by Mark Yarm
He said, “I do know who she is, and actually I can introduce you to her right now, because she’s here and she lives in L.A.” So he introduces me and we got along ferociously well, because as excited as I was to meet her, she was even more excited to meet me, because Courtney obviously wanted more than anything else at that point in time for the media to pay attention to her and here was this hotshot British music journalist—probably the best known at the time, certainly in America—paying attention to her.
We started going around stealing other people’s drinks, because neither of us had much money, and she’s not really much of a drinker. I think somebody slipped acid into my whiskey and at some point we started physically fighting because, I’m only guessing here, I was getting really annoyed because I felt she was flirting with me. I said, “Man, you don’t need to do that with me, because I already like your music.” So we started punching each other and rolling around, kicking, screaming, on the floor.
All of a sudden, Nirvana show up on the scene, and Kurt didn’t know who the blond woman I was fighting was—or maybe he recognized her, I don’t know. But he certainly knew who I was, and it was also equally apparent that the two of us were having more fun than the rest of the audience combined, so the most natural thing in the world was for him to race over to where we were fighting on the floor, jump on top of her, and join in the fight. And that’s how they met.
I had a blackout of about nine or 10 hours. About a year later, I was speaking to Kurt on the phone and he told me, “We were back at the apartment, it was about 2 or 3 in the morning, you just turned up, talking all about this woman Courtney Love: ‘Courtney Love! I’m gonna marry Courtney Love!’ ” I was saying that because I was so off my head. He said he ringed her up right there and then and asked her out on a date. I was like, “You did?” He’s like, “Yeah, I never showed up to it. I only did it to show off in front of you.”
That whole evening was incredibly complicated. I’m not sure that all of the stories have come out of it yet. I just remember waking up completely naked underneath a glass coffee table in Nirvana’s apartment in the Hills the next morning about 7 a.m.
MARK ARM My view towards Courtney changed when all those made-up stories about how they hooked up started coming out, like they met each other in Portland at the Satyricon. What’s the point of this fake backstory? I remember on that tour we did with Hole in ’91 she was asking about him; it seemed like she had her sights set on Kurt even then. Maybe she’s trying to make herself seem like she wasn’t a gold digger, and I don’t think she needed to do that. Because, clearly, they liked each other. Who cares when you met?
LORI BARBERO Kurt and Courtney? I pretty much introduced them. In 1991, when we did the movie The Year Punk Broke, I had already known them each at that point for like five years, and then I had known Dave when he was in Scream. Courtney showed up at that Reading Festival and she’s like, “Can you introduce me to Kurt?” Courtney was there because she was dating Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins, and Nirvana was there, too. And she kept saying, “You need to introduce me to Kurt.” I’m like, “Okay, okay, whatever.”
DAVE MARKEY (1991: The Year Punk Broke documentary director) After Reading, in Rotterdam, Courtney came backstage and brought Billy Corgan to meet everybody. I specifically remember Sonic Youth and Nirvana and me in this sort of classroom that was doubling as a backstage room. The Smashing Pumpkins were getting huge at that time, and in walks Courtney with Billy Corgan, arm in arm.
I remember they left the room, and everyone was cracking jokes at Billy Corgan’s expense, like, “Oh, yeah, we met the rock star.” Cobain went up to the wall and wrote in Magic Marker, COURTNEY + GISH, Gish being the Smashing Pumpkins album at the time. I think that was pretty telling of where people’s attitudes were at that time. Everyone was making fun of the fact that Billy Corgan was already known as sort of an alternative-rock star. This is right before Nirvana would become the real rock stars that we were parodying in the film.
KAT BJELLAND (singer/guitarist for Minneapolis’s Babes in Toyland) I didn’t really know Nirvana when we played Reading. Courtney kept trying to introduce me to Kurt. She’s like, “You gotta meet him! You gotta meet him!” Of course, Courtney tried to get the limelight out of anything. When Babes in Toyland were doing interviews for MTV, she was jumping up and down in the back screaming, like a really weird little kid who can’t get enough attention.
PETER DAVIS (tour booker; Your Flesh zine editor in chief/publisher) Hole was a nightmare. Courtney Love. Really driven and brilliant in a lot of ways, but also very much a crazy person. Bookin’ tour dates and havin’ her disappear so that she could go and schmooze with Billy Corgan one weekend in Chicago and then turn around a week later and she’s doing the same thing, same venue but with Nirvana. It was very peculiar.
LORI BARBERO Later on, Courtney called me in Minneapolis. She’s like, “You need to meet me in Chicago because Nirvana’s playing,” and so I went to Chicago, and then I introduced them at the Metro. She was dating Billy, and she broke up with Billy that night.
COURTNEY LOVE I didn’t dump Billy to go out with Kurt. If anything, later on Billy dumped me because I had something with Trent Reznor, and that was past grunge. Dating Billy was rough. He loves me. I guess I love him, too. He’s a good guy. He saved my life a few times. You can’t ever forget that. We had this very romantic relationship, almost like girlfriends. We wrote letters to each other. We didn’t “do it” a lot, you know what I mean? I know that’s a bad visual, I’m sorry. We were like girlfriends. Girlfriends that loved each other very much.
DANNY GOLDBERG I first met Courtney in Chicago after Nevermind came out. The band did a tour of clubs to show they were still connected to their punk roots before they went on to play bigger places, and one such club was the Metro in Chicago. My wife, Rosemary Carroll, had already told me about Courtney because she had been Courtney’s lawyer for a while and had negotiated the Hole deal with Caroline. Rosemary told me she was really intense.
Lori Barbero from Babes in Toyland was there also, and I guess she wanted to see Dave Grohl. Courtney disingenuously told me she was just there to keep Lori company. But I noticed in the dressing room about 15 minutes later—this was after the show—that she was sitting on Kurt’s lap. I guess they had met sometime before. From that night on, they were always together.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY I remember that night Dave, who was rooming with Kurt, had to come over and sleep in my room. Because I’m sure Kurt and Courtney needed some privacy.
DANNY GOLDBERG There was this benefit coming up for Rock for Choice that Dave Grohl had wanted the band to do, and the band was happy to do it. There was Nirvana, I think Sister Double Happiness, L7, and Hole. Courtney thought she should go higher on the bill, which gave me the sense that this was somebody who was a strong-minded person.
JENNIFER FINCH I knew Kurt completely separate from Courtney when L7 were putting together Rock for Choice. We called Kurt directly, and when Courtney found out that Kurt was on that show she was just like rambling off every good excuse … When Courtney wanted to go out with him, I was verbally against it, although I introduced them because she just would not shut up. Because I come from a place where if you’re gonna do music, don’t date who you want to be.
Dave and I broke up after going to the first Lollapalooza together. Dave and I and Kurt went. We had two seating tickets and a third ticket in the back. It seemed at that moment that Dave had no problem with giving me that third ticket to go sit in the back.… I’m telling you, I’m psycho, okay? His intentions were of no harm whatsoever; he just felt like he needed to bond with Kurt—they had just been going through this recording process. So I went and sat in the back totally resentful. I hung out with my friends there for the rest of the evening and got a different ride home.
After that, we were just hanging out one day, and Dave was playing guitar and video games, and I was like, I don’t want to be with somebody who plays guitar, because I play guitar. It
was jealousy, absolutely. He had his sights on what he is today the second he was in Nirvana. Central figure, songwriter. When he was the new guy in the band, the A&R people would come around and he’d slip them his demo. Songs that he wrote. I knew myself well enough that that would get in the way of any future planning. But I didn’t have the words to explain it to him. It was just out-of-control emotions, and probably someday I owe him an apology.
ERIC ERLANDSON I was actually relieved a little bit when Courtney started dating Kurt, because Nirvana was more our world than the Smashing Pumpkins, and we all got along. When she started out going with Billy, the main problem was that she started treating our band on tour like Billy treats his band. She was putting people down more, and with the group, she started to become more like, “This is my thing.” That was harder than our breakup.
JENNIFER FINCH I know Kurt and Courtney were a couple pretty soon after that show, but it was really when she got pregnant later that I actually accepted it. It just seemed really transitory. They’re both such heated freakin’ people, I can’t even believe they could be in the same room together. Yes, Kurt was heated. They had times when they were very loving and very sweet together and times where there was just a lot of someone not getting their way and the other person being kind of nasty. It wasn’t always Courtney being nasty, like some people might think.
BUZZ OSBORNE Nirvana management was never nice to us. Outright fucking asshole bastards. Right when Nevermind came out, we played a show with Nirvana in New York. Their manager, John Silva, said to me, “If you were a real band, on a real tour you’d understand that this is just fine.” Meaning them fucking us over in one form or another: T-shirts, money, everything. That’s the defining moment for me with Nirvana management. Somebody can only say that to me once, and then I hate their guts forever.
Nirvana had surrounded themselves with regular rock-and-roll people by then. The same rock-and-roll road crew that now does Nine Inch Nails–type tours. I generally don’t get along with those types of people, for good reason, mostly because they’re a bunch of human turds. I’ve never met a group of people who hate music more than rock-and-roll professionals.
After John Silva gave me that speech, I walked out into the lobby of the club, the Marquee, where there were huge, floor-to-ceiling Nirvana Nevermind posters up. Right under the baby on the Nirvana record cover, I wrote in huge letters THE MELVINS SAY NIRVANA SUX for everybody to see when they came in. And Silva went out there and tore it all down. That was pretty funny.
DANNY GOLDBERG I remember when Nirvana played a headlining show in L.A. right after Nevermind came out. Eddie Rosenblatt, the president of Geffen Records, was there with Axl Rose. Guns N’ Roses was the biggest act on Geffen, and Nirvana were the second-biggest act. And he came up to me and said that Axl wanted to come by Nirvana’s dressing room. I knew Eddie was on the spot—he had to look empowered to his star—but I had a pretty good idea of what Kurt was gonna think. I told Kurt about it, and he just made a face. Kurt just didn’t like the idea of Axl.
I said, “Look, man, why don’t you and I just duck out of the dressing room? You won’t have to talk to him because you won’t be there.” Kurt and I went and sat on the stairs, and I gave Eddie all the passes so at least he could walk Axl into the dressing room and maybe say hello to the other guys.
EDDIE ROESER (a.k.a. King Roeser; singer/bassist/guitarist for Chicago’s Urge Overkill) Cleveland was our first show with Nirvana, and they hadn’t really quite hit it really huge there, and like within a week, by the time we were in St. Louis, it was the most insane crowd I’ve ever seen. Kurt could obviously see that there were a lot of frat kids with baseball hats in the audience who would have literally been the kids beating the shit out of him a couple years before, so Nirvana were like, “This music is not for you.” There was also a metal-crossover crowd. But you can’t choose your audience.
MARK KATES (Geffen Records/DGC head of alternative promotion) I went to the show at First Avenue in Minneapolis in October of ’91, which was amazing. One of the topics that night was them going on tour with Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, which I had been asked to bring up to them. They had a hard time taking it seriously. Nor should they have, really. It was a very preposterous idea.
BRYN BRIDENTHAL (Geffen Records publicity head) Axl wanted Nirvana to open for Guns because he, too, heard in the music something really, really special, and he wanted to do whatever he could to help, figuring they were this new young band and not realizing that they were at the front of a movement. He just didn’t understand why they didn’t want to, and Amy—his sister, who worked for him—called me one day and said, “Why won’t they take our help?”
I said, “Because you represent everything that they’re against. You’re a big, successful, corporate million-dollar rock band. That’s the antithesis of Nirvana.” But Axl didn’t think of Guns in that way.
RIKI RACHTMAN (host of MTV’s Headbangers Ball) I was bummed when Nirvana came on Headbangers Ball because I liked Nirvana a lot. I was listening to Bleach all the time, and I knew this band had a buzz. I was all excited, I couldn’t wait to meet them, and then here comes Kurt Cobain, and he’s in the greenroom, facedown, passed out. It was dope. Unless he was suffering what everyone else seems to suffer from: “exhaustion.”
When he comes onto the set, he’s got this big yellow gown on, with a huge collar on it. If he was like, “Hey, check it out!” there’d be a way to have fun with it. The whole joke was that he wore a ball gown because it was the Headbangers Ball. It took me years before I even got that joke. So when he did it and was like, “Uhhh,” and wasn’t answering any of the questions very well—maybe he didn’t want to be on Headbangers Ball. Then stand by your own rules and don’t be on Headbangers Ball. Don’t go on and act like you don’t want to do the show. Just don’t do it.
BUTCH VIG After Nevermind came out, I got solicited with tons of projects, and most of them were not appropriate. Like they’d be sending me, say, a woman blues singer and going, “Can you make her sound like Nirvana? Can you give it that ‘grunge sound’?” Like I invented the sound of Nirvana. Also, some of the hair-metal bands’ managers were contacting me. I got a sense of desperation from them, like, Wow, we need to change our sound a little bit to be hip with the kids.
When we started Garbage, all of our crew guys had come out of that metal scene, working with bands like Skid Row or White Lion. They’d be like, “Butch Vig, fuck that guy, man. He ruined the career of the band I was with.” They’d joke about it with me over a beer. But then they ended up working with us for a long time.
JEFF GILBERT With Nirvana’s success, all of the sudden, heavy-metal chicks who’d been dressing in spandex and fishnets and stiletto boots, now they started showing up to shows and they had washed all the Aqua Net out of their hair and they started to look as ratty as some of the guys. I thought, Oh no, the beginning of the end.
BRET MICHAELS (singer of Los Angeles’s Poison) Most of the bands of our genre changed a little. When I started in my career, I would buy my spandex pants at the Sunoco gas station on Route 83 in fucking York, Pennsylvania, just ’cause I thought that was cool. When grunge hit, it definitely affected the look of bands. I never set out to stay in spandex my whole career. I thought it was great for the day.
RIKI RACHTMAN What happened is, fashion and times change. If there was no Nirvana or no Soundgarden or no grunge era, those hair bands still would have died. We still wouldn’t be listening to Slaughter and Warrant today.
BLAG DAHLIA The glam guys’ lyrics tended to be more obvious and more prosaic and not as allegorical. With something like Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” everything’s right on the surface. I think Nirvana wrote abstract lyrics well; then you get to somebody like Pearl Jam and the allegorical shit is so horrible it looks like a 15-year-old’s notebook. And it’s like, Wow, these lyrics are really terrible, but they’re abstract, therefore people can feel that they’re intelligent.
BRET MICHAELS When I heard “Sme
lls Like Teen Spirit,” I’m goin’, “Well, goddamn, what a great song.” Someone forgot to send me the memo that I’m supposed to be hating this or threatened by it. My career didn’t end with grunge. My career with the media ended with grunge. Most bands get a couple-year window to slowly die down. The media didn’t kinda shut us off. They completely shut us off. But there were three bands in our genre that stayed in the arena: Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Poison.
In ’91, I got Alice in Chains to play a bunch of Northwest dates with us. All I knew was they were starting to break out big. I had a little studio at my house in Malibu, and in probably ’93, Jerry and those guys came out and we sang, wrote music, partied, had a good time. I was talkin’ to Jerry, and we both addressed how now there was supposed to be this anger and hatred between us. I said, “We don’t hate each other, right?” We both laughed, and he goes, “I grew up on Sabbath and Kiss.” And I said, “Me, too.”
And he said, “I know we’re supposed to not like each other, but you’re a cool dude.” We were laughing about the media portraying us as such enemies. If you like somebody, you like somebody.
CHRIS CORNELL In 1990, RIP magazine comes out and there’s an article on Soundgarden and you turn the page and it’s Poison. We were confronted with: Now, does that make us Poison? If we go on tour with Skid Row, are we Skid Row? We’re not playing Skid Row songs. We’re not changing our clothes. All we could really do is just stay who we were. Touring with Skid Row turned out to be a good thing, because we took all their fans, and they went away.
