Come As You Are Page 10

  “We totally sucked,” says Kurt. “We fucked it up.”

  Foster lasted only a few months. “He was a really straight guy but I think we really intimidated him because we were just weird,” says Chris. “He’d just never seen anything like us before. We were just total counterculture people.”

  “I think they were the ones who were uncomfortable, being around what they thought was probably a redneck or something, I don’t know. When all my friends came around, I think that made them uncomfortable. Because they weren’t the type of people they hung out with,” says Foster. “Everybody’s got their own little clique, I guess.”

  “He also had a problem,” says Chris. “He had to go to anger counseling. He’d get in fights and beat the hell out of people. One time we saw him and he was with this friend in his trick truck and the guy spat on his truck and he kicked the guy in the head.”

  Dave Foster’s particular last straw came up when he found out his girlfriend was cheating on him. So he did the manly thing and went out and beat the hell out of the guy she was cheating with. Unfortunately for Foster, his victim happened to be the son of the mayor of nearby Cosmopolis. Foster got a one-year sentence but wound up serving two weeks in jail and getting his license revoked, which meant that he couldn’t get up from Aberdeen to Tacoma to rehearse with Kurt and Chris.

  Once he got out of jail, Foster would call Kurt, asking when he could come up and start practicing again. Kurt said they were writing new material and would get back to him. What he didn’t say was they’d been rehearsing with Aaron Burckhard again, using Foster’s drums.

  But Burckhard’s days in the band were numbered, too. One night after practice, Kurt and Burckhard were drinking at Burckhard’s father’s trailer home in Spanaway. Burckhard told Kurt he was going to get some more beer and borrowed Kurt’s car. But instead of going to the package store, Burckhard hit the taverns instead. After two hours of drinking with his buddies, he left to go back to the trailer and was pulled over on a DWI charge by a black policeman who happened to be named Springsteen. Burckhard started drunkenly calling out “Hey, Bruce! What’s up, Bruce!” and just generally giving the cop “a rash of shit.” Officer Springsteen threw the book at him. Kurt’s car got impounded.

  Since Burckhard’s trailer didn’t have a phone, Chris got the call to get Burckhard out of jail. Chris says Burckhard had called the cop a “fucking nigger,” which is really why he got the book thrown at him. “It was just really embarrassing for me to go get him,” he says.

  “I might have said a few things,” Burckhard admits, “but I have the right to remain silent.”

  Kurt says he called Burckhard the next day and asked him to come to practice. Burckhard said he was too hung over to play and Kurt simply hung up the phone. Burckhard was out of the band for good.

  “I loved playing with them guys,” says Burckhard. “But I was young and stupid and kind of got carried away, you know?”

  If Burckhard hadn’t gone to the taverns that night, he might be a millionaire right now. “Yeah,” he says. “But it’s like playing the Lotto—you can get five numbers and not the sixth and you’re like, ‘God, one more number!’ I don’t regret a thing. I’ll be like—what’s that guy from the Beatles?’ ”

  Nowadays, the Pete Best of Nirvana collects unemployment checks, having been laid off from his job insulating houses. He also plays in a speed-metal band called Attica, which boasts tunes such as “Fuck Blister” and “Drunken Hell Thrash.” Burckhard recently spent three days in jail because he didn’t pay a fine for driving while his license was revoked—apparently, he never did get his license back after that fateful DWI with Officer Springsteen.

  Foster still thought he was in the band. Then one day early that summer, he picked up a copy of the Seattle Rocket to see if there were any good shows coming up. It said that Nirvana was playing a place in Seattle called Squid Row that very night. Foster called Kurt’s house, and Tracy gave him some story. Then he called Chris’s and his roommate accidentally spilled the beans. They had another drummer.

  “I was so fuckin’ pissed,” says Foster. “It was just like if you caught your girlfriend in bed with someone else.” Recall what happened last time Foster felt like that.

  Foster was upset for a long time, particularly when he heard that Nirvana had opened for the Butthole Surfers. “Now that that other shit’s happened it’s even worse,” Foster says. But he’s philosophical about it. “They did what they thought best, I guess,” he says. “I do wish things were different—all I ever wanted to do was play drums for a living.”

  “He was such a mainstream type of guy,” says Chris. “I think we really intimidated him. We’d make him nervous and his beats would be off.” “I wasn’t uncomfortable at all,” says Foster. “It seemed like they were the ones who were uncomfortable. It didn’t bother me a bit.”

  “And he came from a stable family,” Chris half jokes.

  The drummer at Squid Row that night was Chad Channing, a small, pixieish fellow who sounds a little bit like Elroy from “The Jetsons.” “He’s an elf,” says Kurt. “He should be in the Keebler factory. He’s also one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.” Channing lived on Bainbridge Island, an affluent suburb a ferry ride away from Seattle, across Puget Sound. Like Kurt, Chad had also been hyperactive and been given Ritalin. And like Kurt and Chris, his parents were separated, although not divorced.

  Chad Channing was born on January 31, 1967, in Santa Rosa, California, to Burnyce and Wayne Channing. Wayne was a radio disc jockey and was forever moving to different jobs all over the country, from California to Minnesota to Hawaii to Alaska to Idaho and back. “Our motto was ‘Move every six months,’ ” says Chad. “So whatever friends I made, wherever I went, I knew they were just temporary. Everything was just temporary. So that was kind of weird. You don’t really hang out with many people because why make a friend if you’re not going to be around—you’re just going to be gone.”

  Chad had hoped to be a soccer player but when he was thirteen he shattered his thigh bone in a freak gym accident. It took almost seven years of rehabilitation and surgery for him to fully recover. In the meantime, he discovered music and picked up the drums, guitar, and a few other instruments.

  Like Kurt, Chad dropped out of high school during his senior year. He’d lost so much schooling from being in the hospital that he would have had to go through months of summer school and night school to get his diploma. He wanted to be a musician and didn’t see the sense of it. When he met Kurt and Chris, he was a saute cook at a seafood restaurant on Bainbridge Island. By night, he partied with his friends, smoking pot, drinking, and doing the potent local acid, which many swear has fried the brains of an entire generation of Bainbridge Islanders.

  When Chad first heard of Kurt and Chris’s band, they were called Bliss. Bliss shared a show with Chad’s band Tick-Dolly-Row (a sailor’s term for “down and out”) which featured lead singer Ben Shepherd, who went on to play guitar in Soundgarden. Kurt and Chris noticed Chad’s North drum kit—which was made of fiberglass and had unique, flared shells. “They noticed my North kit,” says Chad. “It was kind of loud and that’s what they hit on there. I remember Kurt telling me a long time ago when they were first checking us out, ‘God, man, I wish we could get that guy! Look at those drums! Those are the weirdest things I’ve ever fuckin’ seen!’ ”

  Kurt and Chris briefly considered asking Tad Doyle to be their drummer, then took out an ad in the Rocket: “Heavy, light punk rock band: Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers. Seeks drummer.” Kurt got a bunch of lackluster responses, but in the meantime, their mutual friend Damon Romero introduced Kurt and Chris to Chad at Malfunkshun’s farewell show at the Community World Theater. They talked for a bit and agreed to jam soon at Chris’s house. Chad liked the band, but he wasn’t sure. Then he saw the band play a show at Evergreen and they talked some more and agreed to jam again. “I just kept on coming over and jamming,” says
Chad. “They never actually said, ‘Okay, you’re in.’ ”

  Kurt and Chris built a rehearsal studio in Chris’s basement from old mattresses, carpet they got at the Goodwill store, egg cartons that Shelli and Tracy brought home from work, and scrap wood they pinched from construction sites. It was still pretty loud and the neighbors would complain, so they couldn’t practice late. One day Chris and Shelli’s pet rabbit got out of its cage and chewed through the extension cord that ran down to the basement. The band had to suspend rehearsals for a week until they could get up enough money for a new cord.

  After making Chad strip down his mammoth kit just like Dave Foster did, they rehearsed material from the Crover tape as well as new material such as “Big Cheese” and “School.” They wrote as a band, with Kurt playing a riff and the other two joining in. They began rehearsing at least two or three times a week and a batch of new songs came together very quickly.

  In early May, they played their first show with Chad at the Vogue. Chris sported enormous mutton chop sideburns, while Chad and Kurt’s hair hung in long greasy curtains over their eyes. Poneman got them a gig at the Central Tavern in Seattle on a Saturday afternoon at some benefit show. Nobody was in the club at their scheduled six o’clock set time, so they just packed up their gear and drove back to Tacoma. They soon played another show at the Central, opening for Chemistry Set and Leaving Trains. Not many people were there, either.

  The first article ever written about the band, by Dawn Anderson, editor of the free Seattle music paper Backlash, noted that the band seemed nervous when playing live. In the piece, Kurt confided, “Our biggest fear at the beginning was that people might think we were a Melvins rip-off,” but Anderson bravely ventured that “with enough practice, Nirvana could become … better than the Melvins!”

  The Seattle scene was really starting to bloom around then, with bands such as Skin Yard, the Fluid, Blood Circus, Swallow, TAD and Mudhoney playing the Vogue, the Underground, the Central, the Alamo. Mother Love Bone was gearing up, but the guys in Soundgarden were then the kings of the scene—miraculously, they had just gotten signed to A&M, a full-fledged major label.

  On June 11, 1988, only a month or two after Chad joined, they did the main session for their first single, “Love Buzz.”

  “Love Buzz”—a cover tune, after all—may not have been Kurt’s first choice for the band’s first single, but he eventually came around. It was an accessible, easy-to-listen-to pop song that had become a live favorite of both the crowd and Kurt, who got to run around the stage during the song’s extended guitar solo section. They liked the idea of recording a new track instead of rerecording something off the Crover demo. Besides, Kurt had started getting into primitive-sounding, garage-influenced bands like the Sonics, a legendary Northwest band from the early sixties, and Mudhoney, and had begun to abandon the Byzantine arrangements he had favored on the Crover demo. Even though he didn’t write it, “Love Buzz,” a stripped-down pop song, fit perfectly with the direction Kurt wanted to go.

  Around this time, Kurt hand-wrote a bio of the band, presumably aimed at prospective record labels, with a few facts distorted to make the band seem a little more established than it really was. “NIRVANA is a three piece from the outskirts of Seattle WA. Kurdt—guitar/voice and Chris—bass have struggled with too many undedicated drummers for the past 3 years [sic] … For the last 9 [sic] months we have had the pleasure to take Chad—drums under our wings and develop what we are now and always will be NIRVANA.

  “Willing to compromise on material (some of this shit is pretty old),” the bio concluded. “Tour any time forever. Hopefully the music will speak for itself.”

  Realizing that Sub Pop favored straight-ahead rock in the Stooges/Aerosmith vein, they recorded what little material they had that fit that style, instead of the more bizarre Scratch Acid-type songs they had been playing. Kurt regrets the decision now. “I wish we’d have put ‘Hairspray Queen’ or something,” he says. “But the idea of going into the studio again, instead of using what we had on the demo already, was enough of a challenge.”

  Everybody was very excited about putting out their first record. Still, a pattern was already emerging. “For me, recording always went weird,” says Chad. “I was there, I did my job, and that was it. I didn’t really have any say about how this or that should sound. I might as well have gone up there, did my thing, and then gone out and get a candy bar or something. I’d bang on the drums, get the drum sound down and stuff like that, and then I’d just kick back and wait until they got the bass and guitar sounds and we’d do the song and that was kind of it. The rest of the time, I’d spend listening to see what they did with it. Kurt and Chris were like ‘Let’s do this and let’s do that.’ I would have had things to say, but I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right or something like that. I really had nothing to say or do.”

  Sub Pop didn’t sign its bands to contracts back then. It wasn’t done. Poneman simply told Nirvana that he liked that Shocking Blue cover they did, and would they like to do a single? At first, they held out to do their own song, but eventually relented. They recorded for five hours and ended up with several finished songs, including “Love Buzz,” “Big Cheese,” another stab at “Spank Thru,” and “Blandest.” It was Chad’s first session. He wasn’t hitting very hard then, but he’d come around.

  “Blandest” was going to be the flipside. The song is indeed not nearly as remarkable as what made it to the single, but the track does feature a fairly embarrassing Robert Plant-like falsetto wail toward the end by Kurt. As Endino recalls, the song’s title seemed all too fitting, so he convinced Kurt to use “Big Cheese.” They returned for more work on June 30 and mixed it all on July 16. Poneman didn’t like the vocals on the first mix, so Kurt rerecorded them, although Endino says even he was hard pressed to hear the difference.

  Kurt remembers feeling that “Love Buzz” was sounding too lightweight. They blamed Chad, whom they felt was not as good or as hard-hitting a drummer as Dale Crover. “We just couldn’t get a good sound out of it,” says Kurt. “It sounded really clean and just didn’t have any low end. I think it’s the wimpiest recording we’ve ever done.”

  The intro to “Love Buzz,” a forty-five-second sound collage Kurt made from various children’s records, was trimmed at Pavitt’s request down to ten seconds. It appears only on the original seven-inch single. “They were just constantly having control right away,” says Kurt. “Doing exactly what a major label would do and claiming to be such an independent label.”

  In September, Shelli broke up with Chris. The strain of Shelli’s working the graveyard shift at the Boeing cafeteria and Chris’s playing with the band got to be too much. She had just turned twenty-one and had never been alone. They decided to live separately. They broke up but saw each other often. They missed each other and were depressed.

  As avid students of the indie-rock game, Pavitt and Poneman knew that American artists from Jimi Hendrix to Blondie had established a buzz in the U.K. before anyone in their native country noticed them. So they took the huge financial gamble of flying in a music journalist, Melody Maker’s Everett True, all the way from England to check out a few Sub Pop bands. True raved about the Seattle scene in a series of articles, and soon U.S. press and labels were foaming at the mouth, too.

  Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff EP stayed on the U.K. indie charts for a year, almost unheard of for an American release. Three months later, ultra-influential Radio One DJ John Peel raved about the Sub Pop 200 box set and basically said it was a testament to regional music not seen since Detroit’s Motown label conquered the world in the mid-sixties.

  The Brits went ga-ga over the Seattle scene. “The reason they picked it up was there was a regional identity and flavor to what we were doing,” says Bruce Pavitt. “The history of rock music is broken down that way—it comes down to labels or scenes. We understood that from the beginning. Look at the cast of characters—that’s how you create a soap opera that people come back into.
So all of a sudden, people knew who Mark Arm was, Kurt, Tad, me, and Jon, Jack Endino, Peterson. We tried to introduce in our own way, these celebrities. Like our singles, the only thing that would be on the back was ‘Recorded by Jack Endino’ and ‘Photo by Charles Peterson.’ And after you get ten singles like that, with no information other than that, you’re going, ‘Who’s Charles Peterson? Who’s Jack Endino?’ ”

  On September 27, Nirvana and Endino mixed “Spank Thru” for the Sub Pop 200 compilation. A seminal sonic document, the collection also featured tracks by Soundgarden, TAD, Mudhoney, Beat Happening, and Screaming Trees. The tracks could easily have fit onto two LP’s, but Pavitt and Poneman, who always said yes to another excess, decided to release it as a three-EP set with an extensive sixteen-page booklet of photos by Charles Peterson, limited to five thousand copies.

  Meanwhile, Kurt and Poneman exchanged countless phone calls, trying to hash out the particulars of the single. So much time elapsed between the time that Poneman agreed to do a single and when it actually came out that Kurt and Chris began to become very suspicious of the deal. Kurt would call and ask about the single and Poneman would promise the record would come out soon. Five months later, Pavitt called up wondering if Sub Pop could borrow two hundred dollars to press the single. Kurt hung up on him and sent out another batch of demo tapes to the various labels. The single came out soon afterward, in November of 1988.

  An early Sub Pop catalogue touted the “Love Buzz”/“Big Cheese” single as “Heavy pop sludge from these untamed Olympia drop-ins.” It was the first Sub Pop Single of the Month, a clever scheme in which Sub Pop commanded exhorbitant prices for limited edition singles for which subscribers paid in advance—“We’re ripping you off big time,” the Sub Pop catalogue boasted. Only one thousand hand-numbered copies of the “Love Buzz” single were made. “We were really burned about that,” Chris recalls. “We put a single out and nobody can buy it.”