Michael Azerrad, *Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana* (1993)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

CHAPTER SEVEN
“ARE YOU HUNGRY?” “YES.”


David Eric Grohl was born on January 14, 1969, in Warren, Ohio, to James and Virginia Grohl. His father was then a journalist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, his mother a high school English teacher. Dave has a sister, Lisa, three years older than he is. The Grohls left Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Springfield, Virginia, when Dave was three. When he was six, they divorced. “My mother and father were pretty much at other ends of the spectrum—he’s a real conservative, neat, Washington, D.C., kind of man and my mother’s more of a liberal, free-thinking, creative sort of person,” says Dave. He says the divorce didn’t affect him much, perhaps because he was so young at the time.

Dave was raised by his mom, whom he adores. “She’s the most incredible woman in the world,” he says, obviously filled with pride. “She’s so great. She’s strong, independent, sweet, intelligent, funny, and she’s just the best.”

Raising two kids on alimony payments and a schoolteacher’s modest income was hard. “There were tough times when we’d eat peanut butter and pickle sandwiches for dinner,” Dave recalls.

As a kid, Dave appeared professionally in a Washington theater company, but his main love was music. He formed a little duo with his buddy Larry called the H. G. Hancock Band when he was ten. They’d write songs and Dave would play a one-stringed guitar while Larry banged on pots and pans.

Dave started playing guitar when he was twelve and took lessons for a couple of years. He’d write songs about his friends or his dog and play them into a boom box, then play the tape back over the stereo while he recorded the drum parts back onto the boom box.

Eventually, he got sick of lessons and just played in neighborhood bands doing the typical Rolling Stones and Beatles covers. Dave hadn’t yet discovered punk rock, although he’d already gotten a taste of new wave from the same B-52’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” that Kurt had seen. He had gone out and bought the requisite checkered Vans as well as records by the B-52’s and Devo, but nothing prepared him for the time he visited his cousin Tracy, who lived in Evanston, Illinois, in the summer of 1982, when Dave was thirteen.

When Dave and his sister Lisa came to the door, Dave’s aunt called Tracy downstairs. “And Tracy starts coming down the stairs and she was totally punk,” says Dave. “Bondage pants and chains and crew cut and we were like ‘Wow! Tracy’s punk now!’ ” Tracy took Dave and Lisa to punk shows all that summer, seeing shows by bands like Naked Raygun, Rights of the Accused, Channel Three, and Violent Apathy. “From then on we were totally punk,” says Dave. “We went home and bought Maximumrocknroll and tried to figure it all out.”

Punk agreed with Dave. He liked “just being a little punk shit running around town and being a little derelict,” he says. “I suppose that was half the attraction—being a slacker.” The other half was the extreme energy of the music. “I was super-hyperactive,” Dave says (although not hyper enough to get put on Ritalin).

The solidly middle-class people of Springfield were more tolerant of punk rock than the folks in Aberdeen. Dave always had “good, cool” friends. He was popular enough to get elected vice president of his freshman class at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia. Before he did the morning announcements every morning over the school intercom, he’d treat the whole school to a little blast of the Circle Jerks or Bad Brains.

Like Chris and Kurt, Dave was a stoner in high school. “I smoked too much pot,” says Dave sadly. “That’s the only thing that I really kick myself for doing because it seriously burned me out—bad. From the time I was fifteen to twenty, I smoked four or five times a day and a lot. Every day of my life. You just get so burned out. You don’t feel burned out when you’re smoking it but once you stop you realize, ‘Oh, I lost something here.’ ”

Pot began affecting his grades, so he and his mother decided that he would attend Bishop Ireton, a Catholic school. Meanwhile, he had decided that the drummer in his “bad punk” band, Freak Baby, was so lousy that he could play better. He’d sit down at the drums and bang around a little after practice, but most of his self-education on the drums came the classic way. In his bedroom, Dave would pull up a chair for a high-hat, a book for a snare, and his bed for tom-toms and play along to music by hardcore bands like Minor Threat, DRI, and Bad Brains.

When they kicked out the bass player in Freak Baby, the drummer switched to bass and Dave switched to drums. They changed their name to Mission Impossible and played fast hardcore punk, so fast that they eventually changed their name to Fast, which broke up around 1986.

Being a suburban stoner, it was only natural for Dave to get into Led Zeppelin. It was even more natural for him to start copping the classic licks of Led Zep drummer John Bonham. “I used to rip him off like crazy and then I figured out the weird stuttered kick drum in ‘Kashmir’ and that opened up a million new doors,” says Dave. “You take pieces from other drummers and like the drummer from the Bad Brains to John Bonham to the drummer from Devo and it eventually becomes this big mush and that’s me—just one big rip-off!”

After Fast, Dave was in a band called Dain Bramage that mixed hardcore punk with the sounds of adventurous pre- and post-punk bands like Television and Mission of Burma. “Everybody just hated us,” says Dave. The dogmatic hardcore scene didn’t take too well to outside influences (except for reggae) and Dain Bramage couldn’t get many gigs because they weren’t on the DC-based indie Dischord label, which was cofounded by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat (and later, Fugazi) and was then the only game in town for hardcore bands.

As a joke, Dave originally put Bonham’s three-circle logo on the front of his bass drum; later on, he got the logo tattooed on his arm, then variations of it on his wrist and then his other arm. He’s also got a homemade tattoo of the Black Flag logo on his forearm that he made when he was thirteen.

Dave had long admired a local D.C. hardcore band called Scream, who had already put out several records on Dischord, and then he saw an ad in the local music paper saying that Scream was looking for a drummer. “I thought I’d try out just to tell my friends that I jammed with Scream,” Dave says. He called, but the band never called him back because he was too young—and he had told them he was nineteen even though he was really sixteen. Finally, Dave wangled an audition, and after jamming a few times, Scream asked Dave to join the band. Dave said he was committed to Dain Bramage but a couple of months later he got back in touch with them and convinced them to take him on.

Dave dropped out of high school late in his junior year. “I was seventeen and extremely anxious to see the world and play, so I did,” Dave says. “I’m totally glad I did it.” Dave plans to go to college some day, though.

Much later, when Wendy Cobain met Virginia Grohl in New York for Nirvana’s “Saturday Night Live” appearance, they compared notes on their sons. “We were just amazed at how much these two kids are alike,” says Wendy. “They’re like twins that got separated somehow.”

“I don’t see that at all,” Dave says at first, then he adds, “In some ways I can, because I remember the first time I went into the house where Kurt grew up and we went upstairs where his room was and there was stuff written on the walls—the brain with a little question mark—and I remember being stoned and drawing a little brain with a question mark in it in like seventh or eighth grade. When I saw that I thought it was kind of strange. And we’re both total slobs.”

Dave was supposed to go to night school, but he spent the tuition money on pot instead. He rehearsed with Scream for six months and then the band went on a two-month U.S. tour in October of 1987.

“Touring with Scream was so much fun—it was a lesson in life,” says Dave. “Learning to budget yourself on seven dollars a day. You had three meals—or two—and you have to somehow save up money or ask for the next three days’ per diem if you want to buy pot. You can’t buy cigarettes more than three times a week. If you do, you have to buy bargain brand. I’d never seen the country before and everything was just so fucking punk.”

Dave became a big Melvins fan after seeing them open for hardcore bands in D.C. When he read in Maximumrocknroll that they had re-formed after a brief breakup, Scream was on tour in Memphis. Dave had bought an Elvis postcard and happened to get Elvis’s uncle Vester Presley to sign it. He sent it to the Melvins in San Francisco and asked if they’d come to Scream’s show there. The night before the gig, Dave found out that Scream and the Melvins were on the same bill. Dave befriended the Melvins and they swapped addresses and have corresponded ever since.

Back in San Francisco for another tour, Dave went backstage after a Melvins gig, where Kurt and Chris were hanging out. They were in town to rehearse with Dale Crover for the 1990 West Coast tour with Sonic Youth. “I remember [Kurt] sitting in this chair looking pissed,” Dave recalls, while Chris was being exceptionally loud and boisterous. “Who is that guy?” Dave asked Osborne. He didn’t wind up speaking to either of them.

During one of their forays down to L.A. to meet the labels, Kurt and Chris stopped in San Francisco to hang out with the Melvins, who told them there was a great hardcore band playing at the I-Beam called Scream. They went and were promptly knocked out by their drummer. “God, what a great drummer,” Chris thought. “Wish he’d be in our band.”

Dave recorded one studio and two live albums with Scream, who blossomed into one of America’s most explosive hardcore bands, and toured the U.S. and Europe until the middle of September 1990, when “girlfriend trouble” compelled bass player Skeeter to leave the tour suddenly. Stranded in Los Angeles with no money, Dave called his friend Buzz Osborne.

Osborne knew Kurt and Chris loved Dave’s drumming and called Chris to tell him he’d given Dave his number. When Dave called, Chris was ecstatic, but he felt obligated to at least ask Dave a few questions before going any further. He was into the right bands and Chris invited him up to Seattle.

Dave had heard Nirvana for the first time during one of Scream’s frequent European tours. “You look at the cover of Bleach,” he says, “and you just think they’re these big burly unshaven logger, drinking guys. They look kind of nasty on the front, almost like a metal band, but with this retarded weirdness about them.” He thought they sounded a bit like the Melvins, which was okay by him.

Dave took apart his drums, fit all the pieces into one big cardboard box, and flew up to Seattle with only a bag of clothes. Kurt and Chris picked him up at Sea-Tac Airport and began the drive to Tacoma. To break the ice, Dave offered Kurt an apple. “No thanks,” Kurt replied. “It’ll make my teeth bleed.”

That wasn’t the first awkward moment they had had. On the phone with Kurt before he headed up to Seattle, Dave mentioned a party he had gone to after a Scream show in Olympia. The band had bought a bunch of beer and the great disco music spilling out onto the street augured well for a happening bash. They arrived at the apartment to find about twenty people, with all the guys on one side of the room and all the girls on another. “They were total Olympia hot chocolate party Hello Kitty people,” says Dave. The band stood around drinking beer and feeling awkward until suddenly someone turned off the stereo. “This girl comes in and sits down and plugs in this guitar and starts playing this total bad teen suicide awful music, ‘Boys, boys/ Bad/ Die,’ ” Dave says. “And after every song everyone would clap and we were like, ‘Let’s get out here!’ ” Dave had just begun insulting the “sad little girl with the bad fucking songs” when Kurt said, “Oh yeah, that’s my girlfriend, Tobi.”


Kurt was actually at the party and remembers that the members of Scream were making fun of everybody there. “They were real rocker dudes,” says Kurt. “I hated them, I thought they were assholes.” Kurt remembers Dave in particular. “He brought up this Primus tape from their car and tried to play it and everyone got mad at him.”

The Motor Sports gig happened to be the night after Dave arrived. He was stunned by the size and enthusiasm of the crowd—the only other local show he’d seen that big was Fugazi in D.C. In Seattle, punk rock had become big business. “It seemed like a local punk scene gone bad, in a way,” says Dave. “I saw the Nirvana T-shirt stand—every fucking kid and their brother buying the ‘crack smokin’, fudge packin’ T-shirt. They must have sold two hundred T-shirts that night—that’s insane for a local punk rock show.

“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into at all.”

Dave was not terribly impressed by Nirvana. “I thought they were all right,” he says. “They didn’t completely blow me away. The Melvins played before them and I was so into the Melvins that I was spent by the time Nirvana went on.”

Still, the material seemed fun to play and besides, although Dave thought Danny Peters was “a fucking incredible drummer,” he didn’t think Nirvana sounded quite right with Peters. He was probably right—Peters is an excellent, hard-hitting drummer, but doesn’t play in the heavy, Bonhamesque style that Nirvana requires. Peters played well at the Motor Sports show, but he didn’t quite fit—it was like a man wearing a very nice hat that nevertheless didn’t go with his suit.

Dave stayed with Chris and Shelli at first. The day after the Motor Sports show, Chris and Shelli threw a barbecue, during which Chris, Kurt, and Danny Peters did an interview for a cover story in the now defunct English music weekly Sounds. No one was to know they were auditioning a new drummer.

A few days later, Kurt and Chris auditioned Dave at the Dutchman. “We knew in two minutes that he was the right drummer,” says Chris. “He was a hard hitter. He was really dynamic. He was so bright, so hot, so vital. He rocked.” Dave was steady, solid, tasteful, and definitely a hard hitter. When he played a roll on his snare, it sounded like the powerful chop of spinning helicopter blades; when he pounded on his gigantic tom-toms, they didn’t make a tone so much as they exploded like rifle shots; his outsized cymbals fluttered like punching bags under his attack. Dave could also sing, giving the band the potential for live harmonies for the first time.

Then there was the delicate matter of telling Danny Peters that he was out of the band after only a few weeks.

During an acoustic appearance on Calvin Johnson’s KAOS radio show a few days later, Kurt revealed that they had a new drummer and that he hadn’t even broken the news to Peters yet. “Who is the new drummer?” Johnson asked. “His name is Dave and he’s a baby Dale Crover,” Kurt answered. “He plays almost as good as Dale. And within a few years’ practice, he may even give him a run for his money.”

Kurt acknowledged the awkward situation with Peters. “Dan’s such a beautiful guy and such a beautiful drummer,” he said, “but you can’t pass up an opportunity to play with the drummer of our dreams, which is Dave. He’s been the drummer of our dreams for like two years. It’s a bummer, a big bummer.”

A tour of England had been planned. “Kurt called me up,” says Peters, “and he said he thought they were going to go with Geffen and I’m like ‘Cool.’ Then I go, ‘So what about this tour?’ And he goes, ‘Ahhh. Ummm. Well, ah, well … We got another drummer.’ And I wasn’t bummed at all. I kind of half-assed expected it and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ I wasn’t sure how they were feeling because their communication skills at that time were kind of not happening. I wasn’t bummed at all. I’m still not bummed.”

And as Chris points out, “If he was going to join our band, that would be the end of Mudhoney. And we loved Mudhoney so much, we didn’t want to be responsible for that.”

“Dave suits them way better than I did,” Peters admits. “He really does. To me, that’s more important, too. He’s got the heavy shit right there. He beats the fuck out of those drums. They definitely got the person that suited them better.”

Peters went on to a short stint with Screaming Trees, then Mudhoney re-formed and eventually signed with Warners in 1992. Peters says he’s having a great time with Mudhoney, one of America’s greatest rock and roll bands. “The only thing is,” he says, “[Nirvana] put out one fuckin’ killer record and I sure would have liked to play on it.”

Meanwhile, Scream dissolved and the guitarist and the singer, brothers Franz and Pete Stahl, later formed Wool. In the summer of 1993, Dave joined Skeeter and the Stahls for a triumphant Scream reunion tour.

Kurt and Chris had found a rehearsal space in Tacoma, a converted barn—it had brown shag carpet and a massive P.A. that made a loud hissing sound. They shared it with a slick bar band—students from the Guitar Institute of Technology, by Chris’s guess.

Dave stayed with Chris and Shelli for a month, then moved in with Kurt in Olympia. The Cobain/Grohl house was knee-deep in corn dog sticks. “It was the most filthy pigsty I’d ever lived in,” says Kurt (and that’s saying a lot). They passed the time by shooting a BB gun, occasionally scoring a direct hit on the windows of the State Lottery Building across the street.

Dave describes the apartment as “small, cluttered, dirty, smelly.” Six-foot-tall Dave slept on a five-foot couch. He slept in the same room as Kurt’s tank and the clicking of the turtles’ shells against the glass as they tried to escape would keep him up at night. “It just felt so weird,” says Dave. “The last two and a half years have been pretty weird.

“There wasn’t a lot to do,” Dave continues. “There was a lot of time just spent sitting in the room totally silent reading or just totally silent doing nothing, staring at walls or going downtown and seeing a ninety-nine-cent movie or shooting BB guns in the backyard.” Kurt and Dave began going to sleep at six in the morning as the sun was coming up and waking as the sun was going down, never seeing sunlight.

The two barely spoke. The conversation rarely got past “Are you hungry?” “Yes.”

Still, Kurt became more social after Dave moved in. “Kurt sort of came out of his shell,” says Slim Moon. “He was around more, he seemed happier with his life. He was hanging out with actual Olympians.” Being around so many artistic people seemed to have an energizing, inspiring effect on Kurt; in Olympia, he could express himself without inhibition or fear of rejection. As a highly creative person, Kurt yearned to be around other creative people. In Olympia, he appreciated that he was appreciated.

Kurt had been going out with Tobi Vail since before Dave moved in. She was a couple of years younger than Kurt and had no intention of settling into a long-term relationship. “I was definitely looking for somebody I could spend quite a few years with,” Kurt says, even though he was only twenty-three at the time. “I wanted that security and I knew that it wasn’t with her. So I was just wasting my time and I just felt bad about it.” By late 1990, that fact was becoming painfully apparent, and that’s when Kurt says he broke up with Tobi.

“He was just a wreck,” says Dave, “just a mess.” But Kurt insists that it wasn’t strictly because of Tobi. “It was just that I was tired of my life, basically,” he says. “I was tired of living in Olympia with nothing to do. All during the time that Tracy and I were breaking up, I wanted to move to Seattle. I knew that I was long overdue for a change. I didn’t have any extreme thing I could do to just get out of it right away. It wasn’t like all the other times where I could have a fight with somebody and get kicked out of their house and have no choice but to do something else.

“I was just tired of not finding the right mate,” Kurt says. “I’d been looking all my life. I just got tired of trying to have a girlfriend that I knew that I wouldn’t eventually spend more than a couple of months with. I’ve always been old-fashioned in that respect. I’ve always wanted a girlfriend that I could have a good relationship with for a long time. I wish I was capable of just playing the field, but I always wanted more than that.”

The rides in the van to Tacoma for practice had already been quiet enough, but then Kurt stopped talking completely. Finally, after weeks and weeks of this, they were driving home from practice one night when Kurt broke the silence by saying “You know, I’m not always like this,” adding that he would eventually recover from the breakup. “I just kind of said, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ ” Dave says. “But I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh, thank God!’ ”

They practiced from ten o’clock to one in the morning almost every night over a four- or five-month period. The band’s chemistry was quickly falling into place. “We felt like we could do whatever we wanted to do,” Dave says. “There weren’t any restrictions and it got weird and jammy and we’d do these noisy new wave noise experimental jam things. We’d always start off the practice just jamming. We’d set up and plug in and jam for twenty minutes on nothing at all.” Out of the jams sprang countless songs, but they’d soon forget them or lose the tapes they recorded them on. “There were probably thirty or forty songs we had written that are just gone,” Dave says.

After a few weeks, Dave played his first show with Nirvana at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia. The show had sold out on one day’s notice and Dave was so amazed that he called his mother and sister about it. They opened with a cover of the Vaselines’ “Son of a Gun.” Or at least they tried to—they blew a circuit twice before someone realized all the amps were on one line. It was a frenzied show—Dave played with such force that he broke his snare drum. “I picked it up and held it in front of the audience to show them that we have a new drummer who’s very good,” says Kurt.

“Kurt and Chris knew—and everybody else knew who saw them play—that they were only a hint of what they could be until Dave joined the band,” says Slim Moon. “He just knew how to play drums and he understood their music. Chad just never got it and the guys before Chad never really got it. Danny was a great drummer but he just wasn’t right.”

Then they went over to Europe for a tour with L.A. rockers L7, ostensibly to promote the “Sliver”/“Dive” single, which didn’t actually come out until a month after they left. At London’s Heathrow Airport, they met tour manager Alex Macleod. Macleod and Dave had met on a Scream tour and they hadn’t exactly hit it off. The working papers for the tour listed Danny Peters as Nirvana’s drummer, so Macleod was surprised to see Dave coming through Customs at the airport. “Oh, fuck,” thought Dave. “Oh, fuck,” thought Macleod.

But they quickly made amends, partly out of necessity and partly because they shared an appreciation for what Macleod calls “inane, senseless humor.”

Along for the ride were soundman Craig Montgomery, monitor man Ian Beveridge, and a lot of equipment. They also had a VCR and two tapes—a Monty Python episode and Spinal Tap, which had long since become standard equipment on any tour bus.

They played to packed houses of about a thousand people a night, winning rave reviews from the all-important U.K. music weeklies. Kurt only half-sarcastically told Keith Cameron in the October 27 Sounds, “I don’t wanna have any other kind of job, I can’t work among people. I may as well try and make a career out of this. All my life my dream has been to be a big rock star—just may as well abuse it while you can.” He added that the band was exploring a more pop style of songwriting—“We figured we may as well get on the radio and try and make a little bit of money at it.”

Nirvana’s U.K. publicist Anton Brookes recalls that Kurt was very confident that he would soon realize his dream. “I remember Kurt saying that the album was going to go Top Ten and there were these tracks that were going to be massive as singles,” Brookes says. “You could see in his face that he totally believed that. He knew it.”

Meanwhile, John Silva at Gold Mountain Management in L.A. had recently begun calling up the band and offering his expertise; Chris began consulting him informally on business matters. Gold Mountain, founded by industry veteran Danny Goldberg, counted decided nonpunks such as Bonnie Raitt and Belinda Carlisle as clients, but they also had Sonic Youth. And since whatever Sonic Youth did was by its very nature cool, Gold Mountain was cool by Nirvana. And since Thurston Moore was raving about Nirvana to Gold Mountain, the feeling was mutual. Goldberg was still kicking himself for passing on Dinosaur Jr even after Moore raved about them and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

In November, Gold Mountain flew the band down to L.A., and met with Goldberg and Silva, a hip, bright, and aggressive young manager who had worked with several alternative acts including Redd Kross and House of Freaks. Silva was in touch with the underground enough to have amassed a gigantic seven-inch indie-rock singles collection; he’d even shared an apartment with the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra. Chris liked the fact that Goldberg was also the head of the Southern California chapter of the ACLU; Dave dug that Goldberg had been a publicist for Led Zeppelin in the mid-seventies. After a meeting with Goldberg and Silva, Kurt and Chris left and called Silva from the lobby of the building to say they were going with Gold Mountain. They would have told him in person, they said, but they were late for another major label schmooze.

Sleep had become Kurt’s favorite pastime—he often claimed to be a narcoleptic and to this day, he usually wears pajamas, probably to make sure he’s properly dressed just in case Mr. Sandman should come knocking. “I’d sleep just to get away from the pain,” Kurt explains. “While I was asleep, my stomach wouldn’t hurt. Then I’d wake up and curse myself that I was still alive.”

One day, Kurt was up at the Gold Mountain offices, moping around. “What the fuck are you moping about?” asked John Silva.

Kurt replied, “I’m awake, aren’t I?”

“I just like to sleep,” Kurt says. “I find myself falling asleep at times when I’m fed up with people or bored. If I don’t want to socialize and I’m stuck in a social situation, like backstage or being on tour in general, I just sleep throughout the day. I would prefer to be in a coma and just be woken up and wheeled out onto the stage and play and then put back in my own little world rather than deal with … For so many years, I’ve felt like most of my conversation has been exhausted, there’s not much I can look forward to. Everyday simple pleasures that people might have in having conversations or talking about inane things I just find really boring, so I’d rather just be asleep.”

With lawyer Alan Mintz shopping around the band to all the major labels, Gold Mountain on their side, and a colossal buzz that just kept growing, Nirvana became the object of every major label A&R person’s desire from coast to coast. The band was very wary of the slick, big-city corporate label types. At the fancy restaurants they’d get taken to, Kurt would just eat the expensive food and not say a word, while Chris would usually get quite drunk. It was essentially a milder version of their first meeting with Jonathan Poneman. But this time, they made sure they were nice enough to he labels so that they would get asked back to dinner a few more times, which, after all, was the point. “We felt like snotty little hot-shit kids,” Dave says. “We felt like we were getting away with something.”

At first, the band was confused. Why was everyone so interested in a punk rock band from Aberdeen? For one thing, bands such as U2, R.E.M., and Jane’s Addiction were beginning to score gold and platinum records. “Alternative rock” was the new industry buzzword. The canned, lightweight pop then dominating the charts—Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli, etc.—was making the major labels some quick money, but the labels knew they had neglected to cultivate artists with long-term potential. Alternative bands fit the bill nicely and the best of them had an important thing going for them—a large and loyal fan base. Just like Nirvana.

Other indie bands were being courted, too, like Dinosaur Jr, fIREHOSE, and Teenage Fanclub.

After a while, Kurt, Chris, and Dave began to understand all this and started thinking that they might actually be in a position to be a moderate commercial success—enough to make a living at it, anyway.

The band flew to New York to check out Charisma Records and Columbia Records. Dave was homesick, so he flew to New York on a record label’s tab and then caught a shuttle down to D.C. At Columbia, they met label president Donny Ienner, who told them, “Listen, men, I’m not going to dick you around. We want to turn you into stars.” Actually, that’s precisely what they wanted to hear—Kurt and Chris were afraid that they were going to be treated as a fringe band that no one at a major label would pay any attention to. But Columbia seemed “too Mafiaesque, a little too corporate,” Kurt says. They liked Charisma, even though the label saw fit to make a special “Welcome Nirvana” video that was playing as they walked into the conference room.

Later on in the week, Dave rejoined the band in New York as they continued their whirlwind tour of the various labels. Kurt was so quiet and Chris was so talkative that many label execs assumed that Chris was the frontman of the band. This turned out to be an excellent way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Dave thought the whole thing was pretty silly. “Basically, all I did was try to figure out how you become an A&R person,” he says. “Each one of them, I would ask, ‘So what did you do before you became an A&R person?’ Every one of them had worked at Tower Records.”

The band visited one major label where a loudmouth exec bellowed across his vast desk, “What do you guys want?”

“We want to be the biggest fucking band in the world,” Kurt deadpanned.

“Now that’s what I like to hear!” boomed the suit. “None of this dickin’ around! None of this building from building blocks, brick by brick! Fuck it! That’s great!”

“The best thing about the major label hunt was the collection of A&R people’s business cards that you got,” says Dave. “So when you went into shitty little lounges or taverns, you kind of drop it to the person that’s performing there and give them the impression that you’re an A&R person from a major label and you’re interested in their act. You kind of slide it to them and say ‘Give me a call.’ So all those A&R men we dealt with are probably still getting calls from lounge bands all over Tacoma.”

With Alan Mintz as their legal seeing-eye dog, they visited several other labels, where their music would mysteriously be playing in nearly every office. At Capitol in L.A., they met a promotion man. “He’s this good old boy from Texas, looks like he would like to beat my mom up,” says Kurt. “I just wanted to dance on top of his desk with a dress on and piss all over the place.”

“He asked me, ‘So on that song “Polly,” are you beatin’ that bitch?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ Then two other big jock radio programmers walked into his office and said, ‘Hey, we got two tickets to the Lakers game!’ And they all stood up and started cheering. We knew this wasn’t the label for us.”

Still, they went out to dinner with another Capitol label exec that night. “Just bring us some food, just bring us all the food you have,” he ordered the waitress impatiently. “Put it on this table. I don’t care what it is.” He began talking about spending a million dollars to get Nirvana out of the Sub Pop contract.

A million dollars. For a week, Kurt was seriously thinking of pulling the Great Rock and Roll Swindle—sign the contract, take the million dollars, and then break up. The Sex Pistols had achieved a similar feat not once but twice. Kurt would rant about the idea to Chris. “We’ve got to—it would be such a cool thing to do,” he’d say. “It would be so rock and roll.” Unsure whether this was even possible, Kurt broached the subject with Mintz, who just thought he was kidding.

The way Gold Mountain saw it, it had come down to two labels: Geffen and Charisma. The way Nirvana saw it, it came down to two labels, too: Geffen and K. “We were really close to signing with K Records,” Kurt reveals. “Those were the two we were choosing.” The idea was, they’d pull the swindle, break up, change their name, and go to K. “I thought a million dollars was more money than anyone could ever have,” says Kurt. “I thought a million dollars would support us and the record label for the rest of our lives, which isn’t the case at all, now that I made a million dollars and spent a million dollars in a year.”

Eventually, the Great Rock and Roll Swindle fantasy subsided. Because so many labels were interested in Nirvana, they were in a good bargaining position when it came to negotiating a contract. Geffen wasn’t offering the most money of any of the band’s suitors, but Geffen already had Sonic Youth, and Kim Gordon was urging them to sign with Geffen. And all along, Gold Mountain had been steering the band toward Geffen because they knew the label would work hard at the surely long, hard task of breaking Nirvana—the label had already done well with Sonic Youth, selling 250,000 copies of their major label debut, Goo. Geffen also had two key players: director of alternative music promotion Mark Kates and marketing exec Ray Farrell, both of whom had spent years in the indie world before moving to a major label.

So they went to Geffen. “We just figured it was all just a crap shoot anyway,” says Chris. Sonic Youth’s A&R man, Gary Gersh, signed the band. Gersh had first seen the band with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore at the April 1990 Pyramid show in New York. He had been sufficiently impressed to give them a call later. After talking with them and hearing the Smart sessions tape Gersh was even more impressed. In Nirvana, he heard “the energy and the simplicity and the aggressiveness of the Who.” In Kurt, he saw a gifted songwriter with impeccable instincts about the direction he wanted his band to go. Gersh was savvy enough to be able to explain the band to the label, and just as importantly, hip enough to explain the label to the band.

The band got a $287,000 advance, which was swiftly decimated by taxes, legal fees, the management’s cut, and debts. Instead of the big dough, they had gone for the strong contract, including full mechanical royalties if and after the album hit gold. No one could have guessed it at the time, but in retrospect, abandoning a higher advance in favor of an elevated royalty rate was a brilliant move, making the band millions of dollars they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Then there was the matter of that darned Sub Pop contract. The then-struggling indie label received an initial $75,000 buyout fee (half of which came out of Nirvana’s advance), a reported two points (2 percent of sales) on the next two records, and even got the Sub Pop logo on the back cover of every copy of Nevermind. The arrangement took a bite out of the band’s income, but it also almost single-handedly resuscitated Sub Pop. “I don’t necessarily regret it now because I enjoy knowing that I’m helping Sub Pop put out some really good music,” says Kurt.

“I don’t doubt that for a minute,” says Poneman, “had we not had that agreement, Bruce and I would probably be washing dishes at this moment.”

Sub Pop released one last Nirvana record, a split single featuring Nirvana and the Fluid. Kurt felt Nirvana’s version of the Vaseline’s “Molly’s Lips” was ragged and called up Jonathan Poneman and asked him not to release it, but it was part of the buyout deal. Etched into the run-out groove of the record was a single word—“Later.”

While the band members waited for their advance money to come through, Gold Mountain doled out a thousand dollars a month for each band member, barely minimum wage. Still they had to pawn instruments just to keep themselves fed. Sometimes they’d go down to the Positively 4th Street record store in Olympia and sell T-shirts. “You get thirty-five bucks and you’re so happy,” says Dave, “because you don’t have to eat corn dogs that night—you can have a Hungry Man Dinner!” The band didn’t formally sign a contract until just before recording Nevermind.

In November 1990, Dave was down in Los Angeles sitting in with L7 at a Rock for Choice benefit. He called Chris to ask him to wire some money and they were just about to hang up when Chris suddenly said, “Wait a minute. I gotta tell you something. Kurt’s been doing heroin.”

“What?” said Dave, shocked. “How did you find out?”

“He told me,” Chris said. “Don’t tell him that I told you.”

When Dave came back home, Kurt mentioned he’d done heroin and Dave tried to stay cool about it and just asked what it was like. “It sucked, it’s stupid,” Kurt replied. “It makes you feel gross and bad. I just wanted to try it.”

“Kurt said he wouldn’t do it again and I believed him,” Dave says. “It seemed so innocent. It seemed like a kid sticking a firecracker in a cat’s butt and lighting it off for the hell of it. It didn’t seem like anything at all.”

“The whole winter that Dave and I spent together in that little apartment was the most depressing time I’d had in years,” Kurt recalls. “It was so fucking small and dirty and cold and gray every fucking day. I almost went insane at one point. I just couldn’t handle it. I was so bored and so poor. We were signed to Geffen for months and we didn’t have any money. We ended up having to pawn our amps and our TV, all kinds of stuff, just to get money to eat corn dogs. It just felt really weird to be signed to this multimillion-dollar corporation and be totally dirt poor. All we did was practice. It was the only thing that saved us. Even that got repetitious after a while.”

And so Kurt had sought refuge in heroin. He had been wanting to do it again and finally found a dealer in Olympia. He did it about once a week, not often enough to get a habit. Not even Dave knew he was doing it. “It’s weird, because with someone like Kurt, who’s a sloth anyway, how are you to know?” he says.

No one in the band knew until the night that Kurt called Chris. Chris had gotten extremely worried and hung up. A little while later, he and Shelli called back and told Kurt that they loved him and they didn’t want him to do drugs. “It was nice,” Kurt says, the tone of his voice implying that he appreciated the gesture, but it wasn’t enough to get him to stop.

“I told him he was playing with dynamite,” says Chris. “It bummed me out. It was shocking. I didn’t like it at all. I just don’t see anything in that shit. I just told him that’s the way I feel.” After that, Kurt tried to hide his drug use, but Chris always knew. “I knew he’d hang around these certain people and it was ‘Oh, Kurt’s getting high,’ ” Chris says.

By that time, Kurt and Tracy had gotten back in touch and they went together to see Tobi Vail’s Riot Grrl band Bikini Kill at a party in Olympia. “He kept nodding off and whatnot in the car on the way there,” says Tracy. “He used to fall asleep, but he’d never fall asleep that fast.” On the way to another party that night, Kurt asked if they could stop at his house so he could go to the bathroom. After a while Tracy went up so she could go, too. After fifteen minutes she heard a big crash in the bathroom. “So I go in the bathroom and he’s kind of passed out on the toilet with one sleeve rolled up and I pick him up and he starts laughing and then he nods off instantly and then he laughs again. I said, ‘Kurt, what the hell are you doing?’ ”

“How did you know I did it?”

“Look at you, Kurt,” Tracy said. “You’ve got one sleeve rolled up, there’s a spoon in the sink, you’re passed out on the toilet, and there’s a bottle of bleach on the floor. You never clean anything—why else would you have a bottle of bleach if it wasn’t for your needle?”

“At that time,” says Tracy, “I didn’t know it was going to go as far as it did. I don’t think he did it when we were going out, as far as I know.” Kurt told Tracy that heroin made him really social. “He felt like he could go out and have a good time and talk to people and not feel uncomfortable,” she says.

“The funny thing is, when he was getting all these tests for his stomach, he actually came home one time from the hospital and he said, ‘They tried to give me another blood test and they already gave me four tests.’ He walked out of there because he said he would almost faint when they tried to draw blood because he couldn’t stand the needle in his arm.”

On New Year’s Day of 1991, the band went back to the Music Source, where they had done the Blew EP sessions and recorded several tracks with soundman Craig Montgomery, completing two, “Aneurysm” and “Even in His Youth,” both of which later appeared as B-sides and on Incesticide.

Gersh thought the band should rerecord the seven songs from the Smart sessions and suggested several relatively fancy producers, including Scott Litt, who had worked on R.E.M.’s breakthrough records, long-time Neil Young producer David Briggs, and Don Dixon, who had produced R.E.M., the Reivers, the Smithereens, and many others.

Chris and Kurt demonstrate their onstage chemistry at the Commodore Ballroom. (© Charles Peterson)

At one point, Kurt told the Seattle music paper Backlash that Vig would be the main producer, but they’d use other producers for the songs the band deemed “commercial.”

Briggs and Dixon actually flew up to Seattle to meet the band. Dixon made the final cut, and tentative plans were made for him to produce and Vig to engineer. But then something fell through. Some say that rumors that the band had received an astronomical advance had fooled some producers into pricing themselves out of the job, but the band was really holding out for Vig all along. Vig, a supremely nice guy, simply knew where they were coming from, musically and philosophically, better than anyone else.

Vig had never done a major label project and Gersh initially bridled, but came around to the idea after figuring that even if Vig didn’t get the right sounds during recording, they could do the time-honored thing and fix it in the mix. So Nirvana got their way—this time. Vig got the call just a couple of weeks before recording was to begin.

The band sent him some rehearsal tapes they made on a boom box. The band played so loud that the sound was wildly distorted, but Vig could make out some great tunes. Vig already knew most of the songs from the Smart sessions, but there were a few new ones, too, like “Come as You Are” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that sounded like they had a lot of promise.

“We knew that the stuff we were coming up with was catchy and cool and just good strong songs,” Dave says. “We kind of could tell that they were really great. We didn’t expect what happened to happen, but we knew it was going to be a really good record.”