Eating the Dinosaur Page 3
Do you enjoy being interviewed?
EM: I don’t mind talking. I think talking has been very important to me. For a long time I had writer’s block and all I could do was talk. Then I was able to make movies that involved other people talking. Recently I’ve started writing, and that’s changed things. For a long time, I thought my constant talking was an impediment to my writing, but now I don’t know if that was true or not. I’m envious of writers, because a writer leaves this trail of detritus. As a writer, you have this trail of writing that is an account of yourself and who you are. For years, I was deprived of that opportunity, because I couldn’t write. So the talking was essential. It was a way to do something instead of nothing.
Q: Who is your favorite singer of all time?
A: oh, that’s impossible. I’m not even sure what my answer would mean. A lot of the best singers are the bad singers, and it seems wrong to reward somebody simply for being singular. I mean, is Dylan a good singer or a bad singer? that’s the essential question of all criticism, right? If I were to pick my favorite vocalist, I’d really just be selecting whatever voice best fits a specific song for a specific purpose, so it wouldn’t be any reflection of how good they are in other scenarios. It would just be a manifestation of their raw talent in one situation. It would have almost nothing to do with them.
Q: Do you have a favorite guitarist?
A: No, that’s even harder. That’s more of a question of virtuosity versus feel. Somebody like Jeff Beck has a high level of both, I suppose, but sometimes that works to his disadvantage. Clapton and Page are both good, but I think we’ve taken the blues as far as they can go. The blues get in the way now. I don’t see the need for any new blues.
Q: Well, whom would you classify as the greatest lyricist?
A: Jimi Hendrix.
Q: Why?
A: Highest degree of aesthetic accuracy.
Oh, the Guilt
1 It’s fascinating and stupid to watch adults destroy things on purpose. It’s a sensation that applies to a multitude of stimuli: monster truck shows, the dynamiting of sports arenas, race riots, Van Halen’s musical legacy, eggs, governments, and temporary gods. And guitars. Always guitars. You absolutely cannot destroy enough guitars within the course of your career; Pete Townshend tried, but that still didn’t stop him from getting wrongly accused of pedophilia or thinking that “Squeeze Box” was clever. People wreck guitars to illustrate how important guitars are supposed to be, aggressively reminding us that these are the machines that kill fascists. Sadly, this axiom has proven to be mostly inaccurate; according to the most recent edition of the World Book Almanac, the number of fascists killed in guitar-related assassinations continues to hover near zero.
“It seemed like Nirvana had to smash their instruments,” Mud-honey front man Mark Arm supposedly said about Kurt Cobain. “It was really dumb. A roadie would remove all of the mics from the drum kit so they wouldn’t get hurt. What the fuck?” Arm was talking about the ’92 version of Nirvana, a group who had not yet begun recording In Utero but who’d already begun to lose track of how rich they were. However, the band had been preoccupied with destroying their own equipment long before their fiscal windfall: Nirvana annihilated their set at a show at Evergreen College way back in 1988.1 They would regularly wreck their own possessions while touring in support of Bleach, an album that (initially) sold thirty-five thousand copies and only appealed to slow-witted stoners and big-picture A & R representatives. “When we started smashing our equipment it was out of frustration, because I felt like we weren’t playing very well,” Cobain explained. “People expect it also. Give the kids what they want.”
This is true. This is true, sort of.
2 In Utero was the first album actively promoted as a product I needed to buy because I was not going to like it. The wanting and the hating were somehow related. That’s all I remember about waiting for the release of that record: Over and over again, I was informed about how much I was going to hate this album and how I would never want to play it, supposedly because it would be so challenging and corrosive that it wouldn’t sound like music. It would have no relationship to melody or metal or capitalism. There seemed to be a lot of people arguing about this possibility in public (and they were always the same people), and they would all inevitably say the exact opposite of whatever they had allegedly argued in the past (in fact, it always seemed like their contradictory statements could only be found retrospectively in the denials). Following a lead in the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek raised doubt over whether Geffen Records would allow the album to be released as it was recorded. This was during an era when people still cared what Newsweek reported about rock music. The vortex of the controversy stemmed from Cobain’s selection of Steve Albini as the In Utero producer—an abrasive, ethical man whose legacy is built on crafting sonically authentic records that normal people hate. The word that kept being connected to the project was unlistenable. The vocals were going to be “low in the mix” (which meant nothing to me at the time) and everything was apparently going to sound like the Jesus Lizard covering a Pixies album inside Mechagodzilla (except not good). Cobain insisted In Utero would sell “a quarter as much” as 1991’s Nevermind, a non-arbitrary estimate that could be taken to mean Cobain figured 75 percent of his audience did not care about incendiary sonic experiences. “The grown-ups don’t like it,” he told Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad, the assumption being that “the grown-ups” were the faceless executives at Geffen who had (somehow) hoped that Nirvana was going to bring in twelve new songs that sounded like Aerosmith’s “Crazy.” The accuracy of this assertion remains unclear. Later, in 1994, Cobain delivered an uncharacteristically lucid and relaxed interview to a French video outlet called Metal Express where he merely said, “I think the general consensus was that the album may not sell as much, so they were concerned with that. But they never, ever once put any pressure on us. They just basically told us their feelings about the record. Most people don’t like the record. A lot of my friends don’t even like the record.” He seemed intellectually satisfied by that distaste. And while I’m sure the label would have been happier if Cobain had written a bunch of power ballads and asked Bob Rock to make them sparkle, it’s not like the grown-ups hammered him in the press—David Geffen personally called Newsweek to complain about the accuracy of their report. My suspicion is that the label merely wanted an album that large numbers of people might like, and they did not think such a desire precluded the band from making an album that was valid.
But Nirvana (or at least Cobain, and possibly bassist Krist Novoselic) did not agree. They could not reconcile the dissonance between mass success and artistic merit; interestingly, they assumed combining mass success with dissonance was the only way to salvage any merit at all. And this reality requires some very weird questions: Why did In Utero need to be conventionally “bad” in order for it to be exceptionally good? And—perhaps more importantly—why did that fraction of badness only matter if people knew that the badness was intentional?
3 Nirvana began recording In Utero in February of 1993, the same month the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided the Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas, the home of self-styled doomsday prophet David Koresh and his disciples in the Branch Davidian cult. The raid resulted in the death of six Davidians and four agents, spawning a fifty-one-day siege that ended with over seventy people dying in a fire that was started (or inadvertently created) by a military assault on the compound, ordered by U.S. attorney general Janet Reno. This armed offensive against private U.S. citizens was seen as the last resort against Koresh and his followers after the ATF had run out of alternatives, one of which was bombarding the compound with high-volume recordings of rabbits being slaughtered. I have never listened to the sounds of dying rabbits, so I don’t really know what that sounds like; I suspect the vocals are not low in the mix. “We will never know whether there was a better solution,” Reno eventually testified in 1995, although one could argue that any sol
ution that did not involve the government burning people alive might have been worth considering.
Koresh was a provocative public orator who could quote any passage of the Bible verbatim, instantly connecting it with whatever subject he happened to be discussing at the time. He had a lot of Cobainesque qualities: He had shoulder-length hair, played guitar, had a bad childhood, often complained of stomach problems, and had troubling taste in women. (He is alleged to have slept with a woman who was sixty-eight and a girl who was twelve, although the state of Texas never had enough evidence to press statutory rape charges. It should also be noted that neither of those females was crazy enough to let a total stranger suckle their nipples in a Wendy’s.) Like Cobain, he became obsessed with guns, appealed to disenfranchised eccentrics who felt cast out by society, and played the central role in his own demise; unlike Cobain, he was dangerously self-confident and (at least a little) insane. Writing about Koresh for The Washington Post in the wake of the Waco disaster, neuropsychiatrist Richard Restack cited Karl Menninger’s chief indicators of psychosis: “preoccupation with persecution, usually associated with grandiosity; more or less continuous erratic, disorganized excitement accompanied by irascibility; bizarre delusional ideas coupled with obvious indifference to social expectations; and pervasive convictions of evil or wickedness in self or others.” These were indeed the qualities of David Koresh, and the reason we classify him as “insane” is because he cultivated those qualities himself. But those were also the core qualities of Cobain; the difference is that they were mostly manufactured by society (and were therefore real). Cobain trusted almost no one. He felt like people were viewing him as messianic; he thought they were searching for symbolism in his most minor actions. All of this was true. He was expected to entertain thousands of people in a cathartic, chaotic musical explosion and then answer inane questions about what that performance meant. He was a heavy drug user who could not comprehend why people liked his music, or even that he was under no social obligation to continue producing it. He saw “wickedness” in things that were not wicked in any significant way (the music of Pearl Jam, generally positive coverage in Rolling Stone, fraternity bozos buying his records at Target), mostly because the social role he was burdened to bear required that he remain inflexible about teenage ideals normal adults would never seriously consider. Koresh decided he was literally God. Cobain was told he was figuratively God. Taken on balance, which would make a man crazier?
4 It’s hard to imagine any artist more shamed by his commercial success than Cobain, mostly because no one has ever made so much money by defining himself as anti-commercial. There’s a famous story about how Cobain was outraged at Courtney Love’s decision to purchase a Lexus automobile; he forced her to return it to the dealership so they could go back to driving a pre-Nevermind Volvo. After his suicide, that Lexus became wildly symbolic, a metaphor that confounds anyone who wasn’t nourished by (or force-fed) punk rock idealism. I remember trying to explain this to a fellow newspaper journalist in 1998, a few days after the premiere of Nick Broomfield’s documentary Kurt and Courtney. I have slowly come to understand why my attempt at explanation was so unfathomable.
“Who the fuck cares if she bought a Lexus?” the reporter asked me. “He could afford it. It’s just a nice car. Why should his wife have to drive a shitty car?”
“But it wasn’t just a nice car,” I said. “It was a Lexus. A Lexus. That’s a specific kind of nice car. Everyone knows what owning a Lexus means. To Cobain, a lavender limousine would have been preferable to a Lexus, because at least that would have been gratuitous and silly. The limousine is aware of its excess; a Lexus is at ease with it. A Lexus is a car for a serious rich person. There are no ironic Lexus drivers, or even post-ironic Lexus drivers.”
“But Kurt Cobain wasn’t ironically rich,” the reporter responded. “He was literally rich.”
“Yes, but he got rich by being the kind of person who self-identified with the underclass. Owning a Lexus made him feel hypocritical.”
“Well, a rich person who self-identifies as being poor is certainly more hypocritical than a rich person whose wife drives a Lexus.”
I must admit, even at the time of this conversation, I did not totally buy what I was arguing. The idea of Kurt forcing Courtney to return that car made me like Cobain more, but it also made him seem confused in an unknowingly solipsistic way. It’s like when Oprah Winfrey creates a game show where the whole goal is to give money away to sycophantic strangers: It’s an impossible act to criticize, because (of course) charity is wonderful. Yet there’s something perverse about high-profile public altruism; it always feels like the individual is trying to purchase “good person” status with money they could never spend on themselves, anyway. Oprah is doing something good, but not necessarily for the motive of goodness. And the motive matters. The situation with Cobain and the Lexus was both similar and different: He was trying to retain “real person” status by not spending the money he was convinced he did not deserve. But that makes no sense. A “real” real person lets his dippy wife buy a Lexus when he has the GNP of Mexico in his checking account. No one in suburban Seattle was going to see Cobain behind the wheel of a used Volvo and forget that he could buy a better car; he merely looked like a millionaire trying to convince people that he still wanted to be the kind of guy who refused to buy a Lexus. Which is very, very different than simply not wanting one. Which he obviously realized, which is why he felt so awful.
In Utero sounds like what it is: Guilt Rock.
4A The most mind-bending episode in the history of the ABC program Lost is the finale of its third season, mostly because it’s the first time the show deviated from its pattern of using the narrative device of the flashback (which provided clarity as to who individual characters truly are) and started to employ flash-forwards (which usually serve to make the motives and machinations of the plot all the more twisted). The third season ends with the story’s overt protagonist and failed savior, Dr. Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), desperate and paranoid at the airport, pleading with his love interest Kate (Evangeline Lilly) about how they must return to the mystical island from which they escaped. Jack is racked with remorse and culpability over what has transpired on the island; he has become alienated from everyone in his life, addicted to drugs, and suicidal. He cannot move beyond the singular experience that has come to define everything about his identity. And how do we know this? Well, partially because this is what he says. But also because— earlier in the same episode—Jack drives around Los Angeles aimlessly, wearing sunglasses and listening to “Scentless Apprentice” a decade after its release.
In Utero sounds like what it is: Guilt Rock.
4B In between Nevermind and In Utero, Nirvana released a B-side collection titled Incesticide that contained Cobain’s finest first-person narrative (“Sliver”), a great Vaselines cover (“Molly’s Lips”), two semi-okay originals (“Dive” and “Aneurysm”), something called “Aero Zeppelin” (which doesn’t sound like Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin and a bunch of other songs I never listen to. The most interesting aspect of the record is the unorthodox liner notes, written by Cobain and printed in a thick, zine-like font. In later pressings of the record, Geffen discontinued these notes, which was both a wise and tragic decision. They open with Cobain telling a protracted story about how he was able to have an old album by the Raincoats mailed to him from London, and how this experience made him “happier than playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolization from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass, and the millions of dollars I made last year.” He goes on to talk about how his wife has been persecuted for choosing “not to function the way the white corporate man insists” and how she is preyed upon by an “army of devoted traitor women.” He tells a few people to fuck off for thinking he’s “naïve and stupid” (not sure who he means here), compares his band to Cheap Trick and the Knack, and poses a request to his fans: “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a diffe
rent color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”
There is, certainly, a lot of obvious weirdness to this letter, most notably (a) it’s hard to imagine too many Nirvana completists self-identifying themselves as women-hating racist homo-phobes, regardless of how true that designation might have been, and (b) it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to tell people not to buy your album by including that message inside a shrink-wrapped CD. Kurt did not seem to have a very good grip on the return policies at most mainstream music outlets. But hey, it was December of 1992. Who could cast such stones? Nineteen ninety-two was the absolute apex of the PC era: The sexy goofs in Sonic Youth were writing entertaining songs about Anita Hill while lots of ponytailed boys in English 301 were trying to get laid by demanding the elimination of schoolyard dodgeball (granted,
these events may not have been directly connected, but I think you know what I mean). Writing liner notes about how people needed to give more respect to your overbearing wife was simply what “enlightened” artists were doing at the time. Nobody should hold this against him. But there is at least one line from his manifesto that still strikes me as meaningful: “I don’t feel the least bit guilty for commercially exploiting a completely exhausted Rock youth Culture because, at this point in rock history, Punk Rock (while still sacred to some) is, to me, dead and gone.”
So tell me this: In the scope of your lifetime, how many people have you known who said they didn’t feel guilty about something you never accused them of doing? And—if and when this happened—how often did the expression of their nonguilt only serve to prove the complete opposite of what they literally said?