I Found My Friends (5 page)

DAVE WHITING:
Born on the conservative-cowboy-laden plains of eastern Washington, in the Orwellian year of 1984 … We spent five years of our initial history in Spokane …

Of the bands Nirvana played with during Foster's stint, not one had its roots in Tacoma.

DAVE WHITING:
Needless to say, I don't remember much from that night, or the actual band. We of course met, talked superficially, and courteously listened to each other while mulling about, all the while waiting to push onwards to Seattle … I was fairly oblivious of the music from that night and was not stricken with any sort of awe of having heard something great. My head was more into what we came to do that night, so anything less than extraordinary would not have registered with me … No succinct memories except the vague ones mentioned earlier. What a downer, eh?

Even later, in May, it was still the case that Nirvana were playing second fiddle or lower to numerous other bands.

SHAWN LAWLOR,
Herd of Turtles:
I don't remember their show much. People were moshing from the get-go and really into their sound … It was a big crowd. I remember Nirvana played earlier than we did—so yes, I joke about being able to claim that Nirvana opened for my band—we played right before the Young Fresh Fellows, who headlined the show …

And this wasn't unusual. Neither was the Olympia house party.

RONNA MYLES-ERA,
Treehouse:
This was a fun, crazy, and productive time in Olympia. There were a lot of bands and there were shows pretty much every weekend. In Olympia you didn't need a club to play at, just someone willing to let you play in their house, and there were plenty of those. House shows were the best … House shows were a really big part of the music scene, and that made it easier to play because even if there were only fifteen people, it felt like a full house and you just gave it your all. And if you didn't get invited to play a show, you just put on your own … Our practice space was in the basement of our house, and Steve [Helbert], Damon [Romero], and I all lived there. Our house was called the Tree House.

Nirvana readily embraced the house-party ethos of the local music community. At least a third of their shows from 1987 to 1988 were house parties or college dorms.

SLIM MOON:
I think that some of the house-party shows have been lost to the ages and aren't on any lists. At that point Lush was hopeful of putting out an album, or going on a tour, but we never did … Locally (meaning Olympia and Aberdeen and Tacoma), everybody knew that Nirvana were special. We knew we weren't nearly as good as them. And they drew more local fans than we did. We always played before them, even at parties.

The community within which Nirvana's members lived and socialized throughout the majority of their career was one of living in shared band houses in Olympia, playing one another's shows, sharing parties, and living life on the cheap.

LISA KOENIG,
Calamity Jane:
The good ol' Alamo … there was the Witch House, the Glass House, the Caddyshack—and the first place I ever lived after moving out of my parents' house was the Mansion, or, I think it was called the White House too; it was so cool it had two names. There were twelve of us living there, so our rent was only $50 a month. And we still couldn't afford coffee! What losers we were! None of us really had jobs, we just jammed and made money wherever we could … Then Tim Tafoya brought home scabies one day and the whole house broke out itching. It sucked the big one 'cause we kept passing it around and it seemed like it took forever to get rid of. I think we can rename that one the Scaby House.

While building their reputation within the band-house crowd in Olympia, it was Dave Foster, an old friend from Aberdeen, who held them together on drums. Yet there has been precious little true assessment of Foster's time in the band.

DAMON ROMERO:
I thought he was a solid drummer, good with the band. He rocked hard, he hit hard—I remember once having a conversation with Kurt and Krist where they were sort of complaining, but not about his drumming. It was just that they didn't think he was committed, that he didn't really want to leave Aberdeen. They wanted to be a band that worked and played and recorded and toured and they just got the sense he wasn't on board with that. He just wanted to play in a rock band and drink beer and be a good drummer.

Later biographies dwelled on various differences, and Cobain's journals fueled the fire with a letter claiming Foster was from “a totally different culture.” Yet crucially, what stands out in this unsent venting is that it's one of the rare occasions when Cobain acknowledged how good one of his early drummers was.

PAUL KIMBALL:
He was a great drummer to work with, really fun and funny a lot of the time … just a super-sweet soul.

RYAN AIGNER:
He's a funny guy, a crossover. You've got these worlds in every community: there's the mainstream … People that are musicians, number one, they're not part of the mainstream. They interact with the mainstream, but they've taken this passion for music, they've honed it, and they've become proactive and learned how to play an instrument. Now, you take that same guy that's a musician and you put him into an aesthetic like punk rock—now he's another step or two removed from the mainstream socially acceptable thing. Dave, he worked in the middle there: short haircut, he didn't wear the punk-rock weirdo clothes, he didn't give a flying crap about that, he was just a damn good musician and he just wanted to play and he really thought the music of Nirvana was good. I did too. When I said to Kurt that it was good enough to hear on the radio, that's what Dave heard. Kurt was so worried about whether or not it was Black Flag enough, Dave and I didn't care—it just sounded good and it was original and Dave didn't want to play Judas Priest covers the rest of his life. He wasn't going to get the Black Flag tattoo, he was just going to keep on being Dave.

Others remember little beyond the heft of Foster's equipment.

SHAWN LAWLOR:
Equipment-wise I don't remember what they had, except the drums being what I perceived as
too
big. The toms were probably 18 to 20 and 22 [inches].

SLIM MOON:
He had a really good
large
drum set. By large, I mean each piece was large, not that it had a lot of pieces. He tried to have a more “heavy” style than Aaron …

And some remember both his drums and his talent.

JASON MORALES,
Helltrout:
We were at another keg party and we met this other strange crazy redneck dude who happened to be partying there that night—we started talking to him and he pointed out he had played drums in Nirvana. “No way! I just saw those guys, they're great—why don't you come over to our place and play with us?” We hooked up with him the next morning; he was strolling 'round with a wicked hangover but he remembered us. We were waiting three, four hours, and he showed up with this gigantic drum kit—big double bass drum, everything huge, very Bonham-esque. He set it up and the first song … by the time we'd finished, we were like,
Holy shit this is awesome
. That's the birth of Helltrout right there.

While it was the Crover demo that kick-started Sub Pop's interest, it was Dave Foster holding the beat down when the label's owners saw them in April and when Nirvana received a spot on a Sub Pop Sunday show that month.

CHRIS QUINN:
He gets short shrift in history [but] he was an incredible drummer—this was a guy able to play stuff that Dale Crover had played on, he was great … He was always cool when I talked to him, but a real Aberdeen guy, and he didn't have the same aspirations or the artistic inclinations that Kurt and Krist did. He just wanted to be a kickass drummer, and he was. A lot of the stuff said about him was just Kurt's personal stuff … That guy filled Dale's shoes, and that's no joke—they looked really good with him. I don't think he was as creative as Dale, but he could play those parts, do a lot of what Dale did. That's not to say I don't understand why they got rid of him and got Chad—Chad helped them do more of the poppy stuff. But Dave, being the type of drummer he was, for the time it was and what they were playing, he was amazing. I think the guy deserves more credit. He did help Nirvana bridge that gap.

The final piece soon fell into place. Nirvana fell into line with the sound Sub Pop was peddling and, on Foster's watch, the first songs showing off this alignment—“Blew” and “Big Cheese”—emerged.

SLIM MOON:
I think that Kurt was very influenced by what he was listening to in those days. When I first met him, he was listening to a lot of stuff on Touch and Go, such as Scratch Acid and Big Black, and those influences plus Devo and the Melvins inform the earlier stuff. He
did
start listening to more Sub Pop bands, along with stuff that he was being introduced to through the Olympia scene, and that started to show in the newer songs. I think Dinosaur [who were not yet called Dinosaur Jr. at that time] also influenced him a bit at that time, and he became less shy about his “classic rock” influences from his earlier teens. He once played me the first song he ever wrote, and I thought it sounded like vintage Aerosmith.

By June, Nirvana already had three more songs—“Mr. Moustache,” “Sifting,” and “Blandest”—mining the hard-rock/punk amalgam known as grunge.

CHRIS PUGH:
When I saw them play, I was a fan almost immediately. I felt that though their playing wasn't fantastic, their songs were great, so it was evident even in the early days that they got better fast, rehearsed a lot … by the fourth or fifth time they were really good. The crowds would erupt, people would dance! Their songs and Kurt's singing was very compelling. A lot of bands when they first start they're going to be rough—what got Nirvana to make the jump to great was Kurt's singing, his sense of melody; he was able to capture great hooks and still be a punk rocker—but it's the melody that set them apart.

But Foster wasn't there to see it.

AARON BURCKHARD:
Kurt and Krist would pick me up to come practice with them and just not tell Dave!

JASON MORALES:
The way they kicked him out was pretty lame—they didn't tell him anything, just advertised a show in the paper and he called them to ask about it and they said, “Well, you're not, but we are…”

Regardless, Dave Foster's brief spell with the band saw real change. He was there when it counted and Cobain wouldn't lose his desire to have a hard-hitting drummer someday …

 

4.0

Becoming a Seattle Band

April to June 1988

Punk wrapped itself
in the banner of rebellion, ostensibly against the “old dinosaurs” of '70s rock; generational conflict was explicitly part of the template for the US underground in the '80s. Frozen out by bars either unable to let in teens or simply not fond of punk, the underground was built around any locale in which underage kids could tear through songs. This was the world Nirvana inhabited, and they shared these same challenges and conflicts throughout their early years.

ALAN BISHOP,
Sun City Girls:
The original scene (at least in Austin) was made up of college art and RTF students with “weirdos” thrown in. The places you played, for the most part, were places where kids could not get into the shows … What was known as hardcore was largely based on [a] Do It Yourself ethic that realized that we all needed to find places where shows were all-ages and kids could come see for themselves that
they
could start bands, start fanzines, do something on their own … It was about showing that there was another choice on the table where self-expression lived and
everyone
could participate if they wanted. If you weren't interested, no worries. If you were, come on …

CRAIG CRAWFORD,
Mousetrap:
The music scene in Omaha at the time was very DIY … almost all of the shows were held in rented halls. Since bars in the States require one to be twenty-one years of age to enter, you would have to play independent venues that didn't serve alcohol. The Cog Factory on Leavenworth Street served this purpose, and the names of bands that came out of that place is long and legendary … The Lifticket was located in a lower-working-class neighborhood called Benson, and while the owner was very accommodating to bands, depending on the night the clientele could be a little rough. Later, there was the Capitol Bar downtown, and that became pretty much our main venue from '91 to '95.

JOSH KRIZ,
Anxiety Prophets:
The Zoo, ah the Zoo … miss that place. As you walked in, there was a tall Plexiglas wall that divided the two lower halves of the venue [the over-21 section, and the stage and dance floor area that was all-ages]. There was an upper level that was also all-ages that had a banister that allowed concertgoers to look over the railing and see the action below. The walls were all painted in zebra and animal-print paint jobs (the Zoo, right?). The common denominator was black … lots and lots of black paint—probably about 70 percent was painted black. It allowed smoking back in the day, and there was a thick smoky haze inside.

In Seattle the Teen Dance Ordinance of 1985 generated a clear divide between venues that were friendly to those under twenty-one and those with closed doors.

JAMES BURDYSHAW,
Cat Butt:
Made it nearly impossible to put on an all-ages show in a legitimate club. The ordinance would insist if your place was under-21, you had to pay hefty fees for insurance and to meet fire codes. It was a move by the city to close clubs that were havens for teen runaways to do what they wanted and not tell their parents anything … Every time Seattle opened all-ages or eighteen-plus nightclubs, they would be shut down quick. The Underground in the University District was where the
Sub Pop 200
record-release party was held, and that place lasted maybe six months tops.