Nirvana - Details Magazine - November 1993 [Part II]
Although In Utero is louder and nastier than Nevermind, it's by no means the dissonant, off-putting album touted in various rumors: Kurt doesn't want to shut out the rest of the world altogether. He's knitted scars into melodies, from the acerbic, semiautobiographical "Serve the Servants" ("Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I'm bored and old") to the quiet, moving "Dumb" (a song expressing envy for anyone simpleminded enough to be happy all the time). Kurt once revealed nothing of himself in his songs, even those written in the first person; now he's let his life enter his music.
Kurt initially tries to be polite when talking about Albini. "For the most part, he was surprisingly pleasant to work with." Pressed only slightly, however, he spills his bile. "He had never even met my wife and he had opinions on her. There was no reason for him to call her a talentless cunt. [Albini denies that he said this, claiming "I have no feelings toward her whatsoever."] It just proves to me that he's the asshole I was prepared to meet." Kurt stops and contemplates this sentence. The abuse seems oddly distant---Kurt's detached enough to dissect his own insults. " 'Asshole.' That's so tame, isn't it? He calls my wife a cunt, so I call him an asshole. Nothing he says surprises me, but it shows that he's the misogynist dick I expected him to be."
Nirvana are rehearsing at midnight in a room on the deserted top floor of what used to be Seattle's preeminent jukebox factory. Most of the power outlets are stone dead, so the band stumble over extension cords and amps as they try to set up their equipment in shadows and moonlight.
They haven't played together since they finished recording In Utero, but they need to prepare for a surprise show at the New Music Seminar in New York City next week. Stifling a yawn, Dave settles in behind his drums. Kurt grabs a chair and tunes his acoustic guitar, which is decorated with a NIXON NOW bumper sticker. He can't quite adjust his mike and asks Chris for help. Chris is the band's resident technical expert; if he weren't around to plug in cords tonight, they might just pack up and go home. Also watching Chris fiddle with amps are guitar roadie "Big" John Duncan, who will play rhythm guitar with Nirvana at the New York show, and Lori Goldston, a cellist who has been enlisted for an acoustic set. Tonight the band are learning the ironic lesson that they can't play unplugged without electric current.
Kurt says to nobody in particular, "I haven't played the guitar for months. I haven't even picked it up." At 1A.M., Nirvana finally begins to play "Dumb." Despite their long separation, they make an acoustic set sound graceful, effortless. The cello bolsters the group's sound, but as usual, the most powerful instrument is Kurt's voice: Thick, raspy, and knowing, it snakes through every song. Even when Kurt's lyrics are incomprehensible, his singing makes you want to decipher them. The band unplug "On a Plain," "Heart-Shaped Box," and "Been a Son."
When Dave and Kurt lived together, they sat around playing acoustic guitar for hours at a time. Tonight they're returning to their essence as a band. Without the world watching, Nirvana are rediscovering the pleasures of playing together and the knowledge that they can perfectly anticipate each other's cadences. At a Nirvana concert, the audience is too intent on moshing for such subtleties. The group are playing some of their best music in this loft---and nobody's around to hear it, except maybe the teens who sometimes scale the wall of the factory to listen at the windows.
Most chilling is "Something in the Way," the last cut on Nevermind. Kurt performs most of the song alone with his guitar. Every time he plays it, he does it a little slower, until his drawling, hesitating words of alienation are floating through the loft, as eerie as the nighttime glow of the Seattle Kingdome trickling through the windows.
After an hour, the band decide they're had enough for the night. Kurt invites Big John to stay at his house. "I've got two extra bedrooms. And we've got lots of frozen food." I give Dave a ride home.
Dave's only in Seattle this week because he's playing at the Crocodile Club with his first band, Scream. He's spent the last couple of months with the Scream reunion tour, traveling around America in a van, recapturing the small-scale feel gone forever with Nirvana. Immediately after the show tomorrow night, he's catching a midnight plane to Michigan for an engagement party in Grosse Pointe---he's meeting the relatives of his fiancée, Jennifer Youngblood.
I drive past urban strip malls and motels as Dave perches his feet on the dashboard and smokes. Of Nirvana's three members, Dave's changed the least since Nevermind: He's just as affable and easygoing as when I first met him two years ago. He points out the dealership where he bought two go-carts; he rides them in his backyard. He strongly implies that this is a healthier hobby than the firearms that Chris and Kurt now both own. Twenty-four years old, Dave's still coming to terms with being an adult. Despite getting engaged, owning a house, and investing money with Merrill Lynch, he doesn't feel grown up.
He recognizes that people don't have any image of him beyond "the drummer in Nirvana," which is the way he likes it. He knows he lacks "star quality": "I get in front of a camera and I have the same smile I did for my class picture sophomore year of high school." Being a celebrity disorients Dave. "This is all crazy and amusing, but not anything I'd want to put on a résumé." Would he have been happier if Nevermind had sold half as many copies? He laughs. "Well, yeah, but then it still would have sold four million."
For reasons that he hasn't fully understood, maybe because he's struggling with the meaning of fame, Dave has been having recurring dreams about Eddie Vedder. For example:
"My sister and I are at the zoo. We see this guy painted silver, wearing a Speedo bathing suit, with a bathing cap on---all silver---and it's Eddie Vedder, trying to disguise himself. I walk up to him and say, 'Eddie, I know that's you." He goes, 'Dave how ya doin', man?' And then he takes my hand and puts my finger in his mouth, and he keeps talking while he's sucking on my finger....paging Dr. Freud!"
Chris Novoselic's driver's license now identifies him as Krist Novoselic. The name smells like punk blasphemy, but "Krist" is actually the name his Croatian parents gave him at birth. He changed it in junior high school because other kids were teashing him (in addition to his unusual name, he was a self-described "tall goofball"); at age twenty-eight, he feels comfortable changing it back, although everybody still calls him Chris.
"Chris has mellowed," says Dave, "plus he's stopped drinking so much." Chris denies that he's moderated his alcohol consumption but admits that he's not as tightly wound as he once was. "I'm the happy-go-lucky bassist," says Chris. This is a pleasant contrast to his former role as the band's political orator. Chris hasn't misplaced his conscience; he spends his spare time raising money for Bosnian rape victims. But he's learned not to make everything an ideological confrontation: Now when he's worried about a developer clear-cutting the forest next to his house, he knows he'll get better results if he calls the lumberyard as a citizen worried about his property values than he will by screaming bloody environmental murder.
Chris and his wife Shelli spent enough years in poverty, living off government cheese and cornmeal, that owning two houses, one in Seattle and one in the woods of Washington, still seems comically improbable to them. Posted in Chris's den is a fax from Kurt that underscores the unlikeliness of the group's sudden wealth. It's a copy of his letter from the Publisher's Clearing House, beginning: KURT COBAIN, YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS!!!
Chris and Shelli now indulge themselves, gleefully spending money on toys: a Kiss pinball machine, jukeboxes stocked with Shonen Knife singles, a BMW motorcycle that Chris crashed while doing eighty-five on a dirt road. "I'm always happy," Chris says, and he seems to be right. "That's my claim to fame. It'd be pretentious not to be happy."
Kurt, so often impassive, glows whenever he mentions Courtney. He's very much in love. Courtney does more than loan Kurt her clothing; she challenges him. "It's a whirling dervish of emotion, all these extremes of fighting and loving each other at once. If I'm mad at her, I'll yell at her, and that's healthy," Kurt says. "If we weren't married, just living together, there would have been three or four times when one of us would have walked out on the other. But because we're so committed to each other, we've never had a fight last longer than an hour. We make up every time." While constant conflict may indicate instability in the relationship, it also shows that Courtney can break through his detached facade. When Courtney calls Kurt from England, a transatlantic shouting match soon begins. I discreetly leave their bedroom for twenty minutes.
At times, Kurt-and-Courtney show has threatened to overwhelm Nirvana. Chris ended up not attending their wedding; Courtney wouldn't let Shelli come. Asked about that two years later, Chris mutters, "That was fucked up, but I don't want to dwell on it. It was resolved, more or less." Kurt says he doesn't want to prove to the world that he loves Courtney, but that he needs to defend her against media attacks. The latest installment of "As the Cobains Turn" is a lurid A.P. story about his going to jail after battering Courtney in an argument over his firearms and a juicing machine.
Kurt's version of events is more coherent: He and Courtney woke up around 3P.M., as is their wont, and began writing songs together, with the amps turned up loud. Some of the neighbors, either annoyed by the noise or mistaking punk-rock screams for a pitched battled, made a domestic-violence call to the police. The cops arrived and infromed Mr. and Mrs. Cobain that under Seattle law, one of them had to go to jail. At that point, Kurt and Courtney did start to argue---each of them wanted to be the one to go to prison. When the police asked if there were any firearms in the house, Kurt swore that he didn't have a gun, but Courtney admitted to the presence of two handguns and an M-16 rifle. The police confiscated them and took Kurt to jail, handcuffed in his pajamas.
Although, he is not alone in his affection for Courtney, the feeling among those who know her is hardly unanimous. By all accounts, she's volatile and provokes strong reactions. "Smart but insane," says one friend. "She does a lot of nasty shit, and I truly believe she will be the demise of Nirvana," says another person close to the band.
Kurt objects to the misogynist overtones of making Courtney the scapegoat for everything that might go wrong with Nirvana. And he sneers at the suggestion that he's under Courtney's thumb. "Everyone thinks of me as this sad little spineless puppy who needs to be taken care of. It sickens me. When I first met Courtney, I thought of her as this totally independent self-serving person and I really respected her for that---that's why I fell in love with her. Since we've been married, I've found that she's a bit more insecure. I'm glad---it's nice to know she isn't going to take off one day. I didn't think I'd ever have a best friend, let alone a mate."
So is Courtney the best fuck in the world? Kurt stands up without saying a word. He turns around and hikes his black pinafore dress up around his chest so I can see dozens of red scratches on his back, furrows from Courtney's fingernails.
Kurt concedes that being married to Courtney has meant losing his single-minded focus on all things Nirvana. He doesn't care. He dreams of just writing his songs and selling tapes by mail order. If he can't get up the enthusiasm he once had for Nirvana, it's partially because the band have achieved every pinnacle of success they ever wanted, and several that they didn't. He's ebullient about the music that he and Courtney write together---he finds it rejuvenating, like playing with a band for the first time. Leery of being a modern John and Yoko, he doesn't think they'll release any collaborations.
Dave's put aside a chunk of money so he can go back to school someday. He's a high school dropout but wants to finish college. Chris thinks he'll end up at his farmhouse, growing apples and potatoes, "running with the elk." They both know not to expect a lifetime with Nirvana. Kurt also wishes he had gone to college. "I'll probably go back to school when I'm forty," he says.
"I'm looking forward to a few more years of playing with this band. Then a few years later I might say a few years more. I don't try to predict the future, but I know I'm not going to be rich for the rest of my life. I have money now, but within ten years we'll blow it. I'll have to get a job or have a solo career or something equally embarrassing."