Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [152]
He talked about maybe starting a petting zoo. He was just kind of musing. The energy I was getting was kind of magical: I can pretty much do anything I want. I’d like to start a petting zoo.
That week, Nirvana had knocked Michael Jackson off the charts. In a lot of ways, Kurt reminded me of Michael Jackson. Think about it: Neverland … having a passion for kids and animals. I found it somewhat ironic. If I’d heard those same words coming out of Michael Jackson, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
Later, I read that Kurt OD’d that night.
DANNY GOLDBERG That time when they were in New York, it was clear that Kurt and Courtney were doing drugs and probably heroin. They looked so stoned, and she wanted thousands of dollars in cash to quote-unquote go shopping. Kurt is so amazing that on camera he was fine, but afterwards he just looked really wasted and you had to really be blind or totally inexperienced with seeing people on drugs to not see that.
DAVE GROHL I remember walking into their hotel room and, for the first time, really realizing that these two are fucked up. They were just nodding out in bed, just wasted. It was disgusting and gross.
DANNY GOLDBERG Right after that, there was an article published in Bay Area Music; this guy had been with them a couple of weeks earlier and said that Kurt was on drugs. That’s probably true, but it wasn’t yet in my head until Saturday Night Live. But with the combination of Saturday Night Live and the article coming out, we just knew we had a huge problem on our hands and that we had to do something.
JANET BILLIG Right when it started coming out that Kurt was doing drugs, I remember Steven Tyler called and wanted to help. I told Kurt, “Holy shit, Steven Tyler called my office and he wants to help you. Can I give him your number?” And he was like, “Steven Tyler got to be a junkie for 18 fuckin’ years. I’ve only been doing drugs for an hour.” Lots of stars called. Kirstie Alley called a lot for Courtney to try and make her become a Scientologist.
DANNY GOLDBERG So within a day or two of them getting back to Los Angeles, which is where they were now living, we did an intervention. I’d never done an intervention before, and I think I called David Geffen and he put me in touch with somebody that had been involved with Aerosmith. And that also was around the time that Courtney found out she was pregnant. The two of them, for the rest of their lives—certainly for the rest of Kurt’s life—were in and out of rehab, in and out of treatment.
JANET BILLIG The biggest misconception about them as a couple? That Courtney was the puppet master. That she stuck a needle in his arm and made him do drugs. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Kurt had done drugs well before he met her. They weren’t good for each other habit-wise, but I do think she kept him alive. I think he would have killed himself way before he did, otherwise.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY Then we went to Australia and Japan. I know that Krist and Dave enjoyed that a lot. We went out to beaches and went boogie boarding and stuff together. Kurt and Courtney did not. They stayed in Sydney and tried to get drugs and were sick, and so Alex MacLeod, our poor tour manager, had to stay behind and deal with them while the rest of us had fun. There was definitely tension within the band for various reasons, drugs being one of them and royalties being another one. The royalties thing really started coming to a head on the European leg after that.
During the Australian trip, the whole band was pretty fractured. There was Kurt and Courtney, and then there was everybody else. And I was always very studious about staying neutral and not getting in the middle of anything. ’Cause if you start taking one side over the other, then you’re probably gonna get fired by the side that you didn’t take.
BARRETT JONES We went to Australia and New Zealand and Hawaii and Japan. The Australia thing was so much fun, but