You better watch out you better not cry (someone’s watching) / you better put out records DIY (punk rock values)
—NOFX “I’m Telling Tim”
Sometimes late at night, sublimely drunk or alone, or back years ago when I used to take adderall every morning, or after reading or watching something thought-provoking, I can see for a moment how its all connected, a continuum stretching back to the earliest times, the same strugglings repeated over and over with new souls in new forms.
Take Nirvana. A few months ago, I’m embarrassed to say, I went into a deep book and movie rabbit hole about Nirvana. I hadn’t thought about Nirvana much in years but something drew me back. (Yes, I’m absolutely disgusted with myself for being interested in or even mentioning or thinking about music and bands because any writing about music reminds me of the worst kinds of souls-dead-in-life: the Pitchforky music essayists and indie music critics and thinkers-about-music who grind out nonsense sausage and band oral histories in their factories, but try to bear with me here.)
In high school, Unplugged in New York was one of two records that my dad and I could both listen to and enjoy. The other was Beck Mutations. While visiting some family in Seattle, we even went on a little road trip to Aberdeen, Kurt Cobain’s hometown, and it was every bit the kind of shithole it was supposed to be. My dad was not some kind of subcultural guy or music guy or intellectual guy, he was kind of appalled. We went to Long John Silver’s and they had run out of fish, and the place we stayed had shag carpets and vibrating beds.
I read Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana along with all the bog-standard punk oral histories and when I was in my early 20s, we—the True DIY punks carrying the torch—got completely obsessed with that documentary of the 1991 Sonic Youth/Nirvana tour “The Year that Punk Broke” and watched it over and over again like it was a revelation. It was like finding the Missing Link. This band I had grown up thinking of as big rock stars, there they were goofing off with Sonic Youth and Babes in Toyland and they liked Tribe 8 and Flipper and Jawbreaker, all the bands we liked and knew. The Melvins, Calvin Johnson…the whole thing, they were embedded in a scene. It kind of blew my mind because when I was 18 or 19, Calvin Johnson was always coming through North Carolina and playing little basement shows—this strange graying indie kingmaker who my girlfriend at the time and all her friends had crushes on—this was the one and same guy that Kurt Cobain always tried to cozy up to in Olympia, it was like even though ten years late we were just one step removed.
Olympia and Aberdeen, Aberdeen and Olympia, it’s a story as old as time. Aberdeen will always want to move to Olympia because that’s where all the cool kids are doing cool stuff, they sprout up around the private liberal arts college, that’s where it’s all happening. There’s a big indie record label run by Calvin Johnson, everyone is wearing sweaters and trading zines and wearing cat eye glasses and dating each other, and their cottage-industry politics are beamed out to colleges and college radio stations all around the country, and from there into the mainstream. Aberdeen, by contrast, is a shithole, but it’s bands have some ineffable something—spleen, desperation, a tribal mentality, whatever—they have that something to even become the biggest rock band in the world. Olympia doesn’t want to move to Aberdeen, of course (ew yuck) but maybe they venture out there sometimes to party in the woods and harbor a vague inexpressible dissatisfaction, the nagging sense that they’re not “authentic.”
You can hear the whole dynamic in the early recording where Kurt Cobain calls into Calvin Johnson’s radio show to play some new songs, you can hear Kurt’s tremulous nervousness and bumbling desire to belong, to be part of it. Calvin Johnson is ever-so-slightly condescending and dismissive to this young upstart, no doubt just one of hundreds of aspirants trying to suck his dick at the time to get on K Records, “So Uh, what’s going on, you got some new tunes, you want to share them with us or not?”
Kurt even got the tattoo of Calvin’s record label, the K Records logo and started dating the founding riot grrl Tobi Vail, who, it just turns out, was Calvin’s ex-girlfriend.
Oh yes, he badly wanted to be part of this little tribe.
But at the same time he started to resent them—he calls these twee college kid followers of the new indie ideology “Calvinists.” Pretty good.
Strident Calvinist luxury politics, Evergreen College, campus upheaval, riot grrrl, a new PC culture being beamed out from the fancy universities—it all seems really familiar, doesn’t it?
In Tobi Vail, Charles Cross writes in his biography Heavier than Heaven: The Story of Kurt Cobain, Kurt had “met the first woman who made him so nervous he threw up. He put that experience into the song “Aneurysm,” with the lyric, “Love you so much it makes me sick.” Though she was three years younger, she was more educated than he was, and he’d listen for hours to Tobi and her friend Kathleen Hanna prattle on about sexism and their plans to start a band called Bikini Kill. Tobi had her own fanzine, and in its pages she had coined the phrase “riot grrrl” to describe the 1990 model of punk feminism. She was a drummer primarily, but could play guitar; she had an extensive punk rock record collection; and she was, Kurt imagined, his female counterpart.”
“It was hard enough for Kurt to fit into the cosmopolitan Seattle scene, but even in tiny Olympia he felt as if he were a contestant on a punk rock version of “Jeopardy!” and that one wrong answer would send him packing back to Aberdeen.”
It sounds like Kurt fell head over heels. But according to the story Tobi Vail just wasn’t as into it. She allegedly didn’t want to be monogamous, didn’t take him as seriously, didn’t want to commit to him, etc. It didn’t really work out. That’s the story the biographers tell, though, I’m sure there’s another side to it.
Then there is the famous origin story about where “Smells like Teen Spirit” came from—Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hannah (who at the time was dating Dave Grohl) allegedly trashed Kurt’s apartment and spray-painted “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his wall.
Two girls from a fancy-pants private college trashing the apartment of a pretty poor Aberdeen kid trying to make it in their college town. Pretty bad look.
From Heavier than Heaven again: “In the four months following their breakup, Kurt would write a half dozen of his most memorable songs, all of them about Tobi Vail… One song was called “Formula,” but was eventually retitled “Drain You.” “One baby to another said, ‘I’m lucky to have met you,’ ” went the lyrics, quoting words Tobi had told him. “It is now my duty to completely drain you,” was the chorus".”
It seems like half the songs on Nevermind were largely a result of a kind of hostility that grew in Kurt toward these two gatekeepers he desperately wanted the approval of, but by disposition wasn’t suited to somehow: Tobi Vail and Calvin Johnson.
It’s a straight shot from there—from Kurt’s discomfort with the DIY tribe—to the scathing lyrics in “Smells Like Teen Spirit”:
Our little group has always been / and always will until the end.
It’s very weird that in the bottomless piles of Nirvana books and movies, given her central role in the mythos, Tobi Vail isn’t really interviewed or remains quiet and seems to have somehow evaded the Nirvana-Remembrance-Industrial-Complex that has entrapped Courtney and all the others in his late orbit.
But she’s still very present and around in the DIY punk world that I come from: she’s considered one of the founding DIY punk moral figures who haven’t been corrupted by fame who carry the torch, still make print zines and play in small bands and are unpretentious. Completing the circle, a person I used to know—a lifer scrappy zine writer person who I used to edit and take walks with—has even joined the new incarnation of Bikini Kill.
But the most shocking excerpt from Heavier than Heaven about Tobi Vail is this one, which almost can’t be believed:
“In another unsent screed [to Tobi Vail] Kurt blasted her, Calvin, and Olympia: ‘I made about five million dollars last year and I’m not giving a red cent to that elitist, little fuck Calvin Johnson. No way! I’ve collaborated with one of my idols, William Burroughs and I couldn’t feel cooler… I’ve learned to hate riot grrrl, a movement in which I was a witness to its very initial inception because I fucked the girl who put out the first grrrl-style fanzine and now she is exploiting the fact that she fucked me. Not in a huge way, but enough to feel exploited. But that’s okay because I chose to let corporate white men exploit me a few years ago and I love it. It feels good. And I’m not gonna donate a single fucking dollar to the fucking needy indie fascist regime. They can starve. Let them eat vinyl.”
Jesus. So adolescent and childish and ridiculous, and extremely bitter and extremely interesting.
Much has been made about the psychic wounds imparted on Kurt Cobain from his fame—nodding out at the dinner with the big record company executives, not able to handle it, etc etc, that’s the story—sell out to the evil money men, see how empty it is, lose yourself, die.
But the psychic wounds he experienced among the Calvinists and K Record types in Olympia have somehow gone missing. There is a clear chain of evidence that whatever he experienced led him on his doomed path to oblivion by trying to rebel against them—to spite them (and himself in the end) by doing the opposite of what they did—sign a major label and make as much money as possible and get as famous as humanly possible.