A battle of wills began between MTV brass and the still-in-rehab Kurt, with Finnerty and Gold Mountain acting as go-betweens. MTV threatened to yank Nirvana from the show; Kurt said that was fine. MTV threatened to stop playing Nirvana videos; Kurt said that was fine, though he probably secretly feared it. And then the network upped the ante and threatened to stop playing videos by other artists managed by Gold Mountain. Finnerty was recruited to run between the two camps, and she drove out to Exodus with Courtney, Frances, and nanny Jackie to talk to Kurt, who had been whisked back to the facility immediately after the rehearsal. They sat on the lawn and discussed the options, but no resolution was found, and Kurt had to rush off to therapy. During each progressive rehab effort, therapy had become a larger part of his drug treatment, though he still refused to attend counseling when not in rehab.
Kurt reconsidered his song choice, but only after being told that Finnerty would be fired if Nirvana played “Rape Me.” MTV’s executives were visibly surprised when Nirvana showed up for the final rehearsal on the day of the show. All eyes in the hall turned to Kurt as he entered, and in that moment he reached down, grabbed Finnerty’s hand, and defiantly walked down the center aisle, exaggeratedly swinging his arms with Amy’s, like two toddlers on a day-care excursion. It was done entirely for the MTV honchos: Kurt was letting it be known that if they fired her, he wasn’t playing their party.
This particular rehearsal was uneventful. The band played “Lithium,” it sounded great, and the MTV staff clapped, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. Yet as everyone waited for the show to start, a rumor circulated that once the show was live, Kurt planned to play “Rape Me.” It was the kind of tension that enveloped most significant Nirvana performances, and Kurt thrived on it.
Meanwhile, a drama was unfolding backstage. Kurt, Courtney, nanny Jackie, and Finnerty were sitting with Frances when Axl Rose walked by, holding hands with his model-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour. “Hey Axl,” Courtney beckoned, sounding a bit like Blanche Dubois, “will you be the godfather of our child?” Rose ignored her but turned to Kurt, who was bouncing Frances on his knee, and leaned down near his face. As the veins in Axl’s neck thickened to the size of a garden hose, he barked: “You shut your bitch up, or I’m taking you down to the pavement!”
The idea that anyone could control Courtney was so laughable that a giant smile came to Kurt’s face. He would have started chortling uncontrollably if it weren’t for his own strong sense of self-preservation. He turned to Courtney and ordered, in a robot-like voice: “Okay, bitch. Shut up!” This brought a snicker to everyone within earshot, other than Rose and Seymour. Perhaps seeking to save face, Seymour created her own confrontation, asking Courtney, with as much sarcasm as she could muster, “Are you a model?” Love, who had just delivered her child three weeks before, was too quick for anyone to best her in this type of repartee—particularly Stephanie Seymour—and she fired back, “No. Are you a brain surgeon?” With that, Rose and Seymour stormed off.
Then it came time for Nirvana to take the stage. MTV’s chiefs had already come up with a contingency plan to make sure they weren’t duped by Kurt. The engineers had been instructed that if the band played “Rape Me,” they should immediately go to a commercial. The only problem was, no one in the booth knew what the unreleased “Rape Me” sounded like. The show began, and Nirvana appeared on-stage. Suddenly, there was an awkward pause and in that moment one could see Kurt, Krist, and Dave locking eyes. Kurt lived for moments like this—all those hours during his youth doodling band logos in notebooks and countless hours watching MTV had trained him well. He knew to never disappoint an audience, whether it be eighteen kids at the Community World Theater or a bunch of MTV suits sitting in a VIP section. He began slowly, strumming his guitar. At first it wasn’t clear what song he was playing, but as Krist came in with the bass part, everyone in the hall, and over the airwaves, heard the opening chords to “Rape Me.” What television viewers couldn’t hear or see was an MTV executive running toward the control truck. But before they could be cut off, Nirvana shifted into the first chords of “Lithium.” “We did that to fuck with them,” Krist recalled. It had been less than twenty seconds—and MTV would edit it out when they replayed the show—but it was one of Nirvana’s finest moments. As the song ended, Krist threw his bass in the air and it landed directly on his forehead. He staggered from the stage and collapsed, and many thought he was dead. When Finnerty found him backstage, he was shaking it off and laughing.
When Nirvana won the award for Best Alternative Music Video, they sent a Michael Jackson impersonator to accept. But all three band members did appear when they won Best New Artist, and Kurt said, “You know, it’s really hard to believe everything you read.” Rebutting the Vanity Fair piece had become an obsession for him. Sober for two weeks, he had a clear complexion and a preacher’s clarity in his eyes. Later, while Eric Clapton played “Tears in Heaven,” Finnerty and Courtney conspired to make Kurt and Eddie Vedder slow dance together. When they were pushed together by the women, Kurt grabbed his rival and danced with him like an awkward teenager at the prom.
Novoselic, meanwhile, found himself confronted by Duff McKagan, of Guns N’ Roses, and two bodyguards, looking for a brawl. Krist, Courtney, and baby Frances were inside the band’s trailer when the entourage unsuccessfully attempted to topple it. Kurt missed this because he’d left to make the Exodus curfew. “That was pretty funny, what you did,” Finnerty said as he climbed into the van to leave. “Yeah,” Kurt said. He was smiling like a little boy who had embarrassed his teachers but escaped to annoy them again another day.
A week after the MTV Awards, Kurt sat down in his Alta Loma home with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times for his first major interview in six months. It was the first time he had been remotely honest with anyone in the press about his heroin addiction—over half the printed interview was concerned with his drug and health struggles. Kurt admitted to a heroin problem, but downplayed its extent. He said, correctly, that his experience with narcotics before he recorded Never-mind only amounted to “dabbling,” but when he talked about his use since then, he minimized it, calling it “a little habit,” and describing his addicted phase as “three weeks.” He said he “chose to use drugs,” mirroring the language from his own journals.
Many of his comments, on his health and his life, were shaded by the presence of Frances, who he held in his arms during the interview. “I don’t want my daughter to grow up and someday be hassled by kids at school....I don’t want people telling her that her parents were junkies,” he said. “I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed, and it’s true....I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.”
He talked about how he’d come close to quitting Nirvana, but said the band was now on solid ground. They planned to record “a really raw album,” and might tour again, he suggested. But he discounted the idea of a long tour, warning that his fragile health prevented him from it. “We might not go on any more long tours,” he told Hilburn. “I would rather be healthy and alive. I don’t want to sacrifice myself or my family.”
The interview represented an emotional breakthrough for Kurt; by being truthful about his addiction, he had taken away some of the shame associated with it. Once Kurt found he was applauded for his honesty, rather than shunned, he felt like a man who had been condemned to a public execution only to be pardoned at the last moment. Shortly after the Hilburn article ran, he reflected in his journal on the current state of his life:
Sometimes I wonder if I could very well be the luckiest boy in the world. For some reason I’ve been blessed with loads of neat stuff within the past year, and I don’t really think these baubles and gifts have been acquired by the fact that I’m a critically-acclaimed internationally-beloved teen idol demi-God-like blonde front man, cryptically honest. Stuttering outspoken speech impediment articulately award acceptance speech, Golden boy, rock star who has fina
lly, and finally come out of the closet in regards to his viscous two month drug habit, showering the world with the classic, “I can no longer keep this a secret because it pains me to hide any part of my private life from my adoring, concerned, we-think-of-you-asour-public-domain-cartoon-character-but-we-still-love-you-fans.” Yes, my children, in the words of a total fucking geek, speaking on behalf of the world, “we really appreciate you finally admitting what we have been accusing you of, we needed to hear it because we were concerned because the catty gossip and jokes and speculation at our jobs, schools, and parties had become well, uh, exhausted.”
Chapter 19
THAT LEGENDARY DIVORCE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
SEPTEMBER 1992–JANUARY 1993
That legendary divorce is such a bore.
—From “Serve the Servants.”
Two days after the MTV awards, Kurt, Courtney, and Frances—along with Jamie and Jackie—arrived in Seattle, where Nirvana was headlining a benefit to fight a music-censorship bill introduced into the Washington state legislature. The night before, they’d played a show in Portland to aid homosexual rights. The band’s choice in benefits—mostly pro-gay and pro-choice organizations—had gained them a piece of baggage Kurt hadn’t counted on: He was now receiving death threats. “It was mostly right-to-lifers,” recalled Alex MacLeod. “We brought in metal detectors.” One of the callers had warned that Kurt would be shot the moment he stepped onstage. This prospect was scary enough, but equally terrifying was being back in Seattle, where he would see his relatives for the first time since having the baby.
Kurt arrived at the sold-out, 16,000-seat Seattle Center Coliseum to find Wendy, Kim, and half-sister Brianne already in his dressing room. It was the first time they saw Kurt with Frances. “He was so excited, and he was such a good daddy,” remembered Kim. “He just adored Frances and loved her so much. He would do anything to make her smile or laugh.”
As his family doted on Frances, Kurt heard updates from his road manager. There had been more death threats; Fitz of Depression had problems in soundcheck (Kurt had of course insisted they open); and there were dozens of journalists hoping to interview him. Kurt eventually threw up his hands. Yet just when he thought he’d dispensed with all problems, Kim came running to him in a panic with one crisis Kurt didn’t anticipate. “Dad’s here!” she exclaimed. “What the fuck is he doing here?” Kurt cursed. Don had talked his way backstage by showing his driver’s license and State Patrol I.D. to a security guard. “It’s okay though,” Kim assured Kurt. “I told him they weren’t letting anyone in the dressing rooms.” This was of course a lie, since even minor Sub Pop bands were walking around drinking free beer. Kim warned the head of security to not let Don anywhere near his son. Kurt hadn’t seen his father for eight years, and hadn’t spoken to him since February 1991. Don had tried contacting Kurt but their relationship was so estranged, he didn’t even have his son’s phone number but had left messages with neighbors and record company receptionists.
Don walked into the dressing room with Kurt’s half-brother Chad. “Oh, hi, Dad,” Kurt said, changing the tone of his voice to hide the anger he had been demonstrating moments before. For the first time in a decade, the four original Cobains—Don, Wendy, Kurt, and Kim— were in a room together. Their clan now included two other half-siblings, Courtney, and a couple of Kurt’s employees. Three-week-old Frances Bean Cobain—cooing and grunting as she was passed around her relations—was the only one oblivious to all the tension; to everyone else, it seemed like the weigh-in at a particularly contentious boxing match.
The Cobain family soap opera did not disappoint the onlookers. When Don saw Wendy holding Frances, he said, “Well hello, Grandma,” putting an emphasis on the “Grandma” as if it were a slur. “How’s it feel to be a Grandma?” “Great, Grandpa,” Wendy replied in the same sarcastic tone. “I love it, Grandpa.” What in many families might have been a humorous or sentimental exchange turned into an uncomfortable confrontation. More than eighteen years had passed since Don and Wendy had divorced, but suddenly the original family was emotionally back in 1210 East First Street in Aberdeen, and the relationship between Mom and Dad was unchanged. For Kurt, it was a joining of his new family with the wounds of the original. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, not again,’ ” remembered Kim. The only different dynamic was Kurt’s role; he was no longer the little, helpless boy. He had become—with 16,000 adoring fans waiting on the other side of the wall—the patriarch.
Courtney had never seen Don before, and found herself speechless observing how much he looked like his son—Don had the rough handsomeness of a middle-aged Steve McQueen. But Kurt was not without words, particularly for his elder lookalike: “You shut the fuck up,” he yelled at his father, as forcefully as he had ever spoken in his life, using a curse word that in his childhood would have gotten him “thumped” on the temple. “Don’t talk to her like that. Don’t you put her down.”
Quickly, Wendy, Kim, Courtney, and Brianne left the room. “Jeez, you look old,” Kurt told his father when he calmed down. He immediately assumed Don was there to ask for money. “I didn’t want anything,” Don recalled. “I just wanted to make contact with him. I said, ‘If you’re happy, having fun, that’s great. Just try to keep in touch.’ ”
Kurt signed a poster for his half-brother Chad—who, Kurt introduced to everyone as “his stepbrother,” much to Don’s consternation— and told his father he had to go: He was late for Nirvana’s set. As production manager Jeff Mason walked Kurt toward the stage, Kurt had only a few seconds to leave behind his family, and to become “Kurdt Kobain,” the rock star, his other self. He was about to walk out onstage in the very hall where he’d seen his first rock concert, Sammy Hagar with Quarterflash, only ten years before though it seemed like an eternity ago. Mason and Kurt always used these brief walks to discuss details of the show, or check in emotionally—this was one of the few times Kurt ever took that long walk toward the spotlight in complete silence.
The show itself was phenomenal, the best Nirvana had ever done in Seattle. The rustiness of Reading was gone, and Kurt seemed like a man with a burning desire to convert any non-believers. Hundreds of kids crowd-surfed, cascading over the barricades like lemmings over a cliff. During a song break, Krist told the story of how he’d been “banned for life” from the Coliseum for getting drunk at a Neil Young concert: Backstage he’d found a picture of himself on a bulletin board of individuals who should never be allowed inside.
After the show, Kurt blew off all interview requests except one: Monk, an irregularly published travel magazine. When Monk’s Jim Crotty and Michael Lane made their way to his dressing room, they found it deserted except for Kurt and Frances. “There was this feeling,” Crotty remembered, “akin to when I met the Dalai Lama: When you have somebody whose every move is dissected to such a degree, in your own mind they take on this incredible importance. There was all this activity outside, and then you open the door, and there’s Kurt Cobain holding a child in an empty room. He seemed so sensitive, exposed, vulnerable, and tender, with him holding the child.”
Where the Hilburn interview had found him in a serious mood, this conversation was the greatest myth-making session of Kurt’s life. When asked about Aberdeen, he told a story of being run out of town: “They chased me up to the Castle of Aberdeen with torches, just like the Frankenstein monster. And I got away in a hot-air balloon.” When Crotty asked if there was “a quintessential Aberdeen” place in his memory, he said “under the bridge.” He described his favorite food as “water and rice.” When asked if he believed in reincarnation, he replied: “If you’re really a mean person you’re going to come back as a fly and eat poop.” And when Crotty asked Kurt what he might title his autobiography, his response was, “ ‘I Was Not Thinking,’ by Kurt Cobain.”
That fall Kurt and Courtney—with Frances, Jamie, and Jackie in tow— spent most of their time in Seattle, living in the Sorrento, the Inn at the Market, and a couple of other four-
star hotels. They would register as “Simon Ritchie,” Sid Vicious’s real name. They had just purchased a $300,000 house on eleven acres near Carnation, 30 miles outside of Seattle. The house—which had a tree growing through it—was so rundown they began construction of a new home on the property.
It was while in Seattle Kurt learned two women from England were writing an unauthorized biography. Following on the heels of the Vanity Fair profile, this sent him into a furor, as his Aunt Judy had already been interviewed for the book. On October 22, Kurt, Courtney, Aunt Judy, and Dave Grohl phoned co-author Victoria Clarke and left a series of increasingly threatening messages. “If anything comes out in this book which hurts my wife, I’ll fucking hurt you,” Kurt warned. In another he raged, “I don’t give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I’m threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few hundred thousand dollars to have you snuffed out, but maybe I’ll try the legal way first.” The messages filled the tape on Clarke’s answering machine, which she turned over to the police. Asked about the threats by the New York Times, Danny Goldberg said, “Kurt absolutely denies the notion that he or any member of the band made such phone calls.” But Kurt later admitted he made them. He also wrote Clarke a letter (never sent) that included such venom as, “You are both hideously jealous and hideously ugly. You are not writing a book about my band, you are writing a book about how jealous you are of my smart, beautiful, sexy, and talented wife, none of which either of you are. If one single solitary, tabloidesque or negative comment or statement in regards to my wife shows up in your book, I will (with more enthusiasm than I’ve ever had in my life) gladly devote every fucking waking hour of my life to make yours unlivable. If that doesn’t work, well, let’s not forget that I work for the Mafia.”
Heavier Than Heaven Page 31
