• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

COURTNEY LOVE We had this video camera but we could never figure out how to make the battery work, so it’s like three years of a marriage over three hours of footage, going over and over and over each other. I’ve seen four to seven frames of something on there that I’m like, Oh, geez, if that got slowed down and released it would be the biggest—YouTube would break.

But most of it is just Frances on a bed with two extremely stoned parents, and you see Mark Arm walking by for one second. It’s at the Four Seasons, and you don’t think when you’re a parent, particularly a stoned parent—a good parent but a stoned parent—that your daughter is gonna grow up and be a teenage girl and she’s not gonna want fucking footage of her two stoned parents while she’s naked with no diaper. All we’re saying is, “Naked baby, naked baby, naked baby,” for like two hours.

That’s one thing I have control of is that three to four hours. I’ve let out some footage, like 30 seconds of Frances and Kurt in the bathroom. There’s this really poignant part, when Kurt’s in the bathroom with Frances and he’s swinging her around and he’s being a really good dad, and then you look at where the toothbrushes are, and there’s a syringe. But it’s the truth, so I’m okay with it.

MARK ARM I was obviously pretty reckless. I was hospitalized a couple of times. I actually saw the keyboard player from Gorilla, this local band—except Curtis the guitar player, they were all like doctors or med students—in the emergency room at Harborview hospital twice. He told me that the second time, a friend of his working with him said, “Man, your friend has a problem with weights and measures.”

I OD’d probably five times. If I was alone, I would have been dead for sure. Here’s my advice to the kids: Don’t do drugs alone. And don’t do drugs around people who are afraid to call 911.

On New Year’s Eve ’92 going into ’93, I was at a party. Kurt and Courtney were there and were like, “Hey, we’re going to go back to our room, maybe get some dope.” This was after I had come back from that tour, and I was just chippin’ at that point. My tolerance was pretty low and I had been drinking and went back to their hotel room with Ron Heathman, the Supersuckers guitar player.

RON HEATHMAN We played on New Year’s at RKCNDY. Kurt and Courtney showed up. I didn’t know them that well. I had seen them a few times because I used to get drugs from Tommy Hansen, too. But after the show, Mark was like, “Do you want to go over to where they’re staying?” They were at the Inn at the Market.

We went in, and it was just Kurt and Courtney and me and Mark. I did some and was fully loaded. Kurt was kind of unshaven with the dyed-blond hair and those polka-dot pajamas on. He and I were talking, and I can’t remember what we were talking about, but ironically enough the “Come as You Are” video came on MTV while we were sitting there. Kurt, I think he turned the channel or something.

MARK ARM I did some dope, and I decided I wasn’t high enough and went to do some more.

RON HEATHMAN We didn’t really notice at first, but Mark had gone out. He was turning blue. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in the Seattle scene, so we’re all borderline paramedics at this point. (Laughs.) There was the ice-cube-up-the-butt trick, which we didn’t have to use that night. Kurt and I traded giving Mark CPR—the pumping and the breathing, the whole nine.

And then Courtney got on the phone and called Jonathan Poneman and was like, “You need to get over here because one of your fucking band members on your fuckin’ label”—and at this point, Mudhoney wasn’t even on Sub Pop—“is dying and I can’t have this fucking coming back on us because they’re checkin’ our trash!” She’s worried about what the media would say. I kind of get that, but let’s deal with someone’s life first.

I think she called someone else, too. I don’t know if it was Danny Goldberg. Kurt’s the one that was like, “Will you fuckin’ call the paramedics?” Either Kurt or Courtney finally called the paramedics, and we scooped up the paraphernalia and put it in a bag; but