Author: Spitz, Marc
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Cobain’s self-consciousness converted, in the face of his knucklehead audience, to an equally joyless sense of duty, and at the end of a long day of campaigning for the causes he believed in—gay rights, women’s rights—who wouldn’t want to unwind with a bag of dope? “At this point I have a request for our fans,” Cobain wrote in the scathing liner notes to the post-Nevermind compilation Incestsicide. “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!”
Cobain, though physiologically more attuned to remain a little prince, was duty bound to become instead a real-life catcher in the rye, keeping the kids from going over the cliff as they ran with a kind of freedom he aspired to but could never quite keep.
When Nirvana played “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the UK’s Top of the Pops, eight years after the Smiths’ historic debut, Cobain, clad in shades, sang the song as a dour, histrionic crooning, supposedly in tribute to Morrissey. As with Mozzer, the Nirvana leader enjoyed a good cardigan (he is wearing one in the MTV Unplugged in New York session) and a requited love affair with the British press—which might have also resulted in his undoing. It seemed nobody, not even the most hardened British journos, wanted to take him to task. Too much was riding on his benevolence. Now, in the years before the brothers Gallagher and Damon Albarn, the British music press finally had a new figure, the first since Morrissey, who sold papers every single time he was on the cover. “My body wouldn’t allow me to take drugs if I wanted to, because I’m so weak all the time,” Cobain insisted. And yet he was telegraphing his addiction left and right, recording an album with William Burroughs and showing up for interviews pin-eyed only to be described as “shockingly thin.”
In today’s ultra-scrutinizing, 24/7 media cycle, Cobain would be hazed straight into rehab and no dealer with a sense of self-preservation would go within fifty paces of him. But at the time, he was wink-winked into what became a deep and ultimately fatal addiction. I’m not saying N.M.E. killed him. I have been on tour with bands and watched them ingest drugs, then submitted features in which none of that behavior appears and is only alluded to. Nobody wants to be the narc at the party, especially after Vanity Fair’s Lynn Hirschberg drew so much ire for her profile of Love. Cobain might have benefited from a few more finks. At the behest of Courtney Love, he turned to R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe for some kind of answer. Stipe, the godfather to Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean, even planned to lure him to Athens to record a collaboration in an effort to get him to clean up. Nirvana hired Pixies producer Steve Albini as some kind of reclamation of their identity, recording the decidedly skronky In Utero as a sort of course correction back to the land of the Indie kids, where one could take “comfort” in feeling sad, as he sang on “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge upon Seattle.” Cobain’s own revenge was not satisfying enough to keep him from harm. He didn’t trust himself as a husband or a father. He didn’t even really know who or what he was anymore. “This whole [Indie] thing is based on a lack of commerciality,” says Bernstein. “If it’s the biggest band in the world, is it Indie anymore?” Perhaps it never really was.
“[With] most of the music that’s underground, there’s a temptation to say, ‘Oh, I was into them before anybody,’” says Calvin Johnson, “but most of the music that we were into at KAOS and Sub Pop was never even going to be popular. It’s not like, ‘I was into Devo and their first single on an independent label.’ It’s, ‘I was into this weird band on an independent label and they’re still on an independent label—and they’re never going to be anything else because they’re too weird.’”
Today, that question—“Is it Indie?”—is almost never asked. In the years since his suicide in April of 1994, Nirvana’s power over the young, like the Smiths’, has not waned even as the reasons for his death seem more and more senseless. Cred is no longer an issue anymore; the great conflicts that the Clash and Rage Against the Machine wrestled with as major-label artists are moot. There are teens who love Nirvana and have absolutely no idea that at one point their leader fretted, Hamlet-like, about the band’s fate.
The line between major and Indie labels is all but erased when a band on Merge can sell hundreds of thousands of copies and debut at number one on the Billboard charts. It’s as if Cobain died from a disease called “cred” that we now have a vaccine for. “We’re in a post-cred world,” says local singer/songwriter Sean Nelson. “Culturally there’s no such thing anymore. If you’re under thirty, the idea of selling out simply does not exist. Who gives a shit?”
If great bands have unspoken contracts with their audiences, they are almost obliged to break them if they are going to grow. Bob Dylan going “electric” at Newport in ’65 was a breaking of a contract with the folk community. John Lennon marrying Yoko Ono broke another. And would either have been the figure they were today if they hadn’t? Nirvana remaining in Olympia, pretending to be the less-gifted Tad or even Mudhoney, would have been the true act of dishonesty and betrayal.
“When big Indie bands started going to major labels, it was very divisive. It does seem quaint now—our favorite bands playing bars instead of all-ages clubs and charging ten dollars instead of five. There were major cries of ‘sellout,’” says Slim Moon. “There are people in their mid-forties who’ve forgotten that they were once mad at Sonic Youth for signing to Geffen.”
Like Joy Division, the Modern Lovers, the Clash, and the Smiths, Nirvana can never disappoint. They can never break their contract, never issue a shitty album or do a silly concert film. They are perfect in death. When asked about Cobain, Morrissey told a journalist, “I admire people who self-destruct. They’re refusing to continue with unhappiness, which shows tremendous self-will. It must be very frightening to sit down and look at your watch and think, in thirty minutes I would not be here.” Or maybe it’s that K Records tattoo, after all, that endears, and will forever. The struggle to stay pure when all around you there are temptations and pressures is something teens of any generation can relate to. “Nirvana has become the symbol for a lot of kids who are experiencing angst for the first time,” Tavi Gevinson told me in 2011, the year that Nevermind turned twenty and Kurt Cobain would have turned forty-four. “They want to make themselves over the way that teenagers constantly feel they have to.”
“Kurt amplified the Indie-Twee sensibility in an American sense. He created the American version of the great revolutionary figures like Ian Curtis and Morrissey,” adds the journalist Paul Morley. “These people managed to pull off being icons without being sentimental icons. They did it by evolving elements of a female side and an intellectual side as well as their musical side. Brooklynization gained much more momentum because of Kurt.”
Chapter 10
Do Something Pretty While You Can
1994–1996
In which Glasgow rises again: an improbably superstar group combines the fetishes of 1960s pop with ’80s Indie, and, in the midst of Cool Britannia and coke-and-lad culture, the diffident and often reluctant Belle and Sebastian become the first true pop cult in a decade. Meanwhile the Internet (slowly) replaces the diary as the mode of expression for bedroom-bound Twees.
I’m not as sad as Dostoyevsky. I’m not as clever as Mark Twain. I’ll only buy a book for the way it looks. And then I’ll stick it on the shelf again.” So went a memorable line from “This Is Just a Modern Rock Song,” an early standout by Belle and Sebastian.
Kurt Cobain never lived to see Belle and Sebastian, who formed in 1996, two years after his suicide, but he almost surely would have had a chuckle at those lyrics from their wry, somewhat tongue-in-cheek bit of self-mythology. Cobain, after all, was the one who shoved his guitar into Super 8 filmmaker/Nirvana tour documentarian Dave Markey’s camera during a solo and said, “This is a blues scale in E.” When he was asked who his favorite authors were, Cobain said, “Burroughs, Beckett, Bukowski . . . you know, the B’s.”
Cobain didn’t live to see the Internet take much
of a hold of the greater imagination, either. But both for those who remembered Nirvana and those who discovered them after the fact, Belle and Sebastian were the band. They are the superstars of Twee, especially for the kids of the Internet age—really, the ultimate band for the kids who knew, more and more, what they should know and read and watch and listen to. Remember, Twee was and remains the hardest movement to credibly join. Applicants have to be on their toes, and here was the first band since Nirvana to seriously popularize not only themselves but also their tastes. Belle and Sebastian not only wore their pop-cultural tastes on their sleeves, they also placed them on their record sleeves. They wrote songs about them as well. Ordinarily such fandom among bands, whose motive is usually to get fans for themselves, can seem like a gimmick or a kind of faux deference. But one gets the feeling Belle and Sebastian were forced into existence by the fervor of listening to records and reading books alone, or perhaps sneaking off to the cinema for a revival. Would-be record-company head Stefano D’Andrea and his longtime friend and eventual partner Mark Jones were forced to do some pushing as well.
D’Andrea and Jones cofounded Jeepster Records with little money, a one-room office in the Camelot Center in West London with a few dozen eager scouts looking to make some money to go out and bring back the next cool thing. Jeepster, named for a T. Rex hit, had a roster of exactly: zero.
Friends since their teens, Jones and D’Andrea knew what they liked: Reed, Bowie, and Ian Curtis. What they would get from these scouts was one Blur and Oasis sound-alike after another. These were the heady, coked-up, Union Jack–bedraped Britpop days when even a band like Pulp, who’d been skimming the surface for nearly fifteen years, could now headline a massive festival. Sometimes they’d find one band and get excited, only to learn that their one good song was . . . their one good song. They cast their net far outside of London as well, to Wales, the north of England, and Scotland, which yielded one four-song demo by a band that was at the time answering to the odd, American name Rhode Island. Can’t you see it on a marquee?
“We thought all four songs were as good as each other,” D’Andrea says today. “We hadn’t heard anything in trolling around the country that was like this. It reminded us of other things but we couldn’t put our fingers on it.”
To listen to early Belle and Sebastian for the first time is to be perplexed and beguiled as you are almost challenged to spot the reference, whether it’s a horn riff reminiscent of Love, a lyrical shout-out to the Left Banke, preglitter T. Rex, predisco Bee Gees, Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s trippy duets, Burt Bacharach’s elegant bachelor-pad pop, Donovan, Nick Drake, Bowie, Roxy Music, or 1980s Indie greats like Orange Juice and the Smiths. To make it swing without feeling like a pastiche was a good trick, and Belle and Sebastian were able to do it not only with minimal effort but also with a lack of concern for whether or not anybody else would respond. Or if it was even worth it to investigate. It wasn’t DIY, it was DIYY—Do It Yourself . . . Yawn.
“We heard it once and then we went up to Glasgow and we found that Rhode Island wasn’t even a band. They didn’t have enough people in it to be a band. They weren’t even called Rhode Island anymore,” D’Andrea says. “They’d changed their name to Belle and Sebastian but were just an assemblage of musicians and café denizens who sometimes gathered to play at the Stow College music room. We found ourselves in the position to try to encourage the whole thing into formation. It was much earlier in the process than we thought—but the songs were fully formed.”
While physically little more than a tape and a name, spiritually Belle and Sebastian the band were already beginning to create a complex myth around themselves, and a powerful sensibility built for endurance well beyond the bedroom fantasy realm. Murdoch populated this dream universe with fictional characters that seemed at once alive and familiar as they entered his songs. He gave them all proper names, as Lou Reed had done with Candy or Ray Davies had done with Lola. Murdoch himself could have been one of his characters, had he not created them with his pen. He was pale and handsome in a way that made him seem simultaneously athletic and sickly. He had a front man’s charisma but the shy, even mischievous behind-the-scenes manner of a young Brian Wilson. Time he had spent housebound after a serous bout of chronic fatigue syndrome had forced him to be prolific and populate his room with friends both imaginary and real. While recovering, Murdoch would walk the city or ride buses and observe people passing by, living their lives, and record them in his notebooks, giving them stories, dreams, secrets, and shame.
“Riding on city buses for a hobby is sad,” he admits in the lyrics to “The State I Am In,” which would later be the first song on the first Belle album, Tigermilk.
Here was an outsider, naturally so, fascinated by those who were plugged into the rhythm of the city. These Glaswegians didn’t know or care that Murdoch was studying them, and that they would be incorporated into pop songs. They largely ignored the odd, skinny young man with his furiously moving pen.
Murdoch set these lyrics to organic, handmade sounds, dark and folky. The songs became open and dreaming enough to host a wide variety of styles. The talent pool among the musicians, and especially Murdoch, was huge. It simply required a kind of superconfidence that needed a little coaxing to the forefront and, eventually, to the stage.
“He looked like a real star to us,” says D’Andrea, “just physically—kind of brooding and a bit moody.” But he had a tough streak, stubborn and suspicious like many of the Glaswegians we profiled a bit earlier when faced with eager record-industry (albeit Indie) folks up from London. “He didn’t suffer fools gladly. I think he was prepared to have a fight with anyone who wanted to put his records out because he had such a fully formed idea of how he wanted them to look—how he wanted them to sound—the way he wanted to do things and the things he didn’t want to do.”
When Jones and D’Andrea encountered Belle’s other star, the winsome Isobel Campbell, with her girly barrettes in her straight blond hair, they knew they had something in her as well. Campbell would soon help perpetuate that Twee fashion archetype, indebted to the Nouvelle Vague heroines and still mimicked by a few thousand young women every year to this day: a well-read, cultured, and liberated woman who could turn on a dime and be girlish without pushing aside her integrity as a musician or her feminine strength. Still, video footage of her proudly holding C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia is akin to Twee porn.
“She was really important,” D’Andrea says of Isobel. “People assumed she was just a muse to Stuart, but she had a lot more to her than that, and she quickly became a bit of an Indie goddess to the young record-buying public.” Usually when Indie rock produced a woman this crush worthy, she was almost obliged to be a tomboy in the Kim Deal mode, a hellion like Courtney Love and PJ Harvey, or an intellectual like Liz Phair. Campbell was unique to the 1990s, equal parts swingin’ ’60s muse, Sarah Records–style cutie pie, and femme fatale.
While the early “This Is Just a Modern Rock Song” is an origin story, Belle and Sebastian seemed, to the Londoners, content to merely exist in a fantasy realm, a band on diary paper or sketch-pad page. “They made no effort,” says D’Andrea. “They felt, ‘If it’s good enough, people will contact us. If you have to go and ram it down someone’s throat and tell them how good something is, then it’s probably not that good.’ That was Stuart’s way of looking at it.”
Ironically, while not planning their career, they kept about meticulously designing it. Murdoch already had the sleeve concept for what would come to be their debut, Tigermilk: it shows a woman nursing a stuffed tiger toy, a bit literal but evocative of the Smiths sleeves and hard to ignore. The liner notes, printed up by the band, elaborated on the origin story of Stuart (Sebastian) meeting Campbell (Belle, an actual nickname of hers, and kismet once Murdoch found out). It was largely based on their actual encounter.
“He had placed an advert in the local supermarket,” Murdoch writes, cannily investing fans in the band by offering them a back
story rendered with the same level of wit, wistfulness, and preciousness as the lyrics. “He was looking for musicians. Belle saw him do it.” In reality the pair met on New Year’s Eve, 1995 into 1996, at a DJ set by Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins, then a decade into his solo career. They were dancing in a transvestite bar called Gillespie’s and quickly began courting each other. Murdoch, shaky still from his convalescence, was smitten, and later exchanged letters with Campbell and soon began playing her the songs he’d written in his bedroom or on those bus rides around town. Campbell didn’t need to learn anything. She was a record collector as well, wrote her own songs, and played the cello.
“It was strange. Sebastian had just decided to become a one-man band. It is always when you least expect it that something happens. Sebastian had befriended a fox because he didn’t expect to have any new friends for a while.”
The extremely patient Jeepster would not be able to issue Tigermilk until 1999, even though it was ready to go and clearly a world beater of a debut. Belle and Sebastian had refused, instead allowing Glasgow’s Stow College label Electric Honey to issue one thousand vinyl copies. As a bone, they promised Jeepster “the next record,” with the hapless label heads never hearing any music and having no way of knowing that that album, also almost completely written, would become an all-time British Indie classic, on par with The Queen Is Dead by the Smiths and the self-titled debuts by the Stone Roses and the La’s.