Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  They bonded over rodents—both Kurt and Tracy had pet rats. He had first met her two years earlier outside a punk club in Seattle—it was the location of one of his alcohol arrests. He and Buzz were drinking in a car when Tracy came by to say hi, and Kurt was so enraptured he failed to notice a police car pulling up. They ran into each other over the next year, and in early 1987 they cemented a relationship. “I had been flirting with him for quite a while,” Tracy said. “I think he had a hard time believing a girl actually liked him.”

  Tracy was the ideal girlfriend for the twenty-year-old Kurt, and she would signify a major marker in his path toward adulthood. She was a year older than he was, had been to hundreds of punk rock shows, and knew lots about music, a huge sexual turn-on to Kurt. With dark hair, a curvy body, and large eyes that were as strikingly brown as his were blue, she was a homespun beauty with a down-to-earth attitude. Everyone she met turned into a friend; in this way, and in many others, she couldn’t have been more different from him. He was instantly taken with her, though from the beginning he never felt like he deserved her. Even early in their relationship, these inner wounds and his pattern of withdrawal exhibited themselves. One of the first times they went to bed together, they lay in the afterglow of sex, when she commented, seeing him naked, “God, you are so skinny.” Though she didn’t know it, Tracy couldn’t have said anything more hurtful. Kurt’s response was to throw on his clothes and storm outside. He came back, though.

  Tracy decided she would love him enough so his fear would disappear; she’d love him so much he might even be able to love himself. But for Kurt this was treacherous ground, and at every corner sat an excuse for self-doubt and fear.

  The only thing he loved more that spring than Tracy was his pet rat Kitty. He had raised the male rodent from birth, feeding him with an eyedropper the first few weeks. The rat usually stayed in his cage, but on special occasions, Kurt would let it run around the house, since a few rat turds weren’t going to spoil the filthy carpet. One day, while Kitty was running around the shack, Kurt found a spider on the ceiling and urged Kitty to get it. “I said, ‘See that fucker, Kitty? Get him, kill him, get him, kill him,’ ” Kurt wrote in his journal. But Kitty failed to attack the spider, and when Kurt returned with a can of Brut deodorant spray in an attempt to kill the spider, he heard a heartbreaking noise and looked down to see:

  My left foot...ontopofmy rat’s head. He jumped around squealing and bleeding. I screamed, “I’m sorry,” about 30 times. Picked him up in a pair of dirty underwear. Put him in a sack, found a piece of two by four wood, took him outside and clubbed, and laid it on its side, and stepped all over the sack. I felt his bones and guts crush. It took about two minutes to put him out of his misery and then I went into misery for the rest of the night. I obviously didn’t love him enough, as I do now. I went back into the bedroom, and observed the blood stains and the spider. I screamed, “Fuck you,” to him and thought about killing him, but left him there to eventually crawl across my face as I lie awake all night.

  Chapter 7

  SOUPY SALES IN MY FLY

  RAYMOND, WASHINGTON

  MARCH 1987

  There’s a Soupy Sales in my fly.

  —Kurt to a crowd of fifteen at the first Nirvana concert.

  Kurt Cobain’s career as a bandleader was almost over before it even began. On a rainy night in early March 1987, the band finally drove out of Aberdeen in a panel van packed with gear, headed toward their first show. The band still didn’t have a name, though Kurt had spent countless hours considering many options, including Poo Poo Box, Designer Drugs, Whisker Biscuit, Spina Biffida, Gut Bomb, Egg Flog, Pukeaharrea, Puking Worms, Fish Food, Bat Guana, and the Imcompotent Fools (intentionally misspelled), among many others. But as of March 1987, he had yet to settle on one.

  They were headed for Raymond, a half hour south of Aberdeen but more like Aberdeen than Aberdeen itself; it was truly a town of loggers and rednecks, since nearly every job was timber related. Choosing Raymond for their debut show was like a Broadway production opening in the Catskills—it was a chance to try things out on an audience perceived as not very discerning or sophisticated.

  Ryan Aigner, who with his gregarious nature had become their manager for a brief moment, had set up the gig. He nagged Kurt to perform in public, and when his friend was noncommittal, Ryan scheduled a gig at a party without Kurt’s prior permission. Ryan borrowed a carpet van from his job, loaded up their equipment, and gathered Kurt, Krist, Burckhard, Shelli, and Tracy, who had to sit among rolls of carpet. During the drive Kurt complained incessantly that the band— which had yet to play anywhere other than in his tiny shack—deserved something better than this gig, for which they would not be paid. “We’re playing in Raymond,” he said, stating the name of the town as if it were a slur. “At someone’s house, to boot. They don’t even know what radio is yet. They’re going to hate us.” “Kurt’s theory,” observed Ryan, “was that either the crowd would hate them, which they would embrace, or the audience would love them, which would also be fine. He was ready for either.” This was a classic example of a device Kurt would apply throughout the rest of his career: By downplaying success, and in fact pronouncing the worst possible scenario, he imagined he could protect himself from true failure. If the actual event he dreaded was anything short of a complete disaster, he could declare some degree of triumph that he had outwitted fate again. This one time, however, his foreshadowing would prove accurate.

  The house was located at 17 Nussbaum Road, up a gravel road seven miles outside Raymond in the middle of a field. When they arrived, at 9:30 p.m., Kurt immediately became fearful, seeing an audience of youths he didn’t know. “When I saw what the band looked like,” remembered Vail Stephens, who was at the party, “I said, ‘Uh oh.’ They looked very different than the crowd we hung out with.” That was exactly the same thought Kurt had as he surveyed the dozen teenagers with Led Zeppelin T-shirts and mullet haircuts. In contrast, Krist was barefoot, while Kurt was wearing a Munsters’ T-shirt and a metal stud bracelet with prongs on it that could have come straight from London’s King’s Road in 1978.

  They walked into a house decorated with an “Ernest” poster, a Metallica album flat, and a poster for Def Leppard’s latest album. Nailed to a beam were several stolen street signs including a “Mile 69” highway marker. A Tama drum kit was permanently set up in one corner of the small living room, as was a Marshall stack, and there was a keg outside the kitchen.

  It took a while for the band to arrange their gear, and in that time the newcomers didn’t exactly ingratiate themselves to their hosts. “He didn’t speak one word,” said Kim Maden of Kurt. “He had his hair down, it was kind of greasy, and it was in his face.” At least, in his standoffishness, Kurt was unlike Krist, who marched into the bathroom and started to pee, despite the fact that it was already occupied by a girl. Krist opened the medicine cabinet, discovered a vial of fake Halloween blood, which he used to cover his naked chest, located some duct tape to put on his nipples, and began rifling through the prescription medicine. He left the bathroom, ignored the keg, went for the refrigerator, and, finding Michelob Light, screamed, “Hey, there’s good beer!” At that point Kurt had begun to play and Krist had to run and grab his bass because Nirvana’s very first concert had started.

  They began with “Downer,” one of the first songs Kurt ever wrote. It listed classic Cobain laments on the pitiful state of human existence. “Hand out lobotomies / To save little families,” Kurt sang. The dark lyrics were completely lost on the Raymond crowd, who could hear nothing more than the chunky guitar and bass riffs. Kurt rushed through it, though the song, and the others that followed, was surprisingly professional. By their very first public show, it was all there, every bit of the Nirvana that would conquer the world in the years to come: the tone, the attitude, the frenzy, the slightly-off-kilter rhythms, the remarkably melodic guitar chords, the driving bass lines that were guaranteed to move your body, and, most important, the hy
pnotizing focus of Kurt. He was not yet a fully realized performer—and in fact those at the party don’t remember him ever raising his head or pushing the hair out of his face—but all the raw, essential building blocks were in place. He was worth watching, if only because he seemed so intense.

  Not that the audience noticed, because they were doing what every crowd of teenagers does at a party—drinking and socializing. By far the most remarkable thing about the show was that the crowd didn’t clap when they ended their first song. The only person who seemed excited was Krist, who announced, “That sounds pretty good from here,” perhaps to keep Kurt’s edgy ego from fracturing. Ryan, who was intoxicated, replied, “It sounds a hell of a lot better than usual.” “I think you guys might buy a decent P.A.,” was Kurt’s only comment after finishing his first original song in front of an audience. “We do have a decent P.A.,” argued Tony Poukkula, who lived in the house, “it just keeps blowing up.” Shelli yelled at Krist to keep his pants on—they were the only clothes he still was wearing—while Kurt joked, “There’s a Soupy Sales in my fly.” “Beastie Boys,” one woman shouted out. “Bestiality Boys,” Kurt answered.

  As they tuned between songs, Kurt saw Poukkula, who had a reputation as a hot guitar player in the area, putting his Fender on and approaching the band. What Ryan hadn’t told Kurt was that the evening had been described to Poukkula as a jam session. Kurt’s expression was one of horror, since, even at this early stage in his career, he did not want to share the spotlight. “That’d be cool to jam,” Kurt tactfully lied to Tony, “but do you mind if we play through our set? I really don’t know any poppy songs at all, and it’s cool to improvise, but I only like to improvise when I’m drunk—that way I don’t care.” Poukkula was amenable and sat down. The moment was then on Kurt to entertain the crowd and neither Burckhard nor Krist, now lying on top of the console television, seemed to be ready. “Let’s just hit this one,” Kurt ordered impatiently. “Let’s just figure out how we are going to play it.” And with that he began the opening guitar solo to “Aero Zeppelin,” assuming his bandmates would join in, which they did. Once the song got going, it sounded as finished as it would a year later when they would record it.

  As “Aero Zeppelin” ended, the natives began to get restless. There was once again no applause, and this time Kurt was heckled, though to be fair, much of the heckling was coming from Krist and Ryan, both so seriously drunk they were barely standing. The band had managed, as they would at many of their early shows, to subdue the crowd through volume during the songs; they would not be so lucky during these song breaks.

  “Hey, who’s got all the pot?” yelled Krist.

  “Acid. I want acid!” shouted Shelli.

  “You should just drink alcohol,” said a Raymond woman.

  “All I want is some good pot,” replied Krist.

  “I’m going to pot you in about five minutes,” threatened Ryan. “Play some covers. Play anything. I’m sick of you guys acting dumb, so fucking retarded. You are dumb.”

  “Let’s play ‘Heartbreaker,’ ” yelled Krist as he hit the opening bass riff.

  “Are you guys drunk?” asked a man.

  “Play it like Zeppelin did,” another man shouted.

  “Play it like Tony Iommi,” yelled another man.

  “Do some Black Sabbath,” someone screamed from the kitchen.

  And with that it almost fell apart; Kurt was teetering on the edge of breaking. Krist kept yelling, “play ‘Heartbreaker,’ ” to which Kurt, in a voice that sounded very young, yelled back, “I don’t know it.” But they nonetheless launched into the Zeppelin song, and Kurt’s guitar playing was fine. The rendition crumbled halfway when Kurt forgot the lyrics, but the instant he stopped, the audience edged him back, yelling “Solo.” He did his best Jimmy Page imitation on “Heart-breaker,” and included bits of “How Many More Times,” but as it ended there still was no applause. Kurt wisely called out “ ‘Mexican Seafood,’ everybody,” and they started into this original.

  They followed that with “Pen Cap Chew,” and then “Hairspray Queen.” By the end of this number, Krist was standing on top of the television doing a Kiss imitation with his tongue. While Kurt and Aaron continued to play, Krist jumped out a window of the house. Looking like a three-year-old running through a sprinkler on a summer day, he came back in the house, and then did it all again. “It was wild,” Krist remembered. “Instead of just playing the show, we thought, why not have an event? It was an event.”

  What happened next guaranteed it would be a party to be remembered. Shelli and Tracy decided to add to the freak show by rubbing their hands on Krist’s chest and kissing each other. Kurt quickly introduced the next song: “This one’s called ‘Breaking the Law.’ ” They played what would later be titled “Spank Thru,” a song about masturbation. The Raymond crowd may have not been the most sophisticated audience, but they began to get the sense that they were the butt of some kind of joke.

  Shelli, trying to crib some of the precious Michelob, had the misfortune of catching her necklace on the refrigerator door. When Vail Stephens closed the door and broke the necklace, a fight ensued. “You fat, fucking cunt,” Shelli yelled as she and Vail slugged it out in the driveway. “We were just being obnoxious on purpose,” remembered Shelli. “To us they were rednecks, and we didn’t want to be rednecks.”

  Kurt, seeing his first show turn into chaos, put his guitar down and walked outside, with equal parts amusement and disgust. Outside the house, an attractive young woman came up to Kurt and as she approached he must have felt that his youthful dreams of being a rock star and attracting groupies were finally coming true. But instead of being an adoring fan, this big-haired blond woman wanted to know the lyrics to “Hairspray Queen.” Apparently, she thought the song had been written about her, perhaps on the spot. It would only be the first of many instances of Kurt’s lyrics being misinterpreted. Even at this first gig, Kurt did not take kindly to an audience misreading his true intent. “I’ll tell ya the lyrics,” he told her, sounding like he’d been insulted. “They are, ‘fuck, cunt, cocksucker, asshole, shit-eating, son-of-a-bitch, anal prober, mother fucker....’” The girl stormed away.

  Kurt went to look for Krist and found him atop the panel van, urinating on the cars of the other guests. Seeing this display, and always smartly concerned with his own self-preservation, Kurt told everyone it was time to go. They packed up their gear and left, expecting to have their retreat thwarted by the fists and feet of their hosts. But the Raymond crowd, despite all the craziness and insults they had endured, and despite being imagined as rednecks, had actually turned out to be more accepting than many of the audiences that would pay to see Nirvana over the next several years. A few had even offered up the comment, “you guys aren’t half bad.” Hearing those words was an elixir to Kurt. Seeing his reflection in an audience, even one that wasn’t fully enthusiastic, was far more attractive than his own self-criticism, which was unceasingly brutal. If the crowd had done anything less than hang him from the nearest lightpost, it would have been a triumph. The audience—distracted as they were by cat-fights, beer brawls, and a half-naked man jumping out of windows—had offered him a small taste of something he craved more than anything else in life: the narcotic of attention.

  As they all scrunched into the van, there was some argument about who in the group was the least drunk, and though Kurt was the most sober, no one trusted him to drive. He sat in the back while Burckhard took the wheel. “Everybody went out to the driveway to watch them drive away,” remembered Jeff Franks, who lived in the house. “They all sat in the back of the van, with the rear door still open, sitting on the rolls of carpet. We could see them pull the slider down as they sped away with gravel spitting out from their tires.”

  Inside the van there were no windows, and with the sliding door down, it was pitch black. It would be several months before they would again play in front of an audience, but they were already looking out toward their future, with a small piece
of their legend already formed.

  Chapter 8

  IN HIGH SCHOOL AGAIN

  OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON

  APRIL 1987–MAY 1988

  Fuck, I’m in high school again! I want to move back to Aberdeen.

  —Excerpt from a letter to Dale Crover.

  Two months after the show in Raymond, Kurt took another significant journey: He once and forever left Aberdeen. He had spent the first twenty years of his life there, but having left he would rarely go back. He packed up his stuff, which at the time consisted of little more than a Hefty bag of clothes, a crate of albums, and his now-empty rat cage, and loaded it into Tracy’s car for the 65-mile drive to Olympia. Though Olympia was only slightly bigger than Aberdeen, it was a college town, the state capital, and one of the freakiest places west of the East Village, with an odd collection of punk rockers, artists, would-be-revolutionaries, feminists, and just plain weirdos. Students at Evergreen State College—universally called “Greeners”—created their own curriculum. Kurt wasn’t planning on college, but he was at least the right age to fit in. He was to have a conflicted relationship with the town’s artsy crowd—he yearned for their acceptance, yet he frequently felt inadequate. It was a recurrent theme in his life.

  Kurt moved to Olympia to live with Tracy in a studio apartment in an old house converted to a three-plex at 114½ Pear Street. It was tiny, but the rent was only $137.50 a month, including utilities. And the location, just a few blocks from downtown, was ideal for Kurt, who rarely had access to an operable vehicle. For the first month he looked for jobs without much success, while Tracy supported him working in the cafeteria of the Boeing airplane plant in Seattle. She pulled a graveyard shift, and the long commute meant she left for work at ten in the evening and didn’t arrive home until nine in the morning. The job did provide a steady income—something they both knew couldn’t be expected of Kurt—and she could steal food to supplement her salary. Because of her unusual hours, Tracy began leaving Kurt “to do” lists, and this form of communication would turn into a ritual of their relationship. One such list she wrote in late 1987 read: “Kurt: sweep kitchen, behind cat litter box, garbage can, under cat food. Shake mats, put dirty dishes in sink, clean up corner, sweep up floor, shake mats, Vacuum and clean up front room. Please, please, please.” The note was signed with a heart and a smiley face. Kurt’s note back: “Please set alarm for 11. I will do the dishes then. Okay?”