Aprilie 5th, 2010 | By herminedirt
[Peace, 1992]:
Krist Novoselic: "We crawled out of the sea. We were amoebas and we crawled out of the sea and slowly evolved into legs and armsand hands and picked up guitars and staded playing."
Chad Channing: "And then we were born. No wait, we were reborn first."
Krist Novoselic: "We were reborn Christians. We're going to talk to you about the Lord and God and your personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
[...]
Krist Novoselic:" I do some of the most amazing slap bass on this one song. You should see it. I just break the string right off. I keep on playin' and while I'm playing I tune guitar strings around the broken strings so I can still play while I'm still playing because I am such an accomplished bass player. While we're talking about my bass playing, also, I practice about seven hours a day. You see my talent and the way I play you'd know that it would take dedication. "
Unknown person listening in: "But can you slap like Sly Stone?"
Krist Novoselic: "Sure I can slap him. I slap him upside the head. I slap him. I slap him. Let me talk about me again. I'm a pretty nice person. I get along with... I'm insecure. I can't function socially. See. I'm breaking down in public now. Do you like me? What's wrong with me?"
Peace: "I don't know. What is?"
Krist Novoselic: "What do I look like? A Goddamn psychoanalysis schiz or something?"
[Fender Frontline Magazine, 1994]:
"Fender Frontline Magazine: "You’re a very passionate performer. Do you find yourself re-experiencing the tenderness and rage in your songs when you perform them?"
Kurt Cobain: "That’s tough because the real core of any tenderness or rage is tapped the very second that a song is written. In a sense, I’m only re-creating the purity of that particular emotion every time I play that particular song. While it gets easier to summon those emotions with experience, it’s sort of dishonesty in that you can never recapture the emotion of a song completely each time you play it. Real "performing" implies a sort of acting that I’ve always tried to avoid."
"It upset me that we were attracting and entertaining the very people that a lot of my music was a reaction against. I’ve since become much better for accepting people for who they are. Regardless of who they are before they came to the show, I get a few hours to try and subvert the way they view the world. It’s not that I’m trying to dictate, it’s just that I am afforded a certain platform on which I can express my views. At the very least, I always get the last word."
[?, 1989]:
Krist Novoselic: "Messages. We don't have a message."
Kurt Cobain: "We definitely don't have a message."
Krist Novoselic: "We're not like U2 or Joan Baez. They can give people messages."
Kurt Cobain: "We really don't dwell on thinking about things until we're actually interviewed. And then it's just like, 'Uh, gee, should we have said that?' We don't know what we are. We're trying to figure it out."
[Nirvana Fan Club]:
Pat Smear: "I think guitar smashing is as amazing and shocking as it was when I first saw it done by Marc Bolan at a T-Rex show in '73. Who cares, it's just a piece of wood. Smash away!"
[Option, 1992]:
Kurt Cobain: "We’d play these parties. One of the best was in this town called Raymond, and all these rednecks were there, but they moved into the kitchen. They didn’t like us at all. They were scared of us. We were really drunk, so we started making spectacles of ourselves, playing off the bad vibes we were giving to the rednecks ... you know, jumping off tables and pretending we were rock stars. To top it off, Chris jumped through a window, and then we played Flipper’s ‘Sex Bomb’ for about an hour. Our girlfriends were hanging on us and grabbing our legs and doing a mock lesbian scene. That started freaking out the rednecks."
"There was one show we did at the Central Tavern in Seattle, where nobody came. We didn’t even play. We just loaded up our stuff and left. Not one single person... "
[Flipside, 1992]:
Flipside: "What are your feelings on whole Pearl Jam, Soundgarden thing. I hate to put Soundgarden in that class because when their first EP came out I thought they were like Robert Plant fronting the Butthole Surfers, I thought they were amazing."
Kurt Cobain: "They used to be great, they were even better in like ‘85 when Chris Cornell had a Flock of Seagulls haircut! They were just like the Butthole Surfers, they were amazing."
Flipside: "Now they’re totally into this metal thing, they’re touring with Guns and Roses... That’s the tour you guys turned down?"
Kurt Cobain: "Right, we turned down Guns and Roses. That would be a big waste of time. I can’t comment on Soundgarden because I know them personally and I really like them a lot, but I have strong feelings towards Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains and bands like that. They’re obviously just corporate puppets that are just trying to jump on the alternative bandwagon - and we are being lumped into that category. Those bands have been in the hairspray / cockrock scene for years and all of a sudden they stop washing their hair and start wearing flannel shirts. It doesn’t make any sense to me. There are bands moving from L.A. and all over to Seattle and then claim they’ve lived there all their life so they can get record deals. It really offends me."
[Village Voice, 1991]:
"Ironically, some of the zillions of "Nevermind"s sold were purchased by just the sort of teenage-wasteland dwellers who made Nirvana’s life such a living hell to begin with (in the redneck Twin Peaks environs of Aberdeen, Washington, no less). Truth is, macho, insensitive metal dudes often feel like misfits, too, denied, misunderstood, tortured. It’s a stance Ozzy Osbourne’s been working with considerable success for years. Do those kids listen to "In Bloom" ("He’s the one who likes all the pretty songs/He likes to sing along/And he likes to shoot his gun/But he knows not what it means") and relate? Or understand that it’s a put-down? Probably not. It’s that violin-meets-Uzi, dive-bombing fuzz-explosion guitar lead that gets ‘em."
[Kerang!, 1991]:
Kurt Cobain: "We're not prepared to become super stars because we're not going to be. We're prepared to destroy our career as it happens."
Kerrang!: "Would you describe yourself as a person who would go mad without the music?"
Kurt Cobain: "I used to think that. But now that we're playing almost every night on tour I feel like I can probably do something else eventually. If I keep going for another five years I might burn myself out and not have much desire to play guitar any more. I don't know if it's like this eternal thing that I always have to do. There's so many other things I'd like to do. Sometimes I like just hanging out with my friends. I also like to write a lot, and maybe I might even wanna act in a movie or something. There are lots of things I can think of I would like to do. Maybe I might just be happy being a janitor. I don't know, I can't say at this point. I feel that way now, but I'm sure as soon as I had two months off I would like to start playing again."
[Sassy, 1992]:
Kurt Cobain: "The other day I was driving around in LA listening to a college station. They were playing a lot of my favorite bands, like Flipper and the Melvins. I was saying to myself, This is great. And then the DJ came on and went on this half-hour rant about how Nirvana is so obviously business oriented and just because we have colored hair doesn’t mean we are alternative. And I felt really terrible. Because there is nothing in the world I like more than pure underground music. And to be shunned by this claim that just because you are playing the corporate game you are not honest! You use the corporate ogre to your advantage. You fight them by joining them."
[Backlash, 1988]
Dawn Anderson: "Ah, Aberdeen — a town where there’s nothing to do but drink fish-beer and worship Satan. The Melvins were from Aberdeen. Remember? Now the Melvins’ fan club is cranking out some pretty heavy riffs on their own. They call themselves Nirvana, a name that signifies both everything and nothing. If you don’t understand this you can either take a course in world religion or you can witness Nirvana incarnate next time they perform in the big city."
"Unfortunately, Kurdt’s nervousness was apparent on stage that night, but I’ve seen them twice since and they’ve gotten tighter each time. They’re becoming the kind of band that can turn an entire audience into zombie pod people by their sheer heaviness (this is a compliment)."
[Flipside, 1989]:
Chad Channing: "We wrote down the lyrics on the way to the studio."
Krist Novoselic: "We were trying to be spontaneous."
Flipside: "Didn’t you have enough songs that you play live to put on the album?"
Krist Novoselic: "Oh yeah, yeah. But we wanted to do new songs. We had a demo tape that was going around Seattle and we were going to put all of those songs on the album but we just decided to do new songs. It was just a whim. We make decisions like this (retarded voice) Yeah, let’s do it".
Chad Channing: "We’re the most indecisive band in the world."
Krist Novoselic: "All four of us have been walking around here for an hour deciding what to do."
Flipside: "Is this band like an experiment and one day you’ll do something else?"
Krist Novoselic: "No, we can’t do anything else."
Chad Channing: "If it wasn’t for the band I don’t know where I’d be unless I had a girlfriend to support me or something."
Kurt Cobain: "Someone told us that they wouldn’t even hire us at McDonalds (laughter) So we’d better pull through."
Krist Novoselic: "Job experience, let’s see, I’m a janitor."
Jason Everman: "Industrial painter..."
Chad Channing: "I was a commercial fisherman in Alaska for 4 years."
Kurt Cobain: "I’m a good chef, I’m a totally good cook."
Krist Novoselic: "We’ll all vouch for that."
Flipside: "You’re right they wouldn’t hire you at McDonalds."
[Kerrang!, 1993]:
Kurt Cobain: "A person can read an entire set of lyrics to one song and find the one line that might have something to do with my personal life, and think the entire song is about that."
[Newsweek, 1994]:
Michael Stipe: "I know what the next Nirvana recording was going to sound like. It was going to be very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments. It was going to be an amazing fucking record, and I'm a little bit angry at him for killing himself. He and I were going to record a trial run of the album, a demo tape. It was all set up. He had a plane ticket. He had a car picking him up. And at the last minute he called and said, "I can't come."
[Rolling Stone, 2000]:
"Within weeks of its release, on September 10th, 1991 (two weeks ahead of Nevermind), "Smells Like Teen Spirit" – five minutes of lyric choler and power-trio armageddon – had shut the door on the 1980s with withering finality. Michael Jackson, big-hair metal and stadium-rock ham was out. Bawling guitars, thrift-shop flannel and dysfunctional candor were in with a vengeance."
[Rolling Stone, 1993]:
Kurt Cobain: "I just hope I don't become so blissful I become boring. I think I'll always be neurotic enough to do something weird."
"Teen Spirit" was such a clicheed riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or "Louie, Louie." When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, "that is so ridiculous." I made the band play it for an hour and a half. I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies. I have to admit it [smiles]. When I heard The Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band - or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard."
Rolling Stone: "Where did the line "here we are now, entertain us" come from?"
Kurt Cobain: "That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you're standing around with people in a room, it's really boring and uncomfortable. So it was "well, here we are, entertain us". You invited us here."
[Port Orchard, 1994]
Larry Smith, unchiul lui Cobain: "One day I heard that he was in a fight a few blocks away. When I ran to the scene, the fight was over. However, I heard from a friend that Kurt was assaulted by a burly 250 pound logger type. Evidently, Kurt did not even fight; he just presented the bully with th the appropriate hand gesture every time he was knocked down until the bully gave up. To top it all off, Kurt just had that usual grin on his face!"
[Rolling Stone, 1994]:
Rolling Stone: "One of the songs that you cut from "In Utero "at the last minute was "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die." How literally did you mean it?"
Kurt Cobain: "As literal as a joke can be. Nothing more than a joke.
And that had a bit to do with why we decided to take it off. We knew people wouldn’t get it; they’d take it too seriously. It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves. I'm thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. "He isn’t satisfied with anything." And I thought it was a funny title. I wanted it to be the title of the album for a long time. But I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand it."
[Guitar World, 1995]:
"Who can say why MTV chose to air Nirvana's Unplugged performance over and over, like a tape loop, in the hours and days following the discovery of Cobain's lifeless body on April 8, 1994? Many fans might have preferred some bracing footage of Nirvana fully amped up and defiantly live before a seething mosh pit. Instead, there was Nirvana Unplugged, taped just five months before Cobain's death, and designated as the wake which, through its repeated showings served to diffuse the rock community's grief and shock. The recent release of Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York, the CD version of the television concert, was a mournful déjà vu experience for many. It has become impossible to hear this music outside the context of Cobain's terrible end.
Seen, again and again, in the hours after the artist's death, the somber MTV gig had an oddly lulling effect. It may have helped some viewers find a calm, quiet way to resign themselves to Cobain's violent departure. But the effect was pretty spooky, too. It was as if the guy was singing at his own funeral. Or singing to us from some tranquil, blue world beyond our own."
[Rocket Magazine, 1994]:
Charles R. Cross: "When Kurt Cobain committed suicide recently, I found myself, like everyone else remotely involved in the Seattle music scene, at ground zero for one of the most frenetic media feeding frenzies of this decade.
The resulting TV coverage, the many newspaper stories and the hours of radio talk that followed this tragedy left me ashamed of my own profession, scared of my own absorption with it (reading every story for the first three days until I got disgusted), and finally sick to my stomach as much from the media coverage itself, as from the actual tragedy of Cobain's untimely death."
"Cobain is now dead. I'll miss him. I'll miss the music he'll never make, the songs he'll never sing."
[TIME Domestic, 1994]:
"Last year a journalist visited a home Cobain and Love were renting before they moved into the house in which Kurt would end his life. He had decorated one of the walls with this graffito: "NONE OF YOU WILL EVER KNOW MY INTENTIONS". It could serve as his credo as well as his epitaph."
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