Supplementary Material: Nirvana

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*How is Kurt Cobain enjoying success as the leader of the world's first triple-platunim punk-rock band? Don't ask*
For now, Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain and his new wife, Courtney Love, live in an apartment in Los Angeles's modest Fairfax district. The living room holds little besides a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier, a stringless guitar, a makeshift Buddhist shrine and, on the mantel, the couple's collection of naked plastic dolls.
Scores of CDs and tapes are strewn around the stereo – obscurities such as Calamity Jane, Cosmic Psychos and Billy Childish, as well as Cheap Trick and The Beatles. "Norwegian Wood'' drifts down the hall to the dimly lit bedroom, where Cobain lies flat on his back in striped pajamas, a red-painted big toenail peeking out the other end of the blanket and a couple of teddy bears lying beside him for company. The surprisingly fragrant Los Angeles night seeps through the window screen.
He's been suffering from a particularly heavy cold that surfaced recently, aggravated by stress and, apparently, his screaming singing style. And it also affected his appetite. Having eaten virtually nothing for over more than two weeks, Cobain is strikingly gaunt and frail, far from the stubbly doughboy who smirked out from a photo inside *Nevermind.* It's hard to believe this is the same guy who smashes guitars and wails with such violence – until you notice his blazing blue eyes and the faded pink and purple streaks in his hair.
Cobain had abruptly canceled an earlier interview, partly because of the anti-Nirvana letters that recently dominated *Rolling Stone's* Correspondence page and partly because the magazine borrowed the title of the band's hit single "Smells Like Teen Spirit'' for a headline on the recent *Beverly Hills, 90210* cover.
Then he came around. "There are a lot of things about *Rolling Stone* that I've never agreed with,'' says Cobain in a gentle growl one or two steps up from a whisper. "But it's just so old school to fight amongst your peers or people that are dealing with rock and roll, whether or not they're dealing with it in the same context that you would like to. There are a lot of political articles in there that I've been thankful for, so it's really stupid to attack something that you're not 100 percent opposed to. If there's a glimmer of hope in anything, you should support it."
"I don't blame the average 17-year-old punk rock kid for calling me a sellout,'' Cobain adds. "I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they'll realize there's more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.''
"All I need is a break and my stress will be over with," says the 25-year-old Cobain. "I'm going to get healthy and start over.''
He's certainly earned a break after playing nearly 100 dates on four continents in five months, never staying in one place long enough for to have for a doctor's help. And he and his bandmates, bassist Chris Novoselic (pronounced nova-SELL-itch) and drummer Dave Grohl, have had to cope with the peculiar position of being the world's first triple-platinum punk rock band.
Soon after the September release of *Nevermind*, MTV pumped "Teen Spirit'' night and day as the album vaulted up the charts until it hit No. 1. Although the band's label, DGC Records, doubted the album would sell over more than 250,000 copies, it sold 3 million in just four months and continues to sell nearly 100,000 copies a week.
For Nirvana, putting out their first major label record was like getting into a new car. But the runaway success was like suddenly discovering that the car was a Ferrari and the accelerator pedal was Krazy Glued to the floorboard. Friends worried about how the band was dealing with it all.
"Dave's just psyched,'' says Nils Bernstein, a good friend of the band members' who coordinates their fan mail. "He's 22, and he's a womanizer, and he's just: 'Score!''' Novoselic, according to Bernstein, had a drinking problem but went on the wagon this year so he could stay on top of his exploding career.
But rumors are flying about Cobain. They flew naturally about whether the new heartthrob was seriously dating anyone, especially the degree of seriousness that his relationship with Love was taking. Questions about why, after doing a barnstorming tour of clubs and venues around the world, he and the rest of the band would just put on the brakes, stopping before a proposed arena tour in the spring and summer as well as spurning an offer to join Guns N' Roses on their Use Your Illusion Tour. And of course, questions about whether he was partaking in any typical rock star excesses.
Cobain admits to an extensive history of using a variety of intoxicating substances. Mostly that he's often used pot, and only used a very particular and strong strain that was made specifically for medicinal purposes, because he had been dealing with a longstanding and painful stomach condition that used to be quite mysterious (it was found to be a pinched nerve aggravated by a case of scoliosis, and he's had surgery for that, wears a truss often, and does core exercises to work with), and which often spread into his arms. "It was certainly a really a moment that debilitated me, I'd be so weak all the time. And I got a sense of relief."
If he hadn't, Cobain admits he would've moved onto using heroin to handle the excruciating ailment. "People get desperate in situations like that. I'm no different." Besides that, he used to often indulge in the likes of LSD, huffing solvents, and lots and lots of alcohol. In addition to his stomach ailment, he suffered longtime bronchitis (certainly not helped by his singing), and clinical depression throughout much of his life. His family has a history of depression and suicide, two uncles shot themselves. "I'd probably be on the road to join them if my stomach hadn't been dealt with."
Cobain says that, with the exception of cigarettes, he has essentially given up drugs. "I don't even drink anymore because it destroys my stomach,'' he protests. "My body wouldn't allow me to take drugs if I wanted to at this point, especially because of the bronchitis."
"All drugs are a waste of time,'' he continues. "They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem. They make you feel good for a little while, and then they destroy you. They're no good at all. But I'm not going to go around preaching against it. It's your choice, but in my experience, I've found they're a waste of time.''
Cobain brushes off speculation that he's finding fame difficult and dismisses rumors that he'll soon break up the band because it has become too big. "It really isn't affecting me as much as it seems like it is in interviews and the way that a lot of journalists have portrayed my attitude,'' he says. "I'm pretty relaxed with it.''
But people who know him say otherwise. Choosing his words carefully, Jack Endino, producer of the band's debut album, *Bleach*, says, "When I saw them in Amsterdam a few months back, it seemed like they were a little grouchy and . . . under pressure, let's put it that way.'' "Kurt is ready to strangle the next person who takes his picture,'' adds Bernstein.
Fame rubs against Cobain's punk ethos, which is why he refused a limo ride to Nirvana's *Saturday Night Live* appearance. "People are treating him like a god, and that pisses him off,'' says Bernstein. "They're giving Kurt this elevated sense of importance that he feels he doesn't have or deserve. So he's like 'Fuck you!'"
"Chris and Dave have had to pick up a lot of Kurt's slack,'' Bernstein continues. "Chris and Dave were close before, but now they're inseparable."
"Just to survive lately I've become a lot more withdrawn from the band,'' Cobain confesses. "I don't go party after the show; I go straight to my hotel room and go to sleep and concentrate on eating in the morning. I'd rather deal with things like that. Our friendship isn't being jeopardized by it, but this tour has definitely taken some years off of our lives. I plan to make changes.''
Stress has gotten to Cobain before. He had an onstage breakdown at a 1989 show in Rome, near the end of a particularly grueling European tour. Says Bruce Pavitt, co-owner of Sub Pop Records, Nirvana's first label: "After four or five songs, he quit playing and climbed up the speaker column of speakers and was just going to jump off. The bouncers were freaking out, and everybody was just begging him to come down. And he was saying, 'No, no, I'm just going to dive.' He had really reached his limit. People literally saw a guy wig out in front of them who could break his neck if he didn't get it together.'' Cobain was eventually talked down.
If he can stand the heat, Cobain, extremely bright and unafraid to take provocative stands, may emerge as a John Lennon-like figure. The comparison with Cobain's idol isn't frivolous. Like Lennon, he's using his music to scream out an unhappy childhood. And like Lennon, he's deeply in love with an equally provocative and visionary artist – Courtney Love, leader of the fiery neofeminist band Hole.
Cobain and Love were married on February 24 in a secluded location in Waikiki, Hawaii, after Nirvana's tour of Japan and Australia, with only a female nondenominational minister and a roadie as a witness.
"It's like Evian water and battery acid,'' Cobain says of the couple's chemistry. And when you mix the two? "You get love,'' says Cobain, smiling for the first time. Exhausted and bedridden, Cobain is still so smitten that he can proclaim: "I'm just happier than I've ever been. I finally found someone that I am totally compatible with. It doesn't matter whether she's a male, female or hermaphrodite or a donkey. We're compatible.'' Whenever Love walks into the room, even if it's to scold him about something, he gets the profoundly dopey grin of the truly lovestruck.
"I have thought about it, and I can't come to any conclusions at all,'" says Cobain of *Nevermind's* phenomenal success. "I don't want to sound egotistical, but I know it's better than a majority of the commercial shit that's been crammed down people's throats for a long time.''
*Nevermind* embodies a cultural moment; "Smells Like Teen Spirit'' is an anthem for (or is it rather against) "Why Ask Why?'' generation. Just don't call Cobain a spokesman for a generation. "I'm a spokesman for myself,'' he says. "It just so happens that there's a bunch of people that are concerned with what I have to say. I find that frightening at times because I'm just as confused as most people. I don't have the answers for anything. I don't want to be a fucking spokesperson.''
"That ambiguity or confusion, that's the whole thing,'' says *Nevermind* producer Butch Vig. "What the kids are attracted to in the music is that he's not necessarily a spokesman for a generation, but all that's in the music – the passion and [the fact that] he doesn't necessarily know what he wants but he's pissed. It's all these things working at different levels at once. It's not real cut and dried. I don't exactly know what 'Teen Spirit' means, but you know it means something and it's intense as hell.''
Cobain agrees the message isn't necessarily in the words. "Most of the music is really personal as far as the emotion and the experiences that I've had in my life,'' he says, dragging on a cigarette, "but most of the themes in the songs aren't that personal. They're more just stories from television or books or movies or friends, more so than mine. But definitely the emotion and feeling is from me.
"Most of the concentration of my singing is from my upper abdomen, that's where I scream, that's where I feel, that's where everything comes out of me – right here,'' he continues, touching a point just below his breastbone. It just happens to be exactly where his stomach pain was centered.
When *Nevermind* hit No. 1, Cobain was "kind of excited,'' he says. "I wouldn't admit that at the time. I just hope that it doesn't end with us. I hope there are other bands that can keep it going.''
Although Cobain is thrilled when underground bands infiltrate the mainstream charts, he's outraged by others who are riding the coattails of the alternative boom. His favorite target is Pearl Jam, also from Seattle, which he accused of "corporate, alternative and cock rock fusion'' in a recent *Musician* magazine interview. "Every article I see written about them, they mention us, and they're baiting that fact,'' says Cobain, sitting up cross-legged on the bed. "I would love to be erased from my association with that band and other corporate bands like The Nymphs and a few other felons. I do feel a duty to warn the kids of false music that's claiming to be underground or alternative. They're jumping on the alternative bandwagon."
"I don't know what I did to him; if he has a personal vendetta against us, he should come to us," says Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament, who says Cobain barely even said hello when they did a recent minitour together. "To have that sort of pent-up frustration, the guy obviously must have some really deep insecurities about himself. Does he think we're riding his bandwagon? We could turn around and say that Nirvana put out records on money we made for Sub Pop when we were in Green River – if we were that stupid about it.''
Cobain is happier to reel off a list of some of the bands he does like: The Breeders, The Pixies, REM, Jesus Lizard, Urge Overkill, Beat Happening, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and Flipper. Then there's his beloved Captain America, a ramshackle pop group from Scotland. "Eugene and Frances Kelly are the Lennon and McCartney of the underworld – or the Captain and Tennille,'' says Cobain.
For the members of Nirvana, plugging fellow underground musicians is one of the few consolations for the pressures of fame. When the band played Seattle's Paramount Theater for its big homecoming show last Halloween, its opener was Bikini Kill, a confrontational female-led band from nearby Olympia that came out in lingerie with SLUT written across their stomachs. Novoselic is toying with the idea of a "punk rock MTV'' featuring underground bands.
Helping out fellow alternative types strengthens the community that made Nirvana's own success possible. "It's a question of inclusion,'' explains Sub Pop co-owner Jonathan Poneman, "it's a question of being able to be included. Egalitarian revolution – that's what makes them a punk rock band.''
It's fitting that Nirvana bumped Michael Jackson off the No. 1 spot on the pop charts. Besides a fondness for small children and animals, Cobain and Jackson have little in common – Jackson claims it doesn't matter if you're black or white, but when Cobain hears such saccharine platitudes, he screams. Jackson's music is '80s-style ear candy, while Nirvana makes grassroots music for the '90s. There's no glamour in Nirvana, no glamour at all, in fact.
Novoselic and Cobain come from rural Aberdeen, Washington, 100 miles southwest of Seattle, where Novoselic's mom runs Maria's Hair Design. A depressed logging town, Aberdeen has seen better days – namely, during the whaling era in the mid-19th century, when the town served as one big brothel for visiting sailors, a fact that Novoselic has said makes residents "a little ashamed of our roots.'' Pervasive unemployment and a perpetually rainy, gray climate have led to rampant alcoholism and a suicide rate more than twice the already high state average. The local pawnshop is full of guns, chainsaws and guitars.
One of the more popular bars in town is actually called the Pourhouse, which is where two young men about Cobain's age, Joe and James, sit down for a pitcher of beer – each. Joe is out of work because his leg is broken. "I tried to fly off a house,'' he explains.
"Yeah, I know the Cobain kid,'' says James. "Faggot.''
"He's a faggot?'' asks Joe, taken aback. Recovering quickly, he declares: "We deal with faggots here. We run 'em out of town.''
This is where Cobain and Novoselic grew up. That's why they kissed each other full on the lips as the *Saturday Night Live* credits rolled. They knew it would piss off the folks back home – and everybody like them.
"I definitely have a problem with the average macho man – the strong-oxen working-class type,'' Cobain says wearily, "because they have always been a threat to me. I've had to deal with them most of my life – being taunted and beaten up by them in school, just having to be around them and be expected to be that kind of person when you grow up."
"I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male – or the American idea of what a male is supposed to be,'' Cobain continues. "Just watch a beer commercial and you'll see what I mean.''
Of course, Cobain was miserable in high school. Surrounded by hard-drinking metalheads whose only prospects were unemployment or risking life and limb hacking down beautiful centuries-old trees, Cobain was a sensitive sort, small for his age and uninterested in sports. "He was terrified of jocks and moron dudes,'' recalls Cobain's old friend Mudhoney bassist Matt Lukin.
"As I got older,'' says Cobain, a fan of Beckett's, Burroughs's and Bukowski's, "I felt more and more alienated – I couldn't find friends whom I felt compatible with at all. Everyone was eventually going to become a logger, and I knew I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be some kind of artist.''
"If he would have been anywhere else,'' says his mother, Wendy O'Connor, "he would have been fine – there would have been enough of his kind not to stick out so much. But this town is just exactly like *Peyton Place*. Everybody is watching everyone and judging, and they have their little slots they like everyone to stay in – and he didn't.''
A friend of Cobain's half-joked that *Nevermind* sold to every abused child in the country, and maybe that's not far from the truth – the divorce rate soared to nearly 50 percent in the mid-'70s, and all those children of broken homes are becoming adults. Including Kurt Cobain.
Cobain started life as a sunny child. "He got up every day with such joy that there was another day to be had,'' recalls his mother. "When we'd go downtown to the stores, he would sing to people.'' Cobain's intelligence was apparent early on. "It kind of scared me because he had perceptions like I've never seen a small child have,'' his mother continues. "He had life figured out really young. He knew life wasn't always fair. Kurt was focused on the world – he would be drawing in a coloring book, and the news would be on and he was very attuned to that, and he was just three and a half. He knew all about the war."
"He had make-believe friends, too,'' O'Connor says. "There was one called Boddah – he blamed everything on him. He had to have a place at the table – it just became ridiculous. One day his uncle Clark asked if he could take Bodddah with him to Vietnam because he was lonely there. And Kurt took me aside and whispered in my ear: 'Boddah isn't real. Does Clark know that?' ''
But Cobain's parents – a secretary and an auto mechanic – divorced when he was eight, and "it just destroyed his life,'' says his mother. "He changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very inward – he just held everything. He became real shy. It just devastated him. I think he's still suffering.'' A bit of a "juvenile,'' as he puts it, Cobain was shuffled from his mother to his father, uncles and grandparents and back again.
Cobain listened to nothing but The Beatles until he was nine, when his dad began subscribing to a record club and albums by Led Zeppelin, Kiss and Black Sabbath began arriving in the mail. Then Kurt began following the Sex Pistols' American tour in magazines. He didn't know what punk sounded like, because no store in town stocked the records, but he had an idea. "I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time,'' Cobain says, "something different from heavy metal, a different attitude.''
Cobain idolized the Aberdeen band The Melvins and drove their tour van, hauled their equipment and watched over 200 of their rehearsals, by his estimate. Melvins leader Buzz Osborne became his friend and mentor and took 16-year-old Cobain to his first rock show – Black Flag. According to erstwhile Melvins bassist Matt Lukin, "He was totally blown away.'' It was about this time that Cobain moved from drums to guitar.
"I don't think he had a hell of a lot of friends,'' Lukin recalls. "He was always trying to start bands, but it was hard to find people who wouldn't flake out on him.'' Osborne introduced him to Novoselic, a shy youth so tall (he's 6'7") that he bumped his head on the beams in Cobain's house. Cobain formed a band with this kindred spirit two years his senior. They went through names like Ed, Ted, and Fred; Skid Row (not knowing about the hair metal band from New Jersey named that); and Fecal Matter before settling on Nirvana. Nerves and crummy equipment hampered their live attack, but Nirvana slowly developed a powerful sound, becoming very popular in neighboring Olympia, where they would play wild parties at Evergreen State College.
Meanwhile, Cobain's mother kicked him out of the house after he quit high school and played in bands instead of getting a job. Homeless, Cobain slept on friends' couches. At one point, he lived under a bridge in Aberdeen, an arrangement chronicled in *Nevermind's* "Something in the Way.''
A vandal with a cause, Cobain loved to spray-paint the word queer on four-by-four trucks, the redneck vehicle of choice. Other favorite graffiti included GOD IS GAY and ABORT CHRIST. In 1985 Novoselic, Osborne and 18-year-old Cobain wrote HOMOSEXUAL SEX RULES on the side of an Aberdeen bank (Osborne swears it said, QUIET RIOT). While Osborne and Novoselic hid in a garbage dumpster, Cobain was caught and arrested. A police report lists the contents of his pockets: a guitar pick, a key, a beer, a mood ring and a cassette by the militant punk band Millions of Dead Cops. He received a $180 fine and a 30-day suspended sentence.
"He is really a very angry person,'' says Sub Pop's Bruce Pavitt, "so he makes dramatic gestures that piss people off.'' But Cobain is also sensitive, and sensitive people are often the angriest. "Exactly,'' says Pavitt. "That's the key.''
Cobain wanted to be a commercial artist, but his grades weren't good enough for college classes in art. He took jobs as a janitor at a hotel and at a dentist's office (where he dipped into the nitrous) and moved in with Matt Lukin, who was then with the Melvins. Just to freak the neighbors, Cobain made a satanic-looking doll and hung it from a noose in his window. He kept some pet turtles in a bathtub that he put in the front room. Then he realized there was no way to drain the water, so Lukin, a carpenter, simply cut a hole in the floor. The foundation eventually became waterlogged, leaving the rickety shack teetering.
In a demo session with producer Jack Endino, one of the patron saints of the Seattle grunge scene, Cobain and Melvins drummer Dale Crover finished 10 songs in one afternoon. Impressed, Endino played the tape for Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman. (Two cuts wound up on *Bleach*, and later this year Sub Pop will release a collection of Nirvana rarities.)
At a Seattle coffee shop, Poneman met Cobain, who was awed by Sub Pop because it boasted one of his favorite bands, Soundgarden. Novoselic showed up a bit later. "Chris was drunk and belligerent,'' recalls Poneman, "and just didn't give a flying fuck about it – 'OK, you want to put out our records, that's cool.' And then he'd insult me.'' Poneman signed Nirvana anyway.
A year and two drummers later, in October 1988, Sub Pop released the single "Love Buzz''/"Big Cheese''; Bleach was released in June 1989, recorded for the princely sum of $606.17. (Jason Everman didn't actually play on the album, although he was credited as a guitarist because he bankrolled the recording. "We still owe him the $600,'' says Cobain. "Maybe I should send him off a check.'')
Bleach sold slowly at first, but after a few months, critical raves and effusive praise from indie kingpins Sonic Youth eventually helped *Bleach* to sell 35,000 copies, very impressive for an indie release. (The album's sales exploded in the wake of the success of Nevermind.)
But by this time, Bleach drummer Chad Channing was history. Osborne knew Dave Grohl from sharing bills with Grohl's band, Scream. After Scream's bassist quit, Grohl called Osborne in desperation, and Osborne hooked him up with his old buddies in Nirvana. "Chris and Kurt liked Dave because he hits the drums harder than anybody,'' says producer Butch Vig.
In August 1990, Nirvana recorded six tracks with Vig for a planned Sub Pop album. *Bleach* was very good, but Cobain had returned to the studio with songs that were a quantum leap past anything he'd done before.
Meanwhile, Sub Pop had begun talking to major labels about a distribution deal. Figuring that if they had to be on a major label, they might as well choose it themselves, the members of Nirvana began shopping the Vig demos. Only a major could afford to buy Nirvana out of their Sub Pop contract, and major distribution would get their punk to the people. "That's pretty much my excuse for not feeling guilty about why I'm on a major label,'' says Cobain. "I should feel really guilty about it; I should be living out the old punk rock threat and denying everything commercial and sticking in my own little world and not really making an impact on anyone other than the people who are already aware of what I'm complaining about. It's preaching to the converted.''
A bidding war broke out among a handful of labels. Nirvana signed to DGC Records, an imprint of Geffen Records, the label run by entertainment magnate David Geffen, a subsidiary of giant MCA and the home of Guns N' Roses, Whitesnake, Aerosmith and Cher. The band received $287,000 in advance money.
The group approached REM producer Scott Litt and Southern pop maestro Don Dixon, but neither wound up taking the job, and the band chose Vig to produce instead. During rehearsals for the album, one song really stuck out. "As soon as they started playing 'Teen Spirit,''' Vig says, "it was awesome sounding. I was pacing around the room, trying not to jump up and down in ecstasy.''
*Nevermind* was recorded last spring for $135,000, including living expenses, mastering and even Vig himself (he has since renegotiated his deal). Slayer and Madonna producer Andy Wallace mixed the album. Vig knew something was up when all sorts of people started asking him for advance tapes; now he's besieged with offers to produce bands and "make them sound like Nirvana.''
Just last September Novoselic and Cobain were so poor, they had to pawn their amps; now Cobain gets $20 out of the cash machine and finds there's another $100,000 in his account. When Novoselic told a friend he'd bought a five-bedroom house in Seattle, the friend pointed out that the payments would just be another headache. "What payments?'' Novoselic replied. He'd paid for the house in full.
"A lot of people ask me: 'When's he going to buy you a new car? When's he going to buy you a house?''' says Cobain's mother. "I couldn't even accept it if he offered it. We could have helped him along if we would have realized that this was really going to be something. We thought he'd get over it. I wish we would have helped him out a little more. He owes us nothing.''
Nirvana, however, owes DGC another record, which the band will likely start recording late this fall or early winter. Says Jonathan Poneman, "Either Kurt is going to create something that is an ornate masterpiece, or he is going to create something angry and filled with the rage and confusion.'' Butch Vig thinks it might be a low-key acoustic album.
"I have a pretty good idea,'' says Cobain. "I think both of the extremes will be in the next album – it'll be more raw with some songs and more candy pop on some of the others. It won't be as one-dimensional.''
One-dimensional or not, there's a good chance Cobain's audience just doesn't get his message. The antimacho "Territorial Pissings'' was used as background music for a football show; "Smells Like Teen Spirit'' might suffer the same fate as "Rockin' in the Free World'' or "Born in the U.S.A.'' – listeners may not get the irony at all. Actually, Cobain called it in the chorus to *Nevermind's* "In Bloom'' – "He's the one who likes all the pretty songs/And he likes to sing along . . . /But he knows not what it means.'' Cleverly, the song is a natural-born singalong, trapping listeners into the joke.
According to Nils Bernstein, most Nirvana fan letters are along the lines of "Hey, dude, I saw your video and bought your tape! You guys kick ass!''
"Everybody says, 'You guys kick ass,''' says Bernstein. About half ask for the lyrics to "Teen Spirit'' (the complete lyrics to *Nevermind* will be included with the next single, "Lithium''). Most letter writers are aged 10-22, write on notebook paper, buy cassettes and watch MTV. "There's not very many sexual letters,'' says Bernstein, "which is a drag. The ones from prison are the best ones; also the ones from the military.'' And what do soldiers say? "They say, 'Hey, you guys kick some ass!'''
Cobain accepts that much of his new audience is made up of the same types who hassled him in high school. "I can't have a lot of animosity toward them, because I understand that a lot of people's personalities aren't necessarily their choice – a lot of times, they're pushed into the way they live,'' he says. "Hopefully, they'll like our music and listen to something else that's in the same vein, that's a bit different from Van Halen. Hopefully, they'll be exposed to the underground by reading interviews with us. Knowing that we do come from a punk rock world, maybe they'll look into that and change their ways a bit.''
But it's doubtful that most of them ever will. "Yeah, it seems hopeless,'' Cobain says with a sigh. "But it's fun to fight. It gives you something to do. It relieves boredom.'' He laughs.

**"The Dark Side Of Kurt Cobain," by Kevin Allman, *The Advocate*, February 1993**
*Nirvana's frontman shoots from the hip*
It's 4:00 on a cold Seattle afternoon, and Kurt Cobain, the lyricist-guitarist-lead singer of Nirvana, is sitting in a downtown hotel room, playing with his 5-month-old daughter, Frances, while his wife, Courtney Love-lead singer of her own band, Hole-applies her makeup. At the moment, the Cobains (including the baby) are on the cover of *Spin* magazine-which has named Nirvana as Artist of the Year-and the band's new album, *Incesticide*, is due out within the week. The Nirvana media machine should be in high gear.
But, no.
What's surprising is what's not in the Cobains' room: no entourage, no groupies, no publicists, and no signs of the high life-in any sense of the term. Cobain, in fact, is wearing a pair of fuzzy green pajamas. And he and Love are in Seattle for the sole reason of trying to speed the deal on a modest house they've been trying to buy. The only concession to Cobain's being what he mockingly calls "a rock icon" is the pseudonym under which he has registered, Simon Ritchie.
It's a joke-Ritchie was the real name of Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistol who died from a heroin overdose-and it shows that the Cobains have a sense of humor about being tagged by the press as a modern-day Sid and Nancy. If the Cobains are being reclusive these days, they explain, it's not because they feel they've been strung up-by the media. "Everyone thinks we're on drugs, even people we work with," says Cobain resignedly as Love paints on a perfect babydoll mouth. "I guess I'll have to get used to that for the rest of my life."
While Cobain, 25, is quiet and thoughtful, Love is tailor-made for the media attention, blessed and cursed with what seems as an almost genetic inability to censor herself. Within the first five minutes of THE ADVOCATE's arrival, she is spinning a story about an ex-flame and his lingerie fetish: "He had to wear nylons to have sex-not just any nylons but flesh-colored nylons. And he couldn't buy them, he had to find them." Listening, Cobain smiles, holding Frances by her arms, walking her across his lap. He is-at least for the moment-not feeling beat up.
Getting beaten up, though, is a recurring theme in Cobain's life. In his hometown of Aberdeen in rural Washington, he was branded a "faggot" from an early age. It was a title he eventually embraced and threw back in his tormentors' faces-just for the hell of it. In 1985 he was even arrested when he and friend Chris Novoselic spray painted HOMO SEX RULES on the side of a bank.
Four years later, Cobain, Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl released the first Nirvana album, *Bleach*, on a small Seattle label Sub Pop Records. Recorded for $606.15, it was a blast of pure punk rock that earned them a reputation in Seattle and drew the interest of several major labels. Their major label debut, *Nevermind*, was released by DGC in September 1991-and by the end of the year, *Nevermind* (fueled by the inescapably catchy "Smells Like Teen Spirit") had come from far left field to sell 3 million copies and top critics' best-of-the-year lists. Last January cellular phones all over the record industry were crackling when Nirvana hit No. 1-toppling U2, Metallica, Guns N' Roses and Michael Jackson from the top of the chart. Punk rock was suddenly a commodity, and the term grunge, denoting flannel shirts, ripped jeans, dirty hair, and especially anything Seattle-based, entered the lexicon. Soon record executives were spending weekends in Seattle, trying to find the "next Nirvana," and models cropped up on Paris runways sporting haute grungewear.
But even as Nirvana went from playing club dates to selling out 40,000-seat arenas, the band still didn't play by the rules. They spurned an offer to tour with Guns N' Roses, further fueling already rampant industry rumors that Cobain and his then pregnant wife had a big problem with heroin. Last April, when *Rolling Stone* put the band on its cover, Cobain showed up for the photo session in a T-shirt that read CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK. And an unflattering profile of the Cobains in September's *Vanity Fair* dropped the two into the world of glossy journalism with a jolt. While talking about the article, both Cobain and Love insist that they have been misquoted and misunderstood.
Equally misunderstood, to Cobain, is Nirvana itself-particularly the fact that the band appeals to many of the same hard rock fans who pack Guns N' Roses concerts. But while Axl Rose sang derisively of "immigrants and faggots" in his song "One in a Million," Cobain closed his song "Stay Away" by howling "God is gay!" and Nirvana defiantly cavorted in dresses in the video of their hit single "In Bloom." Last year Nirvana traveled to Oregon to perform at a benefit opposing Measure 9, a statewide ordinance that would have amended the state constitution to prohibit protections for gays and lesbians. And when they appeard on *Saturday Night Live*, Cobain and Novoselic made a point of kissing on camera.
In person, Cobain is the antithesis of a preening guitar cocksman: He's small, pale, soft-spoken, and articulate. Prejudice infuriates him: he spits out the words "homophobe" and "sexist" with the same venom he reserves for the word "spandex." Particularly upsetting to him was an incident last year in Reno, when two men raped a woman while chanting a Nirvana song. On the liner notes for *Incesticide*, he vented his frustration in a blunt statement to Nirvana fans: "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us-leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records."
Despite Cobain's wish that people "leave us the fuck alone," both he and Love seem determined not to surround themselves with a glass bubble of security precautions and stereotypical rock star trappings. Before this interview-the only one the band's lead singer says he plans to do for *Incesticide*-Cobain set down no conditions regarding the questions that could be asked, nor did he bother to notify his record company that the interview would be taking place. (Love, in fact, insisted that the mutual friend who arranged the meeting put THE ADVOCATE in direct contact with the couple: "Gay people can have our phone number")
Back in the hotel room, Love goes out and leaves Cobain to his interview, but she's wary enough to come back twice: "I'm worried about what they're going to write," she finally blurts. Still, her need to trust overwhelms her protectiveness. While she leaves for the third time, she says, "it's a gay publication, Kurt, so don't forget to tell them about the time you stole your tights out of your mother's drawer." Cobain smiles; she laughs and sighs, "I guess I have that effect on men. Bye." And then she's gone for good, pushing Frances's stroller out the door.
*You two don't seem like Sid and Nancy.*
It's just amazing that at this point in rock and roll history, people are still expecting their rock icons to live out these classic rock archetypes, like Sid and Nancy or John and Yoko. To assume that we're just the same-it's pretty offensive to be expected to be like that.
*Does it hurt worse when they say bad things about Courtney?*
Oh, absolutely. What they said about me is not half as strange as what they've said about her. She doesn't deserve that. She sold 60,000 records, and all of a sudden she's found herself as commercially popular as me, and she's just in a punk rock band. Just because she married me, she's subjected to being as popular as an actress or something.
*Who do you trust now?*
Uh-no one? [Laughs] I've always kind of kept myself purposely naive and optimistic, and now I've been forced to be really paranoid. Judgmental. Really defensive all the time. It's been hard for me to change my attitude.
*You're here in this hotel room. Can you go out?*
Yeah. The other night we went shopping at a secondhand store and bought some fuzzy sweaters and some grungewear.
*Real grungewear, not the designer kind?*
Not Perry Ellis. [Laughs] We were driving around in our Volvo, after buying some grungewear and we realized that we're not necessarily as big as Guns N' Roses, but we're as popular as them, and we still don't have bodyguards. We still go shopping, we still go to movies and carry on with our lives. I've always been a paranoid person by nature anyhow, and now I have all these people so concerned with what I say and what I do at all times that it's really hard for me to deal with that. I'm dealing with it a lot better than I would have expected. If I could have predicted what was going to happen to me a few years ago, I definitely wouldn't have opted for this kind of a lifestyle.
*Would it be cooler to have stayed in Seattle and not been on the cover of* Rolling Stone?
Yeah. Well, I chose to do that-although it was a hell of a fight. We were on tour in Australia, and I had completely forgotten that I had promised to do the *Rolling Stone* piece. And that day, they called and said "Are you ready to do the photo shoot?" And it was like, "No, I really don't want to do this." I had so much pressure from my management and the band members-they wanted to do it, and I just agreed. On my way there I just decided, "I'm going to write something on my shirt that's offensive enough to stop getting our picture on the cover." This way I could say that I actually played along with it and still didn't get picked to be on the cover. I wasn't necessarily challenging *Rolling Stone*, saying, "You suck" and "We don't want to have anything to do with you, but we'll still use you for our exposure." *Rolling Stone* sucks, has always sucked, and still sucks just because they have a hip band on their cover. We're not as cool and hip as everyone thinks. Having us on the cover isn't going to make *Rolling Stone* any cooler. Ever since this band has been popular, I've always thought of us as just a '90s version of Cheap Trick or The Knack. They had two sides of appeal that made them kind of a cool band-a commercial side and kind of a new wave side. We have that.
*Everything you do seems to get analyzed. You can't even say or do anything off-the-cuff.*
Yeah, I still have the same views I've always had. When I used to say things to my friends, I didn't expect to be taken so seriously. Now I have to learn to detour my thoughts and what I say in order to stop someone from saying I'm a hypocrite. That was the *Rolling Stone* debate: "Corporate magazines suck, but you're still on the cover." Well, of course! It's a joke. Get over it. People should take things rock stars say with a grain of salt because there's no one in rock and roll right now who's a relevant example of a spokesperson for anything. They do have an influence on people, and I think there's a new consciousness that's really positive among rock stars, like Rock the Vote. They're trying to make people aware, but I really can't think of anyone who's really schooled enough to be political to the point that would be required for a rock star. If Jello Biafra [former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys] was a big international star, it would be really cool. But he's not on a major label, and he doesn't write commercial enough music to use that as a tool.
*Does it make you laugh when people take apart all your songs, and try to figure out what you're saying?*
Oh, yeah. At the time I was writing those songs, I really didn't know what I was trying to say. There's no point in my even trying to analyze or explain it. That used to be the biggest subject in an interview: "What are your lyrics about?" [Laughs] I haven't written any new lyrics, that's for sure. We have about 12 songs for our new album we're scheduled to record in February, and I don't have any lyrics at all. Within the past year, notebooks and poetry books I've had lying around have either been destroyed or stolen. So I don't have anything to go back on at all. It sucks. The past year I haven't been very prolific at all. A few months ago we went on tour to Europe, and before we went I took two of my favorite guitars and all my poetry books and writings and two tapes that had guitar parts I was going to use for the next record, and I put all this really important stuff in our shower, because we've never really used our shower before. And the roommates upstairs had a plumbing problem, so when we came back, everything was destroyed, I don't have anything to go back on at all. It's pretty scary.
*I read the liner notes you wrote on* Incesticide. *I've never seen somebody on a major label say, "If you're a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, we don't want you to buy our records."*
That's been the biggest problem that I've had being in this band. I know there are those people out in the audience, and there's not much I can do about it. I can talk about those issues in interviews-I think it's pretty obvious that we're against the homophobes and the sexists and the racists, but when "Teen Spirit" first came out, mainstream audiences were under the assumption that we were just like Guns N' Roses. Then our opinions started showing up in interviews. And then things like Chris and I kissing on *Saturday Night Live.* We weren't trying to be subversive or punk rock; we were just doing something insane and stupid at the last minute. I think now that our opinions our out in the open, a lot of kids who bought our record regret knowing anything about us. [Laughs] There is a war going on in the high schools now between Nirvana kids and Guns N' Roses kids. It's really cool. I'm really proud to be a part of that, because when I was in high school, I dressed like a punk rocker and people would scream "Devo!" at me-because Devo infiltrated the mainstream. Out of all the bands who came from the underground and actually made it in the mainstream, Devo is the most subversive and challenging of all. They're just awesome. I love them.
*Maybe there'll be a Devo revival soon, like the Village People revival.*
I saw the Village People two years ago in Seattle! They were so cool. They still had the same costumes.
*Is there anything about Guns N' Roses' music you like?*
I can't think of a damn thing. I can't even waste my time on that band, because they're so obviously pathetic and untalented. I used to think that everything in the mainstream pop world was crap, but now that some underground bands have been signed with majors, I take Guns N' Roses as more of an offense. I have to look into it more: They're really talentless people, and they write crap music, and they're the most popular rock band on the earth right now. I can't believe it.
*Didn't Axl Rose say something nasty to you at the MTV Video Music Awards in September?*
They actually tried to beat us up. Courtney and I were with the baby in the eating area backstage, and Axl walked by. So Courtney yelled, "Axl! Axl, come over here!" We just wanted to say hi to him-we think he's a joke, but we just wanted to say something to him. So I said, "Will you be the godfather of our child?" I don't know what had happened before that to piss him off, but he took his aggressions out on us and began screaming bloody murder. These were his words: "You shut your bitch up, or I'm taking you down to the pavement." [laughs] Everyone around us just burst out into tears of laughter. She wasn't even saying anything mean, you know? So I turned to Courtney and said, "Shut up, bitch!" And everyone laughed and he left. So I guess I did what he wanted me to do-be a man. [laughs]
*Does he remind you of guys you went to high school with?*
Absolutely. Really confused, fucked-up guys. There's not much hope for them.
*When he was singing about "immigrants and faggots," people were excusing it by saying, "Well, he's from Indiana-"*
Oh, well, that's OK then. [Laughs] Insane. Later, after we played our show and were walking back to our trailer, the Guns N' Roses entourage came walking toward us. They have at least 50 bodyguards apiece: huge, gigantic, brain-dead oafs ready to kill for Axl at all times. [Laughs] They didn't see me, but they surrounded Chris, and Duff [McKagan of Guns N' Roses] wanted to beat Chris up, and the bodyguards started pushing Chris around. He finally escaped, but throughout the rest of the evening, there was a big threat of either Guns N' Roses themselves or their goons beating us up. We had to hide out. Since then, every time Axl has played a show he's said some comment about me and Courtney. When he was in Seattle, he said "Nirvana would rather stay home and be bullied by their bitch wives than tour with us." [Laughs] That's why there's this big feud in most of the high schools. It's hilarious. He is insane, though. I was scared. I couldn't possibly beat him up; I know he would beat me up if he had the chance.
*How do you feel about Guns N' Roses fans coming to see you?*
Well, when we played that No On 9 benefit in Portland, I said something about Guns N' Roses. Nothing nasty-I think I said, "And now, for our next song, 'Sweet Child o' Mine.'" But some kid jumped onstage and said, "Hey, man, Guns N' Roses plays awesome music, and Nirvana plays awesome music. Let's just get along and work things out, man!" And I just couldn't help but say, "No, kid, you're really wrong. Those people are total sexist jerks, and the reason we're playing this show is to fight homophobia in a real small way. The guy is a fucking sexist and a racist and a homophobe, and you can't be on his side and be on our side. I'm sorry that I have to divide this up like this, but it's something you can't ignore. And besides they can't write good music." [Laughs]
*You know, you were probably taking money from people who were voting yes on 9-but they really wanted to see Nirvana.*
[Laughs] Right! Chris went to a Guns N' Roses concert when they played here with Metallica a couple of months ago, and he went backstage, and there were these two bimbo girls who looked like they walked out of a Warrant video. They were sitting on the couch in hopes of sucking Axl's dick or something, and one of them said, "Chris, we saw you at that No On 9 benefit! We're voting yes on 9! You kissed Kurt on the lips! That was disgusting!" [Laughs] To know that we affect people like that-it's kind of funny. The sad thing is that there's no penetrating them. After all that, after all the things those girls had seen us do, that was the one thing that sticks in their minds.
*You used to push people's buttons like that in high school, didn't you?*
Oh, absolutely. I used to pretend I was gay just to fuck with people. I've had the reputation of being a homosexual ever since I was 14. It was really cool, because I found a couple of gay friends in Aberdeen-which is almost impossible. How I could ever come across a gay person in Aberdeen is amazing! But I had some really good friends that way. I got beat up a lot, of course, because of my association with them. People just thought I was weird at first, just some fucked-up kid. But once I got the gay tag, it gave me the freedom to be able to be a freak and let people know that they should just stay away from me. Instead of having to explain to someone that they should just stay the fuck away from me-I'm gay, so I can't even be touched. It made for quite a few scary experiences in alleys walking home from school, though.
*You actually got beat up?*
Oh, yeah. Quite a few times.
*And you used to spray-paint GOD IS GAY on people's trucks?*
That was a lot of fun. The funniest thing about that was not actually the act but the next morning. I'd get up early in the morning to walk through the neighborhood that I'd terrorized to see the aftermath. That was the worst thing I could have spray-painted on their cars. Nothing else would have been more effective. Aberdeen was depressing, and there were a lot of negative things about it, but it was really fun to fuck with people all the time. I loved to go to parties-jock keggers-and just run around drunk and obnoxious, smoking cigars and spitting on the backs of these big redneck jocks and them not realizing it. By the end of the evening, usually I'd end up offending a girl, and she'd get her boyfriend to come beat me up. [Laughs]
*Because people thought you were gay and you had gay friends, did you ever wonder if you might be gay?*
Yeah, absolutely. See I've always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl. Throughout my life, I've always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I've always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn't find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all. They had really awful haircuts and fucked-up attitudes. So I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I'm just more sexually attracted to women. But I'm really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something. I mean, I'm definitely gay in spirit, and I probably could be bisexual. But I'm married, and I'm more attracted to Courtney than I ever have been toward a person, so there's no point in trying to sow my oats at this point. [Laughs] If I wouldn't have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle. But I just find her totally attractive in all ways.
*She has been described as a fag hag.*
Oh, she is. That was all she did for about five or six years of her life-hang out in gay clubs. She learned everything about perfume and fashion from her friends.
*Now that you've got a baby, how are you going to teach her about sexism and homophobia and things like that?*
I think that just growing up with Courtney and I will be a good enough example that, hopefully, she won't be prejudiced. You have to admit that most of the reasons a person grows up hating the isms is because their parents taught them. She might get confused, but I'm not worried about it at all.
*With the state the world is in, do you ever feel scared for her?*
Well, I have apocalyptic dreams all the time. Two years ago, I wouldn't even have considered having a child. I used to say that a person who would bring a child into this life now is selfish. But I try to be optimistic, and things do look like they're getting a little bit better-just the way communication has progressed in the past 10 years. MTV, whether they're the evil corporate ogre or not, has played a part in raising consciousness. It seems tacky enough almost, but rock and roll and our generation are not going to put up with the same Reaganite bullshit we were subjected to when we were younger. I was helpless when I was 12, when Reagan got elected, and there was nothing I could do about that. But now this generation is growing up, and they're in their mid-20s, they're not putting up with it. I know there's still Republicans all over the place, but don't you feel that it's getting a little bit better? Not just because Clinton is in office now but-look at the first thing he did. He tried to take away the ban on gays in the military, and I think that's a pretty positive thing. I don't expect a lot of change, but I think in the last five years our generation's gotten a little more positive. I know that by reading *Sassy* magazine, you know? As tacky and stupid as that seems, I can tell that the average 14-year-old kid is a lot more sensitive-or trying to be-than they were ten years ago.
*Are you pro-Clinton?*
Oh, yeah. I voted for him. I would have rather had Jerry Brown. I contributed my $100. But I'm definitely happy that Clinton's in.
*Would you play at the White House if they asked you to?*
[Laughs] If we could have some kind of influence on something, yeah. I know that Chelsea likes us a lot, so maybe Chelsea could say, "Dad, do this and do that! Nirvana says so!" [Laughs] Sure, I'd play for the President. And Chelsea seems like a pretty neat person-Birkenstock-wearing kid. Amy Carter's pretty cool too, from what I've heard. She's been seen at Butthole Surfers concerts!
*You guys aren't preachy about your opinions. It's a sensible approach.*
Gee. That's pretty flattering, but out of all the people I know, I'm about the least qualified to be talking politically. I hope I come across more personal than political. About a year ago, when we realized the impact that we have, we thought it was a great opportunity to have some kind of influence on people. I've been called a hypocrite and an idiot and unqualified, but I can't help it. It's just my nature. I have to talk about things that piss me off, and if that's negative or that's preachy, then that's too bad. No one's gonna shut me up. I'm still the same person I was. Actually, I used to be way more of a radical than I am now.
*In thought or in deed?*
Both, really. Mostly in deed; I can't really go around vandalizing anymore. But I have-actually, I just did a while ago.
*What?*
I can't say! [Laughs] I can't even say! I have people checking up on me all the time-I'm constantly harassed at airports and immigration all the time. And the cops-I get pulled over whenever they recognize me, and they search my car.
*How did you feel when you read Lynn Hirschberg's profile of Courtney in* Vanity Fair? *Or hear about those two British women that wanted to write an unauthorized biography of Nirvana?*
I was totally pissed off, especially in how much words were either put in her mouth, or words that were said were taken well out of context, not to mention a number of incredibly sloppy fact checking errors. My first thoughts were to have them fucking snuffed out. I called the British women and left threats on their answering machine, and I definitely got heat, said I thought they were cunts. I wanted to personally beat the shit out of them, and I've never wanted to do that to anybody, especially a woman. But I just had so much anger in me. It was done so well. We were just helpless to combat something like that. We've had to do fluff pieces to try to fight this thing, the *Vanity Fair* thing, and then consent to an authorized biography by Michael Azerrad to get the British book off the market. It's embarrassing to have to do that: to pose with your family on the cover of a magazine, to hope that some people at least question the validity of [*Vanity Fair*].
*You're talking about posing for the December* Spin *cover?*
Yeah, and we've done a couple of other things, especially the Azerrad book. It pissed me off to the point of...not even wanting to hate that much. We could have filed a lawsuit with Conde Nast, but they have so many millions of dollars, they could have filibustered for 10 years, and we wouldn't have come up with anything except losing most of our money.
*What's the funniest thing you've ever seen written about you?*
Practically all of it. [Laughs] Most of the time I come across as just this redneck little rocker kid who basically can't put a sentence together, you know? I come across a lot of times as just a stupid rock and roll kid.
*Courtney comes across in the press as the Nancy Reagan of this relationship.*
It's just sick. God! I don't want to say something like "Well, if anything, I wear the pants in the house." It's completely divided. We have influence on each other. It's totally 50-50. Courtney insists on this: She has a tab when she borrows money from me that she has to pay back. She's only up to $6000. We're millionaires, and she goes to Jet Rag [a Los Angeles vintage clothing shop] and buys clothes-$5 dresses. Big deal! I'll gladly buy her some $5 dresses. We don't require much at all. Our personal expenses over the last year-we made $1 million, of which $380,000 went to taxes, $300,000 went to a house, the rest went to doctors and lawyers, and our personal expenses were like $80,000. That's including car rentals, food, everything. That's not very much; that's definitely not what Axl spends a year. She insisted on a prenuptial agreement; no one knows that. So there's definitely not manipulation going on in this relationship at all. It really sickens me to think that everyone assumes this. It makes me feel even stupider. I'm not the most secure person in the world, and I don't need to know that every time I go outside and someone recognizes me, they think of me as this defenseless little rocker idiot that's being manipulated by his wife. It's a little bit more complex than that. Courtney's had misconceptions about herself all her life. I talk to people who knew Courtney five years ago, and she was way more of a volatile, fucked-up person than she is now. She was insane at times. People would see her at parties just begging for attention. I never could have predicted a successful marriage with this person a few years ago. It just couldn't have happened.
*How does all this affect the other members of Nirvana?*
Definitely not as severe as everyone thinks or what has been written. There was article in the [British music magazine] *NME* that was nothing but an "expose" on Courtney fucking up Nirvana and making us come close to breaking up. It's pretty frightening to find that an article like that can be written by a friend of yours. It makes it hard to trust anybody. Chris and Dave liked Courtney before I even liked Courtney. During that time, I knew that I liked her a lot, but I wouldn't admit it. She and Dave were really good friends-I shouldn't say this, but they almost wanted to get together for a time. When we were on tour in Europe, some of our shows collided with Hole shows, and Courtney would hang out on the bus with us, and Chris and Courtney were really good friends. And it hasn't changed at all. There hasn't been any bad blood except after the *Vanity Fair* piece. For a few days, even Chris was convinced that Courtney had said those things. Courtney had said, "Why don't you kick Chris out of the band?" She said that, but it was a total joke. That's the biggest problem with articles-context. The word sarcastic needs to be in parentheses 90% of the time in an interview with us. Dave and Chris are dealing with this fine, and they're defending us as much as they can, but we can't expect them to go on a defense crusade, because it doesn't affect them like it affects us.
*Have there been times in the last year when you've just wanted to quit?*
Oh, yeah. The other night. I called up Chris late at night; I was really drunk, and I said, "I don't want to be in this band anymore, I'll call you tomorrow." I was dead serious. For a couple of hours. [Laughs]
*How is it dealing with a big label?*
We haven't had any complications. In our contract we have 100% artistic control. What that means in fine print, I don't know. All the evil corporateness that I've heard about since I've been into underground rock probably is true with other bands, but we have a good lawyer and a great contract. And we sell a lot of records for them, so we have the upper hand.
*Courtney's band got a good contract too?*
It's actually better than ours. This is the first decade major labels have even dealt with a contract like this. They're so used to having bands that don't even know what they want to do that they have to be in control. There are a lot of bands that don't have any artistic direction at all, so they need to dress up in spandex.
*So you can turn on mainstream radio and hear some music you like these days.*
That's part of the reason I'm a little bit more optimistic this year-Clinton and because the Screaming Trees are on heavy rotation right now. It's commercial, but it's good music. I don't like Pearl Jam's music at all, but at least they have good attitudes; they're not another Van Halen, who totally refuse to address anything. The only sad thing about it is that the innocence of underground music has been lumped in with the corporate idea of what underground is. There are no boundaries. Pearl Jam's a good example. I don't mean to harp on them; I'm tired of talking shit about them, but they're a real commercial rock band.
*Have you ever met David Geffen?*
Um, not particularly. I don't really have any opinions on him. If I ever meet him, I'll tell you what he's like.
*What do you do when you're not playing music?*
Well, I'm reading *Perfume* for the second time. It's about a perfume apprentice in the 1700s. And I really like Camille Paglia a lot; it's really entertaining, even though I don't necessarily agree with what she says. I still paint once in a while-I painted the cover of *Incesticide*. And I make dolls. I like the style of things from the 1700s and 1800s from Yugoslavia and that area. I copy them from doll collector magazines. They're clay. I bake them, and then I make them look really old and put old clothes on them. They look like I actually came across a real antique, because I don't know where to find the dolls that are in those magazines. I could go to a doll-collectors show, but they're so expensive. I don't want to indulge in things like that- "Now that I'm a rock star, I buy antiques," you know? [Laughs] Some of those things are, like, $50,000. I can't find anything I want. I go shopping, and I buy food, and that's about it. Now that I have all this money, I just can't spend it on anything. Everything that I appreciate is old but not necessarily an antique, so I can get it really cheap.
*So you're not falling into the trap of spending money on things just because you can?*
Sometimes I wish I could. I've noticed there are specialty shops for the rich and famous that have basically the same things you can find at Kmart, but they have a ridiculous price tag, and people buy it just because they don't have anything else to do with their money. There are a lot of things like that on Rodeo Drive. We went into Gucci just to see what a Gucci bag cost. [Laughs] Just this leather bag, and because it had a Gucci name on it, like, $10,000!
*Do you like L.A.?*
I hate L.A. I love the weather, but I can't stand being there. I absolutely hate it. A lot of it has to do with having the responsibility of driving around with the baby. People are so rude there. I'm not that bad a driver, and I get in a wreck almost every day. We were there for the riots. That decision was the most asinine thing I'd ever seen. If they were going to riot, I just wish they could have rioted in the middle of Beverly Hills. Got all the Gucci bags. [Laughs] If people start changing, especially as Frances gets older, and then taking care of her easier, maybe I'll change my mind.
*Now's your chance to say anything you'd like to say.*
I always clam up when that question is asked. Maybe I'll just fumble and stutter and end up saying, "Don't believe everything you read." I always knew to question things. All my life, I never believed most things I read in history books and a lot of things I learned in school. But now I've found I don't have the right to make a judgement on someone based on something I've read. I don't have the right to judge anything. That's the lesson I've learned.

**"Domicile On Cobain Street," by Brian Willis, *NME*, July 24, 1993**
*Goodbye 'Teen Spirit', hello to the strange, anxious, visceral realm of* In Utero*! Presenting the latest* NME *world exclusive, an insight into the domestic and creative life of rock's most enigmatic couple, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love - plus a world-beating preview of the followup to* Nevermind*. While the music industry nervously anticipates the reaction to the new record, NME's Seattle correspondent, Brian Willis goes on a lunatic midnight mission to befriend Kurt 'n' Courtney, gets invited in for muffins and tea and is treated to a private airing of the planet's most eagerly awaited LP of 1993. So, here we are now, entertain us!*
It's after midnight and raining in Seattle. New Model Army have just finished at RKCNDY. Leonard Cohen's show at The Paramount is over. And Hole are about to take the stage at The Off Ramp. There, most definitely, is where the party is.
The Off Ramp is the kind of club you find by accident. Tucked away from the rest of the city and situated next to the freeway, from a distance it looks like a pimple on a model's face. A long squat building dwarfed by silvery skyscrapers, it stands firm as the shadow of this slick city shadow looms over it with outstretched hands, threatening to squeeze this blatant little blemish off the face of Seattle.
The only indication of life is a small neon sign with a couple of naked women on it and the unambiguous words 'LIVE ENTERTAINMENT'. But the venue generates enough of a racket to compete with the heavy trucks trundling up and down Interstate Five. In fact, the noise soon overtakes those motorized monsters, flips them off and roars ahead of them. This is Seattle, after all.
Seattle has more rock stars per square inch than anywhere else in the States right now. It's no longer a city ... it's a sound. As a result, the local press treat their rock glitterati with a certain amount of, well, respect. Nirvana, Pearl Jam. Alice In Chains, Soundgarden and the whole Sub Pop brood are responsible for busloads of wannabe slackers arriving here in search of the Holy Grunge. It's a city of contradictions, too: on the one hand clean, white and middle class; on the other, the home of a dirty, post-punk music scene that desperately wants to be seen as redneck and trashy.
And while Nirvana were once the talk of the town, lips are now twitching about Engine Kid, another local power trio. Recently signed to Seattle indie C/Z Records, rumor has it their fate was decided over a bowling match between the C/Z staff and their equivalents at the mighty Sub Pop. C/Z won, obviously, and Engine Kid's first single, "Astronaut," is just out, a controlled, dynamic song that gives a sleepy nod in the direction of Slint, Codeine and Neil Young. Next, they're on their way to Chicago to record their first album with — yep —Steve Albini. Small world, I guess...
Which brings us back to Nirvana, and that already much-discussed new album produced by Albini. Rumors have been flying around about its nature for months now, from the original stories of Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl making a resolutely uncommercial 'punk' record, to claims that Geffen Records had rejected Albini's rough'n'ready work, to the news that Scott 'REM' Litt had been roped in for remixing and cleaning-up duties, right to the incontestable news that it'll be released on September 13.
Considering all the stories nailing Courtney as a Grade A pain in the arse and Kurt's often, ahem, erratic behavior, I'm beginning to wonder whether trying to talk to them for the *NME* - to find out the truth about the new album and about their relationship - is such a good idea. Basically, I'm getting paranoid.
But I digress. The Off Ramp's jammed tonight, a sellout. So Courtney tears into 'Teenage Whore', and the crowd surge forward, flailing around following her dictates. There's no riot, though, just one woman being gently carried out of a side door by two bouncers. She tells everyone "My favorite band is Echo And The Bunnymen" - and means it - and 'Beautiful Son' is a definite highlight, but overall this is just a warm-up for Hole on safe territory, a mere flexing of muscles. Right at the end Courtney shouts, apropos nothing, "Frances Bean's birthday is the same day as Madonna's and Dan Peters (of Mudhoney)." And that's it.
A few minutes later, The Off Ramp's spilling its patrons on to the street and into the drizzle. Chris Novoselic towers above the crowd and dives into a cab. There's Selene Vigil of 7 Year Bitch and Kat Bjelland's husband, Stuart Gray of Lubricated Goat, but no sign of my targets.
Then Eric, Hole's guitarist, comes out of the club carrying some of his gear. Cautiously approaching, I ask him if he could tell Courtney someone from the *NME* would like to talk to her. Obligingly, he disappears back inside. I wait.
After a few minutes he's back, saying Courtney wants to take a look at me. We go backstage, past Kurt who is talking to some woman, and into a small back room where Courtney sits. She is dressed in a pink slip, white tights, white high-heel shoes and what looks like a mock fur coat. She looks tired and doesn't seem to notice me. I'm momentarily lost for words, but fortunately Eric isn't, shouting "Here's the guy from the *NME*!"
It's then that Courtney perks up. She turns her head in my direction and stares. I'm about to stutter "Hello", when a young woman sticks her head round the door and says, "It's time to go, Courtney."
I'm even more nervous now; will the story end here, so near and yet so far? My reverie's interrupted, though, by a polite voice: "What are your politics?" It's Courtney. She's walking past me towards the exit, without waiting for the reply, but I manage to draw level with a few quick steps. Politics, politics...
Before I can even think of an answer, she's asking another question: "What are the last three bands you've listened to?"
"The Fall's new album *Infotainment Scan*."
Her face lights up. "I saw The Fall in 1982, in Manchester." The ice's broken.
By now we're outside in the car park, where Kurt's waiting with a small group of people in the drizzle. Courtney goes up to him and explains that she wants to speak with me. He gives a quick glance in my direction. Like a fool, I smile. He suggests they give me their phone number, and we can talk later in the day, but Courtney tells him it won't take too long. She wants, it seems, to 'sort it out' now. So Kurt agrees, a little reluctantly; it's now 2 AM, after all.
So Kurt gets into his family Volvo, when Courtney announces she wants to travel in my car. I explain that it's parked a couple of streets away, but she doesn't care, and we start walking. Along the way, though, Courtney wises up and stops, wanting to see some ID, a passport or something. She says I could be anyone, another Ted Bundy, another dangerous crazy ... and she's right.
In January 1989, Bundy was fried in the electric chair in Starke, Florida, for the murder of three young women. Before execution, he admitted to taking the lives of at least 35 more women from coast to coast ...and he lived in Seattle! And he picked up his prey in very similar circumstances, no doubt. It's decided, sensibly, that I'll fetch the car and meet her back at The Off Ramp.
Five minutes later I'm back at the club, parking the car in front of Kurt's Volvo. Courtney asks me to write my name, license number and telephone number on a piece of paper ...which I do, and hand to a patient Kurt as he sits behind the wheel of his car smoking a cigarette. Straight away, Courtney puts her head through the open window and gives her dutiful husband a passionate kiss on the mouth that lasts a very, very long time. Perhaps it just might be a way of disproving the paper's fight story before a journalist, but it certainly looks like love.
Anyway, everything seems to be settled, so we head towards my car, a 1966 Volkswagen Bug that looks its age. Courtney stops, stares at it for a second, then exclaims loudly, "Oh my God, it's Ted Bundy's car!" Shit ...Bundy used to pick up victims in a tan Volkswagen. I'm finished.
She slowly turns on her heels and walks back towards the only car left in the parking lot, containing members of Adickdid, the band who'd opened for Hole earlier. Once again, the interview looks doomed. But wait... Courtney's coming back with a woman from the other car and says she'll accompany us on our strange trip. But there's another problem; the car only has three seats. The front passenger seat is gone, missing in action. I suggest Courtney takes a backseat, but she's other ideas: "I'll sit in the front, the rest of you can get in the back."
I begin to panic - yet again; there is, after all, no bloody front seat. But Courtney, without so much as a second thought, plonks her arse down on the metal floor of the car. In front of us, Kurt's taillights dim as we finally hit the road, shaking and rattling.
Normally, to get remotely close to the most (in)famous rock 'n' roll couple of the '90s takes weeks of pained negotiations through a chain of press officers, managers, personal confidantes, and personal prejudices. And now one's a few yards ahead, amiably leading me to his home in the middle of the night, and the other's happily slumming it sat next to me in a very unglamorous wreck of a car. For a pair so legendarily unapproachable, things tonight could almost get intimate...
25 minutes later, after a short pitstop to pick up some cigarettes, we arrive at the home of Kurt, Courtney and Frances Bean. Their home is a modern, two-story house with a view overlooking Lake Washington, perched in an affluent neighborhood that mainly houses executives from Boeing and Microsoft. The kind of neighbors, in fact, who call the cops when they hear loud music.
We stop the car at the mailbox, where Courtney's psychic usually parks, and head inside. The first thing that strikes you is the amount of space. High ceilings stretch upward, over split-level and sparsely furnished rooms. In the main room there's an antique couch with its back against one wall, facing a big television set. From the corner of the room I can glimpse a table full of naked baby dolls looking back at me with big sad eyes.
Kurt hasn't arrived yet so we go into the kitchen, leaving the front room where a big playpen rests, surrounded by Frances Bean's toys. I relax ... a little. The kitchen's becoming a hub of activity, as the girls from Adickdid wander in and out, and Courtney asks if we'd like a drink. She puts the kettle on, warms the teapot and drops four Tetley's teabags in. I'm beginning to feel almost a part of the family.
Then she grabs a stack of baby photos from the kitchen counter and thrusts them into my hands. While she pours hot water into the teapot and I flick through the family snapshots, she's cottoned on to my Irish roots and is talking about the time she spent a term at Trinity College, Dublin, when she lived near St. Stephen's Green and often visited Bewley's Coffee Shop.
Kurt arrives and goes upstairs while she's busy putting some English muffins into the toaster. Happy as a lark, she's decided she wants to play the new Nirvana album, so we go upstairs in search of Kurt, past the room where Frances Bean lies sleeping. Kurt claims the album's in the CD player, but Courtney can't find it. He lends a hand and, after a few moments, says, "Oh, it's in the cassette player."
It is. While Courtney changes, Kurt talks about the Leonard Cohen show he'd been to before the Hole gig, mentioning that Cohen's name is in one of the songs on the new album. He looks well and relaxed, comfortable in blue jeans, shirt and barefoot, his glasses gone. I'm standing in their bedroom, where there's another TV, more antique furniture in the shape of a massive wooden dresser, and a walk-in closet that holds more shoes than Imelda Marcos ever dreamed she'd own. A pile of ornate jewelry looks lonely in the middle of the bathroom floor. Kurt seems at ease, and I'm wondering if anyone is going to believe a word of this.
Courtney returns, so we head back downstairs and, after a little difficulty trying to get the tape deck to work, myself and Courtney sit cross-legged on the floor. An avalanche of records surrounds us; Sub Pop singles of the month, Kleenex, Opal, Mudhoney, even Suede is here, PJ Harvey's 'Rid Of Me' is on the turntable, and a few books are scattered on the carpet; John Steinbeck, Jean Paul Sartre, William Burroughs' *Queer.* Kurt grabs a book by Leonard Cohen, looks at us bemusedly and retreats upstairs. Courtney lights a cigarette. And, with cups of tea in hand and a big plate of muffins and marmalade in front of us, we wait for someone to press the 'Play' button on the tape deck...
The album is called *In Utero*, meaning within the womb — not yet born. For Kurt, it represents a trip back to the womb and, listening to it, it's obvious he's done some deep soul-searching, with cathartic and at times manic results. The lyrics are personal, often ambiguous, and even playful. If *Nevermind* was a record with a mood dictated by external events during recording — by the horror and tension of the Gulf War — then *In Utero* is much more inward-looking, the product of emotional turmoil and enormous pressure. Perhaps, in that way, it's the classic followup to an unexpected success.
A number of the songs, to that end, deal with a lot of issues and reflect some of the experiences Kurt has had over the last two years: drugs, marriage, his wife, his child, love, success, stardom, fame and everything in between that influenced his life. If Freud could hear it, he'd wet his pants in anticipation. In spite of the title, *In Utero* showcases a significantly older and more experienced Cobain, who's taken the time to delve into the dark recesses of his soul, dug around a bit and lived to tell the tale. Everything, his own raw material, has been used to create an album pregnant with irony and insight. *In Utero* is Kurt's revenge.
"Teenage angst has paid off well/ Now I'm old and bored." The fist words of the first track, 'Serve The Servants', are a fair indication of what's to come. Kurt refused to have it remixed, refused to tamper with its jab at 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', the song that propelled the band to fame, fortune and, perhaps, misfortune too. Next, 'Heart-Shaped Box', set to be the first single, which is a ballad that goes out to the ones he loves. "She eyes me like a Pisces, when I am weak," he sings. "I've been stuck inside your heart-shaped box / I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black / Meal eating orchids forgive no-one just yet / Wrap myself in angel hair and baby breath." Personal? Sure. Maybe it's the work of a happily married father, the introvert to Courtney's extrovert. Right now, it seems like the perfect balance.
But what about the sound? Well, it still has the trademark Nirvana sound of *Nevermind.* The opening slow bass, the drums that build upward until it all comes crashing down are still there on a couple of tracks, almost in an attempt at self-parody. It lacks the raw production qualities of *Bleach*, but still has a noise level that can move from quiet to the blare of an impending storm warning.
Steve Albini's left his mark, too — even if the overall sound is a smoother job than 'Rid Of Me'. And given his past life on Rapeman, perhaps the track 'Rape Me' is a touch ironic. Anyway, it's a blistering rant, with an intro uncannily similar to 'Teen Spirit, that's probably the most immediate song on *In Utero* and a possible later single, during which Kurt fights to be heard over the guitars, and ends up screaming "RAPE ME! RAPE ME! RAPE ME!" An instant classic.
Courtney leans towards me and whispers, "There's a song on the album about Frances Farmer getting her revenge on Seattle (Titled, aptly, 'Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle'). Kurt believes that when Mount St. Helens erupts again it will be Frances getting her own back on the city. The song is so feminine. Men don't often write poetry equating women with nature." Farmer was from Seattle, and the tormented actress was placed in a mental institution by a Seattle judge for so-called antisocial behavior. Mount St. Helens is a volcano about 100 miles south of Seattle who last blew her top in the early '80s. Little Frances Bean isn't named after the actress (though Kurt and Courtney do wish they'd done so).
'Tourette's' again sees the singer spectacularly unhinged, in a song named after the French doctor who first diagnosed the syndrome of losing control over what you say and end up swearing nonsensically (The same doctor and syndrome, incidentally, that inspired 'Symphony Of Tourette' on the recent Manics album). The track's a real wall of noise, hammered home by three simple lyrics; "Shit, piss, fuck". 'Pennyroyal Tea', meanwhile, was co-written with Courtney and was played on last autumn's European tour. "It's about a method of inducing abortions," she explains. "It's been around for years. I'm going to record a version of it for my album, too."
My ears buzz and my head aches. It's powerful stuff, the sort that makes you feel embarrassed, prying, as if you're tapping into someone else's confession. But the tape keeps rolling, and I keep listening intently. Kurt's voice blasts out of the speaker: "What is wrong with me?! A blanket acne'd with cigarette burns! Take it once and taking turns! If you need anything don't ask me." The song's punky, provisionally titled 'Radio Friendly Unit Shifter' and is about drug addiction. The last track's called 'All Apologies' (previewed at the Reading Festival last year). A relatively pretty little thing where Kurt warbles - yes, warbles - "What else can I say?! Everyone is gay!" There are a couple of B-side tracks, one of them titled 'Moist Vagina'... Enough said.
After all the rumors, both record company and fans will breathe a collective sigh of relief when they hear *In Utero*. This is emphatically not an unmarketable album; Albini's production is nowhere near as murky as usual and, while there's nothing quite as outstanding as 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', there are 'Lithium's in abundance. Ultimately, imagine the schizophrenic light and shade of *Nevermind* with the full-tilt grunge-outs of *Bleach*... That's *In Utero.*
The tape comes to a halt. Silence. It's 5 AM. Kurt speaks: "We were just on the news, on MTV. They were talking about how Hole have just started their world tour in Seattle at The Off Ramp," he says with a smile and a hint of irony. "They even played some of the William Burroughs stuff, but the guitar just sounded like 'gurrr'."
What's this? A sense of humor from the man who wanted to call the Nirvana *album I Hate Myself And I Want To Die*? He walks into the kitchen and puts some bread into the toaster. I follow. As we wait for it to pop up, I ask how much of the album has been remixed.
"Just two; 'Heart-Shaped Box' and 'All Apologies'. Both were remixed by Scott Litt. I do think that 'Pennyroyal Tea' hasn't been mixed right, and Litt will remix it for a single release down the line."
He's buttering the toast now. Does he plan to continue living in Seattle?
"Yeah. There are just two places in the world where I'd live, Seattle or Scotland."
What part of Scotland. I inquire, thinking maybe Aberdeen.
Kurt looks at me as if it's one of the strangest questions he's ever been asked. "I don't know, probably Edinburgh."
Before he can take a bite of his toast, I ask about one of the pictures currently being considered for the cover of *In Utero* - a woman with a pair of wings and her arms held out. You can clearly see the different organs of the body; the heart, ribcage, veins, the works.
"It's not a picture, it's a model," Kurt corrects. "It's in some museum but there may be some legal hassles over it. I'm not really sure."
Later I find out the model was originally in the Smithsonian Museum Of Science, is known as *Brunnhilde: The Transparent Woman* and is used by children to learn about different parts of the female anatomy. If you want to see where the heart is, for example, you push a button and it lights up on the body. Kurt added the wings.
Time to leave. The birds are singing outside, and Courtney is almost asleep on the couch. But she's still alert enough to talk about their relationship ... after all, it's partly why I'm here. "We hardly ever fight —no one could ask for a better husband. He went on the cover of *The Advocate* (a national US gay and lesbian magazine). He's a feminist."
Kurt is sitting at the dining room table with four slices of toast and a cup of hot chocolate. I thank him for the tea, the album... shit, the everything.
"No problem. Sorry about all the stuff at the beginning..."
No apologies are needed. When I leave, he's dipping his toast into the hot chocolate, looking out of the window as the sun rises over the lake. For someone who's been through so much shit in the past two years, whose name's being dragged through acrimony, who's about to release a record the whole rock world's desperate to hear and be faced with astonishing attention and pressure, Kurt Cobain's a remarkably contented man.

**"The Kurt Cobain Interview: Success Doesn't Suck," by David Fricke, *Rolling Stone*, January 27, 1994**
*Our man in Nirvana rages on (and on) about stardom, fatherhood, his feud with Pearl Jam, the death of grunge and why he's never been happier in his life*
A shirtless, disheveled Kurt Cobain pauses on the backstage stairway leading to Nirvana's dressing room at the Aragon Ballroom, in Chicago, offers a visitor a sip of his après-gig tea and says in a drop-deadpan voice, "I'm really glad you could make it for the shittiest show on the tour." He's right. Tonight's concert — Nirvana's second of two nights at the Aragon, only a week into the band's first U.S. tour in two years — is a real stinker. The venue's cavernous sound turns even corrosive torpedoes like "Breed" and "Territorial Pissings" into riff pudding, and Cobain is bedeviled all night by guitar — and vocal — monitor problems. There are moments of prickly brilliance: Cobain's sandpaper howl cutting through the Aragon's canyonlike echo in the tense, explosive chorus of "Heart–Shaped Box"; a short, stunning "Sliver" with torrid power strumming by guest touring guitarist Pat Smear (ex-Germs). But there is no "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and when the house lights go up, so does a loud chorus of boos.
According to the Cobain press myth — "pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic," as he quite accurately puts it — the 26-year-old singer and guitarist should have fired the soundman, canceled this interview and gone back to his hotel room to sulk. Instead, he spends his wind–down time backstage, doting on his daughter, 1-year-old Frances Bean Cobain, a petite blond beauty who barrels around the room with a smile for everyone in her path. Later, back at the hotel, armed with nothing stronger than a pack of cigarettes and two minibar bottles of Evian water, Cobain is in a thoughtful, discursive mood, taking great pains to explain that success doesn't really suck – not as much as it used to, anyway – and that his life is pretty good. And getting better.
"It was so fast and explosive," he says in a sleepy, gravelly voice of his first crisis of confidence following the ballistic success of *Nevermind.* "I didn't know how to deal with it. If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me. I still see stuff, descriptions of rock stars in some magazine — 'Sting, the environmental guy,' and 'Kurt Cobain, the whiny, complaining, neurotic, bitchy guy who hates everything, hates rock stardom, hates his life.' And I've never been happier in my life. Especially within the last week, because the shows have been going so well — except for tonight. I'm a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am."
Cobain took some long, hard detours to get there over the past year. The making of *In Utero*, Nirvana's long–awaited studio followup to *Nevermind*, was fraught with last–minute title and track changes as well as a public scrap between the band, its record label, DGC, and producer Steve Albini over the album's commercial potential – or lack thereof. Cobain's marriage to punk-noir singer Courtney Love of the band Hole – dream fodder for rock gossips since the couple exchanged vows in February 1992 — makes headlines for all kinds of claimed fracases and arguments between the couple, real and imagined. Cobain's making a clean breast of his history of depression, experimentation with drugs, near-miss with using heroin, and chronic stomach pain have all certainly pegged him as the prototypical angst-ridden figure of Generation X. He says after all that he's gone through, he's now on the road to spiritual recovery.
But the roots of his angst, public and personal, go much deeper. Born in the logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, Cobain is — like Nirvana's bassist, Krist Novoselic, drummer Dave Grohl and a high percentage of the band's young fans — the product of a broken home, the son of an auto mechanic and a secretary who divorced when he was 8. Cobain had early aspirations as a commercial artist and won a number of high school art contests; he now designs much of Nirvana's artwork. (He made the plastic fetus collage on the back cover of *In Utero*, which got the record banned by Wal-Mart.) But after graduation, Cobain passed on an art school scholarship (which he couldn't actually use because his grades weren't good enough) and took up the teenage-bum life, working as a roadie for the local punk band The Melvins (when he was working at all) and applying himself to songwriting. "I never wanted to sing," Cobain insists now. "I just wanted to play rhythm guitar — hide in the back and just play. But during those high school years when I was playing guitar in my bedroom, I at least had the intuition that I had to write my own songs."
For a long time, after Nirvana catapulted from junior Sub Pop-label signees to grunge supergods — they won the Best Band and Best Album trophies in our 1994 Critics' Poll — Cobain could not decide whether his talent was a blessing or a curse. He has finally come to realize it's a bit of both. He is bugged that people think of him more as an icon than a songwriter yet fears that *In Utero* marks the finish line of the Nirvana sound crystallized in "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Cobain remains deeply mistrustful of the music business but says he has done a complete U–turn on his attitude toward Nirvana's mass punk-wannabe flock. "I don't have as many judgments about them as I used to," Cobain says, almost apologetically. "I've come to terms about why they're there and why we're here. It doesn't bother me anymore to see this Neanderthal with a mustache, out of his mind, drunk, singing along to 'Sliver.' That blows my mind now.
"I've been relieved of so much pressure in the last year and a half," Cobain says with discernible relief in his voice. "I'm still kind of mesmerized by it." He ticks off the reasons for his content: "Pulling this record off. My family. My child. Meeting William Burroughs and doing a record with him. Just little things that no one would recognize or care about. And it has a lot to do with this band. If it wasn't for this band, those things never would have happened. I'm really thankful, and every month I come to more optimistic conclusions."
"I just hope," Cobain adds, grinning, "I don't become so blissful I become boring. I think I'll always be neurotic enough to do something weird."
*Along with everything else that went wrong onstage tonight, you left without playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Why?*
That would have been the icing on the cake [smiles grimly]. That would have made everything twice as worse. I don't even remember the guitar solo on "Teen Spirit." It would take me five minutes to sit in the catering room and learn the solo. But I'm not interested in that kind of stuff. I don't know if that's so lazy that I don't care anymore or what. I still like playing "Teen Spirit," but it's almost an embarrassment to play it.
*In what way? Does the enormity of its success still bug you?*
Yeah. Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It's been pounded into their brains. But I think there are so many other songs that I've written that are as good, if not better, than that song, like "Drain You." That's definitely as good as "Teen Spirit." I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it. Maybe if it was as big as "Teen Spirit," I wouldn't like it as much. But I can barely, especially on a bad night like tonight, get through "Teen Spirit." I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can't pretend to have a good time playing it.
*But you must have had a good time writing it.*
We'd been practicing for about three months. We were waiting to sign to DGC, and Dave [Grohl] and I were living in Olympia [Washington], and Krist [Novoselic] was living in Tacoma [Washington]. We were driving up to Tacoma every night for practice, trying to write songs. I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies. I have to admit it [smiles]. When I heard The Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band — or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard. "Teen Spirit" was such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or "Louie, Louie." When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, "That is so ridiculous." I made the band play it for an hour and a half.
*Where did the line "Here we are now, entertain us" come from?*
That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you're standing around with people in a room, it's really boring and uncomfortable. So it was "Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here."
*How did it feel to watch something you'd written in fun, in homage to one of your favorite bands, become the grunge national anthem, not to mention a defining moment in youth marketing?*
Actually, we did have our own thing for a while. For a few years in Seattle, it was the Summer of Love, and it was so great. To be able to just jump out on top of the crowd with my guitar and be held up and pushed to the back of the room, and then brought back with no harm done to me — it was a celebration of something that no one could put their finger on. But once it got into the mainstream, it was over. I'm just tired of being embarrassed by it. I'm beyond that.
*This is the first U.S. tour you've done since the fall of '91, just before* Nevermind e*xploded. Why did you stay off the road for so long?*
I needed time to collect my thoughts and readjust. It hit me so hard, and I was under the impression that I didn't really need to go on tour, because I was making a whole bunch of money. Millions of dollars. 8-10 million records sold — that sounded like a lot of money to me. So I thought I would sit back and enjoy it. Plus, my bronchitis was continually getting worse, and I got a really bad cold at the end of the Australia and Japan leg, so I definitely wanted to recuperate. I'm thankful that my stomach ailment was dealt with before the band took off because it would've been one of the biggest barriers that stopped us from touring. I was dealing with it for a long time. But after a person experiences chronic pain for five years, by the time that fifth year ends, you're literally insane. I couldn't cope with anything. I was as schizophrenic as a wet cat that's been beaten.
*How much of that physical pain do you think you channeled into your songwriting?*
That's a scary question, because obviously if a person is having some kind of turmoil in their lives, it's usually reflected in the music, and sometimes it's pretty beneficial. I think it probably helped. But I would give up everything to have good health. I wanted to do this interview after we'd been on tour for a while, and so far, this has been the most enjoyable tour I've ever had. Honestly. It has nothing to do with the larger venues or people kissing our asses more. It's just that I'm real healthy and secure now. I'm eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice to be able to do that. And it just raises my spirits. But then again, I was always afraid that if I lost the stomach problem, I wouldn't be as creative. Who knows? [Pauses] I don't have any new songs right now. Every album we've done so far, we've always had one to three songs left over from the sessions. And they usually have been pretty good, ones that we really liked, so we always had something to rely on — a hit or something that was above average. So this next record is going to be really interesting, because I have absolutely nothing left. I'm starting from scratch for the first time. I don't know what we're going to do.
*One of the songs that you cut from* In Utero *at the last minute was "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die." How literally did you mean it?*
As literal as a joke can be. Nothing more than a joke. And that had a bit to do with why we decided to take it off. We knew people wouldn't get it; they'd take it too seriously. It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves. I'm thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked–out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. "He isn't satisfied with anything." And I thought it was a funny title. I wanted it to be the title of the album for a long time. But I knew the majority of the people wouldn't understand it.
*Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?*
For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I'm sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn't hold down water. I would cough up blood. This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself. I'm thankful Krist found that special strain of weed, stronger and smoother than any I'd had before, because I absolutely would've gone to heroin for that relief. When you're facing such chronic pain, you will reach for anything for relief.
*Even as satire, though, a song like that can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal.*
That pretty much defines our band. It's both those contradictions. It's satirical, and it's serious at the same time.
*What kind of mail do you get from your fans these days?*
[Long pause] I used to read the mail a lot, and I used to be really involved with it. But I've been so busy with this record, the video, the tour, that I haven't even bothered to look at a single letter, and I feel really bad about it. I haven't even been able to come up with enough energy to put out our fanzine, which was one of the things we were going to do to combat all the bad press, just to be able to show a more realistic side of the band. But it's really hard. I have to admit I've found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I'm pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me. I feel very, very lucky to be able to go out to a club. Just the other night, we had a night off in Kansas City, Missouri, and Pat [Smear] and I had no idea where we were or where to go. So we called up the local college radio station and asked them what was going on. And they didn't know! So we happened to call this bar, and the Treepeople from Seattle were playing. And it turns out I met three really, really nice people there, totally cool kids that were in bands. I really had a good time with them, all night. I invited them back to the hotel. They stayed there. I ordered room service for them. I probably went overboard, trying to be accommodating. But it was really great to know that I can still do that, that I can still find friends. And I didn't think that would be possible. A few years ago, we were in Detroit, playing at this club, and about 10 people showed up. And next door, there was this bar, and Axl Rose came in with 10 or 15 bodyguards. It was this huge extravaganza; all these people were fawning over him. If he'd just walked in by himself, it would have been no big deal. But he wanted that. You create attention to attract attention.
*Where do you stand on Pearl Jam now? There were rumors that you and Eddie Vedder were supposed to be on that* Time *magazine cover together.*
I don't want to get into that. One of the things I've learned is that slagging off people just doesn't do me any good. It's too bad, because the whole problem with the feud between Pearl Jam and Nirvana had been going on for so long and has come so close to being fixed.
*It's never been entirely clear what this feud with Vedder was about.*
There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn't like their band. I hadn't met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed — not probably against their will — but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.
*Don't you feel any empathy with them? They've been under the same intense followup album pressure as you have.* Ten *was a big album, and* Vs. *is to them what* In Utero *is to you.*
Yeah, I do. Except I'm pretty sure that they didn't go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They're a safe rock band. They're a pleasant rock band that everyone likes. [Laughs] God, I've had much better quotes in my head about this. It just kind of pisses me off to know that we work really hard to make an entire album's worth of songs that are as good as we can make them. I'm gonna stroke my ego by saying that we're better than a lot of bands out there. What I've realized is that you only need a couple of catchy songs on an album, and the rest can be bullshit Bad Company ripoffs, and it doesn't matter. If I was smart, I would have saved most of the songs off *Nevermind* and spread them out over a 15-year period. But I can't do that. All the albums I ever liked were albums that delivered a great song, one after another: Aerosmith's *Rocks*, the Sex Pistols' *Never Mind the Bollocks*, *Led Zeppelin II, Back in Black* by AC/DC.
*You've also gone on record as being a big Beatles fan.*
Oh, yeah. John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down. I don't know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed [laughs]. So I could relate to that. And from the books I've read — and I'm so skeptical of anything I read, especially in rock books — I just felt really sorry for him. To be locked up in that apartment. Although he was totally in love with Yoko and his child, his life was a prison. He was imprisoned. It's not fair. That's the crux of the problem that I've had with becoming a celebrity — the way people deal with celebrities. It needs to be changed; it really does. No matter how hard you try, it only comes out like you're bitching about it. I can understand how a person can feel that way and almost become obsessed with it. But it's so hard to convince people to mellow out. Just take it easy, have a little bit of respect. We all shit [laughs].
In Utero *may be the most anticipated, talked-about and argued-over album of 1993. Didn't you feel at any point during all the title changes and the press hoopla stirred up by Steve Albini that the whole thing was just getting stupid? After all, it is just an album.*
Yeah. But I'm used to it [laughs]. While making the record, that wasn't happening. It was made really fast. All the basic tracks were done within a week. And I did 80 percent of the vocals in one day, in about seven hours. I just happened to be on a roll. It was a good day for me, and I just kept going.
*So what was the problem?*
It wasn't the songs. It was the production. It took a very, very long time for us to realize what the problem was. We couldn't figure it out. We had no idea why we didn't feel the same energy that we did from *Nevermind*. We finally came to the conclusion that the vocals weren't loud enough, and the bass was totally inaudible. We couldn't hear any notes that Krist was playing at all. Hence why Scott Litt remixed "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies." I think there are a few other songs on *In Utero* that could have been cleaned up a little bit more. Definitely "Pennyroyal Tea." That was not recorded right. There is something wrong with that. That should have been recorded like *Nevermind*, because I know that's a strong song, a hit single. We're toying with the idea of re-recording it or remixing it for a single release. You hit and miss. It's a really weird thing about this record. I've never been more confused in my life, but at the same time I've never been more satisfied with what we've done.
*Apparently, David Geffen had to go on record by phoning journalists to say, "No, we haven't rejected the album." What do you think about that?*
Well, I don't quite know what to say or think. I haven't really interacted with David Geffen, I don't know him. Whether I do or not, I don't think it's likely to change my overall opinion about the music business. I will say, though, that the fact we've become one of the biggest bands on his label and we still haven't met him, but Axl and the rest of Guns N' Roses have, that's kinda weird.
*Let's talk about your songwriting. Your best songs — "Teen Spirit," "Come As You Are," "Rape Me," "Pennyroyal Tea" — all open with the verse in a low, moody style. Then the chorus comes in at full volume and nails you. So which comes first, the verse or the killer chorus?*
[Long pause, then he smiles] I don't know. I really don't know. I guess I start with the verse and then go into the chorus. But I'm getting so tired of that formula. And it is formula. And there's not much you can do with it. We've mastered that — for our band. We're all growing pretty tired of it. It is a dynamic style. But I'm only using two of the dynamics. There are a lot more I could be using. Krist, Dave and I have been working on this formula — this thing of going from quiet to loud — for so long that it's literally becoming boring for us. It's like "OK, I have this riff. I'll play it quiet, without a distortion box, while I'm singing the verse. And now let's turn on the distortion box and hit the drums harder." I want to learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way but with a lot more structure. It's a really hard thing to do, and I don't know if we're capable of it – as musicians.
*Songs like "Dumb" and "All Apologies" do suggest that you're looking for a way to get to people without resorting to the big-bang guitar effect.*
Absolutely. I wish we could have written a few more songs like those on all the other albums. Even to put "About a Girl" on *Bleach* was a risk. I was heavily into pop, I really liked REM, and I was into all kinds of old '60s stuff. But there was a lot of pressure within that social scene, the underground-like the kind of thing you get in high school. And to put a jangly REM type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky. We have failed in showing the lighter, more dynamic side of our band. The big guitar sound is what the kids want to hear. We like playing that stuff, but I don't know how much longer I can scream at the top of my lungs every night, for an entire year on tour. Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.
*So what does this mean for the future of Nirvana?*
It's impossible for me to look into the future and say I'm going to be able to play Nirvana songs in 10 years. There's no way, at least not this way, it's quite obvious that can't last. But also I don't want to have to resort to doing the Eric Clapton thing. Not to put him down whatsoever; I have immense respect for him. But I don't want to have to change the songs to fit my age [laughs]. I guess if Nirvana will last, we'll just have to find a balance between doing it this way forever and changing like Clapton. It can probably be done, but I don't know how at the moment.
*The song on* In Utero *that has whipped up the most controversy is "Rape Me." It's got a brilliant hook, but there have been objections to the title and lyric — not just from skittish DJs but from some women who feel it's rather cavalier for a man to be using such a potent, inflammatory word so freely.*
I understand that point of view, and I've heard it a lot. I've gone back and forth between regretting it and trying to defend myself. Basically, I was trying to write a song that supported women and dealt with the issue of rape. Over the last few years, people have had such a hard time understanding what our message is, what we're trying to convey, that I just decided to be as bold as possible. How hard should I stamp this point? How big should I make the letters? It's not a pretty image. But a woman who is being raped, who is infuriated with the situation . . . it's like "Go ahead, rape me, just go for it, because you're gonna get it." I'm a firm believer in karma, and that motherfucker is going to get what he deserves, eventually. That man will be caught, he'll go to jail, and he'll be raped. "So rape me, do it, get it over with. Because you're gonna get it worse."
*What did your wife, Courtney, think of the song when she heard it?*
I think she understood. I probably explained it better to her than I've explained it to you. I also want to make a point, that I was really, honestly not trying to be controversial with it. That was the last thing I wanted to do. We didn't want to put it out so it would piss off the parents and get some feminists on our asses, stuff like that. I just have so much contempt for someone who would do something like that [to a woman]. This is my way of saying: "Do it once, and you may get away with it. Do it 100 times. But you're gonna get it in the end."
*People usually assume that someone who has sold a few million records is really livin' large. How rich are you? How rich do you feel? According to one story, you wanted to buy a new house and put a home studio in it, but your accountant said you couldn't afford it.*
Yeah, I can't. I just got a check a while ago for some royalties for *Nevermind,* which is pretty good size. It's weird, though, really weird. When we were selling a lot of records during *Nevermind,* I thought, "God, I'm gonna have like $10 million, $15 million." That's not the case. We do not live large. I still eat Kraft macaroni and cheese — because I like it, I'm used to it. We're not extravagant people. I don't blame any kid for thinking that a person who sells 10 million records is a millionaire and set for the rest of his life. But it's not the case. I spent $1 million last year, and I have no idea how I did it. Really. I bought a house for $400,000. Taxes were another $300,000 — something. What else? I lent my mom some money. I bought a car. That was about it.
*You don't have much to show for that million.*
It's surprising. One of the biggest reasons we didn't go on tour when *Nevermind* was really big in the States was because I thought: "Fuck this, why should I go on tour? My voice is starting to and I have a really bad cold, I'm selling a lot of records, I can live the rest of my life off $1 million." But there's no point in even trying to explain that to a 15-year-old kid. I never would have believed it.
*Do you worry about the impact that your work, lifestyle and ongoing war with supercelebrity are having on Frances? She seemed perfectly content to toddle around in the dressing room tonight, but it's got to be a strange world for her.*
I'm pretty concerned about it. She seems to be attracted to almost anyone. She loves anyone. And it saddens me to know that she's moved around so much. We do have two nannies, one full–time and another older woman who takes care of her on weekends. But when we take her on the road, she's around people all the time, and she doesn't get to go to the park very often. We try as hard as we can, we take her to preschool things. But this is a totally different world.
*In "Serve the Servants," you sing, "I tried hard to have a father/But instead I had a dad." Are you concerned about making the same mistakes as a father that might have been made when you were growing up?*
No. I'm not worried about that at all. My father and I are completely different people. I know that I'm capable of showing a lot more affection than my dad was. Even if Courtney and I were to get divorced, I would never allow us to be in a situation where there are bad vibes between us in front of her. That kind of stuff can screw up a kid, but the reason those things happen is because the parents are not very bright. I don't think Courtney and I are that fucked up. We have lacked love all our lives, and we need it so much that if there's any goal that we have, it's to give Frances as much love as we can, as much support as we can. That's the one thing that I know is not going to turn out bad.
*What has been the state of relations within Nirvana over the past year?*
I would certainly say that things have been quite good between us. We don't exactly hang out every day or anything, but we're tight. I know we're this great unit that can't be torn apart. Except for Dave. I'm still kind of concerned about him, because he still feels like he can be replaced at any time. He still feels like he . . .
*Hasn't passed the audition?*
Yeah. I don't understand it. I try to give him as many compliments as I can. I'm not a person who gives compliments very often, especially at practice. "Let's do this song, let's do that song, let's do it over." That's it. I guess Dave is a person who needs reassurance sometimes. I notice that, so I try and do that more often.
*So you call all the shots?*
Yeah. I ask their opinions about things. But ultimately, it's my decision. I always feel weird saying that; it feels egotistical. But we've never argued. Dave, Krist and I have never screamed at each other. Ever. It's not like they're afraid to bring up anything. I always ask their opinion, and we talk about it. And eventually, we all come to the same conclusions.
*Haven't there been any issues where there was at least heated discussion?*
Yeah, the songwriting royalties. I get all the lyrics. The music, I get 75 percent. I think that's fair. But at the time, I also made it retroactive to the release of *Nevermind*, quite some time after it had been out, and that was like taking money out of their pockets. And so they thought that I might start asking for more things. They were afraid that I was going to go out of my mind and start putting them on salary, stuff like that. But even then we didn't yell at each other. And we split everything else evenly. And we did make a proviso that if they start writing songs to that extent, that I do, they'll get the exact same split as I get for my songs. So if Dave writes a song, he'll get all the lyrics and 75 percent of the music, the same deal as me. Of course, if he writes with collaborators, that's something else. But I know we could easily figure that out.
*With all of your reservations about playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and writing the same kind of song over and over, do you envision a time when there is no Nirvana? That you'll try to make it alone?*
I don't think I could ever do a solo thing, the Kurt Cobain Project.
*Doesn't have a very good ring to it, either.*
No [laughs]. But yes, I would like to work with people who are totally, completely the opposite of what I'm doing now. Something way out there, man.
*That doesn't bode well for the future of Nirvana and the kind of music you make together.*
That's what I've been kind of hinting at in this whole interview. That we're almost exhausted. We've gone to the point where things are becoming repetitious. There's not something you can move up toward, there's not something you can look forward to. The best times that we ever had were right when *Nevermind* was coming out and we went on that American tour where we were playing clubs. They were totally sold out, and the record was breaking big, and there was this massive feeling in the air, this vibe of energy. Something really special was happening. I hate to actually even say it, but I can't see this band lasting more than a couple more albums, unless we really work hard on experimenting. I mean, let's face it. When the same people are together doing the same job, they're limited. I'm really interested in studying different things, and I know Krist and Dave are as well. But I don't know if we are capable of doing it together. I don't want to put out another record that sounds like the last three records. I know we're gonna put out one more record, at least, and I have a pretty good idea what it's going to sound like: pretty ethereal, acoustic, like REM's last album. If I could write just a couple of songs as good as what they've written . . . I don't know how that band does what they do. God, they're the greatest. They've dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music. That's what I'd really like to see this band do. Because we are stuck in such a rut. We have been labeled. REM is what? College rock? That doesn't really stick. Grunge is as potent a term as New Wave. You can't get out of it. It's going to be passé. You have to take a chance and hope that either a totally different audience accepts you or the same audience grows with you.
*And what if the kids just say, "We don't dig it, get lost"?*
Oh, well. [Laughs] Fuck 'em.

**Excerpt from the 1994 updated version of *Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana* by Michael Azerrad, published December 1994**
Despite the fact that with *Nevermind, In Utero* and *Tuc Eht Parc* all selling millions of copies between them, 10 successful charting singles, and millions of dollars in CD sales, song royalties, touring receipts and merchandise sales, Kurt doesn't take his position for granted. "I don't want to end up like Burt Reynolds, losing so much money that knowing how much I lost exactly would kill me," he says. "I certainly don't want to spend so much that I end up in the hole. It certainly helps that I'm not a fan of extravagance and shit like that."
That especially helps because Kurt does not want to become slaved to albums, music videos and tours becoming the vast majority of his life, an endless treadmill where letting up remotely can put his finances at risk. "Well, I'm having to really learn how to balance my life and get everything in order. I learned the hard way that albums need tours to ensure success and to set up one's bank account, but I also still don't want to go out on the road too long and neglect my kids. I shouldn't have to kill myself and never see Courtney, Frances and Patrick in order for us to be set for life. I definitely want to spend longer stretches of time decompressing at home."
Of course, is Kurt's family life all that secure? With the recent reports that Courtney has been seen in New Orleans with Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, the tabloid writers have been having a field day with the rumors, and have been especially quick to suggest that Kurt and Courtney will divorce. Kurt shrugs his shoulders at that possibility. "I thought Courtney made a hell of an album, and I'm glad it's done so well. I don't have any insight into whether Courtney did sleep with Trent, but at the moment, things are going great for us."
Kurt is not the only one going through such potential changes. Dave, the erstwhile budding musician of his own, has been quite pleased that fans love the B-side song "Marigold", which he entirely wrote and did himself, doing vocals, drums, guitars and bass. "I certainly don't want to only be known as the drummer," he says. "I'm especially loving doing guitar in my spare time. It's real fun."
Dave also thinks it's about time for Kurt to share some of the burden, and creative and monetary rewards, of writing songs. "I know Kurt's letting me use some of my songs on the next album and that's great, but I really want to find my own voice at least some of the time." If necessary, he'll launch a side project to get his voice heard. "I already have a name for it: Foo Fighters."
When asked if this means that he and Kurt are having tension or a potential falling out between them, Dave steadfastly denies it. "Fuck, no. Kurt and I are cool."

**"Nirvana Reaches For Guns, Megabands To Tour Together," by David Fricke, *Rolling Stone*, June 28, 1997**
Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain have officially buried the hatchet, and to celebrate, their respective bands have announced that they will be launching a major co-headlining tour starting at the end of July, starting at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The tour will also be documented by a live album release sometime next year, which will fulfill both bands' contracts with Geffen Records (Guns N' Roses for the main label, Nirvana for the DGC Records imprint), but there will understandably be pressure for them to re-sign with the label, or possibly move over the the hottest new label of recent memory, Jimmy Iovine's Interscope Records, a sibling of Geffen under the MCA umbrella.
This coincides with Guns N' Roses releasing their new album, *Chinese Democracy*, on June 27, their first album since *The Spaghetti Incident?* in 1993 and their first album of original material since the dual release of *Use Your Illusion I* and *Use Your Illusion II* in 1991. The album has been doing a very brisk business in sales already and receiving heavy radio and video rotation and impressive critical reviews, referring to it as "not as ultra-polished as the *Illusions*, but not as wild and raw as *Appetite for Destruction*, achieving a perfectly happy middle to please all fans."
To announce the tour, Cobain and Rose did a joint statement. "Last year, Axl reached out to me to put all our bullshit behind us, and I could see that he was earnest and sincere," Cobain said. "We began to find ground on which we could build a foundation of trust, and began to pour our hearts out to discuss things freely. I also gave Axl advice on how to deal with things in his band, and they helped, as apparently things were getting to be hairy over there." "Slash was on the verge of quitting," Rose explained. "Basically, we'd been drifting apart and I couldn't see it. Kurt pointed it out to me, and I talked to Slash directly, and we were able to work things out."
More than that. Besides keeping the lead guitarist in the band, Guns N' Roses also fired rhythm guitarist Paul Huge, who replaced Gilby Clarke, who replaced Izzy Stradlin, and chose to fill the void again by having Stradlin return to the band on a drop-in, drop-out basis, depending on his mood and feelings and plans related to his solo work, with Clarke in the spot whenever Stradlin does not wish to be with Guns. The main core of Rose, Slash, bassist Duff McKagan, drummer Matt Sorum and keyboardist Dizzy Reed will remain unchanged, though potential touring member expansions could be in the future.
"I think this is going to be an interesting and lovely situation," Cobain says of the tour. "We've gotten to know each other a lot better, and I think it'll go quite well." Apparently, Guns had to outbid to obtain Nirvana's commitment, as the grunge stalwarts had received an offer to join The Rolling Stones on their upcoming tour to promote their new album, *Bridges to Babylon*.

**"Nirvana Signs With Atlantic," *Billboard*, February 22, 1998**
Nirvana and their management team, Gold Mountain Management, announced today that the band has signed a five-album deal with Atlantic Records, for which studio albums, live albums, compilations and box sets can all be counted as fulfilling the deal. Nirvana will receive the rights to their past albums and masters with Sub Pop and DGC Records (a sub-imprint of Geffen Records, part of the MCA/Universal empire, currently in the process of buying PolyGram in the hopes of merging with Interscope Records and Geffen with it) to remaster, reissue and use however they see fit in the future, be it under Atlantic, or any future label.
"With Atlantic, we have found a great new partner for the next step in Nirvana's journey," Gold Mountain's statement reads. "We remain proud of the work and time with DGC, and will think fondly of the time and experience. But you can't stay in the past."
"I am very disappointed to hear that Nirvana felt the desire to leave us," David Geffen personally commented in response. "During our seven and a half years of association with them, we helped make Nirvana one of the most successful bands today, and we have been equitable and fair with them. Jimmy Iovine and I personally hoped they would stick around and sign with Interscope, the way Guns N' Roses have recently decided to do. But you can't force people to do things they don't want to do."
"I wish Nirvana nothing but success with their new label," Iovine said. "I would have loved to have signed them, but I have no ill will towards them."

**"Nirvana Launches Own Label," *Billboard*, April 23, 1998**
Nirvana has announced that they are launching their own vanity label, Exploitation Records, to help look over and administrate the albums under their current five-album deal with Atlantic Records. After fulfillment of that deal, it shall be turned into a full-fledged independent label, with which they will administer all future albums and then hope to expand with signing other artists of different genres.
"It's a real ironic name," frontman Kurt Cobain says. "It's a piss-take on the old Asylum Records label, and it's also making fun of people thinking people are being exploited. When the Atlantic deal is done, we'll use it for not only Nirvana albums, but other artists, established and not. And, just for fun, I'll record street bums, disfigured people, people considered freaks, then release limited copies of them in their hometowns, as further irony of the name, of those who think I'm exploiting these people. There'll be 500 copies of the Singing Flipper Boy from Kansas City, and so on. At the very least they, their families and friends will be happy to have an album."
The success of Exploitation Records past the Atlantic deal is not by any means a sure thing. Artists have started vanity labels before with the art of receiving (or at least getting the appearance of) independence yet within the parent label. Some have had reasonable success, like Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor's Nothing Records, whose works are distributed by Interscope, and include not just NIN's music but also includes Marilyn Manson, PIG, Pop Will Eat Itself, Prick, 12 Rounds, Einsturzende Neubaten and Meat Beat Manifesto. Others become quite disappointing, as in the case of Prince and his Paisley Park Records label when still with Warner Bros., which often became only for signing acts that he helped start himself with very little outreach or success. Then there are others that basically only exist just for the artists themselves, like The Rolling Stones did with Rolling Stones Records, which is now shuttered.

**"Marilyn Manson, Nirvana, Schedule 'Rock Is Dead' Tour," by Gil Kaufman, MTV News website, January 27, 1999**
*Colorful Acts Follow Up Australian Gigs With A Major Tour Of The States*
The potentially volatile mix of shock-rocker Marilyn Manson and reigning grunge kings Nirvana will take to U.S. stages for a tour set to open February 28 in Spokane, Washington, and run throughout the spring: while April 28 (at the Five Seasons Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa) is the last date currently scheduled, more dates are expected to be added. Both groups' sets are also set to be filmed and recorded for a live album and video package, though admittedly the sets may be released as separate entities due to potential legal red tape between Manson's label, Nothing Records, a vanity label run by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor under the control of Interscope Records, and Nirvana's current album deal with Atlantic Records.
The name of the tour is the "Rock Is Dead Tour", after one of the big singles of Manson's current album, and is also meant to be quite ironic. Drummer/guitarist/additional vocalist Dave Grohl explains, "Lots of people have said that rock will die out since the beginning, especially now, with the rise of bubblegum pop and boy bands and electronica everywhere. But if anything, the spirit of rock is alive and well, especially if someone like us is saying it. A little bit of irony goes a long way, especially if you're hooking up with Marilyn Manson, who absolutely wallows in it in his lyrics."
The groups, currently sharing stages on Australia's Big Day Out festival tour, have been painting their respective worlds in front of 40,000 fans a night for the past month. During that time, Grohl said Nirvana and Manson have become chummy, despite some acerbic words from Manson ringleader Marilyn (born Brian Warner). In England's *New Musical Express* last month, he said, "I think their early stuff is quite sloppy, and their current stuff is too tight." He has also expressed a dismissive attitude towards grunge and its more liberal-leaning social and political statements "chasing away all the best things about rock and roll, the theatricality of it."
Nirvana has been busy gigging for a while to promote their last album, *From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah-ha*, released back in 1997, complete with a massive co-headlining tour with Guns N' Roses that year, which was also released as a 4-CD live album, which ended Nirvana's relationship with Geffen/DGC Records. While they are in the works making their next studio album, clearly they felt they needed to squeeze more road dates out of the last one, which has continued their chart-topping and selling success.
Compared to Nirvana, Manson's heavily hyped *Mechanical Animals*, which features the current single, "I Don't Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me)", has failed to live up to the double-platinum heights of their previous, breakthrough album, 1996's *Antichrist Superstar*. *Animals* is ensconced at #115 on this week's chart, having sold 907,000 copies, though it did debut at #1 on the chart.
Manson has adopted a David Bowie-like glam image in place of his formerly black-clad gothic persona, while grunge siren Kurt Cobain continues to maintain his standard look of ripped jeans, T-shirts, cardigans and Converse Chuck Taylors.
The tour will feature Monster Magnet as support for half the dates, the other half divided between Nashville Pussy and Jack Off Jill.
Nirvana/Marilyn Manson Tour Dates:
February 28; Spokane, WA; Spokane Arena
March 2; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; PNE Coliseum
March 3; Seattle, WA; Key Arena
March 6; Portland, OR; Rose Garden
March 7; Boise, ID; Idaho Center
March 10; Daly City, CA; Cow Palace
March 11; Sacramento, CA; Arco Arena
March 13; Anaheim, CA; Arrowhead Pond
March 14; Inglewood, CA; The Forum
March 16; San Diego, CA; Sports Arena
March 17; Las Vegas, NV; Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV
March 18; Phoenix, AZ; Veterans Coliseum
March 21; Houston, TX; Compaq Center
March 22; San Antonio, TX; Alamodome
March 23; Dallas, TX; Reunion Arena
March 25; New Orleans, LA; UNO Lakefront Arena
March 27; Tampa, FL; Ice Palace
March 29; Orlando, FL; Orlando Arena
March 30; Sunrise, FL; National Car Center Arena
April 2; Winston-Salem, NC; Memorial Coliseum
April 3; Washington, D.C.; MCI Center
April 4; Philadelphia, PA; First Union Spectrum
April 6; East Rutherford, NJ; Continental Airlines Arena
April 7; Uniondale, NY; Nassau Coliseum
April 9; Worcester, MA; Centrum
April 10; New Haven, CT; Coliseum
April 11; Buffalo, NY; Marine Midland Arena
April 13; Cleveland, OH; CSU Arena
April 15; Auburn, MI; The Palace of Auburn Hills
April 16; Pittsburgh, PA; Civic Arena
April 17; Ft. Wayne, IN; Allen County War Memorial Coliseum
April 20; Rosemont, IL; Rosemont Horizon
April 21; Grand Rapids, MI; Van Andel Arena
April 22; Indianapolis, IN; Market Square Arena
April 24; Madison, WI; Dane County Coliseum
April 25; Milwaukee, WI; Bradley Center
April 27; Minneapolis, MN; Target Center
April 28; Cedar Rapids, IA; Five Seasons Center

**"Nirvana, Marilyn Manson Cancel Remaining U.S. Tour Dates," MTV News website, April 21, 1999**
Nirvana and Marilyn Manson have decided to cancel the remaining 18 dates of their current tour out of respect for those killed in the recent tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
In a joint message posted on Manson's and Nirvana's official websites, he and Kurt Cobain wrote: "People are trying to sort out what happened and to deal with their losses. It's not a great atmosphere to be out playing rock and roll shows, for us or the fans. While music and pop culture are not to blame for this terrible tragedy, nevertheless we have both agreed that it is not appropriate to be performing at this time."
Manson and Cobain also shot back at conservative activists and those in the media who have blamed them and their music for somehow spurring the Columbine shootings. "The media has unfairly scapegoated the music industry and so-called Goth kids," both frontmen wrote, "and has speculated - with no basis in truth - that artists like ourselves are in someway to blame. This tragedy was a product of ignorance, hatred, and an access to guns."
Part of the reason the rest of the 50-date tour was cancelled was because there was a Denver area date on the itinerary more than three weeks from now, and they clearly did not want to draw the ire of parents there so soon after the tragedy. And given that Edgar Bronfman, head of Seagram, owns Universal Music Group, which owns Interscope Records, which Manson is attached to, one of the upcoming dates, at Universal Studios, also did not seem like good press. The tour's final date will now be last night's performance at the Rosemont Horizon arena near Chicago, during which Cobain made repeated comments lamenting the massacre. The fulfilled dates have been filmed and recorded for a live album and video package and will still be released as planned in November. Manson will go ahead with a series of European festival dates through June and July, and four dates in Japan in August, while Nirvana will apparently retreat from further touring and begin work on their next studio album; rumors of Cobain and wife, actress Charlize Theron, planning some kind of entertainment industry project together have also begun to be whispered.
The dates that have been scuttled include:
April 21; Grand Rapids, MI; Van Andel Arena
April 22; Indianapolis, IN; Market Square Arena
April 24; Madison, WI; Dane County Coliseum
April 25; Milwaukee, WI; Bradley Center
April 27; Minneapolis, MN; Target Center
April 28; Cedar Rapids, IA; Five Seasons Center
May 3; Reno, NV; Lawlor Event Center
May 4; Fresno, CA; Selland Arena
May 5; Las Vegas, NV; The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel
May 7; Greenwood Village, CO; Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre
May 8; Universal City, CA; Universal Amphitheatre
May 10; West Palm Beach, FL; Coral Sky Amphitheatre
May 12; Atlanta, GA; Philips Arena
May 13; Huntsville, AL; Von Braun Civic Center
May 15; Biloxi; MS; Mississippi Coast Coliseum
May 17; North Charleston, SC; North Charleston Coliseum
May 18; Fairfax, VA; Patriot Center
May 20; New York, NY; Madison Square Garden

**Statement in response to Woodstock '99 on Nirvana website, July 31, 1999**
Some time ago, we were offered a considerable amount of money to appear at Woodstock '99, held near Rome, New York, just a week ago. The organizers, Michael Lang and John Scher, and MTV, who were going to broadcast the festival, specifically hoped for a Nirvana performance as a main selling point for Woodstock '99, and as a consolation prize after the decision to cancel the remaining dates of our joint tour with Marilyn Manson. However, we specifically turned down the invitation, choosing instead to work on our next album and help the process of setting up Springbok Productions, as both events were going to take a great deal of our time, or rather, mine.
We certainly, in retrospect, made the right decision. The sight of what Woodstock '99 was, what it was devolving into, was nothing short of disastrous and appalling. First off, the site for the festival, an abandoned Air Force base, simply did not make that much sense, especially since it had a distinct lack of shade in the event of sweltering summer heat, which turned out to be the case as upstate New York was hit by a dangerous heatwave. The logistics for the festival were simply a scandal, with not enough toilets or other amenities for the festivalgoers, ATM machines without cash, and the decision to gouge the attendees to buy food and beverages at inflated prices, such as $4 for water bottles.
It was clear that this festival was not so much a genuine anniversary celebration of the original Woodstock (whose reputation and status in the public eye has surely been exaggerated and mythologized considerably by aging hippies), but a mercenary corporate enterprise cynically using the Woodstock name to profit. John Scher, in particular, clearly engineered the festival to be this way, with giving statements like, "this is the first Woodstock that will be profitable." If you're aiming to take advantage of the crowd in this manner, I'm not surprised that there would be consequences with all the bonfires, riots and property damage. I, naturally, wonder why Michael Lang, who organized the original Woodstock, would allow Mr. Scher to besmirch his baby in this manner.
There's a lot of people rushing to blame the artists that performed for inciting the riots, especially the "nu metal" acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit, or the closing set by the Red Hot Chili Peppers for performing Jimi Hendrix's "Fire" just as the riots got underway. This is blatantly absurd and ridiculous. Much as we've had to endure the complaints about violent media inspiring real world violence because of Columbine, so these artists have to endure it because of the festival. I'm certainly no fan of nu metal bands, but Fred Durst and company didn't get them to start the riots when he launched into a song called "Break Stuff." Besides the fact the riots didn't start then, if anything, he was attempting to get the crowd to purge negative vibes and feel a wave of relief. I agree that it didn't work, and Mr. Durst didn't help the situation, but he didn't light the fuse. Likewise for the Chili Peppers, who we've long been friends with. I know these guys intimately, and I know they would never do something like incite riots. If anyone is to blame in these bands not cooling passions, it's the promoters for not sitting down with them and saying, "Hey, you need to do this when you perform." Instead, they all were clearly left in a bubble, unaware of how the situation was developing, so as far as they knew, it was a standard festival and they were just there to give a damn good show. Of course, I would also say that having a lot of aggro, nu metal, thrash metal and rap rock bands dominate the bill is not exactly the best way to organize a festival where you want calm waters, and Mr. Scher should've thought this over better. After all, Woodstock '94 was far more balanced in representation.
But the part that really gets to me is the reports of sexual assault, rapes and continual sexual harassment emerging from the festival. To see a veritable army of twentysomething young men, the vast majority of them white, continually leer and shout, "Show us your tits!" and then gang up on women forcibly. The fact that Mr. Scher is trying to brush this off and say "It was a few bad apples whose acts have been blown out of proportion by the press" and "MTV is the one setting the tone, so they're to blame", is beyond appalling. When you're the organizer of the festival, what happens there is your responsibility. Now, I'm sure a lot of press pundits will again blame the music for these assaults, which is not true. And then, the men would trot out all the excuses of "they were asking for it," "why did she dress that way?" and "What about the girls flashing their boobs to the bands?" I'm sorry, but however women are acting, even those that seem to be trawling around to look for attention, do nothing to deserve being raped.
I also bet some of these men would go further and say, "Everything's shit here, no food, no water, no toilets, what can we do?" The same answer they're also giving for the riots and fires. The logistics of the festival being shit did not make you rape these women, and it did not give you a license to burn and destroy everything in sight. The fact that a candlelight vigil to honor victims killed in school shootings was used as the spark to light the fires is the truly disheartening part. A beautiful statement of activism, very in line with the original Woodstock's ethos, was corrupted into becoming the second coming of Altamont.
I don't have any real and concrete answers for what should be done after all of this, and I shouldn't have to provide them. Even with all the things I do to support the causes close to my heart, I don't want to be the leader telling everyone what to do. But it's certainly a truly disappointing fact that the ideals and political strides of the '90s, and the work to stand up against misogyny, racism, homophobia and so on, have been completely discarded here. What was at work in the minds of everyone there, I can't hazard a guess. I just hope that future festivals can at least look at what happened here to know what not to do.
-Kurdt

**"*Questions Answered by the Unanswerables* Review," by David Fricke, *Rolling Stone*, March 7, 2000**
As their first album of the new millennium, it is clear that Nirvana intend this to be a turning point of some kind. In many ways, it's more than one...Taylor Hawkins fits in nicely on the drum stool when Grohl picks up his guitar and stands at the mike, and Grohl has truly come into his own, showing he could easily take the reins completely were something to befall Cobain..."Friends Of Pain," a rueful meditation over the deaths of Eddie Vedder, Tom Petty, and even all the way back to those of Andrew Wood and Hillel Slovak, is undoubtedly the song that is destined to become an evergreen favorite, though Grohl's "Learning To Fly" comes in at a very strong second..."Fools And Knaves", a song clearly aimed at the American political process and the lack of informed voters, nevertheless has plenty of hope hidden underneath its veritable sarcasm...The true surprise gem is a rollicking rendition of Bob Dylan's "Political World", in which Cobain intones the lines with urgency, just in time to hopefully drive more young people to the ballot box on November 7.

**"Dixie Dope...Damn," by David Fricke, *Rolling Stone*, October 10, 2003**
Kurt Cobain is a man on a mission. Right now, he's listening to a playback of a song called "The Great Alton County Prison Escape," sitting behind the console to take it in fully. Sitting right beside him are record producers Rob Cavallo and T Bone Burnett, analyzing the song quite determinedly. At the end, the 36-year-old Cobain turns around and says, "I think I fucked up the second bridge. It doesn't sound as good as it could've been. I probably need to do it again."
Cavallo demurs slightly. "I think it was a great take, Kurt. So it's not so perfect, so what? The rawness of it means a lot more, letting little mistakes in here and there." Burnett, hand on his chin as he sits with his legs off the floor and clutched on the edge of the chair against his stomach, just seems quite lost in thought before he speaks. "I think what Kurt is saying is that he wants it to be more melodic, somewhat more Lennonesque in sound." Cobain just looks up. "Yeah, I suppose that's what I meant."
Such is the scene as Nirvana records its latest album, a swinging, slashing concept record entitled *Dixie Dope*. For fans who worried that Cobain's duties and responsibilities as a cofounder of fledgling entertainment company Springbok Productions was taking up so much of his time and that the allure of Hollywood was such that he'd never pick up a guitar again, this new album, the first in three years, seeks to allay those fears. Because not only is Cobain determined to make good Nirvana album; he wants to send a message to America.
"I'll admit it, I want this album to really reverberate, particularly politically. I want to send something that can mobilize the youth so that George W. Bush gets his ass kicked at the ballot box in 2004. I want that because I think that he and his cronies are taking us down a really terrifying road that could really spell disaster for America. The fact that he pushed lies and fear to get us into a war in Iraq while taking away resources from finding bin Laden, I don't see how one could possibly justify that. It's all about greed and oil, full stop."
Massive, hard-charging words from a figure that seemed unlikely to be a leader in political protest up to now. While Cobain has certainly done a lot of rallying and support for the causes he and the members of Nirvana, and his second wife, actress Charlize Theron, believe in so earnestly, he'd never really gone out to do "finger-pointing songs" the way Bob Dylan did before 1964. He certainly never seemed to want to step in the shoes of more established political singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne or Don Henley before him, or artists whose sole focus was to push for revolutionary beliefs like Rage Against the Machine. Cobain himself even agrees with that assessment. "I've never wanted to be the type that preached to people, went out and said, 'do this, do that, support this person.' I've always hated dogma."
So why is Cobain making such an overtly political album, and a concept album (more on that later) to boot? "Sometimes, no matter how much you want to stay above the fray, not get involved, refrain from being sucked in, there comes a time when you don't have a choice and you have to stand up for your beliefs, be counted. You know, when she came out, Ellen (DeGeneres) didn't want to be an activist, a spokesperson on behalf of all gay people. But then Matthew Shepard was murdered, and she realized she needed to get involved. That's the real courage right there, that she made that choice to speak and join the fight. If I didn't say anything about what is happening in America right now, about how we have President that was not elected, but installed into an office he didn't win, got us involved in a fight against a nebulous an undefined enemy without real planning, is juicing the economy with giveaways to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and has improper connections with Enron, then I couldn't really face myself. I couldn't let that sit on my conscience."
Cobain knows full well that he's walking into a minefield where he could very easily end up blown apart for the effort. After all, much of the press was in an uproar over The Dixie Chicks for far less, just saying that "we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." One almost throwaway line in a 2 1/2 hour concert in London. And yet the industry seemed content to effectively help the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys of the world shove them into the dirt and destroy their career, until Cobain and various country artists gave a message of support, and Springbok's record label, Exploitation Records, bought The Dixie Chicks' contract. "I'm pissed off that they fucking did that to them. They didn't deserve any of that shit, especially all the death threats and calling them Saddam's whores and whatnot. It makes me truly ashamed at times to be a man." And yet, Cobain is only more determined to give out a message far more pointed and forceful than anything the country trio ever said. "They're coming out swinging, and I'm gonna swing right back at them. We need to show Fox News and the Murdoch machine that we're not gonna sit back and take it."
It was in this frame of mind, before the war officially began with the initial "shock and awe" campaign, that Cobain conceived *Dixie Dope*. A satirical, pointed hybrid of refreshingly basic punk rock with country and Skynyrd-esque Southern rock, the album tells the story of "Georgie WW Bushbelow," who is the titular "Dixie Dope" and an absolute living embodiment of redneck stereotyping and macho posturing, to prove to the world that he is the hero that will save them, especially from "Albertus Arnoldius Gore (no need to guess who this is)" and his "nerdy book learnin'." Each track on the album, which is layered to tell a story from beginning to end, is preface by the narration of the "Talky Man", a storyteller played by comedic psychobilly artist Unknown Hinson, a growing underground success around the Sunset Strip. (Hinson gets 5 percent of the album's profits, and a development deal to create an animated series with Springbok, with Hinson as main character, has also been inked.
"It's a definite piss-take on everything that one associates with the South, with Bush, and so on. But it's also meant to be affectionate, without demonizing them all as garbage that has no value. I hate Bush the politician, but I don't hate Bush the man. I think he's a real decent guy, and it's clear he does respect the Presidency and all of its responsibilities. I mean, he's not just completely slacking off to play golf or watch TV all the time, he puts in the work to go everywhere, see everyone, look at the paperwork and whatnot. But he's clearly not a curious guy, he doesn't challenge himself. I also think he tends to listen to the wrong people, because he's installed the wrong people for important jobs, just because they're high-ranking Republicans, or they're friends of him, or friends of his father. He thought he could really make things better by being a kickass war hero President, and he's rushed us headlong into disaster."
To help bring this vision to life, Cobain turned to important producers who could help bring the specific sensibilities to life. For the punk aesthetics that have long been a major influence for Nirvana (even if tempered with melodic hooks), Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's major label works *Dookie, Insomniac, Nimrod* and *Warning*, was the prime candidate. "I really liked Green Day, and I'm sorry they couldn't survive," Cobain says. "But clearly things had to go this way because Billie Joe (Armstrong) needed the weight lifted off him to be a healthy, happy dad and husband, and it's working for him. But Rob was a major part of that sound, and the sound of those albums is what I really wanted for this one. Rob and I, we really clicked at once."
And to bring a credible country/Southern rock sound to palate, T Bone Burnett was the man to see. As a youngster, he was a member of the band for Bob Dylan's legendary Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975 and '76. A musician himself with roots in country and Americana, Burnett has produced albums for Elvis Costello, Counting Crows, Roy Orbison, Sam Phillips (not the Sun Records founder who died recently), BoDeans and even pop duo Evan and Jaron ("Crazy for this Girl"). Among his biggest accomplishments, Burnett produced Spinal Tap's "real" album *Break Like the Wind*, The Wallflowers' major label breakthrough *Bringing Down the Horse*, and the soundtrack for the Coen Brothers' acclaimed film *O Brother, Where Art Thou?* Burnett also produced the soundtrack of re-recordings for the much-maligned Jerry Lee Lewis biopic *Great Balls of Fire!* and the soundtrack for *Cold Mountain*, and is set to produce the soundtrack for the forthcoming Johnny Cash biopic *Walk the Line*, set to be directed by James Mangold and starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.
"T Bone really gets the project and knew what needed to be done," Cobain says. "I'm absolutely in awe of him and his talent. Since he's a musician himself, he really understood on an instinctive level what the song needed, and how to make it not a mere pastiche. He really helped strive for authenticity in the sound, and it shows. You listen to the album, it's clear this isn't just something that was tossed off, or something meant to be disrespectful or shit all over a genre or region. I think it's without a doubt a real labor of love, and the best album that is a coherent whole in the Nirvana catalog."
Not that sessions were easier, necessarily, than the albums before. "I had to work my ass off on this one," drummer/guitarist/co-frontman Dave Grohl states. "There's always been some degree of casualness, looseness, in our recording sessions. Not this one. Kurt came in real determined, and there's been a lot of cracking the whip. We were a lot more regimented, a lot tighter, it was almost like boot camp. Not just from Kurt but from Rob and T Bone. I mean, I'm actually glad to have had the experience, because it means I'm real disciplined when I need to be, so I've really done my apprenticeship. But I certainly want to be real easygoing the next time around. At least the trifecta in charge knew we couldn't all business, so we had a lot of jams and bullshit to wind down and let off some steam."
Cobain concurs. "I knew we couldn't just be only drill sergeants and bark orders. Jamming and doing covers has always been a fun way to keep us in the groove and relax, so we definitely needed it here. Doing that, whatever tension we had between us would just vanish immediately, and we felt at ease, at one with the world."
Part of what makes the album special is involvement by Cobain's oldest child, his eleven-year-old daughter Frances Bean. "Frances is really coming into her own, she's so into music and learning so much. We actually incorporated her parts into one track on the album." She also wrote a poem entitled "Dummy" that is included in the liner notes.
Naturally, one wonders how Cobain will feel if Bush is still in the White House come 2005. "I'll be disappointed, certainly, but I can live with it. I certainly want this album to help drive him out, but if nothing else, I'll at least be glad I really got the message out and helped make people passionate about fucking something. That's the legacy I want this album to have."
Beyond that, Cobain naturally takes great pride and interest in Springbok's slate of projects, most notably the most high-profile one yet, a biopic of convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos entitled *Monster*, with Theron in the role. "Charlize really immersed herself into the character on this one. She gained 30, 35 pounds to look as disheveled as Aileen was, and she studied all the footage so carefully. She's like a student at that shit. I think this is the best project we've done yet."
Cobain goes into the main studio room, redoing the part that troubled him earlier. After listening to it again, he smiles warmly. "Yeah, that's the shit right there. That's theo ne we got." The producers agree. Heartened by the success, he retires to the nearby kitchen to heat up some Kraft macaroni and cheese, his reward, he says, for a job well done.

**"A Look Inside Kurt Cobain's Home Studio," by Paul Tingen, *Sound on Sound*, February 2015**
Nestled along Florida's Treasure Coast, in the seaside town of Sebastian, lies one of the many notable properties belonging to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and his wife and business partner, actress Charlize Theron. This particular home once belonged to Arlo Guthrie, and is a modest, but sleekly modern home that includes amenities like a saltwater pool. However what's particularly notable about this property is that it has additional acres directly across from it, which has two additional buildings.
In one of these buildings is a handsome and quite impressive home studio, from which Nirvana shall be recording all its albums going forward, as will Cobain's eldest child, daughter Frances Bean Cobain, in albums for her own music career. To make the studio, Cobain took notes not only from the various professional studios Nirvana had recorded in throughout the past, but also the home studios of other notable rock stars, most notably studios by the likes of Eddie Van Halen, Prince, Joe Perry and Jack White.
"I'm not really an audio or technical geek at all," Cobain states. "I just knew that I wanted the best mix of vintage and modern equipment to work with, the best acoustics, and help from the best technicians and engineers by our side. So, I basically went to learn what I could from other people in order to get an idea of how to go about it, get the best equipment, learn the best techniques. I think it's quite impressive, to say the least."
With Nirvana essentially taking its music into its own hands and self-producing from one particular location from now on, it will certainly be a bit of a change for the band to get used to. "We could have produced yourselves much earlier, started years ago," Cobain admits. "But I guess we always thought we needed a safe pair of ears, an outside listener, to keep track of things and say things quite bluntly that 'that take was shit' or 'those lyrics suck,' or 'that mix is the one.' Now, I'm definitely not the best when it comes to having a pen and clipboard, making notes, keeping track of different takes and choosing which one is the best, but with the experience we have gained over all this time and the people helping run things during the sessions, I'm sure we'll manage. Besides, not having to give outside producers points mean the budgets will be bigger."
Cobain's studio contains a notable mix of different analog and digital recording devices: these include Studer 24-track analog tape recorders, Mitsubishi 32-track digital tape recorders, Alesis ADAT recorders, Genex hard disk recorders, Pro Tools rigs, Apple computers and laptops of different eras from the '80s to now, and the CLASP hybrid systems. There is an SSL desk and a Neve mixing desk, and many of the standard modern plug-ins.
For recording, there are several live rooms and isolation booths, and overdub booths, as well as varying guitars, basses, amps, preamps and drum kits. Neumann, Shure and Ars Technica microphones and bafflers are scattered all around, used interchangeably, depending on the circumstances.
Brian Putralaski, an engineer on staff, who worked with Aerosmith in the past, is quite impressed with the setup. "Kurt definitely knows which way is up, and he certainly doesn't beat around the bush in finding out what we wants in the sound. Basically, it doesn't take long for the band to thrash things out and get the levels right, make the room feel alive and resonant."
When asked how he prefers to record, Cobain shrugs. "We've become quite proficient in doing things live, and in painstakingly laying things down separately, often doing both, with doing the basic track live, and then I go in and do overdubs later. But we often get things done all at the same time. The same is true of mine and Dave's vocals. We always do them live with the band; sometimes as the intended take, sometimes as a guide to go into the booth and do the masters later. But there's definitely no half-assing about it, we're always quite focused on getting things right, even if it is merely a scratch vocal. And then we also do things differently. Sometimes a particular take is good enough to be used in whole, other times we comp takes together, it depends on what suits the song best. Sometimes I'll play with headphones on, sometimes not and we use stage monitors. Sometimes I'll sing on a stage mic, sometimes a standard recording one. Sometimes I'll use an amp, sometimes I'll plug into the console."
Putralaski then attests to how this difference happens. "There are definitely times we get a good complete take, other times we cobble them together. We mix things lots of different ways, try things different ways. We're certainly not averse to pitch correction, but we tend to use those more for giving the song a flavor, rather than specifically to fix dodgy vocals, because, with Kurt in particular, it's not particularly easy to determine what is a blown take because of the way he sings. But we use vocoders and Melodyne at times to give the vocals a particular flavor, an interesting sonic texture that brings something out of the song that ordinarily wouldn't have been present. We mix, mix, and mix some more, sometimes as many as 30 different times for one song, to find something that works. That's certainly easier when we use Pro Tools for that, compared to working with tape, but when we do, we make sure to keep very detailed yet concise notation for it. We still only have two or three pages for track sheets, so it works out fine."
One of the most important tests done is testing the mixes on a car radio, to test how audiences might hear the songs when driving. There is also a similar track of doing this on an iPod to test out the mix there. If the mix passes these tests, it is approved. There is lots of refocusing and rejiggering before sending the approved album to be mastered.
"Basically put, when all is said and done, there's an interesting process, but it all leads to the same result," Cobain says. "And it's certainly nice to have your own space to do it, too."

**“It’s Good to be the King: Inside the Court of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain," by David Fricke, *Rolling Stone*, February 1, 2019**
I have interviewed Kurt Cobain five times over the decades prior to this current session, two of those times with his bandmates. One would think that means that I know exactly what to expect from the Nirvana frontman turned entertainment mogul, but in fact, he always surprises me each time I see him after a period of intervening years. There is always something new, about his field, and the world at large, when I sit and talk with him.
When I first sat with him in the fall of 1993, Nirvana was in the midst of touring *In Utero*, playing general admission venues of an average capacity of 5000, working to confirm that their mainstream success with *Nevermind* was no mere fluke. Cobain was 26 years old, still married to Courtney Love, still grappling with feuds with Pearl Jam and Guns N’ Roses, and while being an adoring father to his eldest child, daughter Frances Bean Cobain, there was also always a coterie of nannies to step in, as they didn’t particularly trust him or Love to take on most of the day-to-day responsibility. Nirvana was signed to DGC Records, a relatively small hard rock imprint of Geffen Records, and David Geffen himself, along with Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein, were the undisputed kingmakers, having amassed considerable power and respect. The Internet was in its infancy, Michael Eisner was in the middle of pulling Disney out of a dark age, and it was at the point people were just starting to always have a VCR in their house.
Fast forward to today, and it’s a very different world. Geffen and Weinstein are gone and long discredited, Cobain divorced Love and is happily married to actress Charlize Theron, with a fairly expansive family, whom they have long been hands-on and direct in rearing. Their production company, Springbok Productions, has emerged to fill the void that Geffen and Weinstein left behind, with untold billions from their sudden dominance in film, television, digital media, animation, video games and musical theater. And Nirvana, as well as Cobain himself, have basically cemented themselves as the most credible challengers to the legacy of The Beatles, selling out tens of thousands of tickets everywhere they play, and Cobain is now seen as a pioneer who has completely disrupted the entire world.
And yet, as I sit to talk to him, Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear and Taylor Hawkins at Springbok’s L.A. offices, surrounded with pictures of their many, *many* friends over the decades, and an enshrined photo of Mel Brooks with the quote “It’s good to be the king,” from *History of the World-Part I*, embossed in gold, the 52-year-old Cobain is still very much the same man I talked to in a Chicago hotel the first time around. “I’ve never been very ostentatious with all the money I’ve earned, enough to last several lifetimes. The houses I own are fairly simple and spartan, in terms of wealth, I don’t like to go to fancy restaurants that often because I don’t like the scene even though I’m part of it, I could easily just live off of eating nothing but ramen and Kraft macaroni and cheese. I’m also not a business-minded guy. I don’t run Springbok, nor does Charlize. It basically runs itself, with all the people we’ve hired. I can still barely fill out my tax forms.”
It would be easy to dismiss these comments as disingenuous, as Cobain wanting to downplay himself for effect, were it not for the fact that everyone who knows him and his family on a day to day basis have all vouched for it. “Kurt is still very much a luddite when it comes to the deeper nuances of the industry,” Jennifer Todd, co-founder and CEO of Springbok, chimes in. “He knows enough to stay informed of new developments, but not enough to actually administrate. Charlize is better in that regard, but she’s also not quite there. If she were in charge of things, Springbok may not have crashed and burned, but it might never have grown beyond a standard vanity shingle. That’s not a knock on either of them, as they’re both immensely talented and compassionate, just stating the facts.”
At this moment, Nirvana is about to go out and promote their new album, a concept piece entitled *Artificial Tension*, mark the 30th anniversary of their debut album *Bleach* with a limited edition vinyl-only release of the 20th anniversary box set for Record Store Day, and mark the 20th anniversary of Springbok’s founding. The band, along with Theron, are also being named Disney Legends this year. The five members of the band clearly wanted to take stock of it all, and show that even now, at the height of their fame and influence, they still feel they have something to prove.
Q: By all rights, you’ve essentially accomplished everything you possibly could. You were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame five years ago, and you and Springbok are being named Disney Legends this year. That’s the type of position where many would feel that’s it and pack it all in.
KC: If anything, we’ve got a lot of mileage left in us. If we weren’t at the age of musicians keeping on making music and touring well into their 80s or 90s, then we probably would feel that way and say it’s the time to stop. But I feel that if anything, we’re still only in the middle of our career, not the end. The idea that rock and roll has a retirement age is pretty ridiculous.
DG: When you break it down, the really great acts are those that continue for decades, that weather every storm to keep on turning out new art, even if they’re not always in the most favorable of circumstances. I always get a thrill of entertaining crowds no matter where we are. For two, three hours on that stage, everything is right in the world and we can escape from our hassles.
Q: What would you say has really changed in terms of how Nirvana operates since the early days?
KN: Other than being bigger and working on concept albums? Nothing really. Kurt is still the one who comes up with the songs, we work our asses off to really get the sounds down, and each time we do is a big risk. We don’t go out with the album thinking, “we’ve got it made, this is another easy day for us.” No, we’re always thinking that somehow, we’ve reached the album that will turn everyone off and people will hate. Each one is a risk for us.
Q: Are Pat and Taylor full members of the band?
KC: Absolutely. I love having someone to work off with, as well as ensuring we’re louder for bigger places, especially when Taylor takes the drums and Dave comes out on guitar and sings.
PS: I’ve always been really good friends with them since the *In Utero* days, and I’ve always felt like part of the band. That was a real trial by fire for me, and it really prepared us for what was to come afterwards. I really feel that.
TH: I may seem to have the easiest time of everyone, since I only have to play a portion of the shows, but I put my all into it every night. I’ve even done some nights playing drums on a lot of the songs Dave normally does that for, to really build my chops. It’s been quite an experience for me, and I’m grateful.
Q: Did you really think you’d be as influential as you’ve become?
KC: Not at all. I certainly didn’t expect that we’d grow to what we are now, and I certainly didn’t think we’d be considered the heirs to The Beatles at all. In my heart, no one can ever be that, and I’ll always feel that way even if the rest of the world says otherwise. Simply put, I never thought the band would be in this position, and I never once imagined myself as an entertainment industry executive. Springbok was not a reality to me, even after it was founded 20 years ago.
Q: Springbok is considered the greatest success story of the 21st century. What do you think is responsible for that?
KC: Finding the right people to work with, to control things, freeing you from being a company director. It’s basically the opposite of when The Beatles launched Apple Corps, which really is the precedent for Springbok. Apple was intended to become everything and anything in the entertainment industry, but it didn’t have a leader. John, Paul, George and Ringo were incredibly naïve about how a business could be run, lots of people were hired and paid to do nothing, and lots of people took advantage of the breaking in new acts that was intended by taking the advance money and running. Then you add the whole Allen Klein situation, someone who didn’t care for the integrity of The Beatles or Apple, who even personally was responsible for George’s plagiarism lawsuit for “My Sweet Lord,” because he also represented the other act. Apple was then only able to succeed as a brand, much as The Beatles have stayed on as a brand.
DG: I certainly could never have come up with an idea for something like Springbok, and I never would’ve tried. I just don’t care at all about business, I want to get out and play. I speak for myself and the other guys, that only Kurt could’ve made that leap.
KN: At least it hasn’t turned him into another suit, that’s the best part. You gotta respect Kurt’s integrity.
Q: Among the projects Springbok has in the pipeline is Clint Eastwood’s film *Richard Jewell*. Nirvana was performing at Centennial Olympic Park that night.
KC: I still have nightmares about it. We were just having a great time onstage, performing for the MTV cameras, which was a real historic part of Olympics coverage. The audience was definitely enjoying themselves, and it felt real magical. Then we could see that people were starting to move back, wondering what that meant.
KN: I was in the middle of telling a joke to the audience when the bomb went off. MTV even captured it in their broadcast, it was chilling. The panic started to set in, especially when we saw it came from a sound and lighting tower, and Dave immediately shouted out for people to stay away from it, that the tower was going to collapse.
DG: Thankfully it didn’t, because someone had nudged that backpack a few inches. If that hadn’t happened, regardless of what Mr. Jewell had done, a lot more people would’ve died with that tower coming down.
Q: Is it true that you’re going to appear in the film as yourselves to reenact the performance?
KC: Yes, because that’s part of what drew us to the script, a chance to sort of exorcise some demons, that and the fact Mr. Jewell’s story needed to be told, and I wanted to ensure it was told respectfully.
Q: I imagine that it was a bit of a titanic struggle, between you and Clint Eastwood.
KC: It had to be done, because Clint intended something very different. He was going to really tear into his political biases to basically say that the “dirty liberal media and Democrat-stooge FBI” were purposefully in cahoots to railroad Jewell, that Bill Clinton was pushing the thumb on the scale for it, and that the reporter at the *Atlanta Journal-Constitution* that broke the initial story was just a bitch on wheels who slept for sources and was personally driven to take Jewell out and make a name for herself. It was just beyond the pale, and I went right up to Clint and told him that he couldn’t do this, that it would be slander against a woman who was merely doing her job, and he would be doing Richard Jewell’s memory a disservice. Now he didn’t like that, and he definitely laid into me, into Springbok as a whole, in that way of his, saying he was going to pull the film away from us, from Disney, and get Warners to make it, since that’s where all his movies end up.
Q: How did you manage to come out on top?
KC: Jennifer’s really the unsung hero, she really went to the bat, and told the scriptwriter, Billy Ray, to try again and rework the material. She’s very blunt, and he basically made it clear that Clint’s reputation wouldn’t simply push into silence. She especially was going to go to the press and denounce the film quite viciously if he was going to pursue this path, and that we’d personally make it our mission to sink it. I think part of the reason he’s so hit and miss these days is because no one questions him, because they’re too in awe of his legend, whereas we dealt with him like a human being, took him down a notch. I’m glad we took on the project, because if we didn’t, he would’ve pulled out his blatant character assassination and smeared a reputable organization just to push his own agenda.
Q: Obviously, there are people who feel that you, Nirvana and Springbok have gotten too big, and that you’re ruining everything about our culture, that you’re overrated and need to simply die.
KC: Are their first names Matt and Trey? (*Chuckles*) No, in all seriousness, no matter who you are, not everyone will like you, and you’ve just got to roll with that. If you spend your time worrying about that and trying to win them over, then you become everything they accuse you of. Paul Stanley’s told me that time and time again. How do you think KISS is what it is, despite having legions of detractors or grizzled ex-fans who like to dogpile on them all the time? Because they simply don’t give a shit about complainers and know they’re a minority, when the real fans are the ones who show up every night.
DG: It’s a bit of jealousy too. They’ll never admit that, but it’s obvious.
PS: I read somewhere that during the French Revolution, a lot of them were actually envious of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the ruling class and wanted to be them, that they were just frustrated people who took their anger out to that extreme to compensate. It’s a very compelling theory.
TH: Meanwhile, we’re still rolling along, and this train ain’t stopping anytime soon.
Q: What do you think the future holds, especially in the next decade?
KC: I don’t have a fucking clue. I never have. That’s part of what makes the future exciting, not knowing what’s to come. If you do know, it’s pretty boring.

**"Nirvana Backing Drummer Taylor Hawkins Dead At 50," by Kat Bouza, *Rolling Stone*, March 26, 2022**
Taylor Hawkins, the jovial, ferocious second drummer for Nirvana for more than 25 years, died Friday at the age of 50. The band announced the musician's death in a statement but did not reveal a cause.
"The Nirvana family is devastated by the tragic and untimely loss of our beloved Taylor Hawkins," the group wrote. "His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever." Nirvana are currently on tour in South America and were scheduled to perform at Festival Estéreo Picnic in Bogotá, Colombia, at the time of Hawkins' death, a rep for the band told *Rolling Stone*.
Bogota municipal government issued a statement Friday night confirming that the city's emergency services received a call about a patient complaining of "chest pain," the Associated Press reports. Ambulances were sent to the Four Seasons Casa Medina hotel, where the band was staying. Health workers "carried out resuscitation maneuvers" on Hawkins but "the patient was declared dead," Bogotá's Secretary of Health tweeted Saturday morning.
According to the Attorney General of Colombia, 10 substances were found in Hawkins, including antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and opioids. "The National Institute for Legal Medicine continues to conduct the necessary medical studies to ascertain the cause of death," the office wrote in a tweet on Saturday. "The Attorney General's office will continue to investigate and will duly inform the findings of forensic examinations in due time."
As news of Hawkins' death spread, numerous musicians and celebrities took to social media to honor the late drummer. "God bless you Taylor Hawkins. I loved your spirit and your unstoppable rock power," wrote Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello, sharing a photo of himself and Hawkins alongside Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell. Miley Cyrus, a noted Foo Fighters fan, shared a photograph of herself and Hawkins to her Instagram stories, writing, "This is how I'll always remember you," and added that her upcoming concert would be dedicated to him. Slash wrote that Hawkins' death left him "devastated," saying, "I've no words to express all the feelings I have about his passing." Former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy, Ozzy Osbourne and producer Steve Albini were among others who also shared tributes.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Hawkins relocated to Laguna Beach, California, with his family in his early childhood. Following a stint with Canadian singer Sass Jordan in the early '90s, Hawkins rose to prominence as the touring drummer for Alanis Morissette during the *Jagged Little Pill* era. "The second I heard 'You Oughta Know,' I was like, 'I'm in that band!'" Hawkins told *Rolling Stone* last November. "I just knew." Hawkins also appeared in the music videos for the singer's hit singles "You Oughta Know" and "You Learn."
With Nirvana branching out to include more of drummer Dave Grohl's compositions, as well as for him to take lead vocals and additional guitar duties for those songs, the need for an additional drummer to play during these songs became apparent. Hawkins officially joined the band at the request of Grohl and guitarist and lead vocalist Kurt Cobain in 1996, and was first featured on Nirvana's album *From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah-ha*.
Grohl would later refer to the drummer as his "best friend and partner in crime" in his 2021 autobiography, *The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music*. "During his stint as Alanis Morissette's drummer, long before he became one of us, we would bump into each other backstage at festivals all over the world, and our chemistry was so obvious that even Alanis herself once asked him, 'What are you going to do when Kurt and Dave ask you to be their drummer?'" Grohl wrote. "Part *Beavis and Butthead*, part *Dumb and Dumber*, we were a hyperactive blur of Parliament Lights and air drumming wherever we went."
Throughout his career with Nirvana, Hawkins occasionally handled vocal duties, singing lead on the group's 2005 non-album single "Cold Day in the Sun" and "Sunday Rain" from 2017's *The Adventures of SlyDan SmallHands.* Hawkins also frequently sang cover songs with the group, both for Nirvana B-sides and during live performances — including a powerful rendition of Queen's "Somebody to Love" during a January 2021 show for fully-vaccinated fans in Los Angeles.
"He came into a band that was pretty scrappy, in general, and kind of acclimated to that for a second, and then was like, 'Hang on a second, what if we become good?'" Nate Mendel, bassist in Grohl, Hawkins and Pat Smear's assembled fictional band Dream Widow, said of Hawkins in the band's recent *Rolling Stone* cover story. "That was Taylor's thing, like, 'Why don't we learn how to be better as a band and pay more attention to what we're doing live?'" Hawkins also co-starred with Grohl, Smear, and Mendel as the fictional band Dream Widow in Grohl's horror-comedy film, *Studio 666*, released last month.
Outside of his work with Nirvana, Hawkins regularly collaborated with other musicians and groups, launching several side projects of his own. In 2006, he embarked on a solo career with Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders, reuniting with his former Morissette touring bandmate and Jane's Addiction bassist Chris Chaney. Hawkins would go on to release three albums under the Coattail Riders banner, tapping artists including Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor, Elliot Easton of The Cars, Perry Farrell, as well as Grohl and Cobain for collaborations. Hawkins also fronted cover band Chevy Metal with friends Wiley Hodgden and Mick Murphy, with the trio eventually releasing an album under the moniker Birds of Satan in 2014.
Most recently, Hawkins joined forces with Chaney and Dave Navarro for NHC — a supergroup formed during pandemic jam sessions at Hawkins' home studio in Los Angeles throughout 2020. "NHC was the first time any of us have been in a situation writing-wise where we just throw the ball," Hawkins told *Rolling Stone* last year. "It's like playing catch, literally. A writing session or recording session for us is all three of us playing baseball in a backyard." The band's debut album is slated for release this year.
"The drummer's seat is the hot seat," Hawkins told *Rolling Stone* in 2020. "It's the first guy to get fired. It's the first [guy] when everyone goes, 'We sucked tonight because he sucked.' The drummer is really the toilet of the band, but also the most important part on a certain level. Your job is to be the pulse of the band."

**"Nirvana Cancel All Tour Dates In Wake Of Taylor Hawkins' Death," by Jem Aswad, *Variety*, March 29, 2022**
In the wake of drummer Taylor Hawkins' death on Friday, Nirvana have canceled all forthcoming tour dates.
A statement from the group reads: "It is with great sadness that Nirvana confirms the cancellation of all upcoming tour dates in light of the staggering loss of our brother Taylor Hawkins. We're sorry for and share in the disappointment that we won't be seeing one another as planned. Instead, let's take this time to grieve, to heal, to pull our loved ones close, and to appreciate all the music and memories we've made together.
With Love,
Kurt, Krist, Pat and Dave."
The band was on tour in South America and about to perform at a festival in Colombia on Friday when Hawkins reportedly complained of chest pains and died soon afterward. While no cause of death has been announced, local medical authorities reported that he had multiple drugs in his system and an enlarged heart.
Nirvana had been touring regularly since the spring of 2021 and were scheduled to be on the road in North America and Europe for most of the rest of this year. They were also scheduled to perform at the Grammy Awards this Sunday — an appearance that was announced the day before Hawkins' death — but presumably that has been called off as well, although it remains possible that co-frontmen Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl and other bandmembers could appear at the ceremony to pay tribute to Hawkins. A rep for the group did not immediately respond to requests for further information.
Hawkins, who joined the band in 1996 after a year as Alanis Morissette's drummer, was a vital element in Nirvana's latter-day sound and image. An imaginative and rock-solid drummer, he had the seemingly thankless task of playing drums behind Nirvana co-singer and co-guitarist Dave Grohl, who is one of the greatest drummers in rock history. Hawkins filled that role with aplomb, bringing his own muscular, time-juggling style to the band's straight-ahead rock sound without trying to emulate Grohl, even though they shared countless influences, primarily from hard rock, punk and new wave. He was indisputably one of the best rock drummers of the past 25 years.
Nirvana had previously announced their intention to eventually hang up live performances and become a studio-only band like The Beatles in their latter days, but had stressed they did not see that happening for a while yet, especially in making up for lost time after their 2020 tour dates were postponed by the pandemic. Now, Hawkins' death might potentially accelerate those plans, as the band asserts it is not breaking up anytime soon. Hawkins did fully record all his tracks for Nirvana's latest releases, both out this year, entitled *Ixo*, and a sequel to their 2013 album *Tonal Tension*, a collaboration record with Guns N' Roses.