27: Kurt Cobain (7 page)

None of Kurt's family had been invited, and Kurt had banned Krist's wife Shelli from the event because he believed she had been talking behind Courtney's back. The next day, when Krist and Shelli flew out of Hawaii, they believed that Nirvana had broken up. ‘Kurt's a fucking junkie asshole and I hate him!' Krist cried to Shelli. After the wedding, he and Krist could never be the same. Although he and Dave had also been like brothers, Kurt was now talking about firing the drummer. Kurt really had formed Nirvana to have a group to play his songs. So for the sake of personal expediency he had no problems with the idea of dumping Krist and Dave. He made them sign a retroactive deal over songwriting credits, giving himself the lion's share of songwriting royalties – perhaps not unreasonably, as essentially the songs were all his.

Nirvana did not in fact perform for another four months. This was unsurprising, really, as over the ensuing spring Kurt did little except take drugs after he and Courtney had flown back to Los Angeles. Dave Grohl was furious: there had been plans for a lengthy arena tour that spring, which had been aborted.

There were occasional efforts at self-control. In March Kurt entered an inpatient dependency unit at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills, where his heroin intake was swapped for methadone. In an interview that appeared in
Rolling Stone
the next month, Kurt expounded his personal worldview as he imagined it the instant of the interview: ‘I don't even drink anymore because it destroys my stomach. My body wouldn't allow me to take drugs if I wanted to, because I'm so weak. All drugs [do is] destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem. They're no good at all.'

In April Kurt and his new bride flew up to Seattle to look for a house to buy. On a visit to his sister Kim in Aberdeen, he threatened her that if she ever used heroin, he would get a gun and kill her. Kim was aware that Kurt was projecting his own inner hell onto her.
[41]
In January Kurt had been spending $100 a day on heroin. Six months later it was up to four times that, a staggering amount.

At the beginning of the summer, Nirvana were thrown back together, honouring a booked European tour which kicked off with a Dublin date on Sunday, 21 June. Five days later they played the massive annual Roskilde festival in Denmark, outside Copenhagen. There were further festival dates, in Norway, Finland, France and Spain. And in late August, Nirvana returned to the UK, to again play Reading festival, this time headlining. The show began with Kurt singing a couple of lines of Bette Midler's ‘The Rose' after being wheeled onstage in a wheelchair by
Melody Maker
journalist Everett True.

While onstage at Reading, Kurt may have had something on his mind. In an article published in the September edition of
Vanity Fair
, which appeared in early August, Courtney Love confirmed to writer Lynn Hirschberg that she and Cobain had been using heroin early in her pregnancy. The article, still on the newsstands on 18 August 1992, the date of birth of Frances Bean Cobain, would have devastating implications. Although both Courtney and Kurt claimed that Hirschberg took her words out of context, child welfare services launched an investigation questioning their parenting abilities. Although the investigation was eventually called off, it was not before Frances had been removed from her parents' custody for a short time, beginning when she was two weeks old.

Returning to Los Angeles from a triumphant visit to England at the beginning of September, Kurt decided once again to enter a treatment programme, this time at Exodus in Marina del Rey. Was the new responsibility of fatherhood weighing on his conscience? Or was it fear of the consequences of the
Vanity Fair
article? At Exodus he was prescribed buprenorphine, an anti-addiction drug which almost had the effect of immediately relieving his stomach pains.

Kurt took a brief leave of absence from Exodus to appear on the MTV Awards show. When Kurt announced he wanted to play ‘Rape Me', a new song, the MTV bigwigs were apoplectic. On learning that the MTV employee assigned to deal directly with them would be fired if they played the song, the band agreed to stick to the agreed number, ‘Lithium'. Live, to the MTV executives' horror, Kurt played the opening chords of ‘Rape Me' … before strutting into ‘Lithium', as promised. Backstage Kurt and Courtney, with Frances on her lap, found themselves face to face with Axl Rose, an especial bête noire of Kurt's on account of his absurd rock star posturing, and his model girlfriend – rock star model girlfriends were sneered at by Courtney as an ultimate cliché. When Courtney asked Rose if he would be Frances's godfather, the Guns N' Roses man was not oblivious to her intended sarcasm. ‘You shut your bitch up, or I'm taking you down to the pavement,' he threatened Kurt. Kurt responded with a smile: ‘Okay, bitch. Shut up.'
[42]
Rose and his girlfriend departed, tails between their legs.

The next day there was a Nirvana show in Portland, followed by a benefit against music censorship in Seattle. At the 16,000-seater sold-out Seattle date, Kurt's father Don showed up backstage, the first time Kurt had seen him for eight years. Also present was his mother Wendy and his sister Kim. When Kurt began to raise his voice towards his father, Wendy led the others out of the dressing room. Later – unusually – Kurt walked to the stage in utter silence to perform the finest show Seattle had ever had from Nirvana. Don's reappearance would grant Kurt songwriting material, specifically for the autobiographical ‘Serve the Servants'.

For some weeks Kurt and Courtney stayed in assorted expensive Seattle hotels, Kurt worryingly registering as Simon Ritchie, the real name of Sid Vicious. They had bought a house overlooking Lake Washington, some thirty miles away, and it was being substantially rebuilt and renovated. As cigarette burns and drug detritus built up in hotel rooms which they would request were never cleaned, invariably they would finally be kicked out of these assorted lodgings. During this time in Seattle, in October 1992, Nirvana recorded several songs, mainly as instrumentals. The demo session was with Jack Endino, the
Bleach
producer, and many of these songs would later be re-recorded for
In Uterh
.

That autumn of 1992, with Frances still kept from them, Kurt and Courtney seemed on the edge of madness. Cracks were very visible. When Victoria Clarke, an Irish journalist, announced she was proposing to write an unauthorized biography of Nirvana, Courtney was enraged. She called up Clarke and – accompanied by Kurt – left a 31-minute harangue on her answering machine. Some of Kurt's threats went as follows: ‘At this point I don't give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I'm threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few thousand dollars to have you snuffed out, but maybe I'll try the legal way. First.' Surprisingly vicious words from a man who, in 1992, was the world's leading stoner anti-hero.

Two weeks before Christmas 1992, a ‘new' Nirvana album was in the stores.
Incesticide
was a collection of fifteen tunes, some previously released. Tracks included ‘Dive' and ‘Sliver' from the ‘Sliver' single; cover tunes like the Vaselines' ‘Son of a Gun' and Devo's ‘Turnaround' from
Hormoaning
, a Nirvana EP released only in Australia and Japan in 1992; ‘Downer' from Bleach; and ‘Mexican Seafood' from a 1989 Sub Pop compilation. The cover art was a painting by Kurt. Hardly promoted by DGC, whose desire to have more Nirvana ‘product' on sale was presumably balanced against the intended release the next year of a brand new album by the band, the record almost immediately sold half a million copies in the US, where it made the Top 40.

In January 1993, Nirvana played a pair of enormous festival dates in Brazil. The first show, in Sao Paulo, had an audience of 110,000. Kurt was drinking and taking pills and could hardly play. Much of the set consisted of cover versions: when playing Queen's ‘We Will Rock You', Kurt changed the lyrics to ‘We will fuck you.'

After performing ‘Territorial Pissings', Kurt dived into the audience, smashed his guitar, and lobbed pieces of it to the crowd. Some forty minutes into the set, a frustrated Krist hurled his bass at Kurt and walked off stage. Contracted to play for ninety minutes to secure their mammoth fee, the crew were obliged to fetch Krist to finish the set. When Krist returned, he picked up his bass from the stage, not bothering to retune it. At which point a guitar tech rolled a cantaloupe melon onstage. Kurt started smashing the fruit on his guitar strings, playing his guitar with it. Then the band switched instruments, with Kurt on drums, Krist on guitar, and Dave on bass. A portion of the audience walked out in disgust.

‘The band started to really fail me emotionally,' Kurt said, in a partial explanation to Jon Savage, ‘because a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were playing a lot of these festivals in the daytime. There's nothing more boring than doing that. The audiences are massive and none of them care what band is up on stage. I was just getting over my drug addiction, or trying to battle that, and it was just too much. For the rest of the year I kept going back and forth between wanting to quit and wanting to change our name, cos I still really enjoy playing with Chris and Dave and I couldn't see us splitting up because of the pressures of success. It's just pathetic, you know: to have to do something like that. I don't know if there is much of a conscious connection between Chris and Dave and I, when we play live. I don't usually even notice Chris and Dave: I'm in my own world. I'm not saying it doesn't matter whether they're there or not, that I could hire studio musicians or something. I know it wouldn't be the same.'

The next Brazil show was in Rio de Janeiro a week later: Kurt opened the performance with a few lines from Electric Light Orchestra's ‘Telephone Line'. Kurt, who had had a row with Courtney, had been threatening to jump out of a high window of his hotel. Eventually the tour manager found Kurt a hotel with a room on the ground floor, which was a dosshouse compared to the palatial five-star hotel into which he had been booked.

In their time off between the two Brazilian shows, the three group members were supposed to be working on new songs, sessions already having been booked for recording a new album. After his first night in his down-at-heel hotel, Kurt showed up the next day at the demo studio in Rio, ready to work. He had with him the first version of a new song, ‘Heart-Shaped Box', which they played at the Rio show on 23 January, along with another newie, ‘Scentless Apprentice'.

Kurt was insisting that the new album would be entitled
I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
. Several times in his journals he had written this phrase. ‘When Kurt used to come out with that I Hate Myself and I Want to Die stuff,' said Jon Savage, ‘people would completely miss his sense of humour. He was being very ironic: I asked him about this when I interviewed him.'

On Valentine's Day, 1993, Nirvana journeyed to Pachyderm Studios, in woodland near tiny Cannon Falls in Minnesota, to begin recording their new album. The facility had been selected by Nirvana's record company for its pastoral isolation – one that would hopefully ensure the absence of negative characters. Steve Albini, former member of Big Black, a major influence on Kurt, was producing: Kurt loved some of his other productions, notably the Pixies'
Surfer Rosa
and the Breeders'
Pod
.

After six days, the group had down the basic tracks. The entire album took half as long as
Nevermind
to make. Among the songs were ‘Heart-Shaped Box' and ‘Pennyroyal Tea', ‘two of Nirvana's most accomplished works,' according to Charles R. Cross.
[43]
Yet Courtney Love's own, tighter lyrical writing had clearly influenced her husband. Over subsequent weeks, the
I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
title was changed, first to
Verse, Chorus, Verse
, and then to
In Utero
, a line from a poem by Courtney.

In March 1993 Kurt and Courtney moved into a relatively modest rented house at 11301 Lakeside Avenue NE in Seattle, as the house they had bought was several months from being ready to live in. To get around the city, Kurt bought a grey 1986 Volvo 240DL, stylish and safe.

A social worker from Los Angeles flew up to Seattle and declared herself satisfied that Frances was being cared for correctly. But the controversy over Kurt and Courtney's child's custody had cost almost a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees. Inevitably, there was a problem with nannies. Unable to cope with the ‘bohemian' lifestyle of the parents, they seemed to arrive and leave the house as though through a revolving door.

Kurt's relationship with Don, his own father, remained largely unresolved. That spring of 1993, Kurt wrote a letter to Don which he never sent. It concluded: ‘I've never taken sides with you or my mother because while I was growing up, I had equal contempt for you both.'

The huge success of Nirvana was played out against the background of assorted vicious territorial wars in what was now former Yugoslavia. For Krist Novoselic, with his Croatian blood, this must have been deeply troubling. On 9 April 1993, Nirvana played at a benefit for Bosnian rape victims at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. They showcased eight new songs, all of which would be on
In Utero
. Also on the bill were L7, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and the Breeders.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings was the release of
In Utero
. Despite having wanted Steve Albini to produce the record, Kurt now thought the sound was a little too raw. Scott Litt, who had produced four REM albums, including 1992's massive breakthrough
Automatic for the People
, was brought in to make ‘Heart-Shaped Box' and ‘All Apologies', both obvious singles, more radio-friendly. Acting in archetypal punk situationist manner, Kurt threatened to release the original Albini mix album as
I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
. A month after this, he said he would release the remixed record, with the title
Verse, Chorus, Verse
.