Come As You Are Read online

  “Amazingly raw and candid … An unsparing and extremely honest depiction of the group’s highly tumultuous history … A wizardly combination of smart journalism and intelligent analysis, Come as You Are is as good as rock bios get.”

  —BILLBOARD

  “Really takes you inside both the business and soul of rock ’n’ roll, providing the lurid details and lucid pop criticism, too.”

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES

  “Come as You Are is the first [book] to comprehensively tell the band’s tale from Aberdeen, Wash., to world domination.”

  —ROLLING STONE

  “Sects and drugs and rock & roll—Come as You Are has got it all. ‘A.’ ”

  —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  “One of the few memorable, indispensable books about alternative rock … It’s all here, in one of the most revealing books about rock to come down the pike in a long, long time.”

  —FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM

  A Main Street Books edition of this book was originally published in 1993. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday.

  Come as You Are. Copyright © 1993 by Michael Azerrad. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Visit our website at www.broadwaybooks.com

  First Broadway Books trade paperback edition published 2001.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has cataloged the previous edition as:

  Azerrad, Michael

  Come as you are: the story of Nirvana / Michael Azerrad. — 1st ed.

  p. cm. “A Main Street book” — T.p. verso.

  1. Nirvana (Musical group) 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography I. Title.

  ML421.N57A9 1993

  782.42166′092′2—dc20

  [B] 93-19821

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83373-0

  v3.1

  FoR JuLie

  AcKNowLedgmEnTs

  My deepest thanks to the following people for their assistance and their encouragement.

  Kurt & Courtney

  Chris & Shelli

  Dave

  Chad Channing

  John Silva, Bethann Buddenbaum, and Michael Meisel

  Susie Tennant & Chris Swenson

  Randy Wagers

  Mark Kates, Rochelle Fox, Luke Wood, Dennis Dennehy, and

  Chrissy Shannon at Geffen

  Charles Peterson

  Tracy Marander

  Neil Ross

  Bruce Tracy

  Scott Moyers

  Sarah Lazin and Laura Nolan

  Ms. Burnyce Channing

  Wendy O’Connor

  Marysarah Quinn

  Kerry Fried

  Amy Finnerty

  Nils Bernstein

  Mark Doctrow

  Beth Cohen

  Matt Sweeney

  No thanks to: Lunatic Fringe (high score: 29,715, level 40)

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter Zero

  A Greasy-haired Little Rebellious Kid

  We Were Just Concerned with Fucking Around

  That’s My Brother Chris. He Listens to Punk Rock.

  These Guys Were from Aberdeen

  Everything’s Gettin’ All Radical

  These Guys Are Going to Be Bigger Than the Beatles!

  “Are You Hungry?” “Yes.”

  Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Solo, Bad Solo

  It Felt as if We Couldn’t Be Stopped

  It Is Now Time to Make It Unclear

  A Cross-format Phenomenon

  Slam-dancing with Mr. Brownstone

  All We Did Was Cry

  Three Nice, Decent, Clean-cut Young Men

  It’s Anger, It’s Death, and Absolute Total Bliss

  Things That Piss Me Off

  The Grown-ups Don’t Like It

  Final Chapter

  Nirvana U.S. Discography

  CHAPTER ZERO

  It’s April 9, 1993, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Eleven thousand people—grunge kids, jocks, metalheads, main-streamers, punks, little kids with their parents, hippie-types—have come from as far away as Los Angeles and Seattle to see Nirvana’s first American show in seven months, a benefit for Bosnian rape victims. Besides a seven-week club tour in late 1991, the closest most American fans had come to seeing the band in concert was their appearance on “Saturday Night Live” over a year before. So much has happened in the meantime: drug rumors, breakup rumors, lawsuits, and about five million more copies of the Nevermind album sold worldwide. And much hasn’t happened—a U.S. arena tour, a new album. It’s a crucial show.

  The band walks out on stage. Kurt Cobain, sporting an aqua cardigan, an inside-out Captain America T-shirt and decomposing blue jeans, gives a nervous little wave to the crowd. He’s dyed his hair blond for the occasion; a mop of it obscures his eyes and indeed the entire top half of his face.

  From the opening chords of “Rape Me,” the band plays with explosive force, salvos of sound catapulting off the stage and into the crowd—“Breed,” “Blew,” “Sliver,” “Milk It,” “Heart Shaped Box.” Toward the end, they play “The Hit” and even though Kurt mangles the opening chords, the moshers on the floor go berserk. As matches and lighters are held aloft during “Lithium,” everyone in this cavernous barn is reminded of exactly why they love Nirvana.

  Although Chris Novoselic and Kurt are at least thirty feet apart, they move and react to each other as if they are much closer; the communication is effortless. Midway through the set, Kurt calls over to Chris, “I feel great! I could play another hour!” And they do, packing twenty-four songs in an hour and a half, including eight songs from the upcoming album. The crowd applauds the new stuff enthusiastically, especially the ferocious assault on “Scentless Apprentice” and the majestic “All Apologies,” which dissolves in a haze of mantra-chant and feedback.

  Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam watches from the side of the stage; not far away is the Melvins’ Dale Crover. Frances Bean Cobain is upstairs in her dad’s dressing room with her nanny; Courtney comes down just in time to dodge a plastic bottle of mineral water that Kurt has thrown without looking. She waves at him sarcastically.

  At the end of the set, Kurt, Chris, and Dave Grohl disappear behind the drum riser and pass around a cigarette as they discuss what songs to play, then return for a seven-song, half-hour encore climaxing with “Endless, Nameless,” the mystery track that closes Nevermind. As the band accelerates the song’s main riff, it becomes a trance. Kurt walks across the top of his amp stack. It’s not that high off the ground, but he’s riveting anyway, like a potential suicide walking along the ledge of a building. The music speeds up even more. The guitars are squalling, Chris has unstrapped his bass and is waving it in front of his amp; Dave Grohl flails with precise abandon. As the music peaks, Kurt falls hard onto the drum set and drums and cymbal stands fall outward, like a carnivorous flower opening up and swallowing its prey. Show over.

  People ask each other if he’s all right. It’s not showmanship. If it were, they’d put down padding first. Maybe it’s a geek stunt, like the kid in grade school who would make his nose bleed and smear the blood on his face so the bully would leave him alone, a case of “I’ll hurt myself before you can” from a guy who opened the set with a song called �
��Rape Me.” Perhaps it’s an homage to two of Kurt’s favorite Stuntmen, Evel Knievel and Iggy Pop. Or is it that he’s so jazzed up from the music that he’s impervious to all physical harm, like a psyched-up swami who can walk across hot coals? Judging by the audience, all agog and aglow, that last explanation seems to fit the best.

  Afterward, the entire entourage celebrates the triumphant gig in the courtyard of the trendy Phoenix motel—except for Kurt and Courtney, who have retired to a fancy hotel across town. The Phoenix, Courtney says, holds some bad memories for them. And besides, the bath towels are too small. Even without them, the place has turned into a little Nirvana village. Dave and his mother and sister are there, Chris and Shelli are there, so is smiling Ernie Bailey the guitar tech and his wife Brenda, tour manager Alex Macleod, lighting designer Suzanne Sasic, folks from Gold Mountain Management, Mark Kates from Geffen/DGC, even members of Seattle’s Love Battery who happen to be in town. Chris goes down to the grocery store and gets a couple of armloads of beer and the party lasts into the wee hours of the morning.

  The next day, Chris makes a pilgrimage to the fabled Beat landmark, the City Lights Bookstore. He goes outside to a cash machine, where a homeless man announces, “Good news, people! We are pleased to accept twenty-dollar bills for Easter!” Chris gives him one.

  The Cow Palace show was a victory. It seemed like a confirmation that a punk rock band that hit the mainstream jackpot wasn’t a fluke after all. That victory had repercussions for the band, all the bands like them, and maybe even the culture at large. As Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon said recently, “When a band like Nirvana comes out of the underground, it really expresses something that’s going on in the culture and it’s not a commodity.”

  What was going on in the culture was reflected not only in the sound of the music, but just as importantly, how it became popular. The punk rock phenomenon started practically the moment Johnny Ramone first put pick to string, inspiring a decade and a half’s worth of hard work by countless bands, independent record labels, radio stations, magazines and fanzines, and small record stores that struggled to create some sort of alternative to the bland, condescending corporate rock which was being foisted on the public by the cynical major labels, the impersonal arenas, the mega-sized record stores, the lowest-common-denominator radio stations and the star-struck national rock magazines.

  Galvanized by the punk rock revolution, the music underground formed a worldwide network, a shadow music industry. It grew and grew until not even the best efforts of the baby boomer-controlled music industry could hold it back. R.E.M. was the first explosion, Jane’s Addiction came later, and then came the Big Bang: Nevermind has sold over eight million copies worldwide to date. It defied the best efforts of the likes of Michael Jackson, U2, and Guns n’ Roses, and hit #1 on the Billboard album chart.

  After this, everything was either pre- or post-Nirvana. Radio and press started taking the “alternative” thing seriously. Suddenly, record labels were rethinking their strategy. Instead of heavily promoted lightweight pop that would sell well at first and never be heard from again, they decided to start signing acts with long-term potential. And they were promoting them from a more grass-roots level, instead of throwing money at them until they started selling. This was an imitation of the way Nirvana broke—a small core group of grassroots media and music fans whose valuable word of mouth expanded the group’s base little by little at first, and then by leaps and bounds. Minimum hype, just good music.

  The investigative zeal required in order to make one’s way through the morass of independent music was in effect a rebuke of herd consumerism. It was a pesky development for the major labels, who had come to depend on promotional dollars to make the public see their way. Independent music required independent thinking, all the way from the artists who made the music to the entrepreneurs who sold it, to the people who bought it. It’s a lot harder to track down that new Calamity Jane single than it is to pick up the latest C+C Music Factory CD.

  In 1990, not one rock album hit the #1 spot, prompting some industry pundits to prophesy the end of rock. The audience for the music had been systematically fragmented by radio programmers looking for the perfect demographic, and it appeared unlikely that rock fans could unite around one record in large enough numbers to put it at the top of the charts. And while rock degenerated into a blow-dried, highly processed faux rebellion, genres such as country and rap more directly addressed the mood and concerns of the masses. Although several other rock albums hit #1 in 1991, Nevermind united an audience that had never been united before—the twentysomethings.

  Tired of having old fogies such as Genesis and Eric Clapton or artificial creations such as Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli rammed down their throats, the twenty somethings wanted a music of their own. Something that expressed the feelings they felt. A staggering number are children of divorce. They had the certain knowledge that they were the first American generation to have little hope of doing better than their parents, the generation that would suffer for the fiscal excesses of the Reagan eighties, that spent their entire sexual prime in the shadow of AIDS, that spent their childhoods having nightmares about nuclear war. They felt powerless to rescue an embattled environment and spent most of their lives with either Reagan or Bush in the White House, enduring a repressive sexual and cultural climate. And they felt helpless and inarticulate in the face of it all.

  Throughout the eighties, many musicians were protesting various political and social inequities, but most of them were boomers like Don Henley, Bruce Springsteen, and Sting. And many fans saw this protest for what it essentially was: posturing, bandwagon-jumping, self-righteous self-promotion. Exactly why did Duran Duran appear on Live Aid, anyway? Kurt Cobain’s reaction to bad times was as direct as can be, and a hell of a lot more honest. He screamed.

  It’s a mistake to call Kurt Cobain a spokesman for a generation, though. Bob Dylan was a spokesman for a generation. Kurt Cobain isn’t supplying any answers and he’s barely even asking the questions. He makes an anguished wail, reveling in negative ecstasy. And if that is the sound of teen spirit these days, so be it.

  The songs on Nevermind might have been about alienation and apathy, but alienation and apathy about things that didn’t mean much anyway. By contrast, the band has expressed strong feelings about feminism, racism, censorship, and especially homophobia. And any hint of passivity was blown away by the awesome force of the music (particularly Dave Grohl’s explosive drumming) and the undeniable craft of the songwriting. This was passionate music that didn’t pretend. Getting into Nirvana was empowering for a generation that had no power.

  The early lives of the band members echo that of their generation. All three come from broken homes. All three (and even their previous drummer) led painfully alienated childhoods; two are high school dropouts.

  Although they’re considered part of the “Seattle sound,” they’re not a Seattle band—Kurt Cobain and Chris Novoselic come from the isolated coastal logging town of Aberdeen, Washington. The band came of age there and in nearby Olympia, home of K Records and the “naive pop” band Beat Happening, both major philosophical, if not musical, influences on Nirvana. When Kurt talks about punk rock, he doesn’t mean green hair and safety-pinned nostrils. He means the do-it-yourself, be-yourself, low-tech ethos of K, Touch & Go, SST, and other fiercely indie labels. It’s an effort to reclaim music from the corporate realm and bring it back to the people, to make it electronic folk music.

  The members of Nirvana clearly weren’t corporate employees (they’ve visited their label’s L.A. headquarters exactly once)—the band carefully defined themselves as being outside an idealized generic mainstream as concocted by Madison Avenue, television executives, the major record labels, and Hollywood. To use a now co-opted term, Nirvana presented an alternative. When eight million people said they felt the same way, the mainstream was redefined.

  Many bands in the charts made good enough music, but it was merely entertainment. This music had r
esonance. It wasn’t slick, it wasn’t calculated. It was exhilarating, frightening, beautiful, vicious, vague, and exultant. And not only did it rock, but you could hum along to it.

  Fame was not something the band wanted or was equipped to deal with. It was a surprise. It was embarrassing to them. It was too much too soon. Chris and Dave took it hard enough, but Kurt took it harder. They lay low for much of 1992, and by the early spring of the following year, Kurt, Chris, and Dave could look back on everything that had happened with 20/20 hindsight.

  Dave told his side of the story at the Laundry Room, the modest Seattle recording studio he co-owns with his old friend and drum tech Barrett Jones. Sitting on the floor amid instruments, amps, and cables, he wore a K Records button on his button-down shirt and wolfed down a toxic meal from the nearby 7-Eleven. Dave is articulate, poised well beyond his twenty-four years. He is extremely self-possessed; he harbors no delusions of grandeur, nor will he sell himself short. “He’s the most well-adjusted boy I know,” Kurt is fond of saying.

  Dave is the least visible of the three—after all, he’s not six foot seven like Chris and he’s not the frontman like Kurt. Like Chris, he goes to shows in Seattle all the time, and can be found standing in the crowd just like everyone else. He’s in an ideal position and he knows it—he’s in one of the most successful rock bands on the planet, yet he can go out on the town for the evening and count the number of people who even recognize him on one hand.

  “Chris has a heart of gold,” says a family friend. “He is a good soul.” Chris speaks slowly, cautiously, and although he’s not a book-learned intellectual type, he’s a genius of horse sense, always ready with plain-spoken perceptions that cut through the bullshit. A self-described “news junkie,” he is deeply concerned and deeply knowledgeable about the situation in what was once Yugoslavia, where his family comes from.

  He and his gracious and levelheaded wife Shelli own a modest house in Seattle’s quiet, suburban University District. It’s a communal sort of place—his sister Diana lives with them, as does tour manager Alex Macleod, a bright, pony-tailed Scot so loyal he’d probably step in front of a bullet for any member of the band. Chris’s brother Robert stops by all the time. Early in March, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore stay there while they’re in town to finish up a world tour. Gordon, Moore, and Mudhoney’s Mark Arm stop by after a day of buying records, one of which is an old Benny Goodman 78. As “Royal Garden Blues” emerges from the crackles and hisses of his old Victrola, Chris jokes to Moore, “Yeah, man, low-fi. This is what our new record sounds like!”