Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  On the tour, Kurt rarely walked by a fire extinguisher he didn’t fire off. On earlier tours, his destructive tendencies had been fueled by frustration with his playing, problems with sound, or fights with his band-mates. But destruction during this brief flash in his life was driven by joyous exuberance. “The most exciting time for a band is right before they become really popular,” Kurt would later tell Michael Azerrad. In Nirvana’s case, this was undoubtedly August 1991.

  When the tour hit Rotterdam on the first of September, it was almost with a nostalgic wistfulness that Kurt approached the last show. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d had on two weeks earlier—it was a bootlegged Sonic Youth shirt—which had gone unwashed, as had his jeans, the only pair of pants he owned. His luggage consisted of a tiny bag containing only a copy of William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” which he had found in a London bookstall. Perhaps inspired by his bedtime reading, the Rotterdam show turned into something out of a Burroughs novel after Kurt discovered some costumes backstage. “Kurt and Ian Dickson were drinking vodka in copious amounts,” recalled MacLeod. “They stole these doctor’s jackets and face masks, and they were storming around the place, bothering people. People would walk into the dressing room and get doused with orange juice and wine. At one point, Ian was wheeling Kurt around in a hospital bed. They’d be two floors up in this atrium pouring orange juice on these security guards and then running.” It was MacLeod’s job to control these antics, but he just threw up his hands: “We were 22 or 23 years old and in a situation that none of us ever imagined being in.”

  In Rotterdam Kurt again encountered Courtney at a club. She was quick to ask for a ride back to England in the Nirvana van. Her coy dance with Kurt continued, and on the ferry over, as the band watched Terminator, Courtney flirted with Dave in an effort to get a rise from Kurt. When that failed, she left her purse with her passport in Nirvana’s van, and had to call the next day to retrieve it. Courtney found herself disappointed when Dickson and MacLeod returned the bag, rather than Kurt. He was playing coy too.

  On September 3 Nirvana recorded another radio show for John Peel and then went out to celebrate their final night in England. Kurt insisted they find the drug Ecstasy, which he took for the first time. The next day he flew back to Olympia, ending one of the most joyous tours he would ever undertake. Still without a place to live, he fell asleep that night curled up in the backseat of his Valiant.

  He returned to an Olympia that was much changed in the three weeks that he’d been gone, at least for him. While Nirvana was playing huge festivals in Europe, Olympia was staging its own festival, the 50-act International Pop Underground. Nirvana had originally been scheduled to play the IPU, but after their major label deal they were no longer an indie act, and Kurt’s absence at the biggest ball Olympia ever staged was notable. It marked the end of his relationship with the Calvinists, and the end of his time living in a city he loved more than any other, yet one he never felt welcome in.

  But in a way, he was ready to leave. Just as Kurt had needed to break free of the orbit of Buzz, he had hit a developmental stage where he had to leave Olympia, Calvin, and Tobi. It wasn’t an easy transition, because he had believed in the Calvinist indie ideals and they had served him when he needed an ideology to break out of Aberdeen. “Punk rock is freedom,” he had learned, a line he would continue to repeat to any journalist who would listen. But he always knew that punk rock was a different freedom for kids who had grown up privileged. To him, punk rock was a class struggle, but that was always secondary to the struggle to pay the rent, or find a place to sleep other than in the backseat of a car. Music was more than just a fad for Kurt—it had become his only career option.

  Before he left Olympia, Kurt sat down and wrote a final letter to Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines, thanking him for playing with Nirvana at Reading. In the letter, he demonstrated he had already begun emotionally departing Olympia. Surprisingly, he criticized KAOS, the much-loved radio station that had been one of his first public forums: “I’ve realized that...DJs have bloody awful taste in music. Oh, yes, and to prove my point, right now they’re playing a Nirvana song from an old demo.”

  He wrote of the recent conflict with Iraq: “We won the war. Patriotic hypocrisy is in full effect. We have the privilege of purchasing Desert Storm trading cards, flags, bumper stickers, and many video versions of our triumphant victory. When I walk down the street I feel like I’m at a Nuremberg rally. Hey, maybe [we] can tour together in the States and burn American flags on stage?”

  He ended the letter with yet another description of his circumstances, which, if Kurt had mailed the letter—as usual, he never put it in the post—probably would have shocked Kelly and anyone else who saw Kurt onstage in Reading, playing to 70,000 adoring fans. “I got evicted from my apartment. I’m living in my car so I have no address, but here’s Krist’s phone number for messages. Your pal, Kurdt.” That same week, the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” single went on sale in record shops.

  Chapter 15

  EVERY TIME I SWALLOWED

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  SEPTEMBER 1991–OCTOBER 1991

  Every time I swallowed a piece of food, I would experience an excruciating, burning, nauseous pain in the upper part of my stomach lining.

  —An inventory of Kurt’s drug and stomach problems from his journal.

  The second Friday of September—a Friday the thirteenth—was one of the most extraordinary days of Kurt’s life. It was a day that would encompass two food fights, a fire extinguisher duel, and the destruction of gold record awards in a microwave oven. All of this divine chaos was in celebration of the release of Nevermind in Seattle.

  The day began with a series of radio interviews on Seattle’s biggest rock stations. Kurt sat still for the first one on KXRX, but barely said a word and started throwing pizza around the control room. Earlier in the week he had been willing to talk with any interested journalist. “Even if it was a writer they didn’t like,” recounted publicist Lisa Glatfelter-Bell, “Kurt would say, ‘That guy’s a prick, but he loves the record, so we’ll give him ten minutes.’ ” His attitude changed after just a few phone interviews. He tired of trying to explain himself, and each progressive interview turned into a game to see what new fiction he could fabricate. When he talked with Patrick MacDonald of the Seattle Times, he claimed to have purchased an inflatable love-doll, cut off the hands and feet, and intended to wear it onstage. Yet, by the end of the week, even deceiving journalists bored him. Where he had been joyous in Europe two weeks previously, being back in America—and promoting the album—seemed to tire him. The exuberance of Rotterdam had quickly given way to reticence and resignation. Kurt stayed in the car during the next two interviews, leaving Krist and Dave to chat up the DJs.

  At six o’clock, the band had their much anticipated invitation-only record release at the Re-bar, an event Kurt had been waiting his whole life for (Bleach had no such celebration). The invitations read, “Nevermind Triskaidekaphobia, here’s Nirvana.” The phobia referred to a fear of Friday the thirteenth, but what was truly scary was how packed the club was with musicians, music journalists, and the power brokers of the scene.

  It was Kurt’s chance to bask in glory, having finally conquered Seattle, yet he seemed uncomfortable with the attention. On this day, and during many to follow, he gave the impression that he’d rather be anywhere than promoting his record. As a boy who had grown up the center of attention in his family, only to lose that distinction in adolescence, he responded with suspicion to his change of fortune. He sat in a photo booth at the party, physically present, but hidden from view by a cloth curtain.

  The band had smuggled in a half gallon of Jim Beam, a violation of Washington liquor law. But before any liquor inspector could bust them, mayhem erupted, when Kurt started throwing ranch dressing at Krist, and a food fight ensued. A bouncer grabbed the offenders and threw them out, unaware he’d ejected the very three men the party was being held for. Before DGC’s Susi
e Tennant was able to straighten matters out, Krist had to be dragged away from a confrontation with the bouncer. “We were laughing,” Krist recalled, “saying, ‘Oh my God, we just got kicked out of our own record release party!’ ” For a time, the band stood in the alley behind the club and talked to their friends through a window. The party was still raging inside, and most of the attendees never noticed the guests of honor had been banished.

  The celebration resumed at the loft of a friend, until Kurt shot off a fire extinguisher and the place had to be evacuated. They then moved to Susie Tennant’s house, where the destruction continued until dawn. Susie had a gold record by the band Nelson on her wall; Kurt took the plaque down, calling it “an affront to humankind,” rubbed lipstick on it, and stuck it in a microwave on defrost. The night ended with Kurt trying on one of Susie’s dresses, applying makeup, and walking around in drag. “Kurt made a great-looking woman,” Susie recalled. “I had this one dress, my Holly Hobby dress, and Kurt looked better in it than I did, better than anyone I’d ever seen.”

  Kurt spent that night at Susie’s, as did many of the revelers. He fell asleep under a Patti Smith poster wearing the dress. When he arose the next morning, he announced that he and Dylan planned to spend the day shooting holes in a rump roast. “After we shoot it all to hell, we’re going to eat it,” he said. He departed, asking for directions to a supermarket.

  Two days later, Nirvana held an “in-store” at Beehive Records. DGC expected about 50 patrons, but when over 200 kids were lined up by two in the afternoon—for an event scheduled to start at seven—it began to dawn on them that perhaps the band’s popularity was greater than first thought. Kurt had decided that rather than simply sign albums and shake people’s hands—the usual business of an in-store—Nirvana would play. When he saw the line at the store that afternoon, it marked the first time he was heard to utter the words “holy shit” in response to his popularity. The band retreated to the Blue Moon Tavern and began drinking, but when they looked out the window and saw dozens of fans looking in, they felt like they were in the movie A Hard Day’s Night. When the show began, Beehive was so crowded that kids were standing on racks of albums and sawhorses had to be lined up in front of the store’s glass windows to protect them. Nirvana played a 45-minute set—performing on the store floor—until the crowd began smashing into the band like the pep rally in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.

  Kurt was bewildered by just how big a deal it had all become. Looking into the crowd, he saw half of the Seattle music scene and dozens of his friends. It was particularly unnerving for him to see two of his ex-girlfriends—Tobi and Tracy—there, bopping away to the songs. Even these intimates were now part of an audience he felt pressure to serve. The store was selling the first copies of Nevermind the public had a chance at, and they quickly sold out. “People were ripping posters off the wall,” remembered store manager Jamie Brown, “just so they’d have a piece of paper for Kurt to autograph.” Kurt kept shaking his head in amazement.

  Kurt retreated to the parking lot for a smoke and some downtime. But there, the day became even more freakish when he saw two of his old Montesano schoolmates, Scott Cokely and Rick Miller, holding copies of “Sliver.” Though Kurt signed hundreds of autographs that day, none made him feel more surreal than putting his signature on a single about his grandparents for two guys from the town his grandparents lived in. They talked about their mutual friends from the harbor, but the conversation made Kurt wistful—Cokely and Miller were a reminder of a past Kurt thought he had left behind. “Do you get back to the harbor much?” Cokely asked. “Not very often,” Kurt replied. Both Cokely and Miller were confused when they looked at their singles and noticed Kurt had signed them “Kurdt.”

  Kurt later cited this exchange as one of the first moments he realized he was famous. Yet rather than comfort him, this realization set off something just short of a panic. Though he had always wanted to be famous—and back when he was in school in Monte, he had promised his classmates one day he would be—the actual culmination of his dreams deeply unnerved him. Krist would recall this particular show—a free show in a record store a week before the album’s official release date—as a turning point in Kurt. “Things started to happen after that,” Krist said. “We weren’t the same old band. Kurt, he just kind of withdrew. There was a lot of personal stuff that was going on. It got complicated. It was more than we bargained for.”

  It wasn’t that the Beehive audience was more intrusive than most; in fact, as the band discovered when their tour began, the Seattle crowd was subdued, compared to what they encountered elsewhere. The tour had been booked before the success of the record, so most of the venues were tiny, leading to hundreds, if not thousands, of fans coveting tickets they couldn’t get. Each show was a circus. When they rolled into Boston on September 22, Kurt was looking forward to seeing the Melvins on this rare night off. Yet when he tried to talk his way into the club, the doorman hadn’t heard of Nirvana. Mary Lou Lord, a Boston singer-songwriter who was standing by the door, chirped in to say she’d heard of Nirvana and they were playing the next night. This failed to sway the doorman, and Kurt finally paid the cover.

  Once inside, Kurt turned his attention to Lord, rather than his old friends. When Lord said she was a musician who played the subway platform, he asked her favorite bands, and she listed the Pastels, the Vaselines, Daniel Johnston, and Teenage Fanclub. “Bullshit,” replied Kurt. “Those are my favorite bands, in order!” He forced her to name songs by each artist to prove she wasn’t jesting. They talked for hours, and Lord gave him a ride on her bicycle’s handlebars. They ended up talking all night, and the next day Kurt went to her apartment, where he saw a picture of Lester Bangs hanging on the wall. He asked Lord to do a song, and when she performed two tunes from the yet-to-be-released Nevermind, he felt like he’d been bewitched by this rosy-cheeked girl from Salem, Mass.

  As they walked around Boston, the stories of his life sprang forth from him in a torrent. He told Lord about his father kicking a dog once, about how miserable he was growing up in his family, and about Tobi. If one of the cardinal rules of flirting was never to talk about your last girlfriend with your potential next, Kurt broke this rule. He told Lord that Tobi was “awesome,” but that she was “a real heartbreaker.” He admitted he wasn’t over her.

  Kurt also told Lord how enraptured he had become with an Eastern religion called Jainism. He had seen a documentary on late-night television that enchanted him because the official Jain flag featured an ancient version of the swastika on it. He had since read everything he could find on the Jains, who worshipped animals as holy. “He told me,” Lord recalled, “that they had hospitals for pigeons. He said he wanted to join them. He planned to have this big career, and that when everything was all done, he was going to go off and join the Jains.” One of the concepts of Jainism Kurt was most taken with was their vision of the afterlife. Jainism preached of a universe that was a series of heavens and hells layered together. “Every day,” Kurt told Lord, “we all pass through heaven, and we all pass through hell.”

  As they walked through Boston’s Back Bay, Kurt couldn’t keep up with Lord. “He was like an old man,” she observed. “He was only 24, but there was a weariness about him far beyond his years.” He told Lord that certain drugs helped temper his stomach pain. She didn’t do drugs, and didn’t inquire further, but a half hour later he revisited the topic and asked her if she’d ever tried heroin. “I don’t even want to hear you talking about that kind of shit,” she said, cutting off the conversation.

  That night they went to the Axis, where Nirvana shared a bill with the Smashing Pumpkins. As Kurt and Lord approached the club, he grabbed her guitar and held her hand. “I’m sure people in line were thinking, ‘That’s Kurt with the dorky subway girl,’ ” Lord said. “I’d been there for years and everybody knew me, and they all probably thought I was awful. But then here I was, walking down this street, holding hands with him.”

  The n
ext day, September 24, Nevermind officially went on sale. An MTV crew filmed a brief news segment of Krist playing Twister in his underwear covered with Crisco shortening. Kurt blew off most of the interviews and promotions DGC had set up and instead spent the day with Lord. When DGC’s Mark Kates took Novoselic and Grohl to Newbury Comics, Boston’s hippest record store, they found a long line. “It was amazing,” Kates recalled. “There were like a thousand kids trying to buy this record.”

  It took two weeks for Nevermind to register in the Billboard Top 200, but when it did chart, the album entered at No. 144. By the second week it rose to No. 109; by the third week it was at No. 65; and after four weeks, on the second of November, it was at No. 35, with a bullet. Few bands have had such a quick ascendancy to the Top 40 with their debuts. Nevermind would have registered even higher if DGC had been more prepared—due to their modest expectations, the label had initially pressed only 46,251 copies. For several weeks, the record was sold out.