by Mick Wall
Full of recycled riffs from older Nirvana songs – most notably, the vampiric ‘Rape Me’, built on the same once-charming chords as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – and pieces that don’t end so much as collapse in a heap when they can run no more, the tracks on In Utero smelled like nothing so much as burnt shit and warm blood, seeping through old bandages encrusted with the broken shards of yellowed syringes. Baffling even to believers; beautiful only to the already dammed. Like Kurt and the woman he wrote most of the songs to, Courtney.
‘The first time I heard it I didn’t get it at all,’ admits Anton Brookes. ‘There were a couple of stand-out tracks like “All Apologies” and “Heart-Shaped Box”, but you go back and listen now and it’s still completely different, only now it makes sense. They did a complete U-turn, encapsulating their sound but pointing into a different direction [and] Dave’s role in that is superb. His drums just explode, yet they’re one of the most subtle things about the album.’
Talking about the album on the twentieth anniversary of its release, in 2013, Dave summed up most people’s reactions first time around to In Utero when he told Rolling Stone: ‘There are a few ways you can look at it. You can describe it as a remarkable achievement’, or ‘as a really fucked-up time’.
DGC saw it more as an underachievement, rejecting the final Albini mixes and bringing in Scott Litt to remix the tracks earmarked as the album’s future singles: ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, ‘All Apologies’ and ‘Pennyroyal Tea’. Litt did not disappoint the executives who had hired him, taking Albini’s ‘pure sound’ tapes and adding a reverb to the drums, extra vocal tracks as bedding, fading out certain rhythm guitars here and bringing further up into the mix a jangly lead guitar line there … adding fairy lights to the dark clouds Albini had so adroitly helped Kurt capture.
Recorded in just 12 days, the end result delighted Kurt, and Dave and Krist too. Mostly, though, Dave was just glad to get the hell out the claustrophobic atmosphere in the studio. ‘That was a weird thing,’ he said in 2013. ‘We’re sequestered in this house, in the middle of the snow, in February in Minnesota. Recording with Steve – he would hit “record”, we’d do a take, and he’d go [claps hands], “Okay, what’s next?” Wait, is it okay?’ He went on. ‘We blazed through In Utero. I was done after three days. I had another ten fucking days to sit in the snow, on my ass with nothing to do. Once we were finished with all of the instrumentation, it was time for Kurt to do his vocals and overdubs.’
The worst moment for Dave occurred – as with Nevermind – when the producer expressed over-concern about the drummer’s ability to keep a straight tempo, in this case on ‘Heart-Shaped Box’. But whereas Butch Vig had suggested using a click track – ‘Not cool, man!’ – Steve Albini made the radical suggestion of using a strobe light to cut Dave in on the beat. ‘I sat there for a take or two with this fucking strobe light in my face until I practically had a seizure. I said, “Can we just play? A little ebb and flow. Don’t worry about it.”’
Once the sessions were complete, Nirvana did … not much else until it was released six months later. They averaged around one gig a month for much of 1993, arenas now, usually, or festivals, but being on the road was by this time a familiar grind. The only thing anyone knew for sure was that Kurt would be out of it. Either good out of it, as in making the gig a better one, which he could still do on those nights when he wasn’t bugging out about something else. Or, more often, bad out of it, as in the day of their supposedly ‘more intimate’ show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, in July, when Kurt nearly killed himself.
Anton Brookes, who had flown in a party of journalists from London, was the one who found Kurt, in his words, ‘slumped behind the toilet of his hotel room in New York’. Anton had gone over to visit the band at their hotel the day before the interviews were set to take place – the first serious round of UK publicity for the forthcoming In Utero album. All was going to plan, with Dave and Krist on their usual good form, when Anton caught sight of someone he immediately recognised as one of Kurt’s drug dealers also in the hotel lobby.
‘You knew what was happening,’ said Anton, ‘and you knew what that guy was there for and you knew what the outcome of that would be. The next day was when we were supposed to do press, and it was just a nightmare from start to finish, really.’ Things got worse when Kurt and Courtney began to fight. ‘I was upstairs,’ Anton recalled, ‘and suddenly the screaming, or the arguments, changed.’ Alerted by the sudden calm, ‘We realised we should go in. We went rushing into the bathroom and slumped behind the toilet was Kurt with a syringe in his arm, blue.’ For all his private and public determination to avoid rock-star clichés, Kurt had fallen for the biggest of them all: shooting smack much stronger than he was used to. ‘Hence the reaction,’ said Anton, ‘virtually ODing.’
Still wincingly unsure of the commercial potential of their new album, when In Utero was released on 13 September 1993, almost two years to the day since Nevermind broke the mould, DGC decided to take what it told America’s leading music biz trade magazine, Billboard, would be a ‘set things up, duck, and get out of the way’ approach. So unconvinced was the company by the album’s commercial potential, DGC didn’t even release a single from it in America, issuing a video of ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ to MTV and sending the sparkly new Litt-mixed version to college and ‘alternative’ radio stations, but omitting to send anything to mainstream Top 40 radio stations in the US.
Adding to the impression that the album was a non-starter in the ‘real’ world, both Wal-Mart and Kmart, the two biggest retail chainstores in America, refused to stock it, objecting, they said, to the ‘controversial’ album artwork, specifically the back cover, a reproduction of one of Kurt’s collages, this time of the tangled bodies and bones of several babies, both in and out of the womb, which he was quoted as describing as ‘Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death.’ There was also consternation about stocking an album on which one of the tracks was titled ‘Rape Me’. DGC eventually reissued the album with a heavily edited version of Kurt’s collage, and with ‘Rape Me’ relisted on the cover as ‘Waif Me’. Kurt felt both justified and vilified by the news. He was mortified, though, when ‘a spokesperson for Nirvana’ explained in an official press release that the band had decided to edit the packaging themselves because as kids Cobain and Novoselic were only able to buy music from the two chain stores; as a result they ‘really want to make their music available to kids who don’t have the opportunity to go to mom-and-pop stores’.
None of which prevented In Utero from debuting in both the US and UK charts simultaneously at No. 1. It would eventually sell less than half the 30 million copies Nevermind had sold worldwide, but it was still one of the biggest-selling albums of 1993. Again, Kurt felt both justified and nonplussed. He needed a fix.
The rock press didn’t care either way. They just wanted to make sure they were still welcome to the party. Rolling Stone in its review called the album ‘brilliant, corrosive, enraged and thoughtful – a triumph of the will’. Time magazine’s Christopher John Farley went further, stating: ‘Nirvana hasn’t gone mainstream, though this potent new album may once again force the mainstream to go Nirvana.’ But it was David Browne’s needlepoint review in Entertainment Weekly that really nailed it. ‘The music is often mesmerising, cathartic rock’n’roll,’ Browne wrote, ‘but it is rock’n’roll without release.’ While in Britain it was John Mulvey in the NME who came closest to really grasping what In Utero represented, when he wrote: ‘As a document of a mind in flux – dithering, dissatisfied, unable to come to terms with sanity – Kurt should be proud of [the album]. As a follow-up to one of the best records of the past ten years it just isn’t quite there.’
To help launch the album in America, the band were booked for their second appearance on Saturday Night Live. A show with a self-aggrandising tradition of ‘controversial’ performances, it agreed that Kurt should be allowed to perform ‘Rape Me’, in defiance of the cringe-making new a
lbum cover DGC was preparing, as well as the band’s new ‘alternative-only’ single, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’. A bigger surprise to Nirvana fans watching back home, however, was the unannounced inclusion of a new, fourth member: the guitarist Pat Smear.
That Kurt had wanted another guitarist in Nirvana was no big secret. He had been talking about one from the start, but after Jason Everman was let go in 1989, no more had come of it, at least not publicly. In fact, Kurt had sounded out Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines 18 months before. Kelly had been in the middle of recording his first album with his new band, Eugenius, at the time. ‘There were loads of messages from their tour manager to call them,’ he later recalled. ‘I phoned them up in Los Angeles and … Kurt said to me, “We’re having a three-month break, then I want you to come over and write songs, maybe join the band.” I was like, yeah, definitely, but I’ve got to finish this record first. After that I never heard anything more. I’m kind of glad it didn’t work out because I’d have come along and hit them with happy, poppy tunes, and In Utero wouldn’t have happened.’
That last sentence seems highly unlikely, and may in part explain why Kurt never got back in touch. His days of including ‘happy, poppy tunes’ in his material were long over. Instead he turned to Pat Smear, whom Courtney had first met some years before, and who Kurt became casually acquainted with in the early Nineties when the largely unknown guitarist was working at the SST Superstore, selling punk rock vinyl and CDs.
Pat – real name: Georg Albert Ruthenberg – had just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday when he got the phone call from Kurt that would finally, after 15 years of trying, make him a star. A native of Los Angeles, Georg had a bloodline which was an unusual blend of African American and Native American on his mother’s side and German immigrant on his father’s. Pushed into taking classical piano lessons as a child, he insists he’d never even heard any rock music until he was at high school. ‘My parents didn’t allow rock music in the house,’ he once explained. ‘I actually didn’t even know it existed until I was probably eleven years old.’ That changed when his parents bought his older sister three albums: the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. ‘She just played them over and over and over … I just thought there was the Beatles – and everything else!’
By the time he met a 19-year-old high-school dropout named Paul Beahm, in 1977, Georg had taught himself to play guitar, taking inspiration from Brian May of Queen and Mick Ronson of Ziggy-era David Bowie. Latterly, he had also become obsessed with the British punk scene, obsessed with the intersexual look as much as the spastic-elastic music. His new friend Paul, who had recently changed his name, in true punk fashion, to Darby Crash, shared similar tastes in ‘outrageous music’, although Darby was more inclined to the Sid Vicious school of ultraviolent onstage action than he was the razor-sharp attitude of a Johnny Rotten. Both, though, had a love of Queen and Iggy Pop and it was on this common ground that they found their place together. With Darby as singer and Pat as guitarist, they would form the band that was to become the start of a musical journey which seemed doomed to failure.
Darby came from pain: an older brother, Bobby Lucas, who had been murdered in a drug deal gone bad, and a stepfather, Bob Baker, who had also checked out badly three years earlier. Brought up by an abusive single mother with her own mental health issues, Darby outlined to Ruthenberg, whom he now renamed Pat Smear, what he thought of as his five-year plan to make himself immortal. First off, form the most outrageous band ever. Next record just one great album. Then kill himself, thus ensuring his legend would live for ever.
Pat listened to all of this and thrilled to the thought. British punk rock had already arrived in Southern California, but it was only ever a second-hand version, based on out-of-date British music paper stories and pix, and simple word of mouth. The Sex Pistols, who they worshipped, never did play live in LA, and The Clash, whom they found too straight by comparison, didn’t get there until 1979, when they headlined a sold-out show at the Santa Monica Civic. Instead, LA punk was like a sleazier version of original Detroit garage rock groups like Alice Cooper and The Stooges, with hot flushes of Bowie-as-Ziggy and Queen-as-Freddie-Mercury-plaything thrown in.
That was what Darby and Pat were aiming for anyway when they formed their group, Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens. Half boy, half girl (they advertised for ‘two untalented girls’, recruiting the bassist Lorna Doom and drummer Belinda Carlisle, whom Darby renamed Dottie Danger, but who soon left to form the Go-Go’s), all amateur, none of the band, aside from Pat, could actually play when they did their first gigs. But that was beside the point. They changed their name to The Germs because it fitted better on T-shirts than Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens, and their shows were essentially triggers for full-on punk riots, with Darby, often tripping on stage, or simply high on anything anyone gave him, from booze to dope to speed to downers, throwing himself around the stage and among the audience, slashing open his chest with broken bottles and mangling lyrics to songs like ‘Sex Boy’. Key line: ‘I like it anywhere any time that I can / I’m the fucking son of superman!’
‘Whatever we were going to be, we were going to be the most,’ said Pat. ‘If we’re gonna be punk, then we are gonna out-punk the Sex Pistols! If we are gonna be the worst band ever, then we are gonna be the fucking worst band ever!’ It was a pledge they more than lived up to. Their only album, (GI), aka Germs Incognito, was released by local LA punk label Slash Records in October 1979. Produced for peanuts by the former Runaways star Joan Jett, idolised by Darby and Pat, its 17 tracks recorded in a matter of days, the comparative clarity of the tracks, as opposed to the totally chaotic live performances, where Darby would deliberately not sing into the mic for half the show, lifted the band’s reputation out of the punk gutter and into the pantheon of all-time LA punk classics. It even got reviewed in the LA Times, which described it as an ‘aural holocaust’.
There was an extra element to what The Germs did, too, that some have theorised since may have had to do with Darby’s closeted homosexuality. Was that inward-turned rage really just another expression of punk rock? Or was the boy railing against something more specific? Pat, too, liked to flaunt an androgynous allure that may have had more to it than just punk ‘front’. Interviewed in the classic Penelope Spheeris movie documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization, about the LA punk scene of 1979–80, Pat cheerfully tells the camera: ‘I’d probably hit lots of girls in the face. I don’t like girls very much.’ Not because he was a tough, butch guy. As he says, ‘I’ve probably punched out everybody I know at one time or another. But I’ve always run afterwards because I can’t fight.’
The question of Pat Smear’s sexuality has been shushed and tutted over ever since. Darby eventually became much more open about his homosexuality, or bisexuality, as he saw it. Pat, despite his heavy makeup, loud clothes, black nail polish and generally effeminate mien, has never been so bold, at least not publicly. And why should he? What does it matter as long as his guitar playing is up to scratch? Yet it seems likely that it was this extra aspect of his personality that helped endear Pat to Kurt, as much as his musicianly abilities. Kurt also liked dressing up in feminine clothes and wearing outré makeup and nail polish. Lived to blur the masculine–feminine, in his music as much as his life. When asked about his love affair with Courtney by Michael Azerrad, he suggested it didn’t matter whether his soul-mate was a man or a woman as long as there was real love there on both sides. Or as he sang in ‘All Apologies’, one of the most affecting tracks from the In Utero album: ‘What else should I say / Everyone is gay.’
Less triumphal was the tragi-comic way Darby Crash eventually died. As good as his word, The Germs had split up in the months that followed the release of their ‘one great album’, dispirited by the near-impossibility of getting gigs (their reputation for leaving venues wrecked having turned off almost all of LA’s club owners) as much as Darby’s five-year plan for self-destruction. Then
, out of the blue, a Germs ‘reunion’ show was announced for Wednesday, 3 December 1980. The venue was a packed Starwood club, on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard. It was, typically, a chaotic affair, with Darby telling the crowd at one point, ‘We did this show so you new people could see what it was like when we were around. You’re not going to see it again.’ On the night, it was interpreted as a literal farewell from the band. But Pat would later recall how in the run-up to the show, Darby had confessed to him: ‘The only reason I’m doing this is to get money to get enough heroin to kill myself with.’ Pat had heard stuff like that from Darby so many times over the years, though, he shrugged it off. ‘He’d said that so many times I just said, “Oh, right”, and didn’t think about it any more.’
Four nights later, Darby and his then girlfriend, Casey Cola, were sitting on the floor of a backroom at her mother’s house and shooting up $400 worth of heroin. Darby shot Casey up first, then himself, then held her in his arms while the lights went out. But Casey didn’t die. Instead, she came to hours later to find a dead Darby in her arms. Blue at 22, he had kept his promise. But fate, always an unreliable witness, foiled his scheme, robbing him of even minor punk immortality when news of John Lennon’s assassination by another painfully deluded young American hit the airwaves.
Pat Smear didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, when he heard the news, he was too in shock, too afraid for his own future. Too busy chewing on a cigarette and hanging by the telephone. Three months later he had joined The Adolescents, Orange County’s reigning punk rock kings. But left soon after when he decided he didn’t want to tour with the band. The Germs had never left LA. The thought of being stuck in the back of a van with a bunch of laughing, farting smart boys was probably too much for the hypersensitive guitarist.
