by Mick Wall
During a gap for tuning between two of the new, as yet unreleased numbers from their new album, ‘Drain You’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Dave took it upon himself to address the audience again: ‘We asked someone how much … admission was … and they told us it cost … you had to bring a forty pound squid … and we were like … no way … and we thought … then we, then we … and then Krist, and then, and then Kurt was like … and then Krist just sorta … you know … and then Krist was just sorta … you know and then Kurt just kinda did this … fuckin’… it was weird cause it was uhhh…’ The crowd laughed and applauded his goofy incoherence while Kurt merely waited for Dave to stop before nonchalantly chopping out the opening lines to ‘Teen Spirit’, while Tony returned to the stage to start flailing around again.
Not yet the climactic moment of the set it would soon become, ‘Teen Spirit’ was largely overlooked in the reviews that followed the show in favour of the real climax of the set, another as yet unknown number called ‘Endless Nameless’. As Krist threw his bass into the drums at the end – and Dave picked it up and threw it back at him – Kurt walked backwards to the lip of the stage then ran full pelt and swallow-dived straight into Dave’s drums. Meeting over. Cue huge applause from the crowd, Kurt walking off waving shyly to them, retrieving his can of beer from behind a stage monitor on the way, still not actually talking to them, but getting his message across loud and clear all the same.
At the time Nevermind was released, on 24 September 1991, Nirvana were completing a two-night stand at the Axis club in Boston, part of a 24-date North American tour that would see them graduating slowly from the clubs to the smaller theatres. Though they were now getting almost daily phone calls telling them how much the album was selling, the band was still blissfully unaware of the sheer scale of the excitement now building around Nevermind.
Before the album was released, Gary Gersh said, ‘I felt like if we kept our heads down and worked really hard, and got a little bit lucky, and the band didn’t implode, that maybe over the course of time, we could sell maybe 500,000 records. Like really a successful first major-label record.’ Initially, however, Geffen decided it would only be shipping 30,000 copies to retail outlets. When Gersh objected that the figure was too small, the label’s president, Eddie Rosenblatt, bet him $1000 the album would not sell the 30,000 in a month.
Determined to win the bet, Gersh decided his best strategy was to simply start passing around pre-release cassettes of the album to as many people in the business as possible, from music critics to radio programmers and DJs, record store managers, regional managers and distribution chiefs, and promotional staff across the US. ‘We made more pre-release tapes of [Nevermind] than anybody had ever made and we gave it to everybody.’ No fears of it being leaked online in those days. In fact, they wanted these tastemakers to pass it around and share, word of mouth being the surest marketing technique of all. ‘People started talking and people started telling other people,’ says Gersh. ‘We could feel it happening.’
The morning of Nevermind’s release, Gersh got a phone call from Rosenblatt. ‘He said, “The record has sold out everywhere in America – and it’s eleven o’clock in the morning and the West Coast hasn’t even opened yet.” He goes, “I think you were right.”’ By the end of that first week DGC had shipped 500,000 copies throughout the US – and sold over 400,000 of them. ‘It wasn’t because the record was on the radio,’ said Gersh. ‘The video had [just] broken on MTV but it wasn’t because of that either. It was because people were just telling other people that it was great. And you couldn’t stop it.’
Meanwhile, Chrissy Shannon in LA and Anton Brookes in London had gone seemingly overnight from working hard to simply get the album reviewed, to fielding calls from major magazines and newspapers for interviews and pictures. ‘It was a little hard for [the band] to initially get that it was getting so huge, so fast,’ says Shannon now. ‘They were playing the same damn circuit every rock band plays around the country and visiting little indie record stores on the way, so it was really hard for them to grasp that they had gone gold in a couple of weeks.’
Chrissy says she remembers the first time they came into the publicity office ‘and Kurt was like a little kid’ spinning around in her boss Lisa Gladfelter’s big leather chair. She laughs. ‘I remember telling him that I was so glad that I could work their album and not be stuck only in the hell of Don Dokken-land and him giving me a pitying look…’
Almost a year to the day exactly since Dave’s first gig with the band, Nirvana played another landmark show in Seattle, at the 2000-capacity Paramount Theater. Mudhoney, who had just released their own new album, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, on Sub Pop, were originally billed as headliners. But by the time the tour had reached Seattle it was clear who the ticket-buyers would be coming to see. ‘Every club we walk into, every fucking club we hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit”,’ recalled Danny Peters. ‘We’re like, “Holy shit, this record’s everywhere!”’ Arriving six weeks into their own tour to hook up with Nirvana in Portland, Peters asked them: ‘“Hey guys, how’s it going?” And they said, “Our record just went gold today.” Ah…’
As if to underline their newfound status, the band had agreed to have the Paramount show filmed by a large professional film crew. The set consisted of almost all of Nevermind, a few crowd-pleasers from Bleach – and one new track that nobody quite knew what to make of yet: ‘Rape Me’. Kurt prefaced the song onstage at the Paramount by saying, ‘This song is about hairy, sweaty, macho, redneck men – who rape.’ In fact, it was an insulting swipe at the record industry that was about to make all of Kurt’s and Krist’s and Dave’s maybe-one-day dreams come true. And written, in spite, to the very same chords as ‘Teen Spirit’ – an incredibly prophetic gesture considering the single was still riding the crest of the charts. But like a cancer victim going under the knife, Kurt already knew what the expected outcome would be for him. At the same time, there was something incredibly disingenuous about Kurt having written a song called ‘Rape Me’, it coming from the same guy who just weeks before had told Keith Cameron: ‘I think denying the corporate ogre is a waste of time. You should use them, rape them the way they rape you. I don’t believe in closing off options to make your own world seem more important.’
Three days after the Paramount show they were back in Britain, for another tour, again upgraded from previous visits, this time to concert halls. In the three months since their Reading appearance, Kurt had become emboldened in a way only a hit record can make you. But there was something else too: he had finally consummated his relationship with Courtney. Making their UK television debut, playing live on the late-Friday-night show The Word, then the hippest music show on British TV, Kurt began by telling the audience: ‘I want all you people in this room to know that Courtney Love, the lead singer of the sensational pop group Hole, is the best fuck in the world!’
According to Jo Whiley, then working as one of the researchers on The Word, now a BBC Radio Two presenter, ‘I was dead keen to get them onto The Word. I was saying to everyone, “We’ve got to have them on”, but nobody had particularly heard of them. We discovered the song [‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’] was really long [and] for the show it had to be under three minutes. I was told, “Tell them to do an edit!” I’m going, “You don’t understand, we’ve got to have them on the show, they’re more important than [that] … This was the one time I thought, “Fuck it, I’m not being a TV researcher here, I’m a fan.” I stood down the front for when Kurt said, “Courtney Love is the best fuck in the world.” Then it kicked off and it was so exciting.’
Three weeks later Nirvana made their debut on Top of the Pops, not the hippest music show but the one with the biggest mainstream audience on British TV, where they were asked to mime to ‘Teen Spirit’. This, of course, was frowned on by the brutally cred-conscious trio, who proceeded to send the whole thing up, not bothering to pretend to play their instruments, while Kurt, offered the chance to at least d
o his vocal live, made a mockery of the process, changing the opening lines to ‘Load up on guns and kill your friends’, while singing in a preposterous baritone, then practically swallowing the mic. Afterwards the staid BBC production team inquired whether Kurt would ‘mind doing that again?’ Kurt’s deadpan reply: ‘No, I’m happy with that, thanks.’ London-based Geffen Records executives watched in disbelief, certain that it would kill the record’s sales stone dead. But nothing could stop the momentum of that song, and ‘Teen Spirit’ went even further up the UK charts the following week.
But Nirvana weren’t quite done with subverting the UK TV viewing audience. When they were booked to appear on the Jonathan Ross chat show The Last Resort, in December, they had agreed to perform live, not ‘Teen Spirit’, this time, the band was relieved to learn, but ‘Lithium’ – the track, in fact, that had originally been earmarked as the lead single from Nevermind, before the band came up with ‘Teen Spirit’. Except, in a fit of extra would-be punk aplomb, Kurt, who had only shown up an hour before broadcast, changed his mind and – much to the producers’ alarm – they ripped into ‘Territorial Pissings’ instead. Ross made the best of it, as the band trashed their gear and stumbled off amid ear-splitting feedback, telling the folks back home, ‘I hope we didn’t wake the neighbours.’ But it was clear this was not all fun for the band. As Dave Grohl trooped off he looked exasperated, wasted. Nirvana had done over 70 shows in the past three months, plus an ever-increasing number of press interviews, record store appearances, and TV and radio slots. Their eyes were dusty; their emotions dumbed down.
The next night they appeared on the bill at the Transmusicales open-air festival in Rennes, France. This was to have been followed by more shows in Spain but they were all exhausted, in bad shape, none more so than Kurt, who had been doing heroin again. Because he missed Courtney, he said. Because it made him sociable, he said. Because his ulcer pains were back and worse than ever, he said. When he said anything at all.
The Spanish shows were cancelled; the festival in Rennes would now be the last stop on the European tour. Kurt could barely make it to the stage, so Dave and Krist improvised a ramshackle version of The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ with Dave on vocals, coyly putting the blame for the band’s disarray on the band’s ridiculously busy schedule, changing the payoff line of the song to: ‘It’s just a major label wasteland.’ At the end, as was becoming tediously predictable, they trashed their gear, as though never intending to use it again. Then, as the feedback whirred in the wind and the crowd cheered for they knew not what really, Krist leaned over and picked Kurt up off the floor where he lay, as though unconscious, and carried him off as though carrying a sleeping baby.
Dave Grohl looked on and said nothing. Just thought it.
6. Dodgy Kebabs
And that was it. It never really got any better for Dave Grohl in Nirvana after those last few months of 1991, when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was becoming the world’s favourite song, and Nirvana the world’s newest coolest band. By the time Nevermind had replaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album at No. 1 in the American album charts, in January 1992, the world had already become aware that the game had changed, maybe for ever.
The only ones still in denial about it were the band themselves. ‘When Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off No. 1, I was there when they got the champagne,’ says Anton Brookes, ‘but it was so anti-climactic. I was excited because it was punk rock. Nirvana knocking Michael Jackson off of Number One – that is punk rock history in the making! But they were all really flippant about it.’
Taking their lead from Kurt, they were too self-conscious, too uptight about not being seen as rock with a capital ‘R’, that they didn’t really know how to react. Kurt didn’t do high-fives. Dave and Krist did, but not while Kurt was watching. Says Anton: ‘They weren’t gonna be jumping up and down, and going like, “Yeah!” That’s not their way. But it was such an anti-climax; it almost went like … it didn’t seem to register. Nobody seemed to be taking much notice of it.’
Nobody wanted to be uncool, at least not while Kurt was around, frowning. ‘It was the same with things like limousines,’ says Anton. ‘If the record companies or promoters hired limos to pick the band up, the band would get in a taxi. It was all kind of like that. They never wanted to be seen as selling out, or that mentality. But then they were learning the game. They were holding back and not giving too much away. I think they learned quite quick that what they would give away people would grasp on to. They were still very cautious.’
Cautious and inhibited and, in Kurt’s case, increasingly, it seemed, just plain fucked-up. A feature published the same month in the high-profile San Francisco magazine BAM wrote of Kurt ‘nodding off in mid-sentence’, and described him as sitting there with ‘pinned pupils, sunken cheeks and scabbed, sallow skin’, pointedly suggesting there was ‘something more serious than mere fatigue’ about the emaciated singer.
But if becoming, as Rolling Stone noted in April, ‘the world’s first triple-platinum punk rock band’ was spacing out Kurt, it was having the opposite effect on his two band mates. ‘Dave’s just psyched,’ Nirvana’s friend and new fan-mail coordinator, Nils Bernstein, was quoted as saying. ‘He’s twenty-two, and he’s a womaniser, and he’s just: “Score!”’ Krist, who was about to get married to Shelli, may not have been a womaniser, but he was a drinker. So much so, Bernstein suggested, he had recently gone on the wagon, to try and bring himself back down off the cloud he’d been riding since Nevermind changed everybody’s minds. He’d also recently bought a five-bedroom house in one of Seattle’s more salubrious neighbourhoods. When one of his pals from back in the day remarked that the mortgage payments must be crippling, Krist had shrugged: ‘What payments?’ He’d paid for the house in cash. ‘[Krist] and Dave have had to pick up a lot of Kurt’s slack,’ said Bernstein. Krist and Dave ‘were close before, but now they’re inseparable’.
In fact, when Dave wasn’t on the road with the band, or hanging out in Seattle, where he was looking to buy a house, he was hurrying back to Virginia, to spend time with his mother and sister and old high school pals. Despite the now out-of-control media blitz surrounding the band, Dave was the only one of the three who could still walk around without drawing a crowd. Everyone now recognised Kurt’s whey-faced visage, all distraught blond hair and big blue crybaby eyes; everyone knew Krist as ‘the other one’, who always accompanied Kurt onstage, this huge, pogoing loony with the horse face and giraffe legs. Dave was the only one in Nirvana nobody ever really recognised offstage. The only one who could still show up at a Mudhoney show and no one would even notice. Shit, Dave could show up at a Nirvana show, some places, stroll through the crowd, and no one would notice. At least, not at first …
Chrissy Shannon says one of her favourite memories from this period ‘was of Dave calling me to bitch about having to leave his hotel room in the middle of the night and go sleep on soundman Craig Montgomery’s floor because Courtney had joined Kurt on the road and they were fucking in the other bed! He’s hilarious when he’s bitching.
‘Another fun moment was Gary Graff from the Detroit Free Press wanting an interview with Kurt that never happened, so I finally set up a phoner with Dave. Dave apparently was not in the mood to talk, so he put [stand up comedian] Bobcat Goldthwait on the phone with Gary, who did the interview straight-up as Dave. It went to print that way and when Dave spilled the beans later, Gary and the Detroit Free Press were not at all amused.’
By the time Rolling Stone ran its first cover story on the band, in April 1992, it was already all over. Kurt had married Courtney in February (she signed a pre-nup, which she later insisted was her idea), two days after the band’s last date of their current tour, she being three months pregnant at the time of the wedding. Both were determined, they said, not to replicate their own experiences of coming from broken homes, and to ensure their child grew up with a married mother and father. A couple of weeks later, the writer Michael Azerrad showed up at their
newly rented two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles’s low-key Fairfax district. In his piece, Azerrad describes Kurt lying around in striped pajamas, his toenails painted red. The place was littered with records and ashtrays and his dolls and teddy bears. Kurt makes much of ‘a long-standing and painful stomach condition … aggravated by stress and, apparently, his screaming singing style’. The fact, as he tells Azerrad, that he has hardly eaten ‘for more than two weeks’ obviously hasn’t helped either. What he makes a point of not telling Azerrad is that he has been doing smack with Courtney on a virtually day-to-day basis, which has also contributed to his ‘gaunt and frail’ appearance.
When Azerrad asks about the couple’s recent marriage – on the idyllic island of Waikiki, in Hawaii, on the way home from Nirvana’s first tours, in January, of Japan and Australia, Kurt describes their relationship as being ‘like Evian water and battery acid’. He was joking but you know what they say about jokes. Azerrad wasn’t to know that yet, though. He could only take what Kurt told him at face value. So that when Kurt had given Krist a kiss on a recent Saturday Night Live performance of ‘Teen Spirit’, it’s because they knew ‘it would piss off the folks back home – and everybody like them’. Cos Kurt is such a rebel, see?
Later in the piece, when Azerrad rides in Kurt’s car with him to go get some money out of a cash machine, Kurt explains how dumbfounded he is to take $20 out only to find his balance is now in excess of $100,000. So he’s still poor, at least in his own mind, and he’s still misunderstood. Kurt is worried that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ will become a latter-day ‘Born in the USA’ – that the millions of kids buying it don’t really get it. That they might lump Nirvana in with all the other bands from Seattle now being gobbled up by major-label deals, with Pearl Jam, whose debut album, Ten, had actually been released a month before Nevermind, coming in for special treatment.
