by Mick Wall
By the start of 1991, paradoxically, just as Kurt’s personal life was becoming more centred on injecting heroin, while attempting to keep it quiet from the rest of band, the pieces were finally starting to fall into place for Nirvana. On Thurston Moore’s personal recommendation, Gold Mountain’s John Silva had flown to Seattle to settle a management deal with the band. After that all the major label A&R teams descended on Nirvana gigs like clouds of flies. The band were simultaneously courted by MCA, Columbia, Capitol, RCA, Charisma and several others.
The winners in what Susan Silver later called ‘a feeding frenzy’ were the one label that had so far not been actively trying to sign Nirvana: DGC. Again, it was the Sonic Youth connection that helped broker the deal – for both band and label. ‘I got turned on to them by Thurston of Sonic Youth,’ explained Gary Gersh, then DGC’s A&R director. The singer had passed on a copy of Bleach to Gersh. ‘I listened to it and I just thought the songwriting was exceptional … [Kurt’s] emotion was pretty special.’
‘Kurt signed to [DGC] because Sonic Youth told him that we didn’t interfere with bands creatively at the label and so he wouldn’t be fucked with,’ Chrissy Shannon, who would become Nirvana’s first publicist at DGC, would later write. ‘I know that I jumped at the chance to work with this indie band cribbed from Sub Pop because I was bored working with the second-and third-generation pop-metal bands [on Geffen].’
The deal included an advance payment on signature of $278,000, with Sub Pop getting $75,000 of the money, plus two royalty points on each of Nirvana’s next two albums, as a way of extricating the band from their deal. Kurt, whose hard-bitten profile among the local Olympia cognoscenti as a stalwart of an independent label scene mentality that viewed all such major label deals as intrinsically foul and wrongheaded, maintained his integrity by pointing out that DGC were also ‘independent’. (In fact, DGC was merely an imprint of Geffen, itself a subsidiary of the giant MCA, and the home of such corporate rock goliaths as Guns N’ Roses, Whitesnake, Aerosmith and Cher.) That if the label was good enough for Sonic Youth, darlings of the ‘alternative’ Washington scene, they were certainly cool enough for Nirvana. And for a while people were happy to go along with that.
Deep down, though, as he lay there at night, smacked out of his brains and dreaming of whatever it was he supposed dreamers still dream of once they’ve hit the big time, Kurt could not have been more delighted. ‘I want to sell a million records,’ he would confide to friends, hugging himself. Then pretend he was joking about it. Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic knew the truth though. They weren’t fools. They wanted to sell a million records too. Who wouldn’t, man? Be fucking serious …
5. Smells Like
The first couple of months of 1991 found Dave Grohl mostly sitting around smoking, drinking and twiddling his sticks. There had been an appearance at the No More Wars benefit gig back at Evergreen College in January, where Kurt gave an impassioned, if rambling, anti-Gulf War speech, then finished the set by smashing his guitar to pieces with a hammer. He was now sporting a dark beard and deep black eye makeup, a plaid shirt and ripped-knee jeans, his unwashed blond hair tangled like rope. Krist had also grown an unkempt goatee. By year’s end, everyone in Seattle would be rocking their own version of this look, as both the music – stripped-to-the-bone rock with a more expansive lyrical edge – and the look – thrift store chic with declamatory beards and unminded hair – replaced the backcombed hair and extravagantly posed hair metal scene that had previously dominated. A year after that the whole world would be walking around in their ‘grunge’ clothes.
For now, though, being in Nirvana was all about handing over the reins to the business people, the new cats with their smart LA offices and cool connections. With Gold Mountain on-board things had moved fast. With Geffen, in the guise of DGC, sending them a list of producers and studios to consider for their first album with them, there were suddenly more important decisions to make than working up a set list for their next gig, which wasn’t until March, at the 1000-capacity Zoo in Boise, Idaho.
There had also been the arrival of several key new songs during rehearsals. ‘A good song is the most important thing, it’s the only way to really touch someone,’ Kurt told Keith Cameron in 1990, preparing the ground for the new, more overtly commercial material he had begun writing. ‘You can have the most perfect ideals in the world and still can’t get your point across unless you have good music.’ That is to say: good sales.
Back in the rehearsal room, Dave watched, fascinated, as Kurt would start to strum the basic chords to whatever his latest masterwork was and expect the band just to pick it up intuitively, bringing their own thing to the job. ‘With Nirvana,’ Dave later observed, ‘the process of making the music was so entirely simple, pure and real. Kurt was a great lyricist, he had a beautiful voice, and he wrote really simple songs. There were things that I learned about songwriting from being in a band with Kurt I don’t think anyone else could have taught me.’
One new number in particular was starting to grab everyone’s attention. ‘I was trying to write the ultimate pop song,’ Kurt later said of the song destined to become his signature tune. ‘I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies, I have to admit it.’ Adding: ‘We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.’ The song was called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, an extraordinarily catchy piece of high musical drama that was about to become the soundtrack of the 1990s. Ironically, given the iconic status it would later achieve under the Cobain imprimatur, ‘Teen Spirit’ was also the only track on Nevermind to be credited on the album equally to the three band members. Krist and Dave, numb with playing the simple singsong riff over and over as Kurt tried to complete it, decided between them to slow the verse part down, to their own metronomic beat. Suddenly the rest of the song just fell into place.
The title was even more coincidental. When Kathleen Hanna spray-painted ‘KURT SMELLS OF TEEN SPIRIT’ on the wall of his grotty room one night, Kurt assumed it was meant as some kind of revolutionary slogan. A salutation to his own indomitable spirit or some such. In fact, what Hanna meant was that Kurt smelled of the deodorant Teen Spirit, which his then girlfriend Tobi Vail wore. When, months later, after the song was a huge international hit, Kurt discovered the truth, it was just one more reason to feel morally ambivalent about his newfound, or as he saw it fake, success.
There had been talk of getting R.E.M.’s producer, Scott Litt, to do the Nirvana record, but by the spring of 1991 Litt was the most sought-after producer in the world, having just guided R.E.M. to the biggest-selling album of their career and first US No. 1, Out of Time. The idea that Litt – whatever his ‘alternative’ credentials – would make his next project an unknown band was unlikely, to say the least. Others were sounded out and considered but they were either unavailable (Don Dixon, who had produced the 1988 album by The Smithereens, Green Thoughts, a big favourite of Kurt’s) or simply too cool for him to feel comfortable with (Gil Norton, who had produced Doolittle, the 1989 classic by the Pixies, on which Kurt was now basing so much of Nirvana’s sound).
In the end, they plumped for using Butch Vig, who had recorded the demo sessions at Smart the year before. Vig might not be a ‘name’ but he had been fun to work with and he seemed to have an easy understanding with Kurt. Unlike all the other suggestions, Butch was also as hungry as Kurt to build a successful career for himself. He had recently enjoyed a career breakthrough as the producer of Gish, the much heralded debut album from the Smashing Pumpkins. But he had never worked on a major-label record before, let alone in LA, which in the early Nineties was now taking over from New York as the home of the American music business.
Arriving for a pre-production session in LA at the end of April, Butch immediately noticed the difference the addition of Dave’s drums had made to the Nirvana sound. Kurt had called him ahead of time, giving him a heads-up about what to expect. Butch was out but Kurt left a message on his answering machine: ‘Butch, we have the best drummer in the world
. He’s the greatest drummer in the world. I’m not kidding you. He’s awesome, dude…’ An opinion Vig instantly shared, he said, the moment the band lit into their newest song, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. He recalled with a smile how ‘when it got to Dave’s part’ – bu-dadung, bu-da-dung – ‘it just floored me!’
It was the same throughout the making of Nevermind. The songs – every track an almost too perfect blend of feral angst, mathematically perfect melody, and sheer bloody-minded intransigence – came out rounded, whole, defiantly so. But while the guitars tended towards fizzy textures and a deliberate kind of blurriness, as opposed to the self-absorbed bugling of most rock guitarists, the bass a spongy force field, elastic and embracing, Grohl’s drums were titanic, thunderous, playful and bold, the strong human bones around which the rest of Kurt’s phantasmagorical images are projected.
Admittedly, Dave had a template to work from, faithfully replicating the bareknuckle punch of the Smart Studio versions Chad Channing had constructed for ‘In Bloom’, ‘Pay To Play’ (now retitled, ‘Stay Away’), ‘Lithium’ and ‘Immodium’ (now retitled ‘Breed’). But it was the extra precision and subtlety he brought to the new recordings that really distinguished his playing – crisp, clean and endlessly inventive – and basic recording was completed within days, leaving Kurt to work on his guitar and vocals. After which Vig experimented with vocal harmonies, overdubs and a whole arsenal of production techniques designed to smooth away the rough edges they had displayed like war wounds on Bleach, now transformed into the sleek sonic landscapes of Nevermind (originally called Sheep, until Kurt had a change of heart and came up with Nevermind, from the line in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’: ‘I found it hard, it’s hard to find / Oh, well, whatever, never mind’).
The only time Dave stumbled during the recording was when they came to record ‘Lithium’. They went through several takes, but the track kept speeding up. ‘It wasn’t Dave’s fault,’ reckoned Vig, ‘it was the whole band. But I said, “Have you ever tried a click track?”’ A click track was a series of audio cues relayed to the drummer via headphones, a recent innovation in recording technology, inspired by the then new digital recording equipment that was becoming widespread. Dave went into emotional free-fall. Asking a drummer to use a click track was like telling a drummer he couldn’t keep time. ‘That was like a dagger in the heart for him,’ Butch agreed. ‘He went back to the hotel that night, freaking out a bit. He had a sleepless night then came in and slayed it in one take [without the click]. It was perfect.’
With recording of the Nevermind album completed by the end of May, DGC were looking at a total cost – including recording, mastering, and living expenses – of around $120,000 (approx. £65,000); 200 times more than Bleach, but still a relatively modest sum for a major label album by 1991 standards. The only bringdown was that nobody liked the initial mixes: not even Butch Vig, who was handling them.
It was the Geffen executive who signed them that had the inspiration of bringing in Andy Wallace to mix Nevermind. At the time, Wallace was ‘the guy who mixed Slayer’. That is, the guy who had been the producer Rick Rubin’s right-hand man on Slayer’s recent Seasons in the Abyss album, which Rolling Stone memorably described as ‘music to conquer nations by’, and had been their first to make the US Top 40. ‘It was quite a ride getting to the point where [Nevermind] was finished,’ Gersh would later say. He recalled walking into the Geffen offices with cassettes of the finished album, and being acutely aware that he was ‘delivering a record that was so different to what was happening in the music business at that time’. But he’d already been working with Sonic Youth for over a year, they’d put out the wondrous Goo, so ‘we already knew that there was this groundswell building. That people just didn’t care for this stuff that was successful at the top level,’ referring to what were then the rock giants of the American charts like Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe.
Chrissy Shannon, at 24 the youngest member of the Geffen Records publicity department, would be assigned the task of handling the press for Nevermind. ‘I vividly remember taking the advance cassette home that night in my car and popping it in as [my boyfriend] Steve and I were driving to dinner. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came crashing out of the speakers and where Grohl’s drums kick in after the opening riff, Steve and I simultaneously reached for the volume knob to crank it! We just sat there in the parking lot, saying, “What the fuck is this?” To me it sounded like nothing I’d heard before, not even Bleach, really, because the songwriting and melodies had improved so much from that album, and me being more of a classic rock person than an indie girl, I hadn’t heard much Pixies and all of that yet. But with that Lennon-like snarl and angst and those propulsive drums, it felt like a bomb going off.’
It was a bomb going off. There would be many casualties, very few survivors.
In June 1991, while still listening to various mixes of the album, Nirvana set out on a short American tour, opening for Dinosaur Jr. Franz Stahl, now living with his brother full-time in LA, was hired at Dave’s recommendation as their roadie for the tour. ‘Just me and the band,’ says Franz now. ‘I was their only roadie. The whole time we were travelling we were listening to these mixes of Nevermind on cassette. I was like, this fucking thing is gonna be huge. But nobody knew it yet. Nobody even knew about Bleach. They were playing to 200 people a night. But on this tour I could see it all happening. I could see it cos I wasn’t in the band and I could step back and watch it. They were crushing it. Places would be packed. Nirvana would come on and play, be done with the show, then 75 per cent of the people would leave. And Dinosaur Jr. would be playing to small portions of that initial crowd.’ Nirvana seemed to be playing each show as if it were their last, he says. ‘I would be wiping down Kurt’s guitar every night. There would always be blood everywhere.’
On 14 June, when the tour reached the Hollywood Palladium, a local band of LA misfits named Hole were added to the bottom of the bill. It was not the first time their singer, Courtney Love, who resembled one of Kurt’s broken panda-eyed dolls, had met the Nirvana singer. That had been the year before, when Nirvana had played at a dingy little dive called Satyricon, in Portland. Courtney had teased Kurt that he looked like the Soul Asylum singer Dave Pirner, and Kurt had play-wrestled her to the floor (something he liked to do with girls). When, several months later, Dave Grohl had begun going out with Courtney’s friend Jennifer Finch, Kurt’s name came up again and Courtney, three inches taller than Kurt and several lifetimes more street savvy, nicknamed him ‘Pixie Meat’, a double joke on his height and his devotion to the music of the Pixies. Courtney had her sights fixed on him, though. The ‘Sliver’ single had done it for her, especially the B-side, ‘Dive’, which she described as ‘sexual, and strange and haunting’.
When Courtney discovered Kurt wasn’t currently seeing anybody she sent him a heart-shaped box with a miniature porcelain doll inside, a toy teacup, some shellac-covered seashells and three dried roses. Kurt was mesmerised. He placed the doll on a shelf next to his growing collection of toy dolls, and wondered what it would be like to fuck someone like Courtney, who was clearly on a different wavelength to the other girls he’d known. At the Palladium, she had told him how her band had just finished recording their debut album, Pretty on the Inside, co-produced by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. Impressed by this further connection, Kurt was even surer of their entwined destinies when Courtney, noticing Kurt gulping from a bottle of cough syrup (his latest ‘stomach-remedy’ of choice), pulled out her own, much stronger cough syrup from her handbag. Before the show was over they had swapped phone numbers. It was the start of a beautiful relationship, they were both sure. But one that would have to be kept secret for now, as Courtney was still sharing an apartment with Hole’s guitarist, Eric Erlandson, still hurting from the breakup of his own affair with Courtney a few months before. She was also still carrying on an on-off-on-again relationship with Billy Corgan, frontman of Smashing Pumpkins. Kurt said he didn
’t mind. Whatever Courtney wanted. It would become his credo throughout their relationship and eventual marriage. Even when whatever Courtney wanted threatened to drive a wedge between the members of Nirvana, or help drive Kurt to his fateful end.
In the weeks leading up to the release of Nevermind in September, the band found themselves back in Britain and Europe for a series of festival dates and smaller concert appearances. The highlight was their appearance at the Reading Festival, in England, on Saturday, 23 August.
Speaking from his home in Brighton, Anton Brookes recalls the occasion with great warmth, and no little astonishment, even after all these years. ‘They were in a respectable mid-table spot on the bill, and they went on and it was a real coming of age. All the cool music journalists were waiting for them to come on, all the cool bands. The audience was also like über-fans, the kind that listened to John Peel. It was almost like a pilgrimage. Then they came on and Kurt was wearing his Sounds T-shirt and they just absolutely destroyed Chapterhouse, the band who had to follow them afterwards. It was like they’d gone and just nuked Reading Festival. Then afterwards that’s all anybody was talking about.’
Dave Grohl later admitted: ‘I had never been so scared in my life’ before going onstage. You would not have known it from his demeanour, though. With Kurt in a typically monosyllabic mood, barely making eye contact with the audience, far less addressing them directly, Dave took it upon himself to make the first verbal contact, before the band had begun playing, when he announced that they would be joined onstage that afternoon by ‘a very special guest. His name is Tony and he is … an interpretive dancer!’
‘Tony’ was Antony Hodgkinson, then the 23-year-old drummer of a British rock band, Bivouac. Also signed to Geffen, Tony was a pal of Nirvana’s London booking agent, Russel Warby, and had become friends with the band, offering to pick them up from the airport and generally hanging out. When Dave joked that Tony should come onstage at Reading with them as their dancer, he took the bait, following them on wearing ‘clown’s trousers’, and braces over his naked torso. Warby scribbled the words, ‘Lose weight now / Ask me how’ on his chest; Kurt wrote: ‘God is gay’.
