This is a Call (37 page)

‘But I stayed. And that was my own decision. My responsibility was to Krist and Kurt, my job was to be there for them. There was never anyone telling me “You have to …” anything. Everybody else worked for me, I knew that, right out the gate. I knew that the first time I tried to quit. “Fuck you people, don’t you fucking tell me what to do! Fuck you! I need to do this? I don’t need to do this. I
like
working at Furniture Warehouse … ”You feel a responsibility to your audience and your fans, but not so much that it would fucking kill me.’

Nirvana’s new guitarist did much to improve the atmosphere in the camp. Born Georg Ruthenberg on 5 August 1959, Pat Smear was a punk rock lifer, with a wry sense of humour honed on the early Hollywood punk scene with his band The Germs, a band Dave Grohl remembers as ‘the baddest motherfuckers in the world’. Formed in 1977 by Queen/Alice Cooper/Runaways fan Ruthenberg and his teenage best friend, the brash, bold and provocative Paul Beahm, aka Darby Crash, The Germs set out to be Los Angeles’ most notorious, controversial and talked-about band: after just one show at the Orpheum on Sunset Boulevard they’d pretty much achieved their aim, with
Raw Power
fanzine dismissing them as ‘the biggest joke of the year’.

‘None of the Germs could play their instruments whatsoever,’ the fanzine noted. ‘They took an hour to get set up and then played for two minutes. The lead singer smeared peanut butter all over his face and everybody’s in the group, and they were all spitting on each other until they were kicked off. You can bet they won’t be back either.’

‘We went out of our way to say things and do things that most people would never say or do,’ recalled Smear to rock writer/Hollywood punk rock man-about-town Brendan Mullen for his superb, highly recommended Germs biography
Lexicon Devil
. ‘It was like, “We’re gonna fucking start a band, and we’re gonna change our names, and we’re gonna fucking be this thing – we’re gonna really be like that, 24 – 7, we’re not going to fake it! … and we’re never gonna puss out! Whatever it is we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be the most – if we’re gonna be punk, then we’re gonna out-punk the Sex Pistols! If we’re gonna be the worst band ever, then we’re fucking gonna be the
worst
band ever!’

Smear’s first appearance with Nirvana came at the band’s
Saturday Night Live
taping on 25 September 1993. By Hallowe’en his effervescent personality had raised morale in the camp to the extent that Nirvana took to the stage of the University of Akron on 31 October in fancy dress – Cobain dressed as the kids TV dinosaur Barney, Smear dressed as Slash, Grohl appearing as a mummy and Novoselic as a black-faced Ted Danson, a reference to a controversial appearance by the comedian at a ‘roast’ dedicated to his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg.

The following week
Nevermind
passed the five million sales mark in America. Danny Goldberg told
Newsweek
that credit for pushing album sales to this landmark figure should go to MTV: Gold Mountain had already accepted the network’s invitation to have Nirvana play on its high-rating
Unplugged
show.

The band taped their
Unplugged
performance at Sony Studios in New York on 18 November 1993: their 14-song set was filmed in a single take. Shunning his best-known songs – ‘Come As You Are’ was the only
Nevermind
-era single aired – Cobain opted instead to flesh out the set with cover versions from David Bowie (‘The Man Who Sold the World’), The Vaselines (‘Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam’), Leadbelly (‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’) and no less than three songs by SST’s Meat Puppets (‘Plateau’, ‘Oh Me’ and ‘Lake of Fire’). Augmented by cellist Lori Goldston, Nirvana had never sounded more desolate, desperate or chilling: this was a punk rock performance in the same way that Bruce Springsteen’s
Nebraska
is a punk rock record. On a stage resembling a funeral rest home, Cobain sang of death, deliverance, betrayal and rejection; when the set emerged as
MTV Unplugged in New York
one year later every word would carry an additional emotional charge.

‘1994 was a bad year right out of the gate,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘Things had changed a lot. Kurt had struggled through a lot of stuff and we were trying to come to terms with being this enormous band, I guess. That whole year is blurry for me because of how lost I was the whole time.’

The year started with Kurt Cobain on the cover of
Rolling Stone
magazine. In an open, emotional interview, sensitively handled by David Fricke, Cobain addressed the nature of fame, marriage and fatherhood, and spoke of his ongoing battle with drugs and the future of his band in stark, unflinching terms. He admitted that his drug use had caused problems between himself, Novoselic and Grohl and stated his belief that, creatively, Nirvana were ‘stuck in a rut’.

‘Krist, Dave and I have been working on this formula – this thing of going from quiet to loud – for so long that it’s literally becoming boring for us,’ he admitted. ‘It’s like, “OK, I have this riff. I’ll play it quiet, without a distortion box, while I’m singing the verse. And now let’s turn on the distortion box and hit the drums harder.” I want to learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way but with a lot more structure. It’s a really hard thing to do, and I don’t know if we’re capable of it – as musicians.’

Yet even as Cobain was decrying the use of this songwriting formula, he was working on a new song, ‘You Know You’re Right’, that stuck rigidly to the template. From 28 to 30 January, just prior to the first leg of the band’s European arena tour, Gold Mountain booked the band into Robert Lang Studios in Shoreline, Seattle – a facility ten minutes’ walk from Dave Grohl’s home – to record the song. Once again, Cobain failed to turn up for the first scheduled day in the studio. There was no sign of the singer on 29 January either. But on the afternoon of 30 January he finally appeared … minus his guitars and amps. It was not a good omen. But in just three takes, the song – classic whisper-scream purgative punk with a brutally succinct one-word chorus – ‘
Pain
’ – was committed to two-inch tape. The band promised to return to the studio after the European tour to complete the session. Circumstances would conspire to break this promise.

‘The last time we’d toured Europe we were still Nirvana, from Seattle, now we were
NIRVANA!
’ says Dave Grohl. ‘Things had changed. We had the Buzzcocks and then Melvins out with us and I was really excited about that, and we were having good shows, but by the time we got to Germany I don’t think Kurt wanted to be there any more. I remember on that tour, I think it was the first time I felt depression, one of the only times I’ve ever felt depression, like “can’t get out of fucking bed” depression. It was in Milan, and I so badly wanted to be home. I’d never felt that way. I don’t think I’d ever missed something where it just makes you collapse. I couldn’t get out of bed. And that was a pretty good indication that I wasn’t happy and didn’t want to be there. But I had made the commitment of doing it and I didn’t want to let anyone down. But it wasn’t long after that until I think Kurt felt the same way …’

On 1 March 1994 Nirvana played their final show at Terminal Einz in Munich, Germany. There was no place for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in the band’s 23-song set. When he walked offstage, Cobain asked the band’s agent Don Muller to cancel the remaining dates as he was too sick to perform.

‘Kurt wanted to go home,’ says Grohl, ‘so I think he intentionally blew his voice out, so that any doctor in his right mind would look at his throat and go, “It’s kinda inflamed.” He intentionally blew his voice out so that we could all go home. I had to stay another day to make a video for the
Backbeat
soundtrack and then the next day I flew home, via Heathrow and San Francisco. So finally I get home, put the bags down, and collapse in bed. And I wake up at five in the morning to an emergency phone call.

‘And it’s some guy, going, “Dave? Is this really Dave Grohl?” And I’m like, “Yeah, who is this?” And he’s like, “I’m John, I live in Boston and I’m a huge fucking fan, and I just wanted to say you guys are great.” So I’m like, “How did you get my phone number?” and he said, “I just told the operator it was an emergency.” So I’m like, “Okay, that’s cool, just don’t phone back …” Five minutes later the phone rings again and someone goes, “Dude, turn on CNN …” And I see Kurt, in Rome. So, that’s when I knew, “Oh no, it’s over …”’

It was 4 March 1994, and Kurt Cobain was in a coma in Rome’s Policlinico Umberto Primo hospital after swallowing 50 to 60 Rohypnol pills in the suite he was sharing with his wife at the Hotel Excelsior.

‘I woke up at, like, four in the morning to reach for him, basically to fuck him, ’cause I hadn’t seen him in so long,’ Courtney Love later told
Spin
magazine. ‘And he wasn’t there. And I always get alarmed when Kurt’s not there, ’cause I figure he’s in the corner somewhere, doing something bad. And he’s on the floor, and he’s dead.’

In his right hand Cobain held 1,000 American dollars. In his left hand was a suicide note. ‘Like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death,’ it read. ‘I choose death.’

‘So I see that [on CNN] and I’m like, “What the fuck?”’ says Grohl. ‘And so Krist and I get on the phone. And then someone says, “He’s okay, he’s just in a coma, he’s not dead.” It was so chaotic and crazy. I mean, there are certain people in your life that you just know they’re not gonna make it. So in the back of your mind you emotionally prepare yourself for something like that to happen … not that it makes it easier, but so that when it
does
happen your world won’t collapse completely. But it was so weird, and surreal, that 28 hours ago I was hanging out with these people. But then someone called and said that he died, and I lost it, I just fucking lost it. This was just twenty minutes later. And then someone rings up again and goes, “Oh, no, he didn’t die.” It was bad.

‘And then he came home, and we talked on the phone. And I told him, “Man, Kurt, fuck …” I didn’t tell him that someone had told me that he’d died, but I told him that I was terrified and so worried. And he was really apologetic, like, “So sorry, I was partying and drinking and I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.” And I said, “Listen, I don’t think you should die!” And then, I think, well, then, you know what happened …

‘From there on out it wasn’t long until he died. It was a weird fucking thing. I was totally non-emotional. I don’t even know if I was in shock, I was just shut down. I remember trying to make myself cry and I couldn’t.’

The circumstances of Kurt Cobain’s last days are still somewhat confused. On 18 March Courtney Love called the Seattle police out to her family home, telling them that her husband had locked himself in a room and was intent upon killing himself. The following week, together with Danny Goldberg, John Silva, Gary Gersh, Krist Novoselic and other close friends, Love staged an intervention to convince Cobain to go into rehab in Los Angeles. On 1 April Cobain jumped over the wall of the Exodus rehab clinic and caught a flight back to Seattle. Four days later the singer barricaded himself into the greenhouse of his Lake Washington home, shot up 1.52 milligrams of heroin, placed a shotgun against his head, and pulled the trigger with his thumb.

When Dave Grohl talks about Kurt Cobain’s last days his body language and speech patterns change. The bounce disappears from his voice, and his recollections are delivered haltingly. When we spoke in November 2009, he slumped almost horizontal on the couch in his suite at the Sunset Marquis, with his head in his hands and tears in his eyes.

‘It’s hard for me to even talk about,’ he said finally. ‘It was just so nuts, I don’t even know how to explain it. The time leading up to that … I can’t talk a lot about it. I can’t talk about it too much because a lot of fucked-up shit went down that nobody knows about. And Krist and I have always kept quiet about a lot of what happened because it’s a personal issue. People know that there was an intervention. People know that he was sent to Los Angeles. People know that he split rehab and that he disappeared. And I know just about as much as everybody else does.