Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  Although Kurt was hardly outgoing, he was rather popular around town. He’d go to parties and sit down somewhere and just smile quietly. To most of the Olympia scenesters, he was a blank slate who was whatever they wanted him to be. They liked Kurt, but they really couldn’t figure out why, and that mystery seemed to suffuse his music as well.

  After a while, Kurt was awarded his own janitorial route, but he was far from a model worker. He’d go off in the van to the first building on his route, throw away a few papers here and there, and then go home and nap. Toward the end of his shift, he’d go to a few more places and do the same slipshod job. After eight months of that, he was fired.

  Kurt admits he’s always been lazy, but he says his dismal employment record doesn’t stem from mere lassitude. “I’ve always had this terrible relationship with co-workers,” he says. “I just cannot get along with average people. They just get on my nerves so bad, I just cannot ignore them at all. I have to confront them and tell them that I hate their guts.”

  Still, Kurt had learned something from his workmates: how to steal drugs. His favorites—when he could get them—were codeine and Vicodin, an opiate-derived painkiller. He smoked pot and did heroin again a few times. He tried cocaine and speed but didn’t like them. “I felt too confident and too sure of myself,” he says. “Just too sociable.”

  Around this time, he first experienced a terrible, piercing pain in his stomach. “It’s burning, nauseous, like the worst stomach flu you can imagine,” Kurt says. “You can feel it throbbing like you have a heart in your stomach and it just hurts really bad. I can just feel it being all raw and red. It mostly just hurts when I eat. About halfway through a meal and once it gets up to a certain area, right where it’s inflamed and red, once it starts hitting there it starts hurting because the food sits on it and it burns. It’s probably one of the worst pains I’ve ever felt.” The condition has dominated Kurt’s life—and baffled even the most distinguished specialists—ever since.

  Meanwhile, Aaron Burckhard kept promising to get a new pair of drums, but never did and had trouble showing up for practice, preferring instead to go out partying with his buddies. “They wanted to practice every night,” says Burckhard. “Every night. I’m like, give me a break. I didn’t show up a couple of times and they got kind of pissed off.” For Burckhard, the band was just for fun—“We’re not going to make no money off it or anything, you know?”

  Aaron Burckhard. (Photo courtesy Aaron Burckhard)

  There may have been some basic incompatibility, too. Although Burckhard now says he’s a punk rock fan, he wasn’t as committed to it as Kurt and Chris were. “I’m not that much into that kind of scene,” Burckhard admits, “where your hair is all different colors and whatnot.”

  By now, Chris and Shelli were in Tacoma and Kurt was in Olympia, but Burckhard didn’t move—his girlfriend was staying in Aberdeen and he himself had hopes of becoming a full manager at the Burger King. Ironically, his cousin married the daughter of the owner of the franchise, and Burckhard never got past production manager. They temporarily lost touch with Burckhard.

  During this time Kurt and Chris decided to practice with Dale Crover with the intention of recording a demo. It was a way of keeping the band alive. They practiced with Crover three weekends in a row, then went up to Reciprocal Recording in Seattle and recorded a demo on January 23, 1988. “After the demo tape was recorded,” Kurt recalls, “we realized that it was actually good music and there was something special about it so we took it a lot more seriously.”

  Kurt says he happened to choose the most happening studio in Seattle simply by comparison shopping in the Seattle Rocket, a free music paper that remains the house organ of the Seattle scene. It was one of the cheapest studios in town, which is why it was the hottest studio in town. But others insist that Kurt chose Reciprocal because that was where his favorite new record, the Screaming Life EP by Soundgarden, had been recorded for the fledgling Seattle indie label, Sub Pop. “Kurt really wanted to record there because he really liked the sound of the Soundgarden record,” says Crover, who set up the studio time. “He was really into it that summer, I remember.” Kurt strenuously denies this. At any rate, they were scheduled to work with another engineer, but at the last minute Jack Endino stepped in, probably because he wanted to work with Crover, who was already known as an excellent drummer.

  Endino, a former Navy engineer, had already become the godfather of the Seattle scene. By recording (he never “produced”—that wasn’t punk rock) countless bands for very little money, he fostered the growing scene and made Sub Pop a viable financial proposition. Endino’s easygoing, avuncular personal style and rip-roaring sound made him a favorite with the young, raw bands from the area. He founded Reciprocal Recording, a studio in the Ballard section of Seattle, with Chris Hanszek, who had also produced the Deep Six compilation.

  Reciprocal was as casual as a band practice room—the paint peeled off the particle-board walls, there were cigarette burns all over every horizontal surface, and it didn’t matter a bit if you spilled your beer on the carpet. There are few bands in Seattle who haven’t seen the inside of Reciprocal (or its latest incarnation, Word of Mouth).

  Chris’s friend Dwight Covey drove the band and their equipment up to Seattle in his beat-up Chevy camper, complete with working wood stove.

  After Chris laid down his parts, he decided to party with Dwight and Dwight’s son, Guy. “He had this two-paper bomber with all bud and we smoked it in the bathroom,” says Chris. “I got so stoned that I had to go outside.” They sat in the camper and lit the fire while Kurt did his vocals.

  The band recorded and mixed ten songs in six hours (Endino charged them for only five). All the tracks were basically cut live, and in one or two takes. Kurt did all the vocals in one take. By three in the afternoon, they had finished all the recording. “Floyd the Barber,” “Paper Cuts,” and “Downer” all wound up on Bleach. Two others have never been released: “If You Must” and “Pen Cap Chew,” which had a fade ending because the tape ran out. A version of “Spank Thru” was later rerecorded with Chad Channing on drums and released on Sub Pop 200. The remaining four tunes—“Beeswax,” “Mexican Seafood,” “Hairspray Queen,” and “Aero Zeppelin”—can be found on Incesticide. Chris had been laid off, so Kurt paid the $152.44 for the recording with money he made as a janitor.

  Crover had arranged a show for them that night in Tacoma at the Community World Theater. They didn’t have a band name again, so Crover suggested Ted Ed Fred, his nickname for Greg Hokanson’s mom’s boyfriend at the time. Chris finally came down from the effects of the two-paper bomber just before show time.

  An early set list. Note the Led Zeppelin and Creedence Clearwater Revival covers on the reserve list.

  Kurt was really happy with the demo. Tracy remembers him sitting in her car holding on to the finished tape, with a huge smile on his face. Endino liked the tape, too, so he made a mix for himself that night and gave a cassette to Jonathan Poneman, who had just released the Soundgarden EP on Sub Pop, which had been founded by his partner, Bruce Pavitt, a few months earlier. There weren’t that many Seattle bands that Poneman, a former club booker, didn’t already know about, but like Endino says, “These guys were from Aberdeen.”

  Poneman was looking for more bands to fill out Sub Pop’s roster, so he asked Endino if he’d heard anything good lately. Endino replied, “Well, there was this one guy who came in—I don’t really know what to make of it, to tell you the truth. This guy’s got a really amazing voice, he came in with Dale Crover. I don’t know what to make of it, but his voice has a lot of power. And he looks a lot like an auto mechanic.”

  Poneman loved the tape. “I was just thoroughly blown away by the guy’s voice,” he says. “It wasn’t like I was listening to any one song that was blowing me away, but at the time, the songs were kind of secondary to the whole feel. The band obviously had a lot of raw power. I just remember hearing that tape and going, ‘Oh my God.’ ”


  Poneman excitedly brought the demo in to Muzak, the background music company, where just about anybody who was anybody in the Seattle scene worked at menial jobs like cleaning tape cartridge boxes or duplicating tapes. Green River’s Mark Arm (now of Mudhoney), Room Nine’s Ron Rudzitis (now of Love Battery), Tad Doyle (an Idaho transplant who would soon lead the band TAD), Chris Pugh of Swallow, Grant Eckman from the Walkabouts, and Bruce Pavitt all worked at Muzak, making it a place where ideas and opinions about rock and roll were developed and discussed. “If anyone wants to get rich,” Poneman announced, “this band is looking for a drummer.”

  But the jukebox jury didn’t like it. The music relied too heavily on tortured, complex arrangements for the Muzak bunch, who were getting into more straight-ahead rock such as early Wipers, Cosmic Psychos, and the Stooges. But the guy did have a great voice. On the other hand, the Muzak crowd might not have liked it no matter what. “Everybody wanted their closest friends to be the biggest stars,” says Pavitt, “and [Nirvana] was from out of town so people were hedging their bets a little bit.” Poneman remembers Mark Arm saying the tape sounded like Skin Yard, “but not as good.” “Basically people were pretty much focused on their clique,” says Pavitt, “and the music that was coming out of that clique.”

  Pavitt thought it was too “rock”—too much heavy metal and not enough underground. Poneman and Pavitt caught a show at the Central Tavern—eight on a Sunday night—that was sparsely attended, even though hundreds of people now claim to have been there. The band was rough but some of the material was very good. Pavitt agreed the band had potential. Poneman remembers Kurt threw up backstage before the show.

  “I wasn’t completely swept over by the band,” Pavitt admits. “I did not see an interesting musical angle with Nirvana.” But Poneman loved the music, and Pavitt, a former journalist, began looking for a hook with which to sell the band to the music press—small indie labels depend on the media to do their promotion for them. Then Pavitt hit on something.

  “The more I spent time thinking about who they were and what was going on in Seattle,” says Pavitt, “it really started to fit in with this Tad thing—the butcher from Idaho—the whole real genuine working class—I hate to use the phrase ‘white trash’—something not contrived that had a more grassroots or populist feel.” Up until then (and to a large extent ever since), independent music was dominated by the East Coast circuit of tip sheets, fanzines, radio stations, and clubs. Instead of the pointy-headed college/art school cabal, “We were trying to work with people who were intelligent and creative but weren’t necessarily in college,” says Pavitt. “And the more I got to know Kurt, they really seemed to fit that picture as well as Tad.”

  When Kurt first moved in with Tracy in Olympia, he complained that he was shunned in Seattle because he wasn’t part of a clique. A year later, he didn’t want to go to shows because so many people wanted to talk to him. They had all heard the demo tape. Endino would make tapes for his friends, who would make copies for their friends.

  Tracy Marander, February 1989. (© 1993 by Alice Wheeler)

  Kurt dubbed off a bunch of cassettes and sent them to every indie label he could think of, including SST in Lawndale, California, and San Francisco’s Alternative Tentacles. But the label he really wanted to be on was Chicago’s Touch & Go—home of some of Kurt’s favorite bands: Scratch Acid, Big Black, and the Butthole Surfers. He sent about twenty copies to the label, always accompanied by letters and “little gifts,” which ranged from little toys and handfuls of confetti to a used condom filled with plastic ants or a piece of paper encrusted with boogers (a stunt which sounds suspiciously similar to what Big Black did with their Lungs EP). No one, especially Touch & Go, called back.

  He didn’t send a tape to Sub Pop because he barely knew it existed. Not a moment too soon, Poneman called Kurt to tell him he liked the tape. Kurt figured Poneman was cool because he was associated with Soundgarden, his favorite band at the time. They arranged a meeting at the Café Roma on Broadway in Seattle.

  Kurt arrived first with Tracy. Tracy was vaguely suspicious and wary of the whole thing—she didn’t like the way Poneman kept his hands jammed in the pockets of his long trench coat, or the way he kept nervously sweeping his eyes around the room. “It looked like the police were after him,” she recalls.

  Poneman remembers Kurt as being “very timid, very respectful” and “a very nice, gentle guy.” Chris, who came in soon after Kurt and Tracy, was a different story. Chris was nervous about the meeting and had polished off a few Olde English forty-ouncers on the way up to Seattle. By the time they arrived, he was quite drunk and was swigging from yet another forty-ouncer that he kept under the cafe table. Throughout the meeting, he would glare at Poneman and insult him, burping loudly and occasionally turning around to bellow at the other customers—“What the fuck are you people looking at? Hey! Hey!” Kurt remembers it as “one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.”

  Poneman did his best to ignore Chris, and somehow managed to convey the idea that he wanted to put out a Nirvana single in the near future.

  Early 1988 was a fallow period for the Seattle scene. Key bands such as the Melvins, Green River, and Feast were either on hiatus or had broken up. Bands such as Tad, Mudhoney, and Mother Love Bone were just getting started. And so was Sub Pop Records.

  Sub Pop began as a fanzine written by Bruce Pavitt, a Chicago transplant who studied punk rock at the free-thinking Evergreen State College in Olympia. Pavitt soon began making tape compilations which highlighted regional music scenes in the United States and eventually spotlighted Seattle in his first vinyl release, Sub Pop 100. In 1987, he released Dry as a Bone by Green River, a Seattle band that dared mix the antithetical sounds of metal and punk (the band later splintered into Mudhoney and Pearl Jam). Their mutual friend Kim Thayil of Soundgarden introduced Pavitt to Jonathan Poneman, a radio DJ and promoter of rock shows in Seattle. They released Soundgarden’s Screaming Life LP in 1988.

  Canny, articulate, and blessed with good ears, Pavitt and Poneman had a flair for self-promotion, and having closely studied the successes and failures of previous indie labels, rapidly established both the Seattle scene in general and Sub Pop in particular as the coolest thing in indie rock. There were other labels in town, including Popllama (who had the Young Fresh Fellows), but Sub Pop had the promotional moxie. On most of the front covers, Pavitt’s friend Michael Lavine took arty, polished studio photographs that created the impression that the label had shelled out big bucks for a fancy photographer. And on the inside and back covers, Charles Peterson created Sub Pop’s defining images—grainy, blurry black-and-white shots that often featured more of the audience than the band. Peterson would fearlessly wade deep into the mosh pit, capturing all the violent motion—all sweat, hair, and bare male chests.

  An interesting new band like Nirvana was big news. Kurt’s guitar style was jagged, yet had an undeniable metal streak. The riffs were clever. The fact that they could sound so good in so little time amazed Endino, who’d recorded many bands already. Even back then, Kurt was setting his melodies in an unusual way against the rhythms and chord changes. Instead of simply following the guitars, he invented almost contrapuntal melody lines. But what put the band over the top were Kurt’s vocals—somehow, he was able to scream on pitch, as well as sing in a very accessible and attractive way.

  They had crappy equipment and terrible-sounding amps. For a long time, they had to put a two-by-four under Chris’s bass cabinet because he was missing a wheel (the problem was remedied only recently).

  By that point—early 1988—Crover had left to move to San Francisco with Osborne, but not before recommending Dave Foster from Aberdeen to be his replacement. Foster played bass with Crover in a Melvins satellite band, but was also a fine drummer. Kurt and Chris knew they didn’t want Foster in the band permanently—with his souped-up pickup truck and his mustache, Foster was too mainstream, too macho for Kurt and Chris. Still, they played him the Crover demo a
nd Foster seemed to like it.

  “They taught me a lot as far as playing,” says Foster, who had studied jazz drums in high school. “They just said forget all that shit and just hit ’em hard. That and cutting the size of my drum set in half. When I got in that band, I had a twelve-piece set, and when I got out, I had a six-piece.”

  They rehearsed in the front room of Chris and Shelli’s new house on Pearl Avenue in Tacoma, near the Tacoma Zoo.

  The first party they played was packed with Greeners and hippies and punkers. Kurt was wearing his usual cutoff denim jacket with his plastic monkey Chim-Chim glued to the shoulder and a cut-out section of a Woolworth’s tapestry of the Last Supper on the back, while Foster was dressed in his usual Aberdeen metal dude clothes. During their set, a punker grabbed the microphone and said, “Gosh, drummers from Aberdeen are sure weird looking!” “I felt out of place,” says Foster, “but I was into what they were doing. I loved to play their music.”

  Dave Foster, Kurt, and Chris. (© 1993 by Rich Hansen)

  Poneman got them their first show in Seattle in early 1988 at the Vogue. It was Sub Pop Sunday. Charles Peterson, a key Seattle tastemaker, recalls there were about twenty people there, even though KCMU was playing “Floyd the Barber” regularly. Still, there was a buzz on the band, which reportedly sounded a lot like Blue Cheer. People like Mark Arm were there, scrutinizing this much-ballyhooed new band from the sticks. Kurt later commented that he thought they should have held up scorecards after every song.

  The band played sloppily and the malfunctioning P.A. didn’t help matters. Peterson, for one, was not impressed with the band’s nearly nonexistent stage presence. “They were not particularly engaging,” agrees Poneman. And the songs sounded too much like the Melvins. Peterson took Poneman aside and said, “Jonathan, are you sure you want to sign these guys?”