“I guess that’s my way of letting the world know that bureaucracy is everywhere and it can happen to anybody and it’s a really evil thing,” Kurt says. “The story of Frances Farmer is so sad and it can happen to anybody and it almost felt at a time that it was happening to us, so there is a little personal part but it’s mainly just exposing the Frances Farmer story to people.
“Seattle is supposedly this perfect, utopic place,” says Kurt. “Judges and heads of state were part of this conspiracy to put her in a mental institution, give her a lobotomy, and she was gang raped every night she was there and she had to eat her own shit and she was branded a Communist because she wrote a poem when she was fourteen entitled ‘God Is Dead.’ They just fucked with her all the time. From the time she was fourteen to when she was a star, they just constantly had her arrested for no reason and totally ruined her reputation by writing right wing lies in magazines and newspapers and stuff and it turned her insane, turned her into a barbiturate addict and alcoholic and she got a lobotomy and ended up being a maid at a Four Seasons and eventually died. There are a lot of very important people in Seattle involved in that conspiracy and they’re still alive today, sitting in their nice fucking houses.”
Although Farmer’s tale is even more dire than Kurt and Courtney’s, their stories are quite similar. “I expect a lot of these titles and little lines in some of the songs to be read as totally personal,” Kurt says, “but there are other angles on them, too. I would rather focus on the Frances Farmer story; it just so happens that there are similar things involved in our story.”
“I miss the comfort in being sad”—Kurt is not used to happiness, a condition which he turned into a whole song in “Dumb.”
Kurt wrote the main outlines of the Beatlesque “Dumb” during the summer of 1990, just before the band signed with Geffen and debuted it on Calvin Johnson’s KAOS radio program that fall. “I think I’m dumb or maybe just happy,” Kurt sings. “I just tried to use some confusion theme,” he says. It’s just interesting that being happy would prove confusing.
Although it was written long before the fact, the verse which goes “My heart is broke but I have some glue/ Help me inhale and mend it with you/ We’ll float around and hang out on clouds/ Then we’ll come down and have a hangover” makes for a good synopsis of his and Courtney’s months in the drug wilderness; distraught after breaking up with Tobi, he sought refuge in heroin with Courtney, then paid the consequences afterward.
The eagle-eared will notice that the song’s chords are similar to those of “Polly.”
Kurt also wrote the anthemic “Pennyroyal Tea” in the apartment on Pear Street during the bleak winter of 1990, after the band signed. “Dave and I were screwing around on a four-track and I wrote that song in about thirty seconds,” says Kurt. “And I sat down for like a half an hour and wrote the lyrics and then we recorded it.”
Pennyroyal is an herb known for its medicinal properties, one of which is an abortive, but only in lethal doses. “I thought that was a cool image,” says Kurt. “I’ve known girls who tried to drink it because they thought they were pregnant. It’s a cleansing theme where I’m trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away. You have to drink gallons of it and I heard it doesn’t work very well. I’ve never found herbs to ever work for me—anything. Ginseng and any of that other shit is all a bunch of hippie left wing fascist propaganda.”
“Very Ape” used to have the working title, “Perky New Wave Number.” “I really didn’t have any idea what the song is about,” Kurt says. “It’s kind of an attack on men in a way and people that have flaws in their personality and they’re real manly and macho.” The “King of Illiterature” line is probably a reference to the way Courtney chides Kurt about not being well read.
On the face of it, “Tourette’s” has nothing to do with anything. “I just babbled,” Kurt says. “I didn’t make any sentences or any words, I just screamed.” An early lyric sheet for the song merely printed the words “Fuck shit piss.” But the title recalls something Kurt said about all the negative press he had been getting. “All my life, I’ve had a bad attitude and it does me no good to become even more of a bitter person because of stuff like this,” he said. “I just don’t know how I can do it. I was starting to get a good attitude again and I’d been validated as a musician and a songwriter and everything and all of a sudden I’m this massive scapegoat. I have this attitude that makes me look even more like an asshole. There’s a big threat of me turning into this crazy street person. Some eighty-year-old guy with Tourette’s Syndrome, cursing his head off, telling the whole world they’re fucked.”
The title of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is obviously a reference to Nevermind. “A blanket acned with cigarette burns” harks back to the scene at the Spaulding apartment, while “Use just once and destroy/ Invasion of our piracy” is yet another reference to harassment by both a fickle public and a hostile, invasive press. Yet even Kurt acknowledges that the song is a throwaway. “It could have been better,” he says. “I know we could have had a few better songs on the album.”
Surely the confessional lyrics of “All Apologies” have some personal meaning for Kurt. “It really doesn’t have any relevance at all,” he says, as usual. “The song isn’t about anything, really.” He did dedicate the song to Frances and Courtney onstage at Reading in 1992, though. “I like to think that that song is for them, but the words really don’t fit in relation to us. I wrote it for them but none of the lyrics really expose anything. The feeling does, but not the lyrics.” The feeling, Kurt says, is “Peaceful, happy, comfort—just happy happiness.” And the way Kurt sings “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” after the second chorus, it’s hard not to feel the same thing.
“I always manage to write a couple of happy songs,” he says, “but then there are lots of neutral songs, too, that sound angry but really aren’t anything.”
So an angry sound is just a starting point, a status quo. Kurt laughs when it’s suggested that his natural state is one of agitation. Not unlike the music of Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis, whose laid-back vocal persona exists against a constant backdrop of angry, teeming distortion. “That’s not really a character he plays—he is that person,” says Kurt. “God, I wish I could get away with that because I’ve always thought I was really close to J Mascis as a person, personality-wise—just quiet and talking with a cigarette voice, but I couldn’t sing like that. I have a different side to me that’s really hyperactive.”
Like Mascis, Kurt appears passive, yet both control virtually every aspect of their band’s music and image. It galls Kurt to realize that most people aren’t conscious of this. “I just can’t believe that people wouldn’t listen to this music and think a little bit more highly of me than they do,” he says. “I come up with every idea for everything we do, practically. Everything. It’s mind-boggling and it’s a lot of pressure. It just pisses me off to see on the back of the Bleach album, ‘art direction by Lisa Orth’ and everyone thinks that Lisa Orth came up with that picture and the idea and the way it was all set up. I came up with the whole idea and they get credit for it. I don’t need it to feed my ego, I just want people to know that I can do other things than just the music.”
Originally, the album was going to be called I Hate Myself and I Want to Die. Ever since the Australian tour, the phrase had been Kurt’s standard answer whenever someone asked him how he was doing. After a few weeks, the title was ruled out. “That’s pushing it too much,” Chris says. “Kids would commit suicide and we’d get sued.” Kurt meant the title as a joke. “I’m tired of taking this band so seriously and everyone else taking it so seriously and trying to read into things,” he said. “Basically that’s what all our songs are about—confusion and I hate myself and I don’t want to live, so I thought it was really appropriate.”
Then the title was changed to Verse Chorus Verse, a sarcastic comment on the standard pop song framework that Kurt says he is tiring
of. “I would hate to keep rewriting this formula,” Kurt says. “It’s a formula. I’ve mastered this. It’s over, as far as I’m concerned, but I know I can probably write a couple more albums like this and be happy with it, but less and less happy every time we do one. Then again, I thought that before I recorded this record and now it turned out exactly how I wanted it to and I’m really proud of it.”
But by late May, the album’s title had changed to In Utero. Kurt had noticed the phrase in some poetry that Courtney had written and decided that it fit the album art perfectly. Of course, it also fit Kurt’s conception of earthly bliss. He didn’t care if people thought it was too close to the embryonic imagery of the cover of their previous album. The artwork, all conceptualized by Kurt and executed by Nevermind designer Robert Fisher, teems with feminine imagery. The front cover features a transparent woman, the female counterpart to the “Sliver” single cover, but winged like some Greek goddess (the feminine symbols sprinkled throughout can be decoded using a book called The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects). For the back cover, Kurt arranged an assortment of plastic fetus models and other body parts, libes, and orchids on a rug at his house (the photograph is by Charles Peterson). “I always thought orchids, and especially lilies, look like a vagina,” Kurt says. “So it’s sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE GROWN-UPS DON’T LIKE IT
Once the album was completed, the band sent unmastered tapes off to Geffen president Ed Rosenblatt and Gary Gersh, as well as their lawyer and the inner circle of Gold Mountain. Kurt’s description of their feedback was succinct. “The grown-ups don’t like it,” he said with a mixture of disappointment and disbelief. In fact, “the grown-ups”—management and senior label execs—hated it. Kurt says they told him the songwriting was “not up to par,” the sound “unlistenable.” There also seemed to be uncertainty whether mainstream radio would go for the Steve Albini sound.
“As it turns out,” says Albini, “the record company would much rather they made an indulgent rock star album because then they’d have something to promote. And the band would be broke and the more broke the band is, the better it is for the record company, because then they can pull the strings more.”
It turned out that few people at Gold Mountain or Geffen really wanted the band to record with Albini to begin with, although the band was free to have their way. Faced with the disapproval of virtually everyone involved in Nirvana’s career, Kurt thought he was getting an unstated message: scrap the album and start all over again—there was still plenty of time and the Albini sessions hadn’t cost all that much, considering they were following up a quadruple-platinum album.
“I should just rerecord this record,” Kurt sneers, “and do the same thing we did last year because we sold out last year—there’s no reason to try to redeem ourselves as artists at this point. I can’t help myself—I’m just putting out a record that I would like to listen to at home. I never listen to Nevermind. I haven’t listened to it since we put it out. That says something. I can’t stand that kind of production and I don’t listen to bands that do have that kind of production, no matter how good their songs are. It just bothers me.”
Friends of the band loved the record, however. As of early April, the band was determined to release the record as it was and damn the torpedoes—DGC would put the record out. “They’re going to eat my shit,” Kurt says. “Of course, they want another Nevermind, but I’d rather die than do that. This is exactly the kind of record I would buy as a fan, that I would enjoy owning. I couldn’t be truer to myself than to put this out the way it is. It’s my favorite production and my favorite songs.”
But even right after returning from Minnesota—and before anyone else had heard the tracks—Kurt and Chris were beginning to worry about the bass sound, which they felt was too mushy and not musical enough, and the vocals, which were too low in the mix, the latter a common complaint leveled at Albini’s productions. Still, those reservations took a backseat to their resolve to release an unvarnished, straightforwardly recorded album.
In hindsight, it’s obvious that Nevermind was a strong rightward swing of the band’s artistic pendulum toward pop, while In Utero leans more heavily on the arty, aggressive side which was showcased on Incesticide. “There’s always been songs like ‘About a Girl’ and there’s always been songs like ‘Paper Cuts,’ ” Chris says. “Nevermind came out kind of ‘About a Girl’-y and this one came out more ‘Paper Cuts.’ It’s an artistic thing. The label’s all freaked out about it. It’s like, ‘Shit, it’s art—what are you going to do about it?’ ”
The record called the bluff of all the music biz pundits who hailed the triumph of “real music” over the processed pop that Nirvana had trounced. One or two of those pundits worked with Nirvana; In Utero forced them to put their money where their mouths were. “The thing about Nevermind was it just flew out the window,” Chris says, “and now nobody can predict anything in the music industry anymore. They say there was a pre-Nirvana music industry and a post-Nirvana music industry, so we’ll see how post-Nirvana the music industry really is.”
The band was prepared not to match the gargantuan sales of Nevermind—although In Utero was really good, it was not necessarily really commercial. “I expect this record will sell maybe half as much,” Kurt predicts. “We’ve offended too many people within the last year.” Dave doesn’t think the album will do as well either, not that he even wants it to. “Not at all,” he says. “I kind of think of it sometimes as a test. We’re testing the limits. A record like Nevermind came along and it blew things apart and it changed a lot of stuff. By doing this, maybe the next big hit could be on an eight-track. A band from out of nowhere could have an eight-track recording of a great song and it will be on the radio. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones did it.”
In a sense, the band could afford to take a chance—since nobody knew exactly why the last album took off, how could anybody second-guess this one? Besides, Nirvana would likely take a pounding no matter what they did.
“It’s the sophomore jinx—everybody’s just waiting for us to fuck up,” says Dave. “Everybody’s waiting to tear this to shreds and say, ‘The one-hit wonder.’ I know that it’s a good record. I know that people who like Nirvana will like this record. The seventy-five thousand people that were into Nirvana before Nevermind I think will like the record maybe even more than Nevermind.”
So this isn’t “career suicide.” “No, although it will be thought of as that,” Kurt says. “The album that brought them down to the gutter.”
“These are the songs we came up with,” says Chris. “If you don’t make a raw album, you make another slick album and then people say, ‘Oh, they just made a slick album so they can sell more records.’ You can’t win for losing. Let them say what they will—I did it my way.
“I told Kurt, ‘If this record bombs and it doesn’t do anything, there’s still all those years we spent in the van and all the good times we had—we were happy back then and nobody can take that away from us,’ ” Chris says. “The music speaks for itself, we put out good records. So what if we have to play fifteen-hundred-seaters. So what if Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots keep going to all the music awards shows—we were never into that shit in the first place.”
Albini had been impressed that Kurt, Chris, and Dave wanted to try to forge new creative ground instead of making a record that was just a retread of the successful ideas of their last record. “Frankly, that’s all the record company wanted or expected, and to date, that’s what they still want,” Albini claimed a month or so after the album was completed. “What they don’t understand is that it represents the band more accurately and it is more faithful to the band’s vision of their record than a record made any other way would be.
“You could put that band in the studio for a year and I don’t think they could come up with a better record,” Albini continues. “I think that’s as good as
they’re going to be. If that doesn’t suit their record company then their record company clearly has problems that go beyond this record. The record company has a problem with the band. The sooner everybody involved recognizes that, the easier it will be on everybody.”
“The people at the record company are clearly geniuses, right?” says Albini. “They put out Nelson—they know what they’re doing. This is the record company that sued Neil Young for not being commercial enough. Those are the people that are telling the band they don’t know what they’re doing. If you have to rely on people like that as your barometer of quality, then you’re in a lot more trouble than just having a bad record. It means you’re a fool.”
“Literally, every other person involved in the enterprise that is Nirvana, besides the band itself, are pure pieces of shit,” Albini rails. “Their management company, their record company, the A&R people, all the hangers-on, all the phonies that cling to that band as a bogus source of hipster credentials, everyone associated with the band—other than the band—I think are pieces of shit and I have no time for them.
“You know, after all this, I would be willing to do another Nirvana record,” Albini said shortly after finishing the record. He would soon change his tune. “I enjoyed dealing with the guys, but I would not be willing to deal with their superstructure anymore—their management company or their record company.”
* * *
On March 23 came good news. After months of legal battles, it was finally decided that none of the allegations made against Kurt and Courtney in Family Court were legally valid. The Cobains had already won legal custody of their daughter, but now, the Department of Children’s Services would not supervise Kurt and Courtney’s care of Frances any longer—no more humiliating urine tests, no more checkup visits from social workers, no more costly legal fights. The nightmare was over.
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