On April 9, the band raised over fifty thousand dollars at a benefit at the Cow Palace in San Francisco for the Tresnjevka Woman’s Group, an organization based in the Croatian city of Zagreb that assists rape survivors. As part of the vicious campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” Serbian soldiers had been systematically raping Muslim women so that they would eventually have Serbian babies. The victims are often mutilated, their children murdered right in front of them.
The benefit was Chris’s idea. “I was really pissed off by everything I’d been reading and nobody was doing anything about it,” he says. After some initial encouragement from Courtney, he started putting together the show, which also featured the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, the Breeders, and L7.
Chris also helped lead protests against Washington State House Bill 2554, better known as the “Erotic Music Bill,” which would jail record store owners for selling music that was judged “erotic” and therefore somehow damaging to minors. Back in December of 1991, Chris led a march and petition drive at the state capitol building in Olympia. MTV News and Rolling Stone picked up the story and the governor’s office was inundated with letters from people who opposed the bill. But Governor Booth Gardner, who only recently had boasted in his 1992 State of the State address that he was “the governor of the home state of Nirvana, the hottest new rock band in the country,” signed the bill into law.
It was repealed, although its sponsor is vowing to submit a modified version of the bill.
“There’s a lot of rap music and rock music for that matter, Andrew Dice Clay, that’s just fuckin’ bullshit, it’s just sexist crap,” Chris says, “but you have to tolerate it. You have to tolerate hate groups, too, because that’s the price of freedom of speech—you place your ideals above your feelings. I can’t make the Ku Klux Klan illegal because I don’t like it—I can’t do that because they have the right to believe what they want.”
Even though he’s known as “the political one,” Chris doesn’t exactly relish the tag. “I want to depoliticize myself—I just don’t want to be this rock and roll pundit,” he says. “I don’t want Nirvana to be a political band—we’re a rock band and I’m a bass player. I just happen to be politically active.”
Despite the band’s determination to release the record exactly as it was, blemishes and all, they began to have serious doubts about it around the time of the benefit show in San Francisco. There was even some talk of going back into the studio and recording a couple of new songs, just to see what they would sound like. By late April, Kurt’s enthusiasm for the album had plummeted drastically. “I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t make me as emotional as it does listening to Nevermind,” he said of the new album. “When I listen to Nevermind, I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times. With this record, I’m just deadpan.”
The hope was that the album could be saved in the mastering process, when a last wave of the electronic wand can often subtly transform a record. After working with mastering wizard Bob Ludwig at his studio in Portland, Maine, Chris was satisfied with the results, but Kurt still wasn’t sure. It wasn’t perfect. Of course, that was part of the deal—you record and mix in two weeks with Steve Albini and you don’t get pristine pop perfection, you get a raw, honest, warts-and-all rock record. It seemed that Kurt was in love with the idea of the low-budget philosophy, but not its actuality. Once again, his pop soul was at war with his rock sensibility.
Then a brief story in the Chicago Tribune quoted Steve Albini as predicting that Geffen/DGC was going to reject the Nirvana album. An item in the influential Village Voice soon picked up on the story.
The story snowballed, gaining a media momentum all its own. A full-page piece in Newsweek further sensationalized the issue. The piece quoted unnamed sources, one of whom claimed to have heard the album but instead had merely heard some demos the band had recorded with Craig Montgomery during the Brazil trip. Writer Jeff Giles quoted Jonathan Poneman as saying that Geffen was “guilty of a complete lack of faith and respect for Kurt, Dave [Grohl], and Chris [Novoselic] as artists,” yet Poneman says Giles left out a key qualifier just before that statement, along the lines of “If what I hear is true, then …” In a letter to Newsweek, the band claimed Giles got quotes by saying he was merely writing a piece about Albini, not Nirvana.
“Most damaging to us is that Giles ridiculed our relationship with our label based on totally erroneous information,” read the letter, which the hand also reprinted in a costly full-page ad in Billboard. In a press release, Ed Rosenblatt vowed Geffen/DGC would release anything the band submitted, and, in a highly unusual move, David Geffen himself blew in an irate phone call to the magazine.
Stories in Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly soon followed as the controversy ballooned even more.
The truth of the matter was, the band had legitimately disliked some aspects of the Albini recordings from the start and had wanted to fix them; that their management and label wholeheartedly agreed made the band appear to he spineless pushovers and their associates to seem like greedy bullies (which is not to say that both Gold Mountain and Geffen/DGC weren’t relieved when some changes were eventually made). The combination of Nirvana’s clout with Geffen and the creative control built into their contract ensured that they could put out whatever record they wanted to, regardless of what anyone else thought.
The whole controversy, ignited by Albini’s single broadside, was a by-product of sloppy, herd-mentality journalism. The one writer who got anywhere close to the truth of the matter was Jim De Rogati’s of the Chicago Sun-Times. The headline to his story read “Flap Over Nirvana LP Smells Like Bogus Issue.” In the piece, even Steve Albini conceded that he didn’t really know what was going on with the album and that he had been speaking “largely out of ignorance.”
Albini, it appeared, was also trying to have his cake and eat it, too—producing a major-label record for $100,000 and then disavowing the whole experience, thereby silencing cries of sell-out. This wasn’t the first time he had done it, either. Albini had used similar tactics after doing major-label productions—or rather, recordings—for the Pixies and the Breeders. And no one pointed out that those avatars of indie credibility, Fugazi, had themselves rejected some recordings they made with Albini shortly before the In Utero sessions. Nobody had called them corporate stooges.
The band wanted to do some more work on a few songs, perhaps with R.E.M, producer Scott Litt, and remix at least a couple of tracks with, of all people, Andy Wallace. Albini vehemently rejected those ideas. He claimed he had a contract with the band that they could not remix or otherwise modify the album without his involvement. The fact that the hand had not actually signed the agreement was immaterial, Albini claimed, since they had been proceeding with the project with that understanding. When Gold Mountain requested the master tapes, Albini at first refused to send them, then eventually changed his mind after a phone call from Chris, At the last minute, the band decided against working with Andy Wallace and instead decided to remix and augment “Heart Shaped Box” and “All Apologies” with Litt.
In early May, Litt and the band worked at Bad Animals Studios (owned by the Wilson sisters of Heart) in Seattle and remixed the two songs, with Kurt adding acoustic guitar and Lennonesque backing harmonies to “Heart Shaped Box.” The rest of the album was left as is, although by remastering, they managed to sharpen up the bass and boost the vocals by some 3 dB’s. So much for the Big Sellout.
Now that they all live in the same town, band morale is at an all-time high. Kurt, Chris, and Dave visit each other at home and hang out and listen to music, just like the old days. Late in March, while Courtney was on a quick English tour with Hole, they all met at Kurt’s house to look at archival footage for a long-form video and to shoot a video for “Sliver” with director Kevin Kerslake.
For the “Sliver” video, Kurt dragged out several years’ worth of dolls and knickknacks from a storage space that hadn’t been opened sin
ce before recording Nevermind, then set it all up in his garage so that it looked just like his old apartment back in Olympia. The band set up and rocked out, with Frances in a chair by her father’s side. Kerslake manned the Super 8 camera while standing on a chair for the adult’s-eye-view effect. Later, Kurt cut some armholes in a big piece of cardboard, placed Frances in front of it and put his arms through it, holding her up so it looks like she’s standing up on her own, dancing like a go-go girl.
MTV accepted the video in mid May, but, because of its rules about product placement, required that the band cut out a few frames of footage that featured a collage of the logos of Maximumrocknroll and Better Homes and Gardens magazines. Unfortunately, those frames also contained a little message Kurt had written: “INDIE PUNX STILL SUCKS.”
The “Sliver” video showed the band in peak playful form, but even if spirits are high, the question remains as to whether the band will be a lasting proposition or just another flash in the pan. Internally, there are still many possible flashpoints: Kurt’s desire to play with other people, the limitations he sees in Chris’s and Dave’s playing, Dave’s alienation from the band, the Courtney factor. Break-up rumors have long dogged the band; although it’s getting to be like the boy who cried wolf, Kurt is always threatening to quit.
“I know we’re going to put out another record after this one,” Chris says. “We’ll play it by ear. I don’t think we’re going to go on and on. I think when the consensus is like ‘yeah, this thing’s pretty much reached its course,’ I think we’re going to know. But I know now that it’s not over. And I never did during that whole pissed-off time. It’s just going to come naturally. We’re all going to get the hit, like yeah, this is it. Maybe we’ll take a sabbatical that will never end, I don’t know. We’ve put out four albums—four albums is a pretty good stretch for a band. How many bands put out four good albums without going on to be the Scorpions or Rolling Stones or whatever?”
It’s strange to ponder the possibility of the band lasting out the decade. “I don’t want it to, but it might,” Kurt says. “It all depends on how the songs are. I was surprised to find us working together as such a unit lately.” But Kurt isn’t sure how much more the three of them can accomplish musically. “I would love to be able to play with other people and create something new,” he says. “I’d rather do that than stay in Nirvana. I don’t want to keep rewriting this style of music, I want to start doing something really different.”
But there’s the question of whether Chris and Dave can keep up with him. “I don’t know,” Kurt says. “I really don’t know.” Kurt thinks that Chris doesn’t practice enough and that Dave isn’t an imaginative enough player. Yet they have always come up with good touches that really complete a song—Kurt loves the bass line Chris dreamed up for “Heart Shaped Box”—but Kurt now wants the collaboration to take place earlier in the songwriting process. “I get really frustrated sometimes when we’re trying to write a song because I’ll sit there and play a riff for a long time and just listen for Chris and Dave to try to come up with something else to help change the song or go into another part and they’ve hardly ever done that,” Kurt says. “They don’t take the lead and they’re always kind of following.”
Of course, for the longest time, that’s exactly what Kurt wanted, and Chris and Dave were more than willing to oblige. Now, Kurt waits for the other two to take the initiative without letting them know that’s what he wants. But someone with that kind of imagination would almost have to be a songwriter himself. Dave writes fine songs on his own, but there’s only so much a drummer can do. “Chris could be a songwriter if he actually wanted to,” Kurt says. “If he had been working on his songwriting for the last few years, he’d probably be up to the level right now where he could help write half of a song for every riff that I come up with and it would be really great.”
Then again, all the best bands are dictatorships. “Yeah, that’s true,” Kurt says. “But I would love to find people that could write songs and write them with them. That’s why it’s so easy to play songs with Courtney—every time we jam on something, we write a great song. It’s weird. Because she’s a person who takes command and isn’t afraid to be the leader. And when you’ve got two leaders together, it takes a lot of pressure off both people. I’ve always wanted to have another person in the band that could write songs with me.” Hence the occasional mutterings from Kurt’s direction that he might start a band with Mudhoney’s Mark Arm or Mark Lanegan from the Screaming Trees.
“I know we won’t break up within this year,” Kurt says. “I guess I just have to take it one year at a time.”
In the Rolling Stone piece back in April of 1992, Kurt predicted very accurately what the next album would sound like—“It’ll be more raw with some songs and more candy pop on some of the others,” he said. “It won’t be as one-dimensional.” So what might the album after In Utero sound like? Kurt thinks it will be an extension of the ideas in “Milk It” and “Scentless Apprentice.” “I definitely don’t want to write more songs like ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ and ‘Rape Me,’ ” he says. “That kind of classic rock and roll verse-chorus-verse, mid-tempo pop song is getting real boring. I want to do more new wave, avant garde stuff with a lot of dynamics—stops and breaks and maybe even some samples of weird noises and things—not samples of instruments. I want to turn into the Butthole Surfers, basically.”
Of course, the Butthole Surfers have already done the Butthole Surfers quite successfully. “Yeah,” Kurt says, “but it would be our version of it. We won’t be able to escape the pop sensibility that we have. It’s ingrained in our marrow—we’ll never be able to get rid of melody and singing, so I want to try to take a pop song and extend it and have weird mood swings in the middle of the song, where it doesn’t just follow this typical rock and roll formula. I’m tired of it.”
Kurt doubts the band will have any lasting influence, say, twenty years from now. “Fuck no,” he says. “It’s sad to think what the state of rock and roll will be in twenty years. It’s already so rehashed and so plagiarized that it’s barely alive now. It’s disgusting. I don’t think it will be important any more.
“It’s just mathematics, that’s all rock and roll is,” Kurt says. “Everything’s based on ten. There’s no such thing as infinity—it repeats itself after ten and it’s over. It’s the same thing with rock and roll—the neck is that long on a guitar, there are six strings, there’s twelve notes, and then it repeats. It can only go to a certain point and it got to that point ten years ago. And there will be another band just like the Black Crowes twenty years from now, doing a version of the Black Crowes doing a version of the Faces.”
“It starts getting watered down every five years,” Kurt observes. “Kids don’t even care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have. It’s already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool for them to fuck and have a social life. At that point, I can’t really see music as having any importance to a teenager, really.”
Of course, many people are quite content with the notion of rock and roll as nothing but a social and sexual soundtrack, but Kurt thinks it will eventually be superseded. “I think they’ll use sounds and tones and use it in their virtual reality machine and just listen to it that way and get the same emotions from it and then go to a party—there will be a virtual reality machine there with a whole bunch of headphones and if you want to talk to people and listen to the virtual reality machine you can do that or you can go into the bedroom and fuck and drink, but actually I think virtual reality machines will get you high. Technology will be that good. And then there will virtual reality junkies and you’ll find them dead on their couch from OD’ing.”
By now, a lot of musicians might be pondering solo albums. Chris, who also happens to play some wicked guitar and banjo, says he’d like to do one some day, except he’d issue it on a ten-inch record only. He says he’s already got some material—a surf
song, some beat poetry. “It’s going to be heavy humor,” he says.
Dave says he’d like to play guitar and sing in a band some day. “Drums get kind of boring after a while,” he admits. He’s been quietly piling up material at Laundry Room Studios, playing all the instruments himself. First, he lays down the drum part without any other accompaniment, then adds bass, guitar, and vocals. One of the outtakes from In Utero was a touching, indelible song Dave wrote called “Marigold,” and there’s more where that came from.
“No,” Kurt says, “I thought about recording stuff on a four-track and releasing it, but I wouldn’t release it as a Kurt Cobain solo thing—I’d make up a name for it and try to be as anonymous as possible. I really like the idea of low-fi recordings and to throw out something that hasn’t been worked on as feverishly as I would a Nirvana project.”
Kurt says he’s going to start his own label and call it Exploitation Records. “I’m just going to record street bums and retarded people and people with deformities and mental deficiencies,” he says, “and I’m going to have a picture of that person on the front of the album and it’s going to be a low-fi recording and it’s just going to be for novelty reasons, for collector geeks to buy for twenty dollars apiece. I’m not really exploiting the people on the records, I’m exploiting the people who buy them, because there’s going to be a twenty-dollar price tag on all of them. There will be a limited edition of five hundred of the Singing Flipper Boy.”
Every label needs a distributor and Exploitation Records will be distributed through one Kurt Cobain. He says he’ll simply take a box of records along with him on tour and sell them to record stores at every stop along the way.
Kurt also says he wants to rerelease all of Nirvana’s releases on vinyl, except remastered by recording the sound from boom box speakers so it sounds just like a low-fi punk rock record or a bootleg, with appropriate cover art. “It’s just for my own punk rock fantasy of thinking that maybe if Nevermind came out this way, it would sound better,” he says. “It would only be for me to have a box of them.”
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