27: Kurt Cobain by Chris Salewicz Read Free Book Online Page A

not play with them ever again. In the audience was someone Buzz Osbourne had brought along – Dave Grohl. Grohl was legendary for the power with which he hit drums and for his across-the-kit attack in the group Scream, a Virginia hardcore outfit.
    Dave Grohl had been born in Warren, Ohio, on 14 January 1969. At the age of twelve he had begun to play guitar. When he formed a punk band, Freak Baby, Dave became so dispirited by the ineffectual drummer he decided he could do better on the kit himself. At sixteen, Dave discovered Led Zeppelin and – specifically – the drumming of John Bonham.
    Kurt and Krist had been in San Francisco and, hearing Scream had a great drummer, had gone to see them play there. Twenty days after the Motor Sports International Garage concert, Dave drummed for the first time with Nirvana at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia. ‘We knew in two minutes that he was the right drummer,’ said Krist.
    Almost immediately afterwards they were off to the UK for a five-date sell-out tour. ‘It looks like it’s gonna be pretty easy to find a big deal, we’ve just got to try to keep from being fucked,’ Kurt told Liz Evans for
Raw
magazine in England. Clearly he was utterly aware of Nirvana’s position and his group’s emerging potential. ‘It’s a hard problem,’ he agreed. ‘Because we feel that we’re diverse and accessible enough to try to infiltrate into more than just one market. We feel we can appeal to more than just the Metal or the Alternative Rock market. We want to try to be mainstream too. We want to reach the Top 40. Even if the whole of the next album can’t get across to that type of audience there’s at least a hit single or two in there.
    â€˜Our next album is going to be so diverse that we really have no choice but to cross over. We can’t be classified into this simple heavy Grunge Rock category anymore. We’ve moved a long way on from there.’
    Back in Seattle, Kurt and Krist were flown down to LA by MCA Records for an unfruitful meeting with label executives. Meeting up with Sonic Youth, who happened to be in the city, Nirvana were urged by these alternative standard-bearers to check out their own management, Gold Mountain, and to sign with Geffen Records – Sonic Youth were on the label’s DGC imprint.
    In Olympia Dave Grohl moved in with Kurt, who had been living on his own and seemed in an increasing state of isolation, especially as he and Tobi were hardly seeing each other. Now, however, Dave started going out with Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hannah, and Kurt and Tobi would often be with them. At Kurt’s house one night, Kathleen Hannah added a piece of graffiti to a wall in the apartment shared by the two Nirvana musicians: ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit,’ a reference to the Teen Spirit deodorant that Tobi used. By November, however, Tobi had dumped Kurt, which he did not take well. He retreated into himself again, often seeming to seethe with rage, his mental state exacerbating his permanent stomach pains.
    But the breakup was positive for his art. In subsequent months he wrote a string of his best songs, all of them about Tobi, including ‘Aneurysm’, ‘Drain You’, ‘Lounge Act’ and – most significantly, of course – ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. He also introduced a new personality into the writings in his journal: her name was spelt ‘heroine’. This wilfully coy use of the word heroin – as though by so archly misspelling it, he removed the danger – perhaps concealed his true feelings about, or fear of, females. He promised Tracy, with whom he had had something of a reconciliation, that he only would do the drug occasionally.
    When Kurt signed a publishing deal with Virgin, his first payment came as a $3,000 cheque. He spent $1,000 at Toys R Us, his purchases including a couple of air rifles, with which he shot out the