I Found My Friends (11 page)

The hub for music in Portland was the Satyricon, and Sub Pop had made sure local tastemakers couldn't fail to miss what they were building.

GEOFF ROBINSON:
“Touch Me I'm Sick” was on the legendary jukebox at Portland's Satyricon. Eight months prior, “Six Foot Under” launched a newly coined “grunge” sound on the same jukebox.

ERIC MOORE,
Rawhead Rex:
For all of us in the Northwest it was ground zero for punk rock and all kinds of cool music. Check these bands out if you want the
real
story about who influenced Kurt: the Rats, Dead Moon, the Wipers, Poison Idea, Sado Nation … playing on the same stage with those guys or even drinking beer with them was, like, “The Big Time.”

BEN MUNAT:
[It was] entirely black inside. It had some art on the walls, but it never really changed … it always had that black, DIY aesthetic … there were definitely stretches where it was pretty much the only punk/indie-rock game in town … Even if I didn't go to a show at Satyricon on a Friday or Saturday, I would usually wind up there around closing to find out where the after-hours party was.

SETH PERRY:
That was our home. We were usually there at least five nights a week, just hanging out and drinking beer. George, the owner, or whoever was booking would just offer us shows, although I'm sure Rich or Dale were probably in their ear a fair amount … There were drug dealers all over the Satyricon … At one point George installed a system that constantly rained water down from above to try and keep the dealers from hanging out against the front of the club. For the more hardcore bands more often than not IV heroin and cocaine use was just part of being hardcore. The culture of the Satyricon was so open and nonjudgmental (and nihilistic) that hard drug use was not considered uncool or undesirable.

Nirvana was hooked up with Mudhoney for a Sub Pop bill there, then with local favorites the Dharma Bums.

DAMON ROMERO:
There was a little bit of showmanship. I rode down to Portland with Nirvana in their van and I remember the show at the Satyricon, Kurt smashed a guitar at the end of that show. It was one he'd bought at a pawn shop super cheap, spray-painted, then brought out for the very last song then smashed it—it wasn't an impromptu spur of the moment thing. Maybe the first time, out of frustration—people loved it. Kurt was really good at giving people what they wanted—he believed in it. I remember speaking to Chad, out on their US tour everyone in the band was getting sick of playing “Love Buzz” but Kurt said “Look, that's what everyone knows us for, we've got to deliver.” He wanted to give people a good show.

A return to the Evergreen State College in February brought echoes of the past; Dave Foster was now playing with Helltrout, and Psychlodds was led by Ryan Aigner, another Aberdeen friend and Nirvana's semi-manager in the early days.

PAUL KIMBALL:
That whole set of dorms [of which K Dorm was one] were brand-new in the fall of '87. The thing was that they had decent-sized living rooms [and two two-bed bedrooms], so if you moved the furniture out you could put a band in there as well as thirty, fifty people. The K unit just happened to wind up with some serious partiers living there, both upstairs and down, so when they threw a kegger over there it would take over the entire building … Helltrout all took mushrooms that night before we went on, just to see how long we could keep it together. As it turned out, the answer was “not very long.” I left before Nirvana even went on that night, but don't ask me where I went! I have no idea …

There was perhaps some lingering (non-chemically induced) discomfort between the bands but this was a tight-knit scene and any awkwardness soon passed. Kimball's previous band, Lansdat Blister, had played with Nirvana more than any other local act and he was a resident of the Alamo band house, so it was unavoidable that their paths crossed.

PAUL KIMBALL:
My connection to them was really through Dave Foster being in our band, and because they'd kicked Dave out of their band I felt vaguely patronized by Krist the first couple times I met him. But he warmed up, as did Kurt … We were having a party at the Alamo, and at one point I walked into the kitchen to find Krist Novoselic and Dylan Carlson standing at our kitchen counter in front of a huge pile of pot. It was a bunch of shake, not buds or anything, but these guys had a two-man assembly line going and were rolling joint after joint and handing them to anyone who walked by. Needless to say they gathered quite a crowd, and before you knew it pretty much everyone in the house was walking around with their very own joint hanging off their lips.

The presence of Psychlodds was a display of Nirvana's determination to support their friends and fellow musicians; something they would carry throughout the life of the band.

RYAN AIGNER:
So one day we're sitting around talking about my guitar and that I wished I was better and how I admired what [Kurt] was doing and how he'd written a large catalog of originals and trying to understand how he did that. He said, “Get your guitar out, plug in—show me these riffs.” So I showed a few little things I'd done and he looked at me and said “Ryan, those are songs.” I said, “They're just riffs, I don't know how to arrange them, they're not enough…” He said, “No, they're enough. More than enough. That's a full song actually. This is where you need to start—this is adequate.” … He said to me, “You just need to start a band.” I said, “Well, we don't have any songs.” He replied, “No, you don't understand. You just get a drummer, get a bass player, find a room and set up regular rehearsal, once or twice a week, you'll go in there, you'll play these little things you have over and over, and two things will happen. One; song form will come, and two; you'll mechanically practice your craft and get better and better each time you rehearse. The function of forming a group of people who have the same goal—it'll do the work for you. You don't get it all arranged then start the band—start a band and the songs will come.” … Shortly after, this was end of '87, early part of '88 I actually started the band … and it was Nirvana who said “We will do these shows with you.” Two of the three shows the Psychlodds did—we only did three concerts ever—two of them were with Nirvana. The reason was that it was Kurt's dedication to his previous statement. He felt he should also support us by telling us that if we wanted to play a show then they would play it with us … that's what I gave to them, too—I gave them encouragement and this positivity and that's all they wanted from anybody. When the Psychlodds went out and played, Krist and Kurt wouldn't come up and say “You were really awful, you really sucked” though we kind of did—they would say “You guys did all right, it sounded pretty good, keep up the good work.” We tried to support each other and we tried to be positive.

DAMON ROMERO:
[Kurt] cared about people, he cared about other musicians. I don't think he really liked Treehouse's music, but he was always supportive of us—he'd say “Great job on the single! I like what you did with the drums!” He'd always find something constructive to say. Always nice about it. I think he liked Lush a lot—it was more crazy, more up his alley. We played a show that Kurt and his friends came to and he started rolling on the floor and doing a worm dance to our music—that was cool.

Nirvana had meanwhile acquired a second guitarist, Jason Everman, a friend with sufficient admiration for them that he invested his own savings to cover the recording costs of
Bleach.

PAUL KIMBALL:
I know that they had buzz around them that I felt was largely undeserved. To my ears they didn't deserve that buzz till Jason Everman joined … it wasn't till the show Helltrout played with them at Reko/Muse … that I found that I finally genuinely liked them, that was a great show, and with Jason on guitar the whole thing really gelled.

Cobain was still learning onstage, and as a trio the burden was on him to carry a substantial portion of the band's presence while juggling guitar and vocals. Everman's purpose was to take pressure off by duplicating the guitar work—a tricky position given that success meant the absence of error rather than any dramatic addition.

RONNA MYLES-ERA:
I remember thinking that maybe it would free up Kurt to make more mistakes, but I don't recall thinking that [Jason] added too much to the sound. It's always a little strange when you see a band for a while and then they add someone … He was also another “quiet” and shy guy, it seemed, so I didn't even really talk to him much. He seemed nice enough though, and he was a really talented guitar player.

The band made a quick hop to California to play a February 10 show supporting the Melvins.

JOE GOLDRING:
We had seen Mudhoney and a few other Seattle classic-rock-sounding bands when we had been up there, so we sort of suspected these guys would be the same type of thing … they were pretty quiet, just some small talk, I suspected a bit of a drug vibe with Cobain, or he might have just been a shy dirtbag. Novoselic was the most friendly—seemed like a very nice chap. The drummer had a crazy-looking '70s drum kit—red flag there … But when they got going we became engaged—they were nothing like the Sabbath rehash that we had witnessed up north! I think they had another guitar player; honestly I can't say a thing about him … The drummer was a bit of a throwback … Bass was interesting but it was definitely Cobain who drew you in; his singing and guitar sound owed more to Public Image than Led Zeppelin … There was an energy in the room emanating from this grubby little bloke—we all felt that. They obviously needed to work out the kinks … they were not the band they were about to become; the clues were in Cobain's trip—there was something deeper going on within him.

They then joined Mudhoney on Saturday.

LINDSEY THRASHER:
We were playing with Mudhoney, who I only knew a little bit about but I had heard they were great. They were immediately super-funny and easy to be around. They asked if their friends Nirvana could open the show [for free] since they were on tour and didn't have a show that night … I talked to Krist a lot that night. He was super-nice and gave me his number to call next time we were in Seattle (or wherever he lived).

But that's where the roaming sputtered out. The band played only one show before April 1, after which, again, a splurge of four shows gave way to a month off.

During what shows they did play, however, there had been a sea change; they'd become a name everyone remembered once witnessed.

RONNA MYLES-ERA:
When they played around town, they weren't that good, I mean, they would mess up a lot and Kurt was off-key … their songs were strong enough to “carry” them even if they were totally destroying their own song. It was painful for me to watch them sometimes for this very reason! They were entertaining and things would always get smashed. In fact, when they would show up at a party, they were a lot of fun, but it seemed like Krist would always break something. I remember thinking that I wouldn't ever invite him to my house!

DAMON ROMERO:
Krist would often get out of control at a party—at a Christmas party once, everyone dressed up and, being civilized, he came in and destroyed the place—did a flying dive onto the hors d'oeuvre table, got kicked out. Another party, more of a rockers' party for New Year's Eve—he let off the fire extinguisher and sprayed a bunch of people with that horrible dry dusty material—he got away with it.

MIKE MORASKY:
I'd met them briefly at a show with the Melvins in San Francisco but just as a visiting member of the audience. When they rolled up to the Vogue in Seattle, there was something kind of young and goofy about them, like they'd just barely managed to actually make it there. Since we'd already been on a couple of tours, they were also the “new guys,” and being from an even smaller town than us … they just seemed like nice guys struggling to get out on tour and not being particularly organized about it.

GLEN LOGAN:
The draw for that show had much more to do with Nirvana and Skin Yard. I hope and think we helped the bill, but we were not the big draw at this show … Nirvana were one hundred percent in the moment. There was no pretense; what you saw is what they were. There was a vital recklessness in what they did, and I mean that in the most positive sense. We … leaned to more of the rock side of this sort of music and may have paired better with a band like Alice in Chains.

Preparation for
Bleach
lingered; photography wasn't finalized until after an April gig in Olympia, which continued to demonstrate Nirvana's reliance on nontraditional venues.

RONNA MYLES-ERA:
Reko/Muse was a space that was created to be an art space and a music space. It was also a collective. I don't recall knowing what exactly the name meant. It was basically just a big echoing room, but it sounded great when it was full of people. The things I remember most about the show … was Krist throwing my old bass in the air and just barely catching it each time. (I had recently sold my bass to Slim Moon and he had loaned it to Krist.) I kept freaking out that he was going to smash it … The other thing was that I brought my own PA for the show and it ended up on the cover of
Bleach
 … Usually local bands didn't get paid. The money would go first to the venue to cover costs and most of what was left would go to the touring band if there was one. I'm sure we had enough to buy beer, though; it was a pretty packed night.

BEN MUNAT:
Blue Gallery was an actual art gallery. It was in a typical store space in northwest Portland. So, not a very big venue. Maybe a couple hundred people if you packed it out. The walls were completely white and had art on them, which changed each month. I can't remember if they took the art down for shows … We had actually set up the show to have Cat Butt headline. But a few days before the show, the bass player for Cat Butt cut his hand opening a wine bottle (he was a waiter) and could not play. They referred us to “this cool band from Olympia; you'll like them.” I further recall that it seemed like the only people left at the show by the time Nirvana went on were the opening bands and our girlfriends … They blew us away. I remember thinking, These guys are gonna be big. Of course, at that point “big” meant they could headline a larger hall.