Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [217]
MARK ARM It seemed like something intense was happening in the couple weeks before Kurt’s death. Bob Whittaker was hanging out with Krist Novoselic an awful lot, and they would go on these hikes up at Tiger Mountain and they would have these conversations, and then Bob would relay the gist of things to me. He was like, “Maybe you should go talk to Kurt.”
And then we went on tour with Pearl Jam. Went from that Nirvana tour, where it didn’t seem like people trusted each other and no one was having a good time, to this Pearl Jam tour where the band had circled their wagons and was trying to take care of each other and trying to keep levelheaded about things. The atmosphere was completely different than the Nirvana tour. They went out of their way to hire good people.
CHRIS CORNELL I think Pearl Jam was the band that set the perfect example. Their big video, “Jeremy,” propelled them into becoming TV stars and one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, so they stopped making videos, which was proof positive that that wasn’t where they wanted to be. And that made a lot of sense to me.
Nirvana doing an Unplugged at the time that they did it and making a video for “Heart-Shaped Box,” that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because it seemed clear to me that Kurt was pretty disillusioned by the situation that he was being put in. It felt like, If he’s so unhappy, he shouldn’t be doing this kind of stuff.
MARK ARM I was thinking, I’m going to come back and try to talk to Kurt if I can. I don’t think I could have done anything, though. I didn’t realize things were at such a severe point for him.
DUFF MCKAGAN I was flying from L.A. up to Seattle, to home. And I get on the plane and Kurt gets on the plane and sits next to me, and we took off and he and I started talking. He told me, “I just took off from Exodus.” We talked, y’know, we were drinking.… We got to Seattle, we went to baggage claim, and he was pretty down. And a friend of mine, this guy Eddie, met me at baggage claim in Seattle. Kurt and Eddie went out to have a smoke, and my friend Eddie came back in. I said, “Hey, man, maybe we should take him over to the house tonight.” … So Eddie went back out to get Kurt, and right at that moment his car had picked him up. And he was gone.
LARRY REID I didn’t know Kurt real well. The last conversation of any substance I had with him was backstage at this show they played at the Seattle Center Coliseum, in September 1992. His baby was like two months old. Someone brought up Jesse Bernstein. I was really closely associated with Bernstein, who was sort of the poet laureate of the grunge scene. He was this second-generation Beat poet who was really engaging and just crazy as the day is long. He’d killed himself the year before by slitting his own throat.
Kurt said something like, “That’s the way I wanna go: Live fast, die young,” or words to that effect. I’m paraphrasing. And I just started yelling at him. I think he must’ve used the word romantic, because I remember saying, “There’s nothing romantic about it at all!” Then I said, “Yeah, you die and it’s fine, but you leave nothing but hard feelings. You’ve got this beautiful young baby, and you’ve got a lunatic wife …”
He just sort of sheepishly wandered off.
STEPHANIE DORGAN I was so pregnant, I was just taking naps all the time, and I just feel like I heard that gunshot. I don’t want to be dramatic—I’m not sure—but it’s a really pretty quiet neighborhood and you hear something but you just never put it into context. It would have been in the afternoon a couple of days before they found him. His house was not very far; we were up back behind them. It was totally possible. Again, I don’t know. Memory and imagination are next to each other in our brains. That’s a fact.
VAN CONNER I was good friends with Dylan Carlson. Him and Mark had been lookin’ for