by Greg Prato
Those were the days: Nirvana opens for Skin Yard
GARRETT SHAVLIK: Probably one of the worst live acts ever. They were really good people, but they were just terrible. It was a chaotic mess — gear falling apart. Chad had these crazy North drums — they’re made out of fiberglass and were usually duct taped together. He had to play hard because Krist and Kurt were so loud, and he’s a little fella. All of a sudden, his rack tom would fall off — I’d run up onstage, wrap it up in duct tape, and put it back on. Obviously, they got a lot better. But God, in the beginning, it was horrible.
CHARLES PETERSON: Consequently, the next time I saw them, which was at the University of Washington HUB Ballroom — a big place, probably could hold 1,000-plus people — they were on a bill opening for some local bands. From the very first chord, they got me. There was just something that changed. Kurt was just absolutely an amazing performer. He was doing these fantastic leaps in the air, just all over the place. They were playing that gig with the second guitarist, Jason Everman, who was also totally crazy and out of control. I don’t know if that inspired Kurt maybe, but it was like “Wow!” Their songs were much more distinct and worked out. They just blew me away.
BRUCE PAVITT: The amazing thing about Nirvana that a lot of people don’t understand — the way they matured and grew in such a short period of time.
ROBERT ROTH: The loudest band I had ever heard. This was at a rehearsal. [Cobain] reminded me of a cross between Charles Manson, Jesus Christ, and Johnny Rotten.
LILLY MILIC: For me, they would be really sloppy some nights and difficult to listen to — possibly too drunk to play. And then other nights they would just blow you away — they were amazing. It was just really inconsistent.
MARK PICKEREL: They were playing at this little community center — Hal Holmes Center. At some point during the show, Krist’s girlfriend was up in the front, knocking about with a bunch of her friends — they were breaking the “no slam dance” rule. The guy who ran the center, came into the crowd, and he tried to intervene, and get the girls to mellow out. Krist’s girlfriend started getting in his face — kind of pushing him. I remember this guy tried to reach to contain her — nothing aggressive — just trying to protect himself from her. When Krist saw this, he threw his bass down, jumps from the stage onto the guy, wrestles him to the ground.
GARRETT SHAVLIK: Krist was crazy, which was awesome. We had a Tad show and Krist showed up. Tacoma had a thugish sort of crowd — leather jacket fuckups with mullets. A brawl started happening around the Tad camp right after they got done playing, and I was breaking down my drums. Krist says, “Hey, do you mind if I borrow that cymbal stand?” And I go, “No, that’s cool.” He pops down the legs, and starts swinging at this guy. I was like, “OK — that’s another use for a cymbal stand.”
BEN REW: Novoselic was always a kick in the pants. We all went to this big “love family” party someplace. After we polished off the beer, there was all this boysenberry wine — hippie wine. This shit must have been twenty fucking proof. All of a sudden, Krist is naked, and he’s jumping over this bonfire. And he burned his sac! People had to tackle him and hold him down. But yeah, he roasted the sac-i-moli.
STEVE TURNER: He’s a real character — you can get really spacey talking to him.
MARK PICKEREL: I remember [Novoselic] and I wrestling onstage during Tad’s performance, when Tad opened for Nirvana at the HUB Ballroom. He used to always arrive everywhere with a big jug of wine — it seemed like there were a couple of jugs of wine with him that night. I remember helping him polish off a jug or two. There’s a picture on the live Nirvana CD [1996’s From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah] of a guy stage diving in mid-air. That picture was actually taken during Tad’s set.
CHAD CHANNING: [Kurt and Krist] always had a pretty good relationship. It was like a special little brotherhood sort of thing. Kurt was a quiet character a lot of the times. So if something was bothering him, you’d never know it, and if he talked to anybody about it, it would always be with Krist. Those guys really cared for each other quite a bit.
NILS BERNSTEIN: What struck me is that all the Seattle bands were such “a guy thing.” There were a lot of girls that went to shows and liked all the bands, but you wouldn’t go over to a girl’s house and she was playing Green River. But Nirvana — all the girls liked Nirvana. And that was real evidence to me that they were going to be big.
ART CHANTRY: I worked on Nirvana’s very first record — [1989’s] Teriyaki Asthma: Volume One [the song “Mexican Seafood”]. [Daniel House] had been dumped by Sub Pop, and he wanted to get this band out before Sub Pop, because he recognized their greatness. Kurdt [Vanderhoof ] spelled his name old school — K-U-R-D-T. Nobody knew how to spell [Kurt Cobain’s] name. When Daniel tried to get a hold of Kurt or anybody, nobody could give him a straight answer. If somebody wouldn’t follow through, I would follow through for them. So I sat down and spelled out his name as extremely as I could — like Kurdt Vanderhoof ’s name. I guess that’s where Kurt started misspelling his name.
KURDT VANDERHOOF: I’m the other “Kurdt” from Aberdeen [laughs].
JACK ENDINO: I gave the tape that I made to Sub Pop, and by and large, came the offer for the seven-inch. That’s when you had the “Love Buzz” seven-inch.
TRACY MARANDER: I think originally, Krist wanted to do the other song [by Shocking Blue], “Venus,” but then Bananarama did it. Kurt liked the Beatles a lot, and ’60s music, and Krist was really into ’60s bands.
KURT DANIELSON: I’ll never forget the day when Jonathan was at the studio, we were doing mixes for [1989’s] God’s Balls, and Jack was there. Jon says, “I got this tape — I want to see what you think of this.” He put it in — I had no idea what it was, I never heard it before. And it was the “Love Buzz” single for Sub Pop. Just the eight-track recording, raw, on a dat tape. I was completely blown away from Krist’s bass playing, first of all. And secondly, by the great singing — everything else was just right on. Jon was like, “The band is not sure that it’s tight enough.”
MARK IVERSON: I was at Fallout Records. I used to go there almost weekly. In fact, that’s where I bought “Love Buzz” by Nirvana — just because they were an Olympia band — and I was able to get number twenty out of a thousand. It’s in my closet in case I ever need money.
CHAD CHANNING: The first time we toured, Bleach hadn’t come out yet, we just had the single out — “Love Buzz”/“Big Cheese.” That was an interesting tour — it was hit or miss. We could end up playing Tucson for twenty people, and be lucky to come out of there with thirty dollars to get us enough gas to make it to the next town, where maybe the next town would be a different story. There were these people that would come out — “We’re on the Sub Pop Singles Club, and we know all about you guys.” It’s like, “You do?”
JACK ENDINO: After the “Love Buzz” seven-inch came out, they started getting a few more people to their shows. Then when we started working on [1989’s] Bleach— over the holidays of ’88. They didn’t really start taking off and having a lot of people coming to their shows until after Bleach came out, which would have been spring of ’89. And Kurt was still trying to figure it out — he would play guitar and his singing just didn’t have the power. Ultimately, I think he concluded that he needed to play simpler songs, so that he could sing better.
CHAD CHANNING: Recording Bleach happened fast. We were in there for I think a week. Recording at Reciprocal — a really cool scene. I always remember Jack sitting there and he had a circle of snacks around him — chocolate bars. We did a lot of weird experimenting with snare sounds. We actually took two snare drums, took the bottom head off one of them and the top head off another, combined the two drums together. So there ended up being this gap between the two snares, but I used double-sided screws to link them together. Another thing — “Blew” was a song that initially was played in D. So when we went to record that song, it had turned out that we were already in D, and that everyone tuned down, or at least Krist
did, to C — it was even lower.
TRACY MARANDER: Kurt chose that shot [for the cover of Bleach]. I had the negatives, he decided he liked that one the best. And it was his idea to make it a negative image — he’d seen some picture somewhere of a negative image, and liked the way it looked. I think he liked the way everyone looked like they were rocking out — they weren’t just standing around playing. Kurt had wanted me to make sure I got a picture of all four members in the photo for the album — even though Jason hadn’t played on the demos. I was secretly thrilled because Kurt was so happy that it was finally out. When he got the first copy, he was clutching it in his hands. Just so happy — couldn’t stop smiling.
ART CHANTRY: The Bleach cover was one of the last album covers [Lisa Orth] designed for [Sub Pop], because by this point, they owed her thousands of dollars. They were jumping from printer to printer, because nobody would print their stuff — they owed so much money. I think they drove a couple of people out of business — they were awful. But because they were friends, you kept doing stuff for them — for nothing or next to nothing. And Lisa only charged them like $300 — the Bleach cover. I remember when she was working on it at The Rocket — in the production room — I was standing there talking to Grant Alden, who set the type and edited the magazine. He set type for me on this old computer typesetting device called a Compugraphic, and Lisa came up, and said, “I’m working on this band for Sub Pop. They said they’re going to pay me up front this time, but they’re not going to. I’m going to do it anyway. They’re a band with a terrible name, Nirvana. They’re from Aberdeen.” It’s like, “Oh Jesus.”
She had this not great photograph — it was another live shot of a band. Another “hair shot,” and she didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t want to put a lot of effort into it, because she knew she was going to get shafted. So she just put the photograph in, and couldn’t crop the photograph, because it was long and skinny, and the record cover was square. She ended up sloping in some type above and below the photo, and reversing the whole thing on the Photostat camera. She went up to Grant, “Can you set the type for me?” “OK, what typeface do you want?” “I don’t know, whatever’s on the machine.” What was on the machine was a typeface called Onyx, which is a bad design that was only available on Compugraphic. He goes, “What’s the name of the band again?” “Nirvana.” And he goes, bam! “There you go.” That’s how Nirvana’s logo was made. Got paid fifteen bucks [for “designing” the logo]. How many millions of dollars were made on swag? And the joke on the back about the $600 was her joke — she put it on there as kind of a jab at Sub Pop.
Later, they used that “blissed out” happy face image. That particular image was actually the logo for a strip club in downtown Seattle, across the street from the New Art Museum, called the Lusty Lady. They had buttons with that image that they gave out on the street that were really popular. Many of the Seattle rock scene girlfriends made money to support their boyfriends’ bands by dancing at the Lusty Lady. It was crucial in the support system of the Seattle grunge scene — as was prostitution. Many early Seattle rock bands were even managed by notorious pimps. One of the dirty little secrets of rock.
JERRY CANTRELL: I think I heard about Nirvana from Chris — Cornell would wear Nirvana T-shirts. The first time I heard Bleach, I hated it. I can say the same for a lot of my favorite all-time records. It was like, “This guy fucking sucks. He can’t play guitar, blah blah blah.” Self-righteous shit, and also having some attitude about your own band. One particular listen at one time, and everything changed — I’m like, “Oh, I get it. I fucking get it. These guys are great.” But it took a while. I didn’t know a whole lot about them. I didn’t see a whole lot of their gigs. I remember the guys in the band were really stoked on it — Layne [Staley] and Sean [Kinney] really liked it a lot. I was a little bit hesitant — it took me a couple more “bites” to realize that I loved it [laughs].
KIM THAYIL: When I heard Bleach, I thought, “Holy cow, this is one of the coolest local bands I’ve ever heard.” Not just a cool local band, but a cool band from anywhere. We did one of our first major van tours — it might have been the SST tour — where we were touring with Sylvia Juncosa. I believe during that tour, the two cassettes that got the most airplay in the van were Nirvana Bleach and the first Fugazi EP [1988’s Fugazi]. Everyone in the band loved Bleach — it was just so amazing. The whole thing — the songs, the guitar, the vocals, the bass, the drums.
JON AUER: I must admit the first time I heard “About a Girl” I thought it was “Blood and Roses” by the Smithereens. Of course, as soon as the vocals came in it was a different story.
ART CHANTRY: Everybody loved that record.
TRACY MARANDER: I remember one time going to a show at the Vogue, and it was so jam-packed. At that point, realizing how big they’d become. They were too big to be playing small clubs like that anymore.
ALICE WHEELER: Instead of being exclusive, it was an inclusive movement. I think in my mind, that was one of the main differences between say, Soundgarden and Nirvana — was the exclusivity versus the inclusively. The rock star thing versus the everybody’s-in-it-together thing.
CHAD CHANNING: When Bleach came out and the second tour [began], things were definitely a lot different. It was generally packed houses. We spent a lot of time hanging out with people that would come to the show, and almost always get hooked up with a place to stay. Some of the most fun places to play were in the Midwest. I think it’s just because they didn’t get a whole lot of bands coming through there — except for really big major acts at whatever coliseum.
One of the bigger memories was when we played in Dallas, and we got caught in that massive rainstorm. It’s on the dvd [With the Lights Out]. We ended up staying at somebody’s house, but it seemed like there were ten or eleven people living at this big house. And then we had that show in San Antonio, where we didn’t end up staying at anybody’s place. We ended up camping out. When we were out there — some sort of campground — we woke up and heard these ducks that sounded like they were getting ripped apart. Crazy noise, huge splashing in the water. I think Jason was walking down at night with a flashlight, looking around the water, trying to see what the hell is going on. We’re like, “God, could that have been alligators?” Hell, it’s swampland, I wouldn’t put it past it. Kurt or Krist might have decided to sleep inside the van after that.
Milwaukee is where I think some of the footage on that dvd came from. The Pixelvision stuff — the really weird black-and-white, grainy, small screen stuff. That clip is a time when we were driving down the road at night — we put up a blanket to separate the two front seats. Krist was driving, and me and Kurt had the Pixelvisions going. Just started doing random things, and saying random stuff. I think we were drinking Jim Beam — wine and whiskey. [On tour] we listened to a lot of Talulah Gosh, Vaselines, Lead Belly, Shonen Knife. Those guys hadn’t been familiar with Shonen Knife until I brought in a tape. In Boston, I’d picked up The Man Who Sold the World. I know those guys — Kurt anyway — weren’t big David Bowie fans. But I popped it in one time, and Kurt was like, “Wow, this is really cool. This is David Bowie?” I’m pretty sure that’s where he got the idea of doing “The Man Who Sold the World.” We listened to some Pogues, and people would give us their demos.
STU HALLERMAN: One time I saw them play at Evergreen State College at K Dorm. There was a place called the Pit, which was the bottom of the staircase, kind of a lounge. This little octagonal room. I didn’t want to be near the mosh pit, so I went up three or four steps, so I could see a little better. The band gets onstage, they play about three notes, and the entire crowd is pushing on each other so hard that everyone fell over! Just this massive heap of people. I’m like, “Oh man, people are going to get hurt.” I reach down and start to pull people up, and there was this human cooperation thing — everyone grabbed the person on their right and leaned up. The entire crowd went from collapsed to up and dancing again — in half a second.
/> SCOTTY CRANE: It was amazing seeing that any of those bands were playing the Moore [for Lame Fest ’89]. Very exciting, but seemed like the apex/pinnacle of any of their careers — like it could not go any higher. And actually, I don’t think it was sold out. I remember the crowd was light for Nirvana, pretty packed for Tad, and thinning out during Mudhoney’s set. No one knew who Nirvana really were. Chad was at the merch booth — gave me the white vinyl version of the record.
JOE NEWTON: They scared me a little bit [laughs]. I always thought that Kurt was going to hurt himself — and he probably did. The first Sub Pop/ Lame Fest thing that they did — I think that was when he was spinning the guitar around his neck, by the guitar strap.
ROBERT ROTH: There’s another interesting synchronistic event that always struck me as being eerily symbolic of the coming “new age” — the first tour Nirvana did of Europe with Tad. It included dates in both East and West Germany, if my memory serves me right, and coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Johnny Rotten wanted to “Go over the Berlin Wall.” Nirvana went through it, metaphorically speaking.
