The second part of
the extract from Nirvana:
The True Story by Everett True, in which
the author pushes Kurt Cobain on to the stage at the Reading Festival in a
wheelchair.
The
lights. That’s all I can remember. The lights. You can’t see a single face. The
crowd is invisible, and all that you feel is this incredible euphoric roar that
increases every step you make towards the microphone.
“He’ll be OK,” Krist Novoselic
reassured the crowd, pointing out to the wings, where we slowly materialised:
“With the help of his friends and his family, he’ll survive.” We started
walking up to the right hand microphone and halfway across the stage Kurt
reached up and grappled my neck. “Great,” I thought to myself in my drunken
stupor. “Kurt wants to start a mock-fight like we used to have on stage with
Nirvana.” I started to wrestle him back. “No, you asshole,” he whispered
furiously. “You’re wheeling me to the wrong mic.”
It was a goof, a cocked pair of fingers
at all the press reports of the singer being sick, unable to play with his
band. Kurt climbed out of the wheelchair, unsteadily, dressed in hospital smock
and wig, sang one line of a song… and collapsed. The crowd laughed and cheered,
relieved. It was obvious the band were out to have a good time. And fuck, so
they did – in fact, the show was so superior to any others they played during
1992, it was like another band altogether. It was like it was 1990 again, and
the Olympia trio didn’t have a care in the world.
Twelve songs in, the band deliberately
cocked up the intro to ‘Teen Spirit’, Dave Grohl bellowing out the words to
Boston’s ‘More Than A Feeling’ over a false start. Kurt wrecked all the guitar
breaks too, but it hardly mattered – the entire world had gone ballistic. With
the exception of ‘Something In The Way’, Nevermind
was played in its entirety: including a typically over-the-top encore of the
traditional instrument-baiting ‘Territorial Pissings’ – Dave Grohl hurled a
cymbal at a bass drum he’d carefully balanced on top of some speakers, seeing
the entire stack collapse very pleasingly. Guitars got trashed, and the
audience’s throats went raw singing along with ‘Negative Creep’, ‘Aneurysm’ et al. It was like Nirvana were mocking
their own importance up there and reaffirming their own mortality – not rock
Gods, but three ordinary dudes out to have a fucking blast. This was the last
truly great show I saw them play as a trio. We might have had mud on our soles
(and in our hair, and on our face and trousers and underwear) but fuck we were
happy.
“Courtney’s had some bad things written
about her in the press recently,” her doting hubby announced. “And now she
thinks everybody hates her. I know this concert is being recorded, so I’d like
to send a message to her. I’d like you all to say, ‘Courtney, we love you…’”
The audience shouted the fucking site down.
“I remember Kurt calling Courtney on the
cell phone from onstage,” laughs Jennifer Finch. “I’d never seen a cell phone
before. Yes, there were many people yelling, ‘We love you Courtney’, yet I was
sitting there transfixed on this cell phone. She’d just given birth, right?
That was when I got to take back the pound I’d given her.”
So
I pushed Kurt Cobain on stage in a wheelchair for what turned out to be his
final UK concert. Big deal. He’d have done the same for me.
After the furore from Reading had died
down, Melody Maker ran a competition
to, “Win the wig that Kurt Cobain wore at Reading”. (I ran on after the show’s
end, and grabbed the wig as a keepsake. I thought that perhaps my sister might
need it back. I wasn’t sure how much wigs cost.) No one wrote in. They didn’t
believe it. So we trailed the competition even bigger the following week,
writing something like, “Listen you dunderheads! This is for real! The first
person to write in with the best reason why they couldn’t actually get to
Reading to see Nirvana wins the wig, and we’ll print the winning entry.”
This time, we were deluged with entries. We
printed the winning one: it was a pithy, witty, beautifully structured and
reasoned piece of writing. We congratulated the winner, commiserated with them
for missing Nirvana and informed them that they were by far and away the finest
entry we received.
Trouble was, by this point I’d decided I
wanted to keep the wig for myself.
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