Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  Once they got back from the tour, Chris and Shelli decided to get married and the band began preparing to record material for an EP.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THESE GUYS ARE GOING TO BE BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES!

  The band recorded the Blew EP in late summer of 1989 at the relatively upscale Music Source on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, a twenty-four-track studio that specialized in ad jingles and movie soundtrack work. The producer was Steve Fisk. Despite that show in Ellensburg with Jason’s out-of-sync hair, Fisk changed his mind about Nirvana after Bruce Pavitt sent him a copy of Bleach. “It was obvious,” says Fisk, “that it was a very good band.”

  The band arrived with their instruments in tatters. Fisk recalls Chad and his mammoth North kit. “The smallest guy in the band had the biggest, stupidest drum set in the Northwest,” says Fisk. “The kick drum was held together by miles and miles of duct tape because the bass had been used as a hatchet to chop the kick drum in half.” The Blew sessions were the last appearance, recorded or otherwise, of Chad’s North drums.

  The rest of the hand’s equipment was in sad shape, too. Chris’s bass had done a lot of aerial work, and had obviously suffered a few too many crash landings. The pickups were nearly shot and one of his two speakers was almost completely destroyed; the other one was completely destroyed. They spent a lot of time trying to get everything to sound good, tripling up the guitars. (Kurt was unsatisfied with the recording and later tried to rerecord some of the tracks with their soundman, Craig Montgomery, but they didn’t turn out well, either.) “They wanted a Top 40 drum sound,” says Fisk. “They were saying that out loud. They knew they were not doing a Top 40 song, but they really liked the idea of having the snare completely jacked up.”

  They recorded “Even in His Youth,” the unreleased “Token Eastern Song,” an electric version of “Polly” that went unfinished, “Stain,” and “Been a Son.” Only the last two made it onto the EP, which also included the title track and “Love Buzz,” both culled from Bleach.

  The instantly catchy two-minute wonder “Been a Son” describes the plight of a girl whose parents would have preferred a boy. “She should have died when she was born,” Kurt sings, his vocal draped in most un-Sub Pop-like harmonies (“Total Lennon harmonies, right out of Rubber Soul,” raves Fisk). Grunge, pop, and feelings of inferiority also merge on “Stain.” Self-hatred never sounded so catchy—it’s easy to miss the fact that the song is simply the same verse repeated three times. Although a different, peppier version of “Been A Son” (minus Chris’s tasty bass solo) wound up on Incesticide, the version of “Stain” hails from the Fisk sessions.

  Backstage pass from TAD/Nirvana European tour.

  TAD and Nirvana, That’s Tad Doyle to Chris’s right, (© Ian T. Tilton)

  The hypnotic “Token Eastern Song” was a reaction to numerous critical observations that the band often favored Eastern modes, as in “Love Buzz.” The back cover shot of the EP, a strangely desolate shot of a doctor’s examination table, was taken by Tracy in her gynecologist’s office shortly after an examination.

  Then came the European tour with TAD. The two bands left Seattle for the first gig, in Newcastle, England, on October 20, 1989. Eleven guys—including the gigantic, three-hundred-pound-plus Tad Doyle and all six feet and seven inches of Chris—were crammed into a teeny Fiat van. At first, it was all laughter and smiles, but then little things began to get on people’s nerves—some of the guys on the bus smoked, and they weren’t always considerate of the guys who didn’t. A kind of delirium swept through the van. One of the guys bought some dirty magazines on Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn. One was a coprophiliac’s magazine which got passed around the bus, “Shit on me!” the guy would bellow over and over, collapsing in laughter. But for Kurt and a few others, the joke got old real fast.

  They played thirty-six shows in forty-two days. Nobody was eating very well and the pace was grueling. It was hard to sleep sitting up in the fiendishly uncomfortable seats. Nirvana was frustrated by their perennially cruddy equipment, hobbled further by the fact that they were smashing it to bits every night and then repairing it on the bus the next day. To make matters worse, the tour manager usually insisted on going straight to the venue when they arrived in town, meaning that the bands couldn’t catch some sleep in their hotel room while awaiting their turn to do soundcheck. Instead, they waited around in the club for hours—cold, hungry, and tired—while the P.A. system was constructed.

  And Doyle had chronic stomach problems. At least once a day, he would have to get the driver to stop on the highway while he got out to throw up. Everyone on the bus would watch and do their own imitations of Doyle’s hurling style. “He was definitely the puke machine,” Chad recalls. “A never-ending vomitron.”

  Although he didn’t smoke hash like most of the other guys on the bus, Kurt got very withdrawn and would react to bad situations either by drinking or retreating behind a wall of sleep. “I used to really enjoy sleep because I could just get away from pain that way,” Kurt says. “I used to sleep constantly. On tour, every time we got in the van, I’d fall asleep. Every time we got to a club and we were waiting for soundcheck, we would sleep. Either I’d go back to the hotel and sleep or stay at the club and sleep until right before we went on stage so I didn’t have to be in reality.”

  Chris was constantly drunk and/or stoned, while Chad, Chris claims, “was kind of out of his mind. He was talking in weird voices and stuff.” For his part, Chad says he’s always talked to himself—once, a waitress in the restaurant where he worked caught him in the walk-in refrigerator talking to a lemon. And he insists that of all the people on the tour, he had the best time—his nomadic childhood was perfect training for touring.

  The band was unprepared for the adulation they received in Europe. Although the U.K. press raved about Nirvana, the band had no idea that they had so many fans over there—they simply weren’t getting any sales reports from their U.K. label. Virtually every show was sold out; the venues were packed, there were lines around the block.

  “That was a crazy tour,” says Chris with some understatement. During the first gig, Chris slammed his new bass on the stage out of frustration with a malfunctioning amp. The neck snapped off and went right through one of the speakers in Kurt’s rented Twin Reverb amp. It went downhill from there.

  They played Berlin the day after the wall came down. Kurt smashed his guitar six songs into the set and walked off. “I’m kind of glad he did,” says Chris. “I was really, really, really stoned.”

  Kurt sent Tracy lots of postcards. There was one where he sketched a picture of a typical Italian toilet. “There was no water,” Tracy says, “so there’s just a toilet with a big stinky pile of shit.” Another time he wrote “I love you” over and over again on a postcard and signed his name.

  The way Poneman sees it, that tour was the beginning of the end of both bands’ relationships with Sub Pop (TAD eventually signed to WEA-distributed Mechanic Records in 1992). In the midst of one of their (in)famous promotional schmooze tours, Poneman and Pavitt turned up at a show in Rome toward the end of the tour. In retrospect, Poneman realized the message that their arrival sent. “There’s TAD and Nirvana riding around in this crummy little van,” says Poneman, “and here come the moguls flying in to Rome. We thought that we were lending emotional support, but from their perspective, I can see them thinking, ‘These arrogant sons of bitches … We don’t have any money, we’re barely eating, we’re riding around in this cramped van, we’ve got this fat lead singer who’s throwing up all over the place, and you’ve got a crazy drunk bass player, and here come the moguls.’ ”

  Not coincidentally, the Rome show was the nadir of the tour. The P.A. was terrible and so was the rented gear. Disgusted with the sound, the bad food, the cramped bus, the low pay, and the frenetic schedule, Kurt smashed his guitar four or five songs into the set (“Spank Thru”), walked off stage, and climbed onto a speaker stack. “He had a nervous breakdown onstage,” says Pa
vitt. “He was just going to jump off. The bouncers were freaking out and everybody was just begging him to come down. And he was ‘No, no, I’m just going to dive.’ He had really reached his limit … People literally saw a guy wig out in front of them who could break his neck if he didn’t get it together.”

  When the P.A. stack started to sway, Kurt clambered through the rafters, screaming at the audience the whole way until he reached the balcony, where he threatened to throw down a chair until someone took it away from him. He wound up backstage, where someone from the venue was arguing with their tour manager over whether Kurt had broken some microphones. Kurt grabbed both mikes, flung them to the ground, and began stomping on them. “Now they’re broken,” he said, and walked away. Then he told everyone in the entourage that he was quitting and he was going home, then put his hood over his head and burst into tears. Poneman took him out for some air.

  “I was walking around the club with him,” Poneman recalls, “and he was saying, ‘I just want to go home, I don’t want to play for these people, these people are fucking idiots, they’re stupid, they expect me to go up there and perform like a trained animal. I don’t respect them. I want to be with my girlfriend and I want to quit music. This is not what I’m about.’ ” Poneman assured him that the next time the band came to Europe, conditions would be far better.

  According to Kurt, the first words out of Poneman’s mouth were, “Well, now that you’re quitting Nirvana, we’d still be interested in you as a solo artist.”

  Chris and Chad also quit the band for a moment, but they all reconsidered and played the final two weeks of the tour.

  The next day, they took a train to Switzerland and while Kurt was asleep, his shoes, his wallet, and most importantly, his passport were all stolen. “I don’t think I have ever seen another human being look as absolutely miserable as Kurt Cobain did at that moment,” says Poneman. He somehow got into Switzerland and got a new passport at the American Embassy. Then they went to a music store in Geneva and Poneman bought Kurt a new guitar.

  And then Kurt got so sick that they had to cancel a show. “He just needed some time off,” says Chris. “I had a crutch—I had booze and hash, but he was straight.” Chad, meanwhile, exhibited an almost Buddha-like serenity. No one could tell whether he was some sort of spiritual savant or just oblivious.

  Nirvana and TAD met up with the Mudhoney tour for the final gig on December 3 at the Astoria in London, dubbed the Lame Festival. Nirvana had one lousy guitar left, and it kept cutting out throughout the set and Kurt had to keep stopping to fix it. “Nirvana’s set was pretty fucked up,” says Mudhoney drummer Danny Peters. Chris was so angry that he swung his bass by the strap around his head; eventually, the strap snapped; the guitar flew straight at Danny Peters’s head and he only barely managed to bat it out of the way.

  “It stunk,” is Chris’s review of the show. “On a scale of one to ten, that was a zero.” The Melody Maker reviewer at the concert that night agreed. “It all falls apart when the lanky, rubberlegged, froglike bassist starts making a jerk of himself,” went the review. “He’ll have to go.

  “As yet, I’m unmoved,” the review concluded.

  Others remember the show far more fondly. Bruce Pavitt rates the show as one of the best Nirvana has ever done, while Jonathan Poneman insists, “To this day, it’s one of the proudest moments in my life.” Journalist Keith Cameron, then with the now defunct U.K. music weekly Sounds recalls it this way: “It was one of these things where the hall is maybe half full when they started, but by the time they finished, everyone in the hall was listening and getting into this band,” he says. “I just ran down the front and freaked out. It was the most amazing band I’d ever seen.

  “What impressed me,” Cameron continues, “was the complete and utter tension that existed between the three people on stage. They thrived upon it. It was uncomfortable watching them sometimes. It was exhilarating and it was exciting because that was the nature of the music but there was also an almost palpable sense of danger, that this whole thing could just fall apart any second but it wasn’t. And it was maintained throughout the set—there was never any relaxation from the first note to the last.”

  At the end of the set, Kurt threw his guitar at Chris, who then smashed it with his bass as if he were hitting a baseball. Kurt’s guitar completely disintegrated. “You see bands smash their equipment and it’s not a revelation,” says Cameron, “but somehow with them, I’d never seen it done with any purpose before. It seemed the perfect way to end that show. You sort of wondered whether Kurt meant to hit Chris with his guitar or was that how they planned it. You got the impression that it wasn’t planned at all. That was what was so good about it—you got the impression that they were learning this for the first time and they were as much in the dark as anyone, but it was just perfect.”

  During their visit to London, Nirvana did a session for Radio One DJ John Peel including “Love Buzz,” “About a Girl,” “Polly,” and “Spank Thru.”

  The British press bad really started rolling in by this time, and the articles fed on the idea that the band came from rural, white-trash America. “They’re a little bit gross and a little bit awesome,” went one profile. “What else would you be if you grew up in the backwoods redneck helltown of Aberdeen …” Sub Pop played it up for all it was worth. “You’ve got the three-hundred-pound butcher hanging out with Kurt the trailer-trash kid and you’ve got the moguls—we’d be posing in suits and ties—adding a little theater,” says Bruce Pavitt. “People got caught up in it.”

  Kurt didn’t like getting painted as some sort of idiot savant yokel one bit. “To be thought of as this stump-dumb rocker dude from Aberdeen who just blindly found his way up to Seattle and this hip label,” says Kurt, “it just felt degrading to be thought of as someone like that when that was something I was fighting against all my life.

  “They were totally manipulating people in trying to put this package together,” says Kurt of Pavitt and Poneman. “They’ve gotten so much credit for being these geniuses, these masterminds behind this whole thing when it really had nothing to do with them. It really didn’t. It had more to do with Charles Peterson’s fuzzy pictures than it did with their attempts at making sure we appeared stupid in interviews. I always resented them for that.”

  And Kurt found Pavitt’s professed populism far more condescending than brilliant. “It was just obvious that he thought of himself as an educated white upper-middle-class punk rocker who knows everything and I’m just this idiot from Aberdeen,” Kurt says. “That was always something that we sensed and we totally resented him for it.” They felt similarly about Poneman, too.

  To be fair, Pavitt and Poneman had seized on a bright idea—that art and culture didn’t have to be developed and transmitted solely from the media centers of New York and Los Angeles. The indie labels had proved that people in places like Minneapolis and Chicago and Seattle had just as much to say as any New York City media creature. For Poneman and Pavitt, finding someone from a place like Aberdeen who made valid art was like hitting the jackpot. “They thrived on that,” Kurt says. “They were excited about it. They’d found these redneck kids from a coastal town that they could exploit, or at least use their image to their benefit. They didn’t really want to find out if we were smarter than they wanted us to be, because that would ruin everything.”

  Kurt might gripe a lot about Sub Pop, but he’ll gladly acknowledge the crucial role the label, and Jonathan Poneman in particular, played in their career. “Jonathan was really, really supportive of us from the very beginning,” Kurt says. “He wanted us to rule the world.”

  After the tour, Kurt and Chad went home, while Chris and Shelli flew to what was still called Yugoslavia to see Chris’s father.

  Chris and Shelli got married soon after they got back home to Tacoma, on December 30, 1989. The ceremony, which was conducted by a woman Shelli knew from work, took place in the couple’s Tacoma apartment. It was a small apartment and it was packed
. Besides Chris’s mom and Shelli’s mother and stepfather, there were Kurt and Tracy, Dan Peters, most of the guys from TAD, old friends and some neighbors. Matt Lukin was Chris’s best man. “They got married,” says Lukin, “and then everybody got drunk,” The reception was distinguished by an inebriated three-way wrestling match between Chris, Kurt Danielson, and Tad.

  Kurt at the HUB Ballroom, January 1990. (© Charles Peterson)

  Kurt at Raji’s in Los Angeles, February 1990. (© Charles Peterson)

  After a brief California tour and some local gigs, the band went out on a U.S. tour, Chad’s last. They each picked up Pixelvision toy video cameras and shot movies in the van to pass the time. They hired a U-Haul trailer—“It was a total advancement in touring technology,” says Chris—and put a loveseat in the back. It was a big step for the band—now they had the whole van to themselves. They also had a T-shirt that reproduced John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s infamous nude Two Virgins album cover, except sticking Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman’s faces on the bodies. They headlined at clubs with a few hundred capacity, making a few hundred dollars a night.

  They played all the same clubs they used to play, except now they had a tour manager, a roadie, and soundman Craig Montgomery working for them full time. At first, the easygoing Montgomery was a little rattled by all the guitar smashing, but soon came to understand what it was all about. “That’s part of the fun of Nirvana, is the unpredictability,” he says. “If they didn’t have that anger at some times, they wouldn’t have that beauty at other times.”

  By this time, people in important places were beginning to buzz about Nirvana. Indie world demi-gods Sonic Youth had seen the band on the Jason tour and had become big fans and ardent boosters in the press. Bassist Kim Gordon and guitarist Thurston Moore showed up at a gig in New York at the Pyramid Club, along with Geffen A&R (Artist and Repertoire) man Gary Gersh. Besides them, no one in the audience liked the band, except for Iggy Pop, who had been brought to the gig by photographer Michael Lavine. Pop hooted and hollered words of encouragement throughout the set, even though the band played miserably. In penance for the gig, Chris shaved his head in the cheap Jersey City motel the band was staying in, but not before they had started shooting a video for “In Bloom,” which can be found on the Sub Pop compilation entitled Sub Pop Video Network Program One. In some scenes, Chris has hair and in some, he doesn’t. So much for continuity.