by Mick Wall
Pat spent the rest of the 1980s living off the fumes of an assumed outlandish past. There had been short-lived new wave bands like Twisted Roots, with Black Flag’s former bassist Kira Roessler as vocalist, who were considered ultra-cool but too late out of the gate to get a deal; 45 Grave, with whom he recorded a single, ‘Black Cross’, before he split; a stint playing with punk-witch-queen Nina Hagen’s live band; and two solo albums – Ruthensmear (1987) and So You Fell in Love with a Musician … (1991), both released on the independent SST label, founded by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn and early home to bands like Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets and Soundgarden. Between times Pat had also built up a CV as a bit-part player in various movies and TV shows, starting as an extra in an episode of Quincy, ME, then appearing as a ‘background artist’ in Bladerunner, Breakin’ and Howard the Duck. It was during this period he first met a teenage Courtney Love, whose lead part in Alex Cox’s so-bad-it’s-good cod-Western, Straight to Hell, also starring Joe Strummer, had been noticed by Pat and his one-day friend Kurt Cobain.
Cut to the summer of 1993, and after several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing about who to ask to join Nirvana as second guitarist – ‘We talked about Steve Turner, we talked about Buzz Osbourne,’ Dave Grohl later revealed, ‘but of course we didn’t want to break up Mudhoney or the Melvins’ – Kurt suddenly decided to phone Pat. It had been what seemed like a lifetime since Pat had been in The Germs, but Kurt the punk-historian revered the story of Darby Crash. No matter that Pat’s most recent claim to fame was an occasional appearance as a lisping fashion consultant on MTV’s House of Style, starring the supermodel Cindy Crawford, as a guitarist he carried all the credibility that Kurt sought for himself.
‘I’d read an interview with Kurt, where he said that Nirvana was meant to be a four-piece, and I thought that I could be that fourth member,’ Pat later recalled in Clash. ‘I was looking to search them out, to ask them about joining. And then I got the call – it was a big, crazy coincidence.’ Before then, he’d been ‘calling friends, asking for Courtney’s number. I’d not had her number for a while, as she was always changing it. But the story I heard about the call was that Kurt and Courtney were just sitting around, talking about potential second guitarists to bring into the band, and The Germs were playing in the background. And then Courtney says, “Hey, I know this guy…”’
At first, he’d thought it was a prank call. Then realised it really was Kurt Cobain on the phone. ‘At the time I was working at a punk rock record store, not really thinking about playing music – I was kind of bored and sick of it and then this came along. It was all such a whirlwind…’ According to Dave, speaking to Mojo in 2013: ‘What Pat added more than anything was an injection of life and happiness to those last months of Nirvana … One of the first rehearsals, we were trying to figure out [David Bowie’s] “The Man Who Sold the World” and the three of us just couldn’t do it. Pat said, “Actually, it goes like this.” I thought: “There’s a musician in the band now!” Having Pat changed things dramatically. Kurt and Courtney were on that side of town and Krist and I were on this side of town, and Pat definitely bridged us back together for a while.’
But only for a while. In truth, Pat would always be more of a friend to Kurt and Courtney than to anybody else in Nirvana. For now, his debut appearance with the band on Saturday Night Live introduced a refreshingly kooky atmosphere to their performance. Just as Kurt begins to look all washed out and Krist’s pogoing takes on a desultory, broken-willed aspect – Dave the only one left of the three still apparently giving his fiery all on the drums – Pat’s angular old-school punk un-dance adds life to what is increasingly becoming a kind of musical wake for a deceased ideal, overexposed and undermined, cheaply surrendered.
It was a similar story for the now famous MTV Unplugged performance they filmed at the Sony Music studios in New York in November. The 22-date US tour they had completed between the two TV appearances has obviously beefed up the band’s musical muscularity, everything suddenly coming easier for them now. But there is still an undeniable air of gloom pervading everything, as though conducting a public post-mortem, a sense of overwhelming ennui not helped by the deliberately tomb-like setting of flickering black candles, half-dead flowers, all bathed in hazed purple lighting, and an almost tangible feeling of having the dust settle onto you like a frost. Meanwhile, Pat, effeminate, half-caste, outcast, street cred to the max but no visible means of support, sits at the back grinning.
‘We were really scared shitless about doing the Unplugged thing,’ Dave said. ‘We really had to sit down and think, “What are we going to do?”’ Rehearsals had not gone well. Few Nirvana songs really fitted the all-acoustic format, forcing them to decide on a range of cover versions, comprising almost half the 14-song set. ‘We thought, “Oh great, we’re going to go out there and make fools of ourselves.” But we got up and did it, and for some reason, it turned out okay. It was kinda nice cos it was the show that wasn’t supposed to work,’ he laughed. ‘We were really looking forward to it sucking hard.’
Musically, though, Unplugged proved an unexpected triumph, even though the largely maudlin choice of songs – from their own decidedly downbeat versions of stuff like ‘About a Girl’ and ‘Come as You Are’ to brutally skull-and-bones versions of Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and the Vaselines’ ‘Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam’, to positively ethereal versions of three Meat Puppets songs: ‘Plateau’, ‘Oh, Me’ and ‘Lake of Fire’, with the brothers Kirkwood, Curt and Chris, joining the band onstage to help out – turned the event into something more resembling a requiem than a celebration.
‘Looking back at MTV’s Nirvana Unplugged I view it, in retrospect, as [Kurt’s] public suicide note,’ says Chrissy Shannon. ‘There is a point at the end of, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” where you see in his eyes a moment of absolute, searing pain. It’s as if for a moment you witness him glimpse the other side and it’s scary as fuck.’
During a lengthy local cable TV show interview in Minneapolis in December, when Pat was asked how playing in Nirvana compared to playing in his ‘previous group’ – meaning The Germs – Pat grinned and said, ‘It’s kind of the same.’ Kurt, seated on the opposite side of the couch, his pinpricked eyes hidden behind plastic blue sunglasses, glances over and says in a comic voice, ‘You mean you calling me Darby?’ Pat, his hair now dyed blond, his eyes weighted with blue eye shadow and long, spider leg mascara, drawls, ‘No [but] he’s got the same problems.’
‘Oh gee, I hope not,’ says the interviewer, but the implication is there for all to see, Dave and Krist chuckling along nervously.
8. Death is a Call
When the end finally came, that cold, bloody day in April, a single blast from a 20-gauge Remington shotgun removing the top of Kurt’s head and what was left of his mind, Dave Grohl – no matter what he said later – was deeply shocked but no longer really surprised. How could he be? As Charles Cross says now, ‘He was Kurt Cobain’s roommate and at one point one of his best friends.’ By the end, though, ‘he’s an estranged band mate on a ship that’s gonna hit an iceberg and neither he nor anyone else can stop that from happening.’
The European tour at the start of 1994 had been one long cold turkey. Without the regular supply of smack that he could get in the States, Kurt had hooked up with one of those London-based ‘Doctor Feelgoods’ familiar to music and movie stars of a certain celebrity status, who loaded Kurt up with prescriptions for enough opiates and tranquilisers to get him through the three-month tour. But still Kurt wasn’t happy, fighting on the phone daily with Courtney, who was busy gearing up for the promotional campaign for the April release of the next Hole album, Live Through This. Falling out with Krist, whom he begged to let him cancel the dates, complaining of bad stomach pain and nausea, which Krist and Dave now routinely shrugged off, seeing it for what it was: Kurt’s endless yearning to retreat to some darkened room where he could obliterate himself on heroin.
Adding
to his misery while he was on the road in Europe was that he was now convinced that Courtney was having an affair with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. He knew the two had been an item in the past, sensed that Courtney had never really got over Billy, and was freaked out to find the Smashing Pumpkins were doing four dates in London during the last week of February, and that Courtney had been on the guest list for them all. Not only had she missed Kurt’s twenty-seventh birthday on 20 February, but she was still in London for their second wedding anniversary four days later. As if to make Kurt even more paranoid, Courtney told him matter-of-factly that Billy had invited her to take a vacation in Paris with him. Stories would later emerge that Courtney had secretly gone with Billy to Paris, where the Pumpkins were booked to make an appearance on national TV, but these were later denied.
Whatever the truth, within days Kurt had called his lawyer in America and told her he wanted a divorce. He also found a German doctor willing to write him a medical note explaining he could no longer continue touring because of a mystery voice problem – finally getting his way when the next two weeks of European dates were cancelled. Dave and Krist, who knew exactly what kind of ‘voice problems’ Kurt was experiencing, flew home the next day. They knew when they weren’t wanted. Kurt had stopped hanging out with them anywhere but on stage long ago. Dave and Krist didn’t find Kurt funny any more. Not even on a good day. Pat still did. ‘That’s one reason Kurt liked Pat,’ says Charles Cross. They shared the same twisted sense of humour. ‘Kurt had a friendship and a kinship with him. Kurt never told me that personally but Courtney Love told me that. She said that towards the end of Nirvana, Kurt and Pat were closer than the other members of the band. Just based on that sense of humour.’ Now, though, Kurt made his position even more clear to the rest of the band, relieved to see Dave and Krist go home, but persuading the guitarist to travel with him to Rome where he had arranged to meet Courtney.
‘The longer things went on it seemed to get more and more personal,’ says Anton Brookes. ‘It just seemed to be more them two – Kurt and Courtney – against everybody else. I remember sometimes I’d been out with them and stood with management and the tour manager, and they’d go: “Do you mind going to get Kurt?”’
By the time Courtney, with baby Frances in tow, arrived at the luxurious Excelsior hotel in Rome on 3 March, he had apparently changed his mind about leaving her and bought her several reconciliatory gifts, including a dozen red roses, some rosary beads from the Vatican, a pair of three-carat diamond earrings – and a bottle of the heavy-duty tranquilliser Rohypnol (‘roofies’, in drug parlance, which would become more famous as a ‘date-rape drug’) from one of his London doctor’s special prescriptions. But when Courtney said she was too tired that night to make love, for Kurt it was the last straw.
‘Even if I wasn’t in the mood I should have laid there for him,’ Courtney later confessed to an American writer, David Frieke. ‘All he needed was to get laid.’ Too late. When she awoke the next morning, she found her husband’s body unconscious on the floor, dozens of empty Rohypnol blister packs and over $1000 in cash by his side, and in his left hand a suicide note.
According to Charles Cross, who would become Cobain’s most authoritative biographer, and who knew him well from his days as editor of Seattle’s best-known local music paper, The Rocket, Kurt had tried to get clean in the weeks leading up to the European tour by checking into the Canyon Ranch, a luxury American health spa and wellness centre. There he had been told by one of the centre’s physicians, Dr Baker, that the time had come for him to continue his addictions – that is, allow himself to die – or get clean, i.e. choose to live. A dead-eyed Kurt had replied: ‘You mean, like Hamlet?’ referring to Shakespeare’s tragic hero.
In his Rome suicide note, Kurt wrote: ‘Dr Baker says that, like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death. I’m choosing death.’ According to Cross, the rest of the note made reference to the fact that ‘Courtney didn’t love him any more’, accusing her of sleeping with Billy Corgan. Over the coming weeks Kurt and Nirvana’s management company, Gold Mountain, would all deny it was a suicide note and that Kurt’s overdose had merely been accidental – like all his other recent overdoses. But given what happened just five weeks later, that now seems an absurd claim.
Rushed by ambulance to the nearby Umberto Polyclinic Hospital, Kurt had his stomach pumped of what was later reckoned to be over 50 of the pale green Rohypnol pills and at least half a bottle of champagne. But he remained in a coma, doctors warning Courtney that he might die, or, worse, wake up a vegetable, or, who knows, make a full recovery. They would have to wait and see. ‘He was dead, legally dead,’ Courtney later claimed. Kurt was then moved to the Rome American Hospital, where he very slowly over the next 24 hours regained consciousness, his first words to Courtney, upon partially awakening: ‘Fuck you.’
Dave, like Krist, now back home in Seattle, claims the first he knew of what had happened was when he turned on the TV and ‘Kurt was being wheeled away in an ambulance.’ Years later, being interviewed for the Foo Fighters’ film documentary, Back and Forth, Dave appeared to buy into the accidental-overdose theory. Kurt, he reckoned, had ‘just made a mistake’, took some pills, drank some vintage champagne, and got carried away with the razzmatazz of being in Rome. But that was Dave in 17-years-later, nicest-man-in-rock mode. Dave who’d by then had so many legal battles with Courtney he was extremely wary of inadvertently opening up any more cans of worms with her name on them.
The Dave Grohl of 1994, however, was frankly appalled, freaked out, ashamed and worried for his own future. Like, what the fuck, dude? We gave you the time off, now this? The day the news broke, CNN actually interrupted their regular broadcast to announce that the Nirvana singer had in fact died in a Rome hospital. Krist got a phone call at home from Gold Mountain confirming it. But that news proved false. Instead, Kurt flew home a week later with his wife and child, to his new $1.1 million mansion in Lake Washington, the most beautiful and exclusive part of Seattle – and a new kind of drug-induced hell.
The next few weeks found Kurt Cobain walking around as though he was already dead. He refused to return to Europe, where promoters had hoped Nirvana would play some rescheduled shows. He even turned down a reported $8 million for Nirvana to headline that summer’s Lollapalooza tour. He didn’t want to rehearse or talk to Dave or Krist. As far as he and Dave were concerned, ‘The band was broken up,’ said Krist. ‘It had sort of split off and it just got really weird,’ said Dave. ‘I don’t do drugs [and] there were drugs around and there was like the people that did the drugs and the people that didn’t do the drugs. And I didn’t do the drugs and so I was just out of that world.’ When you’re a junkie, he shrugged, ‘You don’t care about anyone but yourself, at that point. That’s how it works.’
When Courtney banned drugs from the house, Kurt checked into a sleazy motel and didn’t even bother to use an assumed name. Just paid in cash and began shooting up again. Back at the Lake Washington mansion, his fights with Courtney became so out of control that police were summoned to the place more than once. The second time was because he had locked himself in one of the bathrooms with a load of guns, revolvers and shotguns and was threatening to kill himself. Courtney called 911 but Kurt put on his simple sweet face when they arrived, promising them he was not suicidal. ‘He was so fucked up,’ Krist would tell Charles Cross. ‘He just wanted to die.’
There was an attempt at ‘intervention’ by a professional rehab counsellor just two weeks before Kurt finally did what he’d been threatening to. Courtney and several people from his record company and management office were there. Pat Smear was also there, the only member of Nirvana to be invited. Kurt ranted and raved and called them all hypocrites. At the end of it, Courtney got into a car, taking her to the airport and from there to LA, where she, too, was checking into rehab. The next day Kurt’s mother, Wendy, made plans to fly down with Frances, so the toddler could be near her mother. And Kurt dived off the ledge
into the big black hole below, never to return.
When news broke on the morning of 8 April 1994 that Kurt Cobain, singer of grunge superstars Nirvana, had committed suicide at his home in Seattle, loosing off a 20-gauge shotgun into his face, once again Dave Grohl was deeply shocked but very fucking far from surprised. ‘I knew that he had gone,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know how to feel.’ He added: ‘I don’t think Kurt wanted to become a huge fucking rock star, and I don’t think he could handle how complicated it had all become.’
Seeing the shitstorm that was coming – the endless clichéd headlines written by people who had never even heard a Nirvana record: ‘Tortured Grunge Icon’, ‘Slacker Poet’ or, most frequent and appalling of all, ‘Voice of a Generation’ – Dave dropped right out of sight of the media. The day Kurt died, not knowing what else to do, he and his partner, Jenny, and several other close friends had gone over to Krist’s house. ‘It was such a weird time. We were kids. So it was strange … I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t listen to Nirvana. I’d turn on the radio and hear “All by Myself” [by Eric Carmen] and start crying. It was terrible.’
A couple of days later he simply pulled down the blinds and yanked up the drawbridge. Ran away and hid. Who could possibly blame him? Not even Dave though could imagine the endless river of shit he and Krist would be forced to wade through as the years went by and more and more stories emerged about Kurt’s last days, how he’d hated Dave by the end, for daring to speak out about his appalling drug abuse, how he’d even fallen out with Krist, screaming in his face before running off to his drug dealer’s apartment; more and more theories about how Kurt was murdered, by Courtney, by drug dealers, by accident, that he would never have killed himself, even though he’d both threatened and attempted it repeatedly in the weeks leading up to that final, successful attempt; more and more lies about what really was going on by the end of his life and what it really meant for the rest of us. People say it was the same when Jimi Hendrix died, when Jim Morrison died, when Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious died. And so it was in terms of conspiracy theories, of friends and lovers and band mates and fans left behind to wonder what really happened that night – because it was always night – and why?
