Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Sub Pop planned Nirvana’s first tour of Europe for that summer. Bleach had been released in the United Kingdom to glowing reviews. Kurt had never been overseas and was convinced the band would be bigger in Europe. He promised Tracy he’d come home with thousands of dollars, and that he’d send her postcards from every country he visited.

  Chapter 11

  CANDY, PUPPIES, LOVE

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  OCTOBER 1989–MAY 1990

  At a store near you:

  Nirvana. Flowers. Perfume. Candy. Puppies. Love.

  —From an imaginary ad for Nirvana’s second album.

  On October 20, 1989, Kurt arrived in London. He had three days off before the first show and would have liked to visit the British Museum, yet he felt ill so he settled for getting his photograph taken at the entrance. His bandmates explored the British pubs, but Kurt—who didn’t drink or smoke pot at the time because of his stomach problems—stayed in the hotel with bronchitis, a recurring condition. To try to cure himself, he would beat on his chest with his fist, thinking this violence would loosen his phlegm.

  The band was touring Europe with Tad, another Sub Pop band, who were fronted by Tad Doyle, a 300-pound former butcher from Idaho. Since the two bands shared a deep and heavy sound, and because of Tad’s almost freakish obesity, a clever U.K. promoter advertised one gig as “Heavier Than Heaven.” The play on words became the official title of the tour, used on posters and in newspaper adverts. It was an apt summation of the sonic assault both bands created: If the sheer volume did not subdue you, the dark themes of songs like Nirvana’s “Downer” and Tad’s “Cyanide Bath” surely would. They had planned to co-headline, switching off as openers, in a show of brotherhood.

  Kurt had expected fame and fortune in Europe: What he found instead was a low-budget tour that called for the band to play 37 shows in 42 days in nine different nations, a routing that was only possible if they drove all night. Their vehicle, rented by Sub Pop, was a shrunken ten-seat Fiat van, which had to carry their equipment, tour merchandise, three members of Nirvana, four members of Tad, and two crew members. Considering Tad’s girth, Krist’s height, and the fact that Tad’s drummer insisted on standing up in the van, the daily loading could take an hour and resembled something out of a Marx Brothers’ routine. And prior to departing, due to many gastrointestinal problems, Tad Doyle had to go through an almost ritualistic daily vomiting. This last malady was so regular it could have been written into the tour schedule: “10 a.m., load the van; 10:10, Tad vomits.”

  Kurt was bewitched by Tad’s internal workings. He was suffering his own stomach pains, but he vomited only bile or blood. Tad’s vomit, Kurt would declare, resembled a work of art. “Before Tad would get in the van, Kurt would hold this plastic basin,” Kurt Danielson of Tad remembered. “He would stand there patiently, holding this plastic tub, with a delightful glitter in this eyes. He’d look up at Tad expectantly, and finally Tad would puke, and it would just come out in a glorious, colorful flow, and Kurt would catch it all. No one else got to hold the tub; it was Kurt’s job and it was his delight.” Tad also frequently had bathroom emergencies which meant trips to the side of the road, much to the amazement of the English drivers who passed a 300-pound man relieving himself in the median strip. In some ways, Tad’s gastrointestinal system became Kurt’s muse that fall: He wrote the song “Imodium” about Doyle’s diarrhea medication.

  Elimination continued as a theme when the band explored Hamburg’s notorious red-light district and its porno supermarkets. Kurt was a bit of an amateur pornographer himself: Obsessed with the female derrière, he had photographed Tracy’s rear on several occasions. He found common porn sexist, but was enraptured by deviant porn the way an anthropologist sought out undiscovered tribes. He was particularly enthralled by magazines depicting what he called “shit love,” the sexual fetish more formally called scatophilia. “Kurt was fascinated by anything out of the ordinary: anything anomalous, psychologically strange or unusual, physically or socially strange,” observed Danielson. “If it involved bodily functions, so much the better. Instead of drinking or smoking pot, he’d get high watching the peculiar idiosyncrasies of humanity unfolding around him.” Kurt was too poor to purchase any porn, but Tad did buy one magazine featuring Ciccolina, a sex-industry star who gained international attention after being elected to the Italian Parliament. One pictorial showed Ciccolina getting out of a limousine while in the process of urinating in a man’s mouth. Each morning in the Fiat van, Tad would pull the magazine out and announce, “the library is open,” whereupon the coveted journal would be passed around.

  These adolescent antics were the only diversions to a schedule that was numbing and demoralizing. “We went to Paris, but didn’t have time to see the Eiffel Tower,” recalled Chad. The schedule, Kurt asserted, seemed designed to physically and psychologically break them. The hectic pace began to affect their shows: Sometimes they played exceptionally well (as in Norwich, where a rabid crowd called them back for encores), and sometimes it all fell apart (as in Berlin, where Kurt smashed his guitar six songs into the set). “They were either phenomenal or kind of atrocious,” recalled road manager Alex MacLeod. “But even when they were atrocious, there was an energy about them.” Most of the crowds were enthusiastic and familiar with their songs, and many shows were sold out—a first for Nirvana. But since the venues were small, neither band made much money.

  They did get a lot of press, and that, along with extensive airplay from influential DJ John Peel, propelled Bleach into the Top Ten of the U.K. independent label charts. While in Berlin, Nirvana got their first magazine cover, back in Seattle on The Rocket. Kurt told writer Nils Bernstein his current influences were “cutie bands” like Shonen Knife, the Pixies, and the Vaselines, his latest and greatest crush. He also addressed what he described as the prejudice he felt Seattle hipsters had against Nirvana: “I feel like we’ve been tagged as illiterate redneck cousin-fucking kids that have no idea what is going on at all. That’s completely untrue.”

  Though he was finally playing to adoring audiences, a terrible melancholy overtook Kurt. On the occasions when they could afford a hotel, he would frequently room with Kurt Danielson, and the two would stay up all night in the darkness of their room, staring at the ceiling, and talking about what led them to the hell of a Fiat van. Kurt told fantastic stories of his early life, of the Fat Man, of the Aberdeen jail, and of a strange religion Dylan Carlson had created, mixing Scientology and Satanism. But the most outlandish stories he told were of his own family: tales of Don and Wendy, of guns in the river, of his high-school buddies hitting on his mother. During one restless night, Kurt confessed he wished he was home. “I’ve wanted to go home since the first week of this tour,” he said, lying on his hotel bed. “I could, you know. I could go to my mom’s right now, if I wanted to—she’d let me. She’d wire me the money.” His voice cracked as if he were telling an elaborate lie. “She’d have me, you know.”

  A few days later in Rome, Kurt broke down onstage. Tad had played first and fired up the crowd with chants of “Fuck the Pope,” always popular with punk rockers in Italy. By the time Nirvana came on, the sold-out audience was riled up. But problems with the sound system infuriated Kurt, and after playing 40 minutes, he climbed a 30-foot stack of speakers and screamed to the crowd, “I’m going to kill myself!” No one in the room, not even Krist, Chad, or Poneman and Pavitt (who had come over for the gig), knew what to make of this. Nor did Kurt, who suddenly found himself with an audience shouting “jump” in broken English. He was still strumming his guitar—the rest of the band having stopped to watch—and seemed unsure of what to do next. “He would have broken his neck if he would have jumped, and at some point he realized that,” observed Danielson. Kurt eventually climbed down but his freak-out wasn’t over. Backstage, the promoter complained that a microphone had been broken. Road manager MacLeod was disputing this and demonstrating the microphone worked fine— they could ill afford to replace it.
Kurt grabbed the microphone, twirled it around like Roger Daltry, and smashed it to the floor. “There, now it’s broken,” he exclaimed as he walked away.

  He recovered enough to play another five shows in Europe, and the tour ended in London for another Lamefest. Kurt pulled out all the stops for this last date, jumping up and down on the stage until his knees were bloodied. But psychologically, the tour was over for Kurt after Rome. He didn’t have another guitar player to fire, so this time he essentially fired his label. Pavitt and Poneman had flown into Rome; Kurt couldn’t stop contrasting the conditions in the van with the jet-setting style these two traveled in. Though Nirvana would stay on Sub Pop for another year, in a progressively worsening marriage, Kurt had already emotionally jettisoned his label.

  By the time Nirvana returned to America in early December, Krist and Shelli had announced their engagement, with a wedding set for New Year’s Eve at their house in Tacoma. Kurt and Tracy attended, though the drive from Olympia to Tacoma was one of the worst 30 minutes of their relationship. Tracy couldn’t witness Shelli’s marriage without broaching the subject of commitment with Kurt, even while she knew it was a topic destined to pain her. During the European tour, Krist had phoned Shelli frequently; all Tracy got from Kurt was an occasional postcard, though one of those said “I love you” twenty times. But on the drive to Tacoma the only way he’d address marriage was to joke about her marrying someone else. “I’d still like to have sex with you, because I really like it,” he told her, thinking he was giving her a compliment. At the wedding, Kurt spent most of the evening on the roof by himself, uncharacteristically drunk, welcoming in the new year.

  That Christmas, Kurt and Tracy had celebrated almost three years of togetherness. Though he was hard-pressed to afford it, he had given her The Art of Rock, a $100 coffee-table book, as a present. Outwardly they looked like a tight couple, but something had shifted within Kurt, and both he and Tracy knew it. When he’d return from tours, he took longer to warm up to her, and the contrast between their away-time and together-time was testing her patience. She felt she was losing him to the rest of the world.

  And in a way, she was. As things continued to improve for Nirvana, the band increasingly provided him with the self-esteem and financial support that previously had come from her. By the beginning of 1990, Kurt had band-related business that needed to be done every day, and Tracy knew not to test where she ranked in comparison. But in truth, she also was moving away from him. She was a level-headed girl, and Kurt just kept getting weirder and weirder. She wondered where it might all end. That February he wrote an entry in his journal, half-fantasy and half-reality, that would have concerned any lover: “I am a male age 23 and I’m lactating. My breasts have never been so sore, not even after receiving titty twisters from bully schoolmates. I haven’t masturbated in months because I’ve lost my imagination. I close my eyes and I see my father, little girls, German Shepherds, TV news commentators, but no voluptuous pouty-lipped naked female sex kittens wincing in ecstasy. I see lizards and flipper babies.” This, and other entries like it, made her worry about his mental state.

  Kurt had never slept well, grinding his teeth at night and complaining of recurrent nightmares. “Ever since he could remember, he had dreams about people trying to kill him,” Tracy recalled. “In the dreams, he’d be trying to fight people off with a baseball bat, or people with knives coming after him, or vampires.” When he awoke, sometimes with tears in his eyes, Tracy would comfort him the way a mother would soothe a small boy, holding him in her arms and stroking his hair. She would always be there for him, she told him; she was never going to leave. Yet he’d lie there looking at the ceiling, soaked with sweat. “He had those dreams all the time.” She worried about how he calmed himself when he was on tour.

  Outwardly, during the day, he looked fine, never talking about bad dreams, instead giving the appearance of someone who dreamt of only the band. Nirvana began the year with a brief studio session where they recorded the song “Sappy.” As early as the European tour, they were already talking about a new album by summer. For the first time in Kurt’s career, he wasn’t the solitary force pushing for a new release— now Sub Pop, the press, college radio, and even a growing cadre of fans were asking him for new music. He was still writing at a prodigious rate, and the songs kept getting better. Nikki McClure had moved into the apartment next to his, and she used to hear him through the walls, constantly playing his guitar. One afternoon that winter, she overheard a beautiful melody coming through the heat vent; he kept starting and stopping the song, as if he were constructing it on the spot. That evening she tuned the radio to KAOS and heard Kurt playing the song he’d been rehearsing that day, live on the air.

  On January 19, 1990, Nirvana played yet another Olympia show that would go down in the history books, though this one for different reasons from the others. The show, at a grange hall outside of town, would pair Nirvana with the Melvins and Beat Happening. As a costume, Kurt used stage blood to draw needle marks on his arms. He wasn’t certain what a junkie looked like, so he overdrew the marks, which gave him a ghoulish appearance, more like a zombie from an Ed Wood film than a drug addict. “He was wearing short sleeves, and both arms from the wrists to the sleeves had these bruises,” observed Garth Reeves. “It looked like he had a disease.” Nonetheless, Kurt’s attempt at a joke would have unintended consequences: His parody was lost on many in the crowd, and rumors began to circulate that he was indeed a junkie. Still, the show represented a watershed of sorts: Though the Melvins headlined, Nirvana were now more popular than their mentors. The Melvins ended their set with a dynamic cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Kurt was in the front row, raising his fist with the rest of the audience, yet he couldn’t help but notice that a third of the crowd had left after Nirvana’s set.

  Something even more shocking happened the next night when the Melvins and Nirvana played in Tacoma at a hall called Legends. The concert was completely sold out and earned Nirvana a payday of $500, one of their biggest checks to date. There were a hundred people stage diving, creating chaos. One of the most obnoxious was Matt Lukin of Mudhoney, who used his backstage pass to walk onstage, then dive headfirst into the audience. Nirvana’s set had to be stopped three times to break up fights between Lukin and the bouncers. “He’s our friend,” Kurt kept telling the bouncers, sounding both concerned and embarrassed. By the end of Nirvana’s performance, which included part of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” there were five security guards standing in front of the band. That didn’t seem odd to Kurt, but what positively amazed him was seeing Mark Arm of Mudhoney, standing stage right, bopping his head back and forth during all of Nirvana’s set.

  Mark Arm, whose real name was Mark McLaughlin, was certifiably the tastemaker for Seattle punk rock. While Pavitt and Poneman had craftily capitalized on grunge, Arm, with his band Mudhoney and his previous group Green River, had virtually invented the musical style, and had even come up with the term “grunge,” writing in a Seattle fanzine in the early eighties. Arm was bright, sarcastic, talented, notorious for his partying, and exuded the kind of confidence that made people think he was destined for stardom. In short, he was everything an insecure kid from Aberdeen imagined he could never be. For Arm to appear at your concert, and to be seen enjoying himself, was to have Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis come to your wedding and dance all night. Kurt’s adoration of Arm was obvious to everyone, but it had to be most obvious to Buzz Osborne, who was watching his former charge move on.

  Kurt had attempted to foster a friendship with Arm, with limited success. When in Seattle, he’d frequently stop by Arm’s apartment, where he was intimidated by Arm’s collection of punk rock singles— the ultimate status symbol in their circle. “He obviously idolized Mark,” remembered Carrie Montgomery, Arm’s girlfriend. “Mark wasn’t all that impressed by it, of course.” At the time, Mudhoney remained Sub Pop’s priority and the kings of the Northwest scene. A number of major record labels
were interested in them, but they pledged to stick with Sub Pop, owing to Arm’s friendship with Pavitt.

  But even for Mudhoney, this friendship was tested during 1990, when Sub Pop’s financial problems threatened to sink the label and every band on it. Though records by Tad, Nirvana, and Mudhoney had been consistent sellers, their sales were nowhere near the level required to fund the large operation Pavitt and Poneman had built. “Sub Pop actually asked to borrow half of our first European advance,” Mudhoney’s Steve Turner remembered. The label was so broke they offered bands stock in lieu of royalties owed. “We said, ‘What’s the point of that?’ ” recalled Matt Lukin. “You’re going to be bankrupt in two weeks.” It was particularly hard for Lukin to watch how poorly Sub Pop treated his friends in Nirvana. “I saw how long Bruce had been promising to put out another record from them, and he kept putting them off,” Lukin recalled. “They got put on the back burner.”

  The money Kurt had made from touring was quickly spent. That spring he started applying for jobs again, circling ads in the Daily Olympian for such occupations as cleaning apartments and hosing down dog kennels at a vet’s; he applied for this last position but was turned down. He and Krist decided to start their own janitorial business they would call “Pine Tree Janitorial.” It was one of Kurt’s many get-rich-quick schemes, and he went so far as to draw up a flyer for their new business with illustrations of Kurt and Krist pushing brooms. The ad touted, “we purposely limit our number of commercial offices in order to personally clean while taking our time.” Despite putting flyers up all over Olympia, no client ever employed them.