20. HEART-SHAPED COFFIN
Seattle, Washington
January 1993 - August 1993
I am buried in a heart-shaped coffin for weeks.
- An early version of "Heart-Shaped Box."
The line "I hate myself and I want to die" had been kicking around Kurt Cobain's verbal and written repertoire for some time. Like many of his lyrics, or the quips he threw off in interviews, before it appeared publicly it had been auditioned dozens of times in his journal. The line first appeared in his writing around the middle of 1992 in a list of rhyming couplets, and though he didn't come up with a rhyme to pair it with, like a scientist who had stumbled onto a breakthrough formula, he circled it. By mid-1992, he was fixated on the phrase, telling interviewers and friends it was to be the title of his next record. At best it was gallows humor.
What wasn't a joke were the expressions of self-hate that continually cropped up in Kurt's journals, including a poem that sounded similar to his childhood graffiti: "I hate you. I hate them. But I hate myself most of all." In another Jack Kerouac-styled sentence from this period, he wrote of his stomach pain as if it were a curse: "I've violently vomited to the point of my stomach literally turning itself inside out to show you the fine hair-like nerves I've kept and raised as my children, garnishing and marinating each one, as if God had fucked me and planted these precious little eggs, and I parade around them in a peacock victory and maternal pride like a whore relieved from the duties of repeated rape and torture, promoted to a more dignified job of just plain old every day, good old, wholesome prostitution." The remark "As if God had fucked me" came up often, and it was conjured without humor - it was Kurt's own explanation for his physical and emotional struggles.
It was only after Krist convinced Kurt that Nirvana might be opening themselves up to lawsuits with the title "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" that Kurt considered anything else. He switched titles, first to "Verse, Chorus, Verse," and then finally to "In Utero," which was from a poem of Courtney's.
Many of the songs Kurt had written in 1992 were affected by his marriage. "We feed off each other," he wrote in "Milk It," a line that summed up their creative and emotional union. As in common in the marriage of two artists, they began to think alike, share ideas, and use each other as editor. They also shared a journal: Kurt would write a single line, to which Courtney would add a couplet. He read her writings, and she read his, and each was influenced by the other's musings. Courtney was a more traditional lyricist, crafting tighter and less murky lines, and her sensibility greatly shaped "Heart-Shaped Box" and "Pennyroyal Tea," among others. She made Kurt a more careful writer, and it is not by accident that these stand as two of Nirvana's most accomplished works: They were crafted with more intent than Kurt had spent on the entire Nevermind album.
But Courtney's biggest role in Kurt's new songs was as a character - just as Nevermind was mostly about Tobi, so In Utero would be shaped by Don, Courtney, and Frances. "Heart-Shaped Box," of course, referenced Courtney's initial gift of the silk-and-lace box, but the song's line "forever in debt to your priceless advice" came from a note he sent her. "I am eternally grateful for your priceless opinions and advice," he wrote, sounding more sincere in the writing than he did singing the line. The album was his gift to her - he was returning her a "Heart-Shaped Box," though doing it in a musical form. It was not a Hallmark valentine though: "Heart-Shaped Box" evolved through several drafts, and Kurt had originally titled it "Heart-Shaped Coffin," including the line "I am buried in a heart-shaped coffin for weeks." Courtney advised him that was a bit dark. Yet theirs was a relationship where each urged the other to push boundaries, and the artistic risk of these new songs was a matter of pride to her as well as to him.
Prior to entering the studio, Kurt had a list of eighteen songs he was considering; twelve from the list would ultimately end up on the finished album, but with their titles shifted considerably. The song that eventually was called "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" started life as "Nine Month Media Blackout," Kurt's not-so-veiled response to the Vanity Fair piece. "All Apologies" was originally titled "La, La, La ... La" while 'Moist Vagina," a B-side, began with a far longer and more descriptive name: "Moist vagina, and then she blew him like he's never been blown, brains stuck all over the wall."
The band flew to Minnesota on Valentine's Day to begin the album. Seeking a sparse and raw sound, they had hired Steve Albini to produce - Kurt intended to move as far away as he could from Nevermind. Albini had been in the influential punk band Big Black, and back in 1987 Kurt had traveled to a Seattle steam plant to witness Big Black's last performance. As a teenager, Kurt had idolized Albini, though as an adult it was at best a working relationship. Albini got along well with the rest of the band, but later described Courtney as a "psycho hose-beast." She countered that the only way he would think her attractive would be "if I was from the East Coast, played the cello, had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage, and never said a word."
Gold Mountain had picked Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, thinking the rural climes would minimize distractions. They did: By the sixth day of the session - February 20, Kurt's 26 birthday - the band had finished all basic tracks. When they weren't working, they made crank phone calls to Eddie Vedder and traveled to Minneapolis, an hour away. There Kurt searched the Mall of America for plastic anatomical models of The Visible Man, his latest collecting obsession. When the record was finished, only twelve days after they began, the band celebrated by setting their pants on fire. "We were listening to the final mixes," explained Pat Whalen, a friend who stopped by. "Everyone poured solvent on their pants, lit them, and then passed the flame from one pant leg to another, and from one person to the next." They were wearing their pans when they did this; to avoid burns they had to douse each other with beer the instant the flames shot up their legs.
The finished album had been recorded in half the time of Nevermind. "Things were on the upswing," Krist recalled. "We left all the personal stuff outside the door. And it was a triumph - it's my favorite Nirvana record." Novoselic's viewpoint was shared by many critics, and by Kurt, who thought it his strongest effort. At first, Kurt saw "Pennyroyal Tea" as the first single: It combined a Beatles-like riff with the slow/fast pacing Nirvana perfected. The title referred to an herbal abortion remedy. Though Courtney's lyrics had shaped the tune, it ended with a nonfictional description of Kurt's stomach: "I'm on warm milk and laxatives, cherry-flavored antacids."
In Utero also had a number of up-tempo rockers, but even these had lyrical depth. "Very Ape" and "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" had the kind of crunchy riffs played during a three-second break in a basketball game, yet featured convoluted enough to inspire term papers and Internet debates. "Milk It" was a punk rock burner the band had pulled off in one take, yet Kurt spent days fine-tuning the lyrics. "Her milk is my shit / My shit is her milk," was his twisted way of connecting himself to his wife. The song also hinted at his rehab ("your scent is still here in my place of recovery"), plus he reprised a line that he'd been kicking around in various songs since high school: "Look, on the bright side is suicide." In his unused liner notes for "Dumb" he described his descent to drug addiction: "All that pot. All that supposedly, unaddictive, harmless, safe reefer that damaged my nerves, and ruined my memory, and made me feel like wanting to blow up the prom. It just wasn't ever strong enough, so I climbed the ladder to the poppy."
But no song on the album ranked with "Heart-Shaped Box." "I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black," Kurt sang in what has to be the most convoluted route any songwriter undertook in pop history to say "I love you." With the line, "Throw down your umbilical noose, so I can climb right back," Kurt ended his most transcendent song with a plea that could be to Courtney, to his mother, from his daughter, from himself, or perhaps most likely, to his God. His own explanation in his unpublished liner notes fell completely apart (he crossed most of it out) but touched on The Wizard of Oz, "I Claudius," Leonardo da Vinci, male seahorse (who carry their young), racism in the Old West, and Camille Paglia. Like all great art, "Heart-Shaped Box" escaped any easy categorization and offered many interpretations to the listener, as apparently it did to its author.
What "Heart-Shaped Box" mean to Kurt is best surmised by the treatment he wrote for the song's video. Kurt envisioned it starring William S. Burroughs, and he wrote Burroughs begging him to appear in the video. "I realize that stories in the press regarding my drug use may make you think that this request comes from a desire to parallel our lives," he wrote. "Let me assure you, this is not the case." But exactly what Kurt hoped to achieve by casting the writer was never clear: In his attempt to convince Burroughs to participate, he had offered to obscure the writer's face, so that no one other than Kurt would know of his cameo. Burroughs declined the invitation.
Both the In Utero album and "Heart-Shaped Box" video were obsessed with images of birth, death, sexuality, disease, and addiction. There were several versions of the video made, and a battle over who originated the ideas eventually caused Kurt to split with video director Kevin Kerslake, who promptly sued Kurt and Nirvana; Anton Corbijn completed the final cut, which included shots of Kurt's growing collection of dolls. The released video centered around a junkie-looking elderly Jesus dressed as the Pope, wearing a Santa hat while being crucified in a field of poppies. A fetus hangs from a tree, and reappears crammed inside an IV bottle being fed into Jesus, who has moved to a hospital room. Krist, Dave, and Kurt are shown in a hospital room waiting for Jesus to recover. A giant heart with a crossword puzzle inside it appears, as does the Aryan girl, whose white KKK hat turns to black. And throughout these images, Kurt's face continues to charge the camera. It is an absolutely striking video, and all the more remarkable because Kurt privately told his friends that many of these images were from his dreams.
The first week of March, Kurt and Courtney moved into a $2,000-a-month house at 11301 Lakeside Avenue NE in Seattle. It was a modern three-story home, just up from Lake Washington, with views of Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains. It was also gigantic, and at over 6,000 square feet of living space, it was bigger than all of Kurt's previous homes combined. Yet the Cobains quickly filled the house - an entire room became Kurt's painting space, there were quarters for guests and nannies, and Kurt's MTV awards decorated the second-floor bathroom. In the two-car garage, next to Kurt's Valiant, they now had a gray 1986 Volvo 240DL, which Kurt proudly told his friends was the safest family car ever made.
Soon after the move, Kurt and Courtney's ongoing case with the Department of Children's Services finally came to an end. Though the Cobains had initially followed the court's decrees, they still feared Frances would be taken from them. Moving to Seattle was a strategic chess-move in the battle - Courtney knew Interstate Compact law would prevent the Los Angeles judge from having control over them in Seattle. An L.A. social worker named Mary Brown flew to Seattle in early March to observe Frances in her new home. When she recommended the county drop the case, her decision was eventually accepted. "Kurt was ecstatic," lawyer Neal Hersh recalled. On March 25, just a week after Frances's seven-month birthday, Frances was legally returned to her parent's unsupervised care. They daughter's return came with a price: They had spent over $240,000 on legal fees.
Frances had remained with her parents throughout the entire investigation, though Jamie or Jackie had been on-site to satisfy the court. Jackie had been a life-saver as a nanny, but by early 1993 she was exhausted. She had only been giving a handful of days off during her tenure, though in the new home she had managed to institute stricter parameters on her duty: She insisted that when Frances woke during the night her parents care for her until 7 a.m. But Farry now had to handle many record company calls that Kurt wanted to avoid: "People would call and say, 'Can you have Kurt call me back?' And I'd say, 'I'll tell him,' but I knew he wasn't going to call them back. He just didn't want to deal with what was being forced upon him in his life. He just wanted to hang out with Courtney and not deal with the world." Farry announced she was leaving in April.
Jackie interviewed numerous professional nannies as potential replacements, but it was clear that most couldn't fit with the drama of the Cobain home. "They'd ask, 'When is feeding time?' " Farry said. "I'd have to tell them that things didn't work exactly like that around their house." Eventually Courtney decided to hire Michael "Cali" DeWitt, a twenty-year-old former Hole roadie, as the new nanny. Despite his youth, Cali was an excellent caretaker for Frances, who bonded with him immediately. The Cobains additionally employed Ingrid Bernstein, the mother of their friend Nils Bernstein, on a part-time basis.
April 1993 was a busy month for both Hole and Nirvana. Hole released "Beautiful Son," a song Courtney wrote about Kurt, and used a childhood picture on the sleeve. Nirvana, meanwhile, traveled to San Francisco's Cow Palace to play a benefit for Bosnian rape victims, an issue of concern to Novoselic, due to his ethnic heritage. It was Nirvana's first show in the U.S. in six months, and they used it to showcase their upcoming album, playing eight of the twelve songs on In Utero, many for the first time in concert. Kurt decided to switch from his usual position, stage left, to stage right - it was as if he was attempting to re-craft the band's show. It worked, and hardcore fans cited this as one of the band's best live performances.
Though In Utero had been recorded, it was still waiting for release, and a dispute in April over its production overshadowed everything else the band did that spring. The band had solicited Albini because they wanted a rawer sound, but they found his final mixes too stark. News of this got back to the producer, who in April told the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot, "Geffen and Nirvana's management hate the record ... I have no faith it will released." Kurt responded with his own press release: "There has been no pressure from our record label to change the tracks." But the controversy continued, and Kurt had DGC take out a full-page ad in Billboard denying allegations the label had rejected the album. Despite the denials, most at the label did think the production too raw, and in May, Scott Litt was hired to make "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies" more radio friendly. Once again, when challenged by a problem that might affect the success of his record, Kurt acquiesced to the path of least resistance and greatest sales.
That didn't stop him from quietly steaming. Though he continued to tell reporters he was in support of the Litt remixes and thought Albini did a great job - two contradictory statements - in his journal he outlined plans to release the album exactly as he wanted. He would first release the Albini version as I Hate Myself and Want to Die, but only on vinyl, cassette, and eight-track tape. His next phase of operations would come one month later. "After many lame reviews and reports on curmudgeonly, uncompromising vinyl, cassette, eight-track-only release, we release the remixed version under the title Verse, Chorus, Verse." For this, Kurt wanted a sticker reading, "Radio-Friendly, Unit-Shifter, Compromise Version." DGC, not surprisingly, declined to follow Kurt's plans. The remixed version of In Utero was slated for release in September.
On the first Sunday of May, at 9 p.m., King County's 911 emergency services center received a report from the Cobain house of a drug overdose. When police and an aid car arrived, they discovered Kurt on the living-room sofa babbling about "Hamlet." He was suffering, the officers observed, from "symptoms associated with an overdose of a narcotic ... Victim Cobain was conscious and able to answer questions, but was obviously impaired."
Just a few minutes prior to the arrival of police, Kurt had been blue and appeared, once again, to be dead. Courtney told officers Kurt had been at a friend's house where he had "injected himself with $30 to $40 worth of heroin." Kurt had driven home, and when Courtney confronted him about being loaded, he locked himself in an upstairs bedroom. Courtney had threatened to call the police or his family, and when he didn't respond, she followed through on the second threat. She reached Wendy on the first ring, and Kurt's mother and sister immediately got in their car and "bombed our asses up there," as Kim remembered.
In the two and a half hours it took Kim and Wendy to speed from Aberdeen to Seattle. Kurt's condition deteriorated. By the time Wendy and Kim arrived, Kurt was vomiting and in shock. He did not want 911 called, he told them in his slurred voice, because he would "rather die" than see it in the paper that he overdosed or got arrested. Courtney threw cold water on Kurt, walked him around the house, gave him Valium, and finally injected him with Narcan, a drug used to counteract heroin, but none of these efforts fully revived him (a supply of Narcan, itself illegally obtained, was always kept in the home for this purpose). Wendy tried to rub Kurt's back - her way of comforting her son - but the heroin made his muscles tighter than a plaster mannequin. "It was horrid," remembered Kim. "We finally had to call paramedics because he was starting to turn blue." When police arrived, they found, "his condition gradually deteriorated to the point that he was shaking, became flushed, delirious, and talked incoherently."
Once Kurt was in the aid car, the crisis seemed averted. Kim followed the ambulance to Harborview Hospital, where events took a farcical turn. "There he was hilarious," she recalled. "He was laying out in the hallway of this packed hospital, getting IV fluids, and the staff to reverse the drugs. He's laying there, and he starts talking about Shakespeare. Then he'd nod out and wake up five minutes later, and continue his conversation with me."
Part of the reason Kim had been sent to chase the ambulance was because Courtney wanted to throw away the rest of Kurt's heroin but couldn't locate it. When Kurt came back to consciousness, Kim asked him where he put it. "It's in the pocket of the bathrobe hanging on the stairway," Kurt admitted, right before he passed out again. Kim ran to the phone and called the house, though by then Courtney had already discovered it. When Kim returned to Kurt's side, he had woken again and insisted she not divulge the location of the drugs.
After about three hours of Narcan, Kurt was ready to go home. "When he was able to leave the hospital, I couldn't light his cigarette fast enough," Kim said. There was a huge sadness for her in witnessing what at times had seemed like an almost comic brush with death: Overdosing had become ordinary to Kurt, part of the game, and there was a normalcy to this madness. Indeed, as the police report noted, Courtney told the officers the larger, sadder truth about this one episode: "This type of incident had happened before to Victim Cobain."
"Heroine" was now part of Kurt's daily existence, and sometimes, particularly when he had no band business and Courtney and Frances were gone, the central part. By the summer of 1993, he was using almost every day, and when not using he was in withdrawal and complaining vociferously. It was a period of more functional dependency than in the past, but his usage still surpassed most addicts'. Even Dylan, an addict himself, found Kurt's dosage level dangerous. "He definitely used a lot of dope," Dylan recalled. "I wanted to get high and still be able to do something, but he always wanted to do so much he couldn't do anything. He always wanted to do more than he needed to do." Kurt's interest was in escape, and the quicker and the more incapacitating, the better. As a result, there were many overdoses and near-death situations, as many as a dozen during 1993 alone.
The increase in Kurt's habit ran counter to an effort Courtney was making to sober up. In late spring, she hired a psychic to help her kick drugs. Kurt balked at paying the bills from the psychic and laughed at her advice that the couple both needed to rid themselves of "all toxins." Courtney took it seriously, however; she attempted to stop smoking, began drinking fresh-squeezed juice every day, and attended Narcotics Anonymous. Kurt taunted his wife at first, but then encouraged her to attend N.A. meetings, if only so he had more free time to get loaded.
The first of June, Courtney staged an intervention in the Lakeside house. In attendance were Krist, friend Nils Bernstein, Gold Mountain's Janet Billig, Wendy, and Kurt's stepfather, Pat O'Connor. At first, Kurt refused to leave his room and even look at the group. When he finally left his room, he and Courtney began screaming at each other. In a fit of rage, Kurt grabbed a red Sanford Magic Marker and scrawled "None of you will ever know my true intent" on the hallway wall. "It was obvious there was no getting through to him," Bernstein remembered. The assembled group went through a litany of reasons Kurt should stop doing drugs, one of the most repeated being the needs of his daughter. His mother told him his health was at risk. Krist pleaded with Kurt, talking of how he had limited his own drinking. When Pat O'Connor shared stories of his struggles with alcohol, Kurt was silent and stared at his sneakers. "You could see in Kurt's face that he was thinking, 'Nothing in your life relates to anything in my life,' " Bernstein recalled. "I thought to myself, 'this is so not working.' " When Kurt returned to his bedroom in a huff, those assembled began to argue among themselves about who was to blame for Kurt's addiction. For those closest to him, it was easier to blame each other than to put responsibility at his feet.
Kurt began to increasingly isolate himself that summer; friends jokingly called him Rapunzel because he so rarely came down from his room. His mother was one of the few people he'd listen to, and Courtney increasingly made use of Wendy as mediator. Kurt still desperately needed mothering, and he regressed to an almost fetal state as he retreated from the world. Wendy could soothe him by stroking his hair and telling him everything was going to be fine. "There were times when he would be nodded out upstairs, and nobody, neither Courtney or anyone else, could go near him," observed Bernstein. "But his mom would wander in, and he didn't shut her out. I think it was chemical depression." Depression ran in Wendy's family, and though several of Kurt's friends suggested he be treated, he chose to ignore their pleas and to self-medicate with drugs. Truth be told, it was hard for anyone to get him to do anything: If the world of Nirvana could be considered a small nation unto itself, Kurt was king. Few dared challenge the king's mental health for fear of being banished from the kingdom.
On June 4, after another horrible day of drama, Courtney called the police on Kurt. When officers arrived, she told them they had "an argument over guns in the household," she had thrown a glass of juice in his face, and he had shoved her. "At which time," the police report states, "Cobain pushed Love to the floor and began choking her, leaving a scratch." Seattle law required police to arrest at least one party in any domestic dispute - Kurt and Courtney began to argue over who would be the one arrested, since both wanted this distinction. Kurt insisted he go to jail - for someone passive-aggressive, this was a mother lode of an opportunity to both emotionally retreat and play the martyr. He won. He was transported to the North Precinct and booked into the King County Jail. Police also seized a large collection of ammunition and guns from the home, including two .38 pistols and a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.
But the real story of what happened that day illustrated the increasing strain within their marriage. Like two characters in a Raymond Carver short story, their fights increasingly included digs at each other's weak points, and on this day Kurt was flaunting his drug use in front of Courtney and her psychic. "He had to find, of course, the one drug that would drive me insane," Love recalled. "He decided he was going to try crack. He made this big insane production out of how he was going to acquire and try ten dollars' worth of 'rock.' "
To bait his wife, Kurt acted like "he was pulling down the drug deal of the century" with repeated phone calls to a dealer. Visions of him free-basing crack cocaine in their house enraged Courtney, and instead of throwing a glass at him, as the police report states, she actually threw a juicer. It wasn't much of a fight - physical battle between the two ended in draws, just like their first wrestling match on the floor of the Portland club. But Courtney called the police anyway, figuring that having him go to jail was better than having him burn down their house free-basing. "I'm sure Kurt got his crack eventually, somehow, somewhere, but I never did find out about it," she said. He spent only three hours in jail, and was released that night on $950 bail. Charges were later dropped.
They patched things up after the arrest, and as happened repeatedly in their relationship, the trauma brought them closer. On their bedroom wall she wrote the graffiti, "You better love me, you fucker," inside a heart. A month after the fight, Kurt described their relationship to Gavin Edwards of Details as "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." Both were masers of pushing and testing limits - it was all Kurt did in childhood - and whenever he made Courtney angry, he knew he had to woo her back, usually with love letters. One such note began: "Courtney, when I say, 'I love you,' I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever, ever come close to intimidating, persuading, etc., me into thinking otherwise. I wear you on my sleeve. I spread you out wide open with the wing span of a peacock, yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head." The prose was self-deprecating, describing himself "as dense as cement," but also reminding her of his marriage commitment: "I parade around you proudly like the ring on my finger which also holds no mineral."
Two week after the domestic violence arrest, Neal Karlen arrived at the Cobain house to interview Courtney for the New York Times. When he knocked, Kurt answered, holding Frances, and announced his wife was "at her N.A. meeting." He invited Karlen in, and they sat and watched television. "It was this huge house," recalled Karlen, "but there were cigarette butts put out on plates, and this ugly, shitty furniture. In the living room was this huge, eighteen-foot television. It was as if someone had gone to the store and said, 'I want the biggest television in the catalog.' "
On TV was the latest episode of "Beavis and Butt-Head," MTV's popular show. "I know Beavis and Butt-Head," Kurt told Karlen. "I grew up with people like that; I recognize them." In a grand bit of serendipity, the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on the program. "All right!" Kurt exclaimed. "Let's see what they think about us." When the two cartoon characters gave Nirvana the thumbs up, Kurt seemed genuinely flattered. "They like us!"
As if on cue, Courtney arrived home. She kissed Kurt, bounced Frances on her knee, and with only a mild hint of sarcasm announced, "Ah, the prefect family - just like a Norman Rockwell picture." Even Karlen was struck with a domestic image. "I kept thinking of them as Fred and Ethel Mertz," she recalled. "He was more like Fred, with his hands in his pockets, while Ethel was running the household." Karlen also had caught Kurt on a day his eyes were clear. "I'd seen enough junkies to know he was straight."
As it was, Love didn't want to talk to the New York Times, but she did wish to voice her opinions for a book Karlen was writing on the band Babes in Toyland. Their interview went on for hours, and Kurt frequently chimed in when Courtney would prod him. "He was not as passive as people said," Karlen observed. Courtney used Kurt as she would a resident punk historian - when she made a point, and needed a date or a name, she would query Kurt, and he would inevitably know the answer. "It was like watching a quiz show were they would go to the professor to verify facts," Karlen noted.
Kurt had one quandary of his own: He was pondering whether to buy a guitar that once belonged to Leadbelly. It was for sale for $55,000, but he couldn't decide whether buying it was a "punk move" or an "anti-punk move." The only tension Karlen noticed between the couple was when Courtney stumbled upon a Mary Lou Lord album in Kurt's record collection. This set Love off telling a story of how she'd chased Lord down the street in Los Angeles, threatening to beat her up. Kurt was silent, and it was the only time Karlen thought Kurt acted like "the long-suffering husband."
Courtney's discourse on the history of punk rock went on for hours after Kurt went to bed. Karlen eventually spent the night in a spare bedroom. The morning brought the only evidence this wasn't the typical household: When Kurt went to prepare the morning meal, there was no food. After looking for several minutes, Kurt put some sugar cookies on a plate and announced it was breakfast.
On July 1 Hole played their first show in several months, at the Off-Ramp in Seattle. Courtney had retooled her band, and they were preparing to tour England and make a record. Kurt came to the show, but he was a mess. "He was so wasted he could barely stand up," recalled the club's Michelle Underwood. "We had to help him move around. It seemed like he was very nervous for her." His nerves were exacerbated by the fact that the day of the show, the Seattle Times published a story on his arrest the previous month in the domestic violence incident. Courtney joked onstage: "We're donating all the money you paid to get in tonight to Domestic Violence Wife Beater Fund. Not!" Later she came back to the topic: "Domestic violence is not something that's ever happened to me. I just like to stick up for my husband. It's not a true story. They never fucking are. Why is it that every time we have a fucking beer, it's on the fucking news?" Despite the drama, her performance was riveting, and it was the first time she'd won over a Seattle audience.
Hole's set ended at fifteen minutes past one, but that wasn't the end of the evening for the Cobains. Brian Willis of NME came backstage and asked if Courtney might want to be interviewed. She invited him to their house but she spent most of the interview promoting Kurt's record. Love even played In Utero for Willis, the first time a journalist had heard the album. He was overwhelmed, writing, "If Freud could hear it, he'd wet his pants in anticipation." He called it "an album pregnant with irony and insight. In Utero is Kurt's revenge."
Willis's listening experience was interrupted when Kurt came into the room to report: "We were just on the news, on MTV. They were talking about the story in the Seattle Times and how Hole have just started their world tour in Seattle at the Off-Ramp." With that, Kurt made a snack of English muffins and hot chocolate, and sat at the counter watching the sun rise. When Willis wrote the late-night events up for the NME, he ended his piece with a bit of analysis: "For someone who's been through so much shit in the past two years, whose name's being dragged through acrimony once again, who's about to release a record the whole rock world's desperate to hear and be faced with astonishing attention and pressure, Kurt Cobain's a remarkably contented man."
Seattle, Washington
January 1993 - August 1993
I am buried in a heart-shaped coffin for weeks.
- An early version of "Heart-Shaped Box."
The line "I hate myself and I want to die" had been kicking around Kurt Cobain's verbal and written repertoire for some time. Like many of his lyrics, or the quips he threw off in interviews, before it appeared publicly it had been auditioned dozens of times in his journal. The line first appeared in his writing around the middle of 1992 in a list of rhyming couplets, and though he didn't come up with a rhyme to pair it with, like a scientist who had stumbled onto a breakthrough formula, he circled it. By mid-1992, he was fixated on the phrase, telling interviewers and friends it was to be the title of his next record. At best it was gallows humor.
What wasn't a joke were the expressions of self-hate that continually cropped up in Kurt's journals, including a poem that sounded similar to his childhood graffiti: "I hate you. I hate them. But I hate myself most of all." In another Jack Kerouac-styled sentence from this period, he wrote of his stomach pain as if it were a curse: "I've violently vomited to the point of my stomach literally turning itself inside out to show you the fine hair-like nerves I've kept and raised as my children, garnishing and marinating each one, as if God had fucked me and planted these precious little eggs, and I parade around them in a peacock victory and maternal pride like a whore relieved from the duties of repeated rape and torture, promoted to a more dignified job of just plain old every day, good old, wholesome prostitution." The remark "As if God had fucked me" came up often, and it was conjured without humor - it was Kurt's own explanation for his physical and emotional struggles.
It was only after Krist convinced Kurt that Nirvana might be opening themselves up to lawsuits with the title "I Hate Myself and Want to Die" that Kurt considered anything else. He switched titles, first to "Verse, Chorus, Verse," and then finally to "In Utero," which was from a poem of Courtney's.
Many of the songs Kurt had written in 1992 were affected by his marriage. "We feed off each other," he wrote in "Milk It," a line that summed up their creative and emotional union. As in common in the marriage of two artists, they began to think alike, share ideas, and use each other as editor. They also shared a journal: Kurt would write a single line, to which Courtney would add a couplet. He read her writings, and she read his, and each was influenced by the other's musings. Courtney was a more traditional lyricist, crafting tighter and less murky lines, and her sensibility greatly shaped "Heart-Shaped Box" and "Pennyroyal Tea," among others. She made Kurt a more careful writer, and it is not by accident that these stand as two of Nirvana's most accomplished works: They were crafted with more intent than Kurt had spent on the entire Nevermind album.
But Courtney's biggest role in Kurt's new songs was as a character - just as Nevermind was mostly about Tobi, so In Utero would be shaped by Don, Courtney, and Frances. "Heart-Shaped Box," of course, referenced Courtney's initial gift of the silk-and-lace box, but the song's line "forever in debt to your priceless advice" came from a note he sent her. "I am eternally grateful for your priceless opinions and advice," he wrote, sounding more sincere in the writing than he did singing the line. The album was his gift to her - he was returning her a "Heart-Shaped Box," though doing it in a musical form. It was not a Hallmark valentine though: "Heart-Shaped Box" evolved through several drafts, and Kurt had originally titled it "Heart-Shaped Coffin," including the line "I am buried in a heart-shaped coffin for weeks." Courtney advised him that was a bit dark. Yet theirs was a relationship where each urged the other to push boundaries, and the artistic risk of these new songs was a matter of pride to her as well as to him.
Prior to entering the studio, Kurt had a list of eighteen songs he was considering; twelve from the list would ultimately end up on the finished album, but with their titles shifted considerably. The song that eventually was called "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" started life as "Nine Month Media Blackout," Kurt's not-so-veiled response to the Vanity Fair piece. "All Apologies" was originally titled "La, La, La ... La" while 'Moist Vagina," a B-side, began with a far longer and more descriptive name: "Moist vagina, and then she blew him like he's never been blown, brains stuck all over the wall."
The band flew to Minnesota on Valentine's Day to begin the album. Seeking a sparse and raw sound, they had hired Steve Albini to produce - Kurt intended to move as far away as he could from Nevermind. Albini had been in the influential punk band Big Black, and back in 1987 Kurt had traveled to a Seattle steam plant to witness Big Black's last performance. As a teenager, Kurt had idolized Albini, though as an adult it was at best a working relationship. Albini got along well with the rest of the band, but later described Courtney as a "psycho hose-beast." She countered that the only way he would think her attractive would be "if I was from the East Coast, played the cello, had big tits and small hoop earrings, wore black turtlenecks, had all matching luggage, and never said a word."
Gold Mountain had picked Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, thinking the rural climes would minimize distractions. They did: By the sixth day of the session - February 20, Kurt's 26 birthday - the band had finished all basic tracks. When they weren't working, they made crank phone calls to Eddie Vedder and traveled to Minneapolis, an hour away. There Kurt searched the Mall of America for plastic anatomical models of The Visible Man, his latest collecting obsession. When the record was finished, only twelve days after they began, the band celebrated by setting their pants on fire. "We were listening to the final mixes," explained Pat Whalen, a friend who stopped by. "Everyone poured solvent on their pants, lit them, and then passed the flame from one pant leg to another, and from one person to the next." They were wearing their pans when they did this; to avoid burns they had to douse each other with beer the instant the flames shot up their legs.
The finished album had been recorded in half the time of Nevermind. "Things were on the upswing," Krist recalled. "We left all the personal stuff outside the door. And it was a triumph - it's my favorite Nirvana record." Novoselic's viewpoint was shared by many critics, and by Kurt, who thought it his strongest effort. At first, Kurt saw "Pennyroyal Tea" as the first single: It combined a Beatles-like riff with the slow/fast pacing Nirvana perfected. The title referred to an herbal abortion remedy. Though Courtney's lyrics had shaped the tune, it ended with a nonfictional description of Kurt's stomach: "I'm on warm milk and laxatives, cherry-flavored antacids."
In Utero also had a number of up-tempo rockers, but even these had lyrical depth. "Very Ape" and "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" had the kind of crunchy riffs played during a three-second break in a basketball game, yet featured convoluted enough to inspire term papers and Internet debates. "Milk It" was a punk rock burner the band had pulled off in one take, yet Kurt spent days fine-tuning the lyrics. "Her milk is my shit / My shit is her milk," was his twisted way of connecting himself to his wife. The song also hinted at his rehab ("your scent is still here in my place of recovery"), plus he reprised a line that he'd been kicking around in various songs since high school: "Look, on the bright side is suicide." In his unused liner notes for "Dumb" he described his descent to drug addiction: "All that pot. All that supposedly, unaddictive, harmless, safe reefer that damaged my nerves, and ruined my memory, and made me feel like wanting to blow up the prom. It just wasn't ever strong enough, so I climbed the ladder to the poppy."
But no song on the album ranked with "Heart-Shaped Box." "I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black," Kurt sang in what has to be the most convoluted route any songwriter undertook in pop history to say "I love you." With the line, "Throw down your umbilical noose, so I can climb right back," Kurt ended his most transcendent song with a plea that could be to Courtney, to his mother, from his daughter, from himself, or perhaps most likely, to his God. His own explanation in his unpublished liner notes fell completely apart (he crossed most of it out) but touched on The Wizard of Oz, "I Claudius," Leonardo da Vinci, male seahorse (who carry their young), racism in the Old West, and Camille Paglia. Like all great art, "Heart-Shaped Box" escaped any easy categorization and offered many interpretations to the listener, as apparently it did to its author.
What "Heart-Shaped Box" mean to Kurt is best surmised by the treatment he wrote for the song's video. Kurt envisioned it starring William S. Burroughs, and he wrote Burroughs begging him to appear in the video. "I realize that stories in the press regarding my drug use may make you think that this request comes from a desire to parallel our lives," he wrote. "Let me assure you, this is not the case." But exactly what Kurt hoped to achieve by casting the writer was never clear: In his attempt to convince Burroughs to participate, he had offered to obscure the writer's face, so that no one other than Kurt would know of his cameo. Burroughs declined the invitation.
Both the In Utero album and "Heart-Shaped Box" video were obsessed with images of birth, death, sexuality, disease, and addiction. There were several versions of the video made, and a battle over who originated the ideas eventually caused Kurt to split with video director Kevin Kerslake, who promptly sued Kurt and Nirvana; Anton Corbijn completed the final cut, which included shots of Kurt's growing collection of dolls. The released video centered around a junkie-looking elderly Jesus dressed as the Pope, wearing a Santa hat while being crucified in a field of poppies. A fetus hangs from a tree, and reappears crammed inside an IV bottle being fed into Jesus, who has moved to a hospital room. Krist, Dave, and Kurt are shown in a hospital room waiting for Jesus to recover. A giant heart with a crossword puzzle inside it appears, as does the Aryan girl, whose white KKK hat turns to black. And throughout these images, Kurt's face continues to charge the camera. It is an absolutely striking video, and all the more remarkable because Kurt privately told his friends that many of these images were from his dreams.
The first week of March, Kurt and Courtney moved into a $2,000-a-month house at 11301 Lakeside Avenue NE in Seattle. It was a modern three-story home, just up from Lake Washington, with views of Mount Rainier and the Cascade Mountains. It was also gigantic, and at over 6,000 square feet of living space, it was bigger than all of Kurt's previous homes combined. Yet the Cobains quickly filled the house - an entire room became Kurt's painting space, there were quarters for guests and nannies, and Kurt's MTV awards decorated the second-floor bathroom. In the two-car garage, next to Kurt's Valiant, they now had a gray 1986 Volvo 240DL, which Kurt proudly told his friends was the safest family car ever made.
Soon after the move, Kurt and Courtney's ongoing case with the Department of Children's Services finally came to an end. Though the Cobains had initially followed the court's decrees, they still feared Frances would be taken from them. Moving to Seattle was a strategic chess-move in the battle - Courtney knew Interstate Compact law would prevent the Los Angeles judge from having control over them in Seattle. An L.A. social worker named Mary Brown flew to Seattle in early March to observe Frances in her new home. When she recommended the county drop the case, her decision was eventually accepted. "Kurt was ecstatic," lawyer Neal Hersh recalled. On March 25, just a week after Frances's seven-month birthday, Frances was legally returned to her parent's unsupervised care. They daughter's return came with a price: They had spent over $240,000 on legal fees.
Frances had remained with her parents throughout the entire investigation, though Jamie or Jackie had been on-site to satisfy the court. Jackie had been a life-saver as a nanny, but by early 1993 she was exhausted. She had only been giving a handful of days off during her tenure, though in the new home she had managed to institute stricter parameters on her duty: She insisted that when Frances woke during the night her parents care for her until 7 a.m. But Farry now had to handle many record company calls that Kurt wanted to avoid: "People would call and say, 'Can you have Kurt call me back?' And I'd say, 'I'll tell him,' but I knew he wasn't going to call them back. He just didn't want to deal with what was being forced upon him in his life. He just wanted to hang out with Courtney and not deal with the world." Farry announced she was leaving in April.
Jackie interviewed numerous professional nannies as potential replacements, but it was clear that most couldn't fit with the drama of the Cobain home. "They'd ask, 'When is feeding time?' " Farry said. "I'd have to tell them that things didn't work exactly like that around their house." Eventually Courtney decided to hire Michael "Cali" DeWitt, a twenty-year-old former Hole roadie, as the new nanny. Despite his youth, Cali was an excellent caretaker for Frances, who bonded with him immediately. The Cobains additionally employed Ingrid Bernstein, the mother of their friend Nils Bernstein, on a part-time basis.
April 1993 was a busy month for both Hole and Nirvana. Hole released "Beautiful Son," a song Courtney wrote about Kurt, and used a childhood picture on the sleeve. Nirvana, meanwhile, traveled to San Francisco's Cow Palace to play a benefit for Bosnian rape victims, an issue of concern to Novoselic, due to his ethnic heritage. It was Nirvana's first show in the U.S. in six months, and they used it to showcase their upcoming album, playing eight of the twelve songs on In Utero, many for the first time in concert. Kurt decided to switch from his usual position, stage left, to stage right - it was as if he was attempting to re-craft the band's show. It worked, and hardcore fans cited this as one of the band's best live performances.
Though In Utero had been recorded, it was still waiting for release, and a dispute in April over its production overshadowed everything else the band did that spring. The band had solicited Albini because they wanted a rawer sound, but they found his final mixes too stark. News of this got back to the producer, who in April told the Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot, "Geffen and Nirvana's management hate the record ... I have no faith it will released." Kurt responded with his own press release: "There has been no pressure from our record label to change the tracks." But the controversy continued, and Kurt had DGC take out a full-page ad in Billboard denying allegations the label had rejected the album. Despite the denials, most at the label did think the production too raw, and in May, Scott Litt was hired to make "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies" more radio friendly. Once again, when challenged by a problem that might affect the success of his record, Kurt acquiesced to the path of least resistance and greatest sales.
That didn't stop him from quietly steaming. Though he continued to tell reporters he was in support of the Litt remixes and thought Albini did a great job - two contradictory statements - in his journal he outlined plans to release the album exactly as he wanted. He would first release the Albini version as I Hate Myself and Want to Die, but only on vinyl, cassette, and eight-track tape. His next phase of operations would come one month later. "After many lame reviews and reports on curmudgeonly, uncompromising vinyl, cassette, eight-track-only release, we release the remixed version under the title Verse, Chorus, Verse." For this, Kurt wanted a sticker reading, "Radio-Friendly, Unit-Shifter, Compromise Version." DGC, not surprisingly, declined to follow Kurt's plans. The remixed version of In Utero was slated for release in September.
On the first Sunday of May, at 9 p.m., King County's 911 emergency services center received a report from the Cobain house of a drug overdose. When police and an aid car arrived, they discovered Kurt on the living-room sofa babbling about "Hamlet." He was suffering, the officers observed, from "symptoms associated with an overdose of a narcotic ... Victim Cobain was conscious and able to answer questions, but was obviously impaired."
Just a few minutes prior to the arrival of police, Kurt had been blue and appeared, once again, to be dead. Courtney told officers Kurt had been at a friend's house where he had "injected himself with $30 to $40 worth of heroin." Kurt had driven home, and when Courtney confronted him about being loaded, he locked himself in an upstairs bedroom. Courtney had threatened to call the police or his family, and when he didn't respond, she followed through on the second threat. She reached Wendy on the first ring, and Kurt's mother and sister immediately got in their car and "bombed our asses up there," as Kim remembered.
In the two and a half hours it took Kim and Wendy to speed from Aberdeen to Seattle. Kurt's condition deteriorated. By the time Wendy and Kim arrived, Kurt was vomiting and in shock. He did not want 911 called, he told them in his slurred voice, because he would "rather die" than see it in the paper that he overdosed or got arrested. Courtney threw cold water on Kurt, walked him around the house, gave him Valium, and finally injected him with Narcan, a drug used to counteract heroin, but none of these efforts fully revived him (a supply of Narcan, itself illegally obtained, was always kept in the home for this purpose). Wendy tried to rub Kurt's back - her way of comforting her son - but the heroin made his muscles tighter than a plaster mannequin. "It was horrid," remembered Kim. "We finally had to call paramedics because he was starting to turn blue." When police arrived, they found, "his condition gradually deteriorated to the point that he was shaking, became flushed, delirious, and talked incoherently."
Once Kurt was in the aid car, the crisis seemed averted. Kim followed the ambulance to Harborview Hospital, where events took a farcical turn. "There he was hilarious," she recalled. "He was laying out in the hallway of this packed hospital, getting IV fluids, and the staff to reverse the drugs. He's laying there, and he starts talking about Shakespeare. Then he'd nod out and wake up five minutes later, and continue his conversation with me."
Part of the reason Kim had been sent to chase the ambulance was because Courtney wanted to throw away the rest of Kurt's heroin but couldn't locate it. When Kurt came back to consciousness, Kim asked him where he put it. "It's in the pocket of the bathrobe hanging on the stairway," Kurt admitted, right before he passed out again. Kim ran to the phone and called the house, though by then Courtney had already discovered it. When Kim returned to Kurt's side, he had woken again and insisted she not divulge the location of the drugs.
After about three hours of Narcan, Kurt was ready to go home. "When he was able to leave the hospital, I couldn't light his cigarette fast enough," Kim said. There was a huge sadness for her in witnessing what at times had seemed like an almost comic brush with death: Overdosing had become ordinary to Kurt, part of the game, and there was a normalcy to this madness. Indeed, as the police report noted, Courtney told the officers the larger, sadder truth about this one episode: "This type of incident had happened before to Victim Cobain."
"Heroine" was now part of Kurt's daily existence, and sometimes, particularly when he had no band business and Courtney and Frances were gone, the central part. By the summer of 1993, he was using almost every day, and when not using he was in withdrawal and complaining vociferously. It was a period of more functional dependency than in the past, but his usage still surpassed most addicts'. Even Dylan, an addict himself, found Kurt's dosage level dangerous. "He definitely used a lot of dope," Dylan recalled. "I wanted to get high and still be able to do something, but he always wanted to do so much he couldn't do anything. He always wanted to do more than he needed to do." Kurt's interest was in escape, and the quicker and the more incapacitating, the better. As a result, there were many overdoses and near-death situations, as many as a dozen during 1993 alone.
The increase in Kurt's habit ran counter to an effort Courtney was making to sober up. In late spring, she hired a psychic to help her kick drugs. Kurt balked at paying the bills from the psychic and laughed at her advice that the couple both needed to rid themselves of "all toxins." Courtney took it seriously, however; she attempted to stop smoking, began drinking fresh-squeezed juice every day, and attended Narcotics Anonymous. Kurt taunted his wife at first, but then encouraged her to attend N.A. meetings, if only so he had more free time to get loaded.
The first of June, Courtney staged an intervention in the Lakeside house. In attendance were Krist, friend Nils Bernstein, Gold Mountain's Janet Billig, Wendy, and Kurt's stepfather, Pat O'Connor. At first, Kurt refused to leave his room and even look at the group. When he finally left his room, he and Courtney began screaming at each other. In a fit of rage, Kurt grabbed a red Sanford Magic Marker and scrawled "None of you will ever know my true intent" on the hallway wall. "It was obvious there was no getting through to him," Bernstein remembered. The assembled group went through a litany of reasons Kurt should stop doing drugs, one of the most repeated being the needs of his daughter. His mother told him his health was at risk. Krist pleaded with Kurt, talking of how he had limited his own drinking. When Pat O'Connor shared stories of his struggles with alcohol, Kurt was silent and stared at his sneakers. "You could see in Kurt's face that he was thinking, 'Nothing in your life relates to anything in my life,' " Bernstein recalled. "I thought to myself, 'this is so not working.' " When Kurt returned to his bedroom in a huff, those assembled began to argue among themselves about who was to blame for Kurt's addiction. For those closest to him, it was easier to blame each other than to put responsibility at his feet.
Kurt began to increasingly isolate himself that summer; friends jokingly called him Rapunzel because he so rarely came down from his room. His mother was one of the few people he'd listen to, and Courtney increasingly made use of Wendy as mediator. Kurt still desperately needed mothering, and he regressed to an almost fetal state as he retreated from the world. Wendy could soothe him by stroking his hair and telling him everything was going to be fine. "There were times when he would be nodded out upstairs, and nobody, neither Courtney or anyone else, could go near him," observed Bernstein. "But his mom would wander in, and he didn't shut her out. I think it was chemical depression." Depression ran in Wendy's family, and though several of Kurt's friends suggested he be treated, he chose to ignore their pleas and to self-medicate with drugs. Truth be told, it was hard for anyone to get him to do anything: If the world of Nirvana could be considered a small nation unto itself, Kurt was king. Few dared challenge the king's mental health for fear of being banished from the kingdom.
On June 4, after another horrible day of drama, Courtney called the police on Kurt. When officers arrived, she told them they had "an argument over guns in the household," she had thrown a glass of juice in his face, and he had shoved her. "At which time," the police report states, "Cobain pushed Love to the floor and began choking her, leaving a scratch." Seattle law required police to arrest at least one party in any domestic dispute - Kurt and Courtney began to argue over who would be the one arrested, since both wanted this distinction. Kurt insisted he go to jail - for someone passive-aggressive, this was a mother lode of an opportunity to both emotionally retreat and play the martyr. He won. He was transported to the North Precinct and booked into the King County Jail. Police also seized a large collection of ammunition and guns from the home, including two .38 pistols and a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.
But the real story of what happened that day illustrated the increasing strain within their marriage. Like two characters in a Raymond Carver short story, their fights increasingly included digs at each other's weak points, and on this day Kurt was flaunting his drug use in front of Courtney and her psychic. "He had to find, of course, the one drug that would drive me insane," Love recalled. "He decided he was going to try crack. He made this big insane production out of how he was going to acquire and try ten dollars' worth of 'rock.' "
To bait his wife, Kurt acted like "he was pulling down the drug deal of the century" with repeated phone calls to a dealer. Visions of him free-basing crack cocaine in their house enraged Courtney, and instead of throwing a glass at him, as the police report states, she actually threw a juicer. It wasn't much of a fight - physical battle between the two ended in draws, just like their first wrestling match on the floor of the Portland club. But Courtney called the police anyway, figuring that having him go to jail was better than having him burn down their house free-basing. "I'm sure Kurt got his crack eventually, somehow, somewhere, but I never did find out about it," she said. He spent only three hours in jail, and was released that night on $950 bail. Charges were later dropped.
They patched things up after the arrest, and as happened repeatedly in their relationship, the trauma brought them closer. On their bedroom wall she wrote the graffiti, "You better love me, you fucker," inside a heart. A month after the fight, Kurt described their relationship to Gavin Edwards of Details as "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." Both were masers of pushing and testing limits - it was all Kurt did in childhood - and whenever he made Courtney angry, he knew he had to woo her back, usually with love letters. One such note began: "Courtney, when I say, 'I love you,' I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever, ever come close to intimidating, persuading, etc., me into thinking otherwise. I wear you on my sleeve. I spread you out wide open with the wing span of a peacock, yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head." The prose was self-deprecating, describing himself "as dense as cement," but also reminding her of his marriage commitment: "I parade around you proudly like the ring on my finger which also holds no mineral."
Two week after the domestic violence arrest, Neal Karlen arrived at the Cobain house to interview Courtney for the New York Times. When he knocked, Kurt answered, holding Frances, and announced his wife was "at her N.A. meeting." He invited Karlen in, and they sat and watched television. "It was this huge house," recalled Karlen, "but there were cigarette butts put out on plates, and this ugly, shitty furniture. In the living room was this huge, eighteen-foot television. It was as if someone had gone to the store and said, 'I want the biggest television in the catalog.' "
On TV was the latest episode of "Beavis and Butt-Head," MTV's popular show. "I know Beavis and Butt-Head," Kurt told Karlen. "I grew up with people like that; I recognize them." In a grand bit of serendipity, the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on the program. "All right!" Kurt exclaimed. "Let's see what they think about us." When the two cartoon characters gave Nirvana the thumbs up, Kurt seemed genuinely flattered. "They like us!"
As if on cue, Courtney arrived home. She kissed Kurt, bounced Frances on her knee, and with only a mild hint of sarcasm announced, "Ah, the prefect family - just like a Norman Rockwell picture." Even Karlen was struck with a domestic image. "I kept thinking of them as Fred and Ethel Mertz," she recalled. "He was more like Fred, with his hands in his pockets, while Ethel was running the household." Karlen also had caught Kurt on a day his eyes were clear. "I'd seen enough junkies to know he was straight."
As it was, Love didn't want to talk to the New York Times, but she did wish to voice her opinions for a book Karlen was writing on the band Babes in Toyland. Their interview went on for hours, and Kurt frequently chimed in when Courtney would prod him. "He was not as passive as people said," Karlen observed. Courtney used Kurt as she would a resident punk historian - when she made a point, and needed a date or a name, she would query Kurt, and he would inevitably know the answer. "It was like watching a quiz show were they would go to the professor to verify facts," Karlen noted.
Kurt had one quandary of his own: He was pondering whether to buy a guitar that once belonged to Leadbelly. It was for sale for $55,000, but he couldn't decide whether buying it was a "punk move" or an "anti-punk move." The only tension Karlen noticed between the couple was when Courtney stumbled upon a Mary Lou Lord album in Kurt's record collection. This set Love off telling a story of how she'd chased Lord down the street in Los Angeles, threatening to beat her up. Kurt was silent, and it was the only time Karlen thought Kurt acted like "the long-suffering husband."
Courtney's discourse on the history of punk rock went on for hours after Kurt went to bed. Karlen eventually spent the night in a spare bedroom. The morning brought the only evidence this wasn't the typical household: When Kurt went to prepare the morning meal, there was no food. After looking for several minutes, Kurt put some sugar cookies on a plate and announced it was breakfast.
On July 1 Hole played their first show in several months, at the Off-Ramp in Seattle. Courtney had retooled her band, and they were preparing to tour England and make a record. Kurt came to the show, but he was a mess. "He was so wasted he could barely stand up," recalled the club's Michelle Underwood. "We had to help him move around. It seemed like he was very nervous for her." His nerves were exacerbated by the fact that the day of the show, the Seattle Times published a story on his arrest the previous month in the domestic violence incident. Courtney joked onstage: "We're donating all the money you paid to get in tonight to Domestic Violence Wife Beater Fund. Not!" Later she came back to the topic: "Domestic violence is not something that's ever happened to me. I just like to stick up for my husband. It's not a true story. They never fucking are. Why is it that every time we have a fucking beer, it's on the fucking news?" Despite the drama, her performance was riveting, and it was the first time she'd won over a Seattle audience.
Hole's set ended at fifteen minutes past one, but that wasn't the end of the evening for the Cobains. Brian Willis of NME came backstage and asked if Courtney might want to be interviewed. She invited him to their house but she spent most of the interview promoting Kurt's record. Love even played In Utero for Willis, the first time a journalist had heard the album. He was overwhelmed, writing, "If Freud could hear it, he'd wet his pants in anticipation." He called it "an album pregnant with irony and insight. In Utero is Kurt's revenge."
Willis's listening experience was interrupted when Kurt came into the room to report: "We were just on the news, on MTV. They were talking about the story in the Seattle Times and how Hole have just started their world tour in Seattle at the Off-Ramp." With that, Kurt made a snack of English muffins and hot chocolate, and sat at the counter watching the sun rise. When Willis wrote the late-night events up for the NME, he ended his piece with a bit of analysis: "For someone who's been through so much shit in the past two years, whose name's being dragged through acrimony once again, who's about to release a record the whole rock world's desperate to hear and be faced with astonishing attention and pressure, Kurt Cobain's a remarkably contented man."
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