This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  Cobain originally fancied himself as a drummer, and had graduated from banging on Chuck Fradenburg’s kit as an infant to playing drums in the Montesano Junior High School band by the time he reached seventh grade. But on his fourteenth birthday, in 1981, he had been gifted a guitar and a 10 watt amp by his uncle Chuck. The guitar was second-hand, Japanese and strung so high as to be barely playable, but Cobain carried it with him everywhere as a badge of pride. He began taking lessons from a local guitarist named Warren Mason, then playing in a band with his uncle, and soon learned the chords to AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’, The Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and, inevitably, Washington’s unofficial state anthem The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’. With these cornerstones of rock ’n’ roll in place, he began writing his first songs. The following year, over the Christmas holidays, he made his first recording, at his aunt Mari Earl’s house in Seattle, utilising Earl’s bass guitar, an empty suitcase and a pair of wooden spoons to provide rhythmic accompaniment. He labelled the cassette Organized Confusion.

  ‘Most of what I remember about the songs was a lot of distortion on guitar, really heavy bass and the clucky sound of the wooden spoons,’ Mari Earl told Goldmine’s Gillian G. Gaar in 1997. ‘And his voice, sounding like he was mumbling under a big fluffy comforter, with some passionate screams once in a while. Musically, it was very repetitious. As far as really sharing his music with me, and saying, “What do you think of this?” or whatever, he really didn’t do that. Kurt was very sensitive about the stuff that he wrote and he was very careful about who he let hear it.’

  ‘I told him, “Kurt, you’re totally welcome to use my computer drummer,”’ Earl recalled to English documentary maker Nick Broomfield the following year. ‘And he says, “Oh yeah, I don’t want to use a computer, I want to keep my music pure.”’

  One person permitted to listen to Cobain’s first recordings was Dale Crover. Though Kurt had flunked an audition to join Melvins as a second guitarist, their hard-hitting drummer was impressed by the teenager’s rudimentary original material, and encouraged him in his songwriting. In 1985, when Cobain announced his intention to start a band called Fecal Matter with fellow ‘Cling-On’ Greg Hokanson on drums, Crover offered to help out on bass. But by the time Fecal Matter got around to recording their first demo tape back at Mari Earl’s house in December, the Melvins man found himself playing drums too, as Hokanson was no longer part of the set-up.

  While clearly indebted to Melvins, Scratch Acid, Black Sabbath and late period Black Flag, the most remarkable thing about Fecal Matter’s Illiteracy Will Prevail demo is just how clearly it prefigures Nirvana’s signature sound. Though the seven songs on the cassette are poorly recorded, and often overwhelmed by tape hiss, tinny distortion and peaking sound levels, Cobain’s pit-of-the-stomach yowl, his acerbic, none-more-bleak lyrical obsessions, childlike melodic sensibilities and gift for crafting stubbornly hook-laden punk-metal riffs all shine through the grime.

  The highlight of the tape is the feedback-drenched, spiky, ‘jock’-baiting ‘Class of ’86’, Cobain’s acid commentary upon his high-school peer group. But the shape of Cobain’s punk to come is perhaps best illustrated by the churning garage grind of ‘Laminated Effect’, with the 18-year-old lashing out at Aberdeen’s small-town mores with provocative, misanthropic lyrics calculated to offend. Track four, the seesawing cow-punk of ‘Spank Thru’, mocked wholesome teenage love, celebrated masturbation and would remain a fixture in Nirvana set-lists up through to 1992. The sessions at Mari Earl’s house also yielded an early version of Bleach-era Nirvana track ‘Downer’: quite why Cobain held back this MDC-inspired politico-punk seether from inclusion on the demo while the noisy but unremarkable ‘Sound of Dentage’, ‘Bambi Slaughter’ and ‘Blathers Log’ made the cut is unclear, but in later years the singer admitted to a certain amount of embarrassment over its sophomoric, angry young man lyrics.

  Packaged with the singer’s hand-drawn scatological artwork depicting three flies buzzing around a freshly minted pile of shit, the Illiteracy Will Prevail demo created quite a buzz among Aberdeen’s punk kids. With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Cobain informed friends that Fecal Matter were going to be ‘bigger than U2 or R.E.M.’. In reality, the band split without ever playing a gig, but their cassette did earn Cobain minor celebrity status within his peer group, and bestowed a genuine sense of self-worth upon him for the first time. In April 1986 Buzz Osbourne wrote a letter to another ‘Cling-On’ friend from Aberdeen who’d recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona in search of work, hailing his young protégé’s burgeoning talent.

  ‘Some of [Kurt’s] songs are real killer!’ Osbourne enthused. ‘I think he could have some kind of a future in music if he keeps at it.’

  The recipient of the letter was 20-year-old Chris Novoselic. The firstborn son of Croatian immigrant parents, Krist Anthony Novoselic was born in Compton, California on 16 May 1965. In 1979, squeezed out of California by rising property prices, the Novoselic family moved to Aberdeen, setting up home at 1120 Fairfield Street on Think of Me Hill. Krist Novoselic senior took up a position as a machinist in one of the town’s lumber mills while his wife Maria opened a hairdressing salon, unfussily titled Maria’s Hair Design. Though Aberdeen had a sizeable Croatian community – ‘There are a lot of Croatian people here, and that’s why we are here,’ Maria Novoselic told the Seattle Times in 1992 – the insular small town felt alien to the family. To teenage brothers Krist and Robert, moving to Aberdeen felt like stepping back in time when stacked against the experience of growing up in California.

  When the elder Novoselic boy enrolled at Aberdeen High School, he registered his name as ‘Chris’ rather than his birth name ‘Krist’ in a bid to better assimilate into his new surroundings. A name change alone, however, was never likely to be enough to help the teenager blur into the background: at six feet seven inches tall, young Novoselic stood out among his peers like a cow in a chicken coop.

  Kurt Cobain first noticed Novoselic at an Aberdeen High School assembly. The pair shared no classes, and never actually spoke to one another during their school days, but Cobain remembered the older boy as ‘hilarious … a really clever, funny loud-mouth’, with a gift for subverting the most sombre educational rituals with manic outbursts of songs and poetry. For all his anarchic humour, however, Novoselic was utterly depressed by his new environs, to the extent that in the summer of 1980 his parents were so concerned about his mental well-being that he was sent to live with relatives in Croatia, then still part of Yugoslavia. It was during this summer that the teenager fell in love with punk rock.

  A fan of Black Sabbath, Zeppelin and Aerosmith in his early teens, Novoselic had first discovered the Sex Pistols and Ramones while listening to a Sunday night radio show called Your Mother Won’t Like It on Seattle’s KZOK radio station. In Yugoslavia he was exposed both to the freshest punk sounds coming out of England and an impassioned, vibrant local scene. Empowered by a community which actively celebrated society’s misshapes, he returned to Aberdeen on a mission to spread the punk gospel. It was inevitable that he’d run into the like-minded Buzz Osbourne sooner rather than later.

  Through hanging out with Melvins at their practice pad, Novoselic was drawn into a number of Buzz Osbourne’s short-lived side projects. It was while singing with one such band, the Stiff Woodies, that he first met Kurt Cobain, who would occasionally sit in with the group on guitar or drums. Though Novoselic was a wretched singer, the mere fact that he was aware of the existence of punk rock was enough for Cobain to view him as a potential collaborator.

  ‘Kurt asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him and gave me that Fecal Matter tape,’ Novoselic recalled in the sleevenotes accompanying Nirvana’s With the Lights Out box set. ‘I listened to it and thought, “Hey, this is really good.” I thought it was cool. So I went, “Yeah, let’s do it.” Then we laboured to put the ensemble together, find a drummer … and a drum set.’

  The duo recr
uited fellow ‘Cling-On’ Aaron Burckhard as their drummer: a metalhead stoner who lived down the street from Cobain, Burckhard didn’t actually own a drum kit, but he was the only available drummer within spitting distance of Aberdeen. The trio began rehearsing in earnest in January 1987.

  ‘We had the most intense jams,’ Novoselic recalled in his 2004 autobiography, Of Grunge and Government. ‘We’d simultaneously orbit inner and outer space. It was so serious, if we felt we sucked we were disappointed and we’d sit around bummed out after. It must have been about transcendence. If we didn’t get that rush, that otherworldly sense of liberation, we were let down; it’s hard to lose God after you’ve experienced it. These were not cover-song sessions or protracted blues jams. These were manifestations of a psychic dissonance.’

  The trio had yet to decide upon a name when they played their first show in March ’87, at a house party in nearby Raymond, a town even more isolated than Aberdeen. To the dismay of their hosts, the band played only two cover songs – a ragged take on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’ which crumbled into an even more shambolic, and quickly aborted, version of the same band’s ‘How Many More Times’. The bulk of their set featured brutish originals, among them the newly written ‘Mexican Seafood’, ‘Hairspray Queen’ and ‘Aero Zeppelin’, a gothic-sounding dismissal of mainstream rock ’n’ roll featuring the withering lyric ‘You could shit on the stage, they’ll be fans.’

  ‘We were just snotty and jumped around,’ Cobain later recalled. ‘We rocked, though.’

  It’s a measure of Cobain’s confidence in his new band that he booked the trio a live radio session at KAOS FM, the station at Olympia, Washington’s progressive liberal arts college Evergreen State College, before he had even chosen a name for the group. Cobain loved Olympia, a college town with an artsy, bohemian, free-thinking aesthetic, its own independent record label (Calvin Johnson’s K Records) and fanzine culture (Bruce Pavitt’s Sub Pop and Richie Unterberger’s Option) and a diverse cultural demographic embracing students, punk rockers, artists and oddball small-town eccentrics. Here, Cobain felt, was Nirvana’s natural audience.

  Released in 2004 on Nirvana’s With the Lights Out box set, three tracks taken from the 17 April session (Cobain originals ‘Anorexorcist’ and ‘Help Me, I’m Hungry’ plus a cover of ‘White Lace and Strange’ by obscure Philadelphia psych-rockers Thunder and Roses) show the recently formed trio to be a powerful, locked-in unit, with Burckhard’s John Bonhamesque pounding anchoring Cobain and Novoselic’s lurching, lumbering ‘Black Zeppelin’ riffage. The following evening, when the trio débuted at the Community World Theater in nearby Tacoma, they finally had a name: Skid Row.

  The name didn’t stick. When the trio next played the Community World Theater on 27 June they were called Pen Cap Chew. On 9 August they performed at the same venue as Bliss. When they returned on 23 January 1988 they were billed as Ted, Ed, Fred. At other times they played house parties as Throat Oyster and Windowpane.

  For all the confusing indecision over the band’s moniker, though, their sound, and Cobain’s ambition, remained focused and unwavering. Though he had now moved from Aberdeen to Olympia to live with his girlfriend Tracy Marander, Cobain was keen that the three-piece should come together to practise five times a week: when Aaron Burckhard expressed reservations about committing to this schedule, Cobain promptly fired him from the band. He took out an advert in the October’87 issue of Seattle music paper The Rocket seeking a replacement. His ad read: ‘SERIOUS DRUMMER WANTED. Underground attitude. Black Flag, Melvins, Zeppelin, Scratch Acid, Ethel Merman. [No seriously]. Versatile as heck. Kurdt 352.0992.’ While the search was on-going, Dale Crover stepped into the breach to help out his friends once more.

  On the afternoon of 23 January 1988, before their scheduled gig in Tacoma, the trio cut a new demo at Seattle’s Reciprocal Recording studio with producer Jack Endino, recording ten songs in just six hours. Only ‘Spank Thru’ and ‘Downer’ were retained from Fecal Matter’s Illiteracy Will Prevail demo; newer tracks such as ‘Floyd the Barber’, ‘Paper Cuts’ and ‘Beeswax’ hinted that Cobain’s songwriting was moving into darker, heavier and more melodic territory. Endino, who had previously helmed Sub Pop sessions for Soundgarden (the Screaming Life EP) and Mudhoney (the Dry as a Bone EP), was sufficiently impressed to make his own copy of the session. Some weeks later he passed a dubbed cassette of the demo to Jonathan Poneman, who was actively seeking to expand his new label’s roster.

  ‘I think initially he was intrigued by it, but he wasn’t about to just release it,’ said Endino in a video interview for the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition at Seattle’s Experience Music Project in 2011. ‘He thought, “Hmmm, well, this is interesting; the singer’s got character, let’s see what happens with them.” So his take was basically watchful waiting.’

  In truth, Cobain had little interest in the new label on his doorstep: in 1989 he admitted, ‘We had never heard of Sub Pop.’ The singer was desperate to put out a record on Greg Ginn’s SST label or Chicago’s Touch and Go records, then home to his beloved Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers and Steve Albini’s typically provocative new band Rapeman. He sent about 20 copies of what became known as the Dale Demo to the Midwest label, each one accompanied by a small gift, if used condoms and snot-filled tissues can be defined as ‘gifts’.

  A reply was not forthcoming.

  Cobain was also on the hunt for a new drummer. In spring 1988 he placed a second advert in The Rocket. This one read: ‘DRUMMER WANTED: Play hard, sometimes light, underground, versatile, fast, medium, slow, versatile, serious, heavy, versatile, dorky, nirvana, hungry. Kurdt 352.0992.’ This was the first public mention of what would be his band’s new, and final, name: Nirvana.

  Explaining the name in later years, Cobain declared: ‘Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, “nirvana” means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of punk rock.’

  On 24 April 1988 Jonathan Poneman booked Nirvana (now featuring new drummer Dave Foster) to support Blood Circus on a Sub Pop Sunday show at the tiny Vogue club in Seattle. Poneman cajoled his business partner Bruce Pavitt, Charles Peterson and members of Mudhoney and Soundgarden into coming down early to check out the band. Painfully aware that his songs were to be critiqued by peers he respected, Cobain was so nervous that he threw up in the venue’s car park before taking the stage. By all accounts, the gig which followed was a disaster.

  ‘I thought they sucked,’ said Charles Peterson. ‘I didn’t understand why Jonathan wanted to sign this band. They just seemed like a bunch of mopey shoegazers. The music seemed off, it didn’t do it for me. And stupidly, I didn’t take any pictures of them that night. I just thought, “This is probably the first and last time I’ll ever see or hear from this band.”’

  ‘We were uptight,’ Cobain later admitted to Backlash fanzine writer Dawn Anderson. ‘It just didn’t seem like a real show. We felt like we were being judged; it was like everyone should’ve had score cards.’

  Anderson’s article, which ran in her fanzine in August 1988 under the heading ‘It May Be the Devil and It May Be the Lord … But It Sure as Hell Ain’t Human’, was Nirvana’s first published press feature. The writer referred to the band as ‘the Melvins’ fan club’ and noted ‘it’s probably only fair to inform you that if you didn’t like the Melvins, or if you did like the Melvins but think leadbelly music has run its course, you won’t like Nirvana’.

  ‘But it’s also important to stress that this is not a clone band,’ Anderson added. ‘The group’s already way ahead of most mortals in the songwriting department and, at the risk of sounding blasphemous, I honestly believe that with enough practice Nirvana could become … better than the Melvins!’

  By the time Anderson’s article appeared in print, Nirvana had a new drummer – 21-year-old Chad Channing from Bainbridge Island, a small community located in Puget Sound – and the offe
r of a single release, plus a slot on the forthcoming Sub Pop 200 compilation album, from the stubbornly supportive Poneman. Cobain was not altogether thrilled that for his band’s first single Sub Pop wished to release ‘Love Buzz’, a tripped-out, hypnotic cover of an obscure cut by the Dutch pop band Shocking Blue, in preference to one of his own original songs, but he soon relented. In truth, no one was making Nirvana a better offer.

  Love Buzz/Big Cheese was duly released as the first offering from the Sub Pop Singles Club, a service which delivered seven-inch vinyl releases on a monthly basis to the label’s hardcore fans in return for an annual $35 subscription fee, in November 1988. In the customary Sub Pop tradition, promotional copies of the single came with a gloriously hyperbolic press release. This time, however, Cobain himself was the hype man. He wrote:NIRVANA sounds like: Black Sabbath playing The Knack, Black Flag, Led ZEP, the Stooges and a pinch of Bay City Rollers. Their personal musical influences include: H.R Puffnstuff, Marine Boy, divorces, drugs, sound effects records, the Beatles, Young Marble Giants, Slayer, Leadbelly and Iggy.