LIVE NIRVANA INTERVIEW ARCHIVE September 2, 1993 - Los Angeles, CA, US

Interviewer(s)
Unidentified MTV Correspondent
Interviewee(s)
Kurt Cobain
Krist Novoselic
Dave Grohl
Publisher Title Transcript
MTV TBC Yes

Kurt Cobain: What do you wanna know?

Dave Grohl: Eddie speaks!

MTV: Obvious question right off - what's it like to win one of these things?

Krist Novoselic: Oh...

KC: I've already got two of 'em. I have three toilets and I've put the two of them in each toilet so far, and now I've won a third so they'll all match.

KN: It's The American Dream... three car garage too...

KC: Yep!

KN: That's right!

KC: Hey, can I have that cookie too?

MTV: Sure... Lots of people tell me it's not so much to win the awards and take 'em home and put 'em there, but for the party, for the whole thing, to see live performances... is that kind of it?

KN: No, 'cause if we don't come, they won't show our videos on MTV and our careers will be over.

KC: Yeah, you have to schmooze or they'll... you have to kiss butt!

KN: Yeah, we're here to glad-hand.

DG: It's not "choose or lose", it's "schmooze of lose"!

KN: Schmooze or lose...[laughs]

MTV: How important is MTV in determining what, not only the American public, but what the rest of the world gets to even hear...?

KC: What do you think? It's a monopoly, it's a 99% monopoly.

KN: It's a distributing paradox between the access MTV has to the people of the world and the potential it's just pissing away.

DG: It's become a catalog for like, y'know, middle America viewers. They decide that the hot new video is the hot new band... and, whatever.

MTV: 'Cause people could say that you guys do really well with MTV and MTV exposure...

KN: We do well financially and success-wise but that doesn't mean that we... it doesn't have anything to do with our music or what we want to say. It's just that we wanted to participate in the music industry, so we participated with MTV. We sold out...

KC: Yup!

KN: Kill us...

MTV: Do you feel that the pressure is on you, that you'd better show up and you better, y'know...?

KN: Well, they said that they know where my little sister goes to school...

KC: There's already been a couple of car bombings...

KN: And they know my mom's address, where she lives, and that's scary when they start threatening your family...

MTV: When you go on tour with another album, the one that's coming out, is there any more pressure to play the game, or is the pressure off to keep buying into the whole system...

KC: As of now, officially, it's over with. You've got the first scoop - I quit!

DG: Shit!

MTV: Oh no... you don't really mean it...

KN: The new record... the new album is a concept album based on a fictitious, speculative romance between Eduard Shevardnadze and Boris Yeltsin.

MTV: Are you gonna do a video for it?

KN: Ya, I'm gonna be Mikhail Gorbachev. Kurt is gonna be Leonid Brezhnev, we're gonna glue toothbrushes to his eyebrows and dye them black. And Dave is gonna be Raisa Gorbachev, we're gonna express our sexual frustrations.

© MTV Networks, 1993