I Found My Friends (2 page)

TONY POUKKULA:
In the Raymond days, at that house, we'd party every night, doesn't matter what night it was! We'd have musicians in, didn't matter who you were, you could just come on down and play—not even necessarily bands, but play, we just wanted to hear. That house was very isolated, even if there was a fight out in the driveway it didn't affect anybody, very secluded.

RYAN AIGNER:
I worked with a band called Black Ice. They were a very successful cover band that did shows locally … these guys seemed so skilled and so talented, so good technically … Tony Poukkula rented the house where the first Nirvana show went down—that's why it happened, because I'd worked with Black Ice. He was their guitar player.

TONY POUKKULA:
I talked to Ryan and he was saying, “Hey, I've got these guys—Kurt, Krist, and Aaron—they've got a band together, they're coming up with some cool stuff, would you mind them coming by and jamming sometime?” It was Ryan's suggestion, and I just said, “Yeah, we're going all the time, just tell me when you want.” It was pretty quick after that.

RYAN AIGNER:
They didn't have the wherewithal, they didn't have the place, they didn't have the van, they didn't have the money, they didn't have the job … I was a carpet-layer so I had all these things at my disposal and I was thinking in terms of networking—that's how my mind worked. So I put these pieces together and casually said, “What are you guys doing Friday? Let's do this thing…” Initially there was a kneejerk “Nah, we better not” … I just finessed and kept it up—there wasn't a lot of pressure, they could go try it out and it'd be fun and they could try it out … It didn't take a lot of effort on their part, put it that way. It's about a forty-five-minute drive, so we pile in and start playing.

TONY POUKKULA:
Ryan's good. He'll have made sure they had their act together before they came down. To me it was just going to be the regular thing: a jam session. I had my guitar warmed up by the time they were setting up … I didn't actually know the song. You'll hear me say “I don't know it!” That's why you hear the whammy bar going nuts, plus I was probably “on my way” … After Ryan told me, “Hey, they don't really jam with people,” I was like, “Cool, I'll go grab a beer,” so I sat my guitar down and went into the kitchen and after a little bit Jeff opened his jacket and pulled his collar out and showed me he had that recorder going. I said, “Right on, they actually sound pretty good. They've got some cool stuff.” … They were really rough, but back then you can tell they were just trying to be themselves—coming up with some melody lines—it was different, definitely, to what we were used to. I was just having fun. Krist was standing on the coffee table with duct tape on his nipples and I was just sitting there laughing.

RYAN AIGNER:
We weren't hated, but we weren't liked.… when you grow up in a conservative culture and you try to be liberal or avant-garde or artsy, then you get a kind of rejection—a feeling of “You're not welcome here.” That's hard to take, growing up. The things you've heard, the negative things, about how Nirvana felt about Grays Harbor County, we didn't make that all up. We really wanted to be accepted by our peers and we really weren't until much later. It wasn't because we didn't try to do shows down here. It's what the Raymond show was—they went down, did their thing, and the crowd stood in the kitchen and went “Wow, what the hell is this?” I was in the room, Shelli [Dilley], Tracy [Marander] … about four of us who would have been at the rehearsal if they'd been back in Aberdeen while the Raymond crowd looked through from the kitchen thinking, What the hell is that? and not running into the room like they did in 1991, '92, '93—not pogoing like they did at the Coliseum. We didn't forget that. Standing on the stage at the Coliseum in '92, I was a youth-group advisor for our church and looking out in the crowd I saw kids from my youth group looking up at me onstage and I'm looking out thinking, You were the guys who didn't think they were good enough for the radio—there's 16,000 people pogoing to “Teen Spirit”—I tried to tell you this in '88.

Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic—Cobain's best friend and a gregarious foil to his band-mate's quieter presence—and Aaron Burckhard were not the new Beatles. In this first incarnation they were blaring out a diverse vibe ranging from hard rock to psychedelic covers to sludgy punk—they weren't quite sure what they wanted to be, and that showed in other aspects of their behavior onstage.

SLIM MOON,
Nisqually Delta Podunk Nightmare:
Kurt was definitely showing his “performer” side already. To the best of my recollection, although he seemed nervous, he was dressed very outrageously, sort of a send-up of a glam outfit, and he did a memorable “solo” by squatting down and messing with all the controls on his effects pedals.

For some, however, there was an immediate connection.

JOHN PURKEY,
Machine:
I was in a band called Noxious Fumes—we did a lot of shows at the Tropicana, and Krist Novoselic would travel with the Melvins to the Tropicana … I met Krist when he roadied for them. So, years later, one of those random nights where I went to the Community World Theater—didn't know who was playing—Skid Row was onstage … It was maybe a couple dozen people—maybe twenty-five people or so … I walked in and was like, Wow, that's Krist … His band's cool … Right on! Krist is on bass … So I sat down and watched them play and totally loved it. The emotion, what I was hearing—I really liked. Kurt's voice really blew me away from the start, hands-down—it's a certain sound in his voice. After the show I approached Kurt and I asked him if they had a tape, a demo. He said they were going to record.

Recording was still some way off for this young band. April 1987 was a fresh start for Kurt Cobain in which he gained something that proved crucial to his artistic flourishing: a real home at 114
½
Pear Street in Olympia. His parents' split in 1976 had torn him from the one he had known for eight years—the longest he'd been at a single address in his whole life. From age fifteen, his living arrangements had further imploded and for the next half a decade he didn't stay even a year at any address. At seventeen, eighteen, and again at nineteen he hovered on the border of homelessness and in the ultimate regression slept at the hospital in which he'd been born.

With nowhere lower to go, he climbed. It wasn't through pluck or courage, though. Cobain had a benefactor: his girlfriend, Tracy.

RYAN AIGNER:
Tracy Marander was really involved with the scene and had become a big advocate of the Melvins early on—that's how she met Kurt. She was one of the few Olympia people buying into the little music scene that was happening down in Grays Harbor, which was pretty important because she validated what he was doing from a position of having this much vaster exposure to the music and artists going on around Olympia and the Evergreen State College, yet she was saying,
You guys are kind of cool
 … Tracy went to every Nirvana show. She was very supportive … Krist had [his girlfriend] Shelli. She worked. He worked too, but he could quit working and not work for two-three weeks or a month; he was a painter so he'd work the summer months but then not work because it poured down with rain, so Shelli had this constant job that was always making sure the rent was paid and food was on the table. But when he was away from Shelli, he might or he might not have money in his pocket. Kurt was the same way, he had jobs when he absolutely had to—but he had Tracy Marander, and both Shelli and Tracy worked at this cafeteria for Boeing, worked graveyard shift there, but when either one of those guys didn't have their girlfriend around to support them, they might not have money in their pocket …

Nirvana's next show in May nearly stopped before it started due to a simple case of youthful high spirits—possibly the
whole
case
of spirits.

SLIM MOON:
Krist was very drunk, and yes he was a jolly drunk but also sometimes very annoying. I remember parties where he set off fire extinguishers, broke furniture while dancing on tables … His inebriation didn't affect the music, or at least I don't remember it being affected, but I do think that Kurt was less theatrical at that show.

This was a band sufficiently practiced that they could still go onstage when one-third of the band turned up blitzed … Yet not so focused that the band members made a point of not arriving blitzed.

This was the closing event of the Greater Evergreen Students' Community Cooperation Organization (GESCCO), Nirvana's introduction to the unusually fertile musical environment of Olympia arising significantly from the presence of the Evergreen State College.

SLIM MOON:
GESCCO came about because some college students figured out that they could get funds from the college for a “student organization” that they could use to rent a warehouse space and put on rock shows and art-gallery stuff. It was closing because the college had figured out that rock shows created an insurance liability. GESCCO was a big empty warehouse; it might once have been an auto garage.

GEORGE SMITH,
Dangermouse:
It came with money from Evergreen State College to cross-pollinate the college cultural scene with the Olympia cultural scene—it was definitely a planned endeavor to engage the two communities … when it started there was a seminar where they invited everybody to come down and they had a big group discussion with somebody moderating and a circle of chairs and everyone could have their say about what GESCCO should be … music dominated the scheduling, while the powers behind it were always trying to get more visual arts or theatrical arts, but it never really panned out. As much as anything bands are more organized; if you're touring, you might book a show two months in advance, so the schedule would fill up with music …

Although small, Nirvana's April show had won them an early supporter.

SLIM MOON:
I was not a regular organizer at GESCCO. I just ended up putting on that show because word had gone around that GESCCO was closing very suddenly, and I thought it'd be good to have a “last show.” The bands that played were mostly picked because they were willing to play on short notice, although I definitely asked Skid Row because I had enjoyed their show at CWT … The audience was punk rockers and college students. Mostly friends, people in the music scene in Olympia. I bet half the audience were in bands of their own … For some larger shows like the Melvins, the organizers had brought in stage risers, but for the show you are talking about, we just set up a little PA in one corner.

This show went well enough that the band were invited onto the college radio station, KAOS in Olympia. The band's musical home at this period of time was usually Tacoma.

JOHN PURKEY:
What happens is a lot of musicians come from here and they move—you'll hear that a lot. There's a lot of bands … who are from Tacoma or were in Tacoma or had connections then move down the road. Someone like the Melvins, they never lived in Seattle. Pretty much their original stomping grounds were Tacoma and Olympia and being from Montesano, then they split, started touring, and ended up moving to L.A.… There was a house that Noxious Fumes and Girl Trouble lived at, it was called the Hell House, and it was pretty much the only place that punk bands played in Tacoma. There was one bar called the Bed Rock—they did a couple shows, but it was pretty much nothing. But the Hell House was basically the party house in 1983–85. They would have touring bands play there—Soul Asylum played there, a lot of different bands.

Krist Novoselic moved to Tacoma in 1987 and it was here, at the Community World Theater, that one of the residents of the Hell House, Jim May, would host five of their seven real shows between April 1987 and April 1988.

The Community Theater was a hub for bands; in a brief eighteen months the venue staged an astonishing 130 shows for all-ages audiences.

BRUCE PURKEY:
Unless you were in a big city, and Tacoma is still relatively small, there was very little, if any, punk-rock community back in the early '80s. Most schools had a small group of three or four friends who were into punk. Punk was not cool in any way. You might as well have been the biggest nerd in the school. That's how people looked at you. So when you discovered another person into punk/underground music, you immediately felt a kinship … The Hell House on Fifty-Sixth Street was a hub of house-party shows and welcomed any local band … It wasn't until after some of the major venues like the Gorilla Gardens in Seattle closed that a real community of bands started actually growing and playing in Tacoma. Of course, the Community World Theater made it easier for a Tacoma band to find a place to play. Mid-to-late '80s you started to see a few bands becoming Tacoma fixtures: Soylent Green, He Sluts, Inspector Luv and the Ride Me Babies, Silent Treatment, Subvert, AMQA … The Community World Theater was a rare thing. Run by Jim May, one of us. He didn't make anything on the venture, I'm sure. It was probably a huge headache, and I would guess it lost him money, but for a brief moment the kids had their own place to play. Sure, it was a former porn theater with no heat and a shitty PA, but it was ours. It is no accident that the Community World Theater is remember fondly by most everyone who ever played there, or saw a show there. It was as if, for a moment, the punks actually ran things … It was how things felt for a few months right after Nirvana broke huge—essentially killing hair metal—it felt important, like we were finally noticed, finally being heard. Of course, it was short-lived and quickly coopted.