Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [147]
JENNIFER FINCH I know Kurt and Courtney were a couple pretty soon after that show, but it was really when she got pregnant later that I actually accepted it. It just seemed really transitory. They’re both such heated freakin’ people, I can’t even believe they could be in the same room together. Yes, Kurt was heated. They had times when they were very loving and very sweet together and times where there was just a lot of someone not getting their way and the other person being kind of nasty. It wasn’t always Courtney being nasty, like some people might think.
BUZZ OSBORNE Nirvana management was never nice to us. Outright fucking asshole bastards. Right when Nevermind came out, we played a show with Nirvana in New York. Their manager, John Silva, said to me, “If you were a real band, on a real tour you’d understand that this is just fine.” Meaning them fucking us over in one form or another: T-shirts, money, everything. That’s the defining moment for me with Nirvana management. Somebody can only say that to me once, and then I hate their guts forever.
Nirvana had surrounded themselves with regular rock-and-roll people by then. The same rock-and-roll road crew that now does Nine Inch Nails–type tours. I generally don’t get along with those types of people, for good reason, mostly because they’re a bunch of human turds. I’ve never met a group of people who hate music more than rock-and-roll professionals.
After John Silva gave me that speech, I walked out into the lobby of the club, the Marquee, where there were huge, floor-to-ceiling Nirvana Nevermind posters up. Right under the baby on the Nirvana record cover, I wrote in huge letters THE MELVINS SAY NIRVANA SUX for everybody to see when they came in. And Silva went out there and tore it all down. That was pretty funny.
DANNY GOLDBERG I remember when Nirvana played a headlining show in L.A. right after Nevermind came out. Eddie Rosenblatt, the president of Geffen Records, was there with Axl Rose. Guns N’ Roses was the biggest act on Geffen, and Nirvana were the second-biggest act. And he came up to me and said that Axl wanted to come by Nirvana’s dressing room. I knew Eddie was on the spot—he had to look empowered to his star—but I had a pretty good idea of what Kurt was gonna think. I told Kurt about it, and he just made a face. Kurt just didn’t like the idea of Axl.
I said, “Look, man, why don’t you and I just duck out of the dressing room? You won’t have to talk to him because you won’t be there.” Kurt and I went and sat on the stairs, and I gave Eddie all the passes so at least he could walk Axl into the dressing room and maybe say hello to the other guys.
EDDIE ROESER (a.k.a. King Roeser; singer/bassist/guitarist for Chicago’s Urge Overkill) Cleveland was our first show with Nirvana, and they hadn’t really quite hit it really huge there, and like within a week, by the time we were in St. Louis, it was the most insane crowd I’ve ever seen. Kurt could obviously see that there were a lot of frat kids with baseball hats in the audience who would have literally been the kids beating the shit out of him a couple years before, so Nirvana were like, “This music is not for you.” There was also a metal-crossover crowd. But you can’t choose your audience.
MARK KATES (Geffen Records/DGC head of alternative promotion) I went to the show at First Avenue in Minneapolis in October of ’91, which was amazing. One of the topics that night was them going on tour with Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, which I had been asked to bring up to them. They had a hard time taking it seriously. Nor should they have, really. It was a very preposterous idea.
BRYN BRIDENTHAL (Geffen Records publicity head) Axl wanted