insight that it was going to do what it did — change everybody’s lives here.

  BRAD SINSEL: There is the theory that rock every few years just implodes. It’s had enough, it blows it back down to three chords and simplicity — minimalist approaches. But once artists have some success with three chords, they start finding all these toys. They start layering tracks, you get money around it, and a producer saying, “Oh, we can do this.” It slicks up. Somebody comes around with three chords, it sounds like “Louie Louie,” and it wins. The one thing that always brings super-polished stuff down is “Louie Louie” — which was Nirvana’s tune. Everything in between is people trying to get back to the three chords.

  ROBIN TAYLOR: When I heard the end play [“Teen Spirit”], I just felt a chill up and down my spine — you’d never heard it on regular radio and it sounded so spectacular.

  TRACY MARANDER: All of a sudden, you heard it every forty-five minutes.

  SEAN KINNEY: I remember being in Europe. After shows, promoters would bring you to “the rock club” in Glasgow, Scotland, or something. The kids stand around — drinking beers and smoking spleefs. When a song comes on that they like, like zombies, they’ll get on the floor and start headbanging — like it’s a concert. The next song will come on, and if they don’t like it, they’ll creep back to the wall. When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came on … you knew it was going to take off.

  ROBERT ROTH: I remember when they finished Nevermind, being pretty sure that album was going to wipe out the Sunset Strip. I don’t know if I have a slight bit of clairvoyant in me or what, but I just knew that nothing was going to be the same after that.

  SUSIE TENNANT: This is the era of hair bands — there is no way that MTV is going to play this video. The bands that my friends and I liked weren’t popular — they were popular in the underground, but they weren’t on the radio, and they weren’t on MTV.

  MARK ARM: I remember starting a tour just as Nevermind was about to come out. It seemed like every club was playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as we loaded our gear in. We played the last two shows of that tour with Nirvana in Portland and Seattle. The idea was one band would headline Seattle, and the other would headline Portland. Once Nevermind got released, it was clear that we wouldn’t headline either show [laughs].

  MARK IVERSON: Every week, it was like, “Can you believe it’s up to this … up to this … up to this?”

  SCOTT VANDERPOOL: I went to Hawaii. I was in this bar, with some classic rock cover band, and there’s a bunch of drunken frat boys yelling, “Play fucking Nirvana!” I had to ask them where they were from. They were from Chicago. I’m like, “Holy shit — this stuff is starting to take off.”

  NILS BERNSTEIN: I used to get their mail. They were getting a couple letters a month, so you handwrite back and send stickers. Then it got a little more — started typing out people’s labels, Xeroxing letters and responses. I had to go to Kinko’s and copy a hundred letters just to respond. At the mail place, there were these old ladies that worked there, and they thought it was my band. It’s like watching Nirvana’s success through the eyes of old ladies at the mail stop. Kept moving them into bigger mailboxes, until they ended up with this row of the biggest mailboxes. They said people used to come by there because it had a street address, so people thought it was a member of Nirvana’s home. People would take pictures of the mail location.

  KEN STRINGFELLOW: It’s just one of those things — right place at the right time. They connected with one of those “cosmic shifts,” as that generation became adults. Nirvana was their representative in a way.

  RIKI RACHTMAN: I was so excited to meet Kurt Cobain [on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball], and it was such a disappointment. He was smashed out of his ass — high on dope. I didn’t even get the whole “ball gown thing.” “I’ll wear a ball gown to the ball.” OK, that was really funny, Kurt. It wasn’t uncomfortable, like, “Oh, how do I react?” It was more like, “What a fucking idiot.” I loved Nirvana — I still love Nirvana. I walk into my dressing room, and he’s there — laying facedown on the floor. That’s something that sucks about meeting people you really want to meet, and then they’re just such a letdown. It bums you out.

  RON HEATHMAN: I was with Dylan and Kurt on October 30 in Vancouver — they played the Commodore Ballroom with Mudhoney. Soundscan had just started, and the manager had come back and said the record went gold. I remember everyone sitting around, shrugging their shoulders, like, “What does that mean?”

  KEN STRINGFELLOW: Nirvana didn’t really “get marketed,” to be honest — I know from people working there that their marketing budgets were pretty modest. Their sales projection for Nevermind was like 250,000. They thought they had another Pixies on their hands. They made the video — which was probably the biggest commercial concession they made. Then the record sold itself.

  CRAIG MONTGOMERY: When Nevermind came out, obviously the band was proud of it and it was a great album, but nobody knew what it was going to do. The first tour that was booked was not in big clubs — it was just another run through the same punk rock clubs that they’d played before. It was a pretty stressful scene sometimes — obviously, the Dallas show [when Kurt and a bouncer got into an onstage altercation, as seen on 1994’s Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!]. That was the epitome of that tour — out-of-control, crappy sound systems. It’s stressful when the band sees people outside who can’t get in because it’s already sold out. You feel like you’re kind of wasting your time. Pretty soon after that, we went to Europe, where the venues were bigger. And by this time, MTV is all over it, and it’s getting bigger in the States. So when things really took off and Nirvana became a household word — we were in Europe.

  ROBERT ROTH: Then, things became mega huge. The few times I’d run into [Kurt] at shows, he’d be wearing a disguise or some crazy hat that covered half his face.

  SUSIE TENNANT: After a while, Dave and Krist would do all the talking, because [Kurt] just wasn’t into it. That happened pretty quickly.

  STEVE MANNING: I remember an Urge Overkill show — Kurt Cobain was there. As everybody was leaving, I was walking with him and chatting, and this group of hardcore punk rock skate kids screamed at him, “You killed punk rock!” And just watching his shoulders dip, get quiet, and leave.

  ALICE WHEELER: The atmosphere was completely different from when Nirvana first started. Kurt seemed like he was under a lot of pressure — kind of stressed out.

  TRACY MARANDER: I remember Alice telling me she went backstage at a Nirvana show, and only got to talk to [Kurt] for a couple of minutes. His handlers were like, “He’s got to go do this and this.” She felt like people were keeping his real friends away, and keeping the hangers-on — the people that wanted money or [were] giving him drugs — around.

  CRAIG MONTGOMERY: It was about this time that he met Courtney [Love]. And also the group on tour gets bigger — we have more crew, we’re in big
ger venues. I’m not spending as much time with the band anymore, so I don’t really have a feel for how he feels about things. I mean, it was still fun … I think.

  SLIM MOON: And then Kurt got this girlfriend who publicly slandered my best friends and my town every time she got a chance, and wrote a song about how my town sucks. That was a point when people in Olympia started to willfully not pay attention to Seattle. We started to highlight, “Well, that’s not us. That’s a different scene.”

  TRACY MARANDER: Whenever [Courtney] saw me, she was always really nice. I remember [at] the Crocodile Café show, she was there, and her and I were sitting at the counter talking. It was really funny — people kept walking by looking at us, like they’re waiting [for us] to start fighting at any minute. We were just yakking away. Every few months he and Courtney would call me really early in the morning, like two or six. He would talk to me for a while, and then Courtney, for whatever reason.

  SCOTT VANDERPOOL: I was at the Vogue, and Kurt and Courtney showed up in this big white Lincoln Town Car. Courtney was dancing on the hood of the thing, I was leaving, and Kurt came over, and said, “Hey man, I just want to say thanks for playing us on the radio.”

  BEN REW: I met Courtney when she was a stripper in Portland, and we didn’t mesh, shall we say. She was really loud — like, “I’M PUNK ROCK!” And I was like, “Oh my God, you’re a dude with a dress.”

  ART CHANTRY: I met Courtney Love once — she’s like Godzilla with a skirt. One of the most fearsome creatures. She was with Jonathan Poneman, and Jonathan was terrified of her — you should have seen his expression. Nobody would deal with her when she walked into The Rocket, nobody knew who the fuck she was — this was before she was huge. She was really scary — she’s a big woman, and she had all kinds of junkie zits on her face. Her hair was greasy and dirty, and she was wearing man’s clothes — lumberjack clothes. She just looked terrible. Trying to buy an ad — she was looking for a new bassist for her band, Hole. We had this woman working at the front desk, Anna Woolverton — her nickname was Viva. And Viva was a real piece of work — she knew how to handle anything that walked in that door. So here was this interesting chance meeting between Courtney Love and Viva — I stood in my doorway and watched. She’s digging through her goddamned purse looking for money — she didn’t want to pay for it because she’s “Courtney Love” and it was one of those moments where she was literally emptying out the contents of her purse on the countertop. And the things that came out of that purse, man [laughs].

  She ended up signing over a check that was one of Kurt’s, so it was an awkward thing — they didn’t know whether to take it or not. Jonathan basically said, “I’ll cover for it no matter what happens” — he was terrified to even talk. Now, Charlie Cross — the owner of The Rocket — hates cigarette smoke. He’s one of those guys that is just paranoid about cigarette smoke — cigarette smoke gets anywhere near him, he will grab the cigarette out of somebody’s mouth. That was a totally nonsmoking office — heavily enforced. So [Courtney] was smoking a cigarette ten feet inside the front door. Viva looks up at Courtney, and says, “This is a nonsmoking office.” Courtney was taken by surprise. “What?!” “This is a nonsmoking office — you’re going to have to put out your cigarette.” She goes, “No!” There’s this stare-off — it was one of those moments where Jonathan even took a few steps back. But Courtney backed off, and walked to the front door. About eight inches inside our front door, on the rug, she dropped her cigarette and ground it out in our carpet. And that cigarette butt stayed there for like a week — nobody would pick it up! Finally, I made a little sign that said, “Courtney Love’s cigarette butt,” with an arrow. I taped it next to the butt, and everybody loved that. Eventually, Charlie came in, got pissed, and tore it off the floor.

  SUSAN SILVER: Courtney started taking shots at different musicians in the vicinity. It wasn’t cool — suddenly, there was tension between people. You don’t get far in business or in life by talking out of turn. I was really surprised when I got a phone call from Danny Goldberg, saying, “They just really want you to stop talking about them.” It was like, “What the fuck? What are you talking about? Talking about them? Who would I be talking to them about?” Shortly after that, a woman came from England doing a book on Nirvana. Courtney left a super abusive voicemail on my answering machine — a tape that I still have to this day — just reading me the riot act. It was pathetic more than anything, but it was really clear in that — because she named all the women that Kurt had ever been friends with, and that she had systematically removed from his life — she was really threatened by him having any female friendships. This woman [who was writing the book] came — she was quite disarming and quite lovely — and at that point, I was pissed. Like, “Wait a minute, they’re talking shit about me to other people? She’s leaving me abusive phone messages. She’s having Danny Goldberg calling to basically give me a gag order.” I don’t get angry very well, and haven’t many times in my life, but I had said basically what I said to you, to this woman. And at that point, she put it in some book I think. It’s nothing I wouldn’t say now — Courtney left an abusive phone message and was acting extremely irrational at this concert in Spain. And it was really sad, because she was somewhat instrumental in the undoing of our sense of community here.

  BLAG DAHLIA: I’m always fascinated by that phenomenon of people who are talented and good, but get vaulted to these heights that don’t seem to be in line with reality. I mean, I like Nirvana — I’m a fan. The same way I like Green Day, the same way I like the Beatles. I just don’t really see them as so radically [different]. If you compare what Guns N’ Roses is to what Nirvana is, you find essentially they’re the same thing — cute guys, Geffen Records, heroin, fucked strippers, into 1970s Aerosmith rock. Everything is largely exactly the same, and yet at the time, they were marketed as a different thing. It was time for a different marketing idea.

  DUFF McKAGAN: There was a lot of heroin around at that time. So both bands had a lot of success, there was a lot of drugs and alcohol infiltrated into both bands. Both had huge followings that weren’t going to die anytime soon. Guns N’ Roses had nothing in common with most of the bands of our time. And I think probably the same is true with Nirvana. Even with bands from Seattle — like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. They were alienated in drugs and über success. Guns was a band that did shit on their own terms, and so did Nirvana. There was probably an awful lot more in common than dis-in-common. I never saw it as any different … the press certainly made a lot out of it then — and still does.

  EDDIE VEDDER: You’d see bands, after the show you’d see somebody smoking and drinking. You’d say, “That drum bit in that song, that’s insane” — just kind of picking out parts of the show that are fairly obvious and makes for meaningless conversation. But you couldn’t really do that [with Nirvana], it was like, a Nirvana show. It’s weird, at the time, it wasn’t about any kind of extreme musicianship on anybody’s part — it was truly this three-piston/ three-cylinder combination of everything happening at once. Including the crowd and the power of the songs. It was a real communal experience.

  I got a hold of this show at a place called Trees, which I think we played a week later or something. It was this tiny place — posts in the middle of the crowd — it was in Texas. It was booked three months before the records [were released], so by the time we got there, the venues were packed. They’re playing on a stage about the size of like a modern day drum riser. The amount of people landing onstage — there’s really a grey line between who’s in the band and who’s in the audience. It’s really like the tide keeps going in and out — like a wave going in and out. Just watch the patience — Kurt was so fucking patient with people stepping on his pedals, smacking the mic into his face. And they’re not missing a beat. It was part of that energy, which was like a modified and modernized version of Black Flag and Minor Threat. I almost remember those shows as not being exciting, but when I watch them now, it was exciting on a hun
dred levels. I was still thinking you needed a guitar solo or a Pete Townshend jump to be exciting.

  SLIM MOON: Nirvana went on tour to support Nevermind — those were our friends, people I’d known for five years. When I lived in Seattle, they would always crash at our house. When I lived in Olympia, I lived next door to Kurt. He would come over and borrow my four-track so he could demo songs. Then they went on tour to support Nevermind, and never came back, y’know?

  CHAPTER 21

  “That they didn’t reach a broader audience baffles me”: Mudhoney, Tad, Screaming Trees, Truly, Melvins, Jesse Bernstein

  With the grunge movement in full swing, Mudhoney and Tad each issued classics for Sub Pop, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and 8-Way Santa, while the Screaming Trees made the jump to a major label with Uncle Anesthesia, and the Melvins continued to rock the underground. Also on the scene was a promising new band comprised of ex–Screaming Trees and Soundgarden members, Truly, while Seattle’s local poet, Jesse Bernstein, left an impression on the scene.

  STEVE TURNER: We took a six-month break — I was going to sign up for a couple of quarters of classes. It snowballed that we were breaking up, even though we never said that — we kept saying, “No we’re not.” Looking back at the year that we were supposedly “on break,” we did [1991’s] Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, me and Mark did the Monkeywrench record [1992’s Clean as a Broke Dick Dog], I joined the Fallouts, and I did the Sad and Lonely(s) record [1992’s The Sad and Lonely(s)]. I only made it through one quarter of college.

  TAD DOYLE: Mudhoney never failed to stir up the audience and get them excited. There’d be a lot of stage diving — all kinds of shenanigans and craziness. They’d do all these crazy, “skinny guy antics,” like bending completely over backwards and touching their head on the floor — still holding their guitar and playing. Athletic stuff that a big guy like me can only wonder about.