I Found My Friends (36 page)

ANDRÉ STELLA:
The festival was sponsored by a brand of cigarette and Kurt said he didn't know that when he came to Brazil to do the shows. And he didn't like it. I think his attitude on the show was because of that.

Given that Nirvana had been sold as hell-raising pranksters, everyone simply thought what they wished, whether that meant Cobain's demons were on display, it was a protest gesture, or it was just rock 'n' roll. Heedless of what people had made of his performance, Cobain simply retreated into seclusion and would be seen only fleetingly before it was time for the Rio de Janeiro gig.

JARDEL SEBBA,
Fan
: On the Tuesday before I had the chance to meet [Kurt] and Courtney (and Frances). They were the only act in this festival who were not in Copacabana (they were in São Conrado, which was a much more isolated neighborhood), but they used to hang out with the other bands, and I had the chance to meet them leaving this hotel. I was seventeen years old and had a fanzine … The curious part is that he was wearing the exact same clothes he was then wearing at the gig four days later.

ANDRÉ STELLA:
We met Kurt a couple days before the show. My friends and I went to the front of the hotel where Kurt was staying and we waited there for him for a long time until he finally appeared … He was lovable, pleasant, and attentive with me and my friends. He talked with us a little bit and said they would play new songs at the show. He really paid attention to us.

Kurt may have been cordial to fans but this didn't mean he had undergone a full recuperation.

EDU K:
I saw Kurt stretched out on a sofa in the common backstage area with Frances and Courtney; he looked worse for wear and rather sick.

CASTOR DAUDT:
Kurt was always with his wife and had a large group of people around him. Very inaccessible.

EDU K:
Krist seemed to me like a very relaxed guy riding the eye of a hurricane thunderstorm. He was just hanging around backstage an' came to our dressing room to share a J. We had a good laugh because I told him, “Man, Kurt looks so much like a fucked-up version of Shaun Cassidy!” He said, “Fuck yeah, that's what we've nicknamed him in the band!”

CASTOR DAUDT:
Krist was very kind and seemed happy to be there. He came to me in our dressing room and asked me who I was and which band we were. I explained that we were from southern Brazil, that we had opened the festival and were big fans of Nirvana … We had big laughs comparing Kurt with Shaun Cassidy and I presented him with very good southern Brazilian marijuana.

The relatively orderly show disappointed some, given Nirvana's burgeoning reputation for chaos.

JARDEL SEBBA:
Based on the news that was coming from São Paulo, everybody was a bit frustrated, as they did not change instruments nor break any of their equipment.

There was still enough fire, however, for one further defacement of rock as TV-friendly product for family consumption …

BRUNO CASTRO GOUVEIA:
Simulating masturbation in front of the cameras of Globo TV (the major TV network in Brazil).

EDU K:
Kurt took his cock out an' did a mocksturbation scene in front of TV Globo's (the biggest TV conglomerate in Brazil) cameras and it was all the rage all over the country. That moment in time, to me, was probably the last stand of punk-rock antics and teenage angst and alienation ever in the history of pop music … One thing is really funny, though: when we played São Paulo, there was a moment onstage where I was butt naked except for a sock on my cock—yeah, it was a Chili Peppers dark-humor pun. We were always the ones to pull that kind of party trick outta our hats an' it caused a real commotion in the media. So, if you check Nirvana [and] L7's performance in Rio you can tell that they were influenced by that.

South America brought Nirvana face-to-face with a choice: they could embrace a future as a stadium-filling Guns N' Roses style carnival, or they could walk away. These shows were Nirvana's window into a world where they were known not as interlopers from the underground but simply as one more bunch of American celebrities, kith and kin of bands they would never keep company with by choice. Nirvana made their call and would never play for such large audiences again. These three shows formed a bloody-toothed demonstration of Nirvana's refusal to be packaged like Hollywood cigarettes or sold as light entertainment for primetime TV while, simultaneously, being a visible display of Cobain's drug-frayed state. Regardless, it still thrilled those lucky enough to share it.

GABRIEL GUERRISI:
In Argentina it remains a legendary show.

EDU K:
It still resonates in my heart till these days.

CASTOR DAUDT:
I'll never forget that moment in my life! It was a very happy moment for us.

IVAN BUSIC:
We felt very honored to be sharing the same stage with such a huge band as Nirvana … We had a lot of respect for them and Hollywood Rock is still in everyone's memories. Such a great festival.

 

18.0

In Utero

February to September 1993

Between February
1992 and October 1993—the peak of Nirvanamania—Nirvana played only twenty-one shows, with just nine in the United States. Media hype, however, focused instead on the good news that a new album was imminent. Tentatively entitled
I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
, renamed the equally sardonic
Verse Chorus Verse
, it was ultimately to emerge as
In Utero
in September. Of the fifteen-day recording session, the band played together for only three or four days with half the songs having been written before
Nevermind
back in 1991. It was hard to tell if Nirvana, as a creative unit, still existed.

At least the band made a clear statement by choosing to record with a man with impeccable underground credentials, an ally in Nirvana's retreat from the mainstream: Steve Albini.

RICK SIMS:
Steve was an invaluable friend and accomplice to the band … He gave us the money to record our second record, agreed to release it on Ruthless (although he convinced Touch and Go to release it instead), produced and engineered the
Que Sirhan Sirhan
record for a dollar! We fought and argued like crazy a couple of times during
Que Sirhan Sirhan
sessions about guitar levels or some shit … but that dude was/is great. But be warned: if you hang or collaborate with him he won't couch his opinion. Bottom line is yes I trusted him yet sometimes needed to sort my own direction from what he thought it should be. Plus it was cool recording with him because [you] could hang out at his house, where he made great-sounding records, brewed Café Bustelo, and cooked orzo for us.

TED CARROLL:
Albini was perhaps one of the best people I ever met in the world of music. Opinionated. Absolutely, but at the same time … he came out to L.A., stayed in our shithole of a house, recorded our first album, cooked us dinner (he is an excellent chef) and was a fun, actually sweet, guy. He even offered for us to stay at his mom's house when we were in Missoula, Montana. We stayed at his place in Chicago several times—he had a BBQ for us—and
In Utero
seemed to be all the rage the second time we were there and recording our second (and last) album. Steve pretty obviously
hates
major labels, and I think he was offended by major-label interference with the record … not with Nirvana at all … He liked the album and said quite emphatically it was the record they wanted to make. Not him or his influence. But I never got the impression that he was upset or mad about anything. He was pretty detached from the stuff he did in that he saw it as the band's baby … not his.

Wrangling over the album continued all summer, with Albini taking heat for Nirvana's choices. The presence of older Cobain compositions—“Dumb,” “All Apologies,” “Pennyroyal Tea”—disguised how noisy his newer material was, a continuation of the style of songs recorded the previous April; the new sound wasn't just the result of production decisions.

BLAG DAHLIA:
The follow-up proves they were already on their way down. “Scentless Apprentice”? “Heart-Shaped Box”? Give me a fucking break. Sorry, kids, but rumors of this band's “Beatletude” were grossly exaggerated. A one-trick pony, but hey, it was a good trick.

CHRIS QUINN:
I think the Melvins have been the kind of band that Nirvana wanted to be—they've maintained credibility, they've maintained creativity, they make a living … The Melvins have released thirtysomething records, Nirvana's got three real records—and the last one, whether you love it or you don't, it's still a transitional record—it's not the statement
Nevermind
or even
Bleach
was. It's just a record made by a guy with drug problems. When you “make it,” there seems to be a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with music, but there are people who are impressed by all that stuff and confuse that with what makes the music.

The album succeeded in reconnecting Nirvana to the underground community by virtue of simply trying to be no big deal.

Cobain was still paying a lot more attention to visual concepts—every Nirvana single or LP after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would feature either his art or would interpret his ideas. He also poured energy into the videos.

KEVIN KERSLAKE:
With
Live! Tonight! Sold Out!
Kurt and I spoke about a much more evolved film than what it ended up being in the end. It was going to include more of an interior sense of what it was like to be in the band. Obviously we never got to the point where that part was shot. What ended up coming out was sort of frozen in time—very much a one-note film, which shows a certain frustration about being stuck in the limelight, and is expressed in a charming sort of brattiness. This frustration was a common topic at the time in my conversations with Kurt, but the film wasn't supposed to just be about that, alone.

The video as it emerged is therefore a fair indicator of Cobain's mood in early 1993 even as he had others executing the vision.

KEVIN KERSLAKE:
Source-wise, this was all VHS tapes. Keep in mind this was all pre-DVD, so we're looking at Hi-8 tapes and VHS. Crap quality, but charming for sure, and hoping that at one point we'd contact the sources to get as close to the master footage as possible. But the early stages were just going over those tapes in the TV room … What would happen is Kurt and I would get together, we'd go through a batch of tapes, and that would typically happen over one or two days. I'd take all the tapes back and then Steve McCorkle (the editor) and I would just start editing them together … So, you notice where you start seeing a song in one setting and then it cuts across to another setting? Those decisions just happened to come about because there was a great show in Buenos Aires, there was a great show in Dallas, a great show on some TV show in England … So do we use fragments or do we just choose which of those is the best? It was just throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what stuck. Steve had his ideas, Kurt had his ideas, I had mine, and hopefully we all arrived at the same conclusions. We weren't working for a deadline—as far as I remember—that was any more dramatic than we typically were under, but I do know that we never ended up shooting some of the other stuff that we had intended to. Whether I was going to travel with them on the road or shoot in Seattle, we just never got to it … Kurt knew what was on his shelves, so handing those off to somebody—I'm sure I did notes at the time—but I could have asked him, “What's on these?”—basically, if he liked a particular song on a certain tape, to flag that. But it's our job, mine and the editor's, to look at everything in their entirety—you do your homework. Kurt probably did his homework too … When it was time to start shooting and adding some of the other things,
In Utero
was coming out, and the scheduling got tight, and they had to do the press for it. Lots of other things were going on that competed for time.

Cobain had one other studio engagement that spring.

JONATHAN BURNSIDE,
producer
: It's not easy reminiscing about making the album
Houdini
with Kurt Cobain and the Melvins. Bad communication, drugs, major-label profiteering, rehab, schedule blowouts, backstabbing, and album miscrediting … it was a devil's album. I hadn't worked with Nirvana in a studio, but I had mixed live versions of “About a Girl,” “Spank Thru,” and “Molly's Lips” for them. [These tracks appear on the “Sliver/Diver” single and elsewhere.] Kurt was coming to San Francisco, ostensibly to produce the Melvins' major-label debut,
Houdini
, for Atlantic Records, with me engineering and mixing and Billy Anderson assisting on some of the sessions.
Houdini
was the fourth album I had recorded and mixed for the Melvins. Kurt, Courtney, Frances Bean, and an au pair showed up in a white Volvo and parked in front of the graffitied doors of my studio, Razor's Edge Recording. Kurt told me later he hated that car. It shined conspicuously amongst the rust piles lined up along Divisadero Street. Like a lot of San Francisco, the street gentrified during the dot-com boom, but in the early '90s, it was Cocaine Alley, crack dealers slouching in front of the BBQ joint and storefront gospel church. I saw men shot dead on that block. My studio was near the corner, in the same three-story Victorian where Anne Rice wrote and set
Interview with the Vampire
.

What played out in San Francisco was a tragicomedy.