by Mark Yarm
We went in, and it was just Kurt and Courtney and me and Mark. I did some and was fully loaded. Kurt was kind of unshaven with the dyed-blond hair and those polka-dot pajamas on. He and I were talking, and I can’t remember what we were talking about, but ironically enough the “Come as You Are” video came on MTV while we were sitting there. Kurt, I think he turned the channel or something.
MARK ARM I did some dope, and I decided I wasn’t high enough and went to do some more.
RON HEATHMAN We didn’t really notice at first, but Mark had gone out. He was turning blue. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in the Seattle scene, so we’re all borderline paramedics at this point. (Laughs.) There was the ice-cube-up-the-butt trick, which we didn’t have to use that night. Kurt and I traded giving Mark CPR—the pumping and the breathing, the whole nine.
And then Courtney got on the phone and called Jonathan Poneman and was like, “You need to get over here because one of your fucking band members on your fuckin’ label”—and at this point, Mudhoney wasn’t even on Sub Pop—“is dying and I can’t have this fucking coming back on us because they’re checkin’ our trash!” She’s worried about what the media would say. I kind of get that, but let’s deal with someone’s life first.
I think she called someone else, too. I don’t know if it was Danny Goldberg. Kurt’s the one that was like, “Will you fuckin’ call the paramedics?” Either Kurt or Courtney finally called the paramedics, and we scooped up the paraphernalia and put it in a bag; but it couldn’t go in the garbage because they were searching the garbage. The plan was that I’d say it was my room and I was registered under an alias. And I got them into the bathroom or whatever—I don’t know exactly where they hid, because I was pretty loaded myself. But I’ll never forget Courtney’s reaction. It’s crystal clear.
MARK ARM I heard that Courtney might have first called Jon Poneman and went, “How do I deal with this?” Eventually they were like, “We got to do something.” Thank God. That seems like a weird thing that your first compulsion would be to call someone else. But I’m sure they probably felt pretty hounded by the press. That was around the time of the Vanity Fair story. They weren’t exactly under the radar.
RON HEATHMAN I pocketed some dope and got Mark out when the paramedics got there.
MARK ARM The next thing I know, I’ve got the medics working me over, and I went to Harborview.
RON HEATHMAN And it was never to be spoken of again, until almost 20 years later. The saddest part about the whole thing is that the whole time, Frances Bean was asleep on the hotel bed.
COURTNEY LOVE We only stayed at the Market that one time, and they still are weird about me. Mark Arm OD’ing? I don’t remember, honestly. Was he still with his Amazon girlfriend? She was cool. She wasn’t trying to mack on my husband, she wasn’t trying to mack on me, she just wanted all the drugs. Who’s this guy? Ron Heathman? No. No … Calling Jonathan Poneman? That could be possible. I always trusted Jonathan Poneman for some insane reason.
I remember me not wanting to do any media. That was the media blackout, but I said to Kurt, “You should at least do the gay media,” and so he did The Advocate. I know that Kurt was taking a lot of dope. He was really frustrated by things. Mark’s habit at that point, I don’t know.
MARK ARM It was stupid for me to go back for more when I had been drinking and had a low tolerance. It was after that I had decided it was probably better not to hang out with those folks anymore. They moved into that place in Magnolia, where Kurt ended up killing himself, but I never actually went there. I didn’t want to get in there. I didn’t want to be involved, and I was trying to take care of myself.
But I still fully didn’t learn my lesson: I continued to chip throughout the spring until midsummer.
MIKE INEZ The Ozzy band, we were holed up in Reno, Nevada, mixing the Live & Loud album, and I get a call from Sean Kinney out of the blue. We’d done an American tour with Alice, so I got to be really great friends with them. Sean says, “Hey, what’s goin’ on, Mike?” It was so funny, because Sean’s one of those people where you just know when something’s fishy. He says, “We need you to come down to Brazil, we’re doing Rock in Rio.” At this point, I thought Mike Starr was gonna be coming back; there was talk of him going to be with his family, or he was just getting burnt out from being on the road.
I thought it was a temporary thing, so I told Ozzy, “The Alice guys called, and I don’t want to leave you hanging without a bass player.” And I remember Ozzy’s words exactly. He said, “If you don’t go, we’re gonna have to go to the hospital.” I said, “Why?” He said, “It’s gonna take them about a week to get my foot out of your ass.”
SUSAN SILVER There were continual positions of jeopardy that Mike Starr had put the band in. He had a fantastic mom who did everything to help him, but he got in a lot of trouble. He was constantly putting the band in legal jeopardy, whether it was drugs or selling backstage passes outside the venue, things that he and his dad did together that could have created a lot of ill will for Alice.
There’s only so many times you could ask someone, tell someone, threaten someone, and then those guys had to make that decision, which they made on their own. They called me to tell me that they not only had made that decision, they had talked to Mike. This was before Brazil, in Hawaii. The Brazil shows would be his last.
MIKE STARR One time, Layne was so dope sick he goes to me, “Mike, take these two Van Halen tickets and sell ’em and get a hundred bucks for them so I can get well and play the show.” Sean saw me do it, and Layne goes, “Don’t tell him you sold it for dope for me,” so I kept my mouth shut, and they all got mad at me. And Layne said, “Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it.”
That’s one reason why I got kicked out of the band. Also, Jerry was jealous ’cause I was getting a lot of attention. I was in a magazine, as “sexiest babe of the month.” When that came out, I was walking to the bus, and Jerry had the magazine ripped up at his feet. And I was kicked out two months after that.
JERRY CANTRELL We were really sad about it, of course … We’d been together for five years, did a couple of records, EPs, been in a movie—we had quite a history together. It was a hard decision to make, but things just weren’t working out, so we made the decision to part ways.
MIKE INEZ Sean had said, “You gotta go and get all these shots to go down to Brazil,” so I went back to L.A., got the shots, and was gonna fly out to Brazil. Then they said, “Mike wants to do the last two shows here in Brazil, so we’ll just meet you in London.” I’m like, Oh great, I’m already sick from these vaccination shots!
JENNIFER FINCH When we went to play in South America, we all took the plane—L7 and the Chili Peppers and Nirvana and Courtney—from L.A. We were making these jokes that if that plane goes down, it’s gonna be like the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly situation. When the plane landed, everyone said it lost a wheel, but what really happened was they lost the braking system on one of the wheels so it locked and the plane kind of spun sideways. Everyone was just in shock. Anthony from the Chili Peppers kicked the door open and started screaming at the pilot, and then Anthony was pulled off the plane.
Nirvana totally wouldn’t talk to each other. Everyone was at the end of their rope with the drug and sickness situation with Kurt. Dave had just started his relationship with a gal he later married who’s also named Jennifer. She’s really lovely and had long red hair. Courtney was so pissed at me that I didn’t marry him. Her quote was, “That could be your house on the hill.”
The first weekend was in São Paulo and then the next weekend was in Rio, so there was an entire week off where the promoters just put together all this different really super-fun stuff to do, like scuba diving or going to the beach or going shopping. We all had bodyguards because we had to. L7 were popular down there. Our faces were so public that there were kidnapping threats.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY Rio and São Paulo, that was quite a trip. First we get down there and we play this giant soccer stadium in São Paulo f
or 80,000 people—it was this festival with Alice in Chains and L7 and some other bands. We were all staying at the same hotel. Lots of drinking. Going to the beach.
Kurt and Courtney were just holed up in their hotel room. The Courtney Love hotel room was a particular kind of disaster; I learned this later on, after tour managing Hole. She brings like two or three giant suitcases full of clothes, and somehow all those suitcases would get opened and everything would get spread out all over the hotel room. And then it’s all coated in cosmetics and baby powder, it’s just a tornado of clothes and makeup. They just sit in there and order room service, but they don’t let the maids in to clean up or take out the dishes. It looks like an episode of Hoarders.
COURTNEY LOVE The one time I saw Kurt happy with his job was when we went to Rio. We had a bodyguard, we stayed at a four-star hotel. He hung out with Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains. He blew a line, which is like really tacky, but when in fuckin’ Buenos Aires, blow a line. I was like, “Let’s have a threesome with a model!” And he was like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yeah!” Did we? I’m not gonna tell you. No, I do not do sex stuff; that’s not my jam, and it never has been. But my point was that he had fun mingling with his people.
MIKE STARR After Dirt, I never did heroin again, until the day I was leaving the band.
We were touring with Nirvana and the Chili Peppers, and we were playing a big show, a big festival, down in South America. And Kurt had taken me to the bathroom, him and Courtney, and we shot up all night, and Layne didn’t know that. And I went to Layne’s room and we shot up, and I OD’d.
I wake up, and I’m all wet, and I’m laying over the toilet. I’m in a different room and I’m all wet. And he had had me in the shower and everything—I was obviously blacked out during that whole time. I was flatlined. And he’s crying and punching me in the face. I’m like, “What’s wrong? What did I do?” And he’s like, “You were dead for 11 minutes, Mike.”
I got home to California, and after that’s when it really began. Because I couldn’t forget about losing my band. It was everything to me, and it broke my heart, so I started shootin’ again.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY Nirvana decided to use the time in between shows to go into a studio and just get some ideas down for their next album. So we went to this pretty nice studio in Rio, and the band played all the songs they had written for In Utero, which was not that many, and nothing was very complete, but I remember we had “Heart-Shaped Box” and a few other songs.
“Heart-Shaped Box” was pretty good. Frankly a lot of it I thought was crap. It was just this improvisational, atonal stuff, just noisy. I could tell that Kurt wasn’t at one of his creative peaks at all. It was obvious—and he had said to me and to others—that he just wasn’t really excited about Nirvana anymore and he wanted to do something else. They were struggling to get enough material together for an album. And this is something I haven’t really ever said to anyone else before, but my feeling was like, Wow, good luck making an album, guys. You’re in trouble.
STEVE ALBINI I’d been hearing rumors that I was going to be asked to do the Nirvana record for a long time, and I had gotten a couple of random, drunken phone calls from Kurt—I assume it was Kurt, because I later identified that voice—just slurring that he wanted to make a record with me. I got calls from weirdos all the time, so I didn’t think too much about it.
Then I started seeing stuff, particularly in the English music press, saying that I was doing the next Nirvana record. It made me uncomfortable, so I actually wrote, I think it was Melody Maker, saying, “I don’t know where you’re getting your information. Nobody has spoken to me about making a Nirvana record. You’ve published this, and it’s now causing me some consternation because people are calling me up and hassling me about it.”
Eventually, Kurt called me and said, “If you’re up for it, we’d like you to do this record.” I said, “Sure.” I wasn’t a particular Nirvana fan prior to working on that record, but I grew to respect them a great deal, seeing them work and seeing their work ethic, seeing how they gave each other space to do stuff.
DANNY GOLDBERG Kurt was nervous about looking too mainstream after the huge commercial success of Nevermind, and I think he thought that Albini would add some punk credibility.
STEVE MANNING I remember seeing Kurt at an all-ages Fluid show at RKCNDY and feeling like he was being more reclusive than in the past. Must’ve been right after Nevermind. He was pressed up against the wall in the back corner. I remember walking outside and two young kids with Mohawks were screaming at him, “You killed punk rock! You killed punk rock!” Kurt was with a girl at the time, and I just remember looking at him and seeing the most dejected look on his face. I didn’t feel close enough to him where I could go up and say, “Ah, fuck them, don’t worry about it.” I’ve always wished I would’ve said something.
GILLIAN G. GARR I didn’t even realize that they had disavowed Nevermind until reading the book Come as You Are. It was mainly Kurt, and to some extent the others. He said he was embarrassed by Nevermind and that it wasn’t the kind of record he would listen to. He said it sounded closer to a Mötley Crüe album.
BUTCH VIG To me, that record doesn’t sound slick at all. It sounds like a band playing their asses off in a room. To me what sounded slick were the metal records that were coming out, like Whitesnake. Nirvana was super-happy with Nevermind. Initially I may have been a little hurt by what Kurt said, but I knew that Kurt had to say that because, what can you say, “We sold 10 million records. I loved the way the record sounds”? That’s not very punk.
CHRIS CORNELL When all the bands in the Seattle music scene went on to major labels and bigger success, there was this kind of “Let’s pretend that we don’t wanna be doing this and someone’s sort of forcing us to do it” attitude. I think everybody had it, including members of my own band. The only band I didn’t see acting like that was Alice in Chains, because they didn’t come from that indie-rock world. Everybody else sort of followed the punk-rock bible, and it wasn’t part of punk rock to be on a major label, to make money, to make videos, to spend more than $2,000 on making a record, to be on a tour bus instead of driving a van. And yet, that’s what everyone was doing.
BUTCH VIG Here’s one reason why I knew that Kurt was happy with that record: because he called me up and started bugging me to produce Courtney. He wanted me to do Live Through This. Kurt had so much respect for me, and I think that he knew that I could bring out in Courtney what I had brought out in Nirvana with Nevermind.
He started calling every night at the studio. I’d be at Triclops working with the Smashing Pumpkins and they’d go, “Butch, Kurt’s on the phone.” I’d talk to him and he’d go, “Butch, you gotta do Courtney’s record, man, you just gotta do it.” I was pretty fried from doing the Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream—it was super-draining; six months of pretty much working every single day—and there was just no way I could go right into another crazy record. Billy, who had dated Courtney and knew her really well, said, “You don’t want to go in a studio with Courtney.” That’s all he would say.
PATTY SCHEMEL We lived together for a bit, me and Kurt and Courtney, when I first moved to Los Angeles. They had this really great place, but Kurt would just sit in the closet with his guitar and amp in the dark and play. He liked it in there. And the closet backed up against the room that I stayed in, so I could hear it all. That’s where I heard all the In Utero stuff. The beginnings of “Rape Me” I heard in there.
STEVE ALBINI We did the record at Pachyderm, and I thought it was a plus that it was way out in the boonies of Minnesota. Given everyone’s concerns about Kurt falling off the wagon, being in a studio that was 50 miles out of town made that less likely.
I remember we got an awful lot done in the first week. I was very happy with the progress. Everything sounded really good, the band was in really good spirits, Kurt was sober, there were no flare-ups, no incidents, everything seemed kind of normal. There was one pretty funny episode one night whe
re Dave Grohl and Bob Weston—who was there working on the session, as well—got bored, so they took off into this small town, Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and hit a QuikTrip or the 7-Eleven and bought all of the Reddi-wip in the dairy case. And then stayed up all night doing whippets.
When Courtney showed up at the studio later on? It sucked. She’s like a fucking lead weight on everything. You know, I don’t get any satisfaction talking about that person.
LORI BARBERO When they were at Pachyderm, I took Krist and Kurt to the Mall of America, and Albini kept saying, “You can’t go to the Mall of America—you’ll get swamped.” I’m like, “Nobody is gonna swamp you.” Albini’s like, “You’re gonna be sorry.” He was thinking that they were just gonna get attacked.
I took them to this store called Bare Bones in the Mall of America, because I knew Kurt would love it. It was all about anatomy: babies in jars and skeletons and brains and all that. That’s where he bought the woman figure on the cover of the album.
Back then, I really stood out with my blond dreadlocks, and I lived in the Twin Cities, so that was my stomping grounds. The only people that approached us were a bunch of kids, and they’re like, “You’re in Babes in Toyland!” Not one person recognized Krist and Kurt.
STEVE ALBINI We did a lot of prank calls. We called Eddie Vedder, and they had me pretend to be some famous record producer who had worked with Bowie. I told him that I wanted to get him in the studio with a real band that could really play. I don’t know if he could tell that there was something up or not, but he handled it with a lot of class.
