Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [201]
BUZZ OSBORNE We got about 25 to 30 offers in total, from a variety of labels. Everything was going crazy. What really pissed me off was all these offers from these indies. Where were you guys when we needed you? So what we’re going to do is sign with the biggest label we can. We got a lawyer and signed a deal with Atlantic without even having a manager. I just told them, “Here’s what I want.” We got 100 percent artistic control, they didn’t have to put the records out but they couldn’t make us do another one, they couldn’t sit on us, they didn’t even know where we were recording. It was perfect.
DALE CROVER I think Danny Goldberg might’ve mentioned something about Kurt producing the Houdini record: “I think if you had him do it, you could guarantee that you could sell a bunch more records.” At first I was like, “I don’t want to do that. It just seems kind of cheesy.” But then Buzz was like, “You know, we’ve never done anything like that before. Kurt might help us in songwriting and doing something completely different.”
BUZZ OSBORNE I hadn’t been around Kurt for a long time—not really since we had toured with him, when I got the John Silva speech. Kurt played on “Sky Pup” and the last song on the album. He was just completely strung out, and I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to work. I went to Danny Goldberg’s office in L.A. and said, “Look, Kurt Cobain’s strung out.” Kurt was really bad, as bad as he’s ever been.
DALE CROVER Well, Kurt did nod out a few times. But he definitely tried. But then, we kind of didn’t have any songs at the time. We would write a few songs and have him come down. We tried to convince him that “You’re really good at melody, and if you got any ideas, you should help us out. You should be involved in the songwriting process.”
Nirvana had just done that record with Steve Albini, so Kurt wanted to try some different drum things. But then, after a couple of sessions, he just kind of stopped showing up.
DANNY GOLDBERG Kurt was pretty drugged out. He was also upset that they didn’t have songs. Kurt was tremendously committed to the punk culture, but he was a traditionalist when it came to songwriting. He listened to the Beatles a lot. He didn’t only listen to Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys and the Melvins.
He was very disappointed that, in his mind, they hadn’t prepared for the record the way he prepared for his records. They didn’t have material. They were, he felt, more like jamming. I suggested that he cowrite with them, but he wasn’t that excited about doing that. Buzz asked him to also. Kurt was kind of possessive about his material. He didn’t write for Courtney, either. He liked his good songs to be for him.
Buzz said something about Courtney later on that got Courtney upset. I don’t remember what it was. Courtney was all pissed and said, “I want Kurt to take his name off the album.” I said, “Kurt, I’d really rather you not take your name off the album.” He said, “I’d never take my name off the album, don’t worry about it.”
BUZZ OSBORNE I said something in the media like, “She’s just a fucking gold digger.” And they all flipped out about it. So I called up Cobain and said, “Look, I’m sorry.”
DAN RAYMOND I know Kurt wanted to divorce Courtney. I heard that come out of his mouth, when he was supposedly producing the Melvins’ Houdini sessions. He said, “She’s running up my credit cards” and something or other and, “I want a D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” like out of that country-western song.
COURTNEY LOVE Kurt was Buzz’s Stepin Fetchit boy, and Buzz saw himself as some sort of big-deal motherfucker. And you know, Kurt’s the best friend I’ve ever had, and I’m not gonna put up with somebody putting down my best friend and being mean to him.
I don’t know anything about Buzz other than one Christmas Eve, which was about 1992. Goldberg