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Kurt Speaks: An Exclusive 1994 Interview

Part I: Reaching Nirvana

MTV: When you and Chris Novoselic first met, is it true that it took a while to get him involved in doing something?

Kurt Cobain: Yeah, for a long time. I knew him for at least three years before we started playing seriously in a band together. But we had like side bands with Buzz [Osborne], then the Melvins, other members of the Melvins, and friends of ours. We got together and played in a few bands like the Stiff Woodies. We'd play at local jock kegs. We'd put Knox gel in our hair like [English new wavers] GBH and play live music at these parties. It was great. We freaked everybody out. But everyone was so drunk that they didn't care about our appearance. They just wanted live music.

MTV: So you were trying as hard as you could to piss the local rednecks off?

Cobain: Yeah, and get free beer. I'm condoning drugs, aren't I? I remember seeing that in my high school locker [room], "Alcohol Is a Drug, Too."

MTV: Chris didn't wanna be in the band, right?

Cobain: I don't think he ever really had aspirations to be in a band. He just liked playing guitar. I knew he had a guitar for years. But Dale Crover, the drummer for the Melvins, and I made a demo in late '85 at my aunt's house on a 4-track. I'd had the tape for about a year or so. I was always trying to push it on my friends, to try to get them into starting a band with me. One day Chris, after probably hearing it a few times, just decided, "Hey, this is pretty good!" So, finally, the hint worked.

MTV: Did you play bass on that as well?

Cobain: I played a little bit of bass on it. And Dale played bass on the other parts, on some of the other songs.

MTV: That was Fecal Matter, right?

Cobain: Yeah. That was my band. My imaginary band.

MTV: Do you remember the first time you played together?

Cobain: It clicked in a way where [it was] just the fact that we were actually playing music. I heard these songs with a full band for the first time. It was just so amazing. I'd heard these songs because they were recorded, but there all the instruments were dubbed. To play them live in a room was amazing. It was like the most incredible thing I've ever done, and I'd been wanting to do it for years. I was like six years overdue … already having a guitar and wanting to play with other people, but I could never get anything past like some guy that plays drums and he'd bring his drum set over to my house and I'd start playing this raunchy music and they'd leave, you know? I could never get anyone to stay more than a day or a few hours. [Laughs]

MTV: Was Chris playing [the songs] the way you pictured them being played? What was your first reaction to him playing?

Cobain: He basically played the same notes that were on the tape already. We basically just played the songs that were on the Fecal Matter tape. I mean, he's added stuff, he's added his own style to the band now, since we've started writing songs together. But initially we were just playing those songs off that tape.

MTV: What was the first thing you did together?

Cobain: Oh, the first song that we wrote together?

MTV: Yeah.

Cobain: Oh God, I don't know. Um…

MTV: I think he thought it was "Hairspray Queen."

Cobain: It could have been, yeah. But even at that time when we first started writing songs I would come up with the basslines and everything. I would show everyone what to play. 'Cause I was still writing songs on my own time. So that was probably one of the first songs that I had written at that time and we started to practice with as a band.

MTV: Do you have any memories of the first couple of gigs you did?

Cobain: Let's see … the very first one was a party, I think. If we played together in the house for a couple of hours and two people stopped by, we considered that a gig. So, I mean, that was good enough. We had an audience of two people. Locals who hated our guts and thought it was terrible music. But the first official show we actually played was at a party. It was way out in the woods. I can't even remember what town it was. It was somewhere in between Montesano and Aberdeen and, it was, you know, a typical kegger type of thing. It was pretty amazing. That was a fun night. I think it was Halloween night. We were really drunk, and we had some fake Halloween blood and we smeared it all over ourselves and played our seven songs off the tape. And we alienated the entire crowd. The entire party moved into the kitchen and left the band, just left us there in the front room playing our songs.

MTV: The first single you did after you went to Sub Pop was a cover of Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz." Why did that end up being [used], instead of one of your songs?

Cobain: I really don't have a very good answer for that other than that it was a pop song. It was one of the only palatable songs that we had. At the time we were writing stuff like "Hairspray Queen." Even though there was a little bit of pop element in some of the songs, we thought we'd get instant attention by that. It was such a catchy song and it was so repetitive that we thought that people would listen to it right away and remember it. Also I think Bruce [Pavitt] or John [Poneman, the founders of Sub Pop] - I think it was John - suggested we record that, too. It was one of their favorite songs that we did.

MTV: So you'd been doing it regularly at gigs.

Cobain: Yeah.

MTV: I guess you thought that if people hear that, then they'll listen to the other stuff.

Cobain: Yeah, yeah, I guess that was the idea. I don't know.

MTV: Was it Sub Pop's idea to only do a thousand [copies of the single]?

Cobain: Yeah, it was their idea. It was almost a surprise to us. They might have warned us, they might have told us that this is what they were going to do, but it was kind of a surprise at the time. We were just so thrilled to actually put out a single that it wasn't until after only a thousand were printed that we started to complain about it. It was like, but there's more people who wanna buy this thing! Why not sell more? It just didn't make any sense to us at the time. I understand it now but still, if you're gonna put something out, you should… That's why we were signed to a major label. Everyone should listen to it if they want to.

Part II: Bleach

MTV: How long after your first single, "Love Buzz," was it until Bleach came out?

Kurt Cobain: I don't know, honestly. [Laughs] It seemed like two years. It just seemed like forever. I think it was a bit longer than eight months. I think there're dates on the single, and there's a date on the album.

MTV: Did you feel you had to make a record for your label Sub Pop that fit their established type of sound?

Cobain: Not really. I've always felt that there should have been an album before Bleach. Because, by the time that we recorded the songs off of Bleach, we were really into that kind of music. We don't regret it now. But at the time we should have put out the Fecal Matter tape or at least a lot of the songs that were on the Fecal Matter tape. We should have re-recorded them. Because that was a period of our band. That was part of our progression. We were really into experimental, noisy … like the whole surfers' kind of music. That's always been the case with us. We should have put out something a little bit before the last record, you know.

MTV: So a lot of the stuff on Incesticide you wished could have come out before Bleach?

Cobain: Yeah, yeah. Most of the stuff on Incesticide should have come out before Bleach actually. But we did feel a little bit of pressure, a little bit of intimidation, by the whole Seattle scene because everyone was so heavily into this retro '70s thing. Because we were on that label there was an element of that there. Jonathan [Poneman, Sub Pop boss] had quite a few suggestions from what I can remember. It wasn't like they demanded it. It wasn't like what a major label … I mean I've heard of some really scary major-label stories. But there was a little bit of major-label attitude going on with Sub Pop at the time. I remember one time, Jonathan suggested I change some lyrics in one of the songs and stuff like that. That was just kind of weird because it's supposed to be an independent label, you know what I mean? You should be able to do exactly what you want. But if we weren't so spineless we would have done it, we would have done exactly what we wanted to do, you know.

MTV: Had you wanted to put some of the older songs on Bleach and ended up just doing the new stuff on your own?

Cobain: I think at that time.

MTV: Did you write new songs for Bleach?

Cobain: Yeah, we did write new songs for Bleach. There were a lot of songs that were just written within the two weeks or even the last week prior to recording. At the time we had a time scheduled for the recording of the album, and we only had maybe six songs. During the week prior to that [we] wrote a whole bunch of songs. And we just … uh, I don't know, I don't know what I'm trying to say.

MTV: I guess my question is why the songs that you wrote in those two weeks made it on and not the older ones. Was that your decision?

Cobain: We wrote so many songs in that week right before we recorded that we were excited about the new songs. We wanted to record them. But initially we wanted to just record the few new songs that we had and rerecord most of the stuff that was on the Fecal Matter tape. And that would have been the album. It would have been a lot more like Incesticide, but we just happened to write so many new songs, that we just put it on Bleach. They just happened to have been more in the '70s vein.

MTV: Do you have any memories of that first tour?

Cobain: Yeah. We chose to tour in the middle of the summer. [Laughs] In the South. Imagine being in Texas in July, packed up to the rim of the van with T-shirts and equipment with four members, with no air conditioning, tooling around, living off of $30 a day if you're lucky 'cause … It was fun but we should have been a little bit more smart about it. We should have toured in September or something. But we were so excited about getting the record out and going on tour that we just went for it. Yeah.

MTV: Touring with Tad in Europe in 1989, was that any better? You had a lot of equipment problems. Chris [Novoselic] was telling me, you were always duct-taping stuff together.

Cobain: Yeah. Being in Europe for the first time was more romantic. It wasn't any more comfortable. We were living off of deli trays and cigarettes. And bad beer, or strong beer, I should say. I guess you would call that good beer, wouldn't you? I don't like beer. There were 11 people in a small Euro van. The seats were at this angle, so you would try to sleep and we'd be on like 15- to 18-hour drives just crammed up against one another. In the dead of winter. It was fun, but after seven weeks it took its toll on everyone.

MTV: Did you not want to talk to those guys for a couple weeks after that?

Cobain: Well, I don't think we spoke for months. [Laughs] I actually don't remember. I think we may have played a few shows after that, within that year, together. We were always playing shows together.

MTV: Is that when Sub Pop started talking to majors about a distribution deal?

Cobain: It was part of the reason, yeah. I mean, I can't say that we weren't into the idea of being on a major label. We just didn't like the idea of someone else taking a larger percentage out of our payments. Part I: Reaching Nirvana

MTV: When you and Chris Novoselic first met, is it true that it took a while to get him involved in doing something?

Kurt Cobain: Yeah, for a long time. I knew him for at least three years before we started playing seriously in a band together. But we had like side bands with Buzz [Osborne], then the Melvins, other members of the Melvins, and friends of ours. We got together and played in a few bands like the Stiff Woodies. We'd play at local jock kegs. We'd put Knox gel in our hair like [English new wavers] GBH and play live music at these parties. It was great. We freaked everybody out. But everyone was so drunk that they didn't care about our appearance. They just wanted live music.

MTV: So you were trying as hard as you could to piss the local rednecks off?

Cobain: Yeah, and get free beer. I'm condoning drugs, aren't I? I remember seeing that in my high school locker [room], "Alcohol Is a Drug, Too."

MTV: Chris didn't wanna be in the band, right?

Cobain: I don't think he ever really had aspirations to be in a band. He just liked playing guitar. I knew he had a guitar for years. But Dale Crover, the drummer for the Melvins, and I made a demo in late '85 at my aunt's house on a 4-track. I'd had the tape for about a year or so. I was always trying to push it on my friends, to try to get them into starting a band with me. One day Chris, after probably hearing it a few times, just decided, "Hey, this is pretty good!" So, finally, the hint worked.

MTV: Did you play bass on that as well?

Cobain: I played a little bit of bass on it. And Dale played bass on the other parts, on some of the other songs.

MTV: That was Fecal Matter, right?

Cobain: Yeah. That was my band. My imaginary band.

MTV: Do you remember the first time you played together?

Cobain: It clicked in a way where [it was] just the fact that we were actually playing music. I heard these songs with a full band for the first time. It was just so amazing. I'd heard these songs because they were recorded, but there all the instruments were dubbed. To play them live in a room was amazing. It was like the most incredible thing I've ever done, and I'd been wanting to do it for years. I was like six years overdue … already having a guitar and wanting to play with other people, but I could never get anything past like some guy that plays drums and he'd bring his drum set over to my house and I'd start playing this raunchy music and they'd leave, you know? I could never get anyone to stay more than a day or a few hours. [Laughs]

MTV: Was Chris playing [the songs] the way you pictured them being played? What was your first reaction to him playing?

Cobain: He basically played the same notes that were on the tape already. We basically just played the songs that were on the Fecal Matter tape. I mean, he's added stuff, he's added his own style to the band now, since we've started writing songs together. But initially we were just playing those songs off that tape.

MTV: What was the first thing you did together?

Cobain: Oh, the first song that we wrote together?

MTV: Yeah.

Cobain: Oh God, I don't know. Um…

MTV: I think he thought it was "Hairspray Queen."

Cobain: It could have been, yeah. But even at that time when we first started writing songs I would come up with the basslines and everything. I would show everyone what to play. 'Cause I was still writing songs on my own time. So that was probably one of the first songs that I had written at that time and we started to practice with as a band.

MTV: Do you have any memories of the first couple of gigs you did?

Cobain: Let's see … the very first one was a party, I think. If we played together in the house for a couple of hours and two people stopped by, we considered that a gig. So, I mean, that was good enough. We had an audience of two people. Locals who hated our guts and thought it was terrible music. But the first official show we actually played was at a party. It was way out in the woods. I can't even remember what town it was. It was somewhere in between Montesano and Aberdeen and, it was, you know, a typical kegger type of thing. It was pretty amazing. That was a fun night. I think it was Halloween night. We were really drunk, and we had some fake Halloween blood and we smeared it all over ourselves and played our seven songs off the tape. And we alienated the entire crowd. The entire party moved into the kitchen and left the band, just left us there in the front room playing our songs.

MTV: The first single you did after you went to Sub Pop was a cover of Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz." Why did that end up being [used], instead of one of your songs?

Cobain: I really don't have a very good answer for that other than that it was a pop song. It was one of the only palatable songs that we had. At the time we were writing stuff like "Hairspray Queen." Even though there was a little bit of pop element in some of the songs, we thought we'd get instant attention by that. It was such a catchy song and it was so repetitive that we thought that people would listen to it right away and remember it. Also I think Bruce [Pavitt] or John [Poneman, the founders of Sub Pop] - I think it was John - suggested we record that, too. It was one of their favorite songs that we did.

MTV: So you'd been doing it regularly at gigs.

Cobain: Yeah.

MTV: I guess you thought that if people hear that, then they'll listen to the other stuff.

Cobain: Yeah, yeah, I guess that was the idea. I don't know.

MTV: Was it Sub Pop's idea to only do a thousand [copies of the single]?

Cobain: Yeah, it was their idea. It was almost a surprise to us. They might have warned us, they might have told us that this is what they were going to do, but it was kind of a surprise at the time. We were just so thrilled to actually put out a single that it wasn't until after only a thousand were printed that we started to complain about it. It was like, but there's more people who wanna buy this thing! Why not sell more? It just didn't make any sense to us at the time. I understand it now but still, if you're gonna put something out, you should… That's why we were signed to a major label. Everyone should listen to it if they want to.

Part II: Bleach

MTV: How long after your first single, "Love Buzz," was it until Bleach came out?

Kurt Cobain: I don't know, honestly. [Laughs] It seemed like two years. It just seemed like forever. I think it was a bit longer than eight months. I think there're dates on the single, and there's a date on the album.

MTV: Did you feel you had to make a record for your label Sub Pop that fit their established type of sound?

Cobain: Not really. I've always felt that there should have been an album before Bleach. Because, by the time that we recorded the songs off of Bleach, we were really into that kind of music. We don't regret it now. But at the time we should have put out the Fecal Matter tape or at least a lot of the songs that were on the Fecal Matter tape. We should have re-recorded them. Because that was a period of our band. That was part of our progression. We were really into experimental, noisy … like the whole surfers' kind of music. That's always been the case with us. We should have put out something a little bit before the last record, you know.

MTV: So a lot of the stuff on Incesticide you wished could have come out before Bleach?

Cobain: Yeah, yeah. Most of the stuff on Incesticide should have come out before Bleach actually. But we did feel a little bit of pressure, a little bit of intimidation, by the whole Seattle scene because everyone was so heavily into this retro '70s thing. Because we were on that label there was an element of that there. Jonathan [Poneman, Sub Pop boss] had quite a few suggestions from what I can remember. It wasn't like they demanded it. It wasn't like what a major label … I mean I've heard of some really scary major-label stories. But there was a little bit of major-label attitude going on with Sub Pop at the time. I remember one time, Jonathan suggested I change some lyrics in one of the songs and stuff like that. That was just kind of weird because it's supposed to be an independent label, you know what I mean? You should be able to do exactly what you want. But if we weren't so spineless we would have done it, we would have done exactly what we wanted to do, you know.

MTV: Had you wanted to put some of the older songs on Bleach and ended up just doing the new stuff on your own?

Cobain: I think at that time.

MTV: Did you write new songs for Bleach?

Cobain: Yeah, we did write new songs for Bleach. There were a lot of songs that were just written within the two weeks or even the last week prior to recording. At the time we had a time scheduled for the recording of the album, and we only had maybe six songs. During the week prior to that [we] wrote a whole bunch of songs. And we just … uh, I don't know, I don't know what I'm trying to say.

MTV: I guess my question is why the songs that you wrote in those two weeks made it on and not the older ones. Was that your decision?

Cobain: We wrote so many songs in that week right before we recorded that we were excited about the new songs. We wanted to record them. But initially we wanted to just record the few new songs that we had and rerecord most of the stuff that was on the Fecal Matter tape. And that would have been the album. It would have been a lot more like Incesticide, but we just happened to write so many new songs, that we just put it on Bleach. They just happened to have been more in the '70s vein.

MTV: Do you have any memories of that first tour?

Cobain: Yeah. We chose to tour in the middle of the summer. [Laughs] In the South. Imagine being in Texas in July, packed up to the rim of the van with T-shirts and equipment with four members, with no air conditioning, tooling around, living off of $30 a day if you're lucky 'cause … It was fun but we should have been a little bit more smart about it. We should have toured in September or something. But we were so excited about getting the record out and going on tour that we just went for it. Yeah.

MTV: Touring with Tad in Europe in 1989, was that any better? You had a lot of equipment problems. Chris [Novoselic] was telling me, you were always duct-taping stuff together.

Cobain: Yeah. Being in Europe for the first time was more romantic. It wasn't any more comfortable. We were living off of deli trays and cigarettes. And bad beer, or strong beer, I should say. I guess you would call that good beer, wouldn't you? I don't like beer. There were 11 people in a small Euro van. The seats were at this angle, so you would try to sleep and we'd be on like 15- to 18-hour drives just crammed up against one another. In the dead of winter. It was fun, but after seven weeks it took its toll on everyone.

MTV: Did you not want to talk to those guys for a couple weeks after that?

Cobain: Well, I don't think we spoke for months. [Laughs] I actually don't remember. I think we may have played a few shows after that, within that year, together. We were always playing shows together.

MTV: Is that when Sub Pop started talking to majors about a distribution deal?

Cobain: It was part of the reason, yeah. I mean, I can't say that we weren't into the idea of being on a major label. We just didn't like the idea of someone else taking a larger percentage out of our payments. Why be on a major label through another when you can be on one yourself?

MTV: Then you started pursuing stuff yourself and you met a manager and got a lawyer and stuff? Is that why you and Chris started rethinking the band?

Cobain: No, not at all. We weren't very happy with Chad [Channing]'s drumming, basically. He has his own unique style and it's appropriate for a lot of the songs that we wrote, but not for what we really wanted to do at the time. We just wanted to move into more of a pop world at the time. His style just didn't fit.

MTV: Was it hard to let him go?

Cobain: Oh yeah. That was one of the worst days I've ever had. [Laughs] It was terrible. I hate firing people. It's the worst thing you can do, you know.

MTV: It doesn't seem like he was all that surprised.

Cobain: I think he sensed for quite a few months that we weren't totally happy with his drumming, yeah.

MTV: Well, he's been in a couple of bands.

Cobain: Yeah, he's in the Red Ants … something Ants. It's embarrassing not knowing this other name. So the band named something Ants, Fire Ants, yeah. Chad is in another band called the Fire Ants. [Laughs]

MTV: What happened when Dave Grohl joined the band?

Cobain: [We felt like] This is it.

MTV: We can be around and make five or six records.

Cobain: Right, right. Dave added so much more diversity. Not only did he have perfect metronome timing, he hit really hard. He was able to go in between all the dynamics that we wanted to experiment with. It was just perfect. Plus he sang backup vocals and I'd wanted that forever. Ever since the beginning of the band.

MTV: He's always talking about all his band influences.

Cobain: Yeah, he's really good at copying other drummers' styles. He's got his own original style, too, but he also can play a Led Zeppelin solo note for note perfectly. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. He's a great drummer.

MTV: Did any of the other drummers feel like permanent members?

Cobain: Well, if we could have we would have wanted [original Nirvana drummer] Dale [Burkhart] to be a permanent member. But [with] everyone else we always knew it wasn't quite right.

Part III: Nevermind

MTV: Did you feel with Nevermind that you could make the record you wanted to make?

Kurt Cobain: Yeah. Nevermind was definitely an album we wanted to make. We have no regrets. Other than maybe the production was too slick. Now that I look back on it I don't think it's as raw as it could have been. And that's our fault. I can't blame it on anyone else. I can't blame it on [Nevermind producer] Butch Vig. He recorded the record perfectly. But it's just that studios are a really, really deceiving environment. You don't know what it's going to really sound like until you take it home and it's on a tape and you listen to it over and over again. At that point, after we attempted to mix Nevermind for like two weeks, we were so burnt out on it that we just didn't even care anymore. By the time we got Andy Wallace in, it was just like "Oh, yeah, this is fine!" [Laughs]

MTV: Why was Andy Wallace brought in?

Cobain: We recorded the album, then we immediately started mixing and we were just burnt out. We just couldn't get it together. I don't have any explanation for it really. It just didn't sound good. We just couldn't get it right.

MTV: I talked to you guys at the Reading Festival in 1991 before Nevermind came out, when you were on tour with Sonic Youth. What was that like?

Cobain: It was incredible. I mean, to be asked to go on tour by a band like Sonic Youth was like a dream come true. I still can't describe what I felt. It was like wow, what an honor. It was great and the momentum and excitement at the time was so great, because everyone sensed that the album was going to do pretty well. There was just a feeling in the air, there was just like this new thing happening. No one could quite pinpoint it, but we knew that we were a part of it. One of the first shows we played with them was at the Reading Festival. There had been alternative bands playing the Reading Festival for the last three or four years. We didn't know anything about it. We never knew that that thing existed. To walk out onstage in front of that many people, and to realize that that many people like this kind of music, it was just like, "Wow, where have we been? Under a rock all these years?" But then again, Europe is a bit different than America, too. I mean, America's quite a few years behind.

MTV: It seems like Sonic Youth took you under their wing when you showed up.

Cobain: Oh absolutely, yeah. Sonic Youth has helped more bands than any band I can think of. They always know what's hot and new. They're just really great. They're really good about things like that.

MTV: Did you feel better going to the major label Geffen knowing they had done it?

Cobain: Oh yeah. We just basically do everything that Sonic Youth does. We just steal all their ideas. That's what we're turning into now. If you saw the show tonight, if you saw that last thing we did, whatever you wanna call it, we're turning into a noise guitar prog rock band. Hey, that's the next step for any band! But they've been doing it for years before anyone else. Honestly, I feel kind of burnt out with the formula that we've been doing. We've been in this band for like six years and playing pop music can get a bit redundant, so I think we all wanna start experimenting and really the only alternative you have is to turn into Sonic Youth. [Laughs]

MTV: Not such a bad thing.

Cobain: No. Except for that it's been done. But…

MTV: You gonna start getting the 15 guitars with alternate tunings on all of them?

Cobain: No, I don't think I could ever have the patience to do that. But…

MTV: Looking back, does the two weeks before Nevermind came out seem like a calm before the storm?

Cobain: It must have been. We were unaware of it. I mean, we had an idea that something was gonna happen, but it was a nice storm.

MTV: Do you remember where you were when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" started getting airplay?

Cobain: No. We were somewhere in Europe. The nicest thing about that tour was that we weren't aware of our stardom. We just got reports every once in a while, Hey, you guys are on the top 40. Like, really? We didn't even believe people for a long time. We thought everyone was pulling our legs. But it wasn't until we got back to the States, I turned on MTV and there we were. Because they don't have MTV in Europe very much, in very many places, so we really had no idea.

MTV: So you didn't get it gradually, just all of a sudden.

Cobain: No it was just [when we] came home it was like the Beatles. It was like Nirvanamania, stepping off the plane, there weren't a bunch of kids waiting with banners but… [Laughs]

MTV: Those record company people.

Cobain: Yeah.

MTV: So it hit at once, hey guess what, you're a star?

Cobain: Yeah. Yeah.

MTV: Were you surprised?

Cobain: Shocked is a good word. Yeah. How long did it take me to get used to it? Three years! [Laughs]

MTV: What did you think of the Tori Amos cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"?

Cobain: Flattering.

MTV: Is it true that you and Courtney Love used to wake up and dance around to it?

Cobain: Yeah. We used to put it on every morning and have breakfast and dance around. We'd turn it up really loud and do interpretive dancing to it. It's good breakfast music.

MTV: It's funny to listen to. The mulatto and albino part.

Cobain: [Singing] "I'm mulatto." I know. [Laughs] For a while we were using it as an opener before we came out onstage, too. We would play that song and then we would come out doing dances to the song.

MTV: What about Weird Al's "Smells Like Nirvana"?

Cobain: Oh, I laughed my ass off. I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw. He has some good people working for him. Those people really know how to … I mean, I'm sure he has a lot to do with it, but they really know how to reproduce things to the T. He had the exact same setup. It's the same video with him in it. It's great.

MTV: Do you go along with the idea that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Cobain: Sure. Yeah.

Part IV: Success

MTV: What's your reaction to when Nevermind and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hit big and it was all over radio?

Kurt Cobain: I don't see much of a change, personally. I've said this a million times, and I'm kind of tired of saying it, but we're a new wave band and that's what happened with new wave. Punk rock was the revolution. It was the groundbreaking thing and then all these punk rock bands started making really tame palatable music with punk rock fashion. It entered the mainstream and became popular for a while. It was a fad, and that's the way I look at alternative music. Every once in a while I'll look at the Billboard charts and I just go, "crap, crap, crap," just like I always have. Except for R.E.M., and I mean they totally deserve to be on top 40, but I really can't think of any bands that are on top 40 right now that I like, personally.

MTV: But the punk bands or new wave bands didn't sell 9 million records worldwide.

Cobain: No, they didn't. I'm not saying we're a punk rock band; I'm saying we're a new wave band. But there were new wave bands that sold 9 million copies. Like the Knack. All kinds of stuff like that. Kajagoogoo, whatever.

MTV: That's stretching it a little bit. [Laughs]

Cobain: Yeah.

MTV: Do you have any theory on why it happened? Or do you think it was just you guys making a really good record when things were stale and it was kinda ripe for the picking?

Cobain: You couldn't have said it better. It was just the right album at the right time. I mean, I'm sure there was a collective consciousness. People were tired of Warrant. It just got old. Just like grunge music will be in a couple of years, if it hasn't already. If we don't progress, if we don't change, we don't take chances and do different things, if we put out Nevermind III next year or In Utero II, it's just gonna get boring with people. Pop music loses audiences all the time. It doesn't happen very often, for a pop star to become famous and stay famous for years. Madonna and Michael Jackson and that's about it.

MTV: But in the wake of you doing well, and the other bands, Michael and Madonna and Springsteen were still selling millions, but selling a lot less than before. It's not unfair to say a consciousness was raised.

Cobain: Yeah. I mean, something did happen, but I think it's just a general attitude amongst people. I don't know if it really has that much to do with music. I think music has just been used as a tool. A good example is the shows that we've been playing on this tour. Just like when we went to Reading for the first time, to realize that there are that many people, that many kids our age, that basically have the same views as we do and like the same kind of music, that's a really amazing thing. That's a really positive thing. Things just change all the time, and 1990 was the year for change. It was about time. It was the beginning of a new decade.

MTV: If five years ago someone asked you what your goals were, what would you have said?

Cobain: Put out another record. Or to put out a record. Even just five years ago, to put out a record on an independent label was really, really hard for bands. It wasn't as common as it is now. Like anybody can put out a record. Most people use their records as demos now just to get a deal. That's one of the positive things about alternative music getting big: that really obscure and noisy bands are being signed to major labels. The positive thing about that is that they aren't being ripped off. At least they're getting a good advance and they can live for a couple of years. They deserve to live comfortably. All bands do. If they're a good band and they put out good music, they deserve to get paid the money that they should be paid. I mean, it's just started happening in the late '80s. I remember going to punk rock shows, and bands from out of town were getting paid $30. Some band from San Francisco comes up to Seattle and plays at the Gorilla Gardens; here's your $30 and kiss my feet, the promoter would say. Maybe that band sold out the Gorilla Gardens and there were 400 people there. They should have been paid what they deserve, what they drew. But in the late '80s, all of a sudden these independent bands just started demanding more money. It was almost a revolution, in a way. It was really cool. I remember the first time we sold out the Vogue. That holds like a couple hundred people here in Seattle. It's a bar. And we got paid $600. Three years before that, we'd have been lucky if we'd have got $30.

MTV: Now that you've gained that sort of success, what would you hope happens now?

Cobain: That we are able to sustain ourselves, to put out another really good record, and hopefully to progress. I really want to change our style of music. I don't wanna turn into a prog rock band, literally, but I wanna do something different, really different. I wanna have enough guts to do that, and if it alienates people that's too bad. But the Beatles went from - not to compare us to the Beatles - but the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and bands like that went from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to Sgt. Pepper's. That was a massive progression. I just wanna experiment.

MTV: Is the trouble with the public caused by the Vanity Fair article claiming you and Courtney were using drugs during her pregnancy a closed chapter now?

Cobain: I don't really care. If people can't forget about that and just move on … I mean, if they wanna remember us as the parents who supposedly gave their baby drugs, fine. F*ck them. If that's all they want to think about us, they aren't music fans anyhow. The people who gossip and are concerned about things like that don't like our band. I'm proving that every night. Every time that we play a show, I'm so grateful that there're that many kids that still like us, that have overlooked all that stuff, overlooked all the rumors, and all the stupid things that were printed about us in the last two years. I can look out at an audience and say, "These kids really like our band." I know they genuinely like us, they like our music. They don't care about what we are as people or whatever we supposedly did. That's why I'm so happy about being in this band still. I wasn't happy a couple of years ago, I mean, obviously. But just being on tour every night it's just been great.

MTV: Looking back on that, do you think maybe you should have tried to cover up your drug use?

Cobain: I did lie forever. No matter how badly I don't wanna be a role model or influence anyone, I still do. I knew that I was taking drugs at the time, and there were rumors and people wanted me to talk about it, but I tried for months and months not to talk about it. I tried as hard as I could to deny it. But after a while, there was just no point in it any more. I was just thought of as a big liar all the time. It's not my fault. I hardly ever went out in public when I was on drugs, and I never made a spectacle out of it. I never promoted it. Now I'm going to be associated with heroin for the rest of my life. That's not my fault. I honestly don't think it's my fault. I think it's the journalists' fault who brought it up and exploited it. They're the ones that have influenced the kids, as far as I'm concerned, because they're the ones that brought it up.

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