This is a Call (20 page)

Kurt Cobain first noticed Novoselic at an Aberdeen High School assembly. The pair shared no classes, and never actually spoke to one another during their school days, but Cobain remembered the older boy as ‘hilarious … a really clever, funny loud-mouth’, with a gift for subverting the most sombre educational rituals with manic outbursts of songs and poetry. For all his anarchic humour, however, Novoselic was utterly depressed by his new environs, to the extent that in the summer of 1980 his parents were so concerned about his mental well-being that he was sent to live with relatives in Croatia, then still part of Yugoslavia. It was during this summer that the teenager fell in love with punk rock.

A fan of Black Sabbath, Zeppelin and Aerosmith in his early teens, Novoselic had first discovered the Sex Pistols and Ramones while listening to a Sunday night radio show called Your Mother Won’t Like It on Seattle’s KZOK radio station. In Yugoslavia he was exposed both to the freshest punk sounds coming out of England and an impassioned, vibrant local scene. Empowered by a community which actively celebrated society’s misshapes, he returned to Aberdeen on a mission to spread the punk gospel. It was inevitable that he’d run into the like-minded Buzz Osbourne sooner rather than later.

Through hanging out with Melvins at their practice pad, Novoselic was drawn into a number of Buzz Osbourne’s short-lived side projects. It was while singing with one such band, the Stiff Woodies, that he first met Kurt Cobain, who would occasionally sit in with the group on guitar or drums. Though Novoselic was a wretched singer, the mere fact that he was aware of the existence of punk rock was enough for Cobain to view him as a potential collaborator.

‘Kurt asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him and gave me that Fecal Matter tape,’ Novoselic recalled in the sleevenotes accompanying Nirvana’s
With the Lights Out
box set. ‘I listened to it and thought, “Hey, this is really good.” I thought it was cool. So I went, “Yeah, let’s do it.” Then we laboured to put the ensemble together, find a drummer … and a drum set.’

The duo recruited fellow ‘Cling-On’ Aaron Burckhard as their drummer: a metalhead stoner who lived down the street from Cobain, Burckhard didn’t actually own a drum kit, but he was the only available drummer within spitting distance of Aberdeen. The trio began rehearsing in earnest in January 1987.

‘We had the most intense jams,’ Novoselic recalled in his 2004 autobiography,
Of Grunge and Government
. ‘We’d simultaneously orbit inner
and
outer space. It was so serious, if we felt we sucked we were disappointed and we’d sit around bummed out after. It must have been about transcendence. If we didn’t get that rush, that otherworldly sense of liberation, we were let down; it’s hard to lose God after you’ve experienced it. These were not cover-song sessions or protracted blues jams. These were manifestations of a psychic dissonance.’

The trio had yet to decide upon a name when they played their first show in March ’87, at a house party in nearby Raymond, a town even more isolated than Aberdeen. To the dismay of their hosts, the band played only two cover songs – a ragged take on Led Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’ which crumbled into an even more shambolic, and quickly aborted, version of the same band’s ‘How Many More Times’. The bulk of their set featured brutish originals, among them the newly written ‘Mexican Seafood’, ‘Hairspray Queen’ and ‘Aero Zeppelin’, a gothic-sounding dismissal of mainstream rock ’n’ roll featuring the withering lyric ‘
You could shit on the stage, they’ll be fans
.’

‘We were just snotty and jumped around,’ Cobain later recalled. ‘We rocked, though.’

It’s a measure of Cobain’s confidence in his new band that he booked the trio a live radio session at KAOS FM, the station at Olympia, Washington’s progressive liberal arts college Evergreen State College, before he had even chosen a name for the group. Cobain loved Olympia, a college town with an artsy, bohemian, free-thinking aesthetic, its own independent record label (Calvin Johnson’s K Records) and fanzine culture (Bruce Pavitt’s
Sub Pop
and Richie Unterberger’s
Option
) and a diverse cultural demographic embracing students, punk rockers, artists and oddball small-town eccentrics. Here, Cobain felt, was Nirvana’s natural audience.

Released in 2004 on Nirvana’s
With the Lights Out
box set, three tracks taken from the 17 April session (Cobain originals ‘Anorexorcist’ and ‘Help Me, I’m Hungry’ plus a cover of ‘White Lace and Strange’ by obscure Philadelphia psych-rockers Thunder and Roses) show the recently formed trio to be a powerful, locked-in unit, with Burckhard’s John Bonhamesque pounding anchoring Cobain and Novoselic’s lurching, lumbering ‘Black Zeppelin’ riffage. The following evening, when the trio débuted at the Community World Theater in nearby Tacoma, they finally had a name: Skid Row.

The name didn’t stick. When the trio next played the Community World Theater on 27 June they were called Pen Cap Chew. On 9 August they performed at the same venue as Bliss. When they returned on 23 January 1988 they were billed as Ted, Ed, Fred. At other times they played house parties as Throat Oyster and Windowpane.

For all the confusing indecision over the band’s moniker, though, their sound, and Cobain’s ambition, remained focused and unwavering. Though he had now moved from Aberdeen to Olympia to live with his girlfriend Tracy Marander, Cobain was keen that the three-piece should come together to practise five times a week: when Aaron Burckhard expressed reservations about committing to this schedule, Cobain promptly fired him from the band. He took out an advert in the October’87 issue of Seattle music paper
The Rocket
seeking a replacement. His ad read: ‘SERIOUS DRUMMER WANTED. Underground attitude. Black Flag, Melvins, Zeppelin, Scratch Acid, Ethel Merman. [No seriously]. Versatile as heck. Kurdt 352.0992.’ While the search was on-going, Dale Crover stepped into the breach to help out his friends once more.

On the afternoon of 23 January 1988, before their scheduled gig in Tacoma, the trio cut a new demo at Seattle’s Reciprocal Recording studio with producer Jack Endino, recording ten songs in just six hours. Only ‘Spank Thru’ and ‘Downer’ were retained from Fecal Matter’s
Illiteracy Will Prevail
demo; newer tracks such as ‘Floyd the Barber’, ‘Paper Cuts’ and ‘Beeswax’ hinted that Cobain’s songwriting was moving into darker, heavier and more melodic territory. Endino, who had previously helmed Sub Pop sessions for Soundgarden (the
Screaming Life
EP) and Mudhoney (the
Dry as a Bone
EP), was sufficiently impressed to make his own copy of the session. Some weeks later he passed a dubbed cassette of the demo to Jonathan Poneman, who was actively seeking to expand his new label’s roster.

‘I think initially he was intrigued by it, but he wasn’t about to just release it,’ said Endino in a video interview for the
Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses
exhibition at Seattle’s Experience Music Project in 2011. ‘He thought, “Hmmm, well, this is interesting; the singer’s got character, let’s see what happens with them.” So his take was basically watchful waiting.’

In truth, Cobain had little interest in the new label on his doorstep: in 1989 he admitted, ‘We had never heard of Sub Pop.’ The singer was desperate to put out a record on Greg Ginn’s SST label or Chicago’s Touch and Go records, then home to his beloved Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers and Steve Albini’s typically provocative new band Rapeman. He sent about 20 copies of what became known as the
Dale Demo
to the Midwest label, each one accompanied by a small gift, if used condoms and snot-filled tissues can be defined as ‘gifts’.

A reply was not forthcoming.

Cobain was also on the hunt for a new drummer. In spring 1988 he placed a second advert in
The Rocket
. This one read: ‘DRUMMER WANTED: Play hard, sometimes light, underground, versatile, fast, medium, slow, versatile, serious, heavy, versatile, dorky, nirvana, hungry. Kurdt 352.0992.’ This was the first public mention of what would be his band’s new, and final, name: Nirvana.

Explaining the name in later years, Cobain declared: ‘Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, “nirvana” means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of punk rock.’

On 24 April 1988 Jonathan Poneman booked Nirvana (now featuring new drummer Dave Foster) to support Blood Circus on a Sub Pop Sunday show at the tiny Vogue club in Seattle. Poneman cajoled his business partner Bruce Pavitt, Charles Peterson and members of Mudhoney and Soundgarden into coming down early to check out the band. Painfully aware that his songs were to be critiqued by peers he respected, Cobain was so nervous that he threw up in the venue’s car park before taking the stage. By all accounts, the gig which followed was a disaster.

‘I thought they sucked,’ said Charles Peterson. ‘I didn’t understand why Jonathan wanted to sign this band. They just seemed like a bunch of mopey shoegazers. The music seemed off, it didn’t do it for me. And stupidly, I didn’t take any pictures of them that night. I just thought, “This is probably the first and last time I’ll ever see or hear from this band.”’

‘We were uptight,’ Cobain later admitted to
Backlash
fanzine writer Dawn Anderson. ‘It just didn’t seem like a real show. We felt like we were being judged; it was like everyone should’ve had score cards.’

Anderson’s article, which ran in her fanzine in August 1988 under the heading ‘It May Be the Devil and It May Be the Lord … But It Sure as Hell Ain’t Human’, was Nirvana’s first published press feature. The writer referred to the band as ‘the Melvins’ fan club’ and noted ‘it’s probably only fair to inform you that if you didn’t like the Melvins, or if you did like the Melvins but think leadbelly music has run its course, you won’t like Nirvana’.

‘But it’s also important to stress that this is not a clone band,’ Anderson added. ‘The group’s already way ahead of most mortals in the songwriting department and, at the risk of sounding blasphemous, I honestly believe that with enough practice Nirvana could become …
better than the Melvins!
’

By the time Anderson’s article appeared in print, Nirvana had a new drummer – 21-year-old Chad Channing from Bainbridge Island, a small community located in Puget Sound – and the offer of a single release, plus a slot on the forthcoming
Sub Pop 200
compilation album, from the stubbornly supportive Poneman. Cobain was not altogether thrilled that for his band’s first single Sub Pop wished to release ‘Love Buzz’, a tripped-out, hypnotic cover of an obscure cut by the Dutch pop band Shocking Blue, in preference to one of his own original songs, but he soon relented. In truth, no one was making Nirvana a better offer.

Love Buzz/Big Cheese
was duly released as the first offering from the Sub Pop Singles Club, a service which delivered seven-inch vinyl releases on a monthly basis to the label’s hardcore fans in return for an annual $35 subscription fee, in November 1988. In the customary Sub Pop tradition, promotional copies of the single came with a gloriously hyperbolic press release. This time, however, Cobain himself was the hype man. He wrote:

NIRVANA sounds like: Black Sabbath playing The Knack, Black Flag, Led ZEP, the Stooges and a pinch of Bay City Rollers. Their personal musical influences include: H.R Puffnstuff, Marine Boy, divorces, drugs, sound effects records, the Beatles, Young Marble Giants, Slayer, Leadbelly and Iggy.

NIRVANA sees the underground music SEEN as becoming stagnant and more accessible towards commercialised major label interests.

Does NIRVANA feel a moral duty to change this cancerous evil?

No way! We want to cash in and suck butt of the big wigs in hopes that we too can GET HIGH and FUCK. GET HIGH and FUCK. GET HIGH and FUCK.

American rock bands who could deliver sarcasm and black humour as deftly as they harnessed volume and distortion were thin on the ground in 1988. American rock bands who could deliver sarcasm and black humour
and
land themselves a Single of the Week accolade in not one but
two
influential British music magazines in the same week were even more rare. Reviewing the
Love Buzz/Big Cheese
single in
Melody Maker
and
Sounds
respectively, writers Everett True and John Robb both hailed Nirvana as one of the finest new acts to emerge from the US underground scene in years. With the release of
Bleach
seven months later, the buzz around the band only intensified.

Sub Pop heralded the release of the album in its typically low-key manner. Hyping
Bleach
as ‘hypnotic and righteous heaviness’ and hailing the band as ‘Olympia pop stars’, they crowed, ‘They’re young, they own their own van and they’re going to make us rich!’

‘In our press releases we would announce that the Nirvana album was gonna go double platinum and stuff like that, never believing for a minute that would actually happen,’ Bruce Pavitt admitted in 2008. ‘By 1988 selling five to ten thousand copies a record was considered doing very good business. The idea of selling millions of records was almost inconceivable. A lot of what Jon and I were doing was living in this hyper-fantasy realm where we were pretending – it was almost like we were five years old – let’s play record label!’

In the wake of the phenomenal success of
Nevermind
, it became fashionable to argue that
Bleach
was a much superior manifestation of Kurt Cobain’s songwriting. This is nonsense. As the respected US rock critic Ira Robbins noted in his review for
Trouser Press
,
Bleach
is ‘a punk album of its time, class and place’, and nothing more. Kurt Cobain’s own assessment of the album was equally blunt: for Cobain,
Bleach
was slow, grungey and ‘one-dimensional’, deliberately dumbed down to fit the Sub Pop aesthetic.