How Mudhoney saw the downfall of Nirvana coming: “Really gross”
Decades after his suicide in 1994, the death of Nirvana songwriter Kurt Cobain is still viewed as one of rock and roll’s greatest tragedies. It is easy to see why this might be; after all, few songwriters summed up the grunge scene of the 1990s quite like Cobain. He blazed a defiant trail that countless future songwriters have followed. Nevertheless, the downfall of the frontman was not much of a shock to those who were around him. Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, for instance, saw the early signs of Nirvana’s sinking ship.
In many ways, Cobain and Nirvana owed a lot of their success to the pioneering sounds of Mudhoney. From their early origins in Seattle, Washington, the Mark Arm-fronted band helped to lay the foundations for the grunge scene that would soon take the world by storm. Without seminal releases like Superfuzz Bigmuff in 1988, later triumphs like Nirvana’s Nevermind likely would never have happened. Ever conscious of his influences, Cobain regularly paid homage to the impact of Mudhoney.
In fact, Cobain invited Mudhoney – who never achieved the same mainstream success as their younger counterparts – to tour with Nirvana in 1993. At this time, Cobain and the band were suffering the effects of the global acclaim that Nevermind had brought them. In contrast to their early days on independent labels like Sub Pop, this colossal success brought with it a lot of money and a lot of individuals looking to exploit the band for personal gain. As a result, Cobain was self-medicating with a dangerous volume of drugs.
For Mark Arm, the 1993 tour was not the joyous grunge celebration he had first envisioned. Not long after joining the tour, it became evident that Cobain was not in a good state of mind, and very few individuals were trying to help him. “Nirvana surrounded themselves with really gross people,” he later recalled. “The [1993] Nirvana tour was just awful. Everybody was just stepping on eggshells, trying not to disturb Kurt. Courtney wasn’t on that tour. They tried to make it a dry tour with no alcohol as some sort of example to Kurt.”
The idea of a “dry tour” was flawed from the start, not least because Mudhoney and the rest of the tour still had access to booze. “Kurt’s interest had very little to do with alcohol, so it was a stupid exercise,” Arm shared. “They had no booze backstage, but we had beer on our rider. So every night, Krist, Dave and whoever else wanted a beer would come to our little room and take our beer. It was ridiculous.”
The songwriter questioned, “Why didn’t they just get enough beer for everybody who wanted it? Why this pretence that it’s a dry tour when it’s not really?” On top of that, nobody seemed to take issue with Cobain’s huge drug intake on this apparently “dry” tour. “Kurt was taking massive amounts of pills,” Arm said, “he was totally stoned anyway. The whole idea that this dry tour was helping Kurt in any way was just absurd. Why didn’t they take his pills?”
“Communication within the band and the people around them was pretty much non-existent,” he shared, highlighting the multiple issues that culminated in Cobain’s worsening mental state. At one point, according to the songwriter, Cobain approached him for advice on how to quit drugs. Arm, who had only recently gotten clean himself, told the singer, “I told him that you have to want to quit bad enough and that you’ve got to stay away from your junkie friends because they’re not really your friends. They’re just people who share an interest in heroin with you.”
Ultimately, neither that advice nor the preposterous “dry tour” in 1993 could have saved Kurt Cobain. Only a year later, in 1994, the Nirvana songwriter took his own life in the wake of increased dependency on drugs and a continuously declining mental state. His tragic death still remains incredibly raw for those who were around him at the time, including Arm, even if his declining state was plain to see.
