I Found My Friends

by Nick Soulsby

  The line between mischievous and annoying depends on whether one is on the receiving end.

  PEYTON PINKERTON: They got in trouble with security for stealing loaves of Wonder Bread from the commissary at Saga after the concert … Everett True—the Brit journalist—was traveling with them and I think they were really working the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night shenanigans and doing stupid rock shit. Krist kept stealing the beers that were meant for all of the bands (about ten bands played in total)—taking them out to their van in his pants—making several trips. Bands would come off stage and find no beer waiting for them. The young woman sponsoring the benefit kept getting more beer for the bands—out of her own dollars—yet Krist kept taking them still. Same for cigarettes. We had someone buy us cartons of cigarettes up in Vermont, where they were much cheaper, and they brought them to us at the show. Nirvana kept bumming smokes off me so I gave them a pack. Later I caught Novoselic going through my backpack and taking several packs for himself and the band. When I went to grab my backpack he just gave me this dumb little-boy look like What did I do? I got a bad vibe off of him even before he started hoarding everybody’s beer and smokes. He presented himself as a real dick in several regards from the moment I came in contact with him until their van drove away … He was so rude to the “rich college kids” who were paying to hear his band … I hate that cliché rock-star shit—he acted like they were sticking it to the man but ended up just fucking over some poor students (like the girl sponsoring the event) holding a benefit for a worthy cause … From stage he more than once yelled at kids in the back of the room (a room which was almost entirely a slam/mosh pit) to dance their “rich” asses off. The people in the back by the kitchen doors were actually work-study kids who had to work and clean up at the show to pay for school.

  The tour was certainly not a high for Nirvana; they’d been booed offstage and had equipment break down, then added to the ugly vibe by taking it out on their own drummer, upsetting other musicians and generally acting sullen.

  DANA ONG: I don’t remember Krist being reckless or destructive, he was sitting cross-legged in the dressing room when I met him, surrounded by goggly eyed rockers … I remember Kurt being moody; he was kind of a black cloud when they arrived at MIT. I don’t know if he even introduced himself. I’m sure if he was using at the time [he] could’ve been in a nasty state of withdrawals or waiting to get high … Having met the problems of my own addictions, I understand why he may have been less than charming that day.

  TIM AARON, Gobblehoof: Cobain liked us—gave the band a hundred bucks after the show when he heard we weren’t getting paid. I remember him sitting outside, side stage, on the loading dock just kind of chilling solo and he seemed like he was thinking—wanted his space.

  CHARLES SHIPMAN: There was a negative vibe coming from that crowd. Hard to put a finger on, but they definitely didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves.

  PEYTON PINKERTON: Kurt was shy and fairly amenable to casual conversation, but he shut down after getting stoned and just kind of slumped into his chair in the band room and watched Krist and his mean-spirited behavior. We did manage to talk about Scratch Acid’s first EP and how we both loved Rey Washam’s drumming on that record. He also knew J Mascis was coming to the show, and you could tell he really was worked up about hanging out with someone whom I presumed to be an idol for him.

  CRISPIN WOOD: As for visible signs of tension, that’s so hard to say. Touring can be exhausting, tensions come and go. Cobain wasn’t particularly friendly. Was he always that way? I have no idea.

  ROBERT HAMPSON: I didn’t really care for the Seattle scene. It was filled with too many bar bands that riffed on the sub–Black Sabbath angle or the overearnest, self-indulgent Pearl Jam types … They [Nirvana] definitely were a band apart from the “Seattle sound”; they had something a little extra. I guess you can count me as a fan, so I was looking forward to playing with them … The drummer was nowhere to be seen backstage, so I didn’t meet him. Krist just seemed like a very tall and shaven-headed goof. I tried to talk to Kurt and say how much I liked his records and the show. He just literally blanked me. Didn’t say a word. Looked straight through me. So, I just left him to his own thing. I walked away and just thought, Fuck him, arrogant miserable cunt!

  JIM ROY: Nirvana didn’t make a big impression on me at the time, But Novoselic impressed me as a figure onstage, and played well enough that I approached him after the set to congratulate him, “Great set, dude, you’re a monster up there!” And he just totally shut me down, “No, I’m not,” and walked away. It stung, so I was done with them and didn’t give them another thought until my band had broken up and their band was all over MTV. For a long time, I disliked them out of principle.

  11.0

  Intermission

  June to September 1990

  Cobain retreated to his one-room apartment and spent much of the summer cocooned there. While Nirvana barely played as a group, this time alone would bear fruit in the form of an entire suite of new songs; Cobain’s most prolific spell ever.

  GEORGE SMITH: As far as Kurt the person, he was fairly reclusive—you might see him out at shows, at a party, but he definitely wasn’t out a whole lot. Not terribly social. He wasn’t particularly awkward; he was friendly—not just a wallflower—he just didn’t seem to be someone who craved social attention. He stuck to his own circle. When I knew him he was staying in Olympia, at Tracy’s house—that’s where he lived and he just spent an awful lot of time there.

  JOHN PURKEY: He had a lot of pictures of Jesus and crosses, a collection of them behind the couch … almost like a shrine but not that he’s doing it religiously. Above it was one of his paintings—I remember that. Kurt and Tracy’s place smelled like rabbit shit; they had birds and rabbits, sometimes there’d be a rabbit running around.

  SLIM MOON: I really loved Kurt’s visual art, his sculpture and painting. Also when he lived with Tracy, they had a lot of animals, rats and turtles … I loved his gentle nature. I loved that I introduced Kurt to the music of Lead Belly and he loved it so much.

  RONNA MYLES-ERA: I wouldn’t say that Kurt, Krist (I only knew him as Chris), or Chad ever really rambled around town … Not in the early days. I don’t recall them being in bars much. They were stoner types, usually home listening to or playing music. I would see Kurt around; he lived next to Slim Moon and I would hang out at Slim’s house sometimes. They weren’t showy people at all …

  Channing bowed out on May 17, 1990, having endured his comrades’ increasingly aggressive antics on the last tour: glass thrown at the wall behind him as he played, his kit demolished with him beneath it, a jug full of water gooshed over him.

  PEYTON PINKERTON: Chad Channing seemed like he already knew his days were numbered but was real nice and humble—at, like, five-foot-two, he and Kurt really seemed like hobbits next to Novoselic’s giant frame. Chad just stayed outside the band circle and seemed like he didn’t want to be involved …

  RYAN AIGNER: Chad was the really shocking one to me, because he was pretty punk rock, alternative mentality, came from Bainbridge Island—artsy, hippie, cool—he had the background, he wouldn’t be questioned as hard as Dave [Foster]. Dave they were still like, “Dave you’re still wearing that redneck baseball cap, what’s up with that?” Asking him, “Maybe your culture, your style, needs to be more like us…” Chad had that. Why and how they ever got to where they felt like he wasn’t a good enough commitment I never did know.

  DAMON ROMERO: I feel he got a bit of a raw deal in the end; they weren’t super-professional about how they kicked him out. He put up with a lot—he toured with them all through the United States, all through Europe; he put in the work to help them achieve success. It’s hard to keep together—every band I’ve been in has broken up—so I have respect for people who can be mature enough to keep working together.

  Just as Nirvana’s last shift in drummers had coincided with their move onto Sub Pop in spring 1988, this one happened as a potential
major-label move was in the cards.

  Nirvana had been a relative latecomer to the Seattle scene, and then they were a latecomer to the major-label whirl surrounding the Northwest.

  MATT HUNTER: Well before Nirvana became a global phenomenon … Seattle was already being combed over by A&R people because of Soundgarden and Mudhoney, and a bunch of other bands (as early as 1986, in fact).

  SHAMBIE SINGER: By 1989, I felt very sure about the major-label future of many of the bands who’d been part of the Sub Pop scene. Or the alternative scene, as I knew it then. I don’t recall the label “indie” existing until after all those “indie” bands weren’t part of the underground/alternative scene anymore. It seemed like more of a marketing/cultural meme than an accurate description of what I considered to be alternative music. I remember hearing stories about all the major-label reps that were showing up at alternative music venues like the Pyramid Club in NYC to scout out bands. And stories as well about all the money being offered to bands. This was all in 1989 … I wouldn’t characterize what was happening as a new “openness” to alternative music per se. To me it just felt like labels were following each other in a mad rush to not miss out on the opportunity to make money. And maybe not for the most rational reasons—i.e., that they could actually make money on alternative bands. The whole scene had a sorta frenzied gold-rush vibe about it. Which perhaps is a bit cynical, but, hey, as I mentioned, I was always more of an SST kinda guy.

  Mother Love Bone went to Polygram subsidiary Mercury Records in 1988; 1989 saw the Posies, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains heading to DGC Records, A&M, and Columbia Records respectively; and both Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees went to Epic Records in 1990. Nirvana was merely following the example of others.

  MARK PICKEREL: It was after seeing the success of groups like REM, Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, and Camper Van Beethoven that got us all wondering if there was any room for a Northwest band at the top. Then after one of our own signed with A&M (Soundgarden), it was a mad dash for all of us to get to the next deal … We were lucky enough to share the same management as Soundgarden, Susan Silver. She could charm the skin right off a snake and that’s exactly what she did for many of us—delivering us major-label contracts with her good looks, charm, and her sharp-as-a-knife smarts and know-how!

  With the band almost entirely on pause, Cobain embarked on his most prolific twelve months of songwriting. Tracy Marander had ended their relationship and moved out, leaving Cobain dallying with Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill and mostly sitting at Pear Street.

  DAMON ROMERO: Kurt was sort of … not reclusive, but he didn’t go out very much—he tended to stay at home. He was a charismatic person; he had people coming to his house! He had a lot of social contact because people would come to him. I saw him more at his apartment than I did out on the town. I knew him well enough, I’d go there and we’d watch movies. They had tons of records and he had a lot of pets, too—aquariums, turtles, rabbits or something, a whole bunch of pets—a packed place. He was listening to all kinds of music, he had the punk-rock independent stuff but I remember going one time and he said I should hear this record and he was listening to the Knack Get the Knack, and I was like, “Really?!” He said, “Yeah, it’s a great record.” I thought commercial products like that were taboo; he thought it was great and told me I should totally listen to it. He listened to a vast spectrum of music.

  JASON MORALES: I was in Music 6000 [a legendary music shop in Olympia] once … I was quite a shy guy. At that point Kurt Cobain was more of a mysterious dude—I didn’t know him that well—but sitting in there once Kurt walked up next to me, tapped me on the shoulder, said, “Hey, you’re in Helltrout, right? I really like your band.” I just told him thanks … He was a normal dude, slightly shy, but for the most part nothing out of the ordinary. There was a certain air of stardom around him, he was on Sub Pop, Bleach was a great album—Sub Pop were local heroes at that point in time. He didn’t act that way though, just a nice guy. Honestly, not really the kind of guy you’d see at parties—more of an introvert.

  GEORGE SMITH: I remember when talking to Kurt, spending hours talking about music, that he was sort of an odd little man. Getting into his world, he was in this dark little room littered with posters and stuff. He wanted to play me a record he said was really neat, really meaningful … He played it and it was just some local homespun, non-label-backed recording of some really dumb rock band—butt-rock. Dumb. Really artless. I’m so unclear why he was so taken by it but he was playing it and just looking at me—he was being really reverent toward it. I can understand, I like music like that sometimes too, where it’s just so earnest and bad that it’s good. But being there, unsure how to respond—I couldn’t tell what his angle was; did he see the quality there or was it just so bad it was good? I think it was that it was pure, no put-on, just somebody doing their best to rock with what they had. It was pure. And it was bad. He just had this dark little cave as his hangout in that house.

  While he may have been quite an insular individual, Cobain was certainly a driven one. In the run-up to recording a video on March 20—with vague intentions to sell tapes on tour—Cobain put in his homework, as well as making clear what the future held.

  ALEX KOSTELNIK: I knew Kurt from around town; he had an old cruiser fat-tire bike he’d ride downtown. He ate at the China Clipper a lot … Kurt had been spending a lot of time indoors during the daytime, at his girlfriend’s town house on Pear Street. He taped literally hundreds of television advertisements and anything else gross and funny that TV had to offer. I gave him a quick tutorial on how to edit bits of video together, end-to-end. It was well understood that this was going to be simple and straightforward—play live in front of a green screen with the TV stuff playing in the background … By then they had done the Sub Pop thing, “Lithium” was played for the first time in a recording at this video session. I remember Kurt saying that they wanted to leave Sub-Pop because “they’re sexist.” Kurt said he was going to use the videos to try to get a new, different record contract … the Evergreen State College had a very lenient loan policy—students could routinely check out, for free, whole PA systems, Nagra portable recorders, Neumann mikes. Later, Mexican black-tar heroin flooded the Northwest and theft came into full swing. No more gear party for the A/V nerds … The film students were a small bunch of kids at the Evergreen State College and Jon Snyder called me up and asked me to run a huge heavy studio camera in the TESC student television studio. It was spring break and all the staff were gone—it was time to do whatever we wanted! I got a cement bicycle parking stand from the loading dock outside and stuffed it in Chad’s kick drum because every time he hit the kick pedal the drums would inch forward on the draped green-screen fabric. I put masking tape on Krist’s legs so they would show up on the chroma-key. Otherwise he was a floating, legless bassist. We did “Lithium” for a sound check because I wanted to make sure Krist’s bass could be heard on a tiny television speaker. Remember, this is 1990. Greg Babior did sound. He was in a band with Slim Moon called Witchypoo. Jon Snyder ran the control room and directed the camera motion. My other best lady friend, Maria, and my buddy Geoff ran a second camera. Geoff had to just be the muscle—the camera rigs weighed three hundred pounds … Krist paid me with a large pizza and $40 in $1 bills. I wasn’t complaining. One of the boys came and got a copy of the tape later. They also took dubs that night … Kurt always had everything planned out. He looked like a homeless janitor/weasel; was quiet as hell, shy as hell, but what he did in his “spare time” was nothing short of amazing. He’d thought and rethought the plan probably ten times before coming in. Jon was a great collaborator too, I’m sure he added direction. You know how it goes: highly motivated people with a reason to hustle things …

  Cobain’s early artistic urges had emerged as all sorts of curious home experiments; one example was “Beans,” which included sped-up vocals, acoustic guitar, and a helium-voiced intro skit.

  RYAN AIGNER: The time I heard “Beans” for the
very first time—Kurt came out to my car, I was up at Krist and Shelli’s house, and we sat in the front and listened to it on the cassette tape in there and I was really confused as to what that was all about. He was pretty excited about it. It’s overlooked that there was a sense of humor, there was a softer side—it wasn’t one dimensional, this torrent all the time. Kurt was a charismatic guy and a funny guy and shy at the same time. I remember after the show at Squid Row, Kurt was asking all these questions, “What did the guitar sound like? How was my voice?” People can’t imagine him being insecure about his voice—most people are focused on [how] he had this ferocious powerful voice … They can’t imagine how insecure …

  Cobain’s 1990–1991 spell was far more focused on a particular type of song. A majority of the music that would emerge in the final years of his life would all be written at this time.