11. ILLEGAL TO ROCK 'N' ROLL

Olympia, Washington
February 1989 - September 1989

If it's illegal to rock 'n' roll, throw my ass in jail.
- A line Kurt wrote on a guitar, July 15, 1989.

The day before his 22nd birthday, Kurt wrote a letter to his mother that read: "It's a rainy Sunday afternoon and, as usual there's not much to do, so I thought I'd write a little letter. Actually, since every day is rainy and slow, I've been writing a lot lately. I guess it's better than nothing. I either write a song, or write a letter, and I'm sick of writing songs, for now. Well, tomorrow is the 22nd birthday (and I still can't spell)." He didn't finish the letter, and he didn't send the fragment.

Despite the boredom expressed in the letter, Kurt's inner artistic life was blossoming. His 22nd year would be one almost completely devoted to creating - in the form of music or art. He had long ago given up aspirations of being a commercial artist, but in a way this freedom allowed his art to develop unfettered. He didn't have a job for most of 1989, unless you consider running Nirvana a job. Tracy had become his benefactor, a sole she would assume for most of their relationship.

Walking into his apartment any afternoon during 1989, you were as likely to find him with a paintbrush in his hand as a guitar. But he wasn't actually a painter as much as he was a creator. He used whatever implement was in front of him as his brush, and whatever flat object he found as canvas. He couldn't afford actual canvas or even quality paper, so many of his work were done on the back of old board games he found in thrift stores. Instead of paint - which he could rarely manage - he used pencil, pen, charcoal, magic marker, spray paint, and occasionally even blood. One day a neighbor, Amy Moon, came by only to be greeted at the door by Kurt wearing the grin of a mad scientist who recently had birthed his first creature. He had just finished a painting, he told her, this time done with acrylic paint, but with one special addition, "my secret ingredient." He told Amy he added this to every one of his paintings as the final touch, the fait accompli, once the work was to his liking. The secret sauce, he explained, was his semen. "My seed is on this painting," he told her. "Look, you can see how it glistens!" he motioned. Amy didn't dare ask what method Kurt used to apply his "seed," but she noticed no brush or palate in the area.

The unusual ritual didn't stop Amy from employing Kurt to create a painting for her; it was the only commission he ever took. She described a dream and asked him to depict it. He took the assignment, and she paid $10 for materials. The resulting painting was crudely painted but so evocative of her dream, Amy could barely imagine Kurt had created it from her description. "It's the middle of the night," Amy described, "and there is an eerie force at work. In the background are not well-defined trees, just shadows. In the foreground are the headlights of a car, and a freshly hit deer. You can see the breath coming out of the animal, and the heat coming off its body. There is a very thin female figure in the front, eating the flesh of the animal that is probably not dead yet. His painting is exactly as I saw the dream."

Most of Kurt's creations were unsettling, sometimes strikingly so. Many were of the same themes he'd explored in high-school art class, but there was a darker edge to them now. He still painted aliens and exploding guitars, but his sketchbook also included Dalí-esque landscapes with melting clocks, pornographic body parts on creatures with no heads, and illustrations of severed limbs. Increasingly during 1989, his art began to take on three-dimensional qualities. He shopped Olympia's many thrift stores every week, and anything cheap and bizarre was likely to make its way into one of his constructions. On the back of an Iron Butterfly album, he painted an image of Batman, affixed a naked Barbie doll to it with a noose around her neck, and presented this to Tracy as a birthday gift. He began to collect dolls, car models, lunch-boxes, old board games (some he kept intact, like his beloved Evel Knievel game), toy action-figures, and other assorted objects found on the cheap. These collectibles were not treasured or put away on a shelf; they could be melted in the backyard during a barbecue or glued to the back of a board game. Tracy complained she couldn't turn around without having a doll stare at her. The entire apartment began to take on the look of a roadside museum of kitsch, but one in a constant state of both construction and destruction. "He had this clutter thing," remembered Krist. "His whole house was cluttered, and there were things everywhere. Yet he was a serious artist, and that was one of the ways he expressed himself; how he filtered the world. It came out a lot of ways, and some of it was morbid and twisted. In fact, all the art is decadent and twisted. His theme was pretty consistent. Everything was just a little fucked up and dark."

One of Kurt's favorite twists was switching sexual organs on figures he'd drawn. Male bodies would have vaginas for heads, women might get penises as well as breasts. One work from this period shows four naked women sitting around an oversized Satan, who sports a mammoth erect penis. Though the image is drawn in pencil, the women's heads are pasted from ads in Good Housekeeping magazine. The figures touch each other in one massive human chain: one women is defecating; another has her hand in her vagina; a third has a hand in the next woman's anus; and the final woman has a baby coming out of her womb. All have devil horns, and they are drawn so realistically as to look like the work of the nineties-era San Francisco artist Coop.

Most of Kurt's artwork was never titled, but one particular piece from this period did garner a carefully lettered title. Drawn in black crayon on white twenty-pound bond, it shows a stick figure with a huge smiley face for a head, chopping off his left leg with an axe. The title reads: "Mr. Sunshine Commits Suicide."

---

Though Kurt complained of boredom, 1989 was one of the busiest periods for the band. By the end of 1988, Nirvana had only done two dozen shows during their entire two-year history, under various names, and using four different drummers (Burckhard, Foster, Crover, and Channing). But in 1989 alone, they would play 100 gigs. Kurt's life shifted into the routine of a working musician.

 Their first tour in 1989 was a West Coast swing that brought them to San Francisco, where they saw the "Bleach Your Works" sign. They were touring at the time on the basis of a single, an unheard-of-proposition considering the mathematics of their possible fan base; with fewer than a thousand singles sold in the entire world, the chance of a crowd in San Jose, for example, having heard of them and liking them enough to go see them was beyond absurd. Some of these first gigs attracted an audience of literally a half dozen people, usually musicians interested in Sub Pop, since the label was a bigger draw than the band. Dylan Carlson went along on the tour and remembered Kurt's frustration. "It was kind of a fiasco," he said. "There were lots of shows that got cancelled." The plug was always pulled by club owners, since the band was willing to play for the bartender and doorman. The biggest crowd was when Nirvana opened for Living Color, a more mainstream rock band with a Top 40 hit, before 400 people. The audience hated them.

If there was a low among lows on this first tour, it came in San Francisco. There the band opened for the Melvins at the Covered Wagon, a reunion that Kurt had long been looking forward to. But when he discovered that the Melvins weren't a bigger draw in California than they had been in Grays Harbor, his faith was dashed. As on every other tour date, they struggled to find gas money, a floor to crash on, a food to eat. Tracy had followed the band down to California in her car, taking friends Amy Moon and Joe Preston. There were seven people in the band's entourage, and among them they couldn't afford a burrito. Someone on the street told them about a free soup kitchen. "It may have been run by the Hare Krishnas; Kurt was really creeped out by it," Amy remembered. While everyone else ravenously scarfed down the free soup, Kurt just dejectedly stared at his bowl. "He wouldn't eat it," Amy said. "He finally just got up and left. It depressed him." Hare Krishna food, crowds of ten people, begging for gas money, the Melvins as commercial failures, calling up to request your own single - these represented a level of degradation Kurt had not imagined or prepared for. That night, all seven people slept on a friend's floor in a studio apartment.

They returned to Seattle to play a more successful show on February 25 at the University of Washington. Billed as "Four Bands for  Four Bucks," it was Nirvana's biggest crowd to date, an audience of about 600. They were playing with the Fluid, Skin Yard, and Girl Trouble, all of whom were better known, but it was during Nirvana's set that the crowd went wild. Seattle audiences had begun to slam-dance in the late eighties: This entailed a kind of violent, mad twist, usually performed in front of the stage by a swirling mass of teenagers. When the crowd was large enough, waves of people would begin to slam off each other, as if a hurricane had developed inside the audience. Nirvana's frenzied sound made the perfect soundtrack for slam-dancing, since they never slowed down, and rarely even paused between numbers. When the occasional fan would climb onstage and then jump back into the audience - called stage diving - the ritualistic dance was complete. Kurt calmly sang and played while dozens of kids jumped onstage, only to jump right off. At times there were so many kids jumping off the stage, it appeared Kurt was standing in the middle of some kind of airborne training facility for aspiring paratroopers. It was organized confusion, but this was exactly what Kurt had dreamed of: using his music to create chaos. Many other bands attracted a similar slam-dancing audience but few musicians were able to lackadaisically stand in the midst of these stage invasions the way Kurt was. He gave off the impression he was used to playing while the audience took over the stage; and in Seattle it had become so commonplace that he was.

That day Kurt conducted a brief interview with the Daily, the University of Washington student newspaper, wherein he addressed the Northwest scene, calling it "the last wave of rock music," and "the ultimate rehash." Kurt told writer Phil West the band's music had a "gloomy, vengeful element based on hatred." This article was the first occasion of what would become one of Kurt's favorite sports: spewing mythology to gullible journalists. "In Aberdeen, I hated my best friends with a passion, because they were idiots," Kurt announced. "A lot of that hatred is still leaking through." Kurt did give credit to Tracy for supporting him, but swore one day he'd "live off the band." If not, he pledged, "I'll just retire to Mexico or Yugoslavia with a few hundred dollars, grow potatoes, and learn the history of rock through back issues of Cream."

That spring the band added Jason Everman as a second guitarist, making them a four-piece for the first time. Kurt wanted Jason to cover guitar parts he felt weren't getting justice as his songs became more complicated. Jason had been in earlier bands with Chad, and had a reputation as a hot guitar player. He also had ingratiated himself to the band by loaning Kurt $600, used to pay the recording bill for Bleach. It had no strings attached - Everman was, in fact, never repaid - but Kurt listed Jason on the Bleach album cover, even though he did not play at the session.

With Jason in the lineup, Nirvana played Sub Pop's "Lamefest" on June 9, at Seattle's Moore Theater. In found them opening for Mudhoney and Tad, the two biggest Sub Pop groups, and it marked the official release of Bleach. Nirvana played first - their set was uneventful except for Kurt getting his guitar strings caught in his hair. The highlight of the night came when Kurt witnessed kids lining up to buy Bleach.

By mid-1989 the Northwest music scene began to gain international attention, greased by some smart moves from Pavitt and Poneman, who were showing that their real brilliance wasn't in running a label as much as it was marketing one. Their very concept of calling their annual showcase "Lamefest" was a stroke of genius: It immediately disarmed any possible criticism, while appealing to disaffected music fans who wore T-shirts that read "Loser" (the label sold as many of these as they did records). Despite the poor state of Sub Pop's bank account, in early 1988 they'd sprung for plane tickets for a few British rock critics to take a holiday in Seattle. It was money well spent: Within weeks, Sub Pop band were in the English music weeklies, and bands like Mudhoney were stars, at least in Britain, of the "grunge" movement. The term was meant to describe loud, distorted punk, but it was soon used to categorize virtually every band from the Northwest, even those like Nirvana, who were in truth more pop. Kurt hated the term, but the hype machine had begun in earnest, and the Northwest scene grew. Though there were few venues to play in Seattle, each show became an event, and the crowds became exponentially larger.

Reflecting years later on why the scene exploded when it did, Kurt speculated in his journal: "Lots of flattering hype from multiple occupational English journalists ... catapulted the Sub Pop regime into instant fame (just add water, or hype.)" Nirvana was usually mentioned in the early wave of 1989 press, but in most articles - like one in Melody Maker in March 1989 titled "Seattle Rock City" - they were relegated to a tiny sidebar as also-rans. When Kurt read his first little bit of English press, he was probably most shocked to see Everett True's speculation on what the band would be doing if they weren't musicians: "You're talking about four guys ... who, if they weren't doing this, would be working in a supermarket, or lumber yard, or fixing cars." Two of the three professions listed were jobs Kurt's father had held; the third was Buzz's old job.

Bleach had much to do with Nirvana moving out from under the shadow of their contemporaries. It was an inconsistent album, putting songs Kurt had written four years previously right next to the recent "About a Girl," but it had flashes of inspiration. On sludgy numbers like "Sifting," the chord progression was crude while the actual lyrics - when they could be heard - were smart and clever. When The Rocket reviewed the album, Gillian Gaar pointed out the different directions the band was going in: "Nirvana careens from one end of the trash spectrum to the other, giving a nod towards garage grunge, alternative noise, and hell-raising metal without swearing allegiance to any of them." In his journal around the time of the release, Kurt expressed similar sentiments: "My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They're split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have, and sarcastic, hopeful, humorous rebuttals towards cliché, bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork."

Kurt accurately described Bleach as a mixture of sincere and cliché sentiment, but there was enough of each to get it airplay on divergent college radio stations. The band had used one of Tracy's photos on the cover, printed as a reverse image in negative, and the look was appropriate for the extreme contrast between the dark songs and the pop tunes. Kurt's dualism was key to the band's success: There were enough different-sounding songs that stations could play several cuts without wearing the band out. The album built slowly, but eventually songs like "Blew," "School," "Floyd the Barber," and "Love Buzz" became staples on college radio stations around the nation.

The band still had a long way to go. The day after Lamefest, the group stepped in as a last-minute replacement for Cat Butt for a gig in Portland. Along for the ride was eighteen-year-old Rob Kader, a fan who was at every one of their shows, and Kader led the band in joyously singing the theme songs from "The Brady Bunch" on the van ride down. But when they arrived at the gig, only twelve people had purchased tickets, all of them Cat Butts fans. Kurt made a last-minute decision to forgo a set list and announced to Kader: "We're just going to ask you at the end of each song what you want to hear, and then we'll play that." As each tune wound down, Kurt would walk to the edge of the stage and point at Kader, who would shout out the next number. Other than Kader - who was in his glory - the rest of the audience gave the band a cold response, except on one Kiss song, "Do You Love Me?," which Nirvana had recently recorded for a covers album, and which Kader wisely requested.

---

In late June 1989 the band packed up Krist's Dodge van for their first major tour, a scheduled two-month jaunt that would take them across the United States. Kader and a group of friends gave them a send-off. Kader brought a 24-pack of Mountain Dew as a going-away present, always a band favorite because of the caffeine kick They had stuffed the van with their new band T-shirts, which read: "Nirvana: Fudge Packin', Crack Smokin', Satan Worshipin' Motherfuckers." Krist and Shelli had just recently gotten back together, and their parting was tearful. And even Kurt was a bit broken up about leaving Tracy - it would be the longest they had been apart since they started dating.

They had no manager, so Krist had begun to take on more of the booking work, and the van was solely his domain, governed by a hard set of rules. One instruction was tacked inside the van: "No use of any gas corporation services besides Exxon - no exceptions." To save money, the air-conditioning could never be turned on, and no one was allowed to drive over 70 miles per hour. On this first tour, they split the driving assignments, but Kurt rarely made it into the rotation: His bandmates thought he drove too slowly. "He drove like a little old lady," Tracy recalled. It was just one of the many contradictions in Kurt's character; he might be willing to huff the fumes from the bottom of an Edge Shaving Gel can, but he wasn't going to get in a car accident.

Their first show was in San Francisco, where they found themselves playing to a small audience but enough to avoid the soup kitchen. Though they were now touring behind an album, Sub Pop's distribution was so limited they rarely found their album for sale. When they played an in-store in Los Angeles at Rhino Records two days later, the store only had five copies of the album in stock. In L.A. they were interviewed by the fanzine Flipside, and even though Kurt's name was misspelled as "Kirk" in the printed piece, they felt the clip gave them punk credibility. In the article, the writer asked Kurt about drugs: "I kinda reached my end of things to do, as far as acid and pot and stuff," Kurt replied, sounding downright temperate. "I just reached a maximum on that stuff. Once you got past the learning experience, then you got into the downhill part. I never took drugs as an escape, I always took drugs for learning."

As they headed east toward the Midwest and Texas, they played to progressively smaller crowds - some as tiny as a dozen people - mostly musicians who would see any band. "We measured our shows, not so much by how many people were there," recalled Chad, "but more by what people said. And a lot of people would say they liked us." They were improving as a live act, winning over audiences that weren't familiar with them. Like the Velvet Underground before them, they would soon find that an audience of a thousand musicians is more powerful than 10,000 casual fans. When possible they would hook up with other punk bands they knew of, to sleep on their floors, and these personal connections were as important in boosting their spirits as the shows were. In Denver, they stayed with John Robinson of the Fluid, who already noticed a shyness about Kurt. "Everyone would be in the kitchen eating, happy to have a home-cooked meal," Robinson said. "I'd ask Krist where Kurt was. He said, 'Oh, don't worry about him; he's always off somewhere.' My house wasn't that big, so I went looking for him and found him in my daughter's room with the lights off, staring into space."

While driving through Chicago, Kurt purchased a large crucifix at a garage sale - probably the first religious artifact he didn't steal. He'd stick the crucifix out the window of the van, shake it at pedestrians, then snap a picture of their expression as he drove away. Whenever Kurt was in the passenger seat of the van, he held the crucifix in his hand, as if it were some weapon he might need at a moment's notice.

Many nights the band slept in the van or camped by the side of the road, so solitude was rare. They struggled to find enough money for gas and food, so staying in a motel was out of the question. The only way they were able to buy gas was when they sold enough T-shirts - the "fudge-packin' " shirts saved the tour. One night in Washington, D.C., they arrived late and pulled the van behind a gas station, planning to spend the night. It was too hot to sleep in the van, so they all slept outside on what they thought was a strip of grass in a residential neighborhood. The next morning, they found they had camped on a traffic median.

"We usually had the choice of buying food or gas, and we had to choose gas," Jason recalled. "Most of us did pretty well with it, but Kurt hated it. He seemed to have a low constitution - he would get sick easily. And once he got sick, it would make everyone miserable." Kurt's stomach condition flared up on the road, perhaps from infrequently eating, plus he seemed to consistently catch cold, even in the summer. His health problems weren't from lack of care; during 1989, he was the most health-conscious band member, infrequently drinking and not even letting his bandmates smoke near him for fear of losing his vocal abilities.

---

When the band hit Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, they stayed at the house of photographer J. J. Gonson and her boyfriend Sluggo, from the band Hullabaloo. The band's show that night at Green Street Station was one of the few times Kurt played without a guitar: He'd broken his instrument the night before. He was angry about the guitar, suffering from such stomach pain he drank Strawberry Quik to soothe the inflammation, and he was homesick. He called Tracy after the show and told her he wanted to come home. The next morning, Gonson shot a photo of the band asleep on her floor. They shared one mattress, and Kurt and Krist had cuddled up next to each other during the night like two puppies.

Sluggo had a broken guitar on his wall, and Kurt asked if he could have it. "The neck isn't even snapped off, so I can fix it," Kurt observed. He traded Sluggo an old Mustang guitar, first autographing the Mustang, "Yo, Sluggo, thanks for the trade. If it's illegal to rock 'n' roll, throw my ass in jail." He signed it "Nirvana," thinking his own autograph meant nothing.

Later that day Kurt created a new guitar. It was patched together like Frankenstein, just in time for their next gig, which itself was something out of a horror story. They had agreed to play a fraternity party at MIT because it paid better than their club shows. Before the show, Kurt lay down on a pool table and kicked his legs like a two-year-old throwing a fit, screaming "I'm not playing! This is stupid. We are better than this. We are wasting our time." His tantrum subsided only when Krist told him that without the gig, they wouldn't have enough gas money to get home. As if to spite the crowd, the band played an energetic show, though Krist dismantled a sign that spelled out the fraternity's name in bones, handing the bones to the audience. The brothers insisted Krist apologize and fix the sign. Novoselic was never one to back down from a fight, even if the odds were greatly against him, but he sheepishly grabbed the microphone, asked the crowd to return the bones, and said he was sorry. The fraternity audience ended up loving the show.

It was also in Massachusetts where the first outward conflict between Kurt and Jason sprang up. Jason had made the mistake of inviting a girl home after the gig, something considered in poor taste by the rest of the band. Both Kurt and Krist had surprisingly old-fashioned attitudes about fidelity and groupies. A musician who was in a band for the girls - a large category but one that did not include Jason - they considered compromised.

In truth, Kurt and Jason had never gotten along famously because, in many ways, they were too much alike. Both were prone to brooding and spending time alone, and each felt threatened by the other's solitude. Jason had long, curly hair, which he would thrash about as he played, and Kurt claimed he found this annoying, though he was guilty of the same head movements. Like Foster before him, Jason represented a part of Kurt that the singer didn't want reflected back. Though Kurt wrote all the songs, he complained over this pressure, yet never allowed the other members to have much input. "He didn't want to give up any control. Everyone knew it was 'the Kurt show,' " observed Chad. Kurt asked Jason to come up with some new guitar solos, but when Jason did as requested, Kurt acted as if he'd overstepped his role. Instead of talking about it, or even yelling at each other, both became sullen and unresponsive. As in many conflicts in his life, Kurt turned the professional into the personal, and a blood feud of sorts began.

In New York the band played a show at the Pyramid Club, as part of the New Music Seminar. It was their highest-profile gig to date, in front of an industry crowd including Kurt's idols Sonic Youth. Yet the performance was compromised when a drunk climbed onstage, yelling into the microphone and knocking over the band's equipment. Jason threw the guy offstage and jumped into the audience to chase him.

The next day Kurt decided to fire Jason. They were staying at Janet Billig's Alphabet City apartment, which was known as the punk rock Motel 6 in New York City. Jason and Chad had gone off to sightsee, but Kurt and Krist used their remaining money to buy cocaine, breaking Kurt's tour-long sobriety. Kurt decided Jason was out of the band, though as typical with his non-confrontational style, he failed to announce this to anyone other than Krist. He simply told the other members that the tour was over and they were going home, and, as was usual, no one challenged him. The band cancelled two week's worth of gigs - the first time they'd ever pulled out of a show. The van ride home was hell. "No one said a word for the entire drive," remembered Jason. "We drove nonstop, only stopping for gas." They made it home from New York to Seattle, a drive of almost 3,000 miles, in less than three days. Kurt never actually told Jason he was fired - he simply never called again.

---

Kurt had a warm reunion with Tracy. He told her he missed her more than he realized, and while he was never one to talk about his feelings, Tracy was one of few people he revealed himself to. That August Kurt wrote a letter to Jesse Reed and bragged about what a great girlfriend she was: "My girlfriend now has a brand new '88 Toyota Tercel, a microwave, a food processor, a blender, and an espresso machine. I am a totally pampered, spoiled bum." To Kurt, the Tercel seemed like a luxury car.

With Kurt's return, a sense of romance came back into their relationship, though after living alone for almost two months, Tracy wasn't as keen on Kurt's moodiness. She felt they had outgrown the tiny studio apartment, particularly with Kurt's collecting habit. Early in August she wrote him a note, which read: "I'm not staying here in MOLD HELL any longer than the fifteenth. It's fucking gross." Even though it was the middle of the summer in the Northwest, their apartment was suffering a mold infestation.

It was a wonder anyone noticed mold since, with all their animals, the apartment had taken on the smell, according to Damon Romero, of "a vivisection lab." There were, of course, turtles, rats, and cats, but the strongest odor came from the rabbit. Stew was a female bunny and she served as Kurt and Tracy's surrogate baby, spoiled like an only child. Stew managed frequently to escape her cage, which always led Kurt or Tracy to post a warning, advising visitors they might be stepping on rabbit feces. One day in early August Kurt was on the phone with Michelle Vlasimsky, a booker they had hired to help reschedule their cancelled dates, when the phone went dead. Kurt called her back a minute later and explained: "The rabbit unplugged the phone." He joked that his apartment was nicknamed "the Animal Farm." A few weeks later Slim Moon witnessed Kurt frantically rushing his pet cages outside. "I was defrosting the freezer with a knife when I poked a hole in it, and I didn't want the Freon to kill the animals," he explained.

When a one-bedroom apartment in the same house became available, they moved the traveling Cobain museum. It was $50 more a month, but it was bigger and directly across from the house's garage, which Kurt took over. There was a workbench he utilized to fix the guitars he'd already broken, and to cut more wooden necks for guitars he had yet to break. Within the week, the garage was filled with broken amps, smashed speaker cabinets, and other remnants of Nirvana's road show.

In the middle of August Kurt made his first attempt to seek medical help for his stomach condition, and for advice on gaining weight. His gauntness had become an obsession for him, so much so that he'd bought many remedies from late-night television ads and tried them all without success. He saw a specialist at Tacoma's St. Joseph's Medical Center, in the facility's Eating Disorder Clinic, but despite extensive tests, no physical cause for his stomach pain could be determined. Kurt went to see another physician later that summer, but Tracy found him home ten minutes after his appointment. Kurt's explanation: "They wanted to take some blood and I hate needles, so I left." Tracy recalled he was "terribly afraid of needles." His stomach condition came and went, and there were many nights where he threw up all night. Tracy was convinced it was his diet, which, despite his doctor's advice, consisted of fatty and fried food. Her thoughts were shared at the time by Krist and Chad, who were always urging Kurt to eat vegetables, a category he avoided completely. "I won't eat anything green," he announced.

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The first week of August, the band went into the Music Source Studio with producer Steve Fisk to cut an EP to promote an upcoming tour of Europe. The session lasted two days and found the band recovered from losing Jason, even if their gear was a little worse for wear from touring. "They had those big North drums," recalled Fisk, "and the kick drum was held together with two rolls of duct tape because it had been cracked so often. They joked that it was the 'Liberty Bell drum.' "

They cut five new Cobain compositions: "Been a Son," "Stain," "Even in His Youth," "Polly," and "Token Eastern Song." The quality of these songs represented a huge leap forward in Kurt's development as a writer. Where many of his early tunes had been one-dimensional rants - usually discourses on the sorry state of society - a song like "Polly" found Kurt taking a newspaper clipping and crafting an emotional back story to go with the headline. The song, originally titled "Hitchhiker," had its roots in a real-life incident from 1987, when a young girl was kidnapped, brutally raped, and tortured with a blow torch. The song is written, surprisingly, from the perspective and in the voice of the perpetrator. Kurt managed to capture the horror of the rape ("let me clip your dirty wings"), yet at the same time subtly pointed out the humanness of the attacker ("she's just as bored as me"). Its literary strength was that it concerned itself with internal dialogue, much in the way Truman Capote found a measure of empathy for the murderers in his book "In Cold Blood." The song's subject is in marked contrast to the melody, which, like "About a Girl," is sweet, slow, and melodic, almost as if it were designed to catch the audience off guard and result in the listener unknowingly singing a pleasant melody about a horrific crime. Kurt ends the song with a line that could stand as an epitaph for the rapist, for the victim, or for himself: "It amazes me, the will of instinct." Years later, upon first seeing Nirvana in concert, Bob Dylan picked "Polly" out of the entire Nirvana catalog as Kurt's most courageous song, and one that inspired him to remark of Kurt, "The kid has heart."

The other tunes cut in the session were equally impressive. "Been a Son" is a song about how Don Cobain would have preferred Kurt's sister to have been a boy. Both "Even in His Youth" and "Stain" are also autobiographical songs about Don, addressing Kurt's feelings of rejection. In "Even in His Youth," Kurt writes of how "Daddy was ashamed he was nothing," while in "Stain," Kurt has "bad blood" and is "a stain" on the family. "Token Eastern Song" was the only throwaway - it's about writer's block, essentially a song version of the unsent birthday letter he'd written to his mother.

These songs were also Kurt's most complex musical compositions to date with riffs that were fleshed out and varied. "We want a big rock sound," Kurt told Fisk, and they achieved this. When they played back the tape, Kurt excitedly announced, "We're in a big studio and we have a big Top 40 drum sound." To celebrate, the band asked if they could jump on the tables. "It felt like this high, significant in some way, and worthy of celebration," Fisk recalled. He joined Kurt, Krist, and Chad as they climbed up on the tables and bounced up and down for joy.

Later that August Kurt formed an offshoot band with Mark Lanegan, of the Screaming Trees, Krist on bass, and the Trees' drummer Mark Pickerel on drums. Kurt and Lanegan had been writing songs with each other for several months, though most of their time together was spent talking about their love of Leadbelly. The band rehearsed several times in a Seattle practice space Nirvana had rented above the Continental Trailways bus station. "Our first rehearsal must have been exclusively dedicated to Leadbelly," Pickerel recalled. "Both Mark and Kurt brought Leadbelly tapes, and we listened to them on this little boombox." Kurt and Krist wanted to call the new band "Lithium," while Pickerel suggested "The Jury," the name they ultimately chose. But when the group went into the studio on August 20, with Endino producing, the project misfired. "It was as if both Mark and Kurt had too much respect for each other to tell the other what to do, or even make suggestions for what they should be doing," Pickerel said. "Neither of them wanted to take on the position of being the decision maker." The two singers couldn't even decide on who should sing what song. They eventually cut "Ain't It a Shame," "Gray Goose," and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?," all Leadbelly songs, but they never followed through to finish a record. Kurt became distracted with another non-Nirvana project: He briefly went to Portland to play with Dylan Carlson's band Earth for a studio session.

Nirvana then had to go back out on the road and complete two weeks of Midwest dates. On this jaunt, much to their amazement, the crowds were a little larger and more enthusiastic. Bleach had begun to get college radio airplay and at some shows they drew as many as 200 fans who seemed to know the songs. They sold many T-shirts and actually made money for the first time in their history. When they arrived back in Seattle, they tallied up their income versus their expenses, and went home with several hundred dollars. Kurt was amazed, showing off his earnings to Tracy as if making $300 made up for the years of financial support she'd given him.

Sub Pop planned Nirvana's first tour of Europe for that summer. Bleach had been released in the United Kingdom to glowing reviews. Kurt had never been overseas and was convinced the band would be bigger in Europe. He promised Tracy he'd come home with thousands of dollars, and that he'd send her postcards from every country he visited.