Heroin is a very seductive drug. It feels very relaxing, very comfortable. At low doses, it can make even the shyest user very social; high doses produce the phenomenon of “nodding out,” when the user seems to fall asleep, even in mid-sentence. The high can last for ten hours, but the more you do, the less it lasts. It’s a very insidious drug—it takes a while to become addicted, but once that happens, it suddenly becomes very uncomfortable to stop doing it. And then the cravings start. After a while, it becomes very hard to think clearly and to monitor and control the emotions, and often, the user isn’t even aware that this is happening.
Just after Christmas, the band set off on a brief tour with Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who headlined. No one was happy about Nirvana playing second fiddle to the Peppers, but they had already committed to it during the chaos of the American tour. At any rate, Nirvana stole the show. For one thing, their album was number six with a bullet. And they had outstanding material—songs like “Lithium,” “Teen Spirit” and “In Bloom.” The best the Chili Peppers could muster was a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” Pearl Jam was just getting its act together.
The Chili Peppers tour is when Chris finally admitted to himself that Kurt was heavily into heroin, “He looked like shit,” Chris says. “He looked like a ghoul.” Chris knew he couldn’t do anything about it. “I just figured it’s his fucking trip, it’s his life, he can do whatever he wants,” he says. “You can’t change anybody or preach some kind of morals or anything. What am I going to do? Nothing. So I just do my own thing.”
Everyone assumed that Courtney had gotten Kurt to do heroin. “Everybody was blaming her,” says Shelli. “She was the big scapegoat. If he wouldn’t have hooked up with her, he would have hooked up with somebody else and done heroin. That’s just the fact of the matter. It was easy to blame her at first—and looking back, that’s what everybody did. They still do it. Just because she’s loud and outspoken and has her own point of view …”
Blaming Courtney fit into the convenient stereotype of the domineering bitch and the henpecked wimp. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable that someone could simply talk someone else into doing heroin—people who do heroin want to do it. And the fact is, Kurt had been doing heroin off and on for years by then; Courtney hadn’t done it in three years. “[It’s] such a fucking typical sexist stupid thing to say, so classic,” Kurt says. “Man, when I got off the European tour, I went out of my way to get drugs every fucking day. On my own.”
Chris was also struggling with his own demons. After a New Year’s Eve show at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, he drunkenly hit his head on a low-slung heater element in a backstage passageway. He resolved to go on the wagon for as long as he could.
The first press to acknowledge the heroin rumors was a January profile in BAM magazine which claimed that Kurt was “nodding off in mid-sentence,” adding that “the pinned pupils, sunken cheeks, and scabbed, sallow skin suggest something more serious than fatigue.” Soon, an item in the industry tip sheet Hits was hinting that Kurt was “slam-dancing with Mr. Brownstone,” Guns n’ Roses slang for doing heroin. The tidbit ran in a column written by Lonn Friend, the Rip magazine editor that Kurt had snubbed not so long before.
“By the end, it started to really suck because I started to get really paranoid because there were things being written about me being a heroin addict,” Kurt says. “I just started getting paranoid that cops were going to bust into our house or I’d get pulled over and they’d recognize me, find my track marks and take me to jail. The biggest fear was detoxing cold turkey. I knew I’d probably die if that happened, because the cops wouldn’t give a fuck—they wouldn’t put me in a hospital, they’d just let me go cold turkey and I’d die in jail. So that was kind of scary. In the morning, I’d drive real cautiously to the drug dealer’s house.”
A lot of people around them struggled to understand why Kurt and Courtney were doing this to themselves. “It’s like this,” says Courtney. “ ‘Hey, you know what? I just sold a million fuckin’ records and I got a million bucks and I’m going to share it with you and let’s get high!’ ”
Heroin still held an allure as a staple of rock culture. “That’s the drug that makes you sleepy and happy,” says Courtney. “That’s the drug you do if you’re in a fuckin’ four-star hotel and you can order all the goddamn room service that you want and you can just lay in bed and drool all over yourself because you’ve got a million bucks in the bank. That’s the drug you want to do if you want to be a kid forever.”
The seductive combination of being head over heels in love and basking in the warm, embryonic comfort of heroin—away from the strains and responsibilities of being an internationally recognized rock star—must have been overpowering. “It was a love thing,” Courtney says. “It was a drug/love thing. I met this person that’s perfect for me, I’m in love. Even though it’s not my million bucks, so what. Whatever. He’s saying you can have it, so whatever, I’ll just have his million bucks and let’s just do some drugs. That’s what it was about.” If one of the reasons Kurt did heroin was in a misguided attempt to cope with his fame, perhaps Courtney used heroin to deal with Kurt’s fame as well.
So there was an element of just wanting to get high. “There might have been in her eyes,” Kurt says, who still maintains that he basically did heroin for its analgesic properties.
They went up to Seattle for a while, then spent a week in San Francisco, oblivious to the fact that Kurt’s band was the hottest, most talked-about group on the planet.
In the midst of all this, the unthinkable happened. Nevermind hit #1 on the Billboard album charts the week of January 11, 1992, topping U2, Guns n’ Roses and Garth Brooks, and even pushing Michael Jackson off the top spot. Besides hitting #1 in the United States, Nevermind also topped the charts in Belgium, France, Ireland, Israel, Spain, Sweden, and Canada, and went Top 3 in virtually every other major market in the world except for Italy, Japan, and oddly enough, the U.K.(although it did stay in the British Top 25 for months).
Meanwhile, the band was being wooed by Guns n’ Roses and Metallica to appear on their joint U.S. tour that summer. Despite some very high-level pressure, Kurt and the band refused. They’d never be caught dead playing with Guns n’ Roses.
Then the band went to New York to tape a live set for MTV and to play “Saturday Night Live” on January 11. When the car that had turned up at their hotel in Seattle turned out to be a limousine, Kurt and Courtney sent it back and asked for a more modest car. There were no smaller cars available, so the livery company sent another limousine. When all was said and done, Kurt and Courtney missed their flight.
The MTV taping, January 10, 1992. (Mark Kates)
By then, Kurt and Courtney had been doing heroin long enough to begin to get addicted.
“I remember walking into their hotel room and for the first time, really realizing that these two are fucked up,” says Dave. “They were just nodding out in bed, just wasted. It was disgusting and gross. It doesn’t make me angry at them, it makes me angry that they would be so pathetic as to do something like that. I think it’s pathetic for anyone to do something to make themselves that functionless and a drooling fucking baby. It’s like ‘Hey, let’s do a drug that knocks us out and makes us look stupid.’ It’s stupid and gross and pathetic for anyone to take it to that point.”
(“I went up to his room and Kurt came to the door in his underwear and Courtney, all I saw was a little piece of hair sticking out from underneath the covers,” says Wendy. “There was like five deli trays, room carts with old food. And I said, ‘Kurt, why don’t you get a maid in here?’ And Courtney says, ‘He can’t. They steal his underwear.’ ”)
Although Kurt had been doing heroin for over a month, even his closest associates hadn’t noticed until now. “I didn’t realize that he was getting fucked up until “Saturday Night Live” just because I’m stupid and I just couldn’t pick out something like that,” Dave admits. “I’m naive and didn
’t want to believe it.”
There was at least one thing to be grateful about. “Thank God those two didn’t do cocaine,” says Dave, “because they’d be the biggest fucking assholes in the world.”
It wasn’t as if they were violent or irrational or any sloppier than they usually were. “Kurt was mostly just sleepy,” says soundman Craig Montgomery. “They just seemed to be in a fog. They seemed not to care about much of anything, including their friends. That’s the way it felt sometimes. They were in their own little world. And I’m sure they felt like the whole world was against them, too.”
The day of their “Saturday Night Live” appearance, the band did a now infamous shoot with photographer Michael Lavine. Exhausted and having tanked up just beforehand, Kurt nodded out a couple of times in front of the camera. “I just blocked it out,” says Chris. “I didn’t give a shit.”
Of the shoot, Kurt remembers “Dead silence. Dirty looks and dead silence. [Chris and Dave] weren’t the type to confront anyone about anything. They were so passive-aggressive that they would rather give off bad vibes than talk about anything. I mean, what are they supposed to do? They’re not going to be able to tell me to stop. So I didn’t really care. Obviously to them it was like practicing witchcraft or something. They didn’t know anything about it so they thought that any second I was going to die.”
Lavine was terribly worried, too. “I asked him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He said, ‘It’s the only thing that helps my stomach pain,’ ” says Lavine. “I didn’t have enough guts to say ‘Kurt, that’s a bunch of shit.’ ”
That night, the band played “Teen Spirit” and later, “Territorial Pissings,” with the band trashing their instruments for a finale. Kurt took the opportunity to give some national exposure to an old favorite and wore a Flipper T-shirt he’d made at the Lavine shoot. During the closing credits, Chris kissed both Kurt and Dave flat on the mouth, just to annoy the homophobic rednecks back home, and all the other homophobes in their vast new audience. With twenty-five million people looking on, there was a lot of bourgeoisie to shock.
The next day, Kurt and Courtney did another shoot with Michael Lavine for a cover story in Sassy magazine, the monthly bible of hip teen girls (and certain vampiric adults). “They were totally in love,” says Lavine. “You couldn’t separate them. They are in love—it’s not like this fake thing. They have a genuine chemistry toward each other.”
Kurt nodding out at the Lavine session. (© Michael Lavine)
The April issue of Sassy put a kissing Kurt and Courtney on the cover. “Ain’t Love Grand?” read the cover line. Without seeming to know quite what she was saying, writer Christina Kelly observed, “It’s looking very Sid and Nancy.”
Kurt brought a friend along on their trip to New York who would go out and score for them and then bring the heroin back to the hotel. Kurt gradually realized that the friend was a junkie, too, and was ripping them off. So once, he went down to Manhattan’s notorious Alphabet City himself and bought some heroin on the street while Courtney waited in a nearby Indian restaurant. “People just wait in a line,” Kurt says. “Lawyers, business people in three-piece suits, junkies, low-lifes, all different kinds of people.”
Meanwhile, his hopes raised, Don Cobain had been trying to contact Kurt again ever since Kurt called him just before recording Nevermind. “I don’t know how many million times I tried to get ahold of him,” says Don. “I called Geffen Records and Gold Mountain Management in Los Angeles, I called Sub Pop Records, I sent telegrams to “Saturday Night Live,” I sent letters to him and all the places where he’d been, tried to a get ahold through his mom …” But he never heard back.
The rock and roll trail is littered with heroin fatalities: Sid Vicious, Tim Buckley, Janis Joplin, Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Hillel Slovak, and more recently, Stefanie Sargent of the Seattle band Seven Year Bitch, who OD’d in 1992. “Those people did every drug in the book all at once,” Kurt scoffs. “They get drunk and then they get high and then they die. I never drank—I learned that from junkies. You just don’t mix alcohol and heroin at all or you’ll die. It cuts down on respiratory twice as much. You pass out when you’re drunk and you wake up and get high and there’s no way you’re going to survive that. Everyone I know of who’s OD’d has gotten drunk. And it’s been late at night, too.”
Returning from New York, Kurt and Courtney moved into a modest apartment on Spaulding Avenue in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. Their day-to-day existence was fairly routine. “I just got up and got drugs and listened to music and painted and played guitar,” Kurt says. “That’s about it. Watched TV. It was recuperation. I’d been on tour for seven months. I needed to do that.”
“We went through a lot of blankets because you keep dropping your cigarette—it’s pretty gross,” Courtney says. “I threw all those blankets out.”
Every morning, Kurt would drive to the home of one of their two drug dealers. To them, Kurt was just another customer. “They didn’t care if I was a rock star or not,” says Kurt. “They’d dealt to rock stars before.” Kurt doesn’t know how much he was doing in grams, but he knows he had a hundred-dollar-a-day habit.
Courtney had a very mild habit. “When I gave her drugs, I would do this much,” Kurt says, indicating a large amount,” and I would give her that much,” indicating a very small amount. “I was real selfish,” he admits. “She probably had a twenty-dollar habit, if that. It was more psychological than it was physical.”
Kurt says he never OD’d, although he did once get a case of “cotton fever,” which happens when a stray strand of cotton gets into the needle and is then injected into the vein, producing an extremely high fever and an excruciating headache. Kurt went to the hospital and was given Benadryl, an over-the-counter antihistamine, which cured him. The rumor was that he had overdosed.
They grew paranoid. In the middle of the night, Courtney would think she heard an intruder and Kurt would take out the handgun that Dylan Carlson had given him and check it out. No one was ever there.
“I’m not against guns at all,” Kurt says. “I own one. I believe in them for protection. I’m not as much of a hippie as some people would want me to be. I could blow somebody away easily, no problem, if I had to protect myself or my family. I actually kind of like them now. I’m thinking about buying another one.”
Still, most people wouldn’t have figured Kurt “And I swear that I don’t have a gun” Cobain to be the proud owner of a firearm. “I wouldn’t, either,” Kurt says. “They’re absolute evil things. I shot a gun with Dylan about a year ago. We went down to Aberdeen and went out in the woods and shot this gun and it was just such a reminder of how brutal they are, how much damage they can do to a person. It’s a necessary thing—it’s a defense weapon.”
Looming ahead was a tour that went from California to Oregon to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Hawaii that was scheduled to kick off on January 24.
Courtney found out she was pregnant sometime around “Saturday Night Live”—whether before or after is unclear. Kurt and Courtney hadn’t been using birth control, even though Courtney was mainlining heroin. Courtney calls that “a morality issue” and insists that she knew she’d quit if she discovered she was pregnant. “I was an idiot—what can I say?” she says now. “But I’m not immoral.”
They had wanted to have a baby, but sometime in 1993, and certainly after they had finished with their dalliance with heroin. In the meantime, they thought maybe they’d get a little capuchin monkey. When they found out Courtney was pregnant, Kurt was ready to insist on an abortion because he assumed, like everyone else, that the baby would be born retarded or deformed. Courtney never even considered it. “We should breed,” she thought. “It’s better than buying a monkey.”
They consulted a teratogenic (birth defects) specialist who informed them that heroin use, especially if confined to the first trimester, was virtually harmless to the fetus if the mother’s withdrawal wasn’t too trauma
tic (there is a slight chance that the child may experience mild learning disabilities later on in life, however). Amazing but true. “But tell that to a middle American housewife,” says Kurt. “You can’t expect anyone to believe it.”
“We knew it really wasn’t the best of times to have a child,” Kurt says, “but we were just determined to have one. We figured we may as well do it now. It definitely would have been better on Courtney’s part if she would have waited and put out her record a little while ago but, I don’t know, I don’t regret it now. Frances wouldn’t be Frances if we had her later.”
“I thought [having the baby] would probably be a good thing,” says Danny Goldberg, “but I was also worried about the roller coaster that it puts you on, and when you combine that roller coaster with the roller coaster of massive success, you’re dealing with one of the most complicated, stressful things that a human being can go through.”
Kurt began to see the light at the end of his addiction. “I’m sure the awareness the baby was coming was a major factor,” says Goldberg. “Having a kid is a big deal—it’s one of the biggest things that happens to you. It’s corny, but all different kinds of people, including punk rockers, do react that way.”
“I didn’t have a baby to stop doing drugs,” says Courtney, “but I knew that I would continue to do drugs and my career would go to fucking hell and I wouldn’t give a shit and I’d be one of those junkies that I’ve seen at N.A. meetings with track marks on their hands and neck.”
“If I’ve ever seen Satan, that’s it, because it’s so insidious,” says Courtney. “It breaks you down morally. It’s very insidious. You have this angel that’s really beautiful, it’s not like this guy with horns, it’s this beautiful angel who’s promising you another heaven.”
They entered the strange world of chemical dependency medicine. Various doctors competed for their business, as if they were another celebrity trophy to put on their wall. It was just like a bidding war.
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