I Found My Friends (35 page)

Nirvana decided to retaliate.

GILLY ANN HANNER:
We went off, we're all really upset. The crowd is booing and yelling. There was a big gap … partially because we didn't complete the set and partly because Nirvana stalled after that; they were upset and didn't like how we'd been treated. So they stalled as long as they could. Then it was time, they had to. Courtney came and told us, “Hey, they were going to not play because of how you got treated but they're getting $250,000 for this show—they can't really not play…” I totally understood, I didn't expect them to not play just because of us. They went up, played, Kurt was … he never engaged with the audience anyway, but he was real standoffish even for him during that show—they didn't play their hit song, they pretended to play “Teen Spirit” but never did, they did a big noise jam, they really dragged it out.

Cobain plainly stated his intentions in that warm-up jam, announcing, “I can shit on the stage; I promise to shit on your head…” As well as teasing “Teen Spirit,” they killed the clock by starting songs with weak runs then restarting. Cobain replaced a verse of “Come as You Are” with “Hey-hey-HEY-hey!,” barely mumbled “Beeswax,” then walked off, leaving Grohl to hammer on toy drums while Novoselic deadpanned, “We're one of the most exciting bands on the face of the planet, as you can see…” At another point Krist roared, “Tu me gusto TECHNO!” and impersonated techno over Grohl's improvising … This was music as mockery.

The locals weren't aware it was deliberate; all they saw was a famous junkie putting on a bad show.

GABRIEL GUERRISI:
It was not seen as a band being annoying; but everything did seem to be going without direction, Kurt not knowing the lyrics or the riffs, sometimes he walked off to the backstage and seemed absent from the show, a lot of things were said about it. People read the performance as a little bit crazy rather than seeing it as an angry one … It was known that Kurt was in rehab, so anything could be expected. Nobody related the tone of the show with the incident involving Calamity Jane until
Incesticide
came up … It was not one of the best; I was a little bit lost among the jams and songs that I didn't know. I don't like stadiums either, where the sound comes and goes with the wind.

The bands waited for the audience to disperse.

GABRIEL GUERRISI:
There were food stains on the wall as if they had made some jokes. Kurt looked like a zombie, like somebody lost floating to some other place, no relevant attitude, like a person in suspension … Courtney Love was in a bridal dress … After the show, some of Los Brujos went to greet them. Dave and Krist came in a good mood, made some photos for the press, and left.

GILLY ANN HANNER:
After the show, my band mates got slaughtered, drank a lot—got ill. We were stressed out … the next day we had to go back home and were faced with this large hotel bill from having eaten snacks out [of] the minibar. I think anyone who isn't used to big hotels has done that: “Look at all this free stuff!” We had no money, we were in trouble, the minder, this woman who had been so nice to us the day before, wasn't nice to us at all and told us, “You shouldn't have done that, it was really ugly when you yelled at the crowd, women don't do that.” She really got on my case … So, we went back to our broken-down van, our broken guitars, all our crap in New Mexico … Then our band imploded once we tried to go back on tour. We'd lost heart … our guitars were broken, we couldn't get the money we were supposed to get because we didn't have a bank account in the name Calamity Jane and that's who the check was made out to—it took us three months to get the money. We were broke, bummed out … Argentina was our last show.

Until Buenos Aires, the two October shows had been the only times in 1992 Nirvana declined to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” From its debut, from 150 known sets, the song was excluded only 11 times. Four of those times (Pukkelpop; October 3–4, 1992; the Mia Zapata benefit) were when Nirvana was a substitute or secret guest. Without the pressure to please, they would drop it. Sometimes it was done in anger, as in Buenos Aires, or in Chicago on the
In Utero
tour when the gig went so badly the audience booed and Cobain yelled at them for throwing wet T-shirts onto his pedals. MTV's ever-despised management was also a factor; having refused to play it at the MTV Video Music Awards, Nirvana pointedly sliced it from
MTV Live and Loud
. In November 1993, when negotiating
MTV Unplugged
, the band skipped the song at two performances before hauling the support bands onstage to demolish the tune as a jam. In a non-coincidence, the final two times the song was evicted from the set list were Nirvana's last-ever shows. Cobain was a musician; he voiced his dissatisfaction through music by killing his most famous song—a vengeance running to his last days.

January 1993; Nirvana headed to Brazil for their first shows since the Buenos Aires debacle. This was the Hollywood Rock Festival, an event named after a cigarette brand, Hollywood, that was itself named after one of the grand symbols of American mainstream culture. It was apt, given the local audience were aware of Nirvana only as part of the larger wave of US culture sold into the market.

CASTOR DAUDT,
Defalla:
MTV Brazil has just started to air, and everybody was waiting for the “next big thing.” Turned out that it was us, and from the States, it was Nirvana … When MTV Brazil opened, in 1990, that was the starting point for every good Brazilian rock band of that time.

EDU K,
Defalla:
By then we were not living under the dark clouds of the dictatorship that shredded the country apart in the '60s; we were free to enjoy our Coca-Colas, MTV, and rock concerts.

BRUNO CASTRO GOUVEIA,
Biquini Cavadão:
Until 1990, all the music production was brought by the five major record companies: EMI, RCA, WEA, CBS, and PolyGram. Most of the records were released here, but sometimes it took nearly a year to have new albums, especially from minor labels and [the] punk movement.

Nirvanamania had already hit Brazil.

IVAN BUSIC,
Dr. Sin:
Nirvana were already taking control and becoming the number one band on the planet.

EDU K:
They were, for sure, a huge crossover band here; pop heads as well as rockers and metal heads loved them. It's like, we, the cool people, were aware of them a long time before the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video set the world on fire, but after they took MTV by assault, there was no resisting their power and panache!

ANDRÉ STELLA:
The first time I heard Nirvana was in 1991, on MTV … I tell you, it was a punch to the face. I couldn't believe what I was hearing … The next day, in college, my friends were all asking me, “Did you hear that band Nirvana on MTV last night, did you hear that song? The song kicks ass and the singer looks like you!”

The audiences didn't view Nirvana as unique. They were only one among many world-class American cultural invaders.

CASTOR DAUDT:
There was a kind of “Nirvanamania,” but there were other bands considered just as important like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Extreme … Like I said, MTV Brazil was our connection with the “music world” and we saw all these great bands on a daily basis and listened to them on the radio.

The Brazilian bands chosen to play the festival were all significant regional stars.

EDU K:
We were traveling by bus to a city for a gig, an' we opened up the newspaper an' learned that we were voted by public choice to play the festival!

CASTOR DAUDT:
It was the perfect festival for us to be in, because we were the Brazilian band that had most in common with these bands and we had just released a very well-received album … Apparently the people who were producing that festival thought the same, Defalla was the perfect band to open the festival and represent the new Brazilian sound.

IVAN BUSIC:
Dr. Sin was new, but we were already very popular among the rock scene in Brazil because of many other bands we played with before, such as, Platina, Taffo, A Chave do Sol, Anjos da Noite … We are still a reference when talking about technical musicians and so in the beginning it sounded kind of weird to put our band on the same day as Nirvana, a very straight rock band.

BRUNO CASTRO GOUVEIA:
The show was in the Morumbi Stadium (aka Estádio Cícero Pompeu de Toledo), a soccer stadium adapted for the concerts. It was complete[ly] filled with nearly 60,000 people. I think that there was a ten-meter gap between band and audience … Biquini Cavadão opened for Alice in Chains and Red Hot Chili Peppers. After my show and Alice's, I was hidden at the back of the stage to see RHCP performing … Suddenly, Layne Staley from Alice in Chains arrived … When I looked back again, Kurt and Courtney were also there, just behind me! I spoke only a few words with Layne, the usual thing: “How was the gig?” And I thought, Look at this calm guy with his big wife, a bit shy and quiet: he's Kurt Cobain! Then security arrived. A big guy asking us in English to move from there. Kurt didn't like this and started arguing with him, so did Courtney. I was predicting a fight between them and decided to leave the place … I believe we were not allowed to stay because the RHCP show had special effects—they used helmets with flames throwing from the top of their heads, for instance. I believe the security was not only a question of keeping the place clean. I left them discussing and arguing with Kurt and Courtney … Kurt was serious, not smiling as I recall, but didn't seem angry or upset, or even uncomfortable. Just a quiet guy.

The next evening, however, was close to a reprise of Buenos Aires—this time with no gallant justifications.

IVAN BUSIC:
I guess that for that concert Kurt was a little bit crazier and he couldn't sing or play guitar very well … The studio album with “Smells like Teen Spirit” had such a great sound that we were really shocked; Dave played the drums very well and the bass sounded OK, but Kurt was on another planet … I remember Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers going onstage with them to play trumpet—oh my God … That's OK. It's only rock 'n' roll.

At its nadir, Novoselic threw his bass at Cobain and stormed off, only to be hustled back on once reminded of legal obligations—he didn't bother re-tuning. Cobain, meanwhile, mashed cantaloupe melon over his guitar.

EDU K:
Kurt couldn't get those harmonic notes he did in “Teen Spirit” right anytime they played it. I thought it was hilarious!

Nirvana capitulated, swapped instruments, and ran the clock down jamming old pop songs. In an echo of Buenos Aires Cobain mauled “We Will Rock You,” singing to the audience, “We will fuck you” instead.

EDU K:
I'd never expected Nirvana to do to a “tight” show an' they lived up to their legend. The Chili Peppers, on the other hand, did their “tight” an' bored usual end-of-the-tour show. They lacked energy and danger an' I was disgusted by that an' threw all my Pepper records an' T-shirts in the bin when I came back home … Lemme tell you, when Nirvana swapped instruments an' played Duran Duran's “Rio” I literally creamed my pants, ha-ha! It was incredible. It's not your usual daily thing that you'd see a band falling apart and being so careless an' wild onstage … It seems to me that some people in the press or in the crowd were a li'l pissed off in a sense because, fuck, they've waited that long for this? It was really mixed, in fact. I myself think the ones that didn't get it missed the point of it all and I absolutely loved both shows an' thought they were real genius!

Edu K's positivity is matched by a very clear-sighted assessment of what was witnessed.

EDU K:
It was pretty clear that they were collapsing but, crowds are like Romans at the Coliseum, are we not? Who doesn't like to see public figures falling apart in public? I mean, Nirvana was … this gigantic wounded animal, raw an' alive an' bleeding in front of everybody: if that's not what legends are made of, I don't know what is! To me, at that moment in time, Nirvana was scratching their names with broken an' bloody fingernails in the Rock 'N' Roll Badass Blackboard. It was the stuff of nightmares an' forever unforgettable … They had a lotta guts to do what they did an' also, a show is not only about goin' onstage an' reproducing your hits: these guys were the real deal an' like the Pistols in their heyday, they were def floggin' a dead horse in front of thousands.

CASTOR DAUDT:
It was Nirvana. They had a sort of “free pass” to do that kind of stuff.

Darker rumors circulated about the reasons for the poor show.

IVAN BUSIC:
We had the chance to talk a bit with Dave before the concert and, of course, he was a very nice guy. Unfortunately, Kurt was kind of “too fast” to talk to anyone, if you know what I mean … After a bit we saw him backstage very,
very
slow, if you know what I mean … Still, he shook our hands and was nice to us right before our sound check.

CASTOR DAUDT:
I remember people talking backstage, and back in the hotel, saying that Kurt had taken a lot of pills, like Valium and stuff … the media saw it as funny and punk. We all had listened to Nirvana stories. I think nobody saw it as sad or bad.

BRUNO CASTRO GOUVEIA:
Brazilians believed that Nirvana was uncomfortable with the fact that the festival was sponsored by a famous brand of cigarettes. Therefore, they did a non-show, played with anger, spite, ironically changing instruments, asking Flea to play trumpet … The critics loved it! It was all against the system! The public didn't understand at all. There were some boos.