I Found My Friends (24 page)

ROBIN PERINGER:
The Off Ramp was great for a twenty-one-and-over bar, plus we could walk there from Capitol Hill … As far as what I think makes a top band or not, at the time, I didn't really know what that meant. I had yet to have any friends who were able to even sell out the Off Ramp. I did feel that Nirvana should be making a living off playing music as much as Jane's Addiction or Nick Cave did, but that was about as high as I could imagine any Seattle band going … Nirvana was an excellent band, but there were a lot of excellent bands at that time. These were guys you'd see at local shows, and it just didn't seem like future rock stars would be checking out Girl Trouble on a Tuesday night. Plus, the only bands that achieved crazy levels of fame were together for more than three years.

After months just ticking over, having a permanent drummer meant Nirvana pushed on toward the destination they had set early in the year.

PAUL THOMSON,
Midway Still:
I think the single “Sliver” was a game changer that hinted at the brutal pop they were capable of and was played to death everywhere in London. After that single, I think there was general excitement at what the new album would be.

The band even played a New Year show in Portland to crown 1990.

DANIEL RIDDLE:
I booked the show that night. I got Krist's phone number from the booking info and when I called he had remembered hanging out with us at the Blue Gallery … they set up most of their own gear. They had some new gear that they were getting used to … They knew they had an explosive, powerful new lineup and an amazing batch of songs. The sound check brought tears to my eyes. It was so fucking powerful, filled with melody and raw emotion. They used sound check to rehearse most of the set. It very much felt like the lineup was fresh and most of the tunes had never been played live … After the show I paid them in cash from the door. I think I promised them 60 percent and it was a $10 cover charge. I think they made $1,800. We totally oversold the door. It was so fucking packed in there, people were leaving because after a few drinks and getting pummeled by an insanely loud PA system that I rented—most folks couldn't handle it.

RENÉE DENENFELD:
Nirvana was pretty popular on the West Coast at that point. The club was packed. But they were certainly not popular to the point where anyone foresaw their future fame. They were just some nice guys in a punk band that everyone liked, just like they liked other bands. I didn't feel intimidated, because I had been around Nirvana before, working in the Blue Gallery, and they weren't any different than anyone else … the audience was over-the-top, like always happened on busy nights at Satyricon … there was no backstage to speak of, just a tiny room that stank like pee. So band members always just hung out in the bar with everyone else … I remember after we finished, I was soaking wet from people spraying me with beer. I climbed with a friend into the sound box above the pit. It was amazing to watch and see Nirvana in all the melee.

Still … while Nirvana's popularity was going from strength to strength, the atmosphere around Cobain showed his keen awareness of the darker consequences of success.

DANIEL RIDDLE:
With Kurt it seemed like the right thing to do was say hello and look down. He was not very interested in engaging anyone in an up-close and personal way. His band was gaining momentum and it was understood that this brings on unwanted insincere affection. When that happens, you give those people space and let them come to you or you end up on a mental list of assholes and suck-ups. I had a few nice conversations with Krist and Dave that night. Kurt and I did not talk much.

Cobain later confessed, in the liner notes of a reissue of The Raincoats' first album, that in this period of triumph he was “extremely unhappy, lonely, and bored.” The underground music scene was a place he finally belonged among those people who had seen poverty, who had been alone—they all found friends among the injured. Portland was sympathetic to Cobain because those who played there were much the same as him.

DANIEL RIDDLE:
Most of us came from broken homes and were picked on a lot in school. Humor was a defense mechanism, and playing music was a cathartic release of pain and a way to get the approval of our peers. In all my years of playing music outside of the pop culture, I've never once met a player who had a “good” relationship with their father. Every stripper, every junkie, and every musician had that pain. Why else get up onstage and jump around like an idiot? Those cats in Nirvana where just like us. We were all kids/people who just wanted to belong to something, be good at something, have a sense of community.

RENÉE DENENFELD:
I “sang” for a hardcore punk band when I was sixteen. I was fresh from living on the streets and frankly, the punk community saved me. I was crashing in a house where the Wipers were recording their last album. A hardcore punk band was practicing in the space. They asked me to front them, probably because I was sixteen and could scream really loud. That band was called Sin Hipster, and we opened for Black Flag. Henry Rollins himself told me how much I sucked … I hear the scene has changed a lot … I'm not sure how much that has to do with the music getting popular. I think a more important factor is how expensive it has become to live in this city and others. At the time of that New Year's show, you could rent a run-down house in Portland for a few hundred dollars. It was possible to live and play music while working part-time. You could be someone from a terrible background, alone and in pain, and the punk community was a place to find friends and solace. Now I am not sure how musicians afford places to practice and I've heard the whole community of punk houses has died. That, to me, is sad. I don't know where the lost kids end up anymore. Those homes were havens for many of us, places where we discovered friends and art and music, and hope.

 

13.0

Corporate-Rock Whores

January to July 1991

Nirvana had benefited
from benefactors and mentors throughout their career—the give and take of the music community. Now it was the patronage of Sonic Youth that took them to DGC Records.

DON FLEMING:
I think it was very meaningful to them to be a part of the Sonic Youth party at the time. Everyone in Sonic Youth liked them a lot … when they [Sonic Youth] got their Geffen deal they got a deal to bring bands in—which is usually, or almost always, a deal thrown in there to make the band being signed feel like they're the “big cheese” and they can get stuff going and have a lot of power there; many more bands than Sonic Youth get that kind of deal. But typically, what happens is the label doesn't give a fuck about the bands you bring in—they'll sign one to appease you but there's a whole game in every major label—Geffen is a good example—there's power within the label and to get any band really noticed you have to get every division behind it and there's usually few people in a label who can do that. Most A&R guys don't have enough clout within their label to get everyone—Marketing, Promotion and so on—to really come out and work the record, so typically records get a little bit of work from one or two people who really like the band and like the A&R guy, but only like 1 or 2 percent get this huge push from the label. So when Sonic Youth got Nirvana signed to Geffen, it was kinda like that.

Nirvana began to make a point of playing for causes they respected; 1991 started with a No More Wars benefit.

JELLO BIAFRA:
I was pleasantly surprised when I realized a lot of the grunge-era bands who initially appeared to be a full-on revival of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in the lyrics and attitude department turned out to be pretty politically active and aware … It seemed like Green River on down was a deliberate response against the more dogmatic areas of political hardcore—they weren't going to play that sound and those lyrical angles got tossed out the door.

PAUL KIMBALL:
Evergreen was a very socially conscious environment, sometimes to a fault. But we and the other bands were really feeling it. It was an intense moment. Krist Novoselic spoke at length from the stage that night, and though I remember it being less than entirely eloquent, it was definitely right-on … The big difference at this one was Dave Grohl. All of a sudden what Nirvana had been trying to do finally became undeniable. The songwriting, the time on the road … The fact that Dave could harmonize with Kurt is something that pushed the songwriting way upfront, and his drumming—well, c'mon!

TIMO ELLIS,
Nubbin:
That antiwar show should have been a “peak,” but I remember it as one of our worst shows ever, performance-wise—also made that much more cringe-worthy by the fact that for some unknown reason I decided to wear this ridiculous one-piece sleeveless jumper type of thing … a pretty emotionally charged atmosphere that night, as of course people were generally really disillusioned and pissed off about the fact that a war/invasion of Iraq was likely.

RYAN
VON
BARGEN,
Fitz of Depression:
Krist had written something he was reading about his opposition to the US war and some idiots in the crowd kept yelling at him to “shut up and play.” I have to say that that was one of the things I thought was sad about watching a cool band like Nirvana get bigger; more brain-dead assholes were going to their shows. Good for business, bad for the subculture. That was another thing about watching Nirvana shift the whole perception of rock 'n' roll up to that point: dudes can get all the tribal tattoos and piercings their parents can afford, but it will
never
make them better individuals at heart. I hope some percentage of them did “get it,” wherever the wind has blown them.

For a band that would later spend the
In Utero
tour halting to shout at meatheads harassing the female audience, the shift in audience wasn't a positive.

DANIEL RIDDLE:
You could see that in the self-hatred and frustration those dudes and many others expressed when their bands got “big and successful.” They had guilt and felt responsible for bringing the industry vampires, the violent jocks, the rich-kid poseurs, and corporate consciousness into our sacred spaces—the clubs, the parties, the underground subculture, and even our minds. It couldn't be stopped. It was going to happen sooner or later. The beatniks, the hippies, the punks, every counterculture underground movement eventually gets infiltrated, diffused, polluted, dumbed down, then repackaged, sanitized, and sold to the masses. Most of us in the underground music community saw this happen with the “Nirvana explosion” and we felt a great deal of compassion and empathy for those guys. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it, right?

RYAN
VON
BARGEN:
If some redneck idiots started shit, which they occasionally did, I really liked how there were a few who were like the protectors of the Northwest pacifist punker types … People don't realize how outwardly violent, ignorant, and cruel some of the bastards were around here. There was no Hot Topic to create an air of acceptance around “individuality” for the redneck, just hatred and contempt for these weirdos with Mohawks wearing surplus Army clothes.

TIM KERR:
After Nirvana broke big, a lot of the people fucking with us became the '90s crowd who acted like, “Yeah bro. We are with you! We are of the same cloth!” And I am sure that bugged the hell out of Kurt.

Nirvana increasingly acted on the underground's social activism. In Cobain's journal list of his top fifty albums, of four released after 1990, three were female-fronted. The other, by the Frogs, had a gay theme. Cobain would befriend Kathleen Hanna and Kathi Wilcox of Riot Grrrl legends Bikini Kill and dated their drummer, Tobi Vail, while the band attended classes at Evergreen State College.

GILLY ANN HANNER:
Evergreen—it was very level, a lot of talk about feminism, a lot of feminist courses, women-focused writing courses and so on. I met Kathleen Hanna in a couple of my classes like my Women in Poetry class. Kathi … she was dating my boyfriend's best friend—that's how we ended up living together and she started playing music after hanging around with us, so she took up the bass … They coined the Riot Grrrl thing—made the fanzine, the pictures, really good work—they put together the full concept. Tobi was a really good drummer, Kathi took to the bass real quick, Kathleen's a great singer … I think some of that came out of the way the classes were at Evergreen—integrating pieces together. The concept of having a fanzine, a band, a certain look … all of that—brilliant! I was very jealous at the time. [For us it was like] “We're just a band, we're all women but we're really rocking—but we're not Riot Grrrls.”

The hardcore scene of the early '80s had become increasingly male-oriented by the middle of that decade. Even venues that are now legendary in punk-rock circles were not necessarily female-friendly, even if unintentionally so.

LISA KOENIG:
Tropicana—uh … that was sort of out of my league. I was just a young pup and the Tropicana crowd was like “professional” punk rockers … It wasn't a place for a female newbie on the scene—well, not me anyway, I was too scared, ha. But there were places like Reko/Muse, the backstage of the Capital Theater, the Surf Club, Thekla, Rainy Day Records, and the Smithfield … These places contributed to the whole Olympia vibe in the late '80s/early '90s—a time where art, music, and coffee harmoniously collided; pretty cool and way-less intimidating than the Trop.

The punk scene wasn't a homogeneous entity, however. It had both a progressive wing and a macho side.