This is a Call (26 page)

Courtney Love was not an easy woman to ignore. Loud-mouthed, confrontational, sharp and sassy, the 26-year-old singer was, quite simply, a force of nature. Like Cobain, Love was the product of a broken home and an itinerant childhood. The daughter of former Grateful Dead tour manager Hank Harrison and therapist Linda Carroll, Love had bounced around between Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon and New Zealand in her early childhood, finally settling down with a friend of her mother’s in Eugene, Oregon. There she fell in with a crowd of tough teenage girls and cultivated a reputation as a troublemaker, a reputation she has yet to shed.

‘I found my inner bitch and ran with her,’ she cheerfully informed
Spin
magazine in 1995.

Love and her ‘inner bitch’ clocked up some serious air miles. She worked as a stripper in Japan, studied at Dublin’s prestigious Trinity College, hung out with Julian Cope and Echo and the Bunnymen in Liverpool, fronted an early version of Faith No More in San Francisco (‘She caused a whirlwind of shit,’ bassist Bill Gould once told me approvingly. ‘She was a magnet for chaos’) and landed a bit part in British film director Alex Cox’s
Sid and Nancy
in New York, all before her 22nd birthday. In 1989 she wound up back in Los Angeles on a mission to put together a band influenced by Sonic Youth, Big Black and Fleetwood Mac; as Nirvana were extricating themselves from their Sub Pop contract the label were making plans to release Hole’s second single, the typically abrasive
Dicknail
. After hanging out with Love at the Palladium, Cobain began telling his friends that he had just met the coolest girl in the world. Five months would pass before the pair crossed paths again; from that day forth, their lives would be forever intertwined.

By the beginning of June, Nirvana’s album, now titled
Nevermind
, was in the can. The recording budget had doubled from Geffen’s original $65,000 estimate to over $120,000, but in everyone’s opinion this was money well spent. As Geffen executives began to appear in the studio to hear Butch Vig’s rough mixes of the album, word was already spreading around Los Angeles that Nirvana had created a monster. Grohl’s old friend Barrett Jones was among those who heard early mixes of the record: he left Sound City ‘blown away’ by what he had heard.

‘I remember getting chills just listening to playbacks in the studio,’ he says. ‘I thought it sounded so good. I told Kurt in the studio that they’d be on the cover of
Rolling Stone
before the year was out … and I was right.’

‘John Silva and I went to the studio to hear it when the mixing was finished at Scream in the Valley,’ says Mark Kates. ‘And it sounded like a really great, powerful, complete album. You’re never going to get any of us to say that we could foresee what was going to happen – anyone who says that would not be telling the truth – but we felt they had accomplished the absolute maximum of what could have been expected from them.’

‘As we were mixing the album, Chris and Kurt and I would take a tape of the songs and just drive around the Hollywood Hills listening to it,’ Grohl recalled a decade on. ‘That was something else. Like when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” first came through the speakers: the only demos we’d done of that song were on a boombox – we were used to hearing it sound like a shitty bootleg … all of a sudden you have Butch Vig making it sound like
Led Zeppelin IV
.’

Amid all the positivity surrounding the recording there was but one dissenting voice. Somewhat awkwardly for Dave Grohl, that voice belonged to his girlfriend.

‘When I was in the studio hearing how those songs were represented I didn’t like it,’ admits Jennifer Finch. ‘I thought the songs had got very watered down and very commercial. Dave and Kurt and I went to the first Lollapolooza festival together and we listened to the first version of the album together, Butch’s mix of the record, and I was like, “Wow!” I don’t think I said anything negative, but I was like, “Wow, this is really, really different,” with that weird smile on my face. It’s hard when you’re dating somebody, you don’t wanna be “the girlfriend that has the opinion”, you know? But I wasn’t a big fan of it at all, and I couldn’t totally hide that. I thought that maybe they’d gone too commercial too quickly.’

‘But, of course, at that point we didn’t think
anything
was going to happen with the record,’ says Grohl. ‘It was like releasing a Jesus Lizard record or something. I thought “Teen Spirit” was another good song, and it might get on
120 Minutes
and allow us to tour with Sonic Youth or maybe headline Brixton Academy, but no one thought it was a hit single because a hit single was just unimaginable. There was no world domination ambition. Because that just couldn’t happen. That wasn’t
allowed
to happen.’

Smells like teen spirit

The promoter said, ‘That guy is gonna come back with his friends and he’s going to fucking kill you, so stay in here, and when I give you the secret knock, I’m gonna get you the fuck outta here and into a cab.’ So we run outside: Kurt gets into the cab, Chris gets into the cab … and here comes the guy with all his friends so the cab pulls off …

Dave Grohl

Dave Grohl stands on the stage of Boston’s Venus de Milo nightclub, choking back laughter as he watches Kurt Cobain smear thick white lard onto his best friend’s bare ass. Standing on a plastic Twister mat, Chris Novoselic tugs his tiny black briefs back up over his skinny hips, and attempts to regain his dignity, or as much dignity as a six foot seven inch man wearing only his pants, a pair of white tube socks, half a tub of unctuous vegetable oil fat and a broad smile can hope to muster. Waiting to interview Nirvana for their first ever TV appearance, the nice lady from MTV isn’t quite sure where to look.

‘So what’s going on here?’ she asks breezily, as Novoselic begins massaging the Crisco vegetable fat into his nipples. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We’re playing Crisco Twister,’ says Nirvana’s bassist, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if this were standard practice for new bands being interviewed on MTV.

Spotting Grohl sniggering out of shot, Novoselic breaks away from his interviewer and hurls a fistful of lard across the stage in his direction. When Grohl gleefully lobs a wad of goo right back at the near-naked bassist, MTV’s exasperated director has seen enough. At his signal, the cameras stop turning over and the microphone is cut dead. It’s 23 September 1991 and Nirvana’s first MTV interview is over before it has really begun.

A less patient man than Mark Kates might have thrown in the towel with his new charges at this point. Nirvana’s stay in Boston was not exactly stress-free for Geffen’s head of alternative music promotion. It was Kates’s decision to schedule the first US date of the band’s North American tour at the 1,000-capacity Axis club in his hometown that evening. The gig, at which Nirvana were to be sandwiched between Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins and local alternative rockers Bullet LaVolta, was a birthday bash for Boston radio station WFNX, and the Seattle band’s participation was intended as Geffen’s ‘thank you’ to station director Kurt St Thomas, Nirvana’s first and biggest champion at radio. But upon learning that the WFNX gig was to be a 21+ event, Cobain promptly demanded that Kates arrange a second show at the venue, an all-ages gig, the following night, giving the promoters just 24 hours to shift 1,000 tickets.

That same evening Cobain met local singer-songwriter Mary Lou Lord at a Melvins gig at Boston’s Rat club and – without flagging his intentions up to Grohl, Novoselic or Kates – promptly decided to blow out all his scheduled promotional duties (including a hugely important interview with the
New York Times
’s Karen Schoemer) so he could spend the day hanging out with his cute new friend. On the eve of the release of
Nevermind
, the album he hoped would make him a star, Cobain’s disengagement from the process represented a pointed act of disobedience towards his new corporate paymasters, his own little foot-stamping punk rock declaration of independence.

Still, any irritation Kates might have harboured towards Cobain was swept away the moment Nirvana took the stage at the Axis on 23 September. Kates knew Nirvana were good, but their performance this night was something else – explosive, chaotic, life-affirming, transcendent. As wave after wave of stage divers tumbled through air stale with perspiration, Cobain slashed wildly at his guitar strings and howled like his battered Converse trainers were on fire. ‘
With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Here we are now, entertain us …
’

At the climax of the set, Monty Lee Wilkes, Nirvana’s tour manager, walked past Kates shaking his head.

‘This tour,’ he said, ‘is going to get crazy.’

Nirvana began road-testing their new album just days after leaving Sound City. On 10 June 1991 the trio began an eight-date West Coast tour supporting J. Mascis’s Dinosaur Jr, a group Cobain held in high regard, and one from whom his own band had drawn inspiration. But from the tour’s opening night at the Gothic Theater in Denver, Colarado, it was painfully evident that the majority of those in attendance were more excited about seeing the opening band than the headliners.

‘They were smoking Dinosaur Jr every night, just blowing them away,’ recalls Franz Stahl, who’d landed a job teching for the trio on these dates. ‘By the time Dinosaur Jr came on more than half the audience would be gone, people didn’t even hang around.’

‘It was prior to
Nevermind
coming out and so the band had all these cassettes with them with different mixes of all the songs, and they’d listen to them throughout the trip and talk among themselves about this, that and the other. I’d just be sitting listening to these songs going, “God, this shit is
great
.” And Kurt would be going, “Er, it’s alright …” To be honest, I don’t recall “Teen Spirit”, that wasn’t one of the songs that I thought was going to blow up, but I was like, “Guys, this tape is insane, this is amazing!” They’d be like, “Yeah, yeah …” But I could see it, I could just see it. I’d talk to my brother and go, “Dude, this is going to be
huge.
”’

‘I heard “Teen Spirit” for the first time in that stinky van too,’ says Nirvana sound engineer Craig Montgomery. ‘We listened to it on the boombox and I remember that when it broke down into the quiet, chiming guitar part right after the intro, I said, “Wow … Pixies.” And Kurt said, “Do you think it sounds too much like the Pixies?” I said “No, no one is going to pick up on that …” But it was kinda a logical progression from what they were doing live: Kurt was trying to incorporate more of that pop influence into the songs because that’s what he was into at the time. After having spent a European tour in the van listening to Abba it wasn’t surprising to me that more of a pop sensibility would show up in the music.’

Gold Mountain’s Danny Goldberg saw Nirvana play live for the first time when the tour rolled up to the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on 14 June. The music industry veteran remembers being ‘completely overwhelmed’ by his first sighting of his new act.

‘Kurt had a mystical and powerful connection with the audience that took my breath away,’ he recalled in his modestly titled memoir
Bumping into Geniuses
. ‘After years of increasing cynicism about what rock and roll had turned into, I felt the naïve excitement of a teenager. Somehow Kurt Cobain was able to be both on the stage and in the audience, rocking the crowd out and yet also among them. It was only then that I realised that Kurt Cobain was not just a smart, quirky rock artist but also a true genius.’

‘There are certain frontmen that don’t even consider that concept for one second,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘There are some people – whether that’s Ian Curtis or Bob Dylan or Kurt – whose message and lyrics and personality truly is bigger than a guitar and a stage and an audience. And that can be the most powerful thing. Some frontmen have a real powerful physical presence, like Henry Rollins or H.R. from Bad Brains, and then you have people that just have a huge emotional presence. I think Kurt had an incredibly deep and powerful emotional presence that made it so that he didn’t have to take one step in any direction, because the sound of his voice and the intention of what he was doing onstage was enough to blow an arena full of people away. Coming from the hardcore scene where most of the singers were just fucking insane – they were on top of your head and doing backflips and they were bleeding and covered in glass and peanut butter – to see someone that could just stand and scream his throat raw and have that be enough was really something. I’d never been in a band with someone like that. And I never will be again, I’m sure.’

‘It’s funny how oblivious they all were to what was about to happen,’ says Pete Stahl. ‘I remember sitting with Dave and Chris in their van outside the Hollywood Palladium and talking about the record getting ready to come out and they were saying, “Wow, we’ll never sell enough records to pay off this studio budget.” But you could tell something was going on. From the time I watched Kurt sing in the studio there was definitely something going on.

‘The next time they came back to LA, our band Wool opened up for them at the Roxy. And that was like a madhouse. I remember loading our gear out and someone came up to me and offered me like $200 for my wristband. I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” Things like that just didn’t happen in our world.’

On 17 August, two days after the Nirvana/Wool show at the Roxy, Nirvana shot a video for
Nevermind
’s first single, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, at GMT Studios in Culver City, California. Loosely based upon two of Kurt Cobain’s favourite films, the Ramones’
Rock and Roll High School
and cult teen rebellion flick
Over the Edge
, the concept of the video, which involved the band lip-synching in front of an anarchic ‘pep rally from Hell’, was all the singer’s own work. Cobain sketched out every single shot for the video in advance of the shoot: as an artist, he understood the power of visual imagery and the impact it could have.

‘I saw this movie
Over the Edge
,’ he told
Melody Maker
journalists the Stud Brothers in 1993. ‘I remember leaving that theatre and almost everyone who was in there came running out screaming their heads off and breaking windows and vandalising and wanting to get high. It totally affected them and influenced them. It may not have been the intention of the person who made the movie, and it is a great movie, but that’s what happened.’

With his meticulously plotted storyboard for the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video, Cobain’s own intention was simple: he wanted nothing less than to provoke that same level of mayhem in every suburban neighbourhood in America.

Geffen chose unknown director Samuel Bayer, a recent graduate from New York’s School of Visual Arts, to helm the promo. It was his first gig in the music industry, a fact that soon became transparent even to Dave Grohl, himself a video virgin.

‘The director had a loud bullhorn thing,’ the drummer recalled to
Newsweek
in 1999, ‘and he was trying to explain the concept to the crowd, and saying, “Okay now, in the first verse you’re supposed to look bored and complacent and unhappy. Just sit in your seats and tap your foot and look, you know, distraught, whatever.” And then by the end of the song they’re supposed to be tearing the place to shreds. When they got to the first chorus the crowd was completely out of control, and the director was screaming at the top of his lungs for everyone to fucking calm down and be cool, or they’ll get kicked out. So it was pretty hilarious actually, seeing this man trying to control these children who just wanted to destroy.’

As the shoot dragged on, tensions on the soundstage mounted. Cobain had made no secret of his desire to direct the video himself, and as he swallowed mouthfuls of Jim Beam whiskey between takes, watching Bayer strut around like a bargain basement Cecil B. DeMille, his mood got uglier and his frustration more tangible. When he screamed his lyrics into the rookie director’s lens, his anger was all too real. At the end of the evening, sensing that his own agitation was being mirrored among the increasingly restless teens watching the shoot, Cobain encouraged the extras to come down from the bleachers to thrash around his band as if they were at a real punk rock show. Cue mayhem.

In the edit suite, Cobain reasserted his independence by changing the ending of Bayer’s cut of the video. Against the director’s wishes, he inserted a closing sequence of his own face leering into the camera in close-up. It was a masterstroke. Throughout the video Cobain had come across as every inch the brooding, agitated misfit, his fine features masked by his lank blond hair. But here, at the video’s violent, riotous dénouement, the mischievous expression on his handsome face offered an invitation to the dance, his eyes screaming ‘JOIN US!’ It was an invitation that would prove irresistible.

With the ‘Teen Spirit’ video wrapped, Nirvana did what so many American bands do in the summer, and came to Europe for the festival season. That August the trio interspersed festival appearances at England’s Reading festival, the Monsters of Spex event in Cologne and Belgium’s Pukkelpop, with one-off club gigs supporting their new label mates and management stablemates Sonic Youth. On 20 August they launched their European tour with an appearance at Sir Henry’s in Cork; the following day they played the 500-capacity Top Hat club in Dún Laoghaire, a small seaside town south of Dublin. Grohl and Cobain were thrilled to be in Ireland: on his first morning in the country Dave Grohl phoned his mother Virginia and said, ‘Mom, all the women here look like you!’