Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  They also had their own record label. Along with Candace Peterson, Johnson ran K Records, a small but well-connected indie label which also distributed like-minded foreign bands such as Young Marble Giants, Kleenex, and the Vaselines.

  Kurt didn’t completely buy the K ethos. He liked to wear his hair long and he liked to take drugs. But he did like the music and its message. “It opened up new doors to music that I’d never heard before,” Kurt says. “It made me realize that for years I hadn’t looked back on my childhood. I tried to forget about it. I’d just forgotten about it. It made me look back on my childhood and have fond memories of it. It was just a nice reminder of innocence.” “To try to remind me to stay a child,” Kurt got a tattoo of the K logo, a “K” inside a simple shield, on his left forearm.

  Kurt remained at the shack for another two months after Lukin left, owing the landlady back rent.

  In the meantime, Kurt started seeing a young woman named Tracy Marander. She wasn’t like any of the other girls he knew. She had a zebra-stripe coat and her hair was dyed fire-engine red and she lived in Olympia. Tracy liked to party and had her share of eccentricities, but she was also a placid, nurturing soul. After a few weeks, she became Kurt’s first serious girlfriend.

  Tracy and Kurt had met a year or so before, in front of the Gorilla Gardens, a barnlike all-ages punk club (now defunct) in the Chinatown section of Seattle. They met through their mutual friend Buzz Osborne. She and her boyfriend were sitting in their car drinking beer and talking to Buzz and Kurt, who were also drinking beer. The meeting was cut short when Tracy noticed a couple of cops heading their way and took off in the car, leaving Kurt and Buzz behind to get busted.

  Tracy thought Kurt was nice, if a little young-looking. He was skinny and had short hair. “I was struck by how blue his eyes were,” she recalls. “I’d never seen eyes that blue before.”

  After befriending Chris and Shelli, she became a cling-on and met Kurt again a year later while they hung out at Buzz Osborne’s parents’ house one day watching Buzz and Chris drink Mad Dog. After Kurt left, Buzz informed her that Kurt was the guy who made the really cool Kiss mural on the side of the Melvins’ tour van—known as the Mel-Van—using Magic Markers. Every time a pen ran out, he’d go into the Shop-Rite in Montesano and steal another one. “I thought that was kind of cool,” says Tracy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THAT’S MY BROTHER CHRIS. HE LISTENS TO PUNK ROCK.

  Krist Anthony Novoselic was born on May 16, 1965, in Compton, California. His parents, Krist and Maria, were Croatian immigrants; Mr. Novoselic (the name means “new settler” in Croatian) moved to the United States in 1963, his wife-to-be the following year. They set up house in Gardena, California, and Mr. Novoselic got a job driving a truck for Sparklets drinking water.

  After moving around to a series of apartments with Chris and his younger brother Robert, they got a modest house and then another, nicer one in 1973 when Chris’s sister Diana was born.

  Although busing had been instituted in California, in Gardena kids of different races didn’t mix—except for one group. “There was the one scene with all of us who were in bonehead math,” says Novoselic. “We were totally integrated. Whoever didn’t really fit in all bonded together and there was no racial thing. So integration did work.

  “Robert and I were kind of big boys and we used to get into trouble,” says Chris of his preteen years. “Slash tires, stuff like that. My dad would just have to whip us, because that’s all he knew how to do. We were scared of him. But it wasn’t like he was an abuser—I don’t think he abused us at all. It’s not like he would slap us for anything. It was action and reaction.

  “Like Robert, he got glasses and the first day he got his glasses, he busted ’em,” Chris continues. “That’s just Robert. We’d just do shit like that. Go throw rocks at houses, throw rocks at cars. There was a time when vandalism was really cool. We really got into vandalism. Throwing eggs …”

  Chris says he and his brother straightened out by the time the family moved to Aberdeen in 1979, when Chris was fourteen. Property values in Southern California were getting too high for the Novoselic family and they could get a nice house for a little money in Aberdeen. Besides, there were lots of other Croatian families in the area. Mr. Novoselic got a job as a machinist at one of the town’s many lumber mills.

  After sunny California, Chris didn’t like Aberdeen at all. “It’s got everything against it,” he says. “It’s cloudy and rainy, there’s mud in the streets from all the trucks. The buildings are all kind of dirty. It’s like an East German town or something. Everything is so damp down there that the wood just gets kind of soft and things fall apart.”

  Like Kurt, Chris had a hard time at school because he didn’t fit in. The California stereotype held true—things really were mellower there. “I was perplexed by the weird, twisted social scene they had in Aberdeen,” says Novoselic. “It just seemed like people were a lot more uptight and judgmental.”

  Aberdonians wore leather tennis shoes and elephant flares, while Chris sported deck shoes and straight-leg Levi’s. You were a geek if you wore straight-leg pants. “Three years later,” says Chris, “everybody was wearing straight-leg pants. And I suffered for nothing.”

  And he was very tall—he was six foot seven by the time he graduated from high school. His parents were hoping he’d become a basketball player but his height only made Chris awkward. “I was just weird and maladjusted more than anything else,” Chris says. “I was really depressed when I came up to Aberdeen. I couldn’t get along with anybody. I’d go home and sleep all afternoon and listen to music by myself. I couldn’t get along with those kids. They were assholes. They treated me really badly. I didn’t understand. They just weren’t cool.”

  Chris was into bands like Led Zeppelin, Devo, Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith while his peers were into Top Forty, perhaps because that was all the local radio station played. They’d play Top Forty radio on the school bus and Chris was forced to endure the sound of Kenny Rogers warbling “Coward of the County.” Over and over again.

  Luckily, geography smiled on Chris Novoselic. His family’s house was on Think of Me Hill, the tallest hill in Aberdeen (named because at the turn of the century there was a big sign on the hill overlooking the town that advertised Think of Me tobacco), so he got excellent radio reception—on clear days, he could get Portland, Oregon. He’d lie in his room depressed and listen to the hip Seattle rock stations on his clock radio for hours.

  By June of 1980, Chris’s parents got so worried about his depression that they sent him to live with relatives in Croatia. Chris had picked up Croatian “around the house,” and is still fluent in it. He loved living there—he made lots of friends and the schools were excellent. He even heard something there called “punk rock,” and discovered the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and even some Yugoslavian punk bands. It didn’t make too much of a dent, however. “It was just music to me,” Chris recalls. “It didn’t really mean anything to me—it was just music that I liked.” After a year, his parents called him back home.

  “I was just in a weird limbo,” Chris says. He began drinking and smoking pot heavily. “I’ve always been a big drinker,” says Chris. “When I drink, I just don’t stop. I like to drink because you’re in some weird cartoon land where anything goes. Your vision is blurry and nothing and everything makes sense. It’s crazy. It’s a different reality and a different world of consciousness.”

  Chris became well known on the party circuit. “You’d go to parties and people would be like ‘Hey, Novie!’ ” says Matt Lukin. “They always knew him as the big wacky guy because he was always doing weird things. They just thought he was kind of weird. He’d go to parties and jump around.”

  He had some people to hang out with, but he was hard pressed to call them friends. “I hung out with them because I had nowhere else to go,” says Chris. “It was kind of odd and uncomfortable.” He finally got a job at the local Taco Bell and threw himself into w
ork, working every night and not socializing, just saving money. By senior year of high school, he had bought a car, some stereo speakers, and a guitar. He took some lessons along with his brother Robert and told his teacher, Warren Mason—the same guy who taught Kurt—that he really wanted to play the blues. He quit after a few months and then woodshedded intensively in his bedroom, patiently working out the licks to old B. B. King records with his brother.

  Then he met Buzz Osborne.

  Chris worked at the Taco Bell with a fellow named Bill Hull, whose principal claim to fame was that he had been expelled from Aberdeen High for planting a pipe bomb in the greenhouse. When Hull got transferred to Montesano High, he met Buzz and Matt Lukin. One day, Buzz and Matt visited Hull at the Taco Bell. “And there was this big tall doofy guy back there singing along to the Christmas carols they’re playing on the Muzak,” Lukin recalls. Chris mentioned that he played guitar and later Osborne called up and invited him to hang out in Montesano.

  They talked politics and Osborne turned him on to some cool music—blazing music from the Vibrators, Sex Pistols, Flipper, Black Flag, Circle Jerks. “It was like wow, punk rock,” says Novoselic, marveling still. “I just totally disavowed all this stupid metal—Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, it was just shit, I just could not listen to it anymore. It was crap, it had lost its appeal for me. Sammy Hagar, Iron Maiden, I just didn’t like it. I was still into Zeppelin and Aerosmith and stuff.” Chris had gone through a prog-rock phase—Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and their ilk—but, in his favorite phrase, “it never yanked my crank.”

  Like Kurt, Chris had a delayed reaction to punk rock. “It didn’t really grab me right away because it sounded really live,” says Chris. “It took about a week into it and it finally grabbed me. I was listening to Generic Flipper and the record moved me. It was like, Art. This is Art. It was so substantial. People pay credence to Led Zeppelin IV or the White Album and this was the same thing. So that turned my life around.”

  He began reading punk fanzines such as Maximumrocknroll, discovered political hardcore bands like MDC, and read about everything from anarchism to animal rights. Then he discovered bands such as the Butthole Surfers, Minor Threat, and Hüsker Dü. He and a bunch of friends would pile into Matt Lukin’s mammoth blue Impala and drive up to Seattle to see punk rock shows—two hours up, two hours back. Awed by the big city, they kept to themselves.

  Around this time, Chris’s brother Robert brought his friend Kurt Cobain over to the Novoselic house. When Kurt asked about the racket emanating from the upstairs stereo, Robert replied, “Oh, that’s my brother Chris. He listens to punk rock.” Kurt thought that was very cool and filed the information away.

  Chris graduated from high school in 1983. Soon after, his parents divorced. It was a rough enough time as it was, but he also had some plastic surgery done on his face—doctors cut a small section of bone out of Chris’s jaw and moved some teeth forward to correct a severe underbite (“I looked like Jay Leno,” he says).

  Lukin remembers stopping by with Osborne on the day of the operation. They rang the doorbell over and over again, but nobody answered. Then they tossed some pebbles at Chris’s window. “Just as we were ready to give up,” says Lukin, “the window slides open and he had this huge head, it was totally swollen up—he almost looked like a little fat oriental baby. It was like an elephant man coming up to the window.” Chris was mad because they’d woken him up from his anesthetized sleep. His jaws were tightly wired shut, yet he still managed to communicate something to his friends. “You fuckers!” he cried.

  Chris’s jaw was wired shut for six weeks. He still went out to parties, except he had to carry a pair of wire cutters with him in case he threw up or something got caught in his throat. “He’d go out and get all fucked up,” Lukin recalls, “and he’d be puking and it would be draining through his wires. He said he never did have to cut them, but all the food was like milkshakes anyway, no solid food. Still, it was somewhat reckless of him.”

  “Then the swelling went down,” says Chris, “and I had a new face.”

  One day during his senior year in high school, he had been walking behind two junior girls in the hall who were raving about the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. “Yeah, they’re really great!” he piped up. Shelli remembered him as a “class clown-type guy, always joking.” They talked a little and made friends.

  Shelli was also friendly with Kurt and remembers him as a “smart-ass” who would delight in riling the redneck who sat next to him in art class. Kurt’s mom boarded a friend of Kurt’s for a while and Shelli knew his sister, who was old enough to buy beer. She’d go over to Kurt’s house sometimes to find him and his friends getting very stoned and grooving to Led Zeppelin.

  Shelli dropped out her senior year and took a job at McDonald’s and got her own hundred-dollar-a-month apartment on Market Street, across from the fire department. On her way to work, she would walk past the Foster Painting company where Chris worked and she would talk to him. She got his phone number and started calling him up. They had a lot in common—Shelli had been an oddball in school, too—and by March 1985, they had started hanging out as friends at Shelli’s apartment, listening to punk rock records and going to shows. Soon they started going out.

  Chris and Osborne briefly had a band with original Melvins drummer Mike Dillard, with Chris on guitar and Osborne on bass. Chris played a punked-up version of “Sunshine of Your Love” with members of the Melvins as the opening act of a Melvins/Metal Church bill at the D&R Theater in Aberdeen. Chris became the lead singer for the Stiff Woodies, the Melvins satellite project whose revolving door lineup featured, at various times, Osborne, Crover, Lukin, a fellow named Gary Cole, and others, including drummer Kurt Cobain (“We sounded just like the Butthole Surfers,” Kurt claims). Chris was a flamboyant frontman, recalls Dale Crover. “He wore this big long purple fringe vest and he’d do all these big high kicks,” says Crover. “It was hilarious.” The Stiff Woodies played a few parties before going the way of all satellite projects, probably because Chris’s vocal talents were at roughly the same level as his cameo at the beginning of Nevermind’s “Territorial Pissings.”

  Chris played bass in another Melvins satellite project, a Mentors cover band. His stage name was Phil Atio.

  He had been laid off from his painting job by then and was collecting fifty-five dollars a week unemployment. He usually slept in all morning and then hung out at the Melvins’ practice space, where the band rehearsed every afternoon. Gradually, Chris moved in with Shelli. Chris didn’t hang out with the cling-ons at the Melvins’ practice space so much after that, preferring to spend most of his time with his girlfriend.

  They didn’t have a TV or a phone and they got everything from thrift stores. They had tie-dye curtains and listened to Cream and early Rolling Stones records. “It was one of the greatest times of our lives,” says Shelli. “Everything was so new. Everything was so bright for us. It was the first time we’d been away from our parents and the world was ours. It was really cool.”

  Chris and Shelli moved to a larger but more decrepit house in Aberdeen in December. It was a drafty place, especially in the damp Northwestern winter—you could actually see sunlight streaming through the cracks in the walls.

  Noting that the Melvins were awarded the princely sum of eighty dollars for a night’s work, Chris and Kurt started a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band aptly named the Sellouts. They figured CCR was country-rock and therefore would go over well in rural Aberdeen. The band was Kurt on drums, Chris on guitar, and a fellow named Steve Newman on bass (Newman later lost his fingers in a woodcutting accident). They practiced at Chris and Shelli’s house, but it only got as far as five or six rehearsals. They broke up after Kurt and Newman got into a big fight one day at Chris and Shelli’s. They were sitting around drinking when Newman tried to attack Kurt with a vacuum cleaner. Kurt grabbed a two-by-four and brained his much larger opponent.

  Although the
y had left high school behind, they still hadn’t escaped Aberdeen and their provincial peers. “It was your basic nowhere town and these people considered it the center of the universe,” says Matt Lukin. “There were these bigwigs that were popular in high school who belonged to these little cliques and it kind of carried over out of high school because everybody still hung out. Small-town mentality—real narrow-minded people who looked at something they weren’t used to as something bad.”

  “Kurt was really a victim,” says Shelli. “People wanted to beat him up. He was different from them. He wasn’t a redneck and he liked his own music and people are afraid of that in a small town—you’re different and you’re the freak. We got all kinds of shit in Aberdeen. Chris was talking about socialism at a party once and these guys were talking about slitting his throat, these rednecks because they thought he was a Communist. It was a scary atmosphere, especially back in 1985.”

  In March of 1986, Chris and Shelli moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in search of work. But they soon tired of the stifling, relentless heat and all those Republicans and moved back to the hundred-dollar-a-month apartment. They stayed there for six months before moving to an apartment in nearby Hoquiam (Quinault Indian for “hungry for wood”) above a garage.

  They became vegetarians. Chris got turned on to the idea by a friend from work named Dwight Covey, a hip older guy who had built a cabin for himself out in the woods and used no electricity or running water. Chris quit eating red meat, then gradually dropped poultry and fish. “I was just looking for a better way to live, I guess,” he says. “I started thinking about all the cows slaughtered. It just seemed like a really good thing to do.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THESE GUYS WERE FROM ABERDEEN