Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [219]
And the first guy in, some twentysomething, asks, “Do you have any Nirvana vinyl?” I was so sickened at the thought, and I looked at him and said, “No, we don’t.” Which we did. You know what, if you didn’t have Bleach on vinyl by now, why the fuck do you need it now? It was so gross to me.
Within like 10 minutes, the store is a madhouse, and by now there’s two or three local news teams there, they want to do interviews. If you’re looking for some dramatic reaction for your 5 o’clock news bite, I’m not gonna give it to you. So I called Jonathan: “Jon, it’s crazy over here, what should I do?” And he’s like, “Close the store.”
JANET BILLIG I’d had a skiing accident and I’d just had a second surgery on my knee in New York. My friend Theo showed up. It was ironic that I was so doped up on drugs, I don’t remember finding out that Kurt had died. Theo is screaming at the doctor, “You gotta sign her out!” and he’s like, “I can’t.” Theo, who’s a big tattoo guy, is like, “I’m taking her!”
AMY FINNERTY So I went to the hospital to get Janet. I was supposed to go pick her up and take her home, and I’m racing all over the place searching for her. I finally find some nurse and I say, “I’m searching for Janet Billig, where is she?” She said, “She just walked out the front door and got into a cab.”
I took a cab to her apartment and I walked in and there’s poor Janet, straight out of surgery, half out of it, and she said, “Come and sit down.” I sat down and I said, “I have to tell you something,” because I wasn’t sure she’d heard anything. And she said, “Kurt’s dead.” I said, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” That sort of denial. She said, “I’m sure. Kurt’s dead. We have to go to Seattle.” We got on the next plane.
KURT LODER We must have gone on the air very quickly. Amy Finnerty was there. She was in tears, and Dave Grohl called; I talked to him briefly off-air. Going live is very expensive, but you had to for this band. I’ve heard over the years, “That was the first time I heard about it.” It’s remarkable that television would be the first place you would hear about something, because it took television so much longer to get up and running than it did for radio to do the same. When people say it was the first place they heard the news, I don’t know how to feel about that. I don’t have any feelings about that.
CHARLES R. CROSS It was a complete onslaught. There were TV reporters stopping by The Rocket office. It was like the Lindsay Lohan paparazzi situation that you might see now, but multiplied by having Tabitha Soren outside the building.
There was one point where the receptionist said, “Larry King’s producer is on line three,” and I’m just so exhausted, I don’t want to deal with it, and I go to pick the phone up to tell them I can’t talk to them, and instead I’m on the radio live with Larry King. There’s Larry King’s booming voice: “TELL ME, WHAT IS GRUNGE MUSIC?”
BRYN BRIDENTHAL I just jumped in, with Jim Merlis and Dennis Dennehy, and we handled it. We were the center that the media came to. I don’t think that I even looked up or peed or had a drink or anything until about 11 that night.
The first thing I did when I got back to my hotel room was call Axl, because I was afraid of how the news might impact him. He was such an emotional roller coaster, I was afraid that Axl would hurt himself. He felt things really deeply, and he felt a real connection there, even though there was no connection from the other side. I think he had a lot of empathy for Kurt.
I was on the phone with Axl until about 3 in the morning. Ultimately, it was okay, but I don’t remember what was said because I’d had so many hours and hours of those kinds of conversations with him. One time, I got off the phone with him and my teeth were chattering and I felt like I was energy inside his head. We were just talking on a level that wasn’t in the here and now, that was just pure energy—an out-of-body experience, except that my body acts like it’s freezing or something. It was just so intense.
KURT DANIELSON We were opening