11. CANDY, PUPPIES, LOVE
London, England
October 1989 - May 1990
On October 20, 1989, Kurt arrived in London. He had three days off before the show and would have liked to visit the British Museum, yet he felt ill so he settled for getting his photo taken at the entrance. His bandmates explored the British pubs, but Kurt - who didn't drink or smoke pot at the time because of his stomach problems - stayed in the hotel with bronchitis, a recurring condition. To try to cure himself, he would beat on his chest with his fist, thinking this violence would loosen his phlegm.
The band was touring Europe with Tad, another Sub Pop band, who were fronted by Tad Doyle, a 300-pound former butcher from Idaho. Since the two bands shared a deep and heavy sound, and because of Tad's almost freakish obesity, a clever U.K. promoter advertised one gig as "Heavier Than Heaven." The play on words became the official title of the tour, used on posters and in newspaper adverts. It was an apt summation of the sonic assault both bands created: If the sheer volume did not subdue you, the dark themes of songs like Nirvana's "Downer" and Tad's "Cyanide Bath" surely would. They had planned to coheadline, switching off as openers, in a show of brotherhood.
Kurt had expected fame and fortune in Europe: What he found instead was a low-budget tour that called for the band to play 37 shows in 42 days in nine different nations, a routing that was only possible if they drove all night. Their vehicle, rented by Sub Pop, was a shrunken ten-seat Fiat van, which had to carry their equipment, tour merchandise, three members of Nirvana, four members of Tad, and two crew members. Considering Tad's girth, Krist's height, and the fact that Tad's drummer insisted on standing up in the van, the daily loading could take an hour and resembled something out of a Marx Brothers' routine. And prior to departing, due to many gastrointestinal problems, Tad Doyle had to go through an almost ritualistic daily vomiting. This last malady was so regular it could have been written into the tour schedule: "10 a.m., load the van; 10:10, Tad vomits."
Kurt was bewitched by Tad's internal workings. He was suffering his own stomach pains, but he vomited only bile or blood. Tad's vomit, Kurt would declare, resembled a work of art. "Before Tad would get in the van, Kurt would hold this plastic basin," Kurt Danielson of Tad remembered. "He would stand there patiently, holding this plastic tub, with a delightful glitter in this eyes. He'd look up at Tad expectantly, and finally Tad would puke, and it would just come out in a glorious, colorful flow, and Kurt would catch it all. No one else got to hold the tub; it was Kurt's job and it was his delight." Tad also frequently had bathroom emergencies which meant trips to the side of the road, much to the amazement of the English drivers who passed a 300-pound man relieving himself in the median strip. In some ways, Tad's gastrointestinal system became Kurt's muse that fall: He wrote the song "Imodium" about Doyle's diarrhea medication.
Elimination continued as a theme when the band explored Hamburg's notorious red-light district and its porno supermarkets. Kurt was a bit of an amateur pornographer himself: Obsessed with the female derrière, he had photographed Tracy's rear on several occasions. He found common porn sexist, but was enraptured by deviant porn the way an anthropologist sought out undiscovered tribes. He was particularly enthralled by magazines depicting what he called "shit love," the sexual fetish more formally called scatophilia. "Kurt was fascinated by anything out of the ordinary: anything anomalous, psychologically strange or unusual, physically or socially strange," observed Danielson. "If it involved bodily functions, so much the better. Instead of drinking or smoking pot, he'd get high watching the peculiar idiosyncrasies of humanity unfolding around him." Kurt was too poor to purchase any porn, but Tad did buy one magazine featuring Ciccolina, a sex industry star who gained international attention after being elected to the Italian Parliament. One pictorial showed Ciccolina getting out of a limousine while in the process of urinating in a man's mouth. Each morning in the Fiat van, Tad would pull the magazine out and announced, "the library is open," whereupon the coveted journal would be passed around.
These adolescent antics were the only diversions to a schedule that was numbing and demoralizing. "We went to Paris, but didn't have time to see the Eiffel Tower," recalled Chad. The schedule, Kurt asserted, seemed designed to physically and psychologically break them. The hectic pace began to affect their shows: Sometimes they played exceptionally well (as in Norwich, where a rabid crowd called them back for encores), and sometimes it all fell apart (as in Berlin, where Kurt smashed his guitar six songs into the set). "They were either phenomenal or kind of atrocious," recalled road manager Alex MacLeod. "But even when they were atrocious, there was an energy about them." Most of the crowds were enthusiastic and familiar with their songs, and many shows were sold out - a first for Nirvana. But since the venues were small, neither band made much money.
They did get a lot of press, and that, along with extensive airplay from influential DJ John Peel, propelled Bleach into the Top Ten of the U.K. independent label charts. While in Berlin, Nirvana got their first magazine cover, back in Seattle on The Rocket. Kurt told writer Nils Bernstein his current influences were "cutie bands" like Shonen Knife, the Pixies, and the Vaselines, his latest and greatest crush. He also addressed what he described as the prejudice he felt Seattle hipsters had against Nirvana: "I feel like we've been tagged as illiterate redneck cousin-fucking kids that have no idea what is going on at all. That's completely untrue."
Though he was finally playing to adoring audiences, a terrible melancholy overtook Kurt. On the occasions when they could afford a hotel, he would frequently room with Kurt Danielson, and the two would stay up all night in the darkness of their room, staring at the ceiling, and talking about what led them to the hell of a Fiat van. Kurt told fantastic stories of his early life, of the Fat Man, of the Aberdeen jail, and of a strange religion Dylan Carlson had created, mixing Scientology and Satanism. But the most outlandish stories he told were of his own family: tales of Don and Wendy, of guns in the river, of his high-school buddies hitting on his mother. During one restless night, Kurt confessed he wished he was home. "I've wanted to go home since the first week of this tour," he said, lying on his hotel bed. "I could, you know. I could go to my mom's right now, if I wanted to - she'd let me. She'd wire me the money." His voice cracked as if he were telling an elaborate lie. "She'd have me, you know."
A few days later in Rome, Kurt broke down onstage. Tad had played first and fired up the crowd with chants of "Fuck the Pope," always popular with punk rockers in Italy. By the time Nirvana came on, the sold-out audience was riled up. But problems with the sound system infuriated Kurt, and after playing 40 minutes, he climbed a 30-foot stack of speakers and screamed to the crowd, "I'm going to kill myself!" No one in the room, not even Krist, Chad, or Poneman and Pavitt (who had come over for the gig), knew what to make of this. Nor did Kurt, who suddenly found himself with an audience shouting "jump" in broken English. He was still strumming his guitar - the rest of the band having stopped to watch - and seemed unsure of what to do next. "He would have broken his neck if he would have jumped, and at some point he realized that," observed Danielson. Kurt eventually climbed down but his freak-out wasn't over. Backstage, the promoter complained that a microphone had been broken. Road manager MacLeod was disputing this and demonstrating the microphone worked fine - they could ill afford to replace it. Kurt grabbed the microphone, twirled it around like Roger Daltry, and smashed it to the floor. "There, now it's broken," he exclaimed as he walked away.
He recovered enough to play another five shows in Europe, and the tour ended in London for another Lamefest. Kurt pulled out all the stops for this last date, jumping up and down on the stage until his knees were bloodied. But psychologically, the tour was over for Kurt after Rome. He didn't have another guitar player to fire, so this time he essentially fired his label. Pavitt and Poneman had flown into Rome; Kurt couldn't stop contrasting the conditions in the van with the jet-setting style these two traveled in. Though Nirvana would stay on Sub Pop for another year, in a progressively worsening marriage, Kurt had already emotionally jettisoned his label.
By the time Nirvana returned to America in early December, Krist and Shelli had announced their engagement, with a wedding set for New Year's Eve at their house in Tacoma. Kurt and Tracy attended, though the drive from Olympia to Tacoma was one of the worst 30 minutes of their relationship. Tracy couldn't witness Shelli's marriage without broaching the subject of commitment with Kurt, even while she knew it was a topic destined to pain her. During the European tour, Krist had phoned Shelli frequently; all Tracy got from Kurt was an occasional postcard, though one of those said "I love you" twenty times. But on the drive to Tacoma the only way he'd address marriage was to joke about her marrying someone else. "I'd still like to have sex with you, because I really like it," he told her, thinking he was giving her a compliment. At the wedding, Kurt spent most of the evening on the roof by himself, uncharacteristically drunk, welcoming in the new year.
That Christmas, Kurt and Tracy had celebrated almost three years of togetherness. Though he was hard-pressed to afford it, he had given her "The Art of Rock," a $100 coffee-table book, as a present. Outwardly they looked like a tight couple, but something had shifted within Kurt, and both he and Tracy knew it. When he'd return from tours, he took longer to warm up to her, and the contrast between their away-time and together-time was testing her patience. She felt she was losing him to the rest of the world.
And in a way, she was. As things continued to improve for Nirvana, the band increasingly provided him with the self-esteem and financial support that previously had come from her. By the beginning of 1990, Kurt had band-related business that needed to be done every day, and Tracy knew not to test where she ranked in comparison. But in truth, she also was moving away from him. She was a level-headed girl, and Kurt just kept getting weirder and weirder. She wondered where it might all end. That February he wrote an entry in his journal, half-fantasy and half-reality, that would have concerned any lover: "I am a male age 23 and I'm lactating. My breasts have never been so sore, not even after receiving titty twisters from bully schoolmates. I haven't masturbated in months because I've lost my imagination. I close my eyes and I see my father, little girls, German Shepherds, TV news commentators, but no voluptuous pouty-lipped naked female sex kittens wincing in ecstasy. I see lizards and flipper babies." This, and other entries like it, made her worry about his mental state.
Kurt had never slept well, grinding his teeth at night and complaining of recurrent nightmares. "Ever since he could remember, he had dreams about people trying to kill him," Tracy recalled. "In the dreams, he'd be trying to fight people off with a baseball bat, or people with knives coming after him, or vampires." When he awoke, sometimes with tears in his eyes, Tracy would comfort him the way a mother would soothe a small boy, holding him in her arms and stroking his hair. She would always be there for him, she told him; she was never going to leave. Yet he'd lie there looking at the ceiling, soaked with sweat. "He had those dreams all the time." She worried about how he calmed himself when he was on tour.
Outwardly, during the day, he looked fine, never talking about bad dreams, instead giving the appearance of someone who dreamt of only the band. Nirvana began the year with a brief studio session where they recorded the song "Sappy." As early as the European tour, they were already talking about a new album by summer. For the first time in Kurt's career, he wasn't the solitary force pushing for a new release - now Sub Pop, the press, college radio, and even a growing cadre of fans were asking him for new music. He was still writing at a prodigious rate, and the songs kept getting better. Nikki McClure had moved into the apartment next to his, and she used to hear him through the walls, constantly playing his guitar. One afternoon that winter, she overheard a beautiful melody coming through the heat vent; he kept starting and stopping the song, as if he were constructing it on the spot. That evening she turned the radio to KAOS and heard Kurt playing the song he'd been rehearsing that day, live on the air.
On January 19, 1990, Nirvana played yet another Olympia show that would go down in the history books, though this one for different reasons from the others. The show, at a grange hall outside of town, would pair Nirvana with the Melvins and Beat Happening. As a costume, Kurt used stage blood to draw needle marks on his arms. He wasn't certain what a junkie looked like, so he overdrew the marks, which gave him a ghoulish appearance, more like a zombie from an Ed Wood film than a drug addict. "He was wearing short sleeves, and both arms from the wrists to the sleeves had these bruises," observed Garth Reeves. "It looked like he had a disease." Nonetheless, Kurt's attempt at a joke would have unintended consequences: His parody was lost on many in the crowd, and rumors began to circulate that he was indeed a junkie. Still, the show represented a watershed of sorts: Though the Melvins headlined, Nirvana were now more popular than their mentors. The Melvins ended their set with a dynamic cover of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." Kurt was in the front row, raising his fist with the rest of the audience, yet he couldn't help but notice that a third of the crowd had left after Nirvana's set.
Something even more shocking happened the next night when the Melvins and Nirvana played in Tacoma at a hall called Legends. The concert was completely sold out and earned Nirvana a payday of $500, one of their biggest checks to date. There were a hundred people stage diving, creating chaos. One of the most obnoxious was Matt Lukin on Mudhoney, who used his backstage pass to walk onstage, then dive headfirst into the audience. Nirvana's set had to be stopped three times to break up fights between Lukin and the bouncers. "He's our friend," Kurt kept telling the bouncers, sounding both concerned and embarrassed. By the end of Nirvana's performance, which included part of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," there were five security guards standing in front of the band. That didn't seem odd to Kurt, but what positively amazed him was seeing Mark Arm of Mudhoney, standing stage right, bopping his head back and forth during all of Nirvana's set.
Mark Arm, whose real name was Mark McLaughlin, was certifiably the tastemaker for Seattle punk rock. While Pavitt and Poneman had craftily capitalized on grunge, Arm, with his band Mudhoney and his previous group Green River, had virtually invented the musical style, and had even come up with the term "grunge," writing in a Seattle fanzine in the early eighties. Arm was bright, sarcastic, talented, notorious for his partying, and exuded the kind of confidence that made people think he was destined for stardom. In short, he was everything an insecure kid from Aberdeen imagined he could never be. For Arm to appear at your concert, and to be seen enjoying himself, was to have Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis come to your wedding and dance all night. Kurt's adoration of Arm was obvious to everyone, but it had to be most obvious to Buzz Osborne, who was watching his former charge move on.
Kurt had attempted to foster a friendship with Arm, with limited success. When in Seattle, he'd frequently stop by Arm's apartment, where he was intimidated by Arm's collection of punk rock singles - the ultimate status symbol in their circle. "He obviously idolized Mark," remembered Carrie Montgomery, Arm's girlfriend. "Mark wasn't all that impressed by it, of course." At the time, Mudhoney remained Sub Pop's priority and the kings of the Northwest scene. A number of major record labels were interested in them, but they pledged to stick with Sub Pop, owing to Arm's friendship with Pavitt.
But even for Mudhoney, this friendship was tested during 1990, when Sub Pop's financial problems threatened to sink the label and every band on it. Though records by Tad, Nirvana, and Mudhoney had been consistent sellers, their sales were nowhere near the level required to fund the large operation Pavitt and Poneman had built. "Sub Pop actually asked to borrow half of our first European advance," Mudhoney's Steve Turner remembered. The label was so broke they offered bands stock in lieu of royalties owed. "We said, 'What's the point of that?' " recalled Matt Lukin. It was particularly hard for Lukin to watch how Sub Pop treated his friends in Nirvana. "I saw how long Bruce had been promising to put out another record from them, and he kept putting them off," Lukin recalled. "They got put on the back burner."
The money Kurt had made from touring was quickly spent. That spring he started applying for jobs again, circling ads in the Daily Olympian for such occupations as cleaning apartments and hosing down dog kennels at a vet's; he applied for this last position but was turned down. He and Krist decided to start their own janitorial business they would call "Pine Tree Janitorial." It was one of Kurt's many get-rich-quick schemes, and he went so far as to draw up a flyer for their new business with illustrations of Kurt and Krist pushing brooms. The ad touted, "we purposely limit our number of commercial offices in order to personally clean while taking our time." Despite putting flyers up all over Olympia, no client ever employed them.
When he wasn't being the CEO of Pine Tree Janitorial, Kurt was writing songs and touring. They left the first week of February for a West Coast tour with Tad that was their most successful yet, drawing large, enthusiastic crowds in Portland and San Francisco (for a Valentine's Day gig that billed the bands as "hot hunks"). Even in cynical Hollywood, people clamored to get into their shows at Raji's. "That was the night they won over L.A.," recalled Pleasant Gehman, who booked the room. "People were just in awe. The club only held 200 people, but I swear there were 400 there." In Los Angeles they stayed with Jennifer Finch of the band L7, who described their appearance at the time as "looking like the Great Dance and Poodle act at the circus: Chad was tiny, his hair was down to his ass, and his eyes were feral; Kurt was a bit taller than Chad, but with hair that was stringy and long; and than there's Krist, who is so tall it hurt your neck to look up at him."
The tour also saw Kurt reunite with his old buddy Jesse Reed, who was now living outside of San Diego. They met up at the San Ysidro McDonald's, infamous for being the sight of a bloody shooting, and a place Kurt insisted on making part of their travels. Jesse drove with the band to Tijuana for a show, and later that night, a couple of days before Kurt's 23rd birthday, the two old friends celebrated by drinking a half gallon of booze and snorting crystal meth. Despite continued stomach problems, by early 1990, Kurt had started to drink again, and though his use of alcohol was still infrequent, when he drank he did so to excess.
When Kurt returned to Olympia, he had only three weeks before heading out on yet another long tour, which was to include a stop in Wisconsin to record the follow-up to Bleach. Kurt and Tracy tried to rekindle their romance, but the strain was obvious to all around them. "They didn't interact much in public anymore," recalled Slim Moon. Kurt complained to Slim that Tracy wanted to have sex more often than he did. To her, it was part of the bonding of their relationship; to him, it meant an emotional commitment he could no longer give.
That March, Damon Romero stopped by one night, and they rented videos, a frequent activity for a homebody like Kurt. Kurt had picked the latest film by Alex Cox, titled Straight to Hell - it starred Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello. During the film, Romero gestured at an actress and said, "Hey, there's that girl from that band down in Portland." Romero was pointing at Courtney Love. Despite the savage reviews the movie had garnered from critics, Kurt enjoyed the film. "It had just enough kitsch for Kurt to like it," Romero remembered.
On March 20 the band snuck into an Evergreen classroom with a few friends to film what Kurt imagined would be an official video release of his own. Kurt's plan was that the band would perform while vignettes he had taped off of television would be projected in the background. "He had hours and hours of this wacky shit," director Jon Snyder recalled. "He had recorded 'Star Search' with an old Donny and Marie routine, bits of 'Fantasy Island,' and all these insane late-night 'Lee Press-On Nail' commercials." For the first song, "School," the band played while Donny and Marie tap-danced behind them. For "Big Cheese" the background images came from a silent film about witches Kurt had sent away for, along with some of Kurt's Super-8 films from his childhood. "He had broken dolls, dolls on fire, or stuff like in Toy Story where the dolls are all put together wrong," remembered Alex Kostelnik, who operated one of the cameras. Kurt discussed extending the taping and going to Aberdeen to add more footage from his childhood haunts. Like many of his ideas, it was never pursued.
A week later, they packed up the van again and headed back on tour. Tracy was sleeping while Kurt left, but she had written a note in his journal: "Goodbye, Kurdt. Have a good tour and a great recording. Hang in there. I'll see you in seven weeks. Miss you. Love, Tracy." It was endearing, but even in her affection one could sense a defeat. Even Tracy was now spelling his name as his alter-ego "Kurdt." She had lost her Kurt.
In Chicago, on April 2, the band premiered "In Bloom." After the show, they drove all night to arrive in Madison, Wisconsin, home of Smart Studios and producer Butch Vig. They had only a week to cut their album, but Kurt reminded everyone of how many tracks they had managed during five hours for their first demo. Most of their new songs were still embryonic, a fact Kurt tried to downplay. Yet they had every confidence that Vig - who had worked with hundreds of alternative rock bands - could transform their ideas. Vig did impress the band; as a drummer himself, he managed to capture the drum sound Kurt thought was missing from their other efforts.
Working at a frantic pace, they cut eight songs, including a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Here She Comes Now," recorded for a compilation album. They did five new songs, and re-recorded two old ones in just a handful of days. Kurt was, of course, disappointed they hadn't done more. Five of the songs they cut at Smart would eventually end up on the Nevermind album.
The new songs found Kurt plumbing the emotional depths of his own life for material, and writing about the characters around him. "In Bloom" was a thinly disguised portrait of Dylan Carlson, while "Pay to Play" mocked the practice of clubs charging bands to play. "Breed" was the most complex song of the session: It had begun under the title "Imodium" about Tad's diarrhea medicine, yet there is little in the version recorded at Smart to connect it with Tad; Kurt instead used the title to suggest a running on of the mouth. More elaborate than Kurt's early screeds, it ended with the line "she said," implying the song was captured dialogue, and adding another layer of narrative to decipher.
Kurt had come up with an album title: Sheep. The name was his inside joke on the masses he was convinced would be buying his next effort. "Because you want to not; because everyone else is," he wrote in a fake advertisement for Sheep. The ad read: "May women rule the world. Abort Christ. Assassinate the greater and lesser of two evils. Steal Sheep. At a store near you. Nirvana. Flowers. Perfume. Candy. Puppies. Love. Generational Solidarity. And Killing Your Parents. Sheep." Around the same time, he wrote out yet another fake biography of the band, one that would prove strangely prophetic, even as it was filled with adolescent jokes. It described the band as "three-time Granny Award Winners, No. 1 on Billbored Top 100 for 36 consecutive weaks in a row. Two times on the cover of Bowling Stoned, hailed as the most original, thought-provoking and important band of our decade by Thyme and Newsweak."
A few hours after finishing their final mixing at Smart, they were back on tour, and Vig sent the masters to Sub Pop, even though the band had grave doubts as to whether they wanted the label to release the session. Two weeks later, in Massachusetts, Kurt called Tracy and a long phone conversation ensued - one they both knew was coming but one she had hoped to postpone or avoid. He told her things weren't working out between them, and that maybe they should no longer live together. It wasn't an out-and-out breakup; honesty wasn't Kurt's way of dealing with conflict. "He thought maybe we should live apart for a while because we needed a bigger place," recalled Tracy. Kurt's suggestion was peppered with "maybes" and tempered with the assurance that "even if we aren't living together, we'll still be going out." But they both knew it was over.
Within the next month Kurt slept with a young woman while on the road. It was the only instance of infidelity his bandmates ever witnessed. As it was, the sex was crummy and Kurt hated himself for having been so weak. He told Tracy about it when he returned; there had been plenty of opportunities for him to have been unfaithful over the years, and the timing of this one infraction suggests he was trying to emotionally distance himself, to give her a reason to hate him, which would make breaking up easier.
As with all Nirvana tours, after about month on the road, the band - and Kurt - seemed to fall apart. At a show at the Pyramid Club near the end of April, they had another bout of sound problems. Kurt's spirits were lifted when he saw one person among the crowd of New York hipsters who was bouncing away, even during their long tunings; he couldn't believe his eyes when he realized it was Iggy Pop. But his elation lasted only a moment before turning into embarrassment: Kurt was wearing an Iggy Pop T-shirt. Other people might have been able to laugh this coincidence off, but to Kurt, it corroborated the rock idolatry he desperately wanted to hide. He ended the show by demolishing Chad's drum kit.
Chad had to pay close attention to Kurt's moods to discern when he might torpedo himself into the drums. It was both a self-flagellation and an aggressive act - Kurt had grown dissatisfied with Chad's drumming. In Boston, Kurt threw a full pitcher of water at Chad and missed the drummer's ear by inches.
By the time the band arrived back in the Northwest in late May, it almost didn't have to be said that Chad was out of the band. Nothing, of course, had been said. But about two weeks after the tour ended, Channing looked out the window of his Bainbridge Island home, saw the van edging its way up the long driveway, and, like a doomed character in an Ernest Hemingway short story, knew the end was near. He was actually surprised Kurt had even come along - it was a testament to how much Kurt liked Chad, despite how he soon would claim Chad "didn't fit in with the band." Many times they had all three slept in the same bed, with Kurt and Chad flanking Krist so they could share the one blanket. Krist did the talking; Kurt hardly said a word and spent most of the conversation staring at the ground. But even for Chad, it came as a bit of a relief. "I'd spent the last three years with these guys in really close quarters," Chad recalled. "We'd gone through hell together. We'd been in shit together, in little vans, playing for no money. There wasn't any big daddy with the big bucks bailing us out." Kurt hugged Chad good-bye. Chad knew there had been a friendship, but he also realized it was now gone. "I knew that when we said good-bye, I wouldn't see them for a long time."
London, England
October 1989 - May 1990
At a store near you:
Nirvana. Flowers. Perfume. Candy. Puppies. Love.
- From an imaginary ad for Nirvana's second album.
On October 20, 1989, Kurt arrived in London. He had three days off before the show and would have liked to visit the British Museum, yet he felt ill so he settled for getting his photo taken at the entrance. His bandmates explored the British pubs, but Kurt - who didn't drink or smoke pot at the time because of his stomach problems - stayed in the hotel with bronchitis, a recurring condition. To try to cure himself, he would beat on his chest with his fist, thinking this violence would loosen his phlegm.
The band was touring Europe with Tad, another Sub Pop band, who were fronted by Tad Doyle, a 300-pound former butcher from Idaho. Since the two bands shared a deep and heavy sound, and because of Tad's almost freakish obesity, a clever U.K. promoter advertised one gig as "Heavier Than Heaven." The play on words became the official title of the tour, used on posters and in newspaper adverts. It was an apt summation of the sonic assault both bands created: If the sheer volume did not subdue you, the dark themes of songs like Nirvana's "Downer" and Tad's "Cyanide Bath" surely would. They had planned to coheadline, switching off as openers, in a show of brotherhood.
Kurt had expected fame and fortune in Europe: What he found instead was a low-budget tour that called for the band to play 37 shows in 42 days in nine different nations, a routing that was only possible if they drove all night. Their vehicle, rented by Sub Pop, was a shrunken ten-seat Fiat van, which had to carry their equipment, tour merchandise, three members of Nirvana, four members of Tad, and two crew members. Considering Tad's girth, Krist's height, and the fact that Tad's drummer insisted on standing up in the van, the daily loading could take an hour and resembled something out of a Marx Brothers' routine. And prior to departing, due to many gastrointestinal problems, Tad Doyle had to go through an almost ritualistic daily vomiting. This last malady was so regular it could have been written into the tour schedule: "10 a.m., load the van; 10:10, Tad vomits."
Kurt was bewitched by Tad's internal workings. He was suffering his own stomach pains, but he vomited only bile or blood. Tad's vomit, Kurt would declare, resembled a work of art. "Before Tad would get in the van, Kurt would hold this plastic basin," Kurt Danielson of Tad remembered. "He would stand there patiently, holding this plastic tub, with a delightful glitter in this eyes. He'd look up at Tad expectantly, and finally Tad would puke, and it would just come out in a glorious, colorful flow, and Kurt would catch it all. No one else got to hold the tub; it was Kurt's job and it was his delight." Tad also frequently had bathroom emergencies which meant trips to the side of the road, much to the amazement of the English drivers who passed a 300-pound man relieving himself in the median strip. In some ways, Tad's gastrointestinal system became Kurt's muse that fall: He wrote the song "Imodium" about Doyle's diarrhea medication.
Elimination continued as a theme when the band explored Hamburg's notorious red-light district and its porno supermarkets. Kurt was a bit of an amateur pornographer himself: Obsessed with the female derrière, he had photographed Tracy's rear on several occasions. He found common porn sexist, but was enraptured by deviant porn the way an anthropologist sought out undiscovered tribes. He was particularly enthralled by magazines depicting what he called "shit love," the sexual fetish more formally called scatophilia. "Kurt was fascinated by anything out of the ordinary: anything anomalous, psychologically strange or unusual, physically or socially strange," observed Danielson. "If it involved bodily functions, so much the better. Instead of drinking or smoking pot, he'd get high watching the peculiar idiosyncrasies of humanity unfolding around him." Kurt was too poor to purchase any porn, but Tad did buy one magazine featuring Ciccolina, a sex industry star who gained international attention after being elected to the Italian Parliament. One pictorial showed Ciccolina getting out of a limousine while in the process of urinating in a man's mouth. Each morning in the Fiat van, Tad would pull the magazine out and announced, "the library is open," whereupon the coveted journal would be passed around.
These adolescent antics were the only diversions to a schedule that was numbing and demoralizing. "We went to Paris, but didn't have time to see the Eiffel Tower," recalled Chad. The schedule, Kurt asserted, seemed designed to physically and psychologically break them. The hectic pace began to affect their shows: Sometimes they played exceptionally well (as in Norwich, where a rabid crowd called them back for encores), and sometimes it all fell apart (as in Berlin, where Kurt smashed his guitar six songs into the set). "They were either phenomenal or kind of atrocious," recalled road manager Alex MacLeod. "But even when they were atrocious, there was an energy about them." Most of the crowds were enthusiastic and familiar with their songs, and many shows were sold out - a first for Nirvana. But since the venues were small, neither band made much money.
They did get a lot of press, and that, along with extensive airplay from influential DJ John Peel, propelled Bleach into the Top Ten of the U.K. independent label charts. While in Berlin, Nirvana got their first magazine cover, back in Seattle on The Rocket. Kurt told writer Nils Bernstein his current influences were "cutie bands" like Shonen Knife, the Pixies, and the Vaselines, his latest and greatest crush. He also addressed what he described as the prejudice he felt Seattle hipsters had against Nirvana: "I feel like we've been tagged as illiterate redneck cousin-fucking kids that have no idea what is going on at all. That's completely untrue."
Though he was finally playing to adoring audiences, a terrible melancholy overtook Kurt. On the occasions when they could afford a hotel, he would frequently room with Kurt Danielson, and the two would stay up all night in the darkness of their room, staring at the ceiling, and talking about what led them to the hell of a Fiat van. Kurt told fantastic stories of his early life, of the Fat Man, of the Aberdeen jail, and of a strange religion Dylan Carlson had created, mixing Scientology and Satanism. But the most outlandish stories he told were of his own family: tales of Don and Wendy, of guns in the river, of his high-school buddies hitting on his mother. During one restless night, Kurt confessed he wished he was home. "I've wanted to go home since the first week of this tour," he said, lying on his hotel bed. "I could, you know. I could go to my mom's right now, if I wanted to - she'd let me. She'd wire me the money." His voice cracked as if he were telling an elaborate lie. "She'd have me, you know."
A few days later in Rome, Kurt broke down onstage. Tad had played first and fired up the crowd with chants of "Fuck the Pope," always popular with punk rockers in Italy. By the time Nirvana came on, the sold-out audience was riled up. But problems with the sound system infuriated Kurt, and after playing 40 minutes, he climbed a 30-foot stack of speakers and screamed to the crowd, "I'm going to kill myself!" No one in the room, not even Krist, Chad, or Poneman and Pavitt (who had come over for the gig), knew what to make of this. Nor did Kurt, who suddenly found himself with an audience shouting "jump" in broken English. He was still strumming his guitar - the rest of the band having stopped to watch - and seemed unsure of what to do next. "He would have broken his neck if he would have jumped, and at some point he realized that," observed Danielson. Kurt eventually climbed down but his freak-out wasn't over. Backstage, the promoter complained that a microphone had been broken. Road manager MacLeod was disputing this and demonstrating the microphone worked fine - they could ill afford to replace it. Kurt grabbed the microphone, twirled it around like Roger Daltry, and smashed it to the floor. "There, now it's broken," he exclaimed as he walked away.
He recovered enough to play another five shows in Europe, and the tour ended in London for another Lamefest. Kurt pulled out all the stops for this last date, jumping up and down on the stage until his knees were bloodied. But psychologically, the tour was over for Kurt after Rome. He didn't have another guitar player to fire, so this time he essentially fired his label. Pavitt and Poneman had flown into Rome; Kurt couldn't stop contrasting the conditions in the van with the jet-setting style these two traveled in. Though Nirvana would stay on Sub Pop for another year, in a progressively worsening marriage, Kurt had already emotionally jettisoned his label.
By the time Nirvana returned to America in early December, Krist and Shelli had announced their engagement, with a wedding set for New Year's Eve at their house in Tacoma. Kurt and Tracy attended, though the drive from Olympia to Tacoma was one of the worst 30 minutes of their relationship. Tracy couldn't witness Shelli's marriage without broaching the subject of commitment with Kurt, even while she knew it was a topic destined to pain her. During the European tour, Krist had phoned Shelli frequently; all Tracy got from Kurt was an occasional postcard, though one of those said "I love you" twenty times. But on the drive to Tacoma the only way he'd address marriage was to joke about her marrying someone else. "I'd still like to have sex with you, because I really like it," he told her, thinking he was giving her a compliment. At the wedding, Kurt spent most of the evening on the roof by himself, uncharacteristically drunk, welcoming in the new year.
That Christmas, Kurt and Tracy had celebrated almost three years of togetherness. Though he was hard-pressed to afford it, he had given her "The Art of Rock," a $100 coffee-table book, as a present. Outwardly they looked like a tight couple, but something had shifted within Kurt, and both he and Tracy knew it. When he'd return from tours, he took longer to warm up to her, and the contrast between their away-time and together-time was testing her patience. She felt she was losing him to the rest of the world.
And in a way, she was. As things continued to improve for Nirvana, the band increasingly provided him with the self-esteem and financial support that previously had come from her. By the beginning of 1990, Kurt had band-related business that needed to be done every day, and Tracy knew not to test where she ranked in comparison. But in truth, she also was moving away from him. She was a level-headed girl, and Kurt just kept getting weirder and weirder. She wondered where it might all end. That February he wrote an entry in his journal, half-fantasy and half-reality, that would have concerned any lover: "I am a male age 23 and I'm lactating. My breasts have never been so sore, not even after receiving titty twisters from bully schoolmates. I haven't masturbated in months because I've lost my imagination. I close my eyes and I see my father, little girls, German Shepherds, TV news commentators, but no voluptuous pouty-lipped naked female sex kittens wincing in ecstasy. I see lizards and flipper babies." This, and other entries like it, made her worry about his mental state.
Kurt had never slept well, grinding his teeth at night and complaining of recurrent nightmares. "Ever since he could remember, he had dreams about people trying to kill him," Tracy recalled. "In the dreams, he'd be trying to fight people off with a baseball bat, or people with knives coming after him, or vampires." When he awoke, sometimes with tears in his eyes, Tracy would comfort him the way a mother would soothe a small boy, holding him in her arms and stroking his hair. She would always be there for him, she told him; she was never going to leave. Yet he'd lie there looking at the ceiling, soaked with sweat. "He had those dreams all the time." She worried about how he calmed himself when he was on tour.
Outwardly, during the day, he looked fine, never talking about bad dreams, instead giving the appearance of someone who dreamt of only the band. Nirvana began the year with a brief studio session where they recorded the song "Sappy." As early as the European tour, they were already talking about a new album by summer. For the first time in Kurt's career, he wasn't the solitary force pushing for a new release - now Sub Pop, the press, college radio, and even a growing cadre of fans were asking him for new music. He was still writing at a prodigious rate, and the songs kept getting better. Nikki McClure had moved into the apartment next to his, and she used to hear him through the walls, constantly playing his guitar. One afternoon that winter, she overheard a beautiful melody coming through the heat vent; he kept starting and stopping the song, as if he were constructing it on the spot. That evening she turned the radio to KAOS and heard Kurt playing the song he'd been rehearsing that day, live on the air.
On January 19, 1990, Nirvana played yet another Olympia show that would go down in the history books, though this one for different reasons from the others. The show, at a grange hall outside of town, would pair Nirvana with the Melvins and Beat Happening. As a costume, Kurt used stage blood to draw needle marks on his arms. He wasn't certain what a junkie looked like, so he overdrew the marks, which gave him a ghoulish appearance, more like a zombie from an Ed Wood film than a drug addict. "He was wearing short sleeves, and both arms from the wrists to the sleeves had these bruises," observed Garth Reeves. "It looked like he had a disease." Nonetheless, Kurt's attempt at a joke would have unintended consequences: His parody was lost on many in the crowd, and rumors began to circulate that he was indeed a junkie. Still, the show represented a watershed of sorts: Though the Melvins headlined, Nirvana were now more popular than their mentors. The Melvins ended their set with a dynamic cover of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." Kurt was in the front row, raising his fist with the rest of the audience, yet he couldn't help but notice that a third of the crowd had left after Nirvana's set.
Something even more shocking happened the next night when the Melvins and Nirvana played in Tacoma at a hall called Legends. The concert was completely sold out and earned Nirvana a payday of $500, one of their biggest checks to date. There were a hundred people stage diving, creating chaos. One of the most obnoxious was Matt Lukin on Mudhoney, who used his backstage pass to walk onstage, then dive headfirst into the audience. Nirvana's set had to be stopped three times to break up fights between Lukin and the bouncers. "He's our friend," Kurt kept telling the bouncers, sounding both concerned and embarrassed. By the end of Nirvana's performance, which included part of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," there were five security guards standing in front of the band. That didn't seem odd to Kurt, but what positively amazed him was seeing Mark Arm of Mudhoney, standing stage right, bopping his head back and forth during all of Nirvana's set.
Mark Arm, whose real name was Mark McLaughlin, was certifiably the tastemaker for Seattle punk rock. While Pavitt and Poneman had craftily capitalized on grunge, Arm, with his band Mudhoney and his previous group Green River, had virtually invented the musical style, and had even come up with the term "grunge," writing in a Seattle fanzine in the early eighties. Arm was bright, sarcastic, talented, notorious for his partying, and exuded the kind of confidence that made people think he was destined for stardom. In short, he was everything an insecure kid from Aberdeen imagined he could never be. For Arm to appear at your concert, and to be seen enjoying himself, was to have Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis come to your wedding and dance all night. Kurt's adoration of Arm was obvious to everyone, but it had to be most obvious to Buzz Osborne, who was watching his former charge move on.
Kurt had attempted to foster a friendship with Arm, with limited success. When in Seattle, he'd frequently stop by Arm's apartment, where he was intimidated by Arm's collection of punk rock singles - the ultimate status symbol in their circle. "He obviously idolized Mark," remembered Carrie Montgomery, Arm's girlfriend. "Mark wasn't all that impressed by it, of course." At the time, Mudhoney remained Sub Pop's priority and the kings of the Northwest scene. A number of major record labels were interested in them, but they pledged to stick with Sub Pop, owing to Arm's friendship with Pavitt.
But even for Mudhoney, this friendship was tested during 1990, when Sub Pop's financial problems threatened to sink the label and every band on it. Though records by Tad, Nirvana, and Mudhoney had been consistent sellers, their sales were nowhere near the level required to fund the large operation Pavitt and Poneman had built. "Sub Pop actually asked to borrow half of our first European advance," Mudhoney's Steve Turner remembered. The label was so broke they offered bands stock in lieu of royalties owed. "We said, 'What's the point of that?' " recalled Matt Lukin. It was particularly hard for Lukin to watch how Sub Pop treated his friends in Nirvana. "I saw how long Bruce had been promising to put out another record from them, and he kept putting them off," Lukin recalled. "They got put on the back burner."
The money Kurt had made from touring was quickly spent. That spring he started applying for jobs again, circling ads in the Daily Olympian for such occupations as cleaning apartments and hosing down dog kennels at a vet's; he applied for this last position but was turned down. He and Krist decided to start their own janitorial business they would call "Pine Tree Janitorial." It was one of Kurt's many get-rich-quick schemes, and he went so far as to draw up a flyer for their new business with illustrations of Kurt and Krist pushing brooms. The ad touted, "we purposely limit our number of commercial offices in order to personally clean while taking our time." Despite putting flyers up all over Olympia, no client ever employed them.
When he wasn't being the CEO of Pine Tree Janitorial, Kurt was writing songs and touring. They left the first week of February for a West Coast tour with Tad that was their most successful yet, drawing large, enthusiastic crowds in Portland and San Francisco (for a Valentine's Day gig that billed the bands as "hot hunks"). Even in cynical Hollywood, people clamored to get into their shows at Raji's. "That was the night they won over L.A.," recalled Pleasant Gehman, who booked the room. "People were just in awe. The club only held 200 people, but I swear there were 400 there." In Los Angeles they stayed with Jennifer Finch of the band L7, who described their appearance at the time as "looking like the Great Dance and Poodle act at the circus: Chad was tiny, his hair was down to his ass, and his eyes were feral; Kurt was a bit taller than Chad, but with hair that was stringy and long; and than there's Krist, who is so tall it hurt your neck to look up at him."
The tour also saw Kurt reunite with his old buddy Jesse Reed, who was now living outside of San Diego. They met up at the San Ysidro McDonald's, infamous for being the sight of a bloody shooting, and a place Kurt insisted on making part of their travels. Jesse drove with the band to Tijuana for a show, and later that night, a couple of days before Kurt's 23rd birthday, the two old friends celebrated by drinking a half gallon of booze and snorting crystal meth. Despite continued stomach problems, by early 1990, Kurt had started to drink again, and though his use of alcohol was still infrequent, when he drank he did so to excess.
When Kurt returned to Olympia, he had only three weeks before heading out on yet another long tour, which was to include a stop in Wisconsin to record the follow-up to Bleach. Kurt and Tracy tried to rekindle their romance, but the strain was obvious to all around them. "They didn't interact much in public anymore," recalled Slim Moon. Kurt complained to Slim that Tracy wanted to have sex more often than he did. To her, it was part of the bonding of their relationship; to him, it meant an emotional commitment he could no longer give.
That March, Damon Romero stopped by one night, and they rented videos, a frequent activity for a homebody like Kurt. Kurt had picked the latest film by Alex Cox, titled Straight to Hell - it starred Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello. During the film, Romero gestured at an actress and said, "Hey, there's that girl from that band down in Portland." Romero was pointing at Courtney Love. Despite the savage reviews the movie had garnered from critics, Kurt enjoyed the film. "It had just enough kitsch for Kurt to like it," Romero remembered.
On March 20 the band snuck into an Evergreen classroom with a few friends to film what Kurt imagined would be an official video release of his own. Kurt's plan was that the band would perform while vignettes he had taped off of television would be projected in the background. "He had hours and hours of this wacky shit," director Jon Snyder recalled. "He had recorded 'Star Search' with an old Donny and Marie routine, bits of 'Fantasy Island,' and all these insane late-night 'Lee Press-On Nail' commercials." For the first song, "School," the band played while Donny and Marie tap-danced behind them. For "Big Cheese" the background images came from a silent film about witches Kurt had sent away for, along with some of Kurt's Super-8 films from his childhood. "He had broken dolls, dolls on fire, or stuff like in Toy Story where the dolls are all put together wrong," remembered Alex Kostelnik, who operated one of the cameras. Kurt discussed extending the taping and going to Aberdeen to add more footage from his childhood haunts. Like many of his ideas, it was never pursued.
A week later, they packed up the van again and headed back on tour. Tracy was sleeping while Kurt left, but she had written a note in his journal: "Goodbye, Kurdt. Have a good tour and a great recording. Hang in there. I'll see you in seven weeks. Miss you. Love, Tracy." It was endearing, but even in her affection one could sense a defeat. Even Tracy was now spelling his name as his alter-ego "Kurdt." She had lost her Kurt.
In Chicago, on April 2, the band premiered "In Bloom." After the show, they drove all night to arrive in Madison, Wisconsin, home of Smart Studios and producer Butch Vig. They had only a week to cut their album, but Kurt reminded everyone of how many tracks they had managed during five hours for their first demo. Most of their new songs were still embryonic, a fact Kurt tried to downplay. Yet they had every confidence that Vig - who had worked with hundreds of alternative rock bands - could transform their ideas. Vig did impress the band; as a drummer himself, he managed to capture the drum sound Kurt thought was missing from their other efforts.
Working at a frantic pace, they cut eight songs, including a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Here She Comes Now," recorded for a compilation album. They did five new songs, and re-recorded two old ones in just a handful of days. Kurt was, of course, disappointed they hadn't done more. Five of the songs they cut at Smart would eventually end up on the Nevermind album.
The new songs found Kurt plumbing the emotional depths of his own life for material, and writing about the characters around him. "In Bloom" was a thinly disguised portrait of Dylan Carlson, while "Pay to Play" mocked the practice of clubs charging bands to play. "Breed" was the most complex song of the session: It had begun under the title "Imodium" about Tad's diarrhea medicine, yet there is little in the version recorded at Smart to connect it with Tad; Kurt instead used the title to suggest a running on of the mouth. More elaborate than Kurt's early screeds, it ended with the line "she said," implying the song was captured dialogue, and adding another layer of narrative to decipher.
Kurt had come up with an album title: Sheep. The name was his inside joke on the masses he was convinced would be buying his next effort. "Because you want to not; because everyone else is," he wrote in a fake advertisement for Sheep. The ad read: "May women rule the world. Abort Christ. Assassinate the greater and lesser of two evils. Steal Sheep. At a store near you. Nirvana. Flowers. Perfume. Candy. Puppies. Love. Generational Solidarity. And Killing Your Parents. Sheep." Around the same time, he wrote out yet another fake biography of the band, one that would prove strangely prophetic, even as it was filled with adolescent jokes. It described the band as "three-time Granny Award Winners, No. 1 on Billbored Top 100 for 36 consecutive weaks in a row. Two times on the cover of Bowling Stoned, hailed as the most original, thought-provoking and important band of our decade by Thyme and Newsweak."
A few hours after finishing their final mixing at Smart, they were back on tour, and Vig sent the masters to Sub Pop, even though the band had grave doubts as to whether they wanted the label to release the session. Two weeks later, in Massachusetts, Kurt called Tracy and a long phone conversation ensued - one they both knew was coming but one she had hoped to postpone or avoid. He told her things weren't working out between them, and that maybe they should no longer live together. It wasn't an out-and-out breakup; honesty wasn't Kurt's way of dealing with conflict. "He thought maybe we should live apart for a while because we needed a bigger place," recalled Tracy. Kurt's suggestion was peppered with "maybes" and tempered with the assurance that "even if we aren't living together, we'll still be going out." But they both knew it was over.
Within the next month Kurt slept with a young woman while on the road. It was the only instance of infidelity his bandmates ever witnessed. As it was, the sex was crummy and Kurt hated himself for having been so weak. He told Tracy about it when he returned; there had been plenty of opportunities for him to have been unfaithful over the years, and the timing of this one infraction suggests he was trying to emotionally distance himself, to give her a reason to hate him, which would make breaking up easier.
As with all Nirvana tours, after about month on the road, the band - and Kurt - seemed to fall apart. At a show at the Pyramid Club near the end of April, they had another bout of sound problems. Kurt's spirits were lifted when he saw one person among the crowd of New York hipsters who was bouncing away, even during their long tunings; he couldn't believe his eyes when he realized it was Iggy Pop. But his elation lasted only a moment before turning into embarrassment: Kurt was wearing an Iggy Pop T-shirt. Other people might have been able to laugh this coincidence off, but to Kurt, it corroborated the rock idolatry he desperately wanted to hide. He ended the show by demolishing Chad's drum kit.
Chad had to pay close attention to Kurt's moods to discern when he might torpedo himself into the drums. It was both a self-flagellation and an aggressive act - Kurt had grown dissatisfied with Chad's drumming. In Boston, Kurt threw a full pitcher of water at Chad and missed the drummer's ear by inches.
By the time the band arrived back in the Northwest in late May, it almost didn't have to be said that Chad was out of the band. Nothing, of course, had been said. But about two weeks after the tour ended, Channing looked out the window of his Bainbridge Island home, saw the van edging its way up the long driveway, and, like a doomed character in an Ernest Hemingway short story, knew the end was near. He was actually surprised Kurt had even come along - it was a testament to how much Kurt liked Chad, despite how he soon would claim Chad "didn't fit in with the band." Many times they had all three slept in the same bed, with Kurt and Chad flanking Krist so they could share the one blanket. Krist did the talking; Kurt hardly said a word and spent most of the conversation staring at the ground. But even for Chad, it came as a bit of a relief. "I'd spent the last three years with these guys in really close quarters," Chad recalled. "We'd gone through hell together. We'd been in shit together, in little vans, playing for no money. There wasn't any big daddy with the big bucks bailing us out." Kurt hugged Chad good-bye. Chad knew there had been a friendship, but he also realized it was now gone. "I knew that when we said good-bye, I wouldn't see them for a long time."
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