Kurt Cobain remains to be one of the greatest musicians but his initial years was full of hardships. Krist Novoselic recalled how Kurt Cobain was working many odd jobs to finance Nirvana’s demo tape, and explained why there was “a lot of pain” in the band’s most commercially successful period.
Krist Novoselic opens up on Kurt Cobain
Cobain might have tasted success but that did not came upon without the hard times. Eventually, the trio of Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic went on to get the breakthrough and change the course of rock history.
Finance was also tight in the band’s early days, as Novoselic told Rick Beato in a recent interview. As a result, Kurt Cobain would be working odd jobs to get enough money to record a demo tape:
“He had a job as a janitor. He would go clean like dentist’s office in the evening. There are some crazy stories of what happened. He cleaned toilets to earn the money to make that record.”
And while the band’s 1989 debut album “Bleach” established Nirvana as an important asset to the Seattle underground scene, it was with the release of the sophomore LP “Nevermind” – and its lead single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in particular – that things really blew up. Recalling the particular moment when it happened, Novoselic said:
“That’s interesting. We were on this tour, in this van… were in the United States first. And then we would play these clubs, and they were packed. The radio guy from the label would come by and be like, ‘Hey, you guys added on…’ whatever station it was. And then I remember us just being tired. Then we got on a plane and we did this tour of Europe. And then we made that video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and then got into rotation on MTV. We were getting added on all these radio stations. We would call home and people would say like, ‘Hey, you guys are like all over MTV!’ And we were like, ‘Oh, really?'”
However, Novoselic also notes that Nirvana’s glory era was as painful as it was exhilarating:
“I was broke before that. There are all these blessings, but see, there was a lot of pain, too. Kurt had this addiction. He had a lot of pressure. He was like ‘the guy’, too – he had more attention than we had. He was out there out front, he was the singer. When I think about that time, it was a joyful, beautiful time. But there was a lot of pain. I can’t get into that. And the way it ended was terrible.
“That time of my life from ’91 to ’94, it seems like it was like 20 years, because it was so compressed. And then it ended so terribly. I had to decompress for years. And all the issues that come from being under so much stress like that.”
