This is a Call (18 page)

‘And then Buzz said, “Have you heard of Nirvana?”’ Grohl recalls. ‘He said, “They’re looking for a drummer.” And he gave me Chris’s number.’

Grohl had heard of Nirvana, indeed he owned the Aberdeen trio’s début album
Bleach
. But he knew nothing of the band beyond their music and their status as an underground buzz band: indeed, the previous month he had stood in the I-Beam’s dressing room with Cobain and Novoselic without recognising either man.

‘Someone told me who they were and I was thinking, What,
that’s
Nirvana? Are you kidding? Because on the cover of
Bleach
they looked like psycho lumberjacks. I was like, “What, that little dude and that big motherfucker? You’re kidding me.” I laughed, like, “No way.”

‘But I loved
Bleach
, I thought it was great. It had everything that I really loved about music. It had The Beatles influence on “About a Girl” and then songs like “Paper Cuts” and “Sifting” were heavy as balls. And “Negative Creep” was
amazing
. And girls liked Nirvana. I had a girlfriend that liked Nirvana and I was like, “You like a band that I like? Wow!” So I knew that Nirvana were successful in the underground scene and surely that was some motivation for me to call.

‘So then I talked to Chris and Kurt on the phone, but I didn’t tell Pete and Franz I was talking to them. But when I first called, Chris said, “Oh man, Dan Peters from Mudhoney is our drummer now.” And I said, “Oh, well, if you come down here, call me up and let’s hang out … because I’m fucking stranded here!” And then he called back and said, “You know, actually let’s talk about this …”

‘Those guys liked Scream and they were bummed that we’d broken up, but they also loved Mudhoney, and they didn’t want to be responsible for breaking Mudhoney up. So then I got on the phone with Kurt and in talking to the two of them we realised, Wow, we kinda come from the same place. I love Neil Young
and
Public Enemy, I love Celtic Frost
and
The Beatles, and they were the same in that way. We all came from divorced families. We all discovered punk rock and grew up listening to Black Flag but we also loved John Fogerty. We were all little dirtbags who loved to play rock music. So it seemed like we might have a connection.

‘So then I was faced with this decision, maybe the hardest decision of my entire life. It was, do I leave Pete and Franz and move on and join another band, or do I stay in Los Angeles? Pete and Franz were my best friends. I looked up to Pete like he was my father, he taught me so much, and I respected him so much and we were so close. But to be honest I just didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles and suffer any more. And for me to do that would mean leaving Pete and Franz …’

Agonising over his decision, Grohl picked up the phone and called Kathleen Place to ask his mother for her advice.

‘She loved Pete and Franz as much as I did, we were family,’ he says. ‘And she basically said, of course you need to do what you need to do, but you have to look out for yourself in this situation.’

When he replaced the handset, Grohl made his decision.

‘I remember saying to Franz, “I’m going to go up there to try out.” And he said, “You ain’t coming back.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know if I have the gig.” And he shook his head and said, “You ain’t coming back.”

‘And deep down I knew it too.’

Negative creep

Kurt was a human being. And maybe it’s selective memory, but I don’t want to think of him as some brooding, suicidal genius. He was a fucking nice guy. But I understand. That’s how legends are made …

Dave Grohl

There’s a famous photograph of Kurt Cobain which Nirvana fans will instantly recognise. Shot by
NME
photographer Martyn Goodacre in London in October 1990 during Dave Grohl’s first tour with the band, the image has featured on magazine covers worldwide and been reprinted on countless unofficial T-shirts, posters and live bootleg recordings. In the photo, Cobain stares down the camera from behind a tousled, mussed-up fringe, his eyes ringed with black ‘guy-liner’, his jaw set hard. It’s a powerful piece of iconography, conveying vulnerability, defiance and soulful intensity: the singer’s sullen expression evokes memories of classic movie anti-heroes, from Marlon Brando’s outlaw biker Johnny Strabler in
The Wild One
to Matt Dillon’s high school rebel Richie White in
Over the Edge
. It’s an image that posits the idea of Cobain as a moody, brooding misfit, rock’s last rebel without a cause.

On 4 March 1994, as news broke internationally that Nirvana’s frontman was in a coma in Rome’s Policlinico Umberto Primo hospital following a drug overdose in the city’s Hotel Excelsior, one UK music magazine selected Goodacre’s photo as a potential cover image to accompany its coverage of the story. The following day, after Cobain emerged from the coma and it became clear that he would survive the overdose, the image was placed back in the files. The time was not yet right for Cobain’s beatification. Five weeks later, as reports reached London that a lifeless body had been found in a room above the garage of Cobain’s home on Seattle’s Washington Boulevard, the photo was pulled from the files once more. For even as Kurt Cobain’s death was being reported, his immortality was being packaged and sold.

Former
NME
Editor Steve Sutherland, the man who originally commissioned Goodacre’s session with Nirvana, once claimed that this image ‘tells the story of grunge’, that it ‘tells Kurt Cobain’s story’. But with all due respect to the photographer, it doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. It’s too clean, too pretty, too stylised, too perfect. It’s an image that would be better suited to advertising a Disney biopic of Cobain’s life than the true dirt-under-the-fingernails story. It does, however, perfectly illustrate the
myth
of Cobain – the notion of Nirvana’s frontman as a troubled poetic genius, an artist too sensitive and fragile for the cut-throat corporate entertainment industry into which he was propelled against his will by the phenomenal success of his band’s 1991 album
Nevermind
. That romanticised narrative is neat, conventional and easily grasped, a powerful myth with enduring appeal.

Yet no one was more responsible for constructing myths around Kurt Cobain than the man himself. From the earliest entries in his journals through to his suicide note, Cobain obsessively and compulsively documented, distorted, revised and rewrote his own history, to the point where facts and fictions in his life story have blurred and coalesced into one. The singer used to tell a great story about how he pawned his stepfather’s guns to buy his first guitar: it’s a memorable anecdote, but not true. Then there was the moving tale of Cobain living under a bridge in Aberdeen as a homeless teenager: poignant, but again untrue. As another illustration of his unhappy, deprived childhood, Cobain would tell of receiving just a solitary lump of coal as a present from his parents one Christmas: this piece of heartrending Dickensian storytelling was pure fiction too. For the singer, truth was rarely allowed to stand in the way of a good story.

But if Cobain was, on occasion, an unreliable narrator, then he was following in an accepted tradition. The music business is a hall of smoke and mirrors, and rock ’n’ roll had always provided opportunities for reinvention and rebranding: for all their undeniable integrity, the personas of ‘Joe Strummer’ and ‘Iggy Pop’ were calculated constructs for John Mellor and James Osterberg Jr just as surely as Ziggy Stardust and Alice Cooper were the inventions of David Jones and Vincent Furnier. And just as Robert Zimmerman’s early yarns about being a hobo and a circus performer were pure fantasy, there’s no doubt that padding out his own life experiences with exaggerations, obfuscations and lies damned lies appealed to the mischief-maker in Cobain. As a child, Cobain read about punk rock before he ever
heard
punk rock – courtesy of a
Creem
magazine report on the Sex Pistols’ much-hyped 1978 US tour – and in reading of Malcolm McClaren’s machinations and manipulations he instantly grasped how myths could serve to inspire and incite above and beyond base realities. Rewriting his own story, then, was Cobain’s very own great rock ’n’ roll swindle.

Writing about Nirvana’s frontman in Ireland’s
Hot Press
magazine in 1993, music critic Bill Graham noted, ‘Small-town outsiders frequently believe more intensely in rock myths. Swallowing dreams whole, they can lack the worldliness, agnosticism and chameleon habits of big city scenemakers. Kurt Cobain’s version of punk could be nothing but fundamentalist.’ The intensity of this conviction would prove damning for the singer. On the afternoon of 5 April 1994, before placing the business end of a shotgun against his head, Cobain put pen to paper for the final time. ‘All the warnings from the Punk Rock 101 courses over the years since my first introduction to the, shall we say, ethics involved with independence and the embracement of your community has proven to be very true,’ he wrote. ‘I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things … The fact is, I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.’

‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away,’ he concluded.

With these words, for better or worse, Cobain’s status as a rock ’n’ roll martyr was enshrined. But this reductive version of Nirvana’s story sits uneasily with those, like Dave Grohl, who knew Kurt Cobain best.

‘You have to understand, for me, Nirvana is more than it is for you,’ Grohl told one inquisitive journalist in 2011. ‘It was a really personal experience. I was a kid. Our lives were lifted and then turned upside down. And then our hearts were broken when Kurt died. The whole thing is much more personal than the logo or the T-shirt or the iconic image.’

‘What do you think of when you think of Kurt?’ Grohl asked me rhetorically in 2009. ‘You think of a rock star that killed himself, because of this guilt of being a rock star, [because] he was unhappy with his success. But he was a complicated person, and it’s hard for anyone still to this day to completely understand. He may have seemed like this punk rock iconoclastic misfit, but he still fucking loved Abba, we danced to Abba a hundred times. So, when
I
think of Kurt, I think of the way he giggled, or Abba, or him saying to me, “God man, I wish I could wear sweatpants,” shit like that. He was a human being. And maybe it’s selective memory, but I don’t want to think of him as some brooding, suicidal genius. He was a fucking nice guy. But I understand. That’s how legends are made.

‘Reading John Lennon interviews you can see how he was so conflicted, how he was such a massive tangled ball of contradiction, how he was searching and confused and passionate and a genius. And in reading a lot of those interviews, personally, I see a lot of similarities [with Kurt]. Please don’t quote me saying he was a songwriter like Lennon, but there are some similarities in those two personalities that made for some great contradictions and it’s really complicated to figure them out. Did Kurt want to be considered the greatest songwriter in the world? I think he did. But was he cool about everything else that came along with that? No. Did it keep him from writing songs? No. At the end of the day, if you don’t want to fucking do something, don’t do it.

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on 20 February 1967 at Grays Harbor Community Hospital, on a hill overlooking Aberdeen, Washington. His mother, Wendy, was a homemaker, his father Donald a mechanic at a Chevron station in nearby Hoquiam, where the young newly-weds lived at 2830½ Aberdeen Avenue. Like Dave Grohl, Cobain had Northern European ancestry – his father’s family had Irish roots, while Wendy Cobain’s bloodline, the Fradenburgs, were of German descent. Like Grohl too, Cobain had music in his blood: his uncle Chuck Fradenburg played drums in Aberdeen garage rockers The Beachcombers (whose raucous take on garage standard ‘Farmer John’ can be heard alongside The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ and The Sonics’ ‘High Time’ on the excellent compilation album
The History of Northwest Rock,Volume 2 – The Garage Years
) while Wendy’s younger sister Mari played guitar and performed as a country ’n’ western singer/ songwriter in area nightclubs. By the age of two, Kurt was contributing enthusiastic takes on The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ and The Monkees’ ‘(Theme From) The Monkees’ to family singalongs: one of Mari Fradenburg’s home audio recordings from 1969 finds her stubbornly independent nephew shouting ‘I’ll do it by myself!’ when an adult offers to help out with lyrics.

‘You could just say, “Hey Kurt, sing this!” and he would sing it,’ Mari Fradenburg (then the married Mari Earl) told
Goldmine
magazine in 1997. ‘He had a lot of charisma from a very young age.’

On 24 April 1970 the Cobain family was expanded with the arrival of Kurt’s sister Kimberly. By then the family had moved to Aberdeen, Washington. Derived from the Pictish-Gaelic words
aber devan
, meaning ‘at the meeting of two rivers’, Aberdeen is located on the banks of the Wishkah and Chehalis Rivers, on the southern edge of the picturesque Olympic Peninsula. Developed around its logging and fishing industries, in the post-World War II years it was a thriving seaport and a gateway to the Pacific, with a reputation as a town in which hard, honest graft was handsomely rewarded. Those rewards were not always wholesome: local entrepreneurs recognised that the town’s young, overwhelmingly male itinerant workforce had significant disposable income, and a slew of saloons, gambling dens and brothels grew up around Hume Street to part them from their earnings. The area had a reputation for lawlessness: at a point, violence and villainy was so endemic that sailors kicking their heels in Aberdeen between voyages to Asia bestowed the unwanted nickname ‘The Hellhole of the Pacific’ upon the town. By the time the Cobain family set up home at 1210 East First Street, though, Aberdeen’s streets had been cleaned up and its bordellos had long been shut down. So too, however, had most of its sawmills and fishing canneries. Unemployment, alcoholism and suicide rates were on the rise, homes and shops were being boarded up and abandoned, and Washington State politicians had chosen to avert their eyes from the town’s problems. As the 1970s progressed, Aberdeen’s prospects looked increasingly bleak: to many of its residents, this was a forgotten town drawing its last breaths.

Though he would come to despise his hometown, in the early years of his childhood at least Cobain was oblivious to its rapid deterioration. He was a hyperactive, bright, happy child, popular with his peers and teachers alike, with a flair for art and a gift for mimicry which made him the centre of attention at family parties. But in 1975 the youngster’s self-confidence and self-esteem were dealt a crushing blow when his parents decided to divorce. This was also the year in which Virginia and James Grohl separated, but whereas the six-year-old Dave Grohl, too young to fully grasp the gravity of the situation, took his parents’ divorce in his stride, Cobain, two years older than his future bandmate and shielded less from parental arguments, internalised the split and dwelt upon it constantly. In the summer of 1975 he wrote on his bedroom wall ‘I hate Mom, I hate Dad. Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad. It simply makes you want to be so sad.’

‘It just destroyed his life,’ Wendy Cobain admitted to Michael Azerrad. ‘He changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very inward – he just held everything. He became real shy. He became real sullen, kind of mad and always frowning and ridiculing.’

Where Virginia and James Grohl’s divorce was conducted with civility and mutual respect, and the split actually tightened the bonds between Dave and his mother and sister, the same was not true for Kurt Cobain. Wendy and Don Cobain’s separation was acrimonious, and both Kurt’s parents later admitted that their children were used as pawns in the bitter battle between them. Though Wendy Cobain was awarded custody of the couple’s two children, soon after the divorce Kurt asked to live with his father in the nearby town of Montesano, as he despised his mother’s new boyfriend. He found life with his father problematic too, however. Though Donald Cobain tried his best to develop a relationship with his boy, he was locked down emotionally, and not given to overt displays of affection. His attempts to bond with his artistic, sensitive son over baseball and wrestling were painfully ill-judged: a loathing of the ‘jock’ mentality stayed with Kurt throughout his life.