Author: Spitz, Marc
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Love was a dangerous angel indeed.
Even network television was no longer whitewashed of all its kinks and jagged edges. In the spring of 1990, ABC, then still one of the “big three” networks, debuted David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks (Trojan horse: a high school murder mystery set in a small, insular, Pacific Northwest logging and mill town). Homecoming queen Laura Palmer’s body turned up, blue and “wrapped in plastic,” and with it came an entirely new prime-time aesthetic. From the unpredictable pacing and earnest, almost camp performances (anchored by Kyle MacLachlan’s special agent Dale Cooper) to Angelo Badalamenti’s at times histrionic, other times beatnik score to the unapologetic quirk of its locals (no faceless extras here) to the implication that behind the varsity and club-lounge facade lay a horrible and secret darkness, Twin Peaks took elements of storytelling that were usually the province of cult films (like Lynch’s Blue Velvet) to the mainstream.
“It was the first time I had the experience of being totally speechless while watching a television show,” writer-director Alan Ball told me in 2010. “It really influenced me. There’d be no Six Feet Under or True Blood without it, I would say. And the fact that they got it onto a major network is still an amazing feat.”
So there was no longer a question of when the Big Twee aesthetic was going to blow up. It already had. It took Nirvana to let the world know that the damage was already done.
Kurt Cobain grew up loving the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Kiss, and Black Sabbath. As with the Smiths, there are a multitude of worthy Nirvana histories, including excellent ones by Michael Azerrad and former Rocket editor in chief Charles R. Cross. I won’t condense the saga here. It is worth absorbing it in full on your own. I am here to demonstrate how someone with a working knowledge of Punk and an appreciation of power chords became a Twee Tribe icon.
“Kurt Cobain came to town loving Scratch Acid and the Melvins, and discovered Leadbelly and the Vaselines by becoming a participant in the Olympia scene,” says Slim Moon, a friend and neighbor of Cobain’s in Olympia when Nirvana left Aberdeen for good in 1988. Hailing from Edinburgh, the Vaselines were a duo (Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee) who married the Buzzcocks’ simple, fast, pure pop with an even more arch sense of camp. (One of their most popular tracks was a cover of three-hundred-pound drag queen Divine’s disco novelty song “You Think You’re a Man.”)
“It was part of what happens in a scene like that,” Moon says. “Everybody plays each other music they love. There is a thing of community standards. You sort of lean on people: ‘Well, if you don’t like this, you’re not cool.’ Mostly it’s joyful and organic. People just hang around and make mix tapes for each other. ‘Oh, you have to hear this.’”
A romance with another Olympia resident, Tobi Vail—bandmate of Calvin Johnson in one of his many offshoot bands, the Go Team—set Cobain even farther apart from his Aberdeeners. Vail would go on to cowrite The Riot Grrrl Manifesto, a declaration of independence from the sexism and limitations of established and corporation-fortified culture. Proto–Riot Grrrl made Cobain feel guilty not simply because of his gender but also his honest love for Kiss, Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight, and the Knack’s Get the Knack, all of which were based on Beatlesque melodic pop melodies, not in-your-face screaming (even the “heavy” Kiss essentially wrote pop songs with massive hooks). Kurt was accomplished, a natural guitarist who was forced to pretend he was less gifted.
The lone pop song in Nirvana’s repertoire, “About a Girl,” composed after listening to Meet the Beatles for hours on end, was nearly hip-pocketed in favor of goofy but Olympia-approved Melvins’ sound-alikes like “Hairspray Queen” and “Big Cheese.” When it came time to record “About a Girl” for Nirvana’s Sub Pop debut Bleach, in-house producer Jack Endino observed just how self-conscious Cobain was over the catchy song. “He felt like he had to make an excuse for it,” Endino has said. “I hope the Sub Pop guys like it,” Cobain said, shrugging, resorting to what would soon be the institutionalized standby mode of his generation: irony.
Cobain’s famous envy of the Pixies (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” admittedly copped their patented loud-quiet-loud format) was not just musical. The Boston-based quartet had no such issues when it came to airing out their inner pop fan. The Pixies glided from the gothy and cred-correct UK label 4AD to the major Elektra with an almost blithe sense of entitlement, and therefore received no shit from their own college-town rock scene. When leader Black Francis placed a similarly unabashed pop song, “Here Comes Your Man,” on their major-label debut, 1989’s Doolittle, and released it as a single, it was a sign of their diversity and depth and not an act of an Indie apostate. The Pixies’ 1987 debut EP, Come on Pilgrim, contained a song, “I’ve Been Tired,” that satirizes collegiate self-righteousness viciously. “She’s a real left winger ’cause she’s been down south and held peasants in her arms,” Francis sings in a high-pitched, intentionally mocking voice.
Cobain, a high school dropout full of divorce-kid rage, couldn’t have shelved “About a Girl” if he’d wanted to. He knew this was just the beginning of a shift in his songwriting approach, and even as he played and partied in Olympia, he prepared himself for the inevitable: that he would be the Judas to make it all safe for the knuckleheads. His psyche was painfully split. Part of him was Kurt, who had a McCartney gift for melody and a Morrissey-like desire to throw fame and success in the faces of all those who had written him off. Another part was Kurdt, as he sometimes spelled his name: self-mocking and self-limiting.
Cobain’s behavior in his twenties seemed to be a cross between that of an arrested child acting out and a determined and ambitious music-business player.
“He appears to be an introvert and he appears to kind of not give a fuck—but he [also] puts in effort and energy to be in this incredible, top-notch, groundbreaking band. He signs to a label that has the resources to make him famous. He gets a super powerful management company,” says Moon. Nirvana had indeed signed with Gold Mountain, which also managed Indie darlings Sonic Youth. “He becomes a superstar, and then he puts his torment out there as his thing. He put it out there in the music and in interviews. Sure, the torment was real, but it was also a production. Axl Rose has his shtick, and Kurt Cobain has his shtick, and his shtick was his torment, and I’m not saying his torment wasn’t real, but that’s what he chose to have as his public persona.” Nirvana’s last single for Sub Pop, “Sliver,” “tells the traumas of a child away from his parents for the first time,” according to Cobain. “Mom and Dad go off somewhere and leave the kid with his grandparents and he gets confused.”
When the band recorded the follow-up to Bleach with uber-producer Butch Vig at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, the tracks that came together had sturdy melodies that were instantly memorable, like children’s songs: big choruses and melodic verses that Vig double-tracked to maximize the Beatlesque quality. “Everything I do is an overly conscious and neurotic attempt at trying to prove to others that I’m at least more intelligent and cool than they think,” Cobain said. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” named, as legend has it, after a quip by Riot Grrrl hero Kathleen Hanna concerning a deodorant aimed at the young-girl dollar, was yet another form of hedging on Cobain’s part; a sort of secret language aimed at the K Records crowd telegraphing, “I know this is commercial.” Roll eyes. Irony.
Cobain’s Twee bona fides come in part down to his physical appearance. He was never less than angelic. Those parfait-colored Elizabeth Peyton portraits of him, which make him look like a character in a children’s book, are not wide of the mark. He was portrayed in multiple magazine profiles as rock and roll’s own Little Prince figure, a regal man-child with yellow bed head and a sensitive, searching perspective on the bustle of the music business. He would greet reporters in pajamas. Rolling Stone’s Michael Azerrad observed, “Cobain lies flat on his back in striped pajamas, a red-painted big toenail peeking out the other end of the blanket and a couple of teddy bears lying beside him for company.” Y
et another scribe compares Kurt and his entourage to Christopher Robin and Pooh. Melody Maker’s cantankerous and outrageous Everett True, an early supporter, described him as a “cherub faced misfit.” There’s a scene toward the end of The Little Prince that reminds me of both Cobain’s appeal and the heartbreak that did him in. The boy spies commuters at a busy train station and questions the rush. “No one is ever satisfied with where he is . . . Only the children know what they are looking for.”
Cobain’s demons wouldn’t permit him to linger in such a state of childlike grace for very long. If you have to try to be childlike, you are doomed to fail anyway. As with Morrissey, the divorce of Cobain’s parents served notice that all was not bright and sweet in life, and he carried that around with him for the rest of his days. The suspicion and pain drew him out of Aberdeen, but by the time he found himself among worthy peers, he couldn’t shake it. “I think he was ashamed,” his mother told Rolling Stone at the height of her son’s fame. “And he became very inward—he just held everything. He became real shy. It just devastated him. I think he’s still suffering.”
Other profiles feature him tending his pets, smelly turtles and rabbits, or fondling his transparent Visible Man and Visible Woman models (which would later figure into Nirvana album art). Kurt was even still in touch with his childhood imaginary friend, Baba. Add to this a juvenile fascination with organs, sex, fluids (how many Nirvana lyrics mention them?); that he may have briefly once lived, like a Dungeons & Dragons troll, under a bridge; and that in “Something in the Way,” the string-driven ballad that closes Nevermind, you have a lost boy with animals as friends? Twee!
Once the Butch Vig tapes, featuring the monster drumming of new member Dave Grohl, got around, Cobain’s defection from Indie was a fait accompli, and soon the apologies started. In a published letter to Edinburgh pop-Punk group the Vaselines, one of his favorites and clear members of the deliberate-amateur society, he apologizes for his “business-like” tone in parts. Cobain was seeking permission to release recordings of what are now famous Nirvana cover versions of Vaselines songs like the joyful “Molly’s Lips” and “Son of a Gun.” Sonic Youth, the venerated New York noise-rock band, and to a lesser extent the Pixies, provided some cover as they set a precedent, but Cobain was too handsome and talented to remain an outsider. “Sonic Youth took us under their wing,” bassist Krist Novoselic told me in 2011, but Nirvana would not remain there long. With Nevermind recorded and ready for release, Nirvana supported Sonic Youth on a tour of Europe that was documented by filmmaker Dave Markey and later released as 1991: The Year Punk Broke. “That was the last of Nirvana just being this obscure band. The calm before the storm. The end of our innocence. Mere months later we were the biggest band in the world and we had to deal with that,” Novoselic said.
The next time Nirvana played in Europe they would be headlining massive venues, including the annual Reading and Leeds festivals. “I was traveling around Europe by myself for the first half of 1992,” says the writer Sarah Vowell. “Every time I’d get to a new city, there would be posters for Nirvana’s Nevermind tour plastered all around the train station. For the first time in my life I got to be culturally chauvinistic! They were huge! I bought a copy of Rolling Stone at the Utrecht train station and there was an article about Seattle and Scott McCaughey from the Young Fresh Fellows was quoted in it. A guy I had seen play at the Cat’s Paw, a crummy bar in Bozeman, Montana, was quoted in a magazine! By summer, I was marching to Nirvana’s sold-out Dublin show singing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ along with seemingly every kid in Ireland.”
As he became famous, Cobain was also reckoning with marriage, fatherhood, and drug addiction, as if any one of those wasn’t enough to shake his already fragile system. While Courtney Love is demonized by many, if anything more of her should have rubbed off on him. One listen to the vicious takedown of the K Records scene’s pomposity that is “Rock Star,” the closing track on Hole’s sophomore release Live Through This, and it’s clear that she possessed the better weaponry of the two. “We look the same, we talk the same. We even fuck the same,” Love sang, mocking the cult of Calvin Johnson with a send-up worthy of Dorothy Parker.
Maybe it was the heroin—a drug that pumps up, for a time anyway, a sense of “why can’t we all get along . . . life is beautiful . . .”—that left him soft. For all the larynx-scraping vocals, Cobain was an old softy. “Seasons in the Sun,” Terry Jacks’s sappy, mellow 1974 hit, made him cry. The tragedy of Cobain’s drug use is that it compromised his rage. Nirvana had great rage. Their name was an assault on the boomer generation’s hubris and easy idealism, which the boomers had thrown under the bus en masse once they hit their thirties and started wanting bigger decks and longer vacations. The Nevermind buzz saw “Territorial Pissings” opens with Novoselic intoning the old Youngbloods lyrics: “Come on people now / Smile on your brother / Everybody get together / Try to love one another rightttttt nowwwwww . . .”
Heroin was not a hippie drug, which is part of why it found such favor as the boomers ceded their culture power to the Xers. Nirvana smashing up their equipment was, at its core, another healthy and cathartic outlet for the good rage. Once it became shtick and everyone and their brother was watching, Cobain grew self-conscious and sedentary. Robbed of this release, he did more and more dope.
His marriage and parenthood was a fuck-you to the boomers as well. When he hooked up with Love, they almost immediately began nesting. Love’s own parents were boomer nightmares, her father a Grateful Dead flunkie.
“I wouldn’t wear a tie-dyed T-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia,” Cobain once quipped. Only there didn’t seem to be any glee in that statement, and during the course of the interview, Love calls him out for having planned that line.
Cobain never once seemed to take a moment to be proud or to enjoy his success. He doesn’t even look like he’s enjoying wearing a giant yellow prom dress on MTV’s Headbangers Ball. It seems like some kind of duty, yet another token mea culpa for Olympia. “I think he was a constant ball of stress and pressure from the get-go once his band hit the super mainstream,” says director Dave Markey. “In my film you see him smiling and having a good time on that tour in the summer of 1991. He was just a member of Nirvana. He wasn’t the tortured artist and the media figure that he became, MTV’s spokesman of a generation.”
Kurt Cobain cherished Beat Happening’s Jamboree. He even had the K Records shield tattooed on the top of his left forearm. When asked why, he told a reporter it was to “remind [him] to stay a child.” What makes the rise of Nirvana both Twee culture’s greatest triumph and biggest tragedy is Cobain’s inability to accept that he was really never meant to remain Indie. He was simply too ambitious, too talented, and, with his humble origins in the tiny harborside city of Aberdeen, over a hundred miles from Seattle, too much of an outsider to ever remain very comfortable once he found his way in. Whether the suspicion that his actions came to be regarded with was actual or a by-product of his deep insecurity and drug-induced paranoia doesn’t matter; he lacked the defenses to process it all, and it did him in. Part of him must have hated Olympia. Part of him would have taken them all with him if he could. There were no half measures with Calvin Johnson and his scene. While the K Records founder personally liked Cobain, and acknowledged that his band wrote great songs once they left Sub Pop for Geffen Records, they were part of the problem. “If a band that is operating on an independent level becomes really popular, there’s really no difference between them and Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. They’re just another band on a major label. It doesn’t affect the underground. The underground is always going to be doing its own weird thing,” Johnson says. It’s kind of like the scene in Goodfellas where Paulie, the boss, hands the beleaguered Henry Hill a bankroll and says, “Now I’m gonna have to turn my back on you.” It’s not that Nirvana was no longer respected as musicians. It’s the fact that they were slagged by Olympia after they became the bi
ggest band in the world that so troubled Cobain; it’s that they no longer counted to the people who mattered most to him.
Billy Corgan, of Smashing Pumpkins, arguably as talented a songwriter as Cobain and, fortunately for him, coated with an extra layer of Teflon, issued a sort of preemptive strike against the Indie scene with “Cherub Rock,” the scene-scathing lead track off the Chicago quartet’s major-label debut, Siamese Dream. So when Pixies and Nirvana producer Steve Albini dismissed them as careerists (actually, “pandering sluts” was the phrase he used in a letter to the Chicago Reader, printed in January of ’94), it was actually only a rebuttal.
When people turned to him to actually hear what this generational spokesperson had to say, more often than not Cobain deflected attention to other, less popular bands. Nirvana didn’t tour with their label mates once they started playing major venues, but took Japanese cute-core band Shonen Knife out instead. They did a split single with the Jesus Lizard. Cobain name-checked the Vaselines in the press, calling Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee “the Lennon and McCartney of the underworld.” They covered three Meat Puppets songs at their MTV Unplugged taping and brought the Meat Puppets out to play them. Even Daniel Johnston, the mentally ill singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, was offered a major-label deal with Elektra (the Pixies’ label) thanks in part to Cobain wearing a promotional T-shirt for his Hi, How Are You album in press photos. Alas, Johnston ultimately declined the offer, as he feared that Elektra act Metallica was in cahoots with Satan and was going to kill him. (He would sign with Atlantic instead.)
“Kurt felt he had to compensate by saying, ‘No, I’m into the Raincoats,’ whenever he was asked. He existed in a realm very far outside the small music scene we started, so it became more important to assert the things he asserted,” says Nils Bernstein, a friend and onetime publicist for Sub Pop. “You don’t have to assert that you like the Raincoats when you’re sitting around my house listening to the Raincoats. But when you’re talking to a bunch of asshole frat guys that are fighting in your audience in an arena, then it becomes really important to talk about the Raincoats.”