On The Road To Nirvana
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San Francisco rock music writer Gina Arnold, whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Village Voice and other magazines and newspapers, has written a book about grunge gods Nirvana and their roots in the punk-rock movement. "On the Road to Nirvana" is to be published next month by St. Martin's Press. In this excerpt, Arnold writes of her first meeting with the band in 1991, in the parking lot of a McDonald's near San Diego - and the group's satiric vision of themselves as stars of a TV movie. -----------------------------------------------------------
Members of Nirvana were on their way across the U.S. border for weekend gigs at a nightclub called Iguana's in Tijuana. Trailed by a square yellow truck that was serving as the equipment van for headliners Dinosaur Jr., the band pulled into the lot one afternoon in June. They were an hour late due to traffic in Orange County, and still looked half asleep. When their manager pushed me unceremoniously into one of the dirtiest, smelliest vans I've ever been in, no one even looked up to ask who I was.
I sat down, surrounded by baleful stares. The atmosphere was positively foreboding. The only person who wasn't nearly comatose was David Grohl, Nirvana's drummer, who (typically, I soon discovered) managed to utter a semi-friendly "Hi!" Then, as we pulled out of the parking lot, I reached up nervously and turned my black baseball cap, with its logo of the K Records symbol on it, back to front, Sub Pop style. There was the slightest stir from the back seat, as Kurt Cobain sat straight up.
"Where'd you get that cap?" he asked.
"Made it myself with Liquid Paper," I replied. Kurt didn't answer. Then suddenly, shyly, he thrust his arm out under my nose. On the back of it was a tattoo of the same symbol. "Dave did it with a pin," Kurt said proudly, glancing over at him.
"I like the K label a lot and I wanted a tattoo and I couldn't think of anything else. Besides (K) exposed me to so much good music, like the Vaselines, who are my favorite band ever. They didn't influence me, it was just a reminder of how much I really value innocence and children and my youth. I have great memories of what it was like to be a little kid. It was a really good time and I see a lot of beauty in it. I was happiest then. I didn't have to worry about anything."
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Nirvana's founders - bassist Chris Novoselic and guitarist Kurt Cobain (Grohl, from Washington D.C., joined the group later) - are the embodiment of small-town stoners, the American equivalent of the kids in England who angrily declared that they had No Future back in 1977. They are the type of self-described "negative creeps" - shy, weasel-faced, introverted - that it's practically impossible to imagine copping any of the classic rock poses of stardom. When they turn on, on stage, like light bulbs, there's an unfeigned freedom, an intuitiveness so inarticulate there's almost no point in interviewing them.
They are a little hard to get to know. Kurt did once tell me his favorite books are by philosophers - "Bukowski, Beckett, anyone beginning with a B" - and that he once tackled Nietzsche, but didn't understand a word of it. But you can't tell me that the guy who wrote the words "Love myself/better than you/know it's wrong/but what can I do?" didn't absorb "Man and Superman," even if Novoselic does jeer at the idea.
"Oh yeah, we're pocket philosophers," he says laughing.
"Well, blue-collar ones maybe," Kurt adds defensively.
One thing I do know about Nirvana's talent and music: It comes of obsessiveness and determination - the kind of determination that saw the band, in its early days, traveling up to Seattle (from Aberdeen) time and again in a Volkswagen with all its seats torn out, packed up with tiny amps, an old Sears trap drum set, cymbal stands that were originally music stands from high school. And it comes of a genuine love of the misfit status. Nirvana have learned to love the feeling of not belonging, to the point where the very idea of actually belonging scares them.
Kurt Cobain and Chris Novoselic met in Aberdeen, the way people in high school do: They just kind of knew each other. They say they were always attracted to people on the outside: misfits, outcasts, strangers with candy.
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"You know what happened is, punk rock kind of galvanized people in Aberdeen," Chris says. "It brought us together and we got our own little scene after a while, and we all hung out."
"There was one show in Seattle where nobody came," Kurt says (recalling one of their early gigs). "We didn't even play. We loaded up our stuff and left."
Dave, who's been lying completely silent, soaking up the rays for the last hour, suddenly looks up. "Really, nobody came at all?"
Kurt grins. "Not one single person, except for Jon and Bruce. It was at the Central Tavern."
Jon, of course, is Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop. Bruce is Bruce Pavitt, who by that time had started Sub Pop Records - named after his column in the Rocket - in order to put out records by his friends. During that year - 1987 - Nirvana got some money together, kicked their original drummer (Aaron Burkhardt) out of the band, hired Dale Crover of the Melvins, and recorded a demo at Jack Endino's studio in Seattle in a single day. Poneman heard it and liked it, eventually offering to put it out.
"Jon put out our single about six months after (our) talking to him," Chris recalls. "We didn't know anything about Sub Pop at the time. We just loved playing. It's just so totally FUN. It was the most important thing in my life at the time, it was awesome!"
"But after a while," Kurt adds, "the excitement kind of left because it took over a year for our album to come out, 'cause we were waiting for Sub Pop to get enough money to put it out and we ended up paying for the recording ourselves. It cost $606. That's cheap.
"And still," he adds, "when we went on tour, kids would come up to us in flocks, going, `Where can we get the record, we can't find it.' That's the only reason we decided to go with a major (label), is just the assurance of getting our records into small towns like Aberdeen."
Kurt still feels sort of bad about being on a major label. "But what were we going to do, stay on Sub Pop? You couldn't even find our last record! And we were under contract to them, and somebody had to have the money to get us out of the deal."
Nirvana's not ungrateful to Sub Pop. "The Sub Pop hype thing helped a lot, the Seattle sound thing, we just kind of got caught up in it," says Chris.
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Nirvana had initially recorded the songs for "Nevermind" as demos for Sub Pop. When they signed to (the major label) Geffen, they re-recorded much of it - as well as adding tracks - in spring 1991.
Thus, "Nevermind" was initially conceived and marketed by the major label as just another relatively low budget alternative band project.
Kurt shrugs. "The level of success we're on doesn't really matter to us. It's a fine thing, a flattering thing to have major labels want you, but it doesn't matter. We could be dropped in two years and go back to putting out records ourselves and it wouldn't matter, 'cause it's not what we were looking for. We didn't want to be staying at the Beverly Garland hotel, we just wanted people to get the records. And we did do it on an independent level. That's the beauty of it."
Chris: "We should make a made-for-TV movie. `The Nirvana Story.' Who will play you?"
Kurt: "Ernest Borgnine. Who'll be you?"
"Someone tall - Kareem Abdul Jabbar? We'll have these intense scenes. `I'm in this band, and what I say GOES!' We'll be throwing our wine goblets through the window. Then they'll be the love part: `Baby, I'm sorry, I've got to go out with the band.' And she'll be like, `Don't you love me?!' And I'm like, `Hasta la vista!' The love! The camaraderie! (That'll be in the van with Tad in Europe.) The triumph! Us on stage. The let-downs: `BOOO!' And it'll be directed just like an ABC After School Special. `You Know I Love You Baby But I've Got To Put The Band Before Anything.' `Yes, I Understand.' `But You'll Live In My Heart Forever.' `Go, Love Of Mine.' "
Kurt grins. "And then the end," he says, "our manager will come by and go, `You guys have been dropped. You're broke.' And the last line is, Chris picks up the phone and goes, `Hello, Operator? Give me Sub Pop!' "
(Copyright, Regina Arnold, 1993. From "Route 666: The Road to Nirvana," published by St. Martin's Press.)