This is a Call (30 page)

Family Man: Getting down at the Yo Gabba Gabba! Live! There’s a Party in My City! event in Los Angeles, 27 November 2010.

Foo Fighters with Waisting Light producer Butch Vig in Dave Grohl’s garage in Encino, California, 17 November 2010.

‘I’d graduated from college and I was at home vacuuming and I heard this riff and I’m like, “I fucking love this!”’ recalls Grohl’s childhood friend Tracey Bradford. ‘I turned off the vacuum cleaner and turned around to the television to watch MTV and I see this long-haired guy playing the drums with a Scream T-shirt on. And I’m like, “It’s fucking David Grohl! Oh my God!”’

‘My band Kyuss was on tour,’ recalls Queens of the Stone Age / Them Crooked Vultures frontman Josh Homme, ‘and I remember seeing the video on MTV at 3 a.m. in a hotel room. I was saying, “Man, this is so good, everyone should be into this music but they’re not going to be, it’s not going to get played because it’s too good.” About a week later I realised how wrong I was …’

‘The video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘People heard the song on the radio and they thought, “This is great,” but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, “This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they’re tearing up their fucking high school.” We were touring and we’d go back to the hotel and turn on the TV and see our video and go, “That’s so funny, we’re on TV, and we’ve just played the 9:30 Club!” or whatever. And then with the video came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.

‘The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. That’s when it would be, “Holy shit, these people are fucking nuts.” You’d show up to a 500-capacity gig and there were 500
extra
people there. We were still in our little bubble – we were in our van, the three of us, Chris’s wife Shelli, our monitor guy Miles [Kennedy], and Monte Lee Wilkes our tour manager – and it didn’t seem like anything unusual was happening until we’d get to the gig and it was fucking chaos. And we started to notice there were normal people here. We were like, “What are they doing here? That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here?” And it was like, “Oh, maybe that video thing is attracting some … riff-raff.”’

On 12 October 1991
Nevermind
entered the
Billboard
album chart at number 144. That same day Butch Vig drove down to Chicago from Madison to meet up with the band at their headline show at the Metro, the same venue Cobain, Novoselic and Chad Channing had played as a support band on the eve of their Smart Studio session 18 months previously. The drummer was astonished to find around 5,000 people waiting in line for the 1,100-capacity club.

‘At that point there was a huge buzz in the air,’ says Vig. ‘People were calling me going, “Oh my God, the Nirvana record is amazing.” And I knew there was this electricity in the air, that something was going to happen for them. I took an artist friend of mine, Bill Rock, to the show and he was like, “Who’s Nirvana?” I said, “They’re going to be the next Beatles.” Right before the band came on they were playing the end of Smashing Pumpkins’
Gish
really loud over the PA and that ended right as Nirvana walked onstage so I was double proud in a way. And the second Nirvana walked onstage it was like Beatlemania, kids were just screaming and crying, and Bill was like, “Holy shit!” He didn’t know any of the songs, he just saw them play and saw the crowd reaction and he said, “This is incredible.” And it was. I was thinking, “Wow, this record has really affected people.”’

By coincidence, Courtney Love was also in Chicago on 12 October. Hole’s lead singer had blown into the Windy City to see her on – off boyfriend Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins, but following an argument with Corgan, Love elected to hook up with Babes in Toyland drummer Lori Barbero for a trip to the Metro instead. Later that evening, she and Kurt Cobain had sex for the first time. Their coupling took place in the hotel room Cobain was sharing with Dave Grohl: after unsuccessfully attempting to block out the sounds of passion emanating from the adjoining bed, Grohl crept out of his own bed and sought refuge in soundman Craig Montgomery’s room. He and Cobain would never be so close again.

The tour rumbled on. In St Louis, Missouri, the owners of the Mississippi Nights club called in the local police after Cobain, frustrated at the band’s set being interrupted time and time again by over-enthusiastic stage divers, invited the entire 500-strong audience onstage. In Lawrence, Kansas the band hung out with ‘Beat’ legend William Burroughs, a hero to both Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl’s father, James. But in Dallas, Texas on 19 October the tour almost came to a sudden juddering stop, when bouncers at the Trees nightclub threatened to kill the band.

‘We had a lot of fun on that tour,’ laughs Grohl. ‘In Dallas, Kurt smashed up the monitor board that belonged to the bouncer standing in front of him, and then jumped into the crowd and hit the guy on the head. The guy’s head was spilling blood and he started to beat Kurt up. And Kurt was totally fucked up. Afterwards, the promoter said, “That guy is gonna come back with his friends and he’s going to fucking kill you, so stay in here, and when I give you the secret knock, I’m gonna get you the fuck outta here and into a cab.” So we run outside: Kurt gets into the cab, Chris gets into the cab … and here comes the guy with all his friends so the cab pulls off … And I have to jump back into the club all by myself. Then they get stuck in traffic and some guy breaks the window. Meanwhile, some chick takes me back in her car … and she gets into a car accident. It was insane.’

Promoting their new
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge
album, Mudhoney were also touring US clubs in October ’91. The two bands’ itineraries were due to converge at the end of the month, with two co-headlining shows, at the Fox Theater in Portland, Oregon on 29 October, and at the Paramount in Seattle on Hallowe’en. When Nirvana arrived in Portland, they were informed by Geffen’s regional sales rep Susie Tennant that
Nevermind
had passed the 500,000 sales mark, and would now be classified as a gold record by the Recording Industry Association of America. The notion of Nirvana and Mudhoney swapping headlining duties for the tour’s remaining two dates was now deemed fatuous: Nirvana would headline both shows.

The band returned to Seattle as conquering heroes. It seemed that the whole of the Northwest music community was there to greet them. Though Geffen’s decision to film the show for possible future release added a certain tension to the night, Nirvana pulled off a storming nineteen-track set which left no one in any doubt that their time as local underground heroes was at an end.

‘Nirvana had never played in Seattle before with expectations,’ says Charles R. Cross. ‘All their other concerts had been them trying to get attention. Finally they came back in October ’91 and everyone came to see them expecting them to be great. And they were.’

Among the crowd at the Paramount that night were Grohl’s former Mission Impossible bandmates Chris Page and Bryant Mason, who had moved to Seattle the previous summer. After the show Grohl sought the pair out, and sat chatting quietly with them as the backstage area filled up with friends, family, media and peers.

‘The backstage scene was absolutely mobbed,’ recalls Page. ‘You could tell things were starting to fly in directions that no one had expected. Dave made some comment like, “This is so crazy.” He kept saying, “It’s all happening so fast … it’s all happening so fast.”’

On 2 November 1991, as Nirvana headed over to Europe for six weeks of headline shows,
Nevermind
broke into the top 40 of the
Billboard 200
, hitting number 35. The following week the album moved up to number 17. One week later it was at number 9: the next it sat at number 4. In the two months since its release the album had now sold 1.2 million copies in the US alone.

This unexpected success ensured Nirvana were now making headlines outside of the pages of music magazines. As
Nevermind
climbed up the charts, the
New York Times
dedicated the front page of its business section to an investigative analysis of Geffen’s ‘orchestration’ of Nirvana’s rise. ‘We didn’t do anything,’ admitted DGC president Ed Rosenblatt. ‘It was just one of those “Get out of the way and duck” records.’ Interviewed in
Details
magazine, Mark Kates admitted that, rather than concerning himself with Nirvana’s radio or TV spots at this stage in the campaign, his time might have been better spent driving copies of
Nevermind
straight from the pressing plant to record shops, such was the consumer demand for the record.

‘I was at Geffen when [Guns N’ Roses’ hugely successful 1987 début]
Appetite for Destruction
was released,’ says Kates, ‘so I’d seen a phenomenon happen before. And in this job it’s very helpful to have had that kind of experience, to be able to read signs and be able to see things that indicate far more than the specific nature of what they are. Let’s just say you get an inner feeling that something is going on that not only can you not control, but also you wouldn’t want to control.’

This inability to control the momentum around Nirvana may have been exhilarating for the suits at Geffen, but soon enough the three young men in the eye of the hurricane began to feel like their lives were no longer their own. Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of Nirvana – an autograph, an interview, a photograph, a handshake, an endorsement, an outrageous quote, a punk rock gesture. And Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl were expected to comply with every request, every demand.

For a dispiriting insight into the realities of the major label promotional treadmill, one could do worse than check out footage of Royal Trux – a band formed from the ashes of Pussy Galore, the DC outfit that so terrified Barrett Jones at Laundry Room in the autumn of 1985 – recording idents for ‘alternative’ cable TV rock shows during their brief period as an underground buzz band on Virgin Records in the mid 1990s. As co-vocalists Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema drawl their way through dedications to 101 different programmes – ‘We’re Royal Trux and you’re watching our latest video on
Over The Edge
… on
Outrageous
… on
Bohemia After Dark
… on
Notes from the Underground
… on
Rock ’n’ Roll Circus Show
… on
Subculture
…’ – you can actually see the blood drain from their faces and their will to live slowly ebbing away. Multiply Royal Trux’s promotional commitments by a factor of one hundred and you will have a rough idea of Nirvana’s schedule as their major label début climbed the charts.