I Found My Friends (13 page)

DENNIS FALLON,
Swaziland White Band:
I remember laughing at the big rock-star style hair flippin'/headbanger moves—too funny!

JOSE SORIA,
Happy Dogs:
We had a person who worked with the Sub Pop label, so everyone on Sub Pop would come through the Happy Dogs—we already knew, had their albums, were set up … They stayed at our house a whole day before they played and we partied the whole damn night. Krist was real friendly, knew a little about everything … Kurt Cobain was a little relaxed and didn't open up to you—I didn't get to talk to him for two or three hours after they got there. We had our own conversation. A little more not wanting to talk to everybody … Cobain slept in the van, the rest slept on the floor … River Road, everybody knew our house! It was a place to go.
Elvis-Cooper
—Kurt made it, he had the Elvis thing but he painted Alice Cooper parts on it. My girlfriend had covered herself in it while she was sleeping so in the morning when the band were leaving Kurt looked at her and said, “Hey, you're cold, you can keep it.” They were exactly like us—in terms of wanting to play, wanting to party, they were just really cool and like “Let's do it, let's do it man.” That night it was one of my friends' birthday parties and they were coming through town and weren't even going to play in San Antonio but we said, “You wanna play? You wanna play at Alfred's?” And we did it—a really great thing. Kurt Cobain came back with the other guitarist, bought a couple of guitars here in San Antonio, I kept in touch with Krist Novoselic.

Nirvana would later recall it as a fairly rough tour. Even playing alongside one of the underground's cult acts barely netted them a profit.

ALAN BISHOP:
After the show, the club manager handed me $225 to distribute between the bands ($5 cover, fifty-five people paid—add fifteen, twenty guests and it's seventy plus at the show). I called a guy from Crash Worship over and found Kurt, split the $225 three ways into $75 each and handed both their shares. The Crash Worship guy started complaining and saying that Nirvana was not even supposed to be on the bill and that they didn't deserve a third of the take, that Sun City Girls drew most of the crowd … so I handed him our share of $75 and said something like “Take this—you're on the road too.” He grimaced, knowing there was really nothing he could say, refused the extra cash, and left.

Nirvana rolled into New York so out of enthusiasm they'd already canceled the tour's final eleven days and seven shows. Their relationship with guitarist Jason Everman had broken down.

TOM TRUSNOVIC:
On second guitar, I don't wanna be unreasonable, but I love the Damned, right? That guy looked and sounded pretty fucking far from the Damned. Ha! He seemed to ooze the sort of repellent, dunderheaded machismo that I thought metal represented. Didn't he end up playing in Soundgarden, then joining the Army? Big surprise.

They didn't skip this show, however, because it wasn't just another gig. This was the New Music Seminar, a promotional event giving Nirvana their first contact with the wider music business.

SHAMBIE SINGER:
[It was] essentially a meet-and-greet for up-and-coming bands, record labels, the PR community, and college-radio folks. A chance to assemble everyone in one spot and let the matchmaking happen. I think the official line was a bit less crass … But at heart and in practice, that year at least, it seemed mostly about getting alternative bands hooked up with independent and mainstream labels and PR groups. I think a lot of bands without record contracts came to the NMS specifically to try to find a deal. And for bands on independent labels it was a chance to showcase for the majors.

MIKE HARD,
God Bullies:
This was a
College Music Journal
[CMJ] showcase … Being a showcase pretty much means all the bands get paid the same stipend, like a hundred and fifty bucks, and sets are kept short.

It wasn't necessarily a huge event; each band had fairly casual reasons for being there.

SHAMBIE SINGER:
Mike's grandmother was out of town and we were able to stay for free at her place. And generally it seemed like the trip'd be relatively easy, and the gig fun, and a good chance to see a chick I was sort of dating who lived in NYC.

MIKE HARD:
I think you guys want to make it more than what it was. Like there was some kind of magic there. This was a CMJ show. A joint Sub Pop/Amrep venture, and it was work to us. We knew everyone was there to see Nirvana, so we just wanted to get out of their way, play a good set, make our statement (whether the audience wanted to hear it or not), and then go hang out with our friends. We weren't real bitch magnets or even “cool.” God Bullies was kind of a therapy session for the members involved. We were selfish in that respect. We needed to do this or we would be the ones you would read about in the paper the next day, you know? So and so committed this crime because of their repressive childhood? We were acting out. I do not know what motivated bands like Nirvana. We were trying to save souls and were on a path of enlightenment.

JOHN LEAMY,
Surgery:
For us it was just another hometown gig.

For Nirvana it could still have been a chance for industry exposure. Instead, by the second song, a drunk clambered onstage to shout, “Fucking shit!”

MIKE HARD:
They were off doing interviews all day or something. Rolled in after sound check like rock stars … It was because they were lazy and already thought they had a certain privilege. This is another big bullshit story; they were so poor? Any working band at this time wasn't getting paid shit. Our equipment was like gold. If Nirvana fucked it up or broke it, it would be us the next night who'd be fucked. We'd seen how hard they were on their equipment, we were not about to let them fuck up our shit … There may have been some confusion with all the bands and Nirvana: if we were all going to set up our own backlines or just use one band's. Maybe Nirvana hung around the venue, but it seems they just showed up, wondered if they had to unload or if we were sharing backlines, and then took off until they had to go on.

JOHN LEAMY:
I stood outside smoking cigarettes during their set … Didn't meet them. I was tired though.

KEVIN RUTMANIS,
Cows:
I didn't watch the band at all that night … I walked up, was surprised to see how many people were there, and left. I never cared much for Nirvana—not at all at that point, in fact. I'm sure our booker arranged the show.

SHAMBIE SINGER:
I talked to Kurt briefly in the dressing room … you had to climb down a steep ladder to get there. I recall talking to him about how dangerous it felt to climb up and down that ladder. And I told him a story about another night we'd played … When a huge—like six-foot-seven—dude climbed down the ladder while I was there and transformed himself over the course of about forty-five minutes into a spitting image of Marie Antoinette. Alternative-music night at the Pyramid was always Tuesdays. But on the weekends the club hosted transvestite cabaret acts. And a lot of the regular performers had lockers filled with their stage outfits in the club dressing room … Nirvana didn't seem qualitatively any different from any of the other “Seattle” bands then. And quantitatively I understood they were maybe on the second tier of things.

And with this last whimper, Nirvana's first tour was over.

 

7.0

Still Broke: Second Tour

September to October 1989

Like most bands,
Nirvana was naïve regarding the realities of indie-label life and the mechanics of getting a record to market. They had poured their all into the
Bleach
sessions only to wait another half year for it to actually emerge; they endured the discomfort of their first tour while feeling almost no one could find their album; they had music on the market but no royalties in their pockets.

COLIN BURNS,
Slaughter Shack:
It was easy to feel very Rodney Dangerfield-ish about things. There wasn't “alternative rock” yet. The local press and college radio seemed enamored of college rock. Men with cargo shorts and jangly guitars were critics' darlings. And for a while the hardcore audience didn't know how to react either.

SLIM MOON:
The process of putting out “Love Buzz” and trying to get Sub Pop to put out an album was very frustrating for them, and they talked a lot about feeling that Sub Pop thought they were hicks from the sticks and didn't really believe in them.

CHRIS QUINN:
Jonathan Poneman even said at one point, “We like them as people so we signed them, we thought it'd be cool,” but it felt like Sub Pop was banking more on Mudhoney and Tad and some other stuff. That isn't to say they weren't behind Nirvana, but from my level of enthusiasm it seemed like everything was “less.”

Although there was undoubtedly a kernel of truth in certain gripes, there was never anything bad enough to justify Cobain's claims that the band was treated like a bunch of rednecks, or neglected, or underpromoted.

SCOTT VANDERPOOL:
I could see where Kurt and Krist may have felt that way early on … it was sort of cliquish … but I always moved pretty freely among different groups, kind of like when I was in high school and had plenty of stoner, jock, and nerd friends.

JAIME ROBERT JOHNSON:
I'm not gonna smack-talk Sub Pop, because they did some great things … I always had the idea that Bruce and Jon chose a particular group of artists to focus on and worked their way outward from that core group of artists … Sub Pop seemed to me always to be controlled by a really small group of people who were intent upon keeping it that way regardless of what they were doing.

STEVE MORIARTY:
I didn't always like grunge. Mudhoney, they could play pretty well, the guy could scream pretty good, but they still had that element of rock stars and Sub Pop was about making them into rock stars in order to make money. And that was true with Soundgarden, true with Alice in Chains, true with Nirvana. It was about the mystique of the rock star—the antithesis of punk. So when we were there in 1989 we were thinking, We don't care about all this publicity, and how good these bands are and how long their hair is and all this stuff. We were there to communicate the fact that we're all the same and we're going to play on the floor instead of the stage and so we brought a different ethos and we had a female singer, which was also not done.

While prone to excessive honesty regarding his darkest thoughts and suspicions, it's unlikely that Cobain, in his more considered moments, didn't recognize how lucky Nirvana had been to have the support of Sub Pop.

JOHN PURKEY:
Kurt just wanted to be part of Sub Pop; he really wanted to be part of Sub Pop and really liked the scene around Sub Pop at the time.

A typical contradiction: he wanted to be in the club as long as he could complain about it.

Sub Pop was supporting Nirvana as best they could.

SHAMBIE SINGER:
I recall being in Seattle in May 1989, and riding with Jonathan Poneman out to a guitar store he wanted to show us … We were talking about Mudhoney. I was telling them how much I liked their stuff and how psyched I was that they were doing well, in terms of selling records, getting decent shows and lots of college radio airplay. And Jonathan said, “Oh, you think Mudhoney's doing well, we've got another band that's gonna be even bigger.” And I asked who and he said, “Nirvana.” And my disbelieving response was, “Even bigger than Mudhoney?” Which seemed impossible in May of 1989. But Jonathan was sure of it. I asked him why he thought so and he said because of Kurt's voice.

In fact, Nirvana's status as the first band with a formal Sub Pop contract, getting the first release on the Singles Club and the chance to release an album made Nirvana look a touch pampered compared to the way other bands on Sub Pop were scraping by.

GEOFF ROBINSON:
I felt bands were out there to be beaten. It was raw competition. We felt we were the heaviest and could be the fastest, or the slowest. Whatever the case, loud was the prime directive. We certainly did not live out of other bands' pockets. For the most part, with a few exceptions, we felt that they secretly hated us because we were “from the wrong side of the tracks.” Many of the other bands' members' parents had money, so these guys got up there with some pretty nice equipment … We were working stiffs. I was working for Boeing at the time. T-man [Tracy Simmons] was a fiberglass boat builder and Doug [Day] was a landscaper. Michael [Anderson] was a chef … we were pretty self-absorbed with our own material and that Nirvana seemed to be the darling child of Sub Pop. That gets back to the competitive thing.

JAMES BURDYSHAW:
I didn't make a living off my music then and have never been able to do that. I worked in a deli in 1988 making $4.25 an hour for thirty hours a week. I moved back in with my mother to save money so I could go on tour. In between tours in 1989, I worked temporary labor jobs, including at a fish-packing plant for $5 an hour. It was not easy. It wasn't until the final Cat Butt tour that Danny gave us a per diem of $5 a day. I always took savings with me.

CHRIS PUGH:
When we were on Sub Pop, they were just barely squeaking by, not making a lot of money. When we first started they were well regarded and had some success but didn't have any money though their bands were doing well—especially in the UK. Swallow was never one of Sub Pop's favorite bands—not critically acclaimed or crowd favorites. So we did receive some support—they helped us with touring a bit—but we weren't on top of their list of bands they were interested in spending money on … If you're in a band where you're creating a buzz, then it's self-perpetuating and it'll start taking on a life of its own, but that was never happening for us … The thing about us and Sub Pop was that we were given plenty of opportunity but we weren't able to capitalize on it—if we'd delivered a record like
Bleach
then that would have been great, but we weren't able to do that.