I Found My Friends

by Nick Soulsby

  For all the talk of Cobain’s fragility since his demise, he (and, indeed, the entire underground) endured a lifestyle that involved lengthy periods cut off from any kind of stable home life. Choosing to be a musician meant accepting it might always be a life of few comforts, no health insurance, and no regular pay in return for the chance to be heard.

  9.0

  Home Soil

  January to February 1990

  Nirvana returned to Reciprocal Recording for their customary New Year recording session, devoting two days to “Sappy,” one of only two songs they recorded in studio more than twice. The time expenditure showed how far they’d come; not rich, but able to indulge some musical perfectionism while jostling for third place on Sub Pop’s roster.

  VADIM RUBIN, Haywire: It’s funny, though, that when we played with Nirvana and Tad, it wasn’t clear that Nirvana was the band. In fact, Tad was the headliner!

  JED BREWER: When I found out that we were opening the Nirvana/Tad show, I was actually a little more excited about Tad at the time.

  Nirvana’s arrival was perfectly timed at the crest of a wave. Over a decade of DIY efforts had created an infrastructure that provided all the elements of production, broadcast, and promotion that Nirvana needed. Even in the absence of mainstream awareness, word spread about the band, and other underground stars, via a number of means.

  MATT HUNTER, New Radiant Storm King: College radio, fanzines, and word of mouth, mostly. Spin magazine, NME, and Melody Maker were sometimes useful, and once in a blue moon so was MTV. You’d be surprised how extensive informal networks were in the era just prior to the Internet.

  GEORGE SMITH: It wasn’t terribly difficult to set up a tour; there was a really good underground network of all the clubs, and generally there were a few houses where there might be house parties—little beacons around the country where it was all about the music. And our house in Olympia, the Alamo, was one of those.

  TIM KERR: There was no radio or mainstream magazines for this music, so the only way you were going to find out about this was word of mouth and maybe, just maybe, you could start up a community and connect with other communities … By the mid-’80s things were beginning to change all over the US for this music. The scene was still small in the big picture and the mainstream for the most part was not interested, but there were more kids finding out about this “other choice” … There were more places to play now and shows became shows instead of crazy happenings. A grassroots network was going on so that bands could tour and college radio begin to play more of this music. Grassroots magazines writing about these scenes were becoming more abundant too.

  COLIN BURNS: I feel like it was the clubs where connections were made. In those days, at least half the audience was people from other bands. It felt like a very supportive scene … We won the WBCN Rock ’n’ Roll Rumble in 1990, which was an annual battle of the bands hosted by a Boston radio station. Maybe twenty-five bands over five nights, a winner each night, to five semifinalists, down to two finalists … Iggy Pop was the host. And he was my hero. And used Dana [Ong]’s amp when he played between the bands. And got my blood on his face when he picked up the bloody mike. A stage diver kicked my arm during our final song, the mike broke my nose, blood everywhere, very dramatic—but the Rumble was said to be cursed; something dramatic always happened to the winner, which was most likely breaking up.

  ABE BRENNAN: Independent record stores were a good source of information … but many of the bands we got into we stumbled on through their touring and us playing shows with them and touring to their towns.

  GLEN LOGAN, Bible Stud: There seemed to be so many local record stores owned and staffed by people who were fans of music. To many of these record-store people it was more than just a job or just a business. These people did a lot to support the local scene by stocking many of the local releases.

  DUANE LANCE BODENHEIMER: Russ and Janet owned Fallout Records for a long time, couple, very nice people—my friend Tim Hayes worked there as well. It was a skate shop, comic shop, music shop … I always felt at home with them, very welcoming. A small close-knit group of people who loved music and thrived on it.

  VADIM RUBIN: I grew up in Long Beach … In that area it was centered around Zed Records, an alternative and import record store that was full of great vinyl … This is where you found out about shows, what bands were coming to town … Another central point locally was Fender’s, a show venue. Goldenvoice put on many of the big punk shows, and the guy running it was very close with the Zed Records guys. So I remember going to Zed’s and finding out that we got a spot at a good Fender’s gig for the first time.

  Print media had been a link in the underground chain since the start—Sub Pop itself having been an example, given it began as a fanzine publication.

  GLEN LOGAN: It seemed like more folks were writing their own music. There were also fanzines like Backlash, City Heat, and music-oriented papers like The Rocket. There were record stores by the score. There were legit music venues as well as lofts, basements, and empty warehouse-type places where folks would put on shows. The Rocket magazine covered the scene, and for many of us it became the go-to source for info on all things local music well before the proliferation of the Internet. This probably focused the information on the local/regional scene in a way that would not be possible in today’s world. I think it made a large regional scene seem smaller, maybe a bit more intimate.

  JAIME ROBERT JOHNSON: We had the Rocket, which was an amazing, maddening, annoying, and indispensable part of what was going on. We had peers, dedicated to building a rock ’n’ roll community and playing shows together and having a great time; we had some good people who were willing to take chances.

  TY WILLMAN: Backlash and the Rocket—if you were in a band, this is before Internet, that was your Internet. You would sit and look for your name, and if you were in there then you’d succeeded … It was pretty easy to get mentioned—I was on the cover once, but that only came when the Green Apple Quick Step record was out and was somewhat successful. But if you were in a band and you played, then you could get into those publications somewhere.

  In 1990, Rolling Stone was still featuring Paul McCartney as their crucial February cover star, but it didn’t matter that the mainstream music media was still fixated on bygone eras and sacred cows. Many key underground publications now had circulations in the thousands—crucially, all to people active within the community.

  LORI JOSEPH: Going out and meeting the bands you liked, asking them if they needed a place to stay, and getting to know the local promoters were how we got our shows. Flipside was probably hands-down the best magazine that gave us the most attention back in the day. Maximum Rocknroll, Flipside, and Alternative Press were the only ones I read. In Chicago, WNUR was the biggest college radio station that we did interviews on and promoted all the local shows. I kept up with music by reading Flipside and Alternative Press as well as going to local indie record stores to see what was new.

  VADIM RUBIN: The influential L.A. punk “fanzine” called Flipside … A really important venue that emerged there was Gilman, connected to the people that ran the even bigger punk fanzine Maximum Rocknroll.

  JOHN MYERS: Maximum Rocknroll magazine was a great network. People wanted to share gigs and swap gigs. They would invite you to their town in exchange for you inviting them to your town. There was a certain camaraderie although sometimes there was abuse, too. But generally DIY people were pretty cool and helpful. There wasn’t much money, though. And that was the hardship at that time. As a musician you had to have a day job and then get time off to do your shows.

  The Beatles’ success in the United States had occurred in part as young music fans began listening to FM radio. By the late ’80s, a similar—though less dramatic—shift was occurring as stations, particularly college radio, found their niche playing what mainstream radio wouldn’t.

  GLEN LOGAN: There were local/regional radio stations like KAOS, KCMU, and KJET that played more than
the standard AOR radio format stuff. TV shows like Rev featured much about the local music scene. Musically there was diversity and a degree of acceptance of that diversity that led to more of a vast number of shades of musical styles versus a few hard and fast colors or categories. The scene especially, on the west side, was incredibly vibrant.

  JAIME ROBERT JOHNSON: We had a radio station that was doing the same—KCMU, now KEXP, which still to this day does totally amazing radio.

  SCOTT VANDERPOOL: I made enough of a stink at KCMU that they hired me at one of the big commercial rock stations, KXRX, just before all this Seattle shit took off. I was somewhat instrumental in getting Soundgarden, Nirvana, the Melvins, Green River, Mudhoney, Love Battery, the Posies, and others on the air and more importantly getting ’80s hairspray butt-rock off the air—a personal goal … I remember interviewing Bob Mould from Hüsker Dü and Sugar on my Sunday-night “new music show,” and he observed that all the American rock stations he went to were staffed by his fans, frustrated they had to play fucking “Stairway to Heaven” every day and shit like Bon Jovi, while the people at “alternative” stations were frustrated that they had to play him instead of the Depeche Mode and Alanis Morissette they really liked.

  Just as KAOS and KCMU had given Nirvana early coverage, this same benefit was extended to a whole swath of bands—an entire scene was rising.

  GLEN LOGAN: There was a rise in college radio everywhere at the time and it did seem to be friendly to this genre of music (or, more accurately, these multiple types of music). The folks going to these schools were in large part the demographic that “got it” … That seemed to make shows at colleges more viable, especially where the college radio station was co-located with the college putting on the show.

  MARC BARTHOLOMEW, Vegas Voodoo: Once we started getting airplay from the San Jose State University College radio station (KSJS) and our first studio demo cassette tape sold all ten copies at the indie record store, I really felt like we “arrived.”

  Just as a lot of the Sub Pop crew worked at KCMU, or Calvin Johnson presented on KAOS, a lot of musicians were directly involved in choosing the music that would go out on air.

  LINDSEY THRASHER: We lived in Chico, a fairly small college town in Northern California. Trish, Larry, and I worked at the college radio station and loved music, but weren’t good musicians; that didn’t stop us.

  BILLY ALLETZHAUSER: You wouldn’t guess but Cincinnati had a great scene. I was a bit young to enjoy its heyday, but a joint called the Jockey Club had almost every major name in punk go through … We had a local punk radio show called The Search & Destroy Show that was the gel for everyone.

  JED BREWER: We had one of the best college radio stations in the country, KDVS … What gave KDVS its great national reputation is that it was/is one of the few stations left that was completely free-format, meaning DJs could play whatever they wanted as long as it was something that wasn’t being played on commercial radio. Most college stations give DJs parameters that tend to steer DJs to only playing the biggest names in independent music. I DJed at KDVS in Davis, California, during the Thornucopia years. I truly consider it the best part of my education … KDVS was an early champion of Sub Pop, and we helped put on shows for Mudhoney, the Fluid, et cetera. We played the shit out of those first Nirvana and Tad albums.

  RICK RIZZO: WNUR (Northwestern University) was an incredibly helpful station; WXRT was a unique (to most of the rest of America) commercial station that played us early on. We got a big push from Bucketful of Brains in England, Howl in Germany, Boston Rocker, Byron Coley at Spin and Forced Exposure, and independent weeklies like the Chicago Reader. The major newspaper, Chicago Tribune, had a writer Greg Kot who championed our kind of music from the start.

  A fresh generation had built an entirely new infrastructure required to get their sound out.

  Amid this building excitement, Nirvana’s life continued to be a series of opening and closing doors. On January 20, they gave their last performance in Tacoma.

  JOHN PURKEY: I talked to Krist one day about maybe doing a Nirvana show and having Machine open at Legends … the Melvins were coming up on tour, I knew that—so I thought why not get a show together: Melvins, Machine, Nirvana, and we’ll open. So I had to go through the woman who was managing Legends—I worked everything out and she took over the show. So she hired this security that were all high school kids, but they’d try to throw anybody out for doing anything, the smallest thing: somebody tried to jump off stage, they’d all come after him and try to throw him out. Matt Lukin was there, and he was really good friends with Kurt and Krist. Well, he puked backstage and the security found out and were trying to throw him out. Mayhem! That’s what started it all, they were trying to kick out Matt Lukin and Matt’s like, “No, I’m not going!” He even gets up on the mike and says what’s happening and finally they end up letting him stay.

  It was a less-than-charming location, an indication of the flea-pit circuit on which the rock underground was built. Rooms up in the roof of the venue harbored an assortment of insalubrious characters.

  JOHN PURKEY: The Crips and Bloods—gangs here—they actually used to stay in here because we’d go up over the roof and there’s a way to get over. You end up on the balcony area above the stage … there’d be all this abandoned building with mattresses everywhere and bums, or gangsters, living up there. We’d creep across, go down the balcony, and sneak into shows …

  From playing a former porn theater in 1988 to a hangout for local gangs in January 1990, Tacoma’s local color was undimmed. Likewise, having played eighty-two shows in 1989, Nirvana’s live virginity was long gone. Their antics, since the first shattered guitar, had become wilder.

  STEVE MORIARTY: Jonathan Poneman saw us play then apparently developed a crush on Mia [Zapata] and asked us to play with Nirvana at the HUB [Husky Union Building] Ballroom … It was our second show in town—we thought we had it made. But Mia didn’t want to go out with Jonathan, she wouldn’t tolerate him—so we fell off the radar all of a sudden. We were no longer in the Singles Club. These were regular people; the owners of Sub Pop were as notorious as people in the bands … It’s gone down in history that the University of Washington banned Nirvana for life from playing there. I’m sure that they didn’t care—they didn’t play there again. It was probably two thousand people, the biggest show they’d played at the time—the kids went wild. When we played they went ape shit! We had to tell the bouncers to move the monitors and not beat people up, because they weren’t used to this, they weren’t ready for it. It was so oversold that somebody pulled the fire alarm so that people would leave. Then they sold more tickets and let more people in. That was just where they blew up right there—we knew they were packing hundred-seat places but … It was January, it was a university, people were back to school after holidays. We hung out in the dressing room, drank tequila, and they methodically destroyed the dressing room by smashing the chairs, and Krist was chasing Kurt around with the big cooler of ice they’d brought out for the beers. It was funny. They were just causing trouble, having fun, being rock stars—why not? We were in a classroom, basically, so it was like “school’s out for summer”: Alice Cooper! So they destroyed it—threw ice and beer all over the place and got banned. They were just out to tear it up. That was the biggest fun they’d ever had in their life … Onstage they were just really at the height of their game—they had the enthusiasm, lack of jadedness, lack of ego.

  KAPTAIN “SCOTT GEAR” SKILLIT WEASEL, Crunchbird: The violence had been picking up with roving skinhead gangs. So the day of the show, and I arrive to learn our drummer had been savagely beaten the night before and was in the hospital … So now I am loading my shit in, there is one green room all four bands used. Now, understand, I am a rather large fellow: six-two, one hundred and ninety pounds. Kurt is this tiny, shy mammal. When I stepped into the hall from the loading dock he was on his way out, all greasy and pimpled in a blue flannel shirt—he looked scared shitless by my sudden appe
arance, this giant in combat boots (and a blue flannel I wore in as well) stomping down toward him holding the fifteen-inch speaker. I had to stop and turn my back to the wall, but he actually ducked under me … it was like when a cat scampers under your foot. We get the gear onto the stage and we needed to do sound check right now! We have no drummer! So in steps this very pixielike wonder named Chad Channing who whoops out our sound check and tells us he will fill if Sean doesn’t make it. Now, see, right here I’m like, “Fucking cool!” But it also felt like I was dissing our drummer due to his situation. I relax, but Crunchy [Jaime Robert Johnson] seemed a bit stressed. I went to the green room and I met Mr. Novoselic—we were the same size! He was amazed to not have the biggest feet in the room. He truly seemed sincere … Finally, in walks Sean, head all wired together, can’t talk, just totally punked the hospital to do this show—nothing was gonna stop this man. When we were to go on I was amazed to see that vast hall brimming wall to wall; this was going to be epic! I overheard comments from the other bands about how punk that was; tells a doctor to back off! gets out of hospital, and comes to pound the shit out of those skins.