I Found My Friends (39 page)

JAD FAIR:
I'm not good at guessing audience size, but yes, it probably was in the three- to ten-thousand range.

These shows were deliberately a fraction of the size of the South American events or the summer festivals.

For all the caution, Nirvana onstage could still be an awe-inspiring spectacle.

CHRIS BROKAW:
The thing to remember is that this was the first big tour they did after becoming successful—about two years after
Nevermind
came out and sold ten million copies. So people had been waiting a long time to see them and everything around them was sort of a constant soap opera with the press … The audiences were wild … crazy, just really excited that they were finally seeing Nirvana. And yes, every night people constantly threw clothing onstage. A lot of shoes. Hundreds of shoes! It was insane. The crowds were cool to us. One fascinating thing: when the tour was happening, the Breeders' song “Cannonball” was the number-one song on MTV's
BuzzBin
—and every night that song got the biggest response of the whole night, more than anything Nirvana played. Just total pandemonium. It really showed how powerful MTV was then.

THALIA ZEDEK:
The audiences were absolutely incredible to the opening bands, which was so cool. We were the first band on and they cheered the second we walked onstage, even though I doubt hardly any of them had any idea who we were. No one was shouting “Nirvana” or “Get off the stage!” They were incredibly receptive! I remember there was a strange shoe-tossing thing that was going on at the time, where kids would express their devotion to the band by tossing just one of their shoes onstage, meaning that they had to walk home half-shod. We didn't inspire that level of emotion, but the Breeders did, and they didn't appreciate it.

TROY VON BALTHAZAR:
I remember standing on the side of the stage one night while [Nirvana] were playing and thinking, This is a damn good band. They were an exciting band. The fame around them was also exciting to watch, but seemed a little heavy. I looked out that same night from the side of the stage and realized I couldn't even see anyone's face. The audience was too far away. It's like they were playing to an imaginary crowd a million miles away. I remember thinking they must be phenomenal in a small club. That's where I wish I could have seen them … Playing ten shows with Nirvana on their final American tour was really a thrill. Something I'll remember for the rest of my life.

NAOKO YAMANO:
I enjoyed the shows in front of the big audiences. It was easy for us because we were a front act and the set time was just thirty minutes. It seemed that the audiences liked Shonen Knife because we were all female and came from a faraway country and the audiences knew we were invited by Nirvana … [Kurt] looked tired but performed very hard onstage … I was impressed by Kurt's attitude toward music. He always performed as hard as he could for shows and had a pure mind for music.

JAD FAIR:
The set time for us was tight, but we knew it was going to be. I didn't notice bouncers. I'm sure there were some, I just didn't feel their presence. It was pretty relaxed … Nirvana was such a great live band. I enjoyed every show … Kurt was a great performer at all of the shows I saw. He certainly could perform.

STEVE TURNER:
I was really happy for those guys, and all the success they were having. The crowds were pretty mainstream, I suppose, and opening up for a hit band like that isn't the greatest thing, since the crowd was unfamiliar with us. But we had a good time, as we usually did.

Some bands learned crucial rules of the big band experience.

JAD FAIR:
It was mostly playing to college venues. I was expecting that it would be a college-age audience, but most of the audience was younger than that. At the first show we played some fast songs and some slow ones. Every fast song got a great response and every slow one bombed. For all of the other shows we only played fast ones.

TROY VON BALTHAZAR:
Another lesson I learned came on the night of the first show. We got to the venue and the first thing we saw: the catering tables. Rows of delicious sandwiches and cakes, soups and puddings, sausages, and fish. Chokebore had been starving, sleeping on couches for the past two months barely surviving, and the sight of all that food flew me into an eating frenzy. I tried it all. It was heaven. Vitamins finally, after so long. When I went out onstage it was amazing. Twenty-five thousand people standing in front of us going crazy. We played that show and it all seemed like a dream. But all I was concentrating on was trying not to poop my pants the whole time. All that rich food and then the terror of playing in front of so many people … not a good combination. I learned that night never to eat right before a show, not worth it. Even for all those vitamins.

CRIS KIRKWOOD:
It's ass-whipping to stomp through a PA that size—a great experience, the gear's bigger but they hold a lot of things back for the headliners—like, they have tons of lights but they hold a lot back. You don't get to play with much of the gear. Bigger shows are huge productions—you adhere to a schedule, multiple setups ready, there are people off setting up the next gig ready.

For Novoselic and Grohl, at least, the tolerant freedom afforded musicians on tour still meant embracing and enjoying the experience of being out.

TROY VON BALTHAZAR:
[I] remember that Krist loved red wine. He would roar through the backstage areas jumping over sofas, smashing through doors, throwing food and laughing, and this wasn't at the end of the night … it was on his way to the stage. He seemed like a pretty jolly guy … and after all that, still solid on the bass.

THALIA ZEDEK:
We hung out with the Breeders a lot and with Krist and Dave, who were both really friendly. One night in Miami I remember we all hung out together after the show and went swimming in the sea. The next day we found out that the water was full of sharks. I remember Nirvana's management being really angry at us because Krist was really hungover the next day.

PAUL LEARY,
Butthole Surfers:
It seemed like [Kurt's] wife wanted to keep him away from us as much as possible. But for the few times we got to hang out, he seemed pretty mellow and normal. And their shows were great … As far as “normal,” I really didn't know Kurt well. The times we hung out before and after shows, I didn't notice anything “unusual” about him.

TROY VON BALTHAZAR:
It felt to us that they were just a good small band surrounded by a whirlwind. When they played, it was like all the shows we went to at home in the small clubs—strong and natural.

The tour paused for the
MTV Unplugged
performance that has since defined Nirvana to many. At the time, however, it wasn't clear it would go on to such lasting renown. MTV sulked over the absence of hits, the presence of so many covers, the choice of guests who weren't on their mainstream A-list, and Cobain's refusal to play an encore.

CRIS KIRKWOOD:
There was this open desire to share that with bands like us, bands who were in the same place in terms of attitude. I mean, they were the biggest band in the world, could do whatever he wanted and what does he choose to do with that? To take somebody on MTV with them and play some of our stuff that he really digs. Knowing full well that we weren't making management happy—the guys at MTV didn't want him to have us do it. He
made
them, for real. The idea came up on the tour with them: we got to know him, we were hanging out somewhat. He came up with it somewhere along the way—at first he wanted to do some of our old songs on the show … So, Curt, my brother, was going to teach him how to play [them]. Somewhere in there it just became having us go on and we'd play with them. It came 'round that quick … We were not on MTV at the time, we'd been around a long time and deemed unworthy, so it was like Kurt asking them to let him bring on a turd. MTV were surprised, not that into it, but he got his way.

The band didn't celebrate the MTV performance; the rehearsals and recording had been tacked on at the end of a solid month of near nightly concerts, so they all went their separate ways to enjoy a week off from touring. It would take a year of MTV rotation, one death, and a posthumous LP to cement its subsequent reputation.

JAD FAIR:
I was at the
MTV Unplugged
show. The band seemed to be in good spirit and did a great job.

CRIS KIRKWOOD:
It was just this little performance—but it was nice to get some notice and for little things to pop up that let us make music. After he passed away, they came to us about getting our permission to release it. They'd played the living fuck out of it on MTV and then they decided to release it.

THALIA ZEDEK:
There definitely was a sense that something really incredible had happened. I didn't hear it from the band, but the crew was talking about it … We really didn't understand what they were going on about until much later.

In December, MTV were again involved as Nirvana played the
Live and Loud
show.

B-REAL,
Cypress Hill:
We had done some MTV shows in the past starting with
Yo MTV Raps
,
Daytona Spring Break
and our reputation for live shows had been growing—we'd done Lollapalooza and stuff like that, so MTV now and then, depending on the event, would call upon us to be a part of it … getting a chance to share the stage with Nirvana, who were pretty much the biggest thing at the time, it was a great experience … [We] had to get there early—it was in one of the docks that MTV rented out for this particular show—and it was three bands to play. It was a pretty hectic day; MTV was trying to get everything together and get everyone's sound checks rolling through. We actually did a sound check with Pearl Jam because we'd just done a song with them for the movie soundtrack to the film
Judgment Night
so we had planned to play that with them. So we played our sound check, they played their sound check, and then we ran through that song. The main tension that was going on that day was that nobody could get hold of Eddie Vedder—nobody knew where he was at and people were skeptical that he was going to show up. Everyone was on edge about that. He never turned up—there was no reason given, he just didn't … They're very much about being on time and keeping everything rolling and moving, so they don't fall behind schedule because it was to go out live—realistically, they were pre-recording it for one part of the nation but it's going live to the other part. They're always nervous about getting it off on time but they're very pleasant when they're pushing you to hurry up!… That particular day we were floating around hanging out with everybody—we got to meet Krist and Dave, and Pat, they befriended us, it was very cool—we're friends to this day, always great when we see each other. We got to interact with Flea and Anthony Kiedis because I believe they were the hosts that day, which was funny because I never felt like Anthony liked me so it was probably funny for him to be actually cool with me, just on camera, for once in his life.

Cobain ended
MTV Live and Loud
by sarcastically clapping along with the audience, a manic glint in his eye, before returning to chasing cameramen around the stage; he could tell that regardless of what he did the crowd would applaud like performing seals. He'd been less than merry toward audiences all tour, but without the camera present his approach was usually to withdraw; with MTV there he ratcheted up the aggression far more than usual.

RICK SIMS:
I saw them when they played the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago … I got ferociously drunk with Dan (Peters), the Mudhoney drummer, and remember watching both bands from the side of the stage. They were a good live band, but honestly they occupied the same level of showmanship and musicianship that a lot of the upper-tier bands of that time shared … I also liked to move onstage, probably a nod to my Kiss and Plasmatics influences. And then there were the
FUCK THE PIGS
signs which we handed out to the audience before shows—they usually ended up beating each other over the head with them. The optic was great, though! I would also put on a confrontational air, and this is what audiences came to expect. I had a chip on my shoulder and a resentfulness of “punk rock” pretentiousness. In other words, I didn't like it when people didn't respond favorably to our band and would get belligerent. Audiences seemed to really enjoy that after a while and would cheer favorably when I told them to go fuck themselves and their shitty little town. Nirvana was
nothing
like this when I saw them. They did their show and got off stage. No antics. No fuck-yous. I don't think that was their style. Ha!

No one thought negatively of Kurt's MTV antics; it just cemented Nirvana's reputation as rock thrills for TV audiences. On the road, however, the sense that there were issues circling Cobain became unavoidable.

NAOKO YAMANO:
It was an arena tour. The distance from the main act and a support act became so large. Our dressing rooms were usually far from Nirvana's. We didn't have much time to talk with the members. There were many people around Kurt at the dressing room at any time … From the 1993 tour, I don't have a clear memory about Kurt.

B-REAL:
Kurt might have been around or he might have showed up right before they went onstage—nobody was worried whether he would show up or not, so I think he must have been there, secluded by himself away from everybody, because he struck me as the type who didn't like being around the lights and the glitz … You know, we never ended up meeting him—after the show he was whisked off, like I said; we ended up hanging out with Dave, Pat, and Krist and developed friendships with them but we never met Kurt Cobain.