Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Kurt and Krist found Chad Channing at a show at the Community World Theater. “Kurt was wearing these big high-heel shoes, and wide, blue sparkle flare pants,” Chad recalled. What Kurt and Krist noticed about Chad was his gigantic North drums—the kit was the biggest drum set they’d ever seen, dwarfing Chad, who at five-foot six, with long hair, already looked a bit like an elf. Directness was not Kurt’s forte: Rather than ask Chad to join the band, he simply kept inviting the drummer to practices until it became obvious he was in the group.

  After one of those practices, now scheduled back in Aberdeen above Krist’s mother’s hair salon so they could play all night, the Nirvana veterans decided to show their new drummer the local sites. Chad was from Bainbridge Island and, prior to joining Nirvana, had never been to Aberdeen. The tour was a shock, particularly the neighborhood Kurt grew up in. “It was like stepping into the south side of the Bronx,” Chad recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘holy crap.’ It was really bad. It’s probably the poorest section in all of Washington. All of a sudden you have this instant slum.”

  Chad was more impressed when they drove by the gothic-looking Weatherwax High School. They also showed the drummer the five-story abandoned Finch Building; Kurt said he’d taken acid there as a teenager, though that could have been said for many of the sites in Aberdeen. They pointed out Dils Old Second Hand Store, where a 25-cent album bin stood next to a twenty-foot chainsaw. They went for a beer in the Poorhouse Tavern, where Krist seemed to know every other person. “It was redneck city,” observed Chad. “It was tons of dudes with Skoal behind their lips, and with Skoal caps on and neon pink T-shirts, and vans with mud flaps, and mustaches.”

  When they left the tavern, the two natives planned to take Chad to a haunted house in the hills above the town. Krist pointed the van north and headed into what accounts for Aberdeen’s ritzy neighborhood: a hillside of majestic Victorian homes constructed by pioneer lumber barons. But at the top of the hill, Krist headed the van into the woods, and Kurt began to tell the story of Aberdeen’s haunted house, a place the locals called “the Castle.” He said people had gone in and never come out; one room had pictures of clowns painted on the walls in blood. As he talked, the hillside became heavily forested with trees overhanging the narrow road.

  When they arrived at the Castle, Krist pulled into the driveway and killed the lights, but kept the engine running. In front of them was a structure that had been a three-story house before decay had caused it to crumble upon itself. There was moss on the roof, the porch had caved in, and whole rooms appeared to have been eaten away, most likely by small fires. In the darkness, and shrouded by tree limbs, it really did look like the ruins of a crumbled castle in some distant Transylvanian backcountry.

  As the van idled, Chad wondered why neither Krist nor Kurt made a move to get out. They just sat there, staring at the house as they might look at an apparition. Finally Kurt turned to Krist and said, “Do you really want to go in?” Krist replied, “Nah, fuck it. I’m not going in there.”

  As Chad recalled later, he urged them to venture in, since Kurt’s stories had made him curious: “I was all excited to check it out and see what was so scary. But when we got there, they just sat in the driveway, staring at the house, unable to move.” Chad thought it a dare for him, part of an elaborate hazing rite to test his courage. He had decided that no matter how frightening the house was—and it was plenty scary— he was not going to be too scared to go in. But when he looked at Kurt’s face, he saw real fear. “Well, people have died in there,” Kurt explained. In the fifteen minutes it had taken to drive from the tavern to the house, Kurt had told such convincing stories of the horror, he had begun to believe his own hyperbole. They turned around and headed back to town, and Chad’s tour of Aberdeen was over. Krist took Kurt’s dualism at its face value, but for Chad the fear in Kurt’s face was one of the first pieces of evidence he had that the bandleader was more complicated than he appeared.

  With the new recording session scheduled for the second week of June, Kurt was filled with anticipation and excitement. He could talk about virtually nothing else during May, announcing the upcoming date to everyone he knew, and some he didn’t—like a new father overwhelmed with pride, he’d tell the mailman or the grocery store clerk. The band played a couple of gigs that month to get their sea legs with Chad, including a return visit to the Vogue and a party at the “Witch House” for Olympia musician Gilly Hanner. Hanner turned 21 on May 14, 1988, and a friend invited them as entertainment. “They were not like any Evergreen band,” she remembered. “Their sound hit you. You’d think, ‘I’ve heard this before,’ but you hadn’t. It was more rock ’n’ roll than most stuff of that era, without any noodling.” At the party, Kurt joined Gilly to sing a version of Scratch Acid’s “The Greatest Gift,” and Kurt played a version of “Love Buzz” on his back on the floor. At the time, “Love Buzz” was the best thing about their shows—Kurt was still struggling to settle into an original sound that was raw enough to appeal to his punk sensibilities and still displayed his increasingly complicated lyrics. Far too often the band’s shows turned into loud feedback sessions where virtually none of Kurt’s words could be heard above the din.

  While Kurt’s expectations for the single grew, financial problems within Sub Pop almost doomed the project. One May afternoon Kurt picked up the phone, only to hear Pavitt asking to borrow $200. It was so laughable, it didn’t anger Kurt, though it incensed Krist, Chad, and Tracy. “We were shocked,” remembered Chad. “At that point we began to have our suspicions about those guys.” Kurt would have been more upset had he known Sub Pop had second thoughts about the band creatively. The label wanted one more look, so Poneman hastily arranged a show at the Central Tavern on June 5, a Sunday night. Jan Gregor, who booked the club, put Nirvana into the middle slot on a three-band evening. The night before the date, Poneman called Gregor and asked if Nirvana could be moved down in the line-up and go on first. Poneman’s explanation: “It’s a Sunday night—we don’t want to stay out that late.” When the band went on, there were six people in the audience. Chris Knab of KCMU was one of them: “Bruce and Jon were at the front of the stage, shaking their heads up and down. They must have seen something no one else could, because I thought they sucked.” This particular gig—and many to follow—was plagued by sound problems, which put Kurt in a bad mood and compromised his performance. Despite the crummy sound and the lackluster live show, Poneman and Pavitt decided to proceed with the single.

  On June 11 Nirvana returned to Reciprocal for the session. This time producer Endino knew how to spell Kurt’s name, but the quick and easy studio experience of their first demo was not to be repeated. In five hours they finished only one song. Part of the problem came because Kurt had brought along a cassette of a sound collage he wanted on the single. The only way for this to happen, with the studio’s crude gear, was to hit the “play” button on the cassette deck at the correct point during the mixing.

  The band returned on June 30 for five more hours, and did a final session on July 16 that consisted of three hours of mixing. In the end, the thirteen-hour stint produced four tracks: “Love Buzz”; a new version of “Spank Thru”; and two Cobain originals, “Big Cheese”—which was to be the B-side—and “Blandest.”

  Sub Pop hired Alice Wheeler to photograph the band for the sleeve, and during the last week of August they drove to Seattle in Krist’s van to pick her up. Their first official photo session was so anticipated, they all took the day off work. Krist returned everyone to Tacoma, where they shot in several locations, including “Never-Never Land” at Point Defiance Park, and the foot of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Krist wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and towered over his two tiny bandmates in all the pictures. Chad wore a Germs T-shirt, a beret, and round sunglasses, which gave him the appearance of being the leader of the band. Kurt was in a light-hearted mood, smiling in most of the photos. With his long, girlish hair and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt reading “Live to Ride,” he looks to
o young to drive, much less be in a rock band. He had an outbreak of acne the week before, something he’d struggled with since high school and which gave him fits of self-consciousness. Wheeler told him she was using infra-red film, so his zits weren’t going to show. By the time the band drove back to Seattle, they had spent as much time on the photo session as they had in the studio.

  In late August Kurt received another unusual phone call from Poneman, and like his previous conversations, he couldn’t help but feel he was being conned. Poneman informed Kurt that Sub Pop was starting a new subscription-only singles service, and they planned to use “Love Buzz” as the debut release in their “Singles Club.” Kurt could hardly believe his ears; discussing it later with his bandmates, he was outraged. Not only had the single taken months longer than planned, but now it wasn’t even going to be for sale in stores. It hardly seemed worth the effort. As a collector, Kurt appreciated the club idea, but he wasn’t interested in seeing his band be the test case. But since he didn’t have a contract and Sub Pop had paid for the recording, he also didn’t have much choice.

  Not long after the April show at the Vogue, Kurt had gotten a phone call from Dawn Anderson wanting to interview the band for her Backlash fanzine. Rather than conduct the interview over the phone, Kurt offered to drive up to Seattle, making it seem as if he already had business there, which he didn’t. Though Kurt had waited for this moment for years—and had prepared for it with the fake interviews with himself he’d written as a youth—in his first press interaction, he became nervous and shy. Most of the hour interview ended up being about the Melvins, a subject Kurt seemed more comfortable with than his own band. Reading a transcript one could almost think he was a member of the Melvins, not Nirvana. “He idolized the Melvins,” observed Anderson, something that had been obvious in Grays Harbor for years.

  But like the Sub Pop single, which again had been delayed in late August, the article sat on hold for a few months. With so many delays that he couldn’t control, Kurt felt like he was the only one in the world ready for his musical career. The Backlash article finally ran in September, and even Kurt was surprised to see that in Anderson’s 500-word story the Melvins’ name appeared twice as many times as Nirvana’s. “I’ve seen hundreds of Melvins’ practices,” Kurt said. “I drove their van on tour. Everybody hated them, by the way.” The piece was flattering, and it was helpful in plugging the upcoming “Love Buzz” single, yet when Kurt said, “Our biggest fear at the beginning was that people might think we were a Melvins rip-off,” a casual reader might have had a similar concern. Kurt explained their Vogue debut: “We were uptight....We felt like we were being judged; it was like everyone should’ve had score cards.”

  The “score card” line in this first press interview reprised the imagery Kurt had put forth in his letter to Crover; he also used it in later interviews. It came from his divided self, the same self who said his name was spelled “Kurdt Kobain.” What his interviewers—and the fans who read these stories—never knew was that almost every word he uttered had been rehearsed: in his head with the band driving around in the van or, in many instances, actually written out in his journals. This wasn’t simply craftiness on his part or a desire to put forth the most marketable and attractive image—though despite all the punk ideals he spouted, he, like any other human being, was intrinsically guilty of this—but much of his forethought occurred instinctually. He had imagined these moments since he began retreating from the outside world after his parents’ divorce, spending all that time in his room writing in Pee Chee notebooks. When the world tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Mr. Cobain, we are ready for your closeup,” he had planned how he’d walk toward the cameras, going so far as to even rehearse the way he would shrug his shoulders, as if to give the impression he had only grudgingly acquiesced.

  Nowhere was Kurt’s forethought more apparent than in a band bio he wrote that summer to send out with the Endino demo tape. He’d given the tape many titles, but the one used most often was “Safer Than Heaven”—what that meant, only Kurt knew. He wrote dozens of drafts of the bio, and each revision became more exaggerated. One of many examples read like this:

  Nirvana is from Olympia, WA, 60 miles from Seattle. Nirvana’s guitar/vocalist Kurdt Kobain and bass[ist] Chris Novoselic lived in Aberdeen 150 miles from Seattle. Aberdeen’s population consists of highly bigoted redneck snoose-chewing deer-shooting faggot-killing logger types who “ain’t too partial to weirdo new wavers.” Chad Channing [drummer], is from an island of rich kid LSD abusers. Nirvana is a trio who play heavy rock with punk overtones. They usually don’t have jobs. So they can tour anytime. Nirvana has never jammed on “Gloria” or “Louie, Louie.” Nor have they ever had to rewrite these songs and call them their own.

  Another, only slightly different, version sent to Touch and Go added the following downcast plea: “We are willing to pay for the majority of pressing of 1000 copies of our LP, and all of the recording costs. We basically just want to be on your label. Do you think you could PLEASE send us a reply of ‘fuck off,’ or, ‘not interested,’ so we don’t have to waste more money sending more tapes?” On the flip side of the tape, he recorded a collage that included snippets of songs from Cher, the Partridge Family, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Dean Martin, and another dozen disparate artists.

  Kurt’s offer to pay a label to put out his record shows his increasing level of desperation. He drafted a letter to Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees asking for help (Lanegan was one of a number of his idols Kurt regularly wrote to in his journal, rarely mailing this correspondence). He wrote, “We feel like we’re not accomplishing anything.... It turns out our single will be out in October, but there isn’t much hope for an EP within the near future because Sub Pop is having financial problems, and the promise of an EP or LP within the year was just a bullshit excuse for Poneman to keep us from scouting other labels.” Kurt also wrote to his friend Jesse Reed, declaring the band was going to self-release their LP since they were so sick of Sub Pop.

  Despite Kurt’s frustrations, things were actually going better with the band than they had in some time—though it could never be fast enough for Kurt. Shelli had broken up with Krist, which resulted in Krist having more time to practice. Kurt was happy to finally have two other bandmates who were as into the band as he was. On October 28 they landed their most prestigious gig yet, opening for the Butthole Surfers at Seattle’s Union Station. Kurt had idolized Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the Surfers, so the show was very important to him. Sound problems again derailed Nirvana from putting on their best performance, but the very fact that Kurt could now announce to his friends, “My band opened for Gibby Haynes,” was another piece of evidence to boost his self-esteem.

  Two days later they played one of their most infamous shows, and one that turned Olympia’s heart. It was a party in Evergreen’s K-Dorm on the day before Halloween, and Kurt and Krist had made themselves up for the occasion by pouring fake blood on their necks. There were three bands who played before Nirvana: Ryan Aigner’s band the Cyclods, Dave Foster’s latest group Helltrout, and a new band fronted by Kurt’s neighbor Slim Moon called Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare. In the middle of Nisqually’s set the drummer punched Slim in the face and a fight ensued. It was such a wild rumble that Kurt wondered what Nirvana could possibly do to upstage such an event. He almost didn’t get the chance, as campus police showed up and shut the party down. Ryan Aigner stepped forward and convinced the officers to let Nirvana play, but they were told to be quick.

  When Nirvana finally took the stage, or more accurately moved to the corner of the room acting as a stage, they played only a 25-minute set, but it was a show that was to transform them from Aberdeen hicks to Olympia’s most beloved band. Kurt’s intensity—something that had been lacking in other performances—found a new depth, and not a person in the room could take their eyes off him. “As reserved as he was when he was offstage,” remembered Slim Moon, “when he wanted to be on, he went all out. And on t
his one night, he played with an intensity that I had never seen.” They were the same songs and riffs the band had been performing for some time, but with the added attraction of a possessed lead singer, they were mesmerizing. He had, surprisingly, a confidence now in front of the microphone that he had nowhere else in his life. Kurt’s increased energy seemed to egg on Krist, who bounced around so much he smacked several members of the crowd with his bass.

  But the coup de grâce was to come. At the end of their short set, right after they played “Love Buzz,” Kurt lifted his relatively new Fender Mustang guitar and brought it down to the ground with such violence that pieces shot through the room like projectiles from a cannon. He paused for five seconds, hoisted the remnants in the air, and held it there while eyeing the crowd. Kurt’s face appeared serene and spooky, as if you’d taken a Casper the Friendly Ghost Halloween mask and plastered it onto the body of a 21-year-old man. The guitar went up into the air, and, smash, it hit the floor once more. Kurt dropped it and walked out of the room.