Heavier Than Heaven

by Charles R. Cross

  Usually a quick rise on the charts is attributable to a well-orchestrated promotional effort, backed by marketing muscle, yet Nevermind achieved its early success without such grease. During its first few weeks, the record had little help from radio except in a few selected cities. When DGC’s promotion staff tried to convince programmers to play “Teen Spirit,” they initially met with resistance. “People at rock radio, even in Seattle, told me, ‘We can’t play this. I can’t understand what the guy is saying,’ ” recalled DGC’s Susie Tennant. Most stations that added the single slated it late at night, thinking it “too aggressive” to put on during the day.

  But radio programmers took notice of the number of listeners who phoned in requests. When Seattle’s KNDD did research on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the song received the highest positive response the polling company had ever registered. “When a song like that is being researched,” observed KNDD’s Marco Collins, “we’re talking about playing this track through a phone line, and people only hearing a fifteen-second clip. Try to imagine what it would be like to hear ‘Teen Spirit’ for the first time through the phone.”

  Within MTV, the video caused a stir when it was considered in early September. Amy Finnerty, a 22-year-old programmer, felt so strongly about the video, she announced that if the channel wouldn’t play the clip, then MTV wasn’t the kind of place she wanted to work. After some heated debate, the video was added to the specialty show “120 Minutes.” It went into regular rotation in November as one of the channel’s first “Buzz Bin” videos.

  The first time Kurt saw himself on television was in New York City a few days after the Boston shows. He was staying in the Roger Smith Hotel, and Mary Lou Lord was in his room. When the video came on “120 Minutes,” Kurt phoned his mother. “There’s me,” he gleefully said. “There’s me again,” he repeated when ten seconds later he reappeared. “And there’s me again.” He kept playfully announcing this every time he saw himself on the television, as if his presence were a surprise.

  That afternoon Nirvana played a rare acoustic in-store at Tower Records. During the short set, Kurt pulled Oreos from a bag of groceries one fan was carrying, and washed those down with milk he also pilfered from the sack. That same night, they played a sold-out show at the Marquee Club, which was followed by a party at the home of MTV’s Amy Finnerty. Word of the celebration leaked out to the club audience, many of whom showed up uninvited. Kurt snuck out of the party and went with Finnerty and Lord to a bar across the street. “This place has the best jukebox I’ve ever seen,” Kurt declared, though the machine had only disco tunes. For one of the few times in his entire life, perhaps in honor of the official release of Nevermind, Kurt stood up and danced.

  After New York the tour accelerated, and so did Nirvana’s fame. As both the single and video of “Teen Spirit” vaulted up the charts, every show was sold out and signs of a greater mania appeared. Kurt stayed in touch with Lord by phone and described her to soundman Craig Montgomery as his “girlfriend.” Two weeks after New York she came to Ohio, only to discover Kurt in a meltdown. He was sitting on a pool table, kicking his legs and cursing. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Everything,” he replied. “Nobody can get the fucking sound right. This fucking sucks. I’ve been doing this for so fucking long. And the show fucking sucked. I couldn’t hear myself at all.” Used to busking on the subway for quarters, she told him to enjoy his success, but she was unable to cheer him. “I’m tired of this fucking shit, these fucking rat-holes,” he announced. What she didn’t know was that Kurt was suffering from drug withdrawal. It was a dirty secret he hadn’t told Lord or his bandmates. She followed the tour for two more dates, but in Detroit, on the morning of October 12, she left to return to her job at a record store in Boston. Kurt and the band headed for Chicago and a show at the Metro.

  On that same morning of October 12 Courtney Love boarded a plane in Los Angeles and flew to Chicago to visit Billy Corgan. Love and Corgan had a tempestuous relationship—she was more enthralled by the love letters he wrote than his actual presence. When she arrived at his apartment, she found him unexpectedly back with another girlfriend. A ruckus ensued and Courtney fled amidst a hail of shoes.

  She spent her last $10 on a cab to the Metro, where she was surprised to find Nirvana on the bill. After talking her way past the doorman, she called Corgan from a pay phone: In later tellings, she’d claim the call was to make sure she was completely broken off with Billy before becoming romantically involved with Kurt. Corgan told her he couldn’t see her, and she slammed down the phone.

  All the signs of Courtney and Kurt’s sexual attraction had been present in earlier meetings, just not the opportunity. She watched the final fifteen minutes of Nirvana’s set, which basically involved Kurt smashing the drum kit, all the time wondering what made this boy so angry. He was a mystery to her, and Courtney was attracted by the unexplained. She was not the only woman to fall under this spell. As Carrie Montgomery observed: “Kurt made women want to nurture and protect him. He was a paradox in that way, because he also could be brutally and intensely strong; yet at the same time he could appear fragile and delicate.”

  After the show she made her way to a backstage party, where she beelined for Kurt: “I watched her walk across the room and sit on his lap,” recalled manager Danny Goldberg. Kurt was happy to see her, and particularly happy when she asked to stay at his hotel. If Kurt was bad about confessing past romantic entanglements, Courtney was his equal in this department, and she told him the whole sorry tale of the fight with Corgan. As they conversed, Kurt was reminded of the “coolest girl in the world” description he had bestowed on her after that long talk in Los Angeles five months before. They left the club together and walked along Lake Michigan, eventually ending up at the Days Inn.

  The sex, as Kurt later described it to his friends, was amazing. He told Courtney he could count his previous lovers on one hand. She was as shocked by this fact as anything else he said; she came from a Sunset Strip world where sex was as casually offered as a ride home from a gig. Courtney was also surprised to see that Kurt wore zebra-striped briefs for underwear. “You have got to get boxers,” she told him.

  But their bond, even in that post-intercourse languor, was considerably more than sexual—it was an emotional connection, one that none of their friends or bandmates understood. Ironically, Kurt’s confidantes thought he was slumming to become involved with her; Court-ney’s friends felt the same about her dating him. Their individual stories had a familiar feel, and when Courtney described a childhood that included neglect, being shuttled between divorced parents, and struggles in school, it was a terrain Kurt knew. She was the first woman he’d ever met that when he told her the stories of his youth—mythologized at this point beyond simple exaggeration—she responded by saying, “I can top that.” It became almost a game of “Who had the worst childhood?” but in their union Kurt felt a normalcy about his life.

  Like anyone, what Kurt wanted most in a partner was unconditional love; but that night in the Days Inn he discovered something else in Courtney that had eluded him in other relationships—understanding. He felt Courtney intrinsically knew the smell of the shit he’d crawled through. Mary Lou Lord had liked the Vaselines, but she had never lived in a cardboard box. Tracy, for all her unwavering love of Kurt, had always been accepted by her family, even when she did something as crazy as date a punk rocker from Aberdeen. Kurt had tried everything to make Tobi love him, but their paths had been so different he couldn’t even make her understand his nightmares, much less the reason he did drugs. But Courtney knew the gelatinous flavor of surplus government cheese given out with food stamps; she knew what it was like to tour in a van and struggle for gas money; and during her time working as a stripper, at “Jumbo’s Clown Room,” she had come to understand degradation of a sort not many people taste. Both of them later joked that their bonding was over narcotics—and it would certainly include drugs—but the initial attraction was something far deeper than a
shared desire to escape: It was, instead, the very fact that Courtney Love, like Kurt Cobain, had something to escape from.

  They parted that next morning, Kurt continuing on the tour, and Courtney heading back to Los Angeles. But over the next week, they exchanged faxes and phone calls, and were soon chatting every day. Despite Nirvana’s success, Kurt was not happy on the road, and bitched constantly about the state of their van, the “rat-hole” clubs, and a new complaint—the frat boys who were now coming to their shows after seeing the band’s video on MTV. Some in the Nirvana camp initially greeted Courtney’s involvement with Kurt enthusiastically—at least he had someone to talk to (he was communicating with Novoselic and Grohl less and less).

  In Dallas, on October 19, Kurt went into meltdown mode again, this time onstage. The show was doomed from the start because it was oversold and the audience spilled onto the stage. Frustrated, Kurt destroyed a monitor console by whacking his guitar against it. When a few minutes later he dived into the crowd, a bouncer named Turner Van Blarcum attempted to help him back onstage, which Kurt mistakenly read as an aggressive act. He responded by smashing the butt end of his guitar on Van Blarcum’s head, drawing blood. It was a blow that might have killed a smaller man, but it only stunned Van Blarcum, who punched Kurt in the head, and kicked him as the singer fled. The audience began to riot. Kurt hid upstairs in a closet until promoter Jeff Liles finally convinced him Van Blarcum had gone to the hospital and could do him no harm. “I know he had drunk a ton of cough syrup that night,” Liles explained. Kurt finally reappeared and finished the set.

  But the action was far from over. After the show, Liles managed to get the band into a waiting cab, which sped off only to come right back: No one in the band knew what hotel they were in. Just as the cab returned, so did Van Blarcum—complete with a bloody bandage on his head. He shattered the taxi windows with his fist as the driver frantically tried to pull away. The cab escaped, but as they drove off—with no destination still—the members of Nirvana sat in the backseat covered with broken glass. This was not an isolated event—the band’s road manager soon found himself paying out thousands of dollars every week to cover damages caused by the band.

  A week later Kurt was reunited with Courtney at a pro-choice benefit in Los Angeles. Backstage they seemed very much together, and many remarked how they made the perfect rock ’n’ roll couple. Yet later in the evening, behind closed doors, their relationship took a more destructive bent. For the first time, Kurt brought up the idea of doing heroin. Courtney paused for a moment, but then agreed. They scored dope, went to his hotel, the Beverly Garland, prepared the drugs, and he injected her—Courtney couldn’t stand to handle a needle herself, so Kurt, the former needle-phobe, handled things for himself and her. After getting high they went out walking and came upon a dead bird. Kurt pulled three feathers off the animal and passed one to Courtney, holding the two others in his hand. “This is for you, this is for me,” he said. And then holding the third feather in his hand he added, “and this is for our baby we’re gonna have.” She laughed and later remembered this as the point when she first fell in love with him.

  But Kurt already had another mistress. By the fall of 1991 heroin was no longer a recreational weekend escape for him and was instead part of an ongoing daily addiction. He had “decided” several months before he met Courtney to become a “junkie,” as he wrote in his journal. Later, Kurt sat down and, for the sake of a treatment program he was enrolled in, detailed his entire drug history. It begins:

  When I got back from our second European tour with Sonic Youth, I decided to use heroine on a daily basis because of an ongoing stomach ailment that I had been suffering from for the past five years, [and that] had literally taken me to the point of wanting to kill myself. For five years, every single day of my life, every time I swallowed a piece of food, I would experience an excruciating, burning, nauseous pain in the upper part of my stomach lining. The pain became even more severe on tour, due to lack of a proper and regimented eating schedule and diet. Since the beginning of this disorder, I’ve had ten upper and lower gastrointestinal procedures, which found an enflamed irritation in the same place. I consulted 15 different doctors, and tried about 50 different types of ulcer medication. The only thing I found that worked were heavy opiates. There were many times that I found myself literally incapacitated, in bed for weeks, vomiting and starving. So I decided, if I feel like a junkie as it is, I may as well be one.

  What was extraordinary about Kurt’s recounting of his journey into addiction was his consciousness regarding the choices involved. He wrote of his addiction as a “decision,” one undertaken because of the suicidal thoughts he had after chronic stomach pain. His timing put the start of his full-fledged addiction at the beginning of September 1991, the month of the release of Nevermind.

  Courtney had struggled with drug addiction herself during the summer of 1989, when heroin had been the rage in the Los Angeles rock scene: She had used 12-Step groups and Buddhist chanting to help her break her habit. But her sobriety was tenuous by October 1991, the main reason friends like Jennifer Finch warned her to stay away from Kurt. Love’s drug issues were different from Kurt’s—to her, heroin was a social drug, and the very fact that she couldn’t stand to inject herself was a barrier to daily abuse. But because Courtney had previously struggled with the drug, many in the rock community gossiped that she had gotten him hooked on drugs, when in many ways the opposite was true. “People blame Courtney, that Courtney turned him on to heroin, but that’s not true,” asserted Krist. “He did it before he even met Courtney. Courtney did not get Kurt on drugs.”

  After their first night doing heroin together, he came by the next evening and wanted to get high again. “I had a rule about not doing drugs two nights in a row,” Courtney recalled, “that that was bad. And I said, ‘No, that’s not going to happen.’ So he left.”

  The third night, Kurt phoned her, sobbing, and asked if she could come over. When Courtney arrived at the hotel, she found him shaking uncontrollably, having a breakdown. “I had to put him in the bath,” she remembered. “He was about to get famous, and it freaked him out. And he was really thin and skinny. And I had to sort of pick him up with my arms because he collapsed. He wasn’t on drugs. But he went back and pouted because I wouldn’t do heroin with him.” Courtney did heroin with him again that night. “I’m not saying it was his fault, but I am saying that there was a choice I made. I thought, ‘I’ll go back to this, I guess.’ ”

  As Nirvana continued with the Nevermind tour, record sales increased exponentially. Each morning, as their tour progressed up the West Coast, they would hear a new report of the latest figures. The album had sold 100,000 copies by San Diego, 200,000 by L.A., and by the morning they hit Seattle, for a Halloween show, it had gone gold, selling half a million. Just over a month before, Kurt had been destroying Nelson gold records in a microwave—soon he would have one of his own.

  But despite the attention and his mushrooming fame, that afternoon Kurt had other pressing concerns—he was out of socks. He and Carrie Montgomery walked from the theater to Bon Marché. In the department store, Kurt selected several pair of underwear (he was now buying boxers) and socks (white). When he brought his purchases to the counter, a scene worthy of a Samuel Beckett play unfolded: “He starts taking off his shoes and socks to get the rest of his money out,” recalled Carrie. “He’s got these crumpled bills in his shoe. He is literally dumping his shoe out on the counter in the Bon, and the salesperson is looking at him like he’s insane. In this crotchety, old, crusty way, he starts unfolding these bills, and it took him forever to count them out. He had to reach into another pocket to find more. There’s this big pile of lint on the counter next to his money. The salesman, in a suit, is looking at Kurt as if he were a homeless person.” Despite his gold record, Kurt was still homeless—staying in hotels or with friends like Carrie when the band wasn’t touring.

  That evening’s show was a blur for Kurt: With a document
ary crew filming, media attention, radio promo people, and his family and friends backstage, it seemed like everywhere he turned, someone was asking him for something. He had complicated matters by two of his own decisions: He invited Bikini Kill to open the show, so Tobi was around, plus he had convinced Ian Dickson and Nikki McClure to act as gogo dancers in full body suits—his said “girl,” and hers said “boy.” When the camera operators kept pushing Kurt’s dancers out of the way, he became frustrated and it showed in his performance. The Rocket review noted: “These guys are already rich and famous, but they still represent a pure distillation of what it’s like to be unsatisfied in life.”

  After the show, Kurt looked shell-shocked. “He reminded me of a cat in a cage,” observed photographer Darrell Westmoreland. When Westmoreland posed Kurt with his sister Kim, Kurt yanked her hair at the moment the shutter snapped. “He was all pissed off and being a dick,” Kim recalled.

  But the strangest moments of the day were reserved—as at the Beehive in-store—for a couple of ghosts Kurt couldn’t escape. Later in the evening, he hung out with Tobi, and she ended up sleeping on the floor of his hotel room. She wasn’t the only one in his room—like always, there were a half dozen friends who needed a place to crash— but it was no small irony that Tobi was sleeping on his floor the day he’d sold half a million copies of an album that was ostensibly about how she didn’t love him.

  And after the show, Kurt ran into another familiar face from the harbor. There, standing by the stage door smoking pot with Matt Lukin, was Steve Shillinger, once one of Kurt’s closest friends and a member of the family that had given him shelter when he was sleeping in a cardboard box. Shillinger spoke the words that were now painfully obvious to Kurt no matter how much he wanted to deny them: “You’re really famous now, Cobain. You are on television, like, every three hours.”