LIVE NIRVANA INTERVIEW ARCHIVE October 24, 1991 - Tijuana, MX

Personnel

Interviewer(s)

Shaun Phillips

Interviewee(s)

Kurt Cobain

Krist Novoselic

Dave Grohl

Sources

Medium	Publisher	Date of Issue	Title	Transcript
Print	Vox	01/XX/1992	Teenage Rampage	Yes

Transcript

Their new album Nevermind storms up the charts, their explosive live shows sell out… and all of a sudden everyone wants a piece of Nirvana. Story: Shaun Phillips. Photos: Ed Sirrs.

Shoe-horned between warehouses on an exit from San Diego's Pacific Highway is a cardboard box called The Casbah. Outside the club a guy called Buzz takes the air. He's the lead singer of a little-known band called the Melvins, who've just finished a mind-numbing set within. And all of this would be completely irrelevant if it wasn't for the fact that Buzz went to school with Kurdt Kobain, the lead singer and guitarist of the hottest rock three-piece in America: Nirvana.

“I used to see Kurt in some classes and with my younger brother when Kurdt played junior league baseball,” Buzz recalls after the gig. “We all used to jam together.”

Home for Kurdt and Buzz was Aberdeen, a town of Twin Peaks proportions on the coast of Washington state which, for a while, was the centre of a vibrant “scene” which quickly outgrew its environs and relocated to Seattle. Kurdt left his home in the trailer park and Buzz moved to Olympia.

“There's nothing to go back to,” says Buzz. “Except to be beat up by rednecks.” As if on cue, a good ol' boy in a baseball cap hollers from a passing pick-up: “We're on drugs and we're gonna kill some people tonight!”

The Melvins' popularity owes much to the wave of interest which greeted Seattle's Sub Pop label, an organisation revelling in backwoods redneck stereotypes, and which inspired visions of lumberjacks wild on Jack Daniels wielding electric guitars like buzzsaws. The labels top triumvirate Tad, Mudhoney and—here's the beef—Nirvana all released high octane albums of dubious moral repute, but Nirvana's wild tales about Floyd The Barber and Mr Moustache on Bleach were the most accomplished, and their tour T-shirts leave wearers in no doubt as to the band's manifesto: “Fudge packin', crack smokin', Satan worshippin' motherfuckers.” Over the last two months, Nirvana have sold out every show they've played.

The following morning, on the day the band arrive at San Diego airport for a brief in-store performance at Off The Record—the last stop before the infamous Mexican border hellhole, Tijuana—their major label debut album Nevermind leapfrogs from 65 to Number 35 in the Billboard Top 200.

Tijuana is the only place where Californians under 21 can buy beer legally, and where a carton of 200 cigarettes costs $7. Its red light district and hotroom strip are awash with servicemen from the naval port in San Diego, and Nirvana are here to play the infamous Iguanas Club, where teen spirit is at its most repulsive yet most amazing: the stage-divers specialise in back flips. More impressive and stupid, though, are the fans who dive from the balcony. Tonight, one bounces off a speaker stack before crashing into the thrashing melee below.

In their early days, Nirvana were malevolent grungers, but the arrival of drummer David Grohl from Washington DC's Scream brought a stabilising influence to bear on Kurdt and bass player Chris Novoselic's live performances. No longer were there penances for poor concerts (it had been known for Chris to shave his head and Kurdt to wear a dress after particularly bad gigs).

Like Chris, David came to Nirvana via The Melvins' dating agency. “The Melvins were playing in San Francisco,” he explains just before Nirvana take the stage in Tijuana. “I was backstage talking to Buzz and Dale, and there's this real huge, tall guy going ‘Wuh-uh, wuh-uh’.” He waves his arms like Shaggy imitating Robbie The Robot. “And there was this other guy sitting in the corner like he was taking a shit.”

Chris (the first mentioned) is a gangling giant with a kind of Nicholas Cage attitude. He roams dressing rooms looking for decent alcohol, moaning “They took the good stuff off our rider 'cos we got too wild!” “Too wild” refers to the throwing of items out of hotel windows, something Chris hasn’t done for a while thanks to the presence of his wife Shelley, who organises the T-shirt sales. Chris loves to speak his mind. Onstage at the Pro Choice (ie, pro-abortion) concert in LA the following night, he attacks The System with relish and, when asked about Van Halen's latest album, his response is as swift as it is sweet. “Do you know what I think of, when I think of Van Halen? I think of US bomber pilots over Baghdad dropping their bombs and going ‘Van Halen, Yeaaah!’.”

Back in Tijuana, Kurdt is almost catatonic. Looking like an unwashed Sting, he pauses to recall a misspent youth: “I worked as a janitor for a few years. It was really funny because I cleaned doctors' and dentists' offices, and we'd take advantage of the medicine cabinets and the nitrous oxide tanks.”

The employment of manager John Silva was an important step on the Billboard ladder for Nirvana. Silva—who looks after Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys and Redd Kross—won the band’s approval through his disarming friendliness, frankness about the music business and faith in the band. To prove the latter he wears a bead bracelet inscribed ‘Smells Like Nirvana’. With his help, the band got out of their two-album deal with Sub Pop and moved onto one of America's most impressive major label rosters, David Geffen's MCA subsidiary DGC.

Nevermind, re-recorded for $250,000 after the band left Sub Pop, has been on the shelves just two months, but in that time it's cracked open the American youth market in no uncertain terms. The band’s distorted Sabbath riffs are now leavened by a Beatlesque pop sensibility, gleaned from singles Kurdt got from his aunts. Chris's first LP was Led Zeppelin III, his first single, ‘Hey Jude’.

The title of Nevermind's opening single—‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’—recalls Sonic Youth’s paean to Dinosaur Jr's J. Mascis, ‘Teenage Riot’; the music is a self-confessed emulation of a Steve Albini-produced Pixies rush. As Chris is wont to do himself after a few whiskies, Nevermind's songs scream for social awareness. At Tijuana, however, the crowd don't seem aware that ‘Rape Me’ is about Kurdt's “hatred for sexist macho men”. The kids only know that Nirvana are a “very, very heavy pop band” to whom they can work up a good sweat.

Kurdt, though, is cool. Throughout the set he seems invulnerable, hunched up to the mic stand like an old man, storing energy for solos during which he thrashes uncontrollably across the stage. The crowd respond by assaulting the monitors like the fanatical Warriors in Zulu. The only casualty is Chris, struck between the eyes by a flying shoe. He carries on like a trooper until the finale, then throws the bass 20 feet in the air, catching it milliseconds before it crashes down onto our photographer's skull.

‘In Bloom’ deals with the dichotomy between Kurdt's ideology and that of his fans. “Here's the one, who likes all our pretty sounds/He likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun/But he don't know what it means” It's dedicated to “football players who become stage-divers’; Kurdt later comments: “There were some very violent, macho guys there, who we can't stand, and hopefully we can weed them out. The only thing we can do is make jokes about them.”

Kurdt's remonstrations may have been restrained in Tijuana, but at ‘Frisco in two nights’ time his frustrations cause him to throw his guitar into the drumkit during the thrash finale of ‘Territorial Pissings’, while an incident in Dallas, earlier in the tour, brought the contradictions between Kurdt's beliefs and his erratic behaviour even further to the fore.

“I was under the influence of huge amounts of drink, so I was pretty oblivious of what went on that night,” Kurdt says apologetically. “I started to get more and more frustrated with the monitors as the tour went on. The ones we've been given are ridiculous. They make it impossible for us to hear ourselves and I can't fake a good show. So I get pretty mad and throw a rock star fit once in a while, and at that particular show I destroyed a $5000 monitor board—that's how much it would have cost to bring our own PA system on the road!

“It turned out that it was the bouncer's equipment and he took it upon himself to hit me whenever he could. After a while I got really mad and jumped into the audience. He hit me a few more times so I hit him in the head with my guitar. Blood was spilling all over the place. After the show he waited outside and when we got into a cab he smashed all the windows and tried to kill us.”

People want a piece of Nirvana. Before the maniacal show at the Iguanas Club, it's a charity worker from Shelter who wants shards of Kurdt's guitar; after the in-store at San Diego the fans want signed posters. Meanwhile, at the Pro Choice show (done free, of course) in LA's Palace, the request comes from Axl Rose and his entourage—for a “gold laminate”, no less. It cuts no ice.

Indeed, Motley Crue's drummer is treated similarly: “Tommy Lee was real pissed off that he had to pay,” says tour manager Monty Lee Wilkes the morning after the LA gig, while the crew load for the haul to San Francisco. “l said: ‘It's $15.50 a ticket and if you don't wanna buy them there's a hundred folk who will’. And this is the guy who paid $250,000 for a Porsche—cash.”

Nirvana don't have to worry about Tommy Lee. At the end of the ‘Frisco show they receive the ultimate fax of approval: “We really dig Nirvana, Nevermind is the best album of the year. Let's get together soon, love Metallica. PS Lars hates the band” Some might hold the US chart-toppers’ offer in awe, but Chris just stuffs the fax into his pocket next to the Nirvana Inc credit card. A year ago Metallica and Nirvana were about as equal as Man United and Aldershot, but just a week after the Tijuana gig only 13 places separate the two in the charts: Nevermind has shifted over half a million units. Shelley is doing brisk business too, with new T-shirts that proclaim “Flower sniffin', kitty pettin', baby kissin' Corporation Rock Whores”.

They're $15 each, and if you don't want to buy them there's a hundred folk who will.

© Shaun Phillips, 1991