This is a Call (31 page)

In April 1984, shortly after their début album reached number two in the UK charts, The Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr and vocalist Morrissey were cajoled by their record company into appearing on children’s TV show
Charlie’s Bus
. The programme saw the two punk-inspired musicians travel around London on an open-top bus with a group of kids, who were primed to ask questions of the duo; Morrissey and Marr’s discomfort, and frustration at being talked into this embarrassing promotional chore, is written all over their faces. ‘Where are we going?’ one young lady enquires of the singer at one point. ‘We’re all going mad,’ is Morrissey’s pained, pithy reply. The first indications that the pressures engendered by the unexpected success of
Nevermind
might be having a similar effect on the mental health of the three musicians behind it came during Nirvana’s winter ’91 European tour.

In the UK, Geffen’s decision to press up only 6,000 copies of
Nevermind
had ensured that the album barely scraped into the Top 40 after selling out completely in just two days – it actually débuted at number 36, two places lower than the chart début of Mudhoney’s
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge
one month previously – but with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ firmly ensconced in the Top Ten, the buzz around the band was building daily. On 2 December 1991 journalist John Aizlewood from the strait-laced, earnest monthly music mag
Q
was dispatched to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Nirvana were due to play a sold-out show at the Mayfair club, to file an introductory feature on the band. When Aizlewood introduced himself to Cobain pre-show, the singer ignored the journalist’s outstretched hand and stared at him in silence. Keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the writer, Cobain then climbed onto the table in his dressing room and began calmly and methodically throwing sandwiches from the band’s rider onto the carpet beneath him. He followed this by scattering breakfast cereal atop the sandwiches, before pouring a carton of orange juice onto the mess. The singer then dived off the table top, executed a forward roll through the gunk on the carpet, and stood facing Aizlewood in silence, with sandwich spread, salad leaves and cold meat slices dripping from his clothes and hair. No one in the dressing room spoke a word as Q’s journalist and photographer slunk away in embarrassment. The interview never did take place.

Nirvana did not want for media attention during their time back in the UK, however, thanks largely to a trio of unforgettable TV appearances. On 8 November, on late night youth entertainment show
The Word
, Cobain prefaced an incendiary version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ with the declaration that Courtney Love, ‘lead singer of the sensational pop group Hole’, was ‘the best fuck in the world’. On 27 November, booked to perform their Top Ten single on British TV institution
Top of the Pops
, Nirvana gleefully mocked the show’s mimed performance format, with Grohl and Novoselic hamming up their out-of-sync performances and Cobain delivering his live vocals in a deadpan gothic drawl he later claimed was a tribute to Morrissey: ‘Would you mind doing that again?’ the show’s unimpressed producers asked the singer afterwards. ‘No, I’m quite happy with that, thank you …’ Cobain answered. On 6 December, on Channel 4’s
Jonathan Ross Show
, there was further mischief from the band, as they ditched their agreed performance of ‘Lithium’ in favour of a screeching, feedback-laced blast through ‘Territorial Pissings’. As the trio set about destroying their equipment, the usually quick-witted Ross made a churlish quip about the band’s availability for ‘children’s birthday parties and Bar Mitzvahs’, making himself sound every bit as out-of-touch and uptight as Bill Grundy had appeared in haranguing the Sex Pistols on prime-time British TV 15 years previously. Above the whining feedback in the Channel 4 studio, one could hear the creak of a generation gap yawning.

The band’s European tour ended on 7 December with a show at the TransMusicale Festival in Rennes, France. The set began with Dave Grohl taking lead vocals on an endearingly ramshackle cover of The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ – during which he changed the words to sing
‘It’s only a major label wasteland’
– and ended with the trio trashing every piece of equipment on the stage. Shows in Ireland and Scandinavia were immediately cancelled as the band flew home to Seattle tired, stressed-out and utterly bewildered at their changing fortunes. Their descent into what Grohl would later call ‘a tornado of insanity’ had begun.

‘On that European tour I remember the introduction of anxiety into my life,’ says Grohl. ‘I had this fear of being alone, because I was so surrounded: I was being pushed and pulled to go do interviews, and go do TV and go say hello to these people and those people. We had no idea what it all meant then. I didn’t have my own hotel room, I was sharing with Alex MacLeod, and when I got back home it became really hard to go to sleep at night if I was in a room by myself. I was so used to being surrounded by chaos that silence or solitude kinda flipped me out.

‘But was I comfortable selling 10 million records and buying a house and finally being able to support myself playing music? Absolutely. I never had a problem with that, I have never, ever wished for less.’

‘It was unbelievable,’ Grohl told
Rolling Stone
in 2001. ‘We went from selling amp heads and
Love Buzz
singles for food to having millions of dollars. Coming from Springfield, Virginia, I went from having no money at all and working at Tower Records to being set up for the rest of my life. I remember the first time we got a thousand-dollar check. We were so excited. I went out and bought a BB gun and a Nintendo – the things that I always wanted as a kid.’

‘I was fortunate in that band that I wasn’t the focal point, I was practically anonymous so I got to enjoy a lot of the good things without the hassle,’ Grohl told me the following year. ‘I’d go home to Virginia or back to Seattle and hang out with Barrett and watch TV and everything was absolutely normal.

‘I didn’t live an extravagant, decadent lifestyle, but shit, it was great. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t get depressed; I saw the whole thing as a blessing. Being the person that wasn’t in the spotlight I was left alone so I could live a normal life. But I could see how other people would have trouble with it.’

‘One day we were this virtually unknown band who happened to have signed a major label record deal, the next everyone was telling us that we were the best band in the world,’ recalled Chris Novoselic. ‘I mean, how are you supposed to deal with that?’

It might have been prudent for Gold Mountain to pull Nirvana off the road at this point, to give the trio time to adjust to their new reality. But the company had already accepted a $10,000 per show offer for the band to support the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the West Coast leg of the Californian funk-rockers
BloodSugarSexMajik
arena tour, so on 27 December Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl were pushed back onstage once more. Though the reception afforded Nirvana each night bordered on hysteria – ‘I remember getting shivers every night from the whole place going crazy,’ says Barrett Jones, on the tour as Grohl’s drum tech. ‘It was the first time I’d ever seen an entire arena jumping up and down in sync’ – the tour was not one Dave Grohl remembers fondly.

‘That US club tour and the European tour that followed were Nirvana at our best,’ he says. ‘We were fucking smoking then, we were a jamming band at that time, way more so than later on. But the Chili Peppers tour was a strange one. Kurt was not in a good place on that trip, and we wouldn’t see each other pretty much until the house lights went out every night. So that was kinda weird. And being in arenas was definitely like putting on some clothes that didn’t fit yet. To be honest, it didn’t ever really fit. And I always put that down to losing my concert virginity to Naked Raygun in a tiny club. It took me a long time to appreciate the grand gestures required for stadium rock: knowing what it felt like to play the old 9:30 Club or some of the closets we were playing in, and the intensity of a room that small with music that loud, is something that I don’t think you can recreate in a building that holds 20,000 people. I don’t think any of us were entirely comfortable with it.’

The strained atmosphere around the dates was exacerbated by the fact that the opening band on the tour was Stone Gossard’s new band Pearl Jam, a band Cobain was constantly criticising in interviews for having what he perceived as a ‘careerist’ attitude, unacceptable in punk rock circles.

‘That was a little weird,’ admits Gossard. ‘It was like hanging out with your ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend who hates your guts.’

The rivalry between the two bands added an edge to the tour. In San Diego, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder’s hometown, the singer climbed 100 feet above the stage on a lighting rig during his band’s set, as a watching Dave Grohl held his breath in genuine terror: ‘We were playing before Nirvana, you had to do something,’ reasoned Vedder a decade later. ‘Our first record was good, but theirs was better.’ In San Francisco, on NewYear’s Eve, Pearl Jam played the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ during their set, as Vedder told the crowd, ‘Don’t forget, we played it first.’ The Nirvana camp were not amused. But they would have reason to smile soon enough. Later that evening a record industry associate walked onto Pearl Jam’s bus to inform them that
Nevermind
was destined for the top of the
Billboard
chart.

On 11 January 1992
Nevermind
displaced Michael Jackson’s
Dangerous
album from the top of the
Billboard
200. Nirvana were now the nation’s favourite, and most bewildered, new pop stars. That same weekend the band were in New York City to perform on
Saturday Night Live
, America’s highest-rating TV programme, and the show on which Dave Grohl had first stumbled upon the existence of punk rock twelve years previously. It was a weekend no one in the Nirvana camp would ever forget.

On the morning of 11 January, Danny Goldberg received a phone call at home from Courtney Love, asking if he could deliver $5,000 in cash to her at the Omni Hotel in midtown Manhattan, as she and Cobain were of a mind to do some shopping before the
SNL
taping. Nirvana’s manager dropped off the money in $100 bills later that morning. That afternoon Love and Cobain strolled down to ‘Alphabet City’ on Manhattan’s scuzzy Lower East Side and scored a quantity of China White heroin, returned to their hotel suite and locked the door.

According to
Come As You Are
, Cobain and Love first did heroin together in Amsterdam during Nirvana’s winter ’91 European tour. Both had dabbled with the drug previously – Cobain started using on a casual basis in Olympia, while Love later claimed to have first shot up at a party at actor Charlie Sheen’s house – but using together helped the couple spin their own little cocoon in which to shelter from an increasingly turbulent outside world. The next time they took drugs together, one week later in London, the pair decided to get engaged. Cobain would later maintain that he used heroin only as a painkiller to cope with debilitating stomach pains, but even his closest drug buddy could see that he was in denial about his habit.

‘He was an oblivion seeker, a fucking lotus eater,’ Courtney stated in 2010. ‘I never wanted that. I was the kind of drug addict that just wanted to be comfortable in my skin. Escapism once in a blue moon, but it wasn’t for me. Kurt would just go on until he dropped.’

As discreet as Cobain initially was about his drug habit, he wasn’t always able to disguise the symptoms associated with heroin use. On 10 January 1992 the Californian music paper
Bam
ran an interview with the singer, conducted backstage at the Los Angeles Sports Arena two weeks previously, which alluded to the possibility that Cobain was using heroin. Writer Jerry McCulley noted that Cobain was ‘nodding off occasionally in mid-sentence …’ and wrote, ‘He’s had but an hour’s sleep, he says blearily. But the pinned pupils, sunken cheeks and scabbed, sallow skin suggest something more serious than mere fatigue. The haggard visage and frail frame make him appear more like 40 than 24.’

Nirvana’s ‘people’ initially dismissed McCulley’s story as tawdry gossip-mongering, but events in New York City that weekend were less easy to ignore.

In the early hours of 12 January, as Dave Grohl and his mother Virginia bonded with Wendy O’Connor at the
Saturday Night Live
aftershow party, Courtney Love woke up alone in her bed in the Omni Hotel. She had returned to the suite without her fiancé, as Cobain had a late-night interview scheduled with Kurt St Thomas at another Manhattan hotel, but the singer was now due back. Squinting into the darkness, to her horror Love found her husband-to-be lying face down on the hotel room floor, apparently lifeless. As Love slept, Cobain had returned to the suite, shot up heroin and overdosed. Keeping a remarkably cool head, Love attempted to resuscitate her lover, throwing water over his prone body and repeatedly punching him in the stomach until she heard a gasp of breath. Her actions saved Cobain’s life.