LIVE NIRVANA INTERVIEW ARCHIVE November 5–6, 1991 - London & Wolverhampton, UK
Personnel
- Interviewer(s)
- Mike Gitter
- Interviewee(s)
- Kurt Cobain
- Krist Novoselic
- Dave Grohl
Sources
| Publisher | Title | Transcript |
|---|---|---|
| EC Rocker | But Is Mall-Shopping Madge Really Ready For Green Hair? | TBC |
| RIP Vol.6 #5 | Nirvana: Anarchy In The U.K. | Yes |
Transcript
Though this band caught fire after the deadline for Readers' Poll ballots, they are certain to be one of the hottest new groups of 1992.
Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain looks miserable. Head in hands, Marlboro wedged in there somewhere, he rarely gives the British MTV interviewer even a quick, sullen glance as she prods him with questions for a “Week in Rock” chat. It's soundcheck at London's Astoria Theatre. Cobain and his two best friends/bandmates—gangly drummer Dave Grohl, and 6'7" jolly green giant bassist Chris Novoselic, a man for whom the word loopy was practically invented—are crammed onto a tiny balcony overlooking the stage for the millionth insufferable interview of the day. There are lots of questions about a place called Seattle, a so-called “sound” that emanates from that region, and a bunch of bands Nirvana don't have a whole lot to do with. Boring, boring, boring.
“Seattle? Never heard of it,” says Chris with a journalist-disemboweling huff of condescension.
So this is the mainstream. Lamestream is more like it…
Lord knows, Nirvana didn't ask for this. They'd probably be more comfortable being ignored rather than adored. That's not an option anymore though; not since their second album, Nevermind, exploded up the charts (Number Four in Billboard and well past platinum at this writing) and became one of the first truly important and iconoclastic albums of the decade—the triumph of The Real in an age where M.C. Lamer and Vanilli Lice rule the airwaves. They're proof positive that punk rock wasn't some psychotic fringe element to be swept under the carpet; it was necessary. The Sex Pistols shook shit up at the height of the disco craze; Nirvana are doing the same now, sounding the battle-cry in this new punk nation rising.
After all, over 1,000,000 Nirvana fans can't be wrong.
“Y’know what was the best thing about the good old days—you know, a couple months ago?” offers Chris to the interviewer. “Good old-fashioned punk-rock van tours. No interviews, no road managers, no headaches.”
“No records in the stores, no gas, no money,” pipes in Kurt, perennially in a slouch, almost cracking a smile. “Just utter depravity.”
And there's been plenty of that, too, in between the tedious tasks their new major label has put them through. Sure, they're working for the (Geffen) man, but Nirvana still have their priorities straight. There have been wrecked hotel rooms, curtains in their van set aflame by Kurt during a long and tedious interview session, and a bloody brawl with bouncers outside a club in Dallas—Kurt apparently gave one of 'em the el ka-bong with the business end of his guitar when they started roughing up Nirvana's stagediving flock. Now there's the real blood, sweat and gristle of rock 'n' roll for you. Nothing like the real thing, baby.
Today, on the first date of a massive, sold-out U.K. and European tour, Nirvana are just plain burnt. Three days ago they climaxed what will probably be their last-ever U.S. club jaunt with a blistering Halloween gig in their Seattle hometown with old pals Mudhoney. With under a day to rest, they were shipped off to England to meet with the ever-delightful British press. More interviews, interviews, interviews. Nirvana are in demand, and they'd rather not talk about it. Better to let the music speak for itself, they figure. In just a few short weeks they've gone from being the glittering prize on Sub Pop, the indie label that put Seattle on the map, to being the most vital, exciting rock band in the world. Who woulda' thought? Especially Geffen, who signed the band for a paltry $250,000 and only pressed up 40,000 copies of Nevermind to start with.
“It was all planned out,” deadpans Dave with a smirk. “Chris made up this chart at home, an astrological chart with graphs.”
“Pie graphs,” the bassist nods. “On my Macintosh. It's kinda New Age.”
“It charted out that if we were to release when the sun was in this house and tour when the moon was over there, we'd be insured complete and total underground success,” Grohl continues. The possibility of their current level of success never even occurred to them. “It's almost like a joke at this point,” says Dave. “When people tell us we're Number Nine on Billboard, you can't help but laugh.”
It's a long, long way from Aberdeen, Washington, the uglier-than-Twin Peaks milieu of guns 'n' booze 'n' rednecks where former art-school students Kurt and Chris met a few years back. “The town was so small, we couldn't help but bump heads,” says Kurt, an asthmatic, sickly kid who survived his childhood there by reading about the Sex Pistols and the Clash in old Creem magazines. “I couldn't find any of their records in the library, so I had to make up my own version of punk rock,” says Cobain, who was weaned on equal portions of the Beatles and Black Sabbath. “The funny thing was, it ended up sounding an awful lot like Black Flag.”
Dave Grohl, the latest in a long line of Nirvana skinbeaters, joined later, when, legend has it, the Washington, D.C., native's ex-band, Scream, ran out of money on tour, broke up and were stranded in L.A. Apparently Scream fans Nirvana made him an offer he couldn't refuse. (These days, other Scream members are part of Nirvana's road crew.)
For Kurt and Chris, Aberdeen is a place with a lot of bad memories. A town where they were the oddest men out; where flannel shirts and high-water pants weren't grunge-chic, but a uniform for the ignorant and violent. “I was chased around a lot by rednecks in 4x4s because I wore a trench coat and had spiked hair,” the front-man growls. “I remember having just moved into my first apartment and being beaten up by my next-door neighbor in a hickory shirt and a tractor hat because he didn't like me, my friends or the way we looked. He held me down for, like, an hour and a half with his nostrils flared, his breath stinking, playing out this total power trip. Things like that gave me a real intense hatred for rednecks and macho men in general. I'll always hate those kind of people.”
It's two hours before the gig, and the garage-y sounds of Scottish support act Captain America echo in the upstairs backstage of the Astoria. Kurt's lying face-down on the hardwood floor, dead to the world. Chris and his wife, Shelly, are perusing a book on The Munsters, while Dave air-drums to a Walkman. Goateed manager/coconspirator John Silva (alternately known as Nirvana's Maurice Starr or Reuben Kincaid) ambles into the room with the news that Everett True, a journalist friend of the band's from Melody Maker, is on his way up to see them. A mischievous grin creases Kurt's face. It seems True recently penned an unflattering portrait of Nirvana's TV-trashing on-tour antics and is about to get his just reward. The frontman booby-traps the door with an untouched deli tray. True enters, and whammo!
“Uh, hi, guys,” Nirvana's paunchy victim says, wiping away the cold cuts, mustard and cheese slices.
“Now that's what we do to writers that cross us,” Silva cackles.
“And then we set 'em on fire,” Chris adds.
“And then we throw 'em in a pit of alligators,” snarls Kurt.
“Boy, that would teach Axl Rose a lesson or two about dealing with the press!” Chris laughs.
Onstage that night, Nirvana are exhilarating, wound tight; a three-man electrical storm that wells up inside your gut on the pensive opening number, “Jesus” (a Vaselines cover), explodes into a mass of heaving bodies for growling old faves like “Blew,” and hits with an emotional depth-charge of several squillion tons for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (probably the most meaningful “Yeah!” ever uttered in rock). Kurt wires himself into a dynamo of sweaty, spastic, trembling flesh, his agonized face screwed into an open wound. Barefooted, with bass slung extra-low, Chris lurches back and forth like some demented hillbilly, while Dave pounds the skins like punk rock's answer to Tommy Lee.
There's also a sense of vulnerability in Nirvana's whirlpool of sweat and crush of distortion, which is the very thing that makes it all so vital. “Polly's” acoustic tale of rape slows the mayhem to a standstill with a rough, brutal honesty your average thrash combo could never enunciate so clearly, let alone understand. The night ends in appropriately frenzied form, with Kurt gone surfing over the first few rows, and Chris tossing his bass 20 feet in the air (he even catches it!). Nirvana walk off, leaving you bruised, drained and wanting more.
The next afternoon the band's mini-bus is winding its way through the British countryside to tonight's gig in the small Midlands town of Wolverhampton. An R.E.M. greatest hits CD plays softly. If ever there was a role-model for Nirvana to aspire to, the politically involved, independently spirited R.E.M. would be it.
“R.E.M.'s been in the same situation we're going through now,” says Chris. “They've been in the Top Ten, and they still have hearts of gold.”
Nirvana are determined not to let their insta-stardom even scratch their fierce underground credibility. They've just turned down tours with Ozzy Osbourne, Rush and Skid Row, and are laughing about murmurs they've heard from the Guns N' Roses camp.
“It's a ridiculous situation,” says Kurt. “We wouldn't expect or really want our fans to have to go and waste $25 to see us in a stadium with Ozzy Osbourne. They'd end up watching us from two miles away on a TV screen. We'll probably always headline. I can't think of any band I want to open up for besides the Pixies, R.E.M. or Metallica.”
Nirvana don't do anything they don't want to. After all, everything they've gotten so far has been completely on their terms. “Tours, chart positions, whatever, are completely secondary,” insists Dave. “That's not why I started playing drums, or why Kurt writes a song. It goes a lot deeper than that. The music is what matters the most, and everything else is just some extracurricular activity.”
Another thing they are determined to do is use their new position to foster the independent/punk rock scene that they, themselves, came out of. Y'see, Nirvana are the logical exclamation point on a decade-plus of American punk; three guys who grew up to the vital and criminally unrecognized sounds of bands like Flipper, Minor Threat, Black Flag and Scratch Acid, and they'll be damned if they see any more great bands go unrecognized.
“Imagine if Black Flag was on a major label, was some giant band that sold a million records,” says Chris with genuine wonderment. “Imagine what kind of social value that would have. I bet people would be less doped up and less willing to blindly accept the shit they've been spoon-fed by the media for years now. I'm still waiting for a band to do that.”
Well, Chris, Nirvana could very well be that band; punk populists and hardcore hitmakers with a big song in their hearts and a bigger taste for blood.
“That's why we signed to Geffen in the first place,” says Kurt. “To give people a chance to find punk rock in their local K-Mart—even if they do live in a tiny logging town. Plus, we now have the ability to expose some great bands that most people would never have an opportunity to hear. On this tour alone we've toured with the Melvins, Shonen Knife, Captain America and Urge Overkill. Maybe that's our quest, our crusade: to expose people to truly good music. Maybe that's our justification for signing to a major label when people accuse us of selling out.
“I don't know what I'm gonna do with any money I'm gonna make, but I'd like to put some of it into some independent record labels that I like,” Kurt continues, wistfully, “I'd also like to help bands that I like to put out records. I just want to be the underground sugar daddy! The punk-rock Daddy War-bucks! Any punk rocker can come up to me any time, and if you're in need of a guitar, I'll buy it for you—if I happen to like you.”
While Nirvana would sincerely like to believe that they are creating a punkatopia for disgruntled youth to slam-dance in, they're not blind to the fact that success has its price. Listen to the sentiments espoused in the song “In Bloom”: “He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs/And he likes to sing along/And likes to shoot his gun/But he knows not what it means.” Nirvana have plenty of new fans who know not what it means. Does that bother them?
“Yeah, definitely,” sighs Kurt. “Last tour there was a time when we played in Mexico, and there were these very buff, testosterone-type jock guys up front just reeking of Man. It was gross. They were fighting. You could tell that they were just out of the service, and they were there just to beat people up. It was really shameful.”
Nirvana hate Men (that’s with a capital M). Y'know the type—the Andrew-Dice-Clay-construction-worker-catcalling-honest-to-goodness-son-of-a-bitch. Yeah, that guy. Nirvana are also very much in touch with women's rights and recently gave one of the greatest performances of their career at a Pro-Choice benefit in L.A. Still, as they get bigger, more of the “Coors-swilling, average-American dickheads” will flock to their shows. Kurt Cobain is at a loss trying to explain why so many of them like his band.
“It's a shame, but the majority of people in the mainstream don't have the mental capacity to understand what we're talking about,” the guitarist declares. “It's not entirely their fault, either. I think it's totally organic. They’re born without a brain, and the only thing they can relate to is being sexist and being misogynist and working with their arms and sweating and enjoying sports. I don't think that we're going to have a large enough impact to change this, but it'll be fun to at least try.” Not surprisingly, Kurt's girlfriend, Courtney Love of the superb L.A. band Hole, has called Nirvana “a completely female band—even though they're all guys.” That's a compliment.
Backstage at Wolverhampton's Wulfrun Hall, Chris is attempting to build a sculpture with several six-packs of beer. He's dubbed it “The Leaning Tower of Beer.” Kurt is happily obliging a couple of fanzine interviewers, to whom he's eagerly explaining why it's okay to eat meat. He'll do fanzines till he's blue in the face. Cobain places a much higher premium on his fans and fellow punks than he does on, let's say, Rolling Stone, whom he blew off for a chat a few days later. He's downing glass after glass of vodka and Agua Libre (a fruity tonic water that tastes roughly like cantaloupe beer) and eating handfuls of candy. Kurt loves candy and all things sweet. At heart, he's the free-floating, naked child on the cover of Nevermind, unsure as to whether or not to grab that dollar bill, the root of all evil.
“I have fond memories of being a kid,” he says, when asked about Nirvana's innocent, often childlike lyrical bent. “Not having any worries, and being oblivious to how awful the world can be; of only having to fit yourself into a schedule of playing and drawing and listening to music and watching television. It's a nice way to live, to be a child.”
That night onstage, Kurt's a demon. A bratty kid who grabbed the corporate ogre's dollar bill and ran. So far Nirvana remain uncorrupted, playing by their rules at every turn. The next day, much to their record company's chagrin, they canceled all those pesky interviews. When they appeared on The Word, a British live music TV show, a few days later, Cobain beat the censor to the punch by dedicating a hyperspeed blitz through “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to Courtney, “the best f?!k in the world.” Who knows what havoc they've wreaked by now? The terrible trio from rainy Seattle brought their anarchy to the U.K. Nevermind the bollocks. Here's Nirvana.
© Mike Gitter, 1992
Transcript
TBC
© Mike Gitter, 1992