Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Kurt usually made Christmas presents for his family by hand, both out of artistic preference and economic necessity; in 1987 he’d crafted keychains. But gifts in 1988 were a no-brainer: he gave everyone, including his aunts and uncles, copies of the single. Having the record created a homecoming of sorts for him—he now had evidence to prove to the relatives he was making something of himself. Wendy played the single on the family stereo, but it was clear she wasn’t impressed. She told him he needed “something else to fall back on.” Kurt would hear none of it.

  More exciting than Christmas was yet another high-profile show the band played on December 28 at the Underground in Seattle for the release of the Sub Pop 200 box set. Even while struggling to pay their bands, Sub Pop threw lavish parties, and this event was no exception: It was an eight-band, two-day affair at a U-District club. Nirvana were on the first night and were introduced by Steven Jesse Bernstein as “the band with the freeze-dried vocals.” The show marked one of the first times Nirvana was on equal billing with the rest of Sub Pop’s roster— previously they had been considered a baby band. They stayed in Seattle and, during the next three days, spent another fifteen hours in the studio with Endino. Working until the early evening on New Year’s Eve, Kurt finally retreated to Olympia to start 1989 with Tracy.

  The second week of January, the band was back at work for two more sessions of mixing, and with this they were close to done. After almost 30 hours in the studio, they had nine tracks. They chose to use three of the Crover demos on the album, and they remixed those. Kurt had decided the album would be called Too Many Humans, which wasn’t the name of any individual song but summed up the dark thesis of his work. But in early February the band headed to California on tour, and while driving through San Francisco, Kurt saw an AIDS prevention poster that struck him as funny: It read “Bleach Your Works.” “Bleach,” he said to his two bandmates as the van drove down the street. “That’s going to be the name of our new album.”

  Chapter 10

  ILLEGAL TO ROCK ’N’ ROLL

  OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON

  FEBRUARY 1989–SEPTEMBER 1989

  If it’s illegal to rock ’n’ roll, throw my ass in jail.

  —A line Kurt wrote on a guitar, July 15, 1989.

  The day before his 22nd birthday, Kurt wrote a letter to his mother that read: “It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and, as usual, there’s not much to do, so I thought I’d write a little letter. Actually, since every day is rainy and slow, I’ve been writing a lot lately. I guess it’s better than nothing. I either write a song, or write a letter, and I’m sick of writing songs, for now. Well, tomorrow is the 22nd birthday (and I still can’t spell).” He didn’t finish the letter, and he didn’t send the fragment.

  Despite the boredom expressed in the letter, Kurt’s inner artistic life was blossoming. His 22nd year would be one almost completely devoted to creating—in the form of music or art. He had long ago given up aspirations of being a commercial artist, but in a way this freedom allowed his art to develop unfettered. He didn’t have a job for most of 1989, unless you consider running Nirvana a job. Tracy had become his benefactor, a role she would assume for most of their relationship.

  Walking into his apartment any afternoon during 1989, you were as likely to find him with a paintbrush in his hand as a guitar. But he wasn’t actually a painter as much as he was a creator. He used whatever implement was in front of him as his brush, and whatever flat object he found as canvas. He couldn’t afford actual canvas or even quality paper, so many of his works were done on the back of old board games he found in thrift stores. Instead of paint—which he could rarely manage— he used pencil, pen, charcoal, magic marker, spray paint, and occasionally even blood. One day a neighbor, Amy Moon, came by only to be greeted at the door by Kurt wearing the grin of a mad scientist who recently had birthed his first creature. He had just finished a painting, he told her, this time done with acrylic paint, but with one special addition, “my secret ingredient.” He told Amy he added this to every one of his paintings as the final touch, the fait accompli, once the work was to his liking. The secret sauce, he explained, was his semen. “My seed is on this painting,” he told her. “Look, you can see how it glistens!” he motioned. Amy didn’t dare ask what method Kurt used to apply his “seed,” but she noticed no brush or palate in the area.

  This unusual ritual didn’t stop Amy from employing Kurt to create a painting for her; it was the only commission he ever took. She described a dream and asked him to depict it. He took the assignment, and she paid $10 for materials. The resulting painting was crudely painted but so evocative of her dream, Amy could barely imagine Kurt had created it from her description. “It’s the middle of the night,” Amy described, “and there is an eerie force at work. In the background are not well-defined trees, just shadows. In the foreground are the headlights of a car, and a freshly hit deer. You can see the breath coming out of the animal, and the heat coming off its body. There is a very thin female figure in the front, eating the flesh of the animal that is probably not dead yet. His painting is exactly as I saw the dream.”

  Most of Kurt’s creations were unsettling, sometimes strikingly so. Many were of the same themes he’d explored in high-school art class, but there was a darker edge to them now. He still painted aliens and exploding guitars, but his sketchbook also included Dalí-esque landscapes with melting clocks, pornographic body parts on creatures with no heads, and illustrations of severed limbs. Increasingly during 1989, his art began to take on three-dimensional qualities. He shopped Olympia’s many thrift stores every week, and anything cheap and bizarre was likely to make its way into one of his constructions. On the back of an Iron Butterfly album, he painted an image of Batman, affixed a naked Barbie doll to it with a noose around her neck, and presented this to Tracy as a birthday gift. He began to collect dolls, car models, lunchboxes, old board games (some he kept intact, like his beloved Evel Knievel game), toy action-figures, and other assorted objects found on the cheap. These collectibles were not treasured or put away on a shelf; they could be melted in the backyard during a barbecue or glued to the back of a board game. Tracy complained she couldn’t turn around without having a doll stare at her. The entire apartment began to take on the look of a roadside museum of kitsch, but one in a constant state of both construction and destruction. “He had this clutter thing,” remembered Krist. “His whole house was cluttered, and there were things everywhere. Yet he was a serious artist, and that was one of the ways he expressed himself; how he filtered the world. It came out a lot of ways, and some of it was morbid and twisted. In fact, all the art is decadent and twisted. His theme was pretty consistent. Everything was just a little fucked up and dark.”

  One of Kurt’s favorite twists was switching sexual organs on figures he’d drawn. Male bodies would have vaginas for heads, women might get penises as well as breasts. One work from this period shows four naked women sitting around an oversized Satan, who sports a mammoth erect penis. Though the image is drawn in pencil, the women’s heads are pasted from ads in Good Housekeeping magazine. The figures touch each other in one massive human chain: one woman is defecating; another has her hand in her vagina; a third has a hand in the next woman’s anus; and the final woman has a baby coming out of her womb. All have devil horns, and they are drawn so realistically as to look like the work of the nineties-era San Francisco artist Coop.

  Most of Kurt’s artwork was never titled, but one particular piece from this period did garner a carefully lettered title. Drawn in black crayon on white twenty-pound bond, it shows a stick figure with a huge smiley face for a head, chopping off his left leg with an axe. The title reads: “Mr. Sunshine Commits Suicide.”

  Though Kurt complained of boredom, 1989 was one of the busiest periods for the band. By the end of 1988, Nirvana had only done two dozen shows during their entire two-year history, under various names, and using four different drummers (Burckhard, Foster, Crover, and Channing). But in 1989 alone, they would pl
ay 100 gigs. Kurt’s life shifted into the routine of a working musician.

  Their first tour in 1989 was a West Coast swing that brought them to San Francisco, where they saw the “Bleach Your Works” sign. They were touring at the time on the basis of a single, an unheard-of proposition considering the mathematics of their possible fan base; with fewer than a thousand singles sold in the entire world, the chance of a crowd in San Jose, for example, having heard of them and liking them enough to go see them was beyond absurd. Some of these first gigs attracted an audience of literally a half dozen people, usually musicians interested in Sub Pop, since the label was a bigger draw than the band. Dylan Carlson went along on the tour and remembered Kurt’s frustration. “It was kind of a fiasco,” he said. “There were lots of shows that got cancelled.” The plug was always pulled by club owners, since the band was willing to play for the bartender and doorman. The biggest crowd was when Nirvana opened for Living Color, a more mainstream rock band with a Top 40 hit, before 400 people. The audience hated them.

  If there was a low among lows on this first tour, it came in San Francisco. There the band opened for the Melvins at the Covered Wagon, a reunion that Kurt had long been looking forward to. But when he discovered that the Melvins weren’t a bigger draw in California than they had been in Grays Harbor, his faith was dashed. As on every other tour date, they struggled to find gas money, a floor to crash on, and food to eat. Tracy had followed the band down to California in her car, taking friends Amy Moon and Joe Preston. There were seven people in the band’s entourage, and among them they couldn’t afford a burrito. Someone on the street told them about a free soup kitchen. “It may have been run by the Hare Krishnas; Kurt was really creeped out by it,” Amy remembered. While everyone else ravenously scarfed down the free soup, Kurt just dejectedly stared at his bowl. “He wouldn’t eat it,” Amy said. “He finally just got up and left. It depressed him.” Hare Krishna food, crowds of ten people, begging for gas money, the Melvins as commercial failures, calling up to request your own single—these represented a level of degradation Kurt had not imagined or prepared for. That night, all seven people slept on a friend’s floor in a studio apartment.

  They returned to Seattle to play a more successful show on February 25 at the University of Washington. Billed as “Four Bands for Four Bucks,” it was Nirvana’s biggest crowd to date, an audience of about 600. They were playing with the Fluid, Skin Yard, and Girl Trouble, all of whom were better known, but it was during Nirvana’s set that the crowd went wild. Seattle audiences had begun to slam-dance in the late eighties: This entailed a kind of violent, mad twist, usually performed in front of the stage by a swirling mass of teenagers. When the crowd was large enough, waves of people would begin to slam off each other, as if a hurricane had developed inside the audience. Nirvana’s frenzied sound made the perfect soundtrack for slam-dancing, since they never slowed down, and rarely even paused between numbers. When the occasional fan would climb onstage and then jump back into the audience—called stage diving—the ritualistic dance was complete. Kurt calmly sang and played while dozens of kids jumped onstage, only to jump right off. At times there were so many kids jumping off the stage, it appeared Kurt was standing in the middle of some kind of airborne training facility for aspiring paratroopers. It was organized confusion, but this was exactly what Kurt had dreamed of: using his music to create chaos. Many other bands attracted a similar slam-dancing audience but few musicians were able to lackadaisically stand in the midst of these stage invasions the way Kurt was. He gave off the impression he was used to playing while the audience took over the stage; and in Seattle it had become so commonplace that he was.

  That day Kurt conducted a brief interview with the Daily, the University of Washington student newspaper, wherein he addressed the Northwest scene, calling it “the last wave of rock music,” and “the ultimate rehash.” Kurt told writer Phil West the band’s music had a “gloomy, vengeful element based on hatred.” This article was the first occasion of what would become one of Kurt’s favorite sports: spewing mythology to gullible journalists. “In Aberdeen, I hated my best friends with a passion, because they were idiots,” Kurt announced. “A lot of that hatred is still leaking through.” Kurt did give credit to Tracy for supporting him, but swore one day he’d “live off the band.” If not, he pledged, “I’ll just retire to Mexico or Yugoslavia with a few hundred dollars, grow potatoes, and learn the history of rock through back issues of Creem.”

  That spring the band added Jason Everman as a second guitarist, making them a four-piece for the first time. Kurt wanted Jason to cover guitar parts he felt weren’t getting justice as his songs became more complicated. Jason had been in earlier bands with Chad, and had a reputation as a hot guitar player. He also had ingratiated himself to the band by loaning Kurt $600, used to pay the recording bill for Bleach.It had no strings attached—Everman was, in fact, never repaid—but Kurt listed Jason on the Bleach album cover, even though he did not play at the sessions.

  With Jason in the lineup, Nirvana played Sub Pop’s “Lamefest” on June 9, at Seattle’s Moore Theater. It found them opening for Mud-honey and Tad, the two biggest Sub Pop groups, and it marked the official release of Bleach. Nirvana played first—their set was uneventful except for Kurt getting his guitar strings caught in his hair. The highlight of the night came when Kurt witnessed kids lining up to buy Bleach.

  By mid-1989 the Northwest music scene began to gain international attention, greased by some smart moves from Pavitt and Poneman, who were showing that their real brilliance wasn’t in running a label as much as it was marketing one. Their very concept of calling their annual showcase “Lamefest” was a stroke of genius: It immediately disarmed any possible criticism, while appealing to disaffected music fans who wore T-shirts that read “Loser” (the label sold as many of these as they did records). Despite the poor state of Sub Pop’s bank account, in early 1988 they’d sprung for plane tickets for a few British rock critics to take a holiday in Seattle. It was money well spent: Within weeks, Sub Pop bands were in the English music weeklies, and bands like Mudhoney were stars, at least in Britain, of the “grunge” movement. The term was meant to describe loud, distorted punk, but it was soon used to categorize virtually every band from the Northwest, even those like Nirvana, who were in truth more pop. Kurt hated the term, but the hype machine had begun in earnest, and the Northwest scene grew. Though there were few venues to play in Seattle, each show became an event, and the crowds became exponentially larger.

  Reflecting years later on why the scene exploded when it did, Kurt speculated in his journal: “Lots of flattering hype from multiple occupational English journalists... catapulted the Sub Pop regime into instant fame (just add water, or hype.)” Nirvana was usually mentioned in the early wave of 1989 press, but in most articles—like one in Melody Maker in March 1989 titled “Seattle: Rock City”—they were relegated to a tiny sidebar as also-rans. When Kurt read his first little bit of English press, he was probably most shocked to see Everett True’s speculation on what the band would be doing if they weren’t musicians: “You’re talking about four guys... who, if they weren’t doing this, would be working in a supermarket, or lumber yard, or fixing cars.” Two of the three professions listed were jobs Kurt’s father had held; the third was Buzz’s old job.

  Bleach had much to do with Nirvana moving out from under the shadow of their contemporaries. It was an inconsistent album, putting songs Kurt had written four years previously right next to the recent “About a Girl,” but it had flashes of inspiration. On sludgy numbers like “Sifting,” the chord progression was crude while the actual lyrics— when they could be heard—were smart and clever. When The Rocket reviewed the album, Gillian Gaar pointed out the different directions the band was going in: “Nirvana careens from one end of the thrash spectrum to the other, giving a nod towards garage grunge, alternative noise, and hell-raising metal without swearing allegiance to any of them.” In his journal around the time of the rel
ease, Kurt expressed similar sentiments: “My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They’re split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have, and sarcastic, hopeful, humorous rebuttals towards cliché, bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork.”

  Kurt accurately described Bleach as a mixture of sincere and cliché sentiment, but there was enough of each to get it airplay on divergent college radio stations. The band had used one of Tracy’s photos on the cover, printed as a reverse image in negative, and the look was appropriate for the extreme contrast between the dark songs and the pop tunes. Kurt’s dualism was key to the band’s success: There were enough different-sounding songs that stations could play several cuts without wearing the band out. The album built slowly, but eventually songs like “Blew,” “School,” “Floyd the Barber,” and “Love Buzz” became staples on college radio stations around the nation.

  The band still had a long way to go. The day after Lamefest, the group stepped in as a last-minute replacement for Cat Butt for a gig in Portland. Along for the ride was eighteen-year-old Rob Kader, a fan who was at every one of their shows, and Kader led the band in joyously singing the theme song from “The Brady Bunch” on the van ride down. But when they arrived at the gig, only twelve people had purchased tickets, all of them Cat Butt fans. Kurt made a last-minute decision to forgo a set list and announced to Kader: “We’re just going to ask you at the end of each song what you want to hear, and then we’ll play that.” As each tune wound down, Kurt would walk to the edge of the stage and point at Kader, who would shout out the next number. Other than Kader—who was in his glory—the rest of the audience gave the band a cold response, except on one Kiss song, “Do You Love Me?,” which Nirvana had recently recorded for a covers album, and which Kader wisely requested.