Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [182]
EVERETT TRUE It was just around the time Frances Bean was born. Everybody’s saying the kid’s been born a freak, it was deformed. Also, there’s all these rumors that Nirvana weren’t gonna show and Kurt had OD’d. I was slumped against one of the walls of Nirvana’s trailer with a bottle of vodka, and then, all of a sudden it must be getting close to the time, and somebody was yelling, “Where’s the wheelchair?”
Kurt came over to me, and he’s like, “It’s gonna be a burn on all those people who say I’m in the hospital and I’ve OD’d. I’m gonna wheel myself on in a wheelchair and pretend I’ve just come from the hospital, and we got this smock here.” I’m like, “That’s a great idea! Why don’t you get me to push you on the stage? That will be even funnier.”
I can remember pushing him on the stage, and it was around 9 o’clock at night. You can just hear this massive roar and feel all this steam and sweat coming from the front and the lights blinding you. I was trying to walk in a straight line, and so I start pushing Kurt towards the mic, and he reaches up and grabs me. I thought, Oh cool, he wants to have a mock fight onstage like we always used to have. So I start kind of punching him, and he’s saying, “No, you asshole, you’re pushing me to the wrong microphone.”
CRAIG MONTGOMERY More so in the early days than in the very late days, but a Nirvana show was the most hilarious thing you ever saw. They went onstage thinking, What could we do that would be funny? When talking about Nirvana, it pretty quickly devolved into, “Oh, how was Kurt feeling? What were his drug problems like?” But when Nirvana was onstage, that was not what it was about. It was not about drugs and depression and angst and death. It was about rock and roll as a great big joke.
JEFF SMITH It sounds hokey, but you could tell you were witnessing some epic moment. It’s 60,000 people, it’s 10 o’clock at night, everyone had been standing there for three days in the mud, and people are singing along almost louder than the band. Nirvana were firing on all 12 cylinders that night. The best time I ever saw them.
DAVE GROHL [Reading] was a pretty strange experience. Kurt had been in and out of rehab, communication in the band was beginning to be strained. Kurt was living in L.A., Krist and I were in Seattle. People weren’t even sure if we were going to show up. We rehearsed once, the night before, and it wasn’t good. I really thought, This will be a disaster, this will be the end of our career for sure. And then it turned out to be a wonderful show, and it healed us for a little while.
AMY FINNERTY Nirvana was booked to play at the MTV Video Music Awards. They were booked on like a Monday or something, and coincidentally I went to Reading with them the following weekend. I remember telling them, “Hey, we booked you on this Video Music Awards,” and they didn’t even know about it. I felt a little bit uncomfortable about that. I was so young, and I was just getting my feet wet in terms of how all this business got done, yet here I was, involved with the biggest band on the planet.
DANNY GOLDBERG MTV was very pushy. The award shows were big ratings things for them. They were in the business of selling advertising and not worrying about the feelings of rock stars, selling records, or anything else. They had a virtual monopoly on the music video world at that time and said, “We’ll really be upset if you don’t do it,” and I felt obligated to tell Kurt this. I believe they knew he was in rehab then. It was near the end of his time there, and so he left a day or two early to do the show.
Ethically, I couldn’t have kept it from him; I had to tell him, and it was his choice. He was an incredibly strong-minded, strong-willed guy that didn’t do things just because I told him to do them or not to do them. He wasn’t a child. Nonetheless, I feel creepy about it in retrospect.
AMY FINNERTY Somebody told the band