 I went to the Rough Trade shop, and, of course, found no Raincoats record in the bin. I then asked the woman behind the counter about it and she said "well, it happens that I'm neighbors with Anna (member of the Raincoats) and she works at an antique shop just a few miles from here." So she drew me a map and I started on my way to Anna's. Sometime late, I arrived at this elfin shop filled with something else I've compulsively searched for over the past few years - really old fucked up marionette-like wood carved dolls (quite a few hundred years old) Lots of them... I've fantasized about finding a shop filled with so many. They wouldn't accept my credit card but the dolls were really way too expensive anyway. Anna was there, however, so I politely introduced myself with a fever-red face and explained the reason for my intrusion. I can remember her mean boss almost setting me on fire with his glares. She said "well, I may have a few lying around so, if I find one, I'll send it to you (very polite, very English)" I left feeling like a dork, like I had violated her space, like she probably though my band was tacky. A few weeks later I received a vinyl copy of that wonderfully classic scripture with a personalized dust sleeve covered with xeroxed lyrics, pictures, and all the members' signatures. There was also a touching letter from Anna. It made me happier than playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolization from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass, and the million dollars I made last year. It was one of the few really important things that I've been blessed with since becoming an untouchable boy genius. It was as rewarding as touring with Shonen Knife and watching people practically cry with joy at their honesty. It made people happy and it made me happy knowing that I had helped bring them to the U.K. It was as rewarding as the last Vaselines show in Edinburgh. They reformed just to play with us in their home town, probably having no idea how exciting and flattering it was for us (and how nervous we were to meet them) It was as rewarding as being asked to support Sonic Youth on two tours, totally being taken under their wing and being showed what dignity really means. It was as rewarding as the drawings Daniel Johnston sent me, or the Stinky Puffs single from Jad Fair's son, or playing on the same bill as Greg Sage in L.A., or being asked to produce the next Melvins record, or being on the Wipers' compilation, or Thor from T.K. giving me a signed first edition of Naked Lunch, or making a friend like Stephen Pavlovic - our Australian tour promoter who sent me a Mazzy Star LP on vinyl, or playing "The Money Will Roll Right In" with Mudhoney, or having the power to insist on bringing Bjorn Again to the Reading Festival, or being able to afford to bring my friend Ian along on tour just to have a good time, or paying Calamity Jane five-thousand dollars to be heckled by twenty thousand macho boys in Argentina, or asking my friends Fits of Depression to play with us at the Seattle Coliseum, or playing with Poison Idea at a No On Nine benefit in Portland organized by Gus Van Zandt, or being a part of one of L7's pro-choice benefits in L.A., or kissing Chris and Dave on Saturday Night Live just to spite homophobes, or meeting Iggy Pop, or playing with The Breeders, Urge Overkill, The T.V. Personalities, The Jesus Lizard, Hole, Dinosaur Jr. etc. While all these things were very special, none were half as rewarding as having a baby with a person who is the supreme example of dignity, ethics, and honesty. Did you find it disheartening that you'd started this band and you were playing these great songs when suddenly, all this weird stuff started happening in the media? Oh yeah, it affected me to the point of wanting to break up the band all the time. Was it mainly the Vanity Fair article? [they insinuated that Courtney was on heroin during her pregnancy] That started it. There were probably 50 more articles based on that story. I'd never paid attention to the mainstream press or media before, so I wasn't aware of people being attacked and crucified on that level. I can't help but feel that we've been scapegoated, in a way. I have a lot of animosity towards journalists and the press in general. Because it's happening to me, of course, I'm probably exaggerating it, but I can't think of another example of a current band that's had more negative articles written about them. A lot of it is just simple sexism. Courtney is my wife, and people could not accept the fact that I'm in love, and that I could be happy. Because she's such a powerful person, and such a threatening person, every sexist within the industry just joined forces and decided to just string us up. I've never read an article that was more convincing yet more ridiculous in my life. Everybody from our record label to our management to our closest friends believed that shit. She did a really good job of taking a piece of what Courtney had said and turning it into something completely different. I've seen that happen before - it's happened with me a lot of times - but this was such an extreme and done so well that I have to give her credit. She's a master at being catty. Courtney was honest about the heroin excursion we went on for a few months. Then Courtney found herself pregnant, realized she was pregnant and had a drug problem, and got off drugs. It's as simple as that. But it made it look like eight months after the fact, Courtney was still nine months pregnant and still doing drugs and everyone was really concerned. Like there was some awful den of iniquity going on in our apartment. I looked really skinny. Well, I am a skinny person, and I gain ten pounds every time I'm photographed, so people assume I'm this chunky, normal weight person. I'm just so tired of talking about this. We have to live with the results of this one article every fucking day. It's something we have to deal with all the time. How did you feel when you read it? I was totally pissed off. My first thoughts were to have her fucking snuffed out. I wanted to personally beat the shit out of her, and I've never wanted to do that to anybody, especially a woman. But I just had so much anger in me. It was done so well. We were just helpless to combat something like that. We've had to do fluff pieces to try to fight this thing. It's embarrassing to have to do that: to pose with your family on the cover of a magazine, to hope that some people at least question the validity of [Vanity Fair]  As Kurt Cobain walks into the living room of his rented house, he's made an odd choice in clothing. The most important new voice in American rock in years is wearing a black thigh-length thrift-store dress over flannel long johns. "Wearing a dress shows I can be as feminine as I want" he says, in a jab at the macho undercurrents that he detests in rock. "I'm a heterosexual... big deal. But if I was a homosexual, it wouldn't matter either" I used to pretend I was gay just to fuck with people. I've had the reputation of being a homosexual ever since I was 14. It was really cool, because I found a couple of gay friends in Aberdeen - which is almost impossible. How I could ever come across a gay person in Aberdeen is amazing! But I had some really good friends that way. I got beat up a lot, of course, because of my association with them. People just thought I was weird at first, just some fucked-up kid. But once I got the gay tag, it gave me the freedom to be able to be a freak and let people know that they should just stay away from me. Instead of having to explain to someone that they should just stay the fuck away from me - I'm gay, so I can't even be touched. It made for quite a few scary experiences in alleys walking home from school, though. That was a lot of fun. The funniest thing about that was not actually the act but the next morning. I'd get up early in the morning to walk through the neighborhood that I'd terrorized to see the aftermath. That was the worst thing I could have spray-painted on their cars. Nothing else would have been more effective. Was there an incident that really pushed the button that got you and the town at loggerheads, as it were? Well, what started the witch hunt was I decided to take some acid one evening and spray paint "queer" on the sides of four by four trucks, the local rednecks trucks. And so one of them saw me from his window and started chasing me and started screaming "There's the queer vandal!" I'd been doing it for a while. But that night I decided to really go for it and do a lot, a lot of vandalism. So they caught me and chased me around. And did they know who you were? No. Just that crazy skinny kid who never went to school. Who was probably gay. Are you? If I wasn't attracted to Courtney I'd be a bisexual. Courtney: Faggot! Kurt was my best friend not yours... Because people thought you were gay and you had gay friends, did you ever wonder if you might be gay? Yeah, absolutely. See I've always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl. Throughout my life, I've always been really close with girls and made friends with girls. And I've always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn't find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all. They had really awful haircuts and fucked-up attitudes. So I thought I would try to be gay for a while, but I'm just more sexually attracted to women. But I'm really glad that I found a few gay friends, because it totally saved me from becoming a monk or something. I mean, I'm definitely gay in spirit, and I probably could be bisexual. But I'm married, and I'm more attracted to Courtney than I ever have been toward a person, so there's no point in trying to sow my oats at this point [Laughs] If I wouldn't have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual life-style. But I just find her totally attractive in all ways. She has been described as a fag hag. Oh, she is. That was all she did for about five or six years of her life - hang out in gay clubs. She learned everything about perfume and fashion from her friends. When they appeared on Saturday Night Live, Cobain and Novoselic made a point of kissing on-camera. Prejudice infuriates him: he spits out the words "homophobe" and "sexist" with the same venom he reserves for the word "spandex" On the liner notes for Incesticide, he vented his frustration in a blunt statement to Nirvana fans: "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records" I read the liner notes you wrote on Incesticide. I've never seen somebody on a major label say "If you're a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, we don't want you to buy our records" That's been the biggest problem that I've had being in this band. I know there are those people out in the audience, and there's not much I can do about it. I can talk about those issues in interviews - I think it's pretty obvious that we're against the homophobes and the sexists and the racists, but when "Teen Spirit" first came out, mainstream audiences were under the assumption that we were just like Guns N' Roses. Then our opinions started showing up in interviews. And then things like Chris and I kissing on Saturday Night Live. We weren't trying to be subversive or punk rock; we were just doing something insane and stupid at the last minute. I think now that our opinions are out in the open, a lot of kids who bought our record regret knowing anything about us [Laughs] Punk expressed the way I felt socially and politically. There were so many things going on at once. It expressed the anger that I felt - the alienation. It also helped open my eyes to what I didn't like about metal bands like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin. While I really did enjoy, and still do enjoy, some of the melodies those bands have written, I suddenly realized I didn't like their sexist attitudes - the way that they just wrote about their d**** and having sex. That stuff bored me. It must be a very odd feeling for Nirvana to be performing in sports arenas these days. How do you get along with the crowds you're attracting now? Much better than I used to. When we first started to get successful, I was extremely judgemental of the people in the audience. I held each of them to a sort of punk rock ethos. It upset me that we were attracting and entertaining the very people that a lot of my music was a reaction against. I've since become much better at accepting people for who they are. Regardless of who they were before they came to the show, I get a few hours to try and subvert the way they view the world. It's not that I'm trying to dictate, it's just that I am afforded a certain platform on which I can express my views. At the very least, I always get the last word. Your first album, Bleach, was recorded for $600; how much did Nevermind run you? [laughs] I don't remember, I've got Alzheimers. Please don't ask us how much our video cost; that's a hell of an embarrassment. We definitely could have used some film student, who would've done just as good of a job. Our record-company bio is nothing but a huge lie. They wrote it up, but it was really lame - they called me at seven in the morning. In the end they just turned it over to us to write. So we made most of it up. Nirvana was formed in 1987. Kurt hooked up with Novoselic, and they worked their way toward 1989's Bleach, which was made in three days for $600 and crammed with nihilistic, punk-tinged melodic rock. The band toured, got a record deal with DGC, picked up drummer Grohl in 1990, toured in Europe with Sonic Youth, then put out Nevermind. After a short while, the fairy tale was not much about music anymore. Singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain, the talented enigma of the group, turned out to know exactly what the key to international publicity was: anything but normal behavior. Because of that, the tall tales about Nirvana piled up. Sometimes this was helped by Cobain, sometimes not - but the press quickly latched onto stories of his drug-addiction, his destructive nature, his unhappy youth; his marriage to also-heroin-addicted Courtney Love; allegations of her heroin use during pregnancy; his arrest for posession of illegal weaponry and his supposed tirades directed at the English people, which, as later became clear, were only directed at the British PRESS. Kurt has thoroughly confused his record company by using multiple choice in the spelling of his name: Kurdt, Curt, and Kurt; Cobain or Kobain. Real and imagined stories run rampant of tour bus curtains being lit on fire, drunken backstage debaucheries, Grohl giving out Chris Cornell's (actually Sub Pop's) phone number during an on-air interview, their road manager's being questioned in Pittsburgh because of a torched couch in the club, the band inviting hundreds of audience members onstage during a St. Louis show to escape the violent bouncers, and on and on. Nirvana opening for Dinosaur Jr. at the Crest in 1993 "We only had one dressing room at the time so we used to put opening acts in the basement. Kurt Cobain and other members of Nirvana found a can of green paint, opened it and poured some out. They put their feet in it and took running jumps into the wall to leave their foot marks" Pennyroyal Tea-All Apologies-Serve The Servants- In Bloom-Sliver-Son Of A Gun-Aneurysm [radio session]- Turnaround-Molly's Lips Heartshaped Box-Frances Farmer-Dumb- All Apologies-About A Girl-Love Buzz-Even In His Youth- Marigold-Breed-Smells Like Teen Spirit- Something In The Way-Moist-Come as UR the albums he and Nirvana made, and the concerts they performed, have been forgotten. but in his death they have become but a footnote to his sensationalistic obituary" Oh no I know a dirty word There is nothing I could say that I haven't thought before I love myself better than you I know it's wrong so what should I do I'm so happy cos today I found my friends they're in my head I'm so ugly that's ok cos so are you What else could I say everyone is gay |
