9. IN HIGH SCHOOL AGAIN
Olympia, Washington
April 1987 - May 1988
Two months after the show in Raymond, Kurt took another significant journey: He once and forever left Aberdeen. He had spent the first twenty years of his life there, but having left he would rarely go back. He packed up his stuff, which at the time consisted of little more than a Hefty bag of clothes, a crate of albums, and his now-empty rat cage, and loaded it into Tracy's car the 65-mile drive to Olympia. Though Olympia was only slightly bigger than Aberdeen, it was a college town, the state capital, and one of the freakiest places west of the East Village, with an odd collection of punk rockers, artists, would-revolutionaries, feminists, and just plain weirdos. Students at Evergreen State College - universally called "Greeners" - created their own curriculum. Kurt wasn't planning on college, but he was at least the right age to fit in. He was to have a conflicted relationship with the town's artsy crowd - he yearned for their acceptance, yet he frequently felt inadequate. It was a recurrent theme in his life.
Kurt moved to Olympia to live with Tracy in a studio apartment in an old house converted to a three-plex at 114 Pear Street. It was tiny, but the rent was only $137.50 a month, including utilities. And the location, just a few blocks from downtown, was ideal for Kurt, who rarely had access to an operable vehicle. For the first month he looked for jobs without much success, while Tracy supported him working in the cafeteria of the Boeing airplane plant in Seattle. She pulled a graveyard shift, and the long commute meant she left for work at ten in the evening and didn't arrive home until nine in the morning. The job did provide a steady income - something they both knew couldn't be expected of Kurt - and she could steal food to supplement her salary. Because of her unusual hours, Tracy began leaving Kurt "to do" lists, and this form of communication would turn into a ritual of their relationship. One such list she wrote in late 1987 read: "Kurt: sweep kitchen, behind cat litter box, garbage can, under cat food. Shake mats, Vacuum and clean up front room. Please, please, please." The note was signed with a heart and a smiley face. Kurt's note back: "Please set alarm for 11. I will do the dishes then. Okay?"
At first Kurt helped with the housework, doing the dishes and even mopping the floor occasionally. Though the apartment was tiny, it needed constant cleaning duo to their menagerie of pets. While the actual inventory would vary over the next two years depending on life span, they had five cats, four rats, a cockatiel, two rabbits, and Kurt's turtles. The apartment had a smell that visitors would often compare unfavorably to a pet shop, but it was a home of sorts. Kurt named their rabbit Stew.
He also painted the bathroom blood red, and wrote "REDRUM" on the wall, a reference to Stephen King's "The Shining." Since Kurt had a tendency to write on walls, they wisely covered most with rock posters, many turned reverse side out, so he would have more space to create. The few posters displayed face side up were all altered in some way as it was. A huge poster of the Beatles now sported an afro and glasses on Paul McCartney. Above the bed was a Led Zeppelin poster to which Kurt had added the following prose: "Loser, wino, alcoholic, scum, trash, degenerate, head lice, scabs, infections, pneumonia, diarrhea, vomits blood, urine, malfunctioning bowel muscle, arthritis, gangrene, psychotic mental illness, unable to form sentences, expected to fend for himself in a box in the snow." Next to this screed was a drawing of a bottle of Thunderbird fortified wine and caricature of Iggy Pop. The refrigerator sported a photo collage he created of images of meat mixed with old medical illustrations of diseased vaginas. "He was fascinated by things that were gross," Tracy recalled. And though Kurt himself rarely talked about religion - "I think he believed in God, but more in the devil than actually in God," Tracy said - there were crosses and other religious artifacts on the walls. Kurt enjoyed stealing sculptures of the Virgin Mary from the cemetery and painting blood tears under her eyes. Tracy was brought up Lutheran, and most of their religious discussions concerned whether God could exist in a world filled with such horror, with Kurt taking the position that Satan was stronger.
After a couple of months of being a house-husband, Kurt took a short-lived $4.75-an-hour job at Lemons Janitorial Service, a small family-run cleaning business. He claimed to his friends that he cleaned doctors' and dentists' offices and used the occasion to steal drugs. But according to the owner of the business, the route Kurt worked was mostly industrial buildings with few chances to steal anything. He used some of what he earned to buy a rusty old Datsun. One thing was certain about this janitorial service: In ways both physical and emotional it left Kurt with little energy to apply to cleaning his own apartment anymore, which created the first tension between him and Tracy. Even after he quit the job, he apparently felt like no more cleaning was required of him in his lifetime.
In Olympia, his inner artistic life was developing in ways that it never had before. Being unemployed, Kurt set in motion a routine that he would follow for the rest of his life. He would rise at around noon and eat a brunch of sorts. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was his favorite food. Having tried other brands, his delicate palate had determined that when it came to processed cheese and pasta, Kraft had earned its role as the market leader. After eating, he would spend the rest of the day doing one of three things: watching television, which he did unceasingly; practicing his guitar, which he did for hours a day, usually while watching TV; or creating some kind of art project, be it a painting, collage, or three-dimensional installation. This last activity was never formal - he rarely identified himself as an artist - yet he spent hours in this manner.
He also wrote in his journals, though the inner dialogue he kept was not as much a play-by-play of his day as it was a therapeutic obsessive/compulsive device wherein he let loose his innermost thoughts. The writing was imaginative and many times disturbing. His songs and his journal entries fused together at times, but both were obsessed with human bodily functions: Birth, urination, defecation, and sexuality were topics he was accomplished in. One small segment illustrates the familiar themes that he would revisit again and again:
These inner thoughts, many times full of violence, were in marked contrast to Kurt's external world. For the first time in his life he had a steady girlfriend who doted on him and saw to his every need. At times the attention Tracy paid him bordered on mothering, and in a way he needed mothering. He remarked to his friends that she was "the best girlfriend in the world."
As a couple, they exhibited signs of domestic tranquility. They'd walk to the Laundromat together, and when they could afford it, they'd get take-out pizza from the Fourth Avenue Tavern (they lived next door to a different pizza joint but Kurt insisted it sucked). Kurt enjoyed cooking, and he frequently made Tracy his signature entree, "vanilla chicken," or fettuccine Alfredo. "He'd eat the kind of stuff that would make other people gain weight, but he never gained any weight," Tracy observed. His size had always been a matter of concern, and he'd write away to ads in the backs of magazines for weight-gain powders but they had little effect. "His hip bones stuck out and he had knobby knees," Tracy recalled. "He didn't wear shorts unless it got really hot because he was so self-conscious about how skinny his legs were." For one trip to the beach, Kurt came dressed in long johns, a pair of Levi's, a second pair of Levi's worn over the first pair, a long-sleeved shirt, a T-shirt, and two sweatshirts. "He wanted to make himself look bigger," Tracy said. The one thing in his life that successfully made him feel bigger was his music, and by the summer of 1987 the band was going strong. They still hadn't settled on a permanent name, calling themselves everything from "Throat Oyster" to "Ted, Ed, Fred," after the boyfriend of Greg Hokanson's mom. They played a couple of parties in early 1987, and in April they'd even performed on the college radio station KAOS in Olympia. Tracy gave a tape of the radio show to Jim May at Tacoma's Community World Theater (CWT) and urged Jim to book them. Tracy and Shelli contributed to the band in those early days in ways that cannot be underestimated: They played the informal roles of press agents, managers, bookers, and merchandise-salespeople, in addition to their job of making sure their men were fed, dressed, and rehearsed.
May gave the band their first non-party gig, for which they played under the name Skid Row - at the time, Kurt was not aware that a lite-metal band from New York had the same moniker. It didn't matter; they would change names for every early show, the way a socialite might try on hats. This performance, though not long after the Raymond party, showed the band growing by leaps and bounds. Even Tracy, who was biased since she was in love with the singer, was impressed by how much they'd developed: "When they started to play, my mouth dropped open. I said, 'These guys were good.' "
They may have sounded good, but they certainly looked strange. For this gig, Kurt had attempted to be glam. He wore, as he did at many shows this year, flare pants, a silk Hawaiian shirt, and four-inch platform shoes to look taller. Musician John Purkey happened into the CWT that night and, despite their strange attire, recalled "being blown away. I heard this person's voice singing and it completely impressed me. I never heard a voice like his before. It was very distinct. There was one song, 'Love Buzz,' that definitely stuck out."
"Love Buzz" had been one of the missing pieces the band needed. Krist had discovered the song on an album by a Dutch band called the Shocking Blue, and Kurt embraced it immediately and made it their signature tune. It began with a mid-tempo drum beat, but quickly transitioned into a whirling guitar riff. Their performance of the song mixed equal parts psychedelic-trance with a thudding, slowed-down heaviness from Krist's bass part. Kurt would play the guitar solo on his back on the floor.
They began to play regularly at the CWT, though to suggest that they built an audience there would be an exaggeration. The theater itself was a former porno movie house, and the only source of heat was a propane blower that ran loudly even during the band's sets. Kurt commented that there was the "ever-present smell of urine" in the place. Most in the crowd at their early shows came to see other groups - the night before Kurt played, the lineup was Bleeder, Panic, and Lethal Dose. "Jim May booked those guys when nobody else would touch them," explained Buzz Osborne. "It was where they cut their milk teeth." Kurt, always learning from Buzz, realized that even a gig in front of their friends was a chance to grow. "I could count on them to play anytime," remembered May. "Kurt would never take any money, which was also good for me because I was only doing about twelve shows a month, and only two would make money." Kurt had wisely sized up his situation and realized the band would get more gigs, and more experience, if they played for free. What did they need money for anyway? They had Tracy and Shelli.
Shelli had taken a job alongside Tracy at the Boeing cafeteria. She and Krist had moved to an apartment in Tacoma, 30 miles north of Olympia. With the move, the band briefly fell apart. Previously, with Krist and Aaron both living in the Aberdeen area, Kurt would take the bus back for rehearsals. But with Krist in Tacoma, and working two jobs (at Sears and as an industrial painter), the only one who seemed to have time for the band was Kurt. He wrote Krist a letter to talk him back into the group. "It was funny; it was like a commercial," Krist remembered. "It said, 'Come, join the band. No commitment. No obligation (well some).' So I called him, and said, 'Yeah, let's do it again.' What we did was we built a rehearsal space down in the basement of our house. We cruised construction sites and we took scraps, and built it with old two-by-fours and old carpet." Kurt and Krist had been friends for some time, but this second forming of the band would cement their relationship in deeper ways. Though neither was particularly good at talking about their emotions, they forged a brotherly bond that seemed stronger than all the other relationships in their lives.
But even with a Tacoma rehearsal spot, at 1987 wound down they again faced the drummer problem, which would plague them for the next four years. Burckhard still lived in Grays Harbor, and with a new job as the assistant manager at the Aberdeen Burger King, he couldn't play with them anymore. In response, Kurt placed a "Musicians Wanted" ad in the October 1987 issue of The Rocket: "SERIOUS DRUMMER WANTED. Underground attitude, Black Flag, Melvins, Zeppelin, Scratch Acid, Ethel Merman. Versatile as heck. Kurdt 352 - 0992." They found no serious takers, so by December, Kurt and Krist began to practice with Dale Crover, who was back from California, and they began to talk about making a demo. During 1987 Kurt had dozens of songs, and he had a yearning to record them. He saw an ad for Reciprocal, a studio that charged only $20 an hour for recording, and booked a January session with up-and-coming producer Jack Endino. Endino had no idea who Kurt was and he wrote "Kurt Covain" down in the schedule.
On January 23, 1988, a friend of Novoselic's drove the band and all their gear up to Seattle in a shingle-covered camper heated by a woodstrove. It looked like a backwoods shack deposited on a pickup, which it was. Driving into the big city they looked like the Beverly Hillbillies with wood smoke coming out of the back of the camper; their truck was so overweight it scraped against rises in the road.
Reciprocal was run by Chris Hanszek with Endino. Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Mother Love Bone had all worked there, and it was already legendary by 1988. The studio itself was only 900 square feet, with a control room so tiny three people could not comfortably stand in it at once. "The carpets were worn, the door frames all were coming apart and tacked back a few times, and it showed its age," recalled Hanszek. "You could see that the place had the signs of 10,000 musicians who had rubbed their elbows against the place." Yet to Kurt and Krist, this was exactly what they were seeking: As much as wanting a demo tape, they sought to be in the same league with these other bands. They quickly dispensed with introductions and went into recording almost immediately. In less than six hours, they recorded and mixed nine and a half songs. The last tune, "Pen Cap Chew," was incomplete, as the reel of tape ran out during the recording and the band didn't want to front the additional $30 for another tape reel. Endino was impressed by the band, but not overly so. At the end of the day, Kurt paid the $152.44 bill with cash, money he said he'd saved working at his janitor job.
The camper then was reloaded with equipment and the band headed south - on this day they also had a show scheduled at Tacoma's Community World Theater. During the hour's drive, they listened to the demo twice. The ten song were, in order, "If You Must," "Downer," "Floyd the Barber," "Paper Cuts," "Spank Thru," "Hairspray Queen," "Aero Zeppelin," "Beeswax," "Mexican Seafood," and the half of "Pen Cap Chew." When the time came for their set, they played the same ten songs in order. It was a day of triumph for Kurt, his first day as a "real" musician. He'd been to a studio in Seattle, and he'd played another show in front of an adoring crowd of twenty. Dave Foster was in another band on the bill that night, and recalled the performance as particularly inspired: "They were great. Crover was killer, though you had a hard time hearing him above the propane blower, since it was a really cold night."
Backstage, an incident came up that would mark the night in ways Kurt might not have anticipated. Compared to Krist and Kurt, Crover was a veteran, and he and the Melvins had played the CWT several times. He asked Kurt how much they were making for the gig, and when Kurt told him they were doing it for nothing, Crover protested. May explained he'd tried to pay the band for their last few gigs - the club was finally doing a little better - but that Kurt continued to refuse to take any money. Crover started yelling, until Kurt finally announced, "We're not taking any money." Crover argued that even if the pay was only a paltry $20, there was a principle at stake: "You should never do this, Kurt. These guys are just screwing you. You'll always get screwed. You've gotta get you money." But Kurt and Krist saw the reality of May's situation. May finally came up with a compromise that would let Kurt keep his integrity and make Crover happy: He convinced the band to take $10 for gas. Kurt put the $10 bill in his pocket and said, "Thanks." He left the club that night for the first time in his life a professional musician, fingering the bill all the way home.
A month later Kurt celebrated his 21st birthday, finally experiencing the American rite of passage that meant he could legally buy liquor. He and Tracy got drunk - this one time, Kurt bought - and had pizza. Kurt's relationship with alcohol was an on-again/off-again flirtation. Being with Tracy, he was drinking less and doing fewer drugs than in his Aberdeen shack days. None of his friends remember him being the most intoxicated of their group - that distinction usually fell to Krist or Dylan Carlson, who by then was living next door to Kurt on Pear Street - and at times Kurt seemed downright temperate. Their other neighbor, Matthew "Slim" Moon, had stopped drinking two years previously, so there were examples of sobriety around. Kurt's poverty during 1988 meant he could barely afford food, so a luxury like alcohol was saved for celebrations or when he could raid someone else's fridge.
At the time he turned 21, Kurt had temporarily quit smoking, and was adamant about people not lighting up around him (he signed a note to a friend that year as "the stuck-up rock star who bitches about exhaust fumes"). He felt smoking harmed his singing voice and his health. Kurt was always a strange mixture of self-preservation and self-destruction, and meeting him one night, you might hardly imagine he was the same person if you encountered him two weeks later. "We once went to a party in Tacoma," Tracy remembered, "and the next morning he was asking me what he did, because he was really drunk. And I told him he smoked a cigarette. He was shocked!"
His sister Kim visited around the time Kurt turned 21, and they bonded in ways they hadn't done for years, recounting their shared childhood trauma. "He got me ripped on Long Island Iced Teas at his house," Kim recalled. "I got sick, but it was a fun time." By 1988, Kurt stopped drinking before shows - his focus was always on the band, to the exclusion of everything else. At 21, he was as serious about music as he would ever be. He lived, slept, and breathed the band.
Even before the band had a permanent name, Kurt was convinced that getting a video on MTV was their ticket to fame. To this end, Kurt convinced the band to play at the Aberdeen RadioShack while a friend shot the performance on a low-rent video camera, using multiple special effects. When Kurt watched the complete tape, even he realized that it looked more like amateurs pretending to be rock stars than professional musicians.
Soon after their RadioShack appearance, Crover left the band's employ to go back to California with the Melvins. They'd always known Crover was only a temporary solution to their drummer problem. The Melvins' exodus was indicative of what many Northwest bands at the time believed: It had been so long since any Northwest group had broken through - Heart had been the last big success - that a move to a more populous center seemed the only road to fame. Losing Crover added to Kurt's frustration, but it also helped him find an identity of his own, and his group could be thought of as something other than a Melvins offshoot. As late as mid-1988, more people in Olympia knew Kurt as a roadie for the Melvins than as a leader of his own band.
That was about to change. Crover had recommended Dave Foster, a hard-pounding, and hard-living, Aberdeen drummer. Though having a drummer back in Grays Harbor remained a logistical problem, by this time Kurt had his Datsun to help. When it was running, which was infrequently, he would drive to Aberdeen, pick Foster up, take him to Tacoma for practice, and then reverse the whole route later that night or morning, putting in hours of driving.
Their first show with Foster was a party at an Olympia house nicknamed the Caddyshack. One of Olympia's eccentricities was that every student household in the eighties had some kind of nickname - the Caddyshack was near a golf course. Other than their radio show on KAOS and the Brown Cow show at Gessco, this was Kurt's first public performance in Olympia, and it would be part of a painful growth curve. Playing to a living room full of college students, it was culture shock. Kurt had attempted to dress the part - he wore his ripped-up jean jacket with a tapestry of "The Last Supper" sewed on the back and a plastic monkey, Chim Chim, from the "Speed Racer" cartoon, glued to the epaulet. Foster wore a T-shirt, stone-washed jeans, and a mustache. Before the band even had a chance to begin, a kid with a Mohawk haircut grabbed the microphone and yelled, "Drummers from Aberdeen sure look weird." Though it was Foster the kid was criticizing, the comment cut into Kurt was well: He wanted nothing more than to be thought of as an Olympia sophisticate, not an Aberdeen hick. Classism would be a fight he would struggle with his entire life, because no matter how far away he got from Grays Harbor, he felt branded as a hillbilly. Most of the Greeners were from big cities - like many privileged college kids, their prejudice toward people from rural communities was in marked contrast to the liberalism that they professed toward different races. The Caddyshack gig was almost one year to the day after the Raymond party, and it found Kurt in a paradigm he hadn't expected: His band was too hip for Raymond, but here in Olympia, they weren't hip enough.
He discussed this with his bandmates, hoping that if they looked more sophisticated, they would be taken more seriously. Kurt ordered Foster to cut his drum kit down twelve pieces to six, and then he started on Foster's appearance: "You've got to get with it Dave." Foster angrily replied: "It's not fair to make fun of me as the short-haired guy - I've got a job. We could have green hair and we'd still look like hicks." Despite the fact that he's say the exact opposite in interviews, Kurt cared very much what people thought of hims. If that meant getting rid of his stone-washed jean jacket with the white fleece collar, which now sat in the closet of his apartment, so be it. Foster's dress, other than the mustache, was no different from Kurt's two years before, which may be why Kurt took the criticism so personally. Kurt had discovered that punk rock, despite being billed as a liberating genre of music, came with its own social mores and styles and that these were many times more constricting than the conventions they were supposedly in rebellion against. There was a dress code.
Perhaps in some small attempt to leave behind his past and the associations the band had with Aberdeen, Kurt came up with one final name for the group. Foster first heard about the new name when he saw a flyer at Kurt's house for "Nirvana." "Who's that?" he asked. "That's us," replied Kurt. "It means attainment of perfection." In Buddhism, nirvana is the place reached when one transcends the endless cycle of rebirth and human suffering. By renouncing desire, following the Eight-fold Path and through meditation and spiritual practice, worshippers work to achieve nirvana and thus gain release from the pain of life. Kurt considered himself a Buddhist at the time, though his only practice of this faith was having watched a late-night television program.
It would be under the name Nirvana that the band would first gain attention in Seattle, a city with a population of a half million, where Kurt was convinced his Last Supper jacket would fit right in. Jack Endino had remixed the January 23 session on a cassette that he'd passed on to a few of his friends. One went to Dawn Anderson, who wrote for The Rocket and ran the fanzine Backlash; another to Shirley Carlson, who was a volunteer DJ on KCMU, the University of Washington radio station; and a third he passed on to Jonathan Poneman, co-owner of Sub Pop, a Northwest independent record label. All three cassettes would impact Nirvana's future. Anderson liked the cassette enough that she planned an article; Carlson aired "Floyd the Barber" on KCMU, their first airplay; and Poneman got Kurt's number from Endino. When he phoned, Kurt was there with a visiting Dale Crover.
It was a conversation Kurt had been waiting for his whole life. Later he would recast these events to suggest that fame came without any prodding on his part, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The instant he received the demo, he began dubbing off copies and mailing them to record labels around the country, shopping for a deal. He sent long, handwritten letters to every label he could think of; the fact that he hadn't thought of Sub Pop was only an indication of the label's lowly status. Kurt was most interested in being on SST or Touch and Go. Greg Ginn, one of the owners of SST and a member of the band Black Flag, remembered getting that early demo tape in the mail: "My opinion on them was that they were not that original, that they were by-the-numbers alternative. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either." Though Kurt sent dozens of demos to Touch and Go during 1988, and he'd even gone as far as to title these songs "The Touch and Go Demos" in his notebook, the tape made so little impression that no one at the label remembered receiving them.
The tape made a bigger splash with Poneman, who took the cassette to his partner Bruce Pavitt at his day job - at the Muzak Corporation, the elevator music company. The Muzak tape-duplicating room was, strangely, the day job of choice for many of the members of the Seattle rock elite, and Poneman auditioned the tape for those present, including Mark Arm of Mudhoney. They gave it the thumbs down, with Arm dismissing it as "similar to Skin Yard but not as good." Still, Poneman was able to schedule Nirvana on the bottom of a bill at a small Seattle club called the Vogue for one of the label's monthly "Sub Pop Sunday" showcases. These $2-cover showcases featured three bands, though the beer specials were as big a part of the draw as the music. Poneman asked if Nirvana could play the Vogue on the last Sunday of April. Kurt, trying not to sound too enthusiastic, quickly said yes.
The Vogue was a tiny club on Seattle's First Avenue, best known for its transvestite bartender. In a previous life, it had briefly been a new wave club, and before that a gay biker bar. In 1988 the biggest draw was disco night and the lure of beer specials like three bottles of "Beer Beer" for three dollars. In this regard, the Vogue was reflective of the generally poor state of the Seattle club scene at the time, where there were few places for original bands to play. As Pavitt wrote in The Rocket in December 1987: "Despite the desperate lack of a good club, Seattle has rarely seen so many bands." The Vogue didn't have as strong a pee-smell as the Community World, but it did have a faint odor of vanilla, a remnant from the many amyl nitrite poppers smashed on the floor during dance night.
Nonetheless, Kurt Cobain couldn't wait to get on that stage. Like senior citizens going to a dentist's appointment, the band made sure they were early for this all-important show - arriving fours hours before showtime. Having nothing to do and knowing few people in the city, they drove around aimlessly. Before soundcheck, Kurt puked in the parking lot next to the venue. "It was only because he was nervous," remembered Foster. "He wasn't drinking." Before their call they had to wait in their van, since Foster was underage.
When it came time for them to play, Kurt had become, by Foster's description, "pretty uptight." When they got onstage, they were surprised to see an audience just as small as their usual CWT shows. "There was hardly anyone there," remembered DJ Shirley Carlson. "The few people there all knew Tracy or Kurt from parties, or had heard the tape. We didn't even know who sang."
At best, it was a lackluster performance. "We didn't really fuck up," Foster recalled, "like, we didn't have to stop in the middle of the song. But it was very intimidating, because we knew it was for getting a record deal." They played fourteen songs with no encore, beginning with "Love Buzz," which was unusual at the time. Kurt thought it wise to put their best material first, in case people left.
Some of the audience did leave, and Carlson was one of the few who had anything good to say about the band, comparing them to Cheap Trick: "I remember thinking that not only could Kurt sing and play guitar, though together not very well, but he had a remarkably Robin Zander-like voice." Most of the members of the Seattle rock establishment thought the band stank. Photographer Charles Peterson was so unimpressed he didn't waste any film on them and questioned Poneman about the wisdom of signing the group.
Perhaps the harshest critic of the band's performance, as always, was Kurt himself. When photographer Rich Hansen photographed the band after the show, Kurt, now nursing a drink, shouted, "We sucked!" "They were very self-critical of their set," Hansen recalled. "There seemed to be some discussion of them missing some chords. I was struck by how very green they were. There was an absolute naiveness about them."
Hansen's pictures from that night give much insight into the freakshow appearance of the group. Krist, at six-foot seven, appears as a giant next to Kurt and Foster; he has long sideburns and curly, medium-length hair. Foster, at only five-foot five, reaches to Krist's breast and wears the kind of outfit you can imagine Kurt lecturing him on: stone-washed jeans, a white T-shirt with a mountain silhouette silkscreen, and a backward baseball cap with a Corona Beer logo. He is looking off into the distance, perhaps remembering that he has to be at work by seven that morning. Kurt, who Hansen convinced to sit on Krist's knee for some frames, wears jeans, a gray sweatshirt turned inside out, and a dark sweater. His blond hair had grown to a length three inches below his shoulder. With his five-day beard growth, he bears a striking resemblance to some portrayals of Jesus Christ. Even Kurt's expression in one of the photos - a pained and faraway look, as if he is marking this moment in time - is similar to the image of Christ in Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper."
On the ride home, Kurt discussed the show as their first real setback and vowed they'd never be so embarrassed again. It was four in the morning before they would reach their homes, and on the long drive Kurt pledged to his bandmates, and himself, that he would practice more, write new songs, and they'd no longer suck. But when Poneman called him a couple of days later and suggested they do a record together, suddenly Kurt's own recollections of the show shifted. Two weeks later, Kurt wrote a letter to Dale Crover, titling it, "Oh, and our final name is Nirvana." The purpose of the letter was both to brag and to seek advice. It was one of many letters he wrote but never sent, and its contents describe in detail the parts of the night he was choosing to remember and the parts he had chosen to forget or reconstruct to his own liking. He wrote in full:
Even in this early stage of his career, Kurt had already begun to process of retelling his own story in a manner that formed a separate self. He was commencing the creation of his greatest character, the mythical "Kurdt Kobain," as he had begun to misspell his name. He would bring out this carefully refined phantom when he needed to distance himself from his own actions or circumstances. He exaggerated every aspect of a show that by his own admission sucked: The crowd was too small for "a representative from every Seattle band" to be there; the camera flashes were mostly metaphorical, since Hansen only shot a couple of frames. In describing the Sub Pop honchos coming up to him, Kurt even attempts to portray himself as an unwilling participant in his own success. But he was a novice actor at this point, and he admits that he planned "to talk [Sub Pop] into" a full-length record. It is worth nothing that virtually every business expectation Kurt had of Sub Pop, at least in the short term, went unfulfilled.
Olympia, Washington
April 1987 - May 1988
Fuck, I'm in high school again! I want to move back to Aberdeen.
- Excerpt from a letter to Dale Crover.
Two months after the show in Raymond, Kurt took another significant journey: He once and forever left Aberdeen. He had spent the first twenty years of his life there, but having left he would rarely go back. He packed up his stuff, which at the time consisted of little more than a Hefty bag of clothes, a crate of albums, and his now-empty rat cage, and loaded it into Tracy's car the 65-mile drive to Olympia. Though Olympia was only slightly bigger than Aberdeen, it was a college town, the state capital, and one of the freakiest places west of the East Village, with an odd collection of punk rockers, artists, would-revolutionaries, feminists, and just plain weirdos. Students at Evergreen State College - universally called "Greeners" - created their own curriculum. Kurt wasn't planning on college, but he was at least the right age to fit in. He was to have a conflicted relationship with the town's artsy crowd - he yearned for their acceptance, yet he frequently felt inadequate. It was a recurrent theme in his life.
Kurt moved to Olympia to live with Tracy in a studio apartment in an old house converted to a three-plex at 114 Pear Street. It was tiny, but the rent was only $137.50 a month, including utilities. And the location, just a few blocks from downtown, was ideal for Kurt, who rarely had access to an operable vehicle. For the first month he looked for jobs without much success, while Tracy supported him working in the cafeteria of the Boeing airplane plant in Seattle. She pulled a graveyard shift, and the long commute meant she left for work at ten in the evening and didn't arrive home until nine in the morning. The job did provide a steady income - something they both knew couldn't be expected of Kurt - and she could steal food to supplement her salary. Because of her unusual hours, Tracy began leaving Kurt "to do" lists, and this form of communication would turn into a ritual of their relationship. One such list she wrote in late 1987 read: "Kurt: sweep kitchen, behind cat litter box, garbage can, under cat food. Shake mats, Vacuum and clean up front room. Please, please, please." The note was signed with a heart and a smiley face. Kurt's note back: "Please set alarm for 11. I will do the dishes then. Okay?"
At first Kurt helped with the housework, doing the dishes and even mopping the floor occasionally. Though the apartment was tiny, it needed constant cleaning duo to their menagerie of pets. While the actual inventory would vary over the next two years depending on life span, they had five cats, four rats, a cockatiel, two rabbits, and Kurt's turtles. The apartment had a smell that visitors would often compare unfavorably to a pet shop, but it was a home of sorts. Kurt named their rabbit Stew.
He also painted the bathroom blood red, and wrote "REDRUM" on the wall, a reference to Stephen King's "The Shining." Since Kurt had a tendency to write on walls, they wisely covered most with rock posters, many turned reverse side out, so he would have more space to create. The few posters displayed face side up were all altered in some way as it was. A huge poster of the Beatles now sported an afro and glasses on Paul McCartney. Above the bed was a Led Zeppelin poster to which Kurt had added the following prose: "Loser, wino, alcoholic, scum, trash, degenerate, head lice, scabs, infections, pneumonia, diarrhea, vomits blood, urine, malfunctioning bowel muscle, arthritis, gangrene, psychotic mental illness, unable to form sentences, expected to fend for himself in a box in the snow." Next to this screed was a drawing of a bottle of Thunderbird fortified wine and caricature of Iggy Pop. The refrigerator sported a photo collage he created of images of meat mixed with old medical illustrations of diseased vaginas. "He was fascinated by things that were gross," Tracy recalled. And though Kurt himself rarely talked about religion - "I think he believed in God, but more in the devil than actually in God," Tracy said - there were crosses and other religious artifacts on the walls. Kurt enjoyed stealing sculptures of the Virgin Mary from the cemetery and painting blood tears under her eyes. Tracy was brought up Lutheran, and most of their religious discussions concerned whether God could exist in a world filled with such horror, with Kurt taking the position that Satan was stronger.
After a couple of months of being a house-husband, Kurt took a short-lived $4.75-an-hour job at Lemons Janitorial Service, a small family-run cleaning business. He claimed to his friends that he cleaned doctors' and dentists' offices and used the occasion to steal drugs. But according to the owner of the business, the route Kurt worked was mostly industrial buildings with few chances to steal anything. He used some of what he earned to buy a rusty old Datsun. One thing was certain about this janitorial service: In ways both physical and emotional it left Kurt with little energy to apply to cleaning his own apartment anymore, which created the first tension between him and Tracy. Even after he quit the job, he apparently felt like no more cleaning was required of him in his lifetime.
In Olympia, his inner artistic life was developing in ways that it never had before. Being unemployed, Kurt set in motion a routine that he would follow for the rest of his life. He would rise at around noon and eat a brunch of sorts. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was his favorite food. Having tried other brands, his delicate palate had determined that when it came to processed cheese and pasta, Kraft had earned its role as the market leader. After eating, he would spend the rest of the day doing one of three things: watching television, which he did unceasingly; practicing his guitar, which he did for hours a day, usually while watching TV; or creating some kind of art project, be it a painting, collage, or three-dimensional installation. This last activity was never formal - he rarely identified himself as an artist - yet he spent hours in this manner.
He also wrote in his journals, though the inner dialogue he kept was not as much a play-by-play of his day as it was a therapeutic obsessive/compulsive device wherein he let loose his innermost thoughts. The writing was imaginative and many times disturbing. His songs and his journal entries fused together at times, but both were obsessed with human bodily functions: Birth, urination, defecation, and sexuality were topics he was accomplished in. One small segment illustrates the familiar themes that he would revisit again and again:
Chef Boyardee is meaner stronger less susceptible to disease and more dominant than a male gorilla. He comes to me at night. Willfully opening the locks and bending the bars on my window. Costing me horrendous amounts of money in home burglary devices. He comes to me in my bedroom. Naked, shaved and oiled. Goose-bumped thick black arm hairs risen off his skin. Standing in a pool of pizza grease. Barfing up flour. It enters my lungs. I cough. He laughs. He mounts me. I'd like to kick his hot-stinking, macho fuckin' ass.
These inner thoughts, many times full of violence, were in marked contrast to Kurt's external world. For the first time in his life he had a steady girlfriend who doted on him and saw to his every need. At times the attention Tracy paid him bordered on mothering, and in a way he needed mothering. He remarked to his friends that she was "the best girlfriend in the world."
As a couple, they exhibited signs of domestic tranquility. They'd walk to the Laundromat together, and when they could afford it, they'd get take-out pizza from the Fourth Avenue Tavern (they lived next door to a different pizza joint but Kurt insisted it sucked). Kurt enjoyed cooking, and he frequently made Tracy his signature entree, "vanilla chicken," or fettuccine Alfredo. "He'd eat the kind of stuff that would make other people gain weight, but he never gained any weight," Tracy observed. His size had always been a matter of concern, and he'd write away to ads in the backs of magazines for weight-gain powders but they had little effect. "His hip bones stuck out and he had knobby knees," Tracy recalled. "He didn't wear shorts unless it got really hot because he was so self-conscious about how skinny his legs were." For one trip to the beach, Kurt came dressed in long johns, a pair of Levi's, a second pair of Levi's worn over the first pair, a long-sleeved shirt, a T-shirt, and two sweatshirts. "He wanted to make himself look bigger," Tracy said. The one thing in his life that successfully made him feel bigger was his music, and by the summer of 1987 the band was going strong. They still hadn't settled on a permanent name, calling themselves everything from "Throat Oyster" to "Ted, Ed, Fred," after the boyfriend of Greg Hokanson's mom. They played a couple of parties in early 1987, and in April they'd even performed on the college radio station KAOS in Olympia. Tracy gave a tape of the radio show to Jim May at Tacoma's Community World Theater (CWT) and urged Jim to book them. Tracy and Shelli contributed to the band in those early days in ways that cannot be underestimated: They played the informal roles of press agents, managers, bookers, and merchandise-salespeople, in addition to their job of making sure their men were fed, dressed, and rehearsed.
May gave the band their first non-party gig, for which they played under the name Skid Row - at the time, Kurt was not aware that a lite-metal band from New York had the same moniker. It didn't matter; they would change names for every early show, the way a socialite might try on hats. This performance, though not long after the Raymond party, showed the band growing by leaps and bounds. Even Tracy, who was biased since she was in love with the singer, was impressed by how much they'd developed: "When they started to play, my mouth dropped open. I said, 'These guys were good.' "
They may have sounded good, but they certainly looked strange. For this gig, Kurt had attempted to be glam. He wore, as he did at many shows this year, flare pants, a silk Hawaiian shirt, and four-inch platform shoes to look taller. Musician John Purkey happened into the CWT that night and, despite their strange attire, recalled "being blown away. I heard this person's voice singing and it completely impressed me. I never heard a voice like his before. It was very distinct. There was one song, 'Love Buzz,' that definitely stuck out."
"Love Buzz" had been one of the missing pieces the band needed. Krist had discovered the song on an album by a Dutch band called the Shocking Blue, and Kurt embraced it immediately and made it their signature tune. It began with a mid-tempo drum beat, but quickly transitioned into a whirling guitar riff. Their performance of the song mixed equal parts psychedelic-trance with a thudding, slowed-down heaviness from Krist's bass part. Kurt would play the guitar solo on his back on the floor.
They began to play regularly at the CWT, though to suggest that they built an audience there would be an exaggeration. The theater itself was a former porno movie house, and the only source of heat was a propane blower that ran loudly even during the band's sets. Kurt commented that there was the "ever-present smell of urine" in the place. Most in the crowd at their early shows came to see other groups - the night before Kurt played, the lineup was Bleeder, Panic, and Lethal Dose. "Jim May booked those guys when nobody else would touch them," explained Buzz Osborne. "It was where they cut their milk teeth." Kurt, always learning from Buzz, realized that even a gig in front of their friends was a chance to grow. "I could count on them to play anytime," remembered May. "Kurt would never take any money, which was also good for me because I was only doing about twelve shows a month, and only two would make money." Kurt had wisely sized up his situation and realized the band would get more gigs, and more experience, if they played for free. What did they need money for anyway? They had Tracy and Shelli.
Shelli had taken a job alongside Tracy at the Boeing cafeteria. She and Krist had moved to an apartment in Tacoma, 30 miles north of Olympia. With the move, the band briefly fell apart. Previously, with Krist and Aaron both living in the Aberdeen area, Kurt would take the bus back for rehearsals. But with Krist in Tacoma, and working two jobs (at Sears and as an industrial painter), the only one who seemed to have time for the band was Kurt. He wrote Krist a letter to talk him back into the group. "It was funny; it was like a commercial," Krist remembered. "It said, 'Come, join the band. No commitment. No obligation (well some).' So I called him, and said, 'Yeah, let's do it again.' What we did was we built a rehearsal space down in the basement of our house. We cruised construction sites and we took scraps, and built it with old two-by-fours and old carpet." Kurt and Krist had been friends for some time, but this second forming of the band would cement their relationship in deeper ways. Though neither was particularly good at talking about their emotions, they forged a brotherly bond that seemed stronger than all the other relationships in their lives.
But even with a Tacoma rehearsal spot, at 1987 wound down they again faced the drummer problem, which would plague them for the next four years. Burckhard still lived in Grays Harbor, and with a new job as the assistant manager at the Aberdeen Burger King, he couldn't play with them anymore. In response, Kurt placed a "Musicians Wanted" ad in the October 1987 issue of The Rocket: "SERIOUS DRUMMER WANTED. Underground attitude, Black Flag, Melvins, Zeppelin, Scratch Acid, Ethel Merman. Versatile as heck. Kurdt 352 - 0992." They found no serious takers, so by December, Kurt and Krist began to practice with Dale Crover, who was back from California, and they began to talk about making a demo. During 1987 Kurt had dozens of songs, and he had a yearning to record them. He saw an ad for Reciprocal, a studio that charged only $20 an hour for recording, and booked a January session with up-and-coming producer Jack Endino. Endino had no idea who Kurt was and he wrote "Kurt Covain" down in the schedule.
On January 23, 1988, a friend of Novoselic's drove the band and all their gear up to Seattle in a shingle-covered camper heated by a woodstrove. It looked like a backwoods shack deposited on a pickup, which it was. Driving into the big city they looked like the Beverly Hillbillies with wood smoke coming out of the back of the camper; their truck was so overweight it scraped against rises in the road.
Reciprocal was run by Chris Hanszek with Endino. Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Mother Love Bone had all worked there, and it was already legendary by 1988. The studio itself was only 900 square feet, with a control room so tiny three people could not comfortably stand in it at once. "The carpets were worn, the door frames all were coming apart and tacked back a few times, and it showed its age," recalled Hanszek. "You could see that the place had the signs of 10,000 musicians who had rubbed their elbows against the place." Yet to Kurt and Krist, this was exactly what they were seeking: As much as wanting a demo tape, they sought to be in the same league with these other bands. They quickly dispensed with introductions and went into recording almost immediately. In less than six hours, they recorded and mixed nine and a half songs. The last tune, "Pen Cap Chew," was incomplete, as the reel of tape ran out during the recording and the band didn't want to front the additional $30 for another tape reel. Endino was impressed by the band, but not overly so. At the end of the day, Kurt paid the $152.44 bill with cash, money he said he'd saved working at his janitor job.
The camper then was reloaded with equipment and the band headed south - on this day they also had a show scheduled at Tacoma's Community World Theater. During the hour's drive, they listened to the demo twice. The ten song were, in order, "If You Must," "Downer," "Floyd the Barber," "Paper Cuts," "Spank Thru," "Hairspray Queen," "Aero Zeppelin," "Beeswax," "Mexican Seafood," and the half of "Pen Cap Chew." When the time came for their set, they played the same ten songs in order. It was a day of triumph for Kurt, his first day as a "real" musician. He'd been to a studio in Seattle, and he'd played another show in front of an adoring crowd of twenty. Dave Foster was in another band on the bill that night, and recalled the performance as particularly inspired: "They were great. Crover was killer, though you had a hard time hearing him above the propane blower, since it was a really cold night."
Backstage, an incident came up that would mark the night in ways Kurt might not have anticipated. Compared to Krist and Kurt, Crover was a veteran, and he and the Melvins had played the CWT several times. He asked Kurt how much they were making for the gig, and when Kurt told him they were doing it for nothing, Crover protested. May explained he'd tried to pay the band for their last few gigs - the club was finally doing a little better - but that Kurt continued to refuse to take any money. Crover started yelling, until Kurt finally announced, "We're not taking any money." Crover argued that even if the pay was only a paltry $20, there was a principle at stake: "You should never do this, Kurt. These guys are just screwing you. You'll always get screwed. You've gotta get you money." But Kurt and Krist saw the reality of May's situation. May finally came up with a compromise that would let Kurt keep his integrity and make Crover happy: He convinced the band to take $10 for gas. Kurt put the $10 bill in his pocket and said, "Thanks." He left the club that night for the first time in his life a professional musician, fingering the bill all the way home.
A month later Kurt celebrated his 21st birthday, finally experiencing the American rite of passage that meant he could legally buy liquor. He and Tracy got drunk - this one time, Kurt bought - and had pizza. Kurt's relationship with alcohol was an on-again/off-again flirtation. Being with Tracy, he was drinking less and doing fewer drugs than in his Aberdeen shack days. None of his friends remember him being the most intoxicated of their group - that distinction usually fell to Krist or Dylan Carlson, who by then was living next door to Kurt on Pear Street - and at times Kurt seemed downright temperate. Their other neighbor, Matthew "Slim" Moon, had stopped drinking two years previously, so there were examples of sobriety around. Kurt's poverty during 1988 meant he could barely afford food, so a luxury like alcohol was saved for celebrations or when he could raid someone else's fridge.
At the time he turned 21, Kurt had temporarily quit smoking, and was adamant about people not lighting up around him (he signed a note to a friend that year as "the stuck-up rock star who bitches about exhaust fumes"). He felt smoking harmed his singing voice and his health. Kurt was always a strange mixture of self-preservation and self-destruction, and meeting him one night, you might hardly imagine he was the same person if you encountered him two weeks later. "We once went to a party in Tacoma," Tracy remembered, "and the next morning he was asking me what he did, because he was really drunk. And I told him he smoked a cigarette. He was shocked!"
His sister Kim visited around the time Kurt turned 21, and they bonded in ways they hadn't done for years, recounting their shared childhood trauma. "He got me ripped on Long Island Iced Teas at his house," Kim recalled. "I got sick, but it was a fun time." By 1988, Kurt stopped drinking before shows - his focus was always on the band, to the exclusion of everything else. At 21, he was as serious about music as he would ever be. He lived, slept, and breathed the band.
Even before the band had a permanent name, Kurt was convinced that getting a video on MTV was their ticket to fame. To this end, Kurt convinced the band to play at the Aberdeen RadioShack while a friend shot the performance on a low-rent video camera, using multiple special effects. When Kurt watched the complete tape, even he realized that it looked more like amateurs pretending to be rock stars than professional musicians.
Soon after their RadioShack appearance, Crover left the band's employ to go back to California with the Melvins. They'd always known Crover was only a temporary solution to their drummer problem. The Melvins' exodus was indicative of what many Northwest bands at the time believed: It had been so long since any Northwest group had broken through - Heart had been the last big success - that a move to a more populous center seemed the only road to fame. Losing Crover added to Kurt's frustration, but it also helped him find an identity of his own, and his group could be thought of as something other than a Melvins offshoot. As late as mid-1988, more people in Olympia knew Kurt as a roadie for the Melvins than as a leader of his own band.
That was about to change. Crover had recommended Dave Foster, a hard-pounding, and hard-living, Aberdeen drummer. Though having a drummer back in Grays Harbor remained a logistical problem, by this time Kurt had his Datsun to help. When it was running, which was infrequently, he would drive to Aberdeen, pick Foster up, take him to Tacoma for practice, and then reverse the whole route later that night or morning, putting in hours of driving.
Their first show with Foster was a party at an Olympia house nicknamed the Caddyshack. One of Olympia's eccentricities was that every student household in the eighties had some kind of nickname - the Caddyshack was near a golf course. Other than their radio show on KAOS and the Brown Cow show at Gessco, this was Kurt's first public performance in Olympia, and it would be part of a painful growth curve. Playing to a living room full of college students, it was culture shock. Kurt had attempted to dress the part - he wore his ripped-up jean jacket with a tapestry of "The Last Supper" sewed on the back and a plastic monkey, Chim Chim, from the "Speed Racer" cartoon, glued to the epaulet. Foster wore a T-shirt, stone-washed jeans, and a mustache. Before the band even had a chance to begin, a kid with a Mohawk haircut grabbed the microphone and yelled, "Drummers from Aberdeen sure look weird." Though it was Foster the kid was criticizing, the comment cut into Kurt was well: He wanted nothing more than to be thought of as an Olympia sophisticate, not an Aberdeen hick. Classism would be a fight he would struggle with his entire life, because no matter how far away he got from Grays Harbor, he felt branded as a hillbilly. Most of the Greeners were from big cities - like many privileged college kids, their prejudice toward people from rural communities was in marked contrast to the liberalism that they professed toward different races. The Caddyshack gig was almost one year to the day after the Raymond party, and it found Kurt in a paradigm he hadn't expected: His band was too hip for Raymond, but here in Olympia, they weren't hip enough.
He discussed this with his bandmates, hoping that if they looked more sophisticated, they would be taken more seriously. Kurt ordered Foster to cut his drum kit down twelve pieces to six, and then he started on Foster's appearance: "You've got to get with it Dave." Foster angrily replied: "It's not fair to make fun of me as the short-haired guy - I've got a job. We could have green hair and we'd still look like hicks." Despite the fact that he's say the exact opposite in interviews, Kurt cared very much what people thought of hims. If that meant getting rid of his stone-washed jean jacket with the white fleece collar, which now sat in the closet of his apartment, so be it. Foster's dress, other than the mustache, was no different from Kurt's two years before, which may be why Kurt took the criticism so personally. Kurt had discovered that punk rock, despite being billed as a liberating genre of music, came with its own social mores and styles and that these were many times more constricting than the conventions they were supposedly in rebellion against. There was a dress code.
Perhaps in some small attempt to leave behind his past and the associations the band had with Aberdeen, Kurt came up with one final name for the group. Foster first heard about the new name when he saw a flyer at Kurt's house for "Nirvana." "Who's that?" he asked. "That's us," replied Kurt. "It means attainment of perfection." In Buddhism, nirvana is the place reached when one transcends the endless cycle of rebirth and human suffering. By renouncing desire, following the Eight-fold Path and through meditation and spiritual practice, worshippers work to achieve nirvana and thus gain release from the pain of life. Kurt considered himself a Buddhist at the time, though his only practice of this faith was having watched a late-night television program.
It would be under the name Nirvana that the band would first gain attention in Seattle, a city with a population of a half million, where Kurt was convinced his Last Supper jacket would fit right in. Jack Endino had remixed the January 23 session on a cassette that he'd passed on to a few of his friends. One went to Dawn Anderson, who wrote for The Rocket and ran the fanzine Backlash; another to Shirley Carlson, who was a volunteer DJ on KCMU, the University of Washington radio station; and a third he passed on to Jonathan Poneman, co-owner of Sub Pop, a Northwest independent record label. All three cassettes would impact Nirvana's future. Anderson liked the cassette enough that she planned an article; Carlson aired "Floyd the Barber" on KCMU, their first airplay; and Poneman got Kurt's number from Endino. When he phoned, Kurt was there with a visiting Dale Crover.
It was a conversation Kurt had been waiting for his whole life. Later he would recast these events to suggest that fame came without any prodding on his part, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The instant he received the demo, he began dubbing off copies and mailing them to record labels around the country, shopping for a deal. He sent long, handwritten letters to every label he could think of; the fact that he hadn't thought of Sub Pop was only an indication of the label's lowly status. Kurt was most interested in being on SST or Touch and Go. Greg Ginn, one of the owners of SST and a member of the band Black Flag, remembered getting that early demo tape in the mail: "My opinion on them was that they were not that original, that they were by-the-numbers alternative. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either." Though Kurt sent dozens of demos to Touch and Go during 1988, and he'd even gone as far as to title these songs "The Touch and Go Demos" in his notebook, the tape made so little impression that no one at the label remembered receiving them.
The tape made a bigger splash with Poneman, who took the cassette to his partner Bruce Pavitt at his day job - at the Muzak Corporation, the elevator music company. The Muzak tape-duplicating room was, strangely, the day job of choice for many of the members of the Seattle rock elite, and Poneman auditioned the tape for those present, including Mark Arm of Mudhoney. They gave it the thumbs down, with Arm dismissing it as "similar to Skin Yard but not as good." Still, Poneman was able to schedule Nirvana on the bottom of a bill at a small Seattle club called the Vogue for one of the label's monthly "Sub Pop Sunday" showcases. These $2-cover showcases featured three bands, though the beer specials were as big a part of the draw as the music. Poneman asked if Nirvana could play the Vogue on the last Sunday of April. Kurt, trying not to sound too enthusiastic, quickly said yes.
The Vogue was a tiny club on Seattle's First Avenue, best known for its transvestite bartender. In a previous life, it had briefly been a new wave club, and before that a gay biker bar. In 1988 the biggest draw was disco night and the lure of beer specials like three bottles of "Beer Beer" for three dollars. In this regard, the Vogue was reflective of the generally poor state of the Seattle club scene at the time, where there were few places for original bands to play. As Pavitt wrote in The Rocket in December 1987: "Despite the desperate lack of a good club, Seattle has rarely seen so many bands." The Vogue didn't have as strong a pee-smell as the Community World, but it did have a faint odor of vanilla, a remnant from the many amyl nitrite poppers smashed on the floor during dance night.
Nonetheless, Kurt Cobain couldn't wait to get on that stage. Like senior citizens going to a dentist's appointment, the band made sure they were early for this all-important show - arriving fours hours before showtime. Having nothing to do and knowing few people in the city, they drove around aimlessly. Before soundcheck, Kurt puked in the parking lot next to the venue. "It was only because he was nervous," remembered Foster. "He wasn't drinking." Before their call they had to wait in their van, since Foster was underage.
When it came time for them to play, Kurt had become, by Foster's description, "pretty uptight." When they got onstage, they were surprised to see an audience just as small as their usual CWT shows. "There was hardly anyone there," remembered DJ Shirley Carlson. "The few people there all knew Tracy or Kurt from parties, or had heard the tape. We didn't even know who sang."
At best, it was a lackluster performance. "We didn't really fuck up," Foster recalled, "like, we didn't have to stop in the middle of the song. But it was very intimidating, because we knew it was for getting a record deal." They played fourteen songs with no encore, beginning with "Love Buzz," which was unusual at the time. Kurt thought it wise to put their best material first, in case people left.
Some of the audience did leave, and Carlson was one of the few who had anything good to say about the band, comparing them to Cheap Trick: "I remember thinking that not only could Kurt sing and play guitar, though together not very well, but he had a remarkably Robin Zander-like voice." Most of the members of the Seattle rock establishment thought the band stank. Photographer Charles Peterson was so unimpressed he didn't waste any film on them and questioned Poneman about the wisdom of signing the group.
Perhaps the harshest critic of the band's performance, as always, was Kurt himself. When photographer Rich Hansen photographed the band after the show, Kurt, now nursing a drink, shouted, "We sucked!" "They were very self-critical of their set," Hansen recalled. "There seemed to be some discussion of them missing some chords. I was struck by how very green they were. There was an absolute naiveness about them."
Hansen's pictures from that night give much insight into the freakshow appearance of the group. Krist, at six-foot seven, appears as a giant next to Kurt and Foster; he has long sideburns and curly, medium-length hair. Foster, at only five-foot five, reaches to Krist's breast and wears the kind of outfit you can imagine Kurt lecturing him on: stone-washed jeans, a white T-shirt with a mountain silhouette silkscreen, and a backward baseball cap with a Corona Beer logo. He is looking off into the distance, perhaps remembering that he has to be at work by seven that morning. Kurt, who Hansen convinced to sit on Krist's knee for some frames, wears jeans, a gray sweatshirt turned inside out, and a dark sweater. His blond hair had grown to a length three inches below his shoulder. With his five-day beard growth, he bears a striking resemblance to some portrayals of Jesus Christ. Even Kurt's expression in one of the photos - a pained and faraway look, as if he is marking this moment in time - is similar to the image of Christ in Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper."
On the ride home, Kurt discussed the show as their first real setback and vowed they'd never be so embarrassed again. It was four in the morning before they would reach their homes, and on the long drive Kurt pledged to his bandmates, and himself, that he would practice more, write new songs, and they'd no longer suck. But when Poneman called him a couple of days later and suggested they do a record together, suddenly Kurt's own recollections of the show shifted. Two weeks later, Kurt wrote a letter to Dale Crover, titling it, "Oh, and our final name is Nirvana." The purpose of the letter was both to brag and to seek advice. It was one of many letters he wrote but never sent, and its contents describe in detail the parts of the night he was choosing to remember and the parts he had chosen to forget or reconstruct to his own liking. He wrote in full:
So within the last couple of months our demo has been pirated, recorded, and discussed between all the Scene luminaries. And the Dude, Jonathan Poneman (remember the guy who called me when you were over the last day?) Mr. Big-money inheritance, right hand man of Bruce Pavitt, and also Sub Pop Records financial investor, got us a show at the Vogue on a Sub Pop Sunday. Big Deal. But I guess hype and regularly being played on KCMU probably helped. The amount of people who came to JUDGE us, not be at a bar, get drunk, watch some bands and have fun, but just watch the showcase event. 1 hr. There was a representative from every Seattle band there just watching, we felt like they should have had score cards. And so after the set, Bruce excitedly shakes our hands and says, "wow good job, let's do a record" then flashes of cameras go off and this girl from Backlash says "gee can we do an interview," yeah sure why not. And then people say good job, you guys are great and now we're expected to be total socialites, meeting people, introducing etc. FUCK, I'M IN HIGH SCHOOL AGAIN! I want to move back to Aberdeen. Nah, Olympia is just as boring and I can proudly say I've only been in the Smithfield [Café] about 5 times this year. And so because of this zoo-event we've at least gotten a contract for a 3-song single to be put out by the end of August and an EP out in Sept. or Oct. We're gonna try to talk them into an LP. Now Jonathan is our manager, he gets us shows remotely in Oregon and Vancouver. He's paying for all recording and distribution costs and now we don't have to have outrageous phone bills. Dave is working out okay. Sometime next year, Sub Pop is going to have a caravan of 2 or 3 Seattle bands go on a tour. Yeah we'll see. Thru your past experiences do you think it would be wise to demand receipts for recording, pressing costs? Enough about records. Oh except this one night last month, Chris and I dropped acid and we were watching the late show (rip off of Johnny Carson) and Paul Revere and the Raiders were on there. They were so fucking stupid! Dancing around with mustaches trying to act comical and goofy. It really pissed us off and I asked Chris, Do you have any Paul Revere and the Raiders albums?
Even in this early stage of his career, Kurt had already begun to process of retelling his own story in a manner that formed a separate self. He was commencing the creation of his greatest character, the mythical "Kurdt Kobain," as he had begun to misspell his name. He would bring out this carefully refined phantom when he needed to distance himself from his own actions or circumstances. He exaggerated every aspect of a show that by his own admission sucked: The crowd was too small for "a representative from every Seattle band" to be there; the camera flashes were mostly metaphorical, since Hansen only shot a couple of frames. In describing the Sub Pop honchos coming up to him, Kurt even attempts to portray himself as an unwilling participant in his own success. But he was a novice actor at this point, and he admits that he planned "to talk [Sub Pop] into" a full-length record. It is worth nothing that virtually every business expectation Kurt had of Sub Pop, at least in the short term, went unfulfilled.
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