Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

Later that winter of 1987, Chris and Kurt found a new drummer—mustachioed Aaron Burckhard, who lived down the street from Kurt. A stoner, Burckhard was one of the cling-ons and would occasionally get to sit behind Dale Crover’s drum set and play. “He’s a very upbeat, happy person,” says Kurt. “Loud but not so obnoxious to the point where you hate his guts or anything. And he’s a magnet for trouble.” Burckhard was a bit of a rascal-about-town and had been in a car which a friend drove through the front window of the Shop-Rite in Aberdeen, causing fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of damage. Not long afterward, his face made the front page of the Aberdeen Daily World when another car he was in flipped over a median strip and burst into flames, killing the driver.

  Burckhard had his drawbacks, but he was the only person in Aberdeen Kurt and Chris knew who played drums, so he was in. He had a steady job at the Burger King in town, but somehow couldn’t find the money for a proper drum set, so they scrounged up a set using a few drums that Burckhard had, bits of Dale Crover’s banged-up old Sears kit, and even a sheet music stand to hold up one of the cymbals.

  After Chris’s parents got divorced, Maria Novoselic had moved into the apartment above her beauty shop, so the fledgling band rehearsed at Kurt’s little house. Kurt now had a little Fender Champ and Chris had a PMS brand amp and a clunky old Hohner bass he had borrowed from Greg Hokanson. They started rehearsing in earnest, taking inspiration from the hardworking Melvins.

  At first, Kurt sang in an English accent. “When I first heard American punk rock,” he says, “it didn’t sound punk rock enough to me because the accent was missing.” They learned most of the Fecal Matter tape at first, but then started writing new material almost immediately. Within three months they had about a dozen new songs.

  At the time, Chris was big into beads, incense, and psychedelic rock from the sixties—“a full-blown hippie,” says Kurt. Chris was raving about a record he had found by Shocking Blue, the Dutch band best known for the classic 1970 pop hit “Venus.” Kurt didn’t like the album, but just to humor Chris, he agreed to cover one of its songs, a pseudo-trippy wad of bubblegum called “Love Buzz.” Kurt rocked it up considerably, dispensing with all but the first verse, essentially because he was too lazy to figure out the rest of the words.

  Early on, some friction developed between Burckhard and the rest of the band. Burckhard was more into mainstream metal than what he calls “the punk shit” and didn’t quite grasp Kurt’s music, which recalled arty, dissonant bands such as early Gang of Four, Scratch Acid, and the Butthole Surfers. “I was listening more to the mainstream and Kurt was into the underground scene,” says Burckhard. “But I dug their music.” Looking back on it, it was an early indication of the broad-based appeal Kurt’s music would have—heavily influenced by punk and underground rock, it somehow translated into the mainstream.

  It was a constant battle to try to get Burckhard to practice. He lived with a divorced mother of two who was six years older than he was. She was on welfare, and when the check came in at the first of the month, she and Burckhard would go out and whoop it up—along with all the other unemployed folks in Aberdeen. “The first is wild around this town,” says Burckhard.

  “When the welfare check came in,” says Kurt, “it was impossible to get him to practice.”

  In the beginning, even Chris found it difficult to match Kurt’s zeal—he’d sometimes miss practice or claim he had something else to do, perhaps because Chris’s mother, a proud woman who had started her own successful business, didn’t like Kurt very much. “Fuck, she hated my guts,” says Kurt. “She called me trash. She hated me. I always heard her talking to Chris, saying he should find other friends, always putting him down and calling him a loser, calling all his friends losers.”

  Kurt brought Chris home a few times. Wendy remembers Chris would accidentally bang his head over and over again on the crossbeams in the house. “Oh don’t worry,” he’d say matter-of-factly, “that happens all the time.” Chris was so shy that he would do anything to avoid Wendy, an admitted “yakker.”

  Burckhard recalls that Kurt’s torn jeans and bohemian attitude set him apart from the usual Aberdeen stoner. “It was just the way he carried himself about—like he didn’t give a shit,” says Burckhard. “He didn’t care what other people thought about him.”

  Kurt was unstoppable. “I wanted to put out a record or play some shows, instead of having it fall apart like everything else for the past six years,” says Kurt. “We would play the set and then I would just start playing the songs again right away without even looking up to see if those guys wanted to play them again. I’d just whip them into shape.”

  Eventually, Kurt’s zeal won Chris over and the two became so driven that even one bad practice would get them deeply upset. “We’d get really mad,” says Kurt. “We took it very seriously.” They soon set their sights on getting a gig. “We just had to play a show,” says Kurt. “God, if we could just play a show, it would be so great.”

  At last, they got a gig—a party in Olympia. They loaded up Chris’s VW bug with equipment and rode to the gig all keyed up and excited—their first show! But they arrived to find that the party had already been shut down by the police, so they simply turned around and made the hour’s drive all the way back to Aberdeen.

  Their first real gig was a house party in nearby Raymond, a town even more isolated than Aberdeen, opening for a metal band featuring Aberdeen’s then-reigning guitar hero (“this guy knew all the Eddie Van Halen licks,” says Chris, still semi-impressed). Burckhard recalls the hosts were “these higher-class yuppie people and they had a easeful of Michelob—good beer—and Chris ended up jumping through the window, running around to the front door and repeatedly doing it. He had this fake vampire blood and he just basically made a fool out of himself, but it was fun.”

  “We had everyone so scared of us that they were in the kitchen hiding from us,” says Kurt. “We had the run of the entire living room and the rest of the house.” Just to shock the bourgeoisie, Shelli and Tracy started making out; Kurt would jump on a table mid-solo and they would caress his legs. “Of course, by the end of the evening, most of the girls at the party had talked their boyfriends into wanting to beat us up,” says Kurt. “They didn’t beat us up, but they let us know we weren’t welcome. ‘It’s time to pack up and leave now, boys.’ ”

  Most people were confused because the band didn’t play many covers. “They didn’t know what to think,” says Chris, who remembers that an adventurous few walked up to the band after the set and raved. “Who knows what happened to the people who thought it was cool,” he adds, shaking his head in pity.

  By then, their repertoire included originals like “Hairspray Queen,” “Spank Thru,” “Anorexorcist,” “Raunchola” (“That was really raunchy,” Chris explains), “Aero Zeppelin,” “Beeswax,” and “Floyd the Barber,” as well as covers such as “Love Buzz,” “White Lace and Strange” by the obscure sixties band Thunder and Roses, Flipper’s epic “Sex Bomb,” and Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” with Chris on lead vocals.

  Soon they played their first big gig—closing night of GESCCO Hall in Olympia. They took out the backseat of Chris’s Volkswagen bug again and polished off a gallon bottle of wine on the drive up from Aberdeen. There were perhaps ten people at the show, but they all tore down the yards of arty plastic sheeting on the walls and rolled it around them as the band played. It was a good beginning.

  Skid Row’s debut at GESCCO Hall. (Tracy Marander)

  Then the band got a show at the Community World Theater, a converted porno theater in Tacoma. Tracy was a friend of the proprietor, Jim May, and helped get them the gig. May charged only a couple of bucks at the door and didn’t mind if underaged kids drank beer. Bands with names like the Dicks and Jack Shit played the Community, as well as the Melvins and touring punk bands such as the Circle Jerks.

  The band didn’t have a name yet and May wanted a name to put on the marquee, so Kurt came up with the name Skid Row (the
term had originated in Seattle). None of their friends expected much from the band, but a bunch went to see the show. And surprise—the band was good—they had real songs and Kurt could really sing. And they were not above a little showmanship—for a while, Kurt would put on a pair of outrageous silver-sparkle platform shoes during “Love Buzz,” jump five feet in the air and land in a split. Skid Row soon amassed its own group of “cling-ons.”

  In April of 1987, the band played a radio show on KAOS, the station at Evergreen State College in Olympia. Kurt had made friends in Olympia from going to Melvins shows there, and one of them was a KAOS DJ. Their recorded appearance—a live midnight show—became the band’s first demo. They did remarkably full-blown versions of “Love Buzz,” “Floyd the Barber,” “Downer,” “Mexican Seafood,” “Spank Thru,” “Hairspray Queen,” and three other songs that even Kurt doesn’t remember the names of. Burckhard turned out to be a solid, hard hitter in the John Bonham vein—sort of the hard rock ancestral conscience of the band (interestingly, a Bonham maniac would one day become their best drummer). Kurt sings in a few voices—including a desperate death-metal growl and a strangulated cat-in-heat scream—that sound nothing like he does today.

  Later, they went through various names, including Ted Ed Fred, Bliss (“I was on acid one night,” Kurt explains), Throat Oyster, Pen Cap Chew, and Windowpane.

  And finally, the band settled on Nirvana, a Hindu and Buddhist concept which Webster’s defines as “the extinction of desire, passion, illusion and the empirical self and attainment of rest, truth and unchanging being.” That idea of heaven—a place, as David Byrne once put it, “where nothing ever happens”—sounds a lot like the way Kurt felt when he did heroin, but he says that wasn’t the idea. “I wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk rock name like the Angry Samoans,” says Kurt. “I wanted to have something different.” These days, Kurt isn’t so crazy about the name anymore. “It’s too esoteric and serious,” he says. And later on, he’d have to pay another band fifty thousand dollars for a name he didn’t even care for that much.

  Chris doing his best Gene Simmons imitation at the Community World Theater, spring 1987. (Tracy Marander)

  Kurt hadn’t paid rent on the little shack for several months and was being evicted. Tracy asked if he’d like to move into her place in Olympia, and Kurt agreed. It was convenient because Chris and Shelli had decided to move to Tacoma and it was a lot easier to keep the band together if Kurt moved, too. Tacoma was out of the question for Kurt, being, as he describes it, “a more violent Aberdeen.” Besides, Olympia was a cool college town.

  In the fall of 1987, Kurt moved into Tracy’s tiny studio apartment at 114 North Pear Street in Olympia (a “shoe box,” according to Kurt), which they rented for 137 dollars a month, including electricity, hot water, and garbage pickup. They stayed there a little over a year, then moved to a small one-bedroom in the same building.

  Kurt had escaped from Aberdeen. Tracy remembers that shortly after Kurt moved in with her, he told her that while she was away at work, he had had a meal of cream cheese and crab, and that he felt very cultured sitting in Olympia on a real hardwood floor eating such fancy food.

  For about a month that summer, Chris and Shelli lived there during the week, too, to avoid the two-hour commute to their jobs, meaning that four people were now crammed into the little studio apartment. Shelli and Tracy both worked the graveyard shift at the Boeing cafeteria, while Chris worked in Tacoma making six dollars an hour as an industrial painter. Kurt would sleep at night and hang out at the house by day. Chris and Shelli would go back to their place in Hoquiam on the weekends.

  The four spent lots of time together, partying or just hanging out at the apartment watching TV or going out tripping. “The acid wasn’t what the Beatles took,” Chris recalls. “It was more speedy, dirty acid … We’d just go wild, raging all night long.”

  Kurt describes the apartment as “a curiosity shop.” Tracy would take Kurt thrift shopping every weekend and come back with carloads of kitsch. “You couldn’t even move in that place,” he says. The apartment was completely decorated with thrift purchases, including a huge Aerosmith poster on the living room wall and a bunch of transparent plastic anatomical models. The walls were lined with Kurt’s paintings, cutouts from the Weekly World News and the National Enquirer, and strangely adulterated religious pictures. Always lurking around was one of Kurt’s most prized possessions—Chim-Chim, his plastic monkey.

  Chris and Shelli fall off the veggie wagon at their Tacoma home in the fall of 1990. (© Ian T. Tilton)

  There were animals everywhere—three cats, two rabbits, some pet rats, and a bunch of turtles. It was as “odorous” as the shack back in Aberdeen. “Rat piss hell” is Kurt’s succinct description. By chance, an Olympia punk rock scenester by the name of Bruce Pavitt stopped by one day and one of the pet rats bit him on the finger (“He screamed like a woman,” Tracy says with a giggle). Pavitt would go on to found Sub Pop Records, Nirvana’s first label.

  As usual, Kurt stayed indoors, sometimes not venturing outside for weeks at a time, indulging in what he calls his “little art world fantasy.” He didn’t particularly take advantage of Olympia’s cultural scene, but it was nice to know it was there. And he didn’t have to worry about having to deal with doltish stoners and rednecks. He let his hair grow long and concentrated on his art.

  Kurt began collecting and making dolls. It was the start of a long obsession that continues still. He found a type of clay that turned all sorts of strange colors when it was baked and he made dolls out of it—like the doll on the cover of Incesticide, but much more intricate and bizarre. He’d find baby dolls, cover them with clay and bake them in the oven until they looked like ancient artifacts. He also collected antique baby dolls, especially eerily lifelike ones.

  Once, when Kurt was working at the resort hotel, he had gone into a room where a gynecologist was staying and lifted a book full of pictures of diseased vaginas. He cut them out and combined them into a collage with pictures of pieces of meat and an illustration of Kiss and put it on the refrigerator door.

  Kurt went through a brief death rock phase (Black Sabbath—not Bauhaus) and started constructing nativity scenes full of decayed bodies, skeletons, and demons.

  He’d make psychedelic tapes that strung together Christian records, political speeches, commercials, and music that was slowed down or speeded up. He made collages, but mostly, he painted. His paintings had lots of weird distended figures or fetuses set in thorny landscapes. It’s hard not to look at those paintings as autobiographical—helpless children set adrift in hostile worlds.

  Kurt also sculpted. “He would make these incredibly beautiful, intricate sculptures out of weird shit he’d buy at thrift stores,” says Slim Moon. “Little invisible man things and figurines. It would be this weird mixture of pop culture artifacts that you’d get from thrift stores, mixed up with actual clay sculpture of these tortured figures. He’d make a huge four-foot by four-foot diorama or he’d make it inside an aquarium and he’d spend weeks on it and anybody who came over would be totally amazed at what a great sculptor he was. We used to try to talk him into getting a show at the Smithfield [cafe] and he’d say no and he’d tear it all down. You’d go over the next day and it would be all gone and he’d be starting on a new one.”

  Necessity is the mother of invention, which is how Kurt came up with one of his favorite decorations. “I have this weird magnetic attraction to flies,” says Kurt. “Or flies attract to me, actually. I’d wake up in the morning and these flies would keep me awake for hours, buzzing and bouncing off my face. They’d just attack me and this has happened over and over again in my life.” Kurt hung up dozens and dozens of fly strips all over the apartment and they soon collected all kinds of dead insects.

  Kurt insists that his income from the band paid the meager rent, but occasionally, Tracy would ask him to get a job and Kurt would offer to move out and live in
his car, which was enough to keep her from asking again for a while. It seemed as if Tracy was as much Kurt’s patron as she was his lover.

  Kurt insists he was pulling his weight, partly because of something unusual that was happening in Seattle. For a few years before Nirvana arrived, antimaterialistic Seattle punk bands had allowed themselves to be fleeced by the local clubs. But by this time, Seattle musicians had informally united and made it known that they wouldn’t play for peanuts anymore. The emerging Seattle record label Sub Pop played a big part in making sure that a lot of their artists got paid well for live gigs. Kurt remembers playing an early show at the Vogue to three hundred people and the band pulling in six hundred dollars, a lot of money even now.

  But in order to save up enough money to record a proper demo tape, that fall he took a job at a janitorial company for four bucks an hour. He would ride around town in a cramped van with two “co-workers from hell,” as Kurt puts it, “worse than your typical brain-dead Aberdonian.” Typically, his workmates would down a couple of sixes each in the course of a night’s work while they called Kurt a fag and jostled him around the van. Several of their clients were doctors and dentists, and they would show Kurt how to steal pills and inhale nitrous oxide without anyone finding out.

  Dylan Carlson and Slim Moon eventually moved in next door. Since Kurt worked at night and Carlson was unemployed, they hung out a lot, sharing their disdain for the Calvinists (“I think Kurt and I were the only ones not throwing a yo-yo that summer,” cracks Carlson). They’d hang up strings of tacky lamps from the fifties (another thrift store purchase) and have barbecues in the backyard. Sometimes Chris would come over and they’d inevitably break out a bottle of red wine and start to act up. The police showed up one time after the three attacked an abandoned Cadillac with some lawn chairs.

  Still, Kurt was basically a recluse, and remained so for virtually the entire four years he lived in Olympia. “He was like a hermit in a cave,” says Slim Moon. “That was the way we perceived him—the mad hermit who would sit there and play his guitar for twelve hours a day and never leave his house except to go on tour.”