Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [144]
The video world-premiered on 120 Minutes. Within a week or two, we got it in heavy rotation, and within less than a month, the face of MTV had started to make a major transition.
SAMUEL BAYER In the fall of 1991, that video was getting a lot of airplay on MTV, and I would spend hours at my girlfriend’s house just laying in bed waiting for it to come on, ’cause it was really exciting, really like nothing else out there. At the time, I think my competition was a million-dollar Guns N’ Roses video and Michael Jackson doing something with Eddie Murphy or MC Hammer. The “Teen Spirit” video was nasty, brown-colored—it looked dirty, it really stood out.
Within a year of that, there were a lot of different-looking videos: Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden. It seemed like all the videos now had this angry, dark vibe to them.
COURTNEY LOVE I met Kurt in Portland in 1989. Nirvana played with a band called the Dharma Bums—they were very big in Portland. I met Kurt there and everyone knows that story, and it’s pretty true as is told. I just read a first draft of the biopic film, and it’s deadly accurate. He was with Tracy, and then Kurt and I got into a wrestling thing. But in the first draft of this script it says Living Colour was on the jukebox. No, for fuck’s sake, it was a song called “Dear Friend” by Flying Color from San Francisco.
We started wrestling because I told him he had a fat girlfriend. I was just being a dick. But then he gave me a sticker—a little sticker with Chim Chim [the monkey] on it that had Nirvana in his hand.
EVERETT TRUE Did I tell you the story of me introducing Kurt to Courtney? No, there’s not that much debate about it. The only debate that exists is the fact that Courtney made up a story that she met Kurt a couple of years earlier in Portland and Kurt backed it up—with my full approval, because we didn’t want her to be seen as a gold digger. I went along with it because I thought it was funny.
ERIC ERLANDSON Courtney and I saw Nirvana together in L.A. a couple times. They were playing some weird club in a strip mall. L7 were raving about them, and we were like, “Uhhh.” We left early, I think. We were both into the Mudhoney thing still at that point, not Nirvana. It wasn’t until the next year, in the spring of ’91, when Courtney actually met Kurt, when Everett True was here. Courtney and I were dating then; we were still living together.
EVERETT TRUE Courtney, how should we say, had a talent for being slightly liberal with the truth. That was one of the things I loved about her, and so did Kurt. Kurt had a talent for being liberal with the truth, too. All of us did. If you go back and do the research, there’s a cover story in Sassy magazine in ’92, where Kurt and Courtney refer to the first time they ever met, and it’s at a Butthole Surfers show.
It was my first time in L.A. The next night there was a show down at the Hollywood Palladium—the Butthole Surfers, Redd Kross, and L7—and I went down there early to make sure I could get in. The first person I bumped into was John Silva, who had just started managing Nirvana at the time. I said, “John, do you know anything about this girl Courtney Love? I want to meet her; her band is playing in town in a few days’ time.”
He said, “I do know who she is, and actually I can introduce you to her right now, because she’s here and she lives in L.A.” So he introduces me and we got along ferociously well, because as excited as I was to meet her, she was even more excited to meet me, because Courtney obviously wanted more than anything else at that point in time for the media to pay attention to her and here was this hotshot British music journalist—probably the best known at the time, certainly in America—paying attention to her.
We started going around stealing other people’s drinks, because neither of us had much money, and she’s not really much of a drinker. I think somebody slipped acid into my whiskey and at some point we started physically fighting because, I’m only guessing here, I was getting really annoyed because