I Found My Friends

by Nick Soulsby

  This was a band sufficiently practiced that they could still go onstage when one-third of the band turned up blitzed … Yet not so focused that the band members made a point of not arriving blitzed.

  This was the closing event of the Greater Evergreen Students’ Community Cooperation Organization (GESCCO), Nirvana’s introduction to the unusually fertile musical environment of Olympia arising significantly from the presence of the Evergreen State College.

  SLIM MOON: GESCCO came about because some college students figured out that they could get funds from the college for a “student organization” that they could use to rent a warehouse space and put on rock shows and art-gallery stuff. It was closing because the college had figured out that rock shows created an insurance liability. GESCCO was a big empty warehouse; it might once have been an auto garage.

  GEORGE SMITH, Dangermouse: It came with money from Evergreen State College to cross-pollinate the college cultural scene with the Olympia cultural scene—it was definitely a planned endeavor to engage the two communities … when it started there was a seminar where they invited everybody to come down and they had a big group discussion with somebody moderating and a circle of chairs and everyone could have their say about what GESCCO should be … music dominated the scheduling, while the powers behind it were always trying to get more visual arts or theatrical arts, but it never really panned out. As much as anything bands are more organized; if you’re touring, you might book a show two months in advance, so the schedule would fill up with music …

  Although small, Nirvana’s April show had won them an early supporter.

  SLIM MOON: I was not a regular organizer at GESCCO. I just ended up putting on that show because word had gone around that GESCCO was closing very suddenly, and I thought it’d be good to have a “last show.” The bands that played were mostly picked because they were willing to play on short notice, although I definitely asked Skid Row because I had enjoyed their show at CWT … The audience was punk rockers and college students. Mostly friends, people in the music scene in Olympia. I bet half the audience were in bands of their own … For some larger shows like the Melvins, the organizers had brought in stage risers, but for the show you are talking about, we just set up a little PA in one corner.

  This show went well enough that the band were invited onto the college radio station, KAOS in Olympia. The band’s musical home at this period of time was usually Tacoma.

  JOHN PURKEY: What happens is a lot of musicians come from here and they move—you’ll hear that a lot. There’s a lot of bands … who are from Tacoma or were in Tacoma or had connections then move down the road. Someone like the Melvins, they never lived in Seattle. Pretty much their original stomping grounds were Tacoma and Olympia and being from Montesano, then they split, started touring, and ended up moving to L.A.… There was a house that Noxious Fumes and Girl Trouble lived at, it was called the Hell House, and it was pretty much the only place that punk bands played in Tacoma. There was one bar called the Bed Rock—they did a couple shows, but it was pretty much nothing. But the Hell House was basically the party house in 1983–85. They would have touring bands play there—Soul Asylum played there, a lot of different bands.

  Krist Novoselic moved to Tacoma in 1987 and it was here, at the Community World Theater, that one of the residents of the Hell House, Jim May, would host five of their seven real shows between April 1987 and April 1988.

  The Community Theater was a hub for bands; in a brief eighteen months the venue staged an astonishing 130 shows for all-ages audiences.

  BRUCE PURKEY: Unless you were in a big city, and Tacoma is still relatively small, there was very little, if any, punk-rock community back in the early ’80s. Most schools had a small group of three or four friends who were into punk. Punk was not cool in any way. You might as well have been the biggest nerd in the school. That’s how people looked at you. So when you discovered another person into punk/underground music, you immediately felt a kinship … The Hell House on Fifty-Sixth Street was a hub of house-party shows and welcomed any local band … It wasn’t until after some of the major venues like the Gorilla Gardens in Seattle closed that a real community of bands started actually growing and playing in Tacoma. Of course, the Community World Theater made it easier for a Tacoma band to find a place to play. Mid-to-late ’80s you started to see a few bands becoming Tacoma fixtures: Soylent Green, He Sluts, Inspector Luv and the Ride Me Babies, Silent Treatment, Subvert, AMQA … The Community World Theater was a rare thing. Run by Jim May, one of us. He didn’t make anything on the venture, I’m sure. It was probably a huge headache, and I would guess it lost him money, but for a brief moment the kids had their own place to play. Sure, it was a former porn theater with no heat and a shitty PA, but it was ours. It is no accident that the Community World Theater is remember fondly by most everyone who ever played there, or saw a show there. It was as if, for a moment, the punks actually ran things … It was how things felt for a few months right after Nirvana broke huge—essentially killing hair metal—it felt important, like we were finally noticed, finally being heard. Of course, it was short-lived and quickly coopted.

  TIM FREEBORN, Sons of Ishmael: Compared to many of the places we played that summer—a barn in rural El Paso, a boxing club (the ring was being disassembled as we arrived), a garage, a couple of living rooms, a ramshackle VFW hall, a roller rink, a pizza joint—it seemed like a palace, the very Fillmore.

  MIKE CANZI, Sons of Ishmael: I’m pretty sure that it was decrepit; most of the venues we played in were. I’d be willing to bet that there was red carpet in the lobby and that it was covered in cigarette burns and wads of blackened bubble gum, and that the smells of urine and mildew were an almost physical presence.

  CHRIS BLACK, Sons of Ishmael: They had removed several rows of seats at the front in order to create a space suitable for moshing. However, I also recall most people sat in the seats that were still there and watched the show … Later, when I knew there would be no sleep for me in the lobby of a haunted theater I, of course, headed out to the van.

  PAUL MORRIS, Sons of Ishmael: This venue stood out, and the fact that it was rumored to be haunted made it doubly noteworthy. It is also unusual that we would sleep overnight in the venue as well, but for our promoter, Jim, this was normal … I think he lived in the projection room.

  GLENN POIRIER, Sons of Ishmael: I recall trying to sleep in the lobby on a blue vinyl bench by the popcorn machine in full view of the street outside the front doors. The theater was reputed to be haunted; I pity the ghost that had to endure that flatulent night air!

  Nirvana returned in June, under the name Pen Cap Chew.

  RYAN LOISELLE, Machine: We’d seen Pen Cap Chew at the CWT, and Skid Row. We’d go there every weekend, it didn’t matter who was playing—it was our church.

  DAVE CHAVEZ, Hell’s Kitchen: Hell’s Kitchen was a side band I started … I had to quit when Verbal Abuse went on tour … We only played together seven months. The show in question was the biggest highlight playing live, that and recording the HK demo … I just remember they were a loose garage band with cool vocals … Kurt wore a lot of clothes and was hella hot … They looked like they sounded, so to speak.

  Cobain would still do this later in life, compensating for his skinny frame by layering clothes to conceal his body.

  BRUCE PURKEY: The music stuck with me much greater the second time. The first time, it seemed looser, more chaotic, noisier. I’m not sure if that’s just my ear hearing it better on a second go-round, or if they actually were a more cohesive band. I’m guessing it was a combination of the two. Like other “noisy” bands—Sonic Youth, U-Men (another vastly underrated early Northwest band) it often takes a few spins of the record to start seeing the shapes amid the seeming chaos.

  By August, the band had morphed again, into Bliss. Yet having played to a mere twenty-five people in April, the audience this time around had swelled only to perhaps forty.

  PAUL MORRIS: We rolled into Tacoma (famous
for its poor bridge design) suffering from head colds that I believe we picked up from Youth of Today in San Francisco at the Maximum Rocknroll house.

  TIM FREEBORN: We were pleased to sell out the Community World Theater. The first row, anyway … Big Black were playing their final show in Seattle, so I assume that several Tacomans who might have attended our show drove up to Seattle.

  MIKE CANZI: I’m not being sarcastic here, but I think there was someone in the audience wearing a red-and-black lumber jacket.

  For Bliss, this show was no more or less successful a musical happening than the performances in April, May, or June.

  TIM FREEBORN: Their songs were pretty sludgy and unmemorable, to my tired, ravaged ears.

  MIKE CANZI: I have no memories whatsoever of Bliss’s music. We heard a lot of bands that summer, but only three stood out in a positive way: Nomeansno, False Prophets, and Porn Orchard.

  PAUL MORRIS: Like Tim, at this time I was suffering from the burnout of seeing too many bands in such a short time … Musically and visually I was not impressed and I did not care for them.

  GLENN POIRIER: Bliss didn’t stand out at all to me … they were a young band finding their way … I liked the Magnet Men that played that night more.

  CHRIS BLACK: I do remember a lot of plaid, and long songs—two maybe three minutes in length some of them … mumbly stage banter, lots of looking down at the floor, and long, slow-tempo songs … I recall thinking that either speedy hardcore hadn’t yet arrived in this neck of the woods, or that they were already past it.

  TIM FREEBORN: Aside from the promoter—the affable and, at that time, broken-footed Jim May—I can name no one that we met that night … I do remember chatting with Jim May at a greasy spoon after the show about a local scenester with an exotic STD, which produced pyramidal growths on his forearm.

  These weren’t stunningly professional shows. They were more like exotic sleepovers with no commercial prospects.

  DAVE CHAVEZ: I just remember people chanting, “We brought our sleeping bags and we’re not going home!”

  TIM FREEBORN: I remember chatting with the Magnet Men, who turned their earnings over to us … The fact that it was a bag of coins did not lessen my appreciation of either the gesture or the cash.

  BRUCE PURKEY: I have a photo of George and me from the same show with Slim Moon playing in the background. So much future fame behind us, but for all of us it was just another night with fifty or sixty of our friends in this cavernous, freezing old movie theater, sitting in the shitty seats once occupied by old pervs, now occupied by young punks, but we loved it. It was ours and we made it something special, if only for a little while. Of course, at the time, we complained about the cold, complained about the small crowds, no money, whatever …

  Although Bliss was too shy to engage with the audience and too preoccupied trying to perform their intricate early compositions to rock out, they still displayed a degree of ambitiousness …

  TIM FREEBORN: Bliss kind of sent out … mixed signals; maybe a joke? After all, the guitarist was wearing satin pants and platform shoes (and what kind of looked like a Lynyrd Skynyrd–style hairpiece).

  PAUL MORRIS: When I saw these guys get up there with platform shoes and silky flare pants, my skepticism went way up … Beyond the clothing there was nothing memorable about the stagecraft.

  The clothing was as far as the stagecraft went, but it still represented a band figuring out how to stand out.

  Then it all ground to a halt. Burckhard was dismissed and the band disappeared for nearly five months.

  AARON BURCKHARD: I was drunk and I got Kurt’s car impounded—that’s why he fired me!

  RYAN AIGNER: I remember when they lost Aaron. He was a liability because he was a little older and he had an interest in girls and drinking that at times superseded the interests of the band, and that became the biggest drawback … he was one of these guys who didn’t feel the need to go get the Black Flag tattoo. What Kurt and Krist were looking for was one hundred percent dedication—they expected you to morph into one hundred percent of what they were doing. I’m not sure what it would have taken to convince them of that total commitment.

  The band’s uncertain status was all-pervasive, and with only six shows all year it wasn’t clear if it was anything more than a hobby. Similarly, their diverse early sound made it unclear if these were Melvins clones, a New Wave act, or a hard-rock/punk-fusion outfit. The most telling sign was that they couldn’t even settle on a name. Cobain knew that a name was crucial in creating connections to a musical legacy.

  JACK ENDINO, Skin Yard: Kurt used “Kurdt” a few times as a subtle tip of the hat to the only other famous musician to ever emerge from Aberdeen, Washington, prior to Nirvana: local legend, guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof, cofounder of the Northwest-based band Metal Church (with several major-label records in the ’80s) … Metal Church was huge here, and if not for Nirvana, Vanderhoof would probably still be the only successful musician to have ever emerged from Aberdeen. You can bet every kid who grew up in tiny Aberdeen in the ’80s knew who he was.

  Summing up 1987: little had changed. Cobain started a band, as he had in two previous years, but the public results amounted to two house parties, a college show, and three run-throughs in Tacoma—leaving perhaps one hundred witnesses. They could feel encouraged that they’d made it onto radio … Yet not one person interviewed mentioned having heard it. Nirvana didn’t exist. A nameless hobby band from a tiny Northwest town got on the road … But there were no guarantees the road led anywhere.

  2.0

  The First Album: Nirvana in Studio

  January 1988

  Cobain and Novoselic wanted to greet the New Year by making progress, so they booked time at Reciprocal Recording in Seattle for January 23 under the name Ted Ed Fred. The timing would become a trend; 1992 would be the only year they didn’t record in January. Some people hit the gym, Nirvana made music. Before the recording, they first had to return to Aberdeen, where they hammered out three practices at the home of Melvins drummer Dale Crover, who was temporarily substituting as drummer.

  JOHN PURKEY: At a Community World Theater show that Dave Foster played at, Kurt finally had made me a copy of the first demo tape. I’d heard it from Jim May, who ran the Community World Theater, and Kurt had given him a copy to get a show there and then I heard it and was like, Oh my God, I’ve got to get a copy of it … I had a dream and I told Kurt about it. We were walking back, we walked up to his car, he got the tape, the other side was Montage of Heck, and he gives it to me and we’re walking back and I said, “Kurt, I had the weirdest dream, I was in the Coliseum watching you guys play in front of thousands of people…” I don’t remember what his response was—it wasn’t like, Whoa, really?! It was more like, Whoa, cool. I remember the dream to this day; being in there with thousands of people watching those guys play—in my mind the music was that good.

  CHRIS QUINN, Sister Skelter: The first time I ever met Kurt was at a party in Olympia, late ’87. Dale from the Melvins was there—I asked how he was doing. He explained, “Oh, I’m doing this thing with this guy,” and he points over and there’s this scrawny-looking rocker guy with a jean jacket—he had this Scratch Acid thing he had painted on the back of the jacket—I loved them, so I thought, Whoa, Dale Crover, Scratch Acid … I wanna know what this is! I said hi to him that night, talked about his jacket, Scratch Acid, the whole thing intrigued me.

  RYAN AIGNER: I watched “Hairspray Queen” be composed—Kurt had the vision, he had the parts and the pieces, so much so that he physically showed Krist how to play the bass line—I was physically in the room. It’s a weird bass line, with those slides up and down the neck … When Dale came in, Dale was given the early demos and he got the fundamental idea of things … The fact that Kurt was able to find three drummers in one town willing to play in the band and with the style of music shows that there was a lot of activity and a lot of talent in those days.

  Producer Jack Endino accepted the booking be
cause Crover’s presence reassured him it’d be an interesting band. Others reacted the same way.

  RYAN LOISELLE: It’s 1988, John Purkey played in a badass band, Subvert, and we became really good friends. So he comes into high school with this Nirvana cassette, back when there were cassettes: “Man, you’ve got to hear this! My friend Kurt!” Their first demo with Dale. I felt if Dale was playing drums, then, hell, all right! We played it and knew this is really good, love this … they’re really good, but the reason they were good was because Dale was playing drums … But the other reason was that they’re original and crazy, the recording was awesome … Whatever that demo was, it was the best album.

  Nirvana’s ability to go around making friends was critical—the underground thrived on people knowing people.

  PETER LITWIN, Coffin Break: My standout memory is just what a nice bunch of guys they were. I mostly just knew them back then, from playing some gigs together. Remember, they didn’t live in Seattle at first. I remember Kurt as being a quiet, kind of shy pothead. Krist was supercool and has always been a really friendly guy.

  DAMON ROMERO, Lush: We played a house party with them at our bass player’s house, the Caddyshack, before the Community World Theater show in March … I’d heard their demo tape that Slim had a copy of (I was a DJ at KAOS for a brief time. Kurt gave me the Nirvana cassette demo to play on air. He also gave me his four-track of solo stuff that I played a few times), so seeing those songs live for the first time was amazing. It was a packed house, over capacity, people still out in the front yard—people were going nuts! They hadn’t heard these songs before, but they all loved it—they were awesome. In general, people in the Northwest are kinda subdued, they don’t go crazy all the time, but when Nirvana played people went ape shit. I was blown away: Holy shit, these guys are on a whole ’nother level!… We all knew that punk rock was stuck in the past, people were trying to bring different influences to it, Nirvana were really able to bring the heavy rock sound and the punk rock simplicity together really perfectly. Those songs were amazing—that first set they had. I don’t think this is true, but the sort of mythology that was going around at the time was that the first twelve Nirvana songs were the first twelve songs Kurt had ever written. It’s not true; he had demoed, he had done other stuff … but that was the mystique. It kinda made sense: here’s this kid out of Aberdeen, he’s a brilliant songwriter … Nirvana really did play a lot when they were in Olympia—they’d play parties, they made themselves very accessible, they just had some magic combination that everyone loved them—K Records loved them, the more slick Seattle people liked them.