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MILK IT!
 Also by Jim DeRogatis

Turn On Your Mind:

Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock

Let It Blurt:
The Life and Times of Lester Bangs,
America's Greatest Rock Critic
Collected Musings on the
ALTERNATIVE MUSIC
EXPLOSION of the'90s

JiM
DeROGATIS

Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
 Copyright © 2003 by Jim DeRogatis
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of
the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book

is available from the Library of Congress

First Da Capo Press edition 2003

ISBN 0-306-81271-1
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
http: / /www.dacapopress.com

Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts

for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations,
institutions, and other organizations. For more information,
please contact the Special Markets Department at the
Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center,
Cambridge, MA 02142,
or call (800) 255-1514 or (617) 252-5298, or e-mail
[email protected].

Interior book design by Cynthia Young

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9—07 06 05 04 03
 For the teachers and editors

who taught me to convey my ideas on the page—

in particular Marisa Pitaro-Minkler, Dorothy Campbell,

John Campion, Jim O'Donnell, Jim Testa,

Mickey Carroll, Steven Newhouse, Pat Donnelly,

Margaret Schmidt, Keith Moerer, Susan Hamre,

and all of my colleagues at the Chicago Sun-Times—

with the caveat that any obstinate opinions and

boneheaded mistakes herein are entirely my own.

This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Foreword by Keith Moerer xi

Introduction xv

RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY

UNIT SHIFTERS 1
Smells Like a Nirvana Article 3
Nirvana's Raw Power Shoves the Hype Aside 18
Rocker Cobain Knew Pitfalls of Stardom 20
Foo Fighters, Foo Fighters 22
Senator Krist 24
The Nirvana Wars 29

THE GIRL WITH THE MOST CAKE 59

Hole, Live Through This 40
With Love, Cobain Widow Delivers Heartfelt,
Cathartic Set 42
Courtney Unplugged 43
The Quotable Courtney 48

PUSH ME, PULL ME, YIELD 55

Pearl Jam, Vs. 56
The Courtship of Eddie Vedder 57
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy 60
Pearl Jam, No Code 61
yield: A Sign of Surrender? 63
Kicking Out the Jam 66
Is Chicago the Next Seattle? 69

VII
VIII CONTENTS

MELANCHOLY AND THE PEAR-SHAPED &OY 73

Smashing Pumpkins Carve Out Their Niche 75
Up Against the Wall: Mellon Collie and
the Infinite Sadness 80
No, Really: The Smashing Pumpkins, Adore 82
Billy Speaks 84
Perfect Timing: The Smashing Pumpkins Say Goodbye 89

POSITIVE SLEEPING 93
Chicago's Leading Alternative 94
Urge Overkill, Saturation 100
Escape From Guyville 101
Urge Overkill, Exit the Dragon 107

ITWASARIOT.GIRL6 109
Sex in Rock 101: Selling the Maiden Phair 111
L7 Makes Anger Fun 115
Louder Than Words 118
Harvey's Happy to Be an Outsider 120
The Do-It-All Icelander 121
Tori! Tori! Tori! 123
Sinead's Not Bad (She's Just Misunderstood) 125
Warming Up to the Muffs 128
Elastica Connects 129
The Building of a Buzz Band 132

LOLLAPALOOZA NATION 139

Lollapalooza: Alternative Celebration or
Big Business as Usual? 141
Rock of Ageless 142
Taking Stock of the Muddy Mess 144
Women Power Lollapalooza '95 148
Been Caught Squealing 152

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE MOTHERLAND 159

The Evolution of Creation 160
A Love Letter to Guitar-Based Rock 163
Ride, Carnival of Light 166
 CONTENTS IX

Blur Shows Talent to Survive Passing Trends 168

An Oasis in U.K/s Rock Desert? 170
Oasis, Be Here Now 171
The Stone Roses, Second Coming 172
Adventures in Stereo 174
Thievery? Sure, But Inspired Thievery 175
Acid Reign 178

PIONEERS ANP TRAIL&LAZERS 183

Love & Death 184
Slow Dazzle 189
Taking Advice by Strategy 192
The Original Alternative Rock Band? 197
The Real Live Wire 200
On the Beat 205
Five Alive 207
Patti Smith, Gone Again 209
Great Gobs of Guitar Grunge 211
Mudhoney's Dirty-Sweet Mix 214
Overrated: Alex Chilton 215
Mercenary Visionary 216
Curiouser and Curiouser 219
Kraftwerk at the Riviera Theatre 221

OUT OF TIME: R.EM AND U2 225

Musical Perversity 226
Grand Old Men of Modern Rock 234
Automatic for the Press 243
U2 Pumps Up the Power with Zoo TV 253
U2: A Critical Discography 255

HOOTIEGATE 261
American Blandstand 263

UNREPENTANT HYPES ANP

FA&ULOUS FRAUDS 267
N.W.A, Niggaz4Life 269
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion 271
X CONTENTS

The Wesley Willis Fiasco 277

Never Mind 279
Quantity Over Quality 281
Shootout at the Rage Factory 283
Singer Gets an Eye for Eye 286
Neil and Marilyn 290
My Britney Problem—And Yours 297

FREAKS AND GEEKS 305

Psychedelic Rock from the Bible Belt 307
The Next Prime Cut in Rock 314
Screeching Halt 317
Leapin' Lizards 322
Into the Sunset 324
Looney Tunes 326
Weening Ways 329
One Power-Filled Alternative 330
Speaking of Geeks . . . 331
Stone Loco 333
An Arresting Development in Hip-Hop 338
The P.M. Dawn of a New Day in Hip-Hop 341
The Aphex Twin, Richard D, James 343
The Orb, Orblivion 345
Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile 346
The End of Rock 348
Psychedelic Radio Shack 352

MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL 355

Mud, Moshing, Mayhem, and Money:
The Best and Worst of '94 356
Postmark: Cleveland 361
Heavy Hitters 367
What's Up with Generation Y? 372
Rock 'n' Roll Is Alive and Well and Living at
(Address Unlisted at the Customer's Request) 376

The Ninety Best Albums of the '90s 381

Index 385
About the Author 410
Foreword
by Keith Moerer

LOUD, OBNOXIOUS, FREQUENTLY WRONG—these are just three of the quali-

ties I love about Jim DeRogatis.
You see, I don't want to read rock critics who never rattle me, and I don't
need them to guide or confirm my own impeccable taste. I prefer to be chal-
lenged, surprised, infuriated, informed, amused, or touched. Yet most of
what passes these days for rock criticism—and its even milder cousin, rock
journalism—is stultifying in its predictability: timid hacks praising artists
more for what they've done in the past than in the present, or lamenting
prefab pop as if it had been invented by the Backstreet Boys and will topple
for good with the inevitable career decline of Christina Aguilera.
To state what is already obvious or soon will be, Jim doesn't have a prob-
lem speaking his mind. Every critic angers artists they pan; Jim is one of
the few with an ability to piss off people whose work he generally admires,
mostly by telling the truth as he sees it on a particular Saturday night or
Tuesday afternoon. If not always painful, the truth is often inconvenient,
which is why over the years he's earned the grudging respect, corrosive
scorn, and rock-star self-pity of Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, Steve Albini,
and the cry-baby half of Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo).
I met Jim in 1990, shortly after he'd left a job covering parking-ticket
scams and corrupt politicians as a reporter for The Jersey Journal. Within a
year of our meeting, an American president named Bush would attack Iraq
and Nevermind would dominate the pop charts. As this is being written
twelve years later, another American president named Bush is preparing to
attack Iraq, and Nirvana is back on the charts—this time with a posthu-
mous greatest-hits collection and a best-selling book in Kurt Cobain's
haunted Journals. During the years in between, alternative rock went boom,

XI
XII FOREWORD

followed by a sickening bust (I'm talking about overdoses and suicides, not
its misfortunes on the Billboard Hot 200). Hip-hop and teen pop took con-
trol, much of it formulaic in its calibration of success (Cristal champagne,
designer SUVs) and beauty (silicone implants not really optional). Oh, and
Jim developed from a reporter covering the Hoboken City Council (with a
clip file full of fanzine bylines on the side) to the chief pop music critic at
the Chicago Sun-Times and a nationally known freelancer who witnessed
and documented many of these developments from the third row (the first
two being reserved for industry weasels and the holders of scalped tickets).
I hired Jim twice during the first half of the '90s, and the second time he
repaid me by getting me fired before I turned into a hopeless wino or,
worse, one of those smug New York magazine types—alternative
newsweekly graduates who pretend that putting some female celebrity
half-naked on a magazine cover qualifies as the satisfying culmination of a
long and distinguished career. The first time we worked together we had a
blast. It was at a Minneapolis magazine called Request, and it was a better
publication than it had any right to be (it was owned and distributed by a
national chain of mall music stores, but its executives gave us lots of auton-
omy, and any flaws the magazine had were ours, not theirs). It was at
Request that I learned firsthand how passionately Jim believes in music, its
power to transcend, but also its potential for disappointment or hollow
poses. Whenever one of us made a particularly boneheaded pronounce-
ment, the other would yell, "Them's fightin' words!" and off we'd go, argu-
ing as if our jobs, or at least our self-respect, were at stake.
The second time we worked together was at Rolling Stone, where we
were hired in 1995 to make a publication going through a prolonged iden-
tity crisis relevant again, reclaiming its past as a music magazine, covering
younger artists sooner and more aggressively. Within months I would be
standing in my boss Jann Wenner's office, editing a forty-thousand-word
interview he'd done with some up-and-comer named Mick Jagger while a
band of snotty upstarts called Fleetwood Mac blared over his office stereo
system. Jim was forced to assign a string of news stories about the Grateful
Dead, a band for which Jann had rediscovered a passion shortly after Jerry
Garcia's death rendered it kaput. In truth, there wasn't much to inspire in
the younger musicians we covered, either. Cobain was already dead, re-
placed on the scene by Nirvana-wannabes Bush and Layne Staley of Alice
in Chains, who was well into his own sad, fatal decline.
We didn't last a year at Rolling Stone, thanks to all of the above, plus the
gall of Jim giving Hootie and the Blowfish one less star than the three Jann
 FOREWORD XIII

felt were guaranteed to any artist who'd previously been on the cover of his
magazine. I just checked a few sites on the Internet, and you can now buy
that underappreciated classic, Fairweather Johnson, for twenty-four cents, or
you can join any one of three auctions on eBay, where the starting bid,
should someone choose to enter it, is a penny. Which means, of course, that
history has proven Jim wrong: He should have taken both of the stars he
granted Hootie and given them to Jann for a seven-star review of the next
Jagger solo album.
Reading through this collection of Jim's writings from the '90s, I'm struck
by a number of things. The first is that his experience as a news reporter has
served him well, giving him a good instinct for framing a story and the ability
to ask tough, substantive questions. He knows when to hurl a hard question
(challenging Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine on the "righteous"
means used by Peru's Shining Path guerrillas, for example) and when to shut
up and let his tape recorder do the work (as when Courtney Love freely ad-
mits to taking drugs during the first trimester of her pregnancy, but not dur-
ing the second, dammit, no matter what that writer-bitch Lynn Hirschberg
wrote in Vanity Fair). He's well-informed enough to talk to Krist Novoselic
about the NRA, political action committees, and the Dead Kennedys, but
playful enough to pose the following question to Justine Frischmann of
Elastica: "You live with Damon Albarn of Blur and two cats. Who's more
trouble?" Her answer makes it obvious that their romance will never last.
As might be expected of a collection that covers the '90s, this one in-
cludes interviews with Cobain, Love, Corgan, Perry Farrell, the Flaming
Lips, and those twin totems of alt-rock, R.E.M. and U2. No book covering
the past decade would be complete without them. But Jim also has a keen
enough appreciation for history to include the pioneers who preceded
them: Lou Reed, John Cale, Wire, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, and David
Thomas of Pere Ubu. Yet some of my favorite pieces here are the least obvi-
ous ones of all, such as the profile of Ben Weasel, a role model for both
Green Day and Blink 182, who ended the century as a recovering agorapho-
bic, still flying the flag for punk rock, but now driving a new Honda and
living in a six-room condo in suburban Chicago.
One of the qualities I appreciate most about Jim is his insistence in fol-
lowing his passions, wherever they might lead. This is why you'll find effu-
sive praise for Julian Cope, Spiritualized, and Wake Ooloo in these pages,
but also rare dissenting opinions on such sacred subjects as Guided By
Voices, Patti Smith, Alex Chilton, and Lee "Scratch" Perry. When he does
tackle an obvious target, he's often able to do so from a fresh perspective.
XIV FOREWORD

(Read Jim's piece on Britney Spears toward the end of this collection,
wherein he wrestles with his distaste for the teen queen not as a critic de-
fending rock, alt or otherwise, but as the father of a young daughter.)
Jim also has a good eye for telling details. Read in context now, there's
something eerie about his description of Cobain having his shoes torn off his
feet while crowd-surfing at a Chicago concert, and something touching
about Louise Post of Veruca Salt asking for the house lights of a club to be
turned up so she can better see the frets on her guitar. It's amusing to read
his wry acknowledgment of the long line of rebels at Lollapalooza waiting
patiently for wristbands that will permit them to join the mosh pit, or his
bold assertion that there wasn't enough corporate sponsorship at Woodstock
'94, proved by the lack of adequate toilet facilities and sky-high ticket prices.
Much as Jim and I have disagreed about music over the years, reading
this book makes me realize that he got most of the big stories of the '90s
right, and a lot of the little ones, too. I could give you plenty of examples of
what I think he missed or got wrong, but part of the fun of reading this
book is nodding in agreement when he strikes a personal chord, or shaking
a fist when he hits some particularly sensitive nerve of yours. Contrary to
popular opinion, fifty million screaming fans can be wrong, and one lone
bastard—Jim, me, you—can be right.
As I write this, 2002 is coming to a close, allowing enough perspective on
the final decade of the twentieth century for me to state the following: That
however great Nirvana's music is, their success didn't "change" the music
industry, except on the most superficial level for a couple of years, and
Britney Spears won't singlehandedly destroy it, either (although another
decade of record executive greed and stupidity just might). That Pearl Jam
has never been more admirable, or less interesting, than now. That
Courtney Love will probably always be interesting, but never particularly
admirable. That Dave Matthews will continue to be more popular than he
has any right to be. That PJ Harvey will remain less popular than she de-
serves to be. That Steve Albini will continue to hate Jim's guts. And, finally,
that Jim will carry on as he always has—as loud, obnoxious, and convinced
he's right as ever. Don't let him get away without a good fight.

After a five-year stint as Editor-in-Chief of Music and Books at Amazon.com,

Keith Moerer is currently working on a book called Looking for Lewis and Clark, a
social, political, and personal history of his hometown of Great Falls, Montana. In
2004, he plans to launch a magazine for people who appreciate compelling stories
and good writing about all kinds of music.
Introduction

IT SEEMS TO &E OBLIGATORY in the introduction to collections such as this

one—even my very favorites, like Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, A
Whore Just Like the Rest: The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer, and The Nick
Tosches Reader—to note that the pieces that follow are being presented
pretty much as they ran—errors, awkward passages, and snap judgments
intact—in the interest of preserving the spirit of the moment, as with dis-
patches from the front. My guess is that this is a deterrence machine (at
least for those rock-writer heroes who are still breathing and compiling
themselves), a way to hedge against a charge I make several times herein.
Nostalgia is the most insidious enemy of great art, especially rock 'n' roll,
a music that is about living in the moment. That holds for rock writing, too.
No writer wants to be accused of dwelling in the past and cannibalizing
him- or herself, so he or she puts an ironic, self-deprecating title on their an-
thology and notes that it's just a bunch of old crap, scribbled in the heat of
battle, presented as is in the interest of verisimilitude, and collected in the
hope of giving the reader some slight sense of what it was like to be there.
Well, that holds here, too, for the most part, but I ain't gonna lie to you:
Perhaps a quarter of these articles benefited from some correcting, a bit of
rewriting, and a touch of synthesizing—especially the daily newspaper
pieces, which, after all, are the most immediate and ephemeral kind of criti-
cism or journalism. But I didn't try to turn those newspaper pieces into
something they weren't originally—I wanted to preserve the unique feeling
of reading an account of a great album published a week before its release,
or of a noteworthy show recalled in print a mere five hours after it hap-
pened, even if that album or show is now twelve years in the past—and
there has been absolutely no revisionism. I change my mind and double
back on myself all the time; all of us do. As with lovers and friends, our re-
lationship with the music changes and evolves as we live with it, and I'd

XV
XVI INTRODUCTION

advise that you never trust a critic who doesn't admit as much. Still, the
opinions and observations here are unaltered because that's what I thought
at the time, when I was in the thick of things, and it does seem dishonest to
allow hindsight to enter into the picture now.
I cannot imagine the reader who will agree with everything in these
pages—as I said, I no longer agree with everything myself!—but that has
never been my goal. My approach to rock criticism is that it's best when it's
a spirited dialogue between people who care passionately about the music.
To that end, I often run my readers' emails and letters in my columns in the
Chicago Sun-Times; my partner Greg Kot and I encourage listeners to call,
voice their thoughts, and challenge us both every Tuesday night on Sound
Opinions, "the world's only rock 'n' roll talk show"; and as you will soon
see, I have no problem accepting and publishing criticism of myself that's
as barbed and acerbic as what I've dished out. All of us—critics, artists, and
fans—ought to be able to take a little ego bashing if it's in the interest of
communicating, exchanging ideas, and growing in our love and under-
standing of the music.
How do those of us who love rock 'n' roll interact with it in real life? We
sit on the couch and blast the stuff on the stereo, trying to convince each
other that the music we love is something that our friends need in their
lives, too, while simultaneously railing against the crap that we bought that
turned out to be a hype. I can't thank you enough for picking up this book
and joining me on my couch, and I'll consider it a compliment if something
I've written prompts you to hurl these pages across the room. I'm not try-
ing to change your mind. After the fundamental journalistic goal of docu-
menting, the slightly more ambitious one of entertaining, and the critical
missions of offering context and insight, I was attempting in each of these
dispatches to inspire you to question your own reactions, to engage with
the music on a deeper and hopefully more fulfilling level, to set your pulse
pounding as you race to the record store (or the file-swapping Web site),
and most of all to think for yourself.
Although I rarely imitate them (not consciously, anyway), Jack Kerouac and
Lester Bangs are two writers I love, but the critiques of their work from which
I've gained the most are the ones that contend they were charlatans, frauds,
and lightweights. Obviously I disagree, but the skeptics forced me to focus my
own thoughts and opinions—to question my values and ask why I feel as I
do—and that is one of the primary joys and affirmations of being alive.
As for what went into this collection, I was trying to fulfill two goals at
once, and I'm not sure I completely succeeded at either. Milk It! is partly a
 INTRODUCTION XVII

broad, sweeping overview of the alternative-rock era, an account of the mu-

sic of the '90s compiled on the fly as it was sprouting, blooming, and wither-
ing, but certainly some things are missing. There should probably be more on
Seattle, for example, but I spent most of those years in Chicago, and it wasn't
only because of homerism that I found its music more interesting. Alt-rock
didn't happen in a vacuum, and hip-hop was of course a major force in pop-
ular music throughout the decade, but with a handful of exceptions (N.W.A,
P.M. Dawn, Arrested Development, Tone-Loc), much of my writing on the
subject is absent here because it just didn't seem to fit. There should probably
be more on Beck and the riot grrrls and Nine Inch Nails and the Red Hot
Chili Peppers. And so on. But all of that had to be balanced with the other
goal of this book, which was to stand as a "Best of Jim DeRogatis (So Far)"—
or, if you prefer, a bunch of old crap—and I at least wanted to include the
stuff that held up the best (or the shit that stank the least).
My own professional odyssey began (as indeed I did) in New Jersey. I
was born and raised just across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Jersey
City (the armpit of the universe), but I moved up in the world to Hoboken
as soon as I was able. I wanted to write about rock 'n' roll from the minute I
fell in love with it—like Bangs, I was "a fanatical fan with fanatical opinions
that I wanted to inflict on people"—and I scrawled reviews and transcribed
interviews for my high school and college newspapers (not the Washington
Square News, which was the more respectable and dreadfully dull of New
York University's two student-run rags, but the far seedier and more sub-
versive Courier). The dream of becoming a "professional" rock writer was
there all through the time I was pursuing degrees in journalism and sociol-
ogy (which seemed like the same thing), and my enthusiasm was not
dampened by the fact that I was consistently and rather rudely rejected by
outlets that should have been open to a precocious and ambitious late teen
or early twentysomething at the time.
Shut out of the big leagues, I did what every fanatical fan with fanatical
opinions did during the indie-rock heyday of the mid-'80s: I wrote for es-
tablished fanzines—Matter, The Bob, and especially Jersey Beat, whose editor,
Jim Testa, became a valued mentor and a lifelong friend—and I published
my own 'zine, thanks to time stolen on various office copy machines. (It
was called Reasons for Living; I was nothing if not a ridiculously earnest
young thing.) All the while I was playing in bands and hosting college ra-
dio shows and going to gigs and reading the rock press and buying and lis-
tening to records voraciously—again, like Lester, it all seemed part of the
same basic impulse and obsession.
Will INTRODUCTION

My career proper began at The Jersey Journal, a then-sixty-five-thou-

sand-circulation daily newspaper in dear old Jersey City, where I rose
from a beat reporter to an investigative reporter to a (sub- sub- sub-)
Jimmy Breslin-like city columnist. It was exciting stuff. I covered brutal
jail riots, I got a councilman indicted for voter fraud, and I saw the Feds
fish a mobster's body out of the Hackensack River. (John "Bayonne
Butch" DiGilio was a boxer turned mob henchman who "went missing,"
as they say. After a few months, his mother requested the body so she
could bury him, but he'd been gone for quite some time, and he wasn't in
the best shape when he resurfaced, as you might imagine. Cop to earnest
young reporter at 6 A.M. in the Meadowlands: "Hey, kid, come'n look at
dis! They safety-pinned his credit cards to his balls so's we could figger
out who he is!" Earnest young reporter to the bushes: "Blaaahhhlll" It was
all very Sopranos.}
With the exception of a handful of pieces in the final issues of Creem (as-
signed by my pal and fellow fanziner, David Sprague—we bonded in
NYU's magazine editing and production class, where we both got mediocre
grades even though we were actually writing, editing, and publishing the
"mock magazines" we submitted), I didn't make a dime writing about mu-
sic for eleven years, though I probably wrote about it as much then as I do
now. After five years at The Jersey Journal, I burned out on the day job—I
simply could not ask another African-American mother in the projects how
she felt after her son had been shot in the street—and I decided to move to
Minneapolis in the summer of 1990. I'd visited on tours with various bands
through the years, and I realized that all of my slacker friends there (and in
places like Cleveland, Portland, Austin, and Seattle) were living better than
I was, working fifteen hours a week at Kinko's while playing in a band or
publishing a comic book or writing the great American novel. I had no idea
what I was going to do, but I needed a change, and I wanted to meet a corn-
fed Midwestern farm girl.
As luck would have it, at exactly the point when my savings ran out and
the farm girl appeared, my second great mentor and lifelong chum, Keith
Moerer, hired me at Request. As the assistant editor and junior staffer, my
more odious tasks included proofreading, taking out the trash, and fact-
checking Chuck Eddy (ugh). But I also got to write, and I could never ex-
press just how much I learned under Keith and managing editor (later edi-
tor) Susan Hamre, who remain two of my dearest friends. Their deft editing
and constant prodding to get me to push myself as a journalist, writer, and
critic was my version of graduate school.
 INTRODUCTION XIX

I'll pick up the pace a bit: Two years at Request led to my first stint as the
pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, starting in the summer of 1992
and ending in the fall of 1995, when I went back to New York to join Keith
at Rolling Stone. My mercifully brief tenure there lasted eight months (more
about that in Chapter Eleven), after which I took my unemployed ass, my
Midwestern farm girl, and the baby in her belly back to Minneapolis and
square one. There was no guarantee that I'd be able to make it as a free-
lancer, and getting by on a Kinko's salary was going to be easier there than
in Chicago or New York. I did alright, though, thanks to the faith of editors
like Robert Wilonsky at New Times Los Angeles and Kiki Yablon at the
Chicago Reader, whose considerable talents improved many of the pieces
collected here, and I was well into writing my second book and labor of
love, Let It Blurt, when the Sun-Times called in the fall of 1997 and asked if
I'd like to come back to Chicago.
"Sure," I said, "but I want the deal Roger Ebert has." They rolled their
eyes. "No, no, no; I know you're not going to pay me what he makes. But
he only comes into the office once a year at Christmas to give everybody a
movie-of-the-day calendar. Don't make me work at the paper; I can't sit
around and write in my underwear and blast loud music!" They quite rea-
sonably agreed. I've been back in Chicago ever since, and I'm never leaving
again.
I relate all of this because I'm asked about it fairly often (Almost Famous
seems to have bred a whole new generation of aspiring rock writers,
though I've certainly never met a Kate Hudson doing this, much less a
Fairuza Balk), and because it may be helpful to convey the context (or at
least the geographic locale) in which some of these pieces were written. If
you didn't know already or haven't surmised by now, I took a typically
cynical Generation Xer-indie rocker's view of the alternative explosion,
amplified by my ingrained journalistic skepticism (that hard-news training)
and by the fact that I had already witnessed several times the way music
"scenes" are built up and then demolished (the "Hoboken is the new
Liverpool!" power-pop craze of the mid-'80s—in which genuinely wonder-
ful bands such as the Bongos, the dB's, and the Feelies were briefly
anointed as gods, hyped to the high heavens, then just as quickly written
off—was similar indeed to what Seattle went through in the early '90s,
though the bands of the Pacific Northwest sold a helluva lot more records
and won much more mainstream attention).
"Alternative to what?" was a question that cynics asked over and over
again through the '90s, and like many punks, my answer was, "Absolutely
XX INTRODUCTION

nothing!" The music business acted like the music business always does
(there's plenty of grousing, dirt, and insight about all of that in what's to
come, and for even more elucidation, I can't recommend heartily enough
Commodify 'Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age, an an-
thology of pieces about the co-option of youth culture during those years
culled from the amazingly incisive if sometimes annoyingly Marxist pages
of The Baffler), but all of that is of secondary interest as far as I'm concerned
compared to the actual sounds, and those were nothing fundamentally new,
either. (Nothing under the sun ever is! It's all been done before! So freaking
what? If it's good, just turn it up!)
For me the music of the '90s was all a part of the gloriously noisy contin-
uum that stretches from Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran and Little
Richard and Gene Vincent (and some before them, too) through the
Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the Troggs and James Brown and the
Beatles-Byrds-Rolling Stones Baby Boom canon through the Stooges and
Wire and the Sex Pistols and Public Enemy right up to the White Stripes
and the Roots and Wilco and the Flaming Lips, yadda yadda yadda—the com-
mon attitudes and life force shared by all of these rock 'n' rollers being in
the end infinitely more enduring and intriguing and vital than their partic-
ular genres and personality distinctions (though I spent more than my
share of time charting those, too—as I said, I was a sociology-journalism
double major).
And yet—and yet, and yet. There was something special about the '90s,
about a mere seventeen million members of Generation X briefly having
their moment in the sun (soon to be eclipsed once again by the seventy-six
million Baby Boomers who preceded us and the seventy-two million mem-
bers of their snot-nosed progeny in Generation Y who followed), seeing
Nevermind seize No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, enjoying that (illusory,
sure, but still fun) sense of community at Lollapalooza, crying together over
the death of a hero who never asked to be one, hearing however fleetingly
actual good music on mainstream radio (three or four songs in a row even!),
and feeling like it all really mattered. Which it didn't, not in any sweeping
cultural-historical sense (it never does; even the '60s weren't as "important"
as the '60s, we all know that), but it made an impact on our lives—mine
and yours—and it still can, even if you missed it all, via the best of the mu-
sic chronicled in the urgent dispatches to come.
In ending this introduction, I'd be remiss if I did not thank some of the
other people who assigned, improved, and published these pieces, in addi-
tion to those who have already been cited in the dedication and the words
 INTRODUCTION XXI

above, and with the repeated caveat that anything wrong- or lunkheaded is
my fault, not theirs. I also owe particular debts of gratitude to Marc
Weingarten at Request; P. J. Bednarski, John Barren, Michael Cooke, John
Cruickshank, Miriam DiNunzio, Laura Emerick, Darel Jevens, Cristi
Kempf, Mark Nadler, Nigel Wade, and Jeff Wisser during various eras at
the Chicago Sun-Times; Sia Michael, Greg Milner, and Jon Dolan at Spin; Bill
Holdship and Steve Stolder at BAM; Mike Bieber and Doug Hyde at Audio;
Jim Walsh and Will Hermes at City Pages; Keith Goetzman at the Twin Cities
Reader; Barbara Rice-Thompson at Penthouse; Andy Wang at Ironminds; John
Strausbaugh at the New York Press; Bill Wyman and Jeff Stark at Salon; Scott
Becker and Jason Fine at Option; and Keven McAlester at New Times Los
Angeles (and I apologize to anyone I've omitted).
Thanks are due as well to the (often anonymous to me) copy editors who
titled these pieces; with the exception of my daughter, Melody, I have always
been lousy at naming things, so very few of these headlines are my own.
Additional thanks to Andrea Schulz (who first suggested the idea for this col-
lection before leaving Da Capo) and Ben Schafer (who enthusiastically em-
braced, encouraged, and shepherded it to completion once he arrived); to
production editors Fred Francis and Erica Lawrence, publicist Kate Kazeniac,
marketing guru Kevin Hanover, designer Cynthia Young, and copy editor
Delia Guzman; to Frank Kozik for the incredible cover image; to my agents,
Chris Calhoun and Kassie Evashevski; to Blurt editor Gerry Howard (that
next book is coming soon, Gerry, I swear!); and to my loyal friends, helpers,
volunteer editors, and ever-reliable sounding boards, including Eric Boehlert;
my ex-wife Kim DeRogatis; my first writing partner Anthony J. DiMurro;
Paula Kamen; Greg Kot; Rob O'Connor; Jay Orff; Erica Roewade; Jason
Saldanha; Tom Schraeder, Jr.; Matt Spiegel; Cynthia Taylor-Handrup; my
bandmates, Tony Tavano, Chris Martiniano, and Michael Weinstein; my par-
ents, Helene and Harry Reynolds; my brother, his wife, and their son,
Michael, Mary Ellen, and Ryan DeRogatis, and mi corazon verdadero, Carmel
Carrillo.
Finally, thanks again to you, the reader. I hope you enjoy scanning these
reviews, reports, features, essays, and asinine opinions as much as I en-
joyed writing, living, and spouting them. Try not to break anything if you
do send this tome flying.
This page intentionally left blank
 RELUCTANT RADIO
FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS

ANY ACCOUNT OF THE ALTERNATIVE ERA must begin

with the phenomenal success of Nirvana's Nevermind, which was released in
early 1991 and sold an amazing three million copies within a six-month pe-
riod during "the year punk broke." The pressures that sudden fame brought
to bear on Kurt Cobain have been well-documented (the most riveting ac-
count is Charles R. Cross's bestselling biography, Heavier Than Heaven), and
the artist was understandably gun-shy when dealing with the press before
the release of In litero in 1993. He agreed to grant only three newspaper in-
terviews, and he singled me out for inclusion because he appreciated the re-
porting I'd done surrounding the controversy over the band's third album.
In an interview with my friendly competitor, Greg Kot of the Chicago
Tribune, "recordist" Steve Albini (see Chapter Five) had claimed that Geffen
was reluctant to release In Utero because it was too harsh and abrasive, and
that Cobain was bowing to pressure to remix it, as he'd done with Andy
Wallace on Nevermind. In fact, though he didn't want to admit it publicly
lest he blow whatever "indie cred" came from hiring Albini in the first
place, Cobain himself had decided to hire Scott Litt (the pop-oriented pro-
ducer of R.E.M. and the dB's) to remix parts of the record, because he felt
the vocals were too low in the mix and he wanted to emphasize the beauty
of the more melodic tracks in order to make the impact of the noisier songs
even more powerful.
Around the time that "Smells Like a Nirvana Feature" was published in
Request, I reviewed two of the group's final American shows. The first con-
cert at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom was the only time the band ever per-
formed "You Know You're Right" onstage, and it was one of the best shows
I've ever seen. The second was one of the worst. The contrast between the
two was evidence that this was still very much a group that was living in

1
2 MILK IT!

the moment, and that it was anything but the big, slick rock machine that
the industry so desperately wanted. Nirvana was still a band where any-
thing could happen, including imminent self-destruction.
Six months later, I was writing Cobain's obituary.
Life rolled on for the surviving members of the band, though bassist
Krist Novoselic has yet to approach anything near the artistic and commer-
cial accomplishments of Nirvana with either of his new groups, Sweet 75
and Eyes Adrift, and after the promise of their debut, Dave Grohl's Foo
Fighters quickly devolved into hammering away at an increasingly tired
and shallow formula. Meanwhile Cobain's widow, Courtney Love (see
Chapter Two), instigated a bitter fight over who would control the group's
posthumous legacy. For a time the contentious court case looked as if it
might become the ugliest feud in rock since the conflicts over the estates of
Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, but less than five months after "The Nirvana
Wars" was published in Spin, the two factions reached a settlement.
Generally underreported in news analyses was the fact that Love won, and
the settlement closely mirrored the proposal that her husband's former
bandmates had earlier rejected.
The Limited Liability Corporation that had been set up to administer
Nirvana's business dealings was dissolved, and the band's future output
will be overseen by a new entity controlled by a representative of each
side—Jim Barber (a former Geffen Records executive and Love's significant
other) and John Silva (Nirvana's former manager and the current manager
of Grohl and Novoselic)—though Love, Grohl, and Novoselic can override
their actions with a unanimous vote. Love has primary control over any
film made about Cobain, but the former Nirvana musicians have a say over
how they are portrayed. After their deaths, all control of Nirvana's future
will go to Frances Bean, Cobain's daughter.
The settlement paved the way for Nirvana, the single-disc greatest-hits set
that sits atop the charts as I write this and which finally includes the previ-
ously unreleased gem, "You Know You're Right." (The long-promised box
set and a single-disc rarities collection are both expected by 2004.) At the
same time, Cobain's journals top the bestseller list with their odd mix of
voyeurism and insight. As with the posthumous cash-ins of so many rock
legends, none of this product really does justice to the band's true legacy,
which remains difficult to evaluate. I suspect that its real impact has yet to
be felt and is being considered most significantly in some garage or base-
ment studio as I write, via its inspiration on any number of smart, passion-
ate, and emotional young artists prompted to pick up that guitar for the
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 3

first time by "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Rape Me." I'm sure that's the gift
that Cobain would be proudest of leaving us.

Smelle Like a Nirvana Article

Request, November 1993
SEVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE are waiting outside Club USA, a trendy New
York disco in the heart of Times Square. It's the third night of the New
Music Seminar, the music industry's largest annual gathering, and the
crowd has come to hear the Boredoms, a jazz-noise group from Japan
that's one of the seminar's biggest buzz bands. People are growing irrita-
ble in the heat of the muggy July evening because the beefy bouncers
won't let anyone in, even though the place is as big as an aircraft hangar
and only half full.
Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic is standing with a small group that in-
cludes his wife, Shelli, and band biographer Michael Azerrad. Novoselic
has gone unnoticed until now, even though he stands a foot taller than most
of the people on line. Maybe it's because New Yorkers don't acknowledge
celebrities in their midst, or maybe no one recognizes him since he cut the
long hair and shaved the scraggly beard he wore in the video for "Smells
Like Teen Spirit." In any event he hasn't asked for or received special treat-
ment, which I find admirable, since it's in keeping with punk rock's central
tenet that band members are no better than their fans.
I wince when Novoselic starts jumping up and down and shouting at the
bouncers to let him in—until I hear what he's screaming. "Don't you know
who I am?" he shouts. "I'm Andy Kaufman. I was in Taxil"
The bassist bears more than a passing resemblance to the dead comic, but
it doesn't matter to the bouncers, and soon he and his friends are shrugging
their shoulders and heading off to another club.

SINCE ITS RELEASE in late 1991, Nirvana's second album has sold nine
million copies worldwide. Nevermind was the first punk album to make it to
No. 1, and its success resulted in a major-label feeding frenzy that injected
obscene amounts of money into the once-marginal indie-rock world.
"Alternative" suddenly became a viable marketing niche, and every move
that Novoselic, guitarist-vocalist Kurt Cobain, and drummer Dave Grohl
made came under the media's harsh glare.
4 MILK IT!

That's a hell of a lot of baggage to carry to a recording session, and skep-

tics expected the group to self-destruct as the Sex Pistols did in a brilliant
flash before it could even attempt an encore. But the members of the Seattle
trio fought the pressures of addictions, fame, and money, hired Chicago
producer and provocateur Steve Albini, and recorded the follow-up to
Nevermind in two weeks for twenty-five thousand dollars, a fraction of the
time and money spent on most major-label releases. And somehow they
pulled it off.
In Utero—"in the womb"—is an uncompromising album full of harsh
guitars and aggressive rhythms, but Nirvana's candy-coated riffs and sing-
along choruses are present in force, and they're every bit as catchy as those
on Nevermind. As always, Cobain's angry, passionate voice cuts through the
chaos around it, demanding your attention. "Teenage angst has paid off
well," he sings, acknowledging with the first line of the first song that the
band has been changed by stardom. Then he proceeds to prove that it
hasn't hurt the music a bit.
"Whether this record is released or the tapes are bulk-erased is less im-
portant than what the band has done up until now," Albini said in his usual
acerbic manner when the album was finished last spring. "They got them-
selves in a position of influence and power by being a band that everybody
liked, and at this point, everything that they do for the rest of their career is
going to be secondary to what they've done up until now. Not secondary in
quality, but secondary in impact."
Several months later, Cobain reflects on Albini's comments and grins.
"We're certain that we won't sell a quarter as much, and we're totally com-
fortable with that because we like this record so much," he says in a mea-
sured, quiet voice. "I wasn't half as proud of Nevermind as I am of this
record. We intentionally made an aggressive record. I'm really proud of the
fact that we introduced a different recording style, a different sound, and
we're in a position where we're almost guaranteed a chance of it being
played on radio. They're at least going to try it for a while and see how it
sticks. And just doing that is a satisfying accomplishment."
Cobain is sitting on a well-worn couch in the split-level living room of
the house he shares with his wife, Courtney Love (leader of the band Hole),
and their fifteen-month-old daughter, Frances Bean. The family outgrew the
home it bought after Nirvana's initial success, and this place is a rental.
Located on a steep hill in North Seattle, it's only yards from the shore of
scenic Lake Washington. Frances Bean's playpen and wading pool sit in the
living room near an enormous TV and a collection of plastic anatomy dolls,
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 5

one of which graces the cover of In Utero. Beside the couch sit two new
Fender guitars, prototypes that the company wants to manufacture as the
"Kurt Cobain model." Cobain designed it himself: A cross between a Jaguar
and a Mustang, he calls it a "Jagstang."
In six days Cobain's band will play its first high-pressure show in a year
at the New Music Seminar; in eight weeks In Utero will arrive in record
stores. Courtney and the baby are in England as Hole performs at the
Phoenix Music Festival, and Cobain is alone except for Geffen Records pub-
licist Luke Wood, who's coordinating his interviews. As our conversation
begins, Wood puts his tape recorder on the coffee table next to mine—
"Double-recording ... for the band"—before going off to the kitchen.

GEFFEN IS PARANOID about the media, but the members of Nirvana seem
just as concerned and annoyed. Shortly after In Utero was finished, several
major publications ran stories quoting sources who said that Geffen consid-
ered the album "unreleasable." With comments like "I don't think that all
the pussies and wimps who liked the last album will ever like this one,"
Albini didn't help matters any. Finally the band and the label bought a full-
page ad in Billboard to set the record straight, lest anyone think that the
group's satirical T-shirt slogan—FLOWER-SNIFFIN' KITTY-PETTIN' BABY-KISSIN'
CORPORATE ROCK WHORES—had become a reality.
Albini's name in the credits was supposed to be insurance against such
charges. With the exception of occasional high-profile projects like PJ
Harvey's Rid of Me, he mostly works with hardcore punk bands, recording
in his basement studio on Chicago's North Side. His underground creden-
tials are flawless: As a musician he led Big Black, a grinding metallic trio
that was enormously influential in the underground (including Seattle's
nascent "grunge" scene). As a producer he takes a flat fee based on what
bands can pay, rejects groups that don't live up to his punk ideals, and
stresses immediacy in recording (one or two takes and a song is done, over-
dubs be damned).
"I've never really paid any attention to Steve Albini's personality or any-
thing that he supposedly is a crusader for," Cobain says between bites of a
cheap frozen pizza. "In fact, I've never really been much of a Big Black fan,
to tell the truth. I think I had Songs About Fucking. It's good music; it's
something a bit more innovative than a lot of stuff that was coming out at
that time. I saw their last show here in Seattle at the Steam Room. But for
the most part I wanted to work with him because he happened to produce
two of my favorite records, which were Surfer Rosa [by the Pixies] and Pod
6 MILK IT!

[by the Breeders]. By listening to those records, I realized something that I

had been trying to prove for like three years: Ever since we started record-
ing, I've always thought that it would be really logical to record with a lot
of microphones to get an ambience from the room. It just seems obvious to
me that if you want it to sound like you're standing right next to the band,
if you want that live feeling, then you have to use a lot of microphones.
"It just seems like an obvious thing to do," Cobain continues. "And every
time we went in the studio, we would ask the person we were recording
with to try this, and they just flat out refused every time: 'This isn't the way
you record. It's not what I learned at engineering school.' During the
recording, I felt totally comfortable, and I still have no regrets with the way
the tracks were done, except I wish I would have added a few more vocal
harmonies. For some reason, the vocals didn't turn out the way they should
have. I'm not a big fan of multitracking, but I did that on Nevermind on
quite a few tracks, and I didn't even realize it at the time. I didn't realize
that that was what Butch [Vig] was doing; I thought he was just asking for a
lot of takes so he could pick out which was the best. It should have worked
[on In Utero], because we had these great microphones—we used three or
four microphones. I stood in front of these amazing, expensive-looking
mikes, and it sounded great in the playback. But the final mixes for some
reason got squashed. We're a pretty vocal-oriented band, and that's one of
the main things I regret."
Albini helped the band get the live sound it wanted, but when the trio re-
turned to Seattle with cassettes of the finished album, problems in the mix
became apparent. Most were solved in mastering (the process of preparing
tapes to manufacture CDs and cassettes), but two songs were remixed by
R.E.M. producer Scott Litt, and another ("I Hate Myself and Want to Die")
was dropped because Cobain thought there were too many noise songs in a
row. ("It was just such a typical, boring song," he says. "We could write that
song in our sleep. There was no point to putting it on the record. ... If you
look back on the record, there are so many noise songs all in a row that it
makes it seem like it's nothing but a noise record. It's really not; there are
plenty of soft spots to it.") In Utero is now tilted in favor of pop songs, with
seven catchy would-be anthems to five pure noise outbursts.
Cobain and Novoselic (who were interviewed separately) both laugh
when it's suggested that the album begins with "Serve the Servants" and its
"teenage angst" line for the benefit of rock critics. Nirvana is rarely so cal-
culated. When I note that the song's jagged, angular guitar solo sounds like
Robert Quine, neither musician recognizes the name. Alternative rockers
 RELUCTANT RAPIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 7

from New York or Los Angeles would never admit that they didn't know
the former guitarist with Richard Hell and the Voidoids, but Cobain and
Novoselic grew up in small-town Aberdeen, Washington. Their punk dis-
coveries were hard-earned, unpredictable, and incomplete, but they made a
lasting impression.
"The guitar players I'm fond of are like from Scratch Acid and the first
White Zombie EP," Cobain says, wiping tomato sauce on his T-shirt. (His
fingernails are perfectly painted with bright red polish, but his toenails are
chipped and fading, in need of a fresh coat.) "Fucked-up, bending strings,
borderline in-tune—that type of chaos."
With a driving mechanical drumbeat and electronically treated screams,
"Scentless Apprentice" is one of several discordant songs that recall Big
Black. The tune is credited to the band, and it came together in rehearsal;
the lyrics are a bizarre free-association nightmare about childbirth. "My
lyrics are total cut-up, just because I take lines from different poems that
I've written," Cobain says. "I build on a theme if I can, but sometimes I
can't even come up with an idea of what the song is about."
There's little doubt about what the singer is addressing in the deceptively
sweet "Heart-Shaped Box." As much as he's protested the idea that he's a
spokesman for his generation, Cobain eloquently sets twentynothings' frus-
tration against Baby Boomers' pious preaching. Following the formula of
"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the verses percolate over a quiet riff until the
song explodes in an angry, irresistible chorus: "Hate Haight! I've got a new
complaint / Forever in debt to your priceless advice."
The opening chords of "Rape Me" also recall Nirvana's biggest hit. The
song can be taken on several levels: as a statement against atrocities in the
former Yugoslavia (Novoselic spent time there as a teenager and Nirvana
played a benefit for Bosnian rape victims); as an angry comment against
misogyny (in the liner notes of Incesticide Cobain attacks the "wastes of
sperm and eggs" who raped a woman while singing "Polly"); or as a re-
sponse to perceived media abuses ("My favorite inside source / I'll kiss
your open sores"). When the song was written more than a year ago,
Nirvana thought it would be a single. The group tried to play it on the 1992
MTV Video Music Awards, but it wasn't permitted, and Cobain was told
that the network is squeamish about a "Rape Me" video. The track is the
catchiest on the album, and it isn't hard to imagine it becoming a hit—and a
Madonna-sized scandal.
Violence against women is a common topic on gangsta rap albums, but
it's rarely addressed so directly in rock. Cobain says the band members
8> MILK IT!

may reconsider the song for a single and video in the future, but for now
they're going with "Heart-Shaped Box" because it's "fresher and more of an
epic first single." You can almost hear Geffen's collective sigh of relief.
"Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" is the album's most
enigmatic song title, but the tune contains one of Cobain's most revealing
choruses. "I miss the comfort in being sad," he sings, summing up the
dilemma of someone who's found fame by complaining but who suddenly
doesn't have much to complain about. "I guess I could consider that a per-
sonal thing," Cobain says thoughtfully. "But for the most part the song is
about Frances Farmer, and I'm sure she felt that way, too."
The rebellious actress was a rising star in the late '30s, but she became an
alcoholic and the center of Hollywood scandal, after which she was
hounded by the press, institutionalized by her parents, and finally
lobotomized. Cobain and Love named their daughter after Farmer, but the
singer pauses when asked why he's drawn to her story. "The tragedy of bu-
reaucracy and how people are treated," he says after a while. "Public hu-
miliation is one of the most stressful things a person can go through."
In November 1992, after months of veiled references in numerous articles
on the band, Cobain admitted to using heroin to Robert Hillburn in the Los
Angeles Times. After dabbling with the drug for several years, he said, he
developed a serious habit during the chaotic days following the success of
Nevermind. After going through rehab, he started visiting a clinic to help
deal with stomach pains from a serious ulcer. He maintains that the ulcer
caused most of the sullen behavior journalists described as drug-related,
but his position on drugs is clear: He's nonjudgmental, but says he learned
the hard way that they're stupid.
"It was long overdue," Cobain says of his confession to Hillburn. "I tried
to deny it for so long simply because I didn't want to influence anyone.
There was just no point in bleeding my heart in front of the whole world;
it's really no one's business. But I was pretty much cornered at that point. I
couldn't deny it any more. Otherwise everyone would think I was a big
liar."
"Dumb" seems to be a song about falling into addiction ("I'm not like
them / But I can pretend") and discovering the pleasures ("I think I'm
dumb / Or maybe just happy") and the pains ("Skin the sun / Fall asleep /
Wish away / The soul is cheap"). But a sober and clear-eyed Cobain po-
litely disagrees with my reading. "Actually, that was a song about a concus-
sion. I wrote it two years ago, and the lyrics came to me in about ten min-
utes. It was just one of those four-track demo things late at night."
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 9

The second half of In Utero is more chaotic, hitting the listener with the
album's hardest tracks in rapid succession: "Very Ape," "Milk It," the sar-
castically titled "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," and "Tourette's" (with mum-
bled lyrics transcribed in their entirety in the liner notes as, "Fuck, shit,
piss"). The four noise tunes are divided into pairs by "Penny Royal Tea," a
pleasant hook-filled number about a home-abortion method. The song
mentions Leonard Cohen and contains another of Cobain's most memo-
rable lines: "I'm anemic royalty." It was not, as reported by England's New
Musical Express, cowritten with his wife, Cobain says.
"All Apologies" is a lulling, hypnotic track that features cellist Kera
Schaley, a member of the Chicago group Doubt and a friend of Albini's.
"All in all is all we all are," Cobain chants mantralike to end the song and
the album, but the lyric that demands the most attention is shouted in the
middle of the tune: "I'm married / Buried." "That was another line that
was written before Courtney and I started going out," Cobain says dismis-
sively, but it's sure to be cited by the legions of Love-bashers.

SINCE THEIR MARRIAGE in February 1992 at a quiet ceremony in Hawaii,

Love has become the most hated rock wife since Yoko Ono. She's been the fo-
cus of several intensely negative stories, including Lynn Hirschberg's infamous
Vanity Fair article charging that Love used heroin while pregnant, and a chap-
ter in Britt Collins and Victoria Clarke's as-yet-unpublished Nirvana: The
Definitive Story. (Cobain attempted to stop the Collins and Clarke book with
nasty late-night phone calls, but he shouldn't have bothered: A reading of the
advance manuscript reveals that the authors dig up no truly embarrassing dirt,
rely extensively on previously published articles, and generally write some of
the most flatulent prose ever committed in the name of rock journalism.)
To be sure, Love has courted her share of controversy and publicity, culti-
vating a sexually aggressive and sometimes obnoxious persona onstage, in
interviews, and in her music. But it's doubtful that she could have foreseen
the way things are amplified in the media, or the painful personal costs for
her and Cobain. Azerrad's unauthorized biography, Come as You Are: The
Story of Nirvana, reveals that the two were separated from their child for a
month by Los Angeles County authorities because of the drug charges lev-
eled in Vanity Fair. Cobain told Azerrad that he considered shooting himself
after the article was published, and he vowed revenge on Hirschberg:
"She'd better hope to God that someday I don't find myself destitute with-
out a wife and baby. Because I'll get fucking revenge on her. Before I leave
this earth, she's going out with me."
10 MILK IT!

The media's treatment of Love is obviously a sensitive issue in the band.

Novoselic dismisses everything that's been written about her supposedly
bullying ways with two sentences—"It's just a story. People need some-
thing to write about"—but he is reluctant to discuss the subject further.
Cobain meanwhile says journalists are trying to make the couple conform
to stories that have already been written—the John and Yoko or Sid and
Nancy models. "Why can't there be a Kurt and Courtney model? Why do
they dwell on the past?" he asks. "I don't mean to put down Sid and Nancy
or John and Yoko, but I just don't relate to them in any way."
In June Cobain was arrested and spent three hours in jail before being re-
leased on bail of nine hundred fifty dollars. He says he and Love were jam-
ming together when neighbors called police because of the noise. The po-
lice report charges that the singer assaulted his wife, but Love denied this
in The Seattle Times and said the couple only started arguing after police
asked if there were guns in the house. Cobain said there weren't, but Love
said there were, and she didn't appreciate having them around. The cops
were obligated to arrest one of the partners for a cooling-off period, and
they confiscated three guns and several clips of ammunition.
"Once the cops explained to me that they had to take one of us to jail be-
cause there was a domestic violence call from one of the neighbors, I under-
stood that because they were so nice about it," Cobain says. "They explained
it in full detail and made me realize that most domestic violence calls are
real, and if one or the other people aren't arrested, then the cops will just be
called back an hour or two later, and this time one of them may be dead."
The most surprising thing about the incident isn't the fight—"Kurt and I
hardly fight," Love told the NM.E. "No one could ask for a better hus-
band"—but the fact that Nirvana's leader feels the need to own guns. Guns
come up several times in the lyrics on Nevermind, usually in a negative con-
text. "No, I don't have a gun," Cobain chants in "Come As You Are," and in
"In Bloom," he seems to attack as ignorant gun-toting fans of his music
("He's the one who likes all our pretty songs / And he likes to sing along /
And he likes to shoot his gun / But he don't know what it means / He
don't know what it means"). "Throughout my entire life, I had never shot a
gun before," the singer says. "Growing up in Aberdeen, I had plenty of op-
portunities, but I was against... not really against the right to own a gun,
I'm all for that, it's a right that we all have."
"But wouldn't America be a better place if we didn't all have guns?" I ask.
"It's true, but you'd never get rid of them," Cobain says. "I don't know, I
just decided to buy a gun one day. Actually, a friend of mine gave us one for
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT 5HIFTER6 11

a wedding present, and I never used it. And finally I went to the range and
started shooting one day and kind of realized that this is like a challenging
thing—a nice pastime—to try and hit this target. And I came to the realiza-
tion that you really have to be prepared to shoot a gun if you're going to de-
fend yourself, because it's a really hard thing to hit a target.
"Have you shot guns before?" Cobain asks. I tell him that I haven't.
"It's amazing how precise you have to be. Like if there was a person right
there in the corner, I'd probably still, because I've only had the experience
of shooting like twenty times since I've owned guns since last year, I'd have
to shoot off four or five rounds to actually hit the person. And that's a really
dangerous situation. I want to be able to be precise and shoot their
kneecaps or something. Shoot exactly where I want to, so I don't actually
have to kill somebody."
"Do you worry that you need to protect yourself in a John Lennon way?"
I ask. (Publicist Wood has caught the drift of our conversation and entered
the living room, and he's listening intently with a look somewhere between
consternation and horror.)
"Not in that way, no," Cobain says. "It's just kind of a vulnerable area.
We've got big windows, and I have a baby and a wife to protect. Things
like that happen. People come into your house, not to steal your stereo,
but to rape your wife and sodomize your baby. I just could not survive
something like that. There's no way I could ever live with myself without
trying to get revenge on that person and putting him out of his misery. I
wouldn't think twice about blowing somebody away if they came into
this house."
I grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, not Aberdeen, I tell Cobain, and
where I come from, only idiots own guns, and they use them in stupid
ways. I tell the singer that if somebody comes into his house, they're proba-
bly breaking in to steal his fucking stereo, and would he really want to kill
someone based on such a slight offense? I was mugged once, when I was
working my way through college. It was right before Christmas, and I had
just cashed my two-week paycheck and Christmas bonus. Two kids tackled
me from behind, held a knife to my back, grabbed my wallet, and ran off.
I'd worked hard for that money, and I was furious. If I'd had a gun at that
moment, I would have shot them both in the back—and I would have
hated myself forever from that point on. A couple of hundred bucks meant
a lot to me then, but it wasn't worth two lives.
For these reasons, I would never want to own a gun, I tell Cobain, much
less consider using one in anger.
12 MILK IT!

The singer stares at me with a vacant, detached look; it's clear that he
doesn't really understand my point, and that the only way anyone will take
his guns away is if they pry them from his cold, dead fingers. "There's a
difference between owning a gun and having it safely put away in your
house for an intruder," he finally says. "To carry a gun ... I would never
carry a gun."
I'm not convinced, and it's the only time during several hours of smart,
friendly, and spirited conversation that I feel as if we have no connection.

THERE'S AN ELEMENT of danger in most great rock 'n' roll, a sense that
anything can happen. This is a key to Nirvana's appeal: At any moment,
the group might career out of control or come screeching to a violent halt.
"When we played in Buenos Aires, we brought this all-girl band from
Portland called Calamity Jane," Cobain says. "During their entire set, the
whole audience—it was a huge show with like sixty thousand people—was
throwing money and everything out of their pockets, mud and rocks, just
pelting them. Eventually the girls stormed off crying. It was terrible, one of
the worst things I've ever seen, such a mass of sexism all at once.
"Krist, knowing my attitude about things like that, tried to talk me out of
at least setting myself on fire or refusing to play. We ended up just having
fun, laughing at them. Before every song, I'd play the intro to 'Teen Spirit'
and then stop. They didn't realize that we were protesting against what
they'd done. We played for about forty minutes, and most of the songs
were off Incesticide, so they didn't recognize anything. We wound up play-
ing the secret noise song ["Endless Nameless"] that's at the end of
Nevermind, and because we were so in a rage, we were just so pissed off
about this whole situation, that song and the whole set were one of the
greatest experiences I've ever had."
The show sounds similar to dozens the Replacements played in their
heyday. On any given night the Minneapolis quartet could deliver a pas-
sionate full-throttle blowout, a drunken self-indulgent mess, or a combina-
tion of both. But the night before interviewing Cobain, I saw former
Replacements leader Paul Westerberg perform at the base of the Space
Needle during the Bite of Seattle festival. Westerberg led his hired band
through a tight, well-rehearsed, and boring set, stopping frequently to ask
if everyone was in tune.
Anarchy doesn't age well, and it's impossible to sustain. In Route 666: On
the Road to Nirvana, rock critic Gina Arnold makes a case that Nirvana's suc-
cess was the result of a decade of underground activity. Punk rock failed to
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 15

change the world in the late '70s, but it inspired a generation of musicians,
writers, college-radio DJs, promoters, and indie-label entrepreneurs who
built an alternative network. From that network came the Replacements,
the Feelies, Hiisker Dii, Mission of Burma, Naked Raygun, Big Black, and
many more bands that played uncompromising music powered by the
emotion of the moment. For most of them, the moment came and went be-
fore conditions coincided to make a difference to the outside world. But for
Nirvana everything clicked.
"There are different aspects of where we were culturally," says
Novoselic, the band's resident philosopher. "In January 1990, George Bush
had like an eighty-five percent approval rating, and in 1992 when
Nevermind was happening, we elected this governor from Arkansas. Maybe
it took until late 1992 for the '90s to happen.
"And now comes the exploitation part of it. There are some bands out
there now that would easily fit into the repertoire of, say, Rick Springfield
or Phil Collins. But they're young, they dress kind of hip and modern, and
they're called alternative. It's just bullshit. It's just exploitation."
But there's got to be more to the story than that. Mudhoney's classic "If I
Think" from 1988's Superfuzz Bigmuff EP is easily the anthemic equal of
"Smells Like Teen Spirit." But Mudhoney didn't do what Nirvana did.
Novoselic nods and stumbles for an answer.
"Yeah. No. Maybe it was the production," he says finally. "What 'If I
Think' did was help to unite the Seattle scene. When that EP came out, it
was a must-have, and those were magical times. That was the Seattle scene.
When Mudhoney was playing and we were playing, and Tad and the Fluid.
That was a little time in history that you can compare to the Liverpool
scene, the Cavern Club. It was innocent. It wasn't exploited. Now look
what it's come to. Everybody's older and wiser."
Says Cobain: "A lot of the bands who are finally getting their just re-
wards, like Soul Asylum—bands who have been around for a long time
and have apparently been innovative—they seem to be in competition with
each other now. It's mainly been quotes from most of these bands in arti-
cles; that's where I've noticed it. I don't understand how these people can
come from an environment and a lifestyle after so many years of being in
underground music and keeping that kind of music alive, and now it sud-
denly seems like a desperate attempt by some of these bands who've never
been recognized at trying to say we deserve that. It's kind of sickening to
see how these bands become careerists all of a sudden. That's what every-
one was against when they started these bands. The reason I wanted to be
14 MILK IT!

in a band was to be in a band and write songs. You can be validated if you
sell two thousand records, and you should be happy with that."
Maybe it was just a nostalgic window to the past, but the scene at the
Crocodile Cafe the night before didn't seem too jaded. Novoselic is still hold-
ing his head from the festivities, and he's drinking coffee to clear the fog.
Scream, Grohl's old hardcore band from Washington, D.C., played an ener-
getic reunion gig at Seattle's hippest rock club, part of a tour to promote a
new CD of previously unreleased material. (The drummer skipped Nirvana's
week of interviews to travel with the group.) Novoselic danced awkwardly
through the entire show, part of an enthusiastic crowd that included fellow
Seattle legends Tad and Mark Arm of Mudhoney (but not Cobain). When the
members of Scream took the stage, Nirvana's bassist welcomed them by
shouting, "Stone Gossard Pirates!" simultaneously dissing the Pearl Jam gui-
tarist and pathetic Pearl Jam wannabes Stone Temple Pilots.
Novoselic's life has clearly been changed by Nirvana's success, but it's
just as plain that he hasn't lost much of his love for the music. He owns a
beautiful two-story house in a pleasant, tree-lined neighborhood midway
between downtown Seattle and the Cobains' place further out on the city's
edge. But he seems proudest of his two jukeboxes, one in the living room
for 45s, and one in the basement that plays albums.
Midway through our conversation, the Federal Express man rings the
doorbell. Novoselic brings the package into the den and opens it to find a
framed gold record signifying sales of five hundred thousand for Incesticide,
the compilation of B-sides and rarities that Nirvana released after
Nevermind. Today's Seattle Times carries a short item noting that Nevermind
has finally dropped off Billboard's Top 200 album chart after an impressive
ninety-two weeks.
"If it wasn't for 'Teen Spirit/ I don't know how Nevermind would have
done," Novoselic says. "There are no Teen Spirits' on In Utero. There are six
or seven great songs, but no phenomenal big hit."
Regardless of how many copies the album sells, the band members be-
lieve they've already succeeded. They're working together better than they
ever have, Cobain says, and he hopes they'll write more as a group in the
future. The night before our interview, he and Novoselic sat up until dawn
brainstorming over the storyboard for the "Heart-Shaped Box" video,
which the duo envisions as a spoof of The Wizard of Oz filmed in a tech-
nique approximating Technicolor.
"I have my heart set on—everybody, the whole band has their heart set
on—releasing 'Scentless Apprentice' after 'Heart-Shaped Box/" Cobain
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 15

says. "That's a really good example of the direction we're going in. We ac-
tually collaborated on that song. It came together in practice. It was just a
totally satisfying thing to finally contribute equally to a song, instead of
me coming up with the basics of the song. Obviously, we're pretty much
on the same wavelength; there's never been a situation where I tell them
what to do. But there are a lot of times where I've had to sit behind the
drum set and show Dave what I've been thinking in my head, and he'll in-
corporate that idea. For the most part, it's always been like eighty percent
my song that I've written at home and introduced to the band later on in
practice. I'm just so pleased to be able to collaborate. I'm getting tired of
being expected to be the sole songwriter. I would love to have a songwrit-
ing partner. And Krist and Dave for some reason have started to come out
of their shell."
"There was a time when things broke down and got screwy after the suc-
cess of Nevermind, but everything was pretty much resolved by communi-
cation," Novoselic says. "There were just so many factors; things were hap-
pening so fast. There was all this fame and all these people who might want
something. You'd walk into Safeway, and people would be looking at you
real strange, wanting autographs. We had different reactions to it. There
was a time when the way I reacted to the band was, 'I don't care.
Whatever/ And I think Kurt reacted to that: 'Well, Krist doesn't care any-
more.' And it snowballed. But now I find myself getting more and more
outspoken again, and I think that's healthy. I think Kurt respects that. He
has somebody to bounce things off of and get some input from. He feels he
has all this pressure on him as the center figure, the singer-songwriter, and
he appreciates having some help."
The difficulties the members of Nirvana face now include accepting the
responsibilities of platinum-selling rock stars ("We have to be a good role
model to people," Novoselic says sincerely. "I try not to brag about being a
drunkard or a pot smoker") while maintaining their punk credibility ("Do
you think that we're still a pain in the ass for the music industry?" he asks.
"Are we still uncooperative? Is there still that vibe in the air?"). They also
have to focus their rage on the right targets and convince the massive
Nevermind audience to grow with them. But there's every indication they're
up to the challenge.
At Roseland during the New Music Seminar, the band takes the stage af-
ter an opening set by invited guest the Jesus Lizard, a Chicago quartet
that's considered one of the harshest bands in the noise-rock underground.
Augmented by a second guitarist, former Exploited player Big John
16 MILK IT!

Duncan, Nirvana runs through a sloppy but intense twenty-song set that
draws from each of its albums. This is the first time fans are hearing "Serve
the Servants/' "Heart-Shaped Box/' and "All Apologies/' but many are
singing along by the final choruses.
There's an unusually heavy bonehead element at the show, violent jocks
slamming with wild abandon in the middle of the floor, disregarding the
etiquette of the mosh pit, and sending dozens of more peaceful fans scurry-
ing to the sides of the room with bruises and bloodied noses. The group
ends its set with four acoustic songs, sitting on stools at the edge of the
stage like Led Zeppelin in its unplugged mode. "Fuck the folk shit," one of
the boneheads shouts, but most people listen intently to the simple, elo-
quent versions of "Dumb," "Polly," and "Something in the Way." The show
ends with Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," which is treated
as a sort of Appalachian folk song similar to the version done by Ricky
Skaggs. Its sad, haunting strains provide the night's most moving moment.
Nirvana returns for a half-hearted, badly out-of-tune "Smells Like Teen
Spirit" and a version of "Endless, Nameless." But the encore is anticlimac-
tic. Tonight, the band members make their point by quietly strumming their
instruments instead of smashing them.

IHE NIGHT AFTER the Roseland show, I run into Novoselic as he's heading
into Irving Plaza to see Pavement, one of the many indie comers pegged as
"the next Nirvana." It's an opinion I don't share, and I'm leaving to catch
the older but more reliable Buzzcocks at the Academy when the bassist
stops me with a big, friendly hello.
"I know you," I say. "You're Andy Kaufman." And Novoselic smiles
broadly.

THE DIFFICULT BIRTH OF IIM UTERO

From the beginning, overseeing In Utero was an unenviable job. Never-
mind established producer Butch Vig's career, but even he would have
thought twice about working on its follow-up. "I love the band dearly, and
I would love to work with them again at some point, but it would be a
blessing-slash-curse to do this one because of the overwhelming
scrutiny," he says.
In the studio, In Utero producer Steve Albini instituted a strict policy of
ignoring everyone except the three members of Nirvana to prevent Geffen
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT 6HIFTERS 17

executives and the group's managers from interfering. "Everyone else

connected with the band besides the band members were the biggest
pieces of shit I ever met," he says with characteristic frankness.
Several weeks after the album was finished, the Chicago Tribune ran a
story quoting a source close to the band who said that Geffen considered
In Utero "unreleasable."The story was advanced by Newsweek, which in-
accurately charged that the group was being forced to remix the album.
Geffen and Nirvana fired back with a letter to the magazine (published as a
full-page ad in Billboard), charging that Newsweek's reporter "ridiculed our
relationship with our label based on totally erroneous information. Geffen
Records has supported our efforts all along in making this record."
But clearly, someone had problems with the album. The members of
Nirvana say they were pleased when they left the studio, but they started
noticing problems with the mix when they played their cassettes at home.
Krist Novoselic thought that one of the guitar effects Albini used on "Heart-
Shaped Box" sounded "like a fucking abortion hitting the floor." And Kurt
Cobain began wishing they'd spent more time on the vocals or tried some
of the subtle multitracking thatVig used on Nevermind.
"I've never been more confused about a session in my life. I just could
not put my finger on it," the singer says. "I called up Steve, and I basically
asked him for some advice. Like, 'Why don't I feel the same emotion I did
on Nevermind or Bleach?' We achieved exactly what I wanted, and it
sounded exactly how I expected it to turn out—at least the drums and the
guitars did. It took me a long time to realize the vocals weren't loud
enough and the bass guitar was almost impossible to hear. [Albini] as-
sured me it could be fixed in the mastering if we really worked on it, and it
turned out to be true. But by that time, our A&R man had expressed his
opinion and pretty much said that he didn't like the record."
The A&R man was Gary Gersh, the executive who brought Nirvana to
the label. At the same time the band was finishing In Utero, Gersh was ne-
gotiating with Capitol Records to become that company's new president.
Now in place in his new job, he declined to comment for this story-
"When things like that are said to you, when Gary and I talk to one an-
other, it's always on a personal level," Cobain says. "That was his personal
opinion, and it never went beyond that. There was never any sense of a
threat, like, 'We're not going to put this record out.' Because they can't."
But Geffen can and has: The label once sued Neil Young for making mu-
sic that didn't sound enough like Neil Young, and it rejected the first ver-
sion of Aerosmith's Get a Grip, forcing the band to return to the studio. If
1& MILK IT!

label executives did consider rejecting In Utero, they were prompted to

change course when the story became public, or they risked damaging the
"alternative" credibility of the band and the label. Asked whether the
Nirvana camp spread the "unreleasable" story itself to force Geffen's
hand, manager John Silva says, "That's a good theory, but there's no basis
to it."
Searching for a compromise, Geffen suggested remixing with Andy
Wallace, who had done the same thing for Nevermind, Silva says. Wallace
had scheduling conflicts, so Nirvana called R.E.M. producer Scott Litt, who
had been a candidate for producing Nevermind. Novoselic says the band
never considered reworking the whole album, but it wanted to tweak
"Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies." Cobain added some harmonies
to the two songs, and Litt brought the vocals up in the mix (he's credited
with "additional mixing"). Otherwise the songs appear in the same ver-
sions completed by Albini.
"The record sounded so good, but it needed a couple more touches,"
Novoselic says. "My perspective was, we've got a single like 'Heart-
Shaped Box' and 'All Apologies,' these really kind of nice songs, and most
of the record's really aggressive. I wanted 'Heart-Shaped Box' to be a gate-
way for people to buy the record, and then they'd put it on and have this
aggressive wild sound, a true alternative record."

Nirvana's Raw Power Shovee the Hype Aside

The Chicago Sun-Time, October 25,1993
TWENTY-THREE SONGS into Nirvana's show at the Aragon on Saturday,
the first of a sold-out two-night stand, singer Kurt Cobain stood atop a
stack of amplifiers as the last wails of feedback from the group's impro-
vised encore echoed through the cavernous Capone-era ballroom. From
there he climbed to the top of a prop tree towering some fifteen feet above
the stage. He appeared to consider diving headfirst into the drums like he
used to in the old days, but instead he turned his attention to a giant replica
of the winged anatomy doll on the cover of In Utero.
Both Cobain and the doll came crashing to the floor, the doll's head shat-
tering in a thousand pieces, and Cobain landing in a heap. He picked him-
self up, casually strolled to the microphone, and said, "Thank you."
Those were the only words he spoke all night.
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS \Q

These days the only other platinum rock star who vents the emotion in
his music in such immediate and physical terms is Pearl Jam's Eddie
Vedder. But acrobatics aren't the only way that Cobain puts himself on the
line. Through the course of an amazing two-hour performance, Nirvana
built the crowd into a frenzy with full-throttle punk assaults ("Radio
Friendly Unit Shifter," "Scentless Apprentice") and anthemic sing-alongs
("Penny Royal Tea," "In Bloom," "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), only to turn
and slow the pace with breathtakingly beautiful acoustic numbers.
Augmented by former Germs guitarist Pat Smear and cellist Laurie
Goldstein, Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl chal-
lenged the audience they won with the nine-million-selling Nevermind. As
they tamed the Aragon's notoriously muddy acoustics, they displayed a new
musical maturity and proved that Nirvana is just as potent at any volume.
Cobain's soulful vocals on "Dumb" were even more heart-wrenching
than they are on the album. "Polly" had a hushed solemnity, and
Novoselic's accordion added a melancholy sweetness to a cover of the
Vaselines' version of "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam."
The band isn't immune to the trappings of stardom: The members are
surrounded by industry hacks who shelter them and treat them like gods,
and the garish stage set would have been more appropriate for the Black
Crowes. But like its third album, In Utero, the first of Nirvana's two Chicago
performances proved that the group is honest and unpretentious where it
counts—in its music—and it's committed to the punk ideal that the band
members are no better than their fans.
Nirvana handpicked a dozen bands to open its United States tour, with
the groups trading places after a week. The modish punk trio Jawbreaker
and Seattle grunge legends Mudhoney opened at the Aragon Saturday with
enthusiastic sets. Hidden from view behind the monitor soundboard,
Cobain sat cross-legged on the floor, rocking his head in time with every
other punk in the crowd. He may be a star, but he remains first and fore-
most a fan.
He also remains a somewhat inconsistent performer—at least onstage.
Like the Replacements, one of the many punk groups of the indie-rock
'80s who paved the way for Nirvana's success, the Seattle trio can be an al-
most completely different band on two consecutive nights. And while its
first Chicago show was among the best I've ever seen, Sunday's concert
was one of the worst.
Cobain apparently couldn't hear himself because of faulty stage moni-
tors, and he griped about it several times. He also snapped at the audience
20 MILK. IT!

because fans were throwing wet T-shirts onstage, shorting out the guitars'
effects pedals. The band members took long pauses between every song—a
sharp contrast to Saturday's fast and furious pacing—and they continually
mocked the Aragon's notorious acoustics by mumbling nonsense syllables
into the microphones. (How could the sound be pristine one night and crap
the next?)
Nirvana walked off without playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and fans
booed. Hearing the jeers, Cobain returned and flung himself into the
crowd. When he emerged five minutes later, the fans had stolen the shoes
off his feet, but he was grinning from ear to ear. It was the only time all
night that he smiled.

Rocker Cobain Knew Pitfalls of Stardom

The Chicago Sun-Times, April 10,1994
LIKE MOST TWENTY50METHINGS, Kurt Cobain knew that the rock star ly-
ing dead in a pool of his own vomit has become a pathetic cliche. He grew
up well aware of the litany of fallen heroes: Jim Morrison. Janis Joplin. Jimi
Hendrix. Brian Jones. John Bonham. Keith Moon. Sid Vicious.
But that knowledge didn't help him deal with the fame that came from
fronting one of the most important bands of the '90s. It didn't stop him
from abusing drugs, and it didn't help him cope with personal pressures
that his fans will never fully understand.
Alone in his home in Seattle, Cobain apparently committed suicide
Thursday by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun, police said. He
was twenty-seven years old.
The shaggy blond rocker was quiet, intense, and possessed with a sly
sense of humor. He didn't fight for anybody's right to party, and he didn't
rock and roll all night long. Nevertheless, his name has been added to the
list of musicians whose excesses ended their careers and their lives too
soon.
Cobain had struggled with an addiction to heroin, and he spent twenty
hours in a coma in early March after overdosing on champagne and tran-
quilizers. "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club," his mother, Wendy
O'Connor, said on Friday. "I told him not to join that stupid club."
But if Cobain's death was in part about rock star indulgence, his life was
about the opposite. His brilliantly simple music railed against complacency
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 21

and alienation, exploding with the energy of the punk scene that inspired
him. "We are stupid and contagious / Here we are now, entertain us," he
sang with a sneer on Nirvana's biggest hit. In "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and
songs like it, he spoke as well as anyone for a generation that shared his
cynicism, skepticism, and ironic sense of humor.
Like many members of that generation, Cobain was the product of a bro-
ken home. He grew up an outcast in small-town Aberdeen, Washington.
Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic was one of his few friends, and the two
never really felt like they fit in until they discovered the punk-rock under-
ground.
Even after his band's multiplatinum success, Cobain stressed the punk
ideal, maintaining that he was no different or better than his fans. In his
shabby sweaters and torn-up jeans, he certainly looked like them. When
Nirvana last performed in Chicago, he sat cross-legged onstage, hidden in
the shadows, watching the opening bands and rocking his head in time,
just like every other punk in the crowd. I can count on one hand the num-
ber of times I've seen a member of the headlining group so thoroughly en-
joy the entire sets by the bands who opened for him.
When I last interviewed him in July, Cobain was optimistic: Nirvana was
playing better than ever, he said, and he considered its third album, In
Utero, to be its best. He explained that he had dropped a song called "I Hate
Myself and Want to Die" from the disc because it had been too noisy. The
title was a joke, and the passion in his vocals indicated he was feeling any-
thing but suicidal. "I still haven't had my full," he screams in the song. "Fill
in the someday."
People close to the band are wondering when he began to feel differently.
"The [overdose] in early March led me to believe that he was quite an
unhappy person," says Michael Azerrad, author of the Nirvana biogra-
phy, Come As You Are. "He was a teetotaler; he did not drink. Somewhere
in my book he mentions that most of the people who died of overdoses
drank, and that's exactly what he did. You can come to your own conclu-
sions on that."
Come As You Are recounts how Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love,
nearly lost custody of their daughter because of their drug use. Cobain told
me that he had conquered his addiction to heroin, but a source close to the
band said he had recently returned to the drug. The source said that Love,
Cobain's managers, and bandmates Novoselic and Dave Grohl had decided
to distance themselves from the singer in an attempt to scare him into quit-
ring drugs once and for all.
22 MILK IT!

Love and daughter Frances Bean were in Los Angeles when Cobain died.
Police said his body lay for a day until it was found by an electrician sched-
uled to work at the couple's lakeside home. It was a sad and lonely end, but
before the end of the day Friday, the myth-making had already begun.
On MTV, Rolling Stone writer David Fricke compared Cobain's death to
John Lennon's. But suicide isn't murder, and drug abuse is not an accident.
Cobain would have scoffed at such romantic nonsense, just as he balked at
the idea of worshipping the musician instead of the music. "I'm anemic
royalty," he screamed on In Utero.
Remember him for that attitude. But above all, remember him for the
music.

Foo Fighters, Foo Fightere

Request, September 1995
"/ DONT OWE you anything," Dave Grohl shouts in the early moments of
his solo debut. True enough, but who was expecting anything from the for-
mer Nirvana drummer?
Timekeepers get as little respect on the alternative rock scene as they've
gotten through the rest of rock history. (You know the joke: "What's a
drummer?" "Someone who likes to hang out with musicians.") Consider
the curse of the Minneapolis skinsmen: Grant Young, Ken Callahan, and
Chris Mars were treated as disposable cogs in the rock machine by Soul
Asylum, the Jayhawks, and the Replacements. Seattle has been no
friendlier; witness Pearl Jam's treatment of Dave Abbruzzese. Gary Gersh,
currently the president of Capitol Records but formerly the Geffen A&R ex-
ecutive who signed Nirvana, showed a lot of faith by not only championing
Grohl, but giving him his own label, Roswell Records. It's damn near cer-
tain that nobody else was betting the farm on the Foo Fighters' self-titled
debut. The fact that it's distinctive, accomplished, and just plain rockin' is
an achievement for drummers everywhere, as well as a gift to fans of
melodic punk.
Melodic punk—yeah, that's what Nirvana was, too, but Grohl has a dif-
ferent sense of hooks than the late Kurt Cobain. Cobain nodded to the
Beatles with "About a Girl" on Bleach, then quickly progressed to darker,
more twisted, and less conventional ditties. Grohl has a deep and abiding
love for the early garage-rock Beatles (remember his participation in the
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 23

Backbeat band), as well as the optimistic psychedelic pop group of Revolver.

Tunes such as "This Is a Call" and "I'll Stick Around" would fit right in on
Nuggets, Lenny Kaye's classic compilation of one-hit wonders by
post-British Invasion American garage bands, while "Floaty" and the
nearly six-minute album-closer "Exhausted" are two of the most effective
mergers of psychedelic jangle and punk-rock drive since Hiisker Dii's Zen
Arcade and that band's version of the Byrds' "Eight Miles High."
If one of Courtney Love's gripes with Grohl in their simmering feud is
that he's ripping off Cobain's style of songwriting, she's way off base. Of
course there are touches of Nirvana; like Hole and countless others, Grohl
employs the patented Cobain dynamic shift (quiet verse, loud chorus, quiet
verse). He's picked up a few of Cobain's vocal mannerisms, but fewer than
you'd expect given that he sang harmony vocals with the guy for three
years. Overall, words are a lot less important to Grohl than they were to
Cobain. The lyrics are buried in the mix under layers of fuzz guitar. Odd
catchphrases emerge—"I don't doubt that anyway," "This is a call to all my
past resignation," and "It's you I fell into"—but they're the sort that are
hastily improvised at the microphone when a songwriter realizes the need
for a chorus.
Recorded before Grohl formed the band of the same name, Foo Fighters
was crafted during a week at Barrett Jones's studio in Seattle. Grohl
played all the instruments himself (with the exception of a guitar cameo
on "X-Static" by the Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli), and he trips up on only
two of the twelve songs. "Weenie Beenie" and "Watershed" are transpar-
ent tributes to Steve Albini's mid-'80s noise-rock band Big Black, complete
with piledriver machine rhythms, distorted industrial vocals, and pierc-
ing guitar. (Grohl got along with Albini better than the other members of
Nirvana. Love jokes that the only thing you have to know about the
drummer to understand his personality is that he was the guy who liked
to go out back with Albini and set his farts on fire during downtime in the
studio.)
Now that he's a guitar-playing member of a tight and allegedly demo-
cratic unit—the touring Foo Fighters are completed by former Germs and
Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear and the Sunny Day Real Estate rhythm section
of Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith—hopefully Grohl can be dissuaded
from further noisy flatulence. When they're concentrating on the catchier
numbers, the Foo Fighters are simply too good to waste time on throwaway
skronk. In fact, the only way they could possibly be better is if Grohl still
played the drums.
24 MILK IT!

Senator Krist
Rolling Stone, February 8, 1996
MOST ROCK. FANS think of Krist Novoselic as the former bassist for
Nirvana, the impossibly tall and goofy guy who threw his bass up in the air
at MTV's Video Music Awards in 1992 only to have it come crashing back
down on his skull, knocking him senseless. But since then Novoselic has
awakened in more ways than one.
Drawing on the clout and cash that come from having been in one of the
most successful groups of the '90s, Novoselic entered the political fray in
his home state of Washington, fighting music censorship. He linked up with
the Washington Music Industry Coalition, a grassroots group dedicated to
fighting the so-called erotic music law, which would restrict minors from
purchasing records with "adult" or "objectionable" content. He went on to
co-found and fund the Joint Artists and Music Promotions Political Action
Committee, which hopes to persuade politicians to view musicians and
fans as tax-generating voters whose concerns deserve to be heard.
Novoselic remains reluctant to address the suicide of his friend Kurt
Cobain, but activism seems to have helped him through one of the most dif-
ficult periods of his thirty years. Now sworn off drugs and alcohol, he talks
about politics with the same infectious enthusiasm he displays when talking
about rock 'n' roll. And he has returned to making music: Sweet 75, his new
trio, is recording its debut album and preparing for a spring release.
Novoselic talked about JAMPAC during a long interview at a New York
hotel. "Senator Krist, my friends call me," he says, laughing. "Haven't I
emerged? I just hope I don't sound like a civics lecture."

Q. Let's start with how you became politicized.

A. I was politicized in high school. I had an open mind and didn't really
care for Reagan. I cut my teeth on radical punk rock—the Dead Kennedys,
MaximumrockNRoll, and MDC. Those were the anti-Reagan voices at the
time, especially if you were in Aberdeen [Washington] and were eighteen
years old. I didn't feel like reading dry political analyses. I needed some-
thing that spoke to me, that I could understand.
Q. Still, MDC's sentiments weren't very sophisticated. How did "Fuck Reagan"
lead to something more?
The state of mind I was in was just anti-establishment and feeling awk-
ward. I realized that "It's not me, it's those people [who have a problem]."
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 25

They totally bought into the mainstream culture, and I disassociated myself
from it. Republicans—even Democrats—it was like, "What do I care?" But I
did vote when I was eighteen. I voted for Walter Mondale, and I've voted in
every presidential election since.
Q. Mondale went down inflames. What did that say to you?
A. It didn't really break my heart. It wasn't like it was gonna change any-
thing. Walter Mondale wasn't exactly radical. But I voted and I had my say.
Q. What was the next step?
A. Well, Nirvana was always political. We talked about things and how
we felt. There was Operation Desert Storm in early '91, and it broke my
heart that people bought into that. I was living in Tacoma, Washington, a
real meat-and-potatoes town, and it was scary and surreal, the hypocrisy of
the government and people buying it. Six months later, the mainstream cul-
ture that was duped by Desert Storm was all over us. We were repulsed. We
were like, "Who are these people?" It took us a long time to deal with that.
Q. How did you get involved with the Washington Music Industry Coalition?
A. Back in 1992 there was this broad piece of legislation in Washington
State that was really scary. Say that you have a song and you make reference
to an ass, "ass" meaning buttocks. In the sponsors' definition, that was part
of the human anatomy, and that could be considered adult material unsuit-
able for minors. Somebody could go to a county prosecutor and say, "I think
this material is obscene." The prosecutor would decide whether to deem this
material erotic or not. You could then challenge that in front of a jury. I was
like, "Jesus Christ, this is totally un-American! This is unconstitutional." But
the legislature passed it, the governor signed it, and it was law.
The WMIC, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Recording
Industry Association of America challenged it in the state Supreme Court,
and it was declared unconstitutional, but [the bill's proponents] came back
again the next year. Now if someone had a complaint against Nirvana, we
could have afforded the hundred dollars an hour for attorneys. But if
you're a struggling artist or a mom-and-pop record retailer, you couldn't af-
ford to go to court, so you're more likely to just not carry it.
Q. When did you jump into the fray?
A. The first time I got involved, I went on this TV show, a sort of town-
meeting forum, and I went up against this mother from Edmunds,
Washington, who instigated all of this because her kids came home with a 2
Live Crew CD, and she thought it was terrible. I was really nervous. I
wasn't well versed on the legislation or anything. I just dealt my cards from
my perspective. She thought I was a nice young man, and she wouldn't go
26 MILK IT!

against Nirvana: "Nirvana's fine, but it's this crazy stuff, this 2 Live
Crew ..." They always go after the extremes, and I'm so sick of that.
Q. Where did the legislation wind up?
A. It keeps coming back, because you have these people who are zealots
who are worried about children losing their innocence. What happened
was, we had a wonderful governor elected in 1992, Mike Lowry, and he ve-
toed the legislation in '93 and again in '94. But last year was kind of funny,
because in '94 the legislature changed. This thing sailed through the House,
so we decided we had to lobby the Senate. I stood back and looked at the
system and said, "Well, if you can't beat them, join them."
Q. So you formed a political action committee so they would take you seriously?
A. Exactly. I could have walked around with a petition or could have
held rallies on the Capitol steps. But I said, "We've got to get in there, shake
hands, develop relationships, make a few campaign contributions, and be-
come part of the political culture." That's how it works if you want to be
taken seriously. Over the last couple of years, Seattle bands have sold over
one hundred sixty million records, and nobody's moved away. I thought,
"God damn, look at us! We're the establishment now! We're making all this
money." Microsoft has lobbyists. Weyerhauser, Boeing—they're all active
on the political scene. You think state government is gonna move against
those companies? No way.
Q. OK, so I don't live in Washington State. You've defeated this legislation sev-
eral times now. What are you all excited about?
A. Censorship is popping up all over the country. You have Bob Dole out
there; he's never seen Pulp Fiction, never listened to Nine Inch Nails. George
Will's wife writes him a speech, and he comes out a total crusader. These
guys all want to wave the pro-family flag. They go to bed dreaming of Leave
It to Beaver and this '50s ideal. But if you look at the economy of the '50s,
there was a lot of opportunity. I think they're pissing up a tree. They want
to mandate morality, but if you give people opportunity, that's all anybody
wants: to live and prosper. What I say about these social problems is, "It's
the economy, stupid."
Q. What did you think of the recent shareholders' attack on Time-Warner?
A. The whole thing with Interscope Records ... what percentage of mu-
sic is overtly sexual or overtly misogynistic or overtly violent? It's a very
small percentage, three percent or four percent. But they want to regulate
the ninety-six percent that's fine. It just doesn't make any sense. It goes
back to economics. If C. Delores Tucker was real, she wouldn't be banging
down the door at Time-Warner shareholders' meetings and demanding re-
 RELUCTANT RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTERS 27

sponsibility, she'd be banging down the doors of these corporations that in-
vest overseas instead of investing in the inner cities in our country.
Q. Do you think that some people in the fight against censorship go too far in de-
fending objectionable material? I'm thinking of rock critic and activist Dave Marsh
comparing N.WA to Henry Miller. "Yo bitch! Get in my pickup /And suck my
dick up / 'Til you hiccup" is not exactly Tropic of Cancer.
A. I'm not gonna defend that material, but if you want to look at it with
an open mind, it's like, "Where are these guys coming from?" I think it's
really immature, but I don't feel threatened by it. Maybe that's because I'm
a white male, and I don't have to walk down the street alone and be afraid
every time there's a guy standing in the shadows. As far as what Dave
Marsh thinks, that's his interpretation, and that's fine. But I generally agree
with him on the basic premise that rating records is censorship and creating
an adult section of record stores is censorship.
Q. So how does a legitimately concerned parent deal with monitoring music?
A. If you're really concerned about your kids and you want to impress
them, go out and get some rock magazines and see where it's coming from.
Look at it as a parenting opportunity. If you were to play some really over-
the-top thing for your child, and your child says, "This is really stupid," I
think that would be great, because it shows that your values have really
been instilled in your child.
Q. You talk a lot about politics being fun, almost in the way that you talk about
rock 'n' roll. What's so much fun about it?
A. What's fun is the results you achieve and interacting with people. It
used to be I would never sign autographs, and I was in a crisis and in de-
nial [about my fame]. But now I meet people and I'm like, "How are you
doing? What's your name?" I try to be real with them. It's also fun because
it's a contest. You put your heart behind this person, you want them to win,
you work for them, you've got an emotional stake. You want to be with the
winner. You've got to utilize a democracy. Otherwise it's like if you're a
member of a club and you pay fees, but you never go and you never enjoy
the benefits.
Q. Cynics could say it's easy for you to talk about getting involved—you don't
have to work.
A. Since I don't drink anymore, I get up in the morning and I drink my
coffee-substitute barley drink and read the paper and evaluate what I read.
I don't do anything unless I'm compelled. Otherwise it's a chore, it's a job—
and you're right, I don't have to work. But if I didn't feel like doing the PAC
or doing music, I could retire, live on my farm, grow potatoes, and have or-
Other documents randomly have
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Miss Santa
Claus of the Pullman
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
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Title: Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman

Author: Annie F. Johnston

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISS SANTA

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 The Project Gutenberg eBook, Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman,
by Annie Fellows Johnston, Illustrated by Reginald B. Birch

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MISS SANTA CLAUS OF THE

PULLMAN
 Miss Santa Claus

MISS SANTA CLAUS

OF THE PULLMAN
 BY
ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSON
Author of "The Little Colonel Series," etc.

With illustrations by
REGINALD B. BIRCH

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1913

Copyright, 1913, by
The Century Co.

Published, October, 1913

TO
MY SISTERS
LURA AND ALBION
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Miss Santa Claus Frontispiece
PAGE
"Oh, dear Santa Claus" 19
"Here!" he said 29
"Oh, rabbit dravy!" he cried 57
He pushed aside the red plush curtain and looked in 69
And ran after the boy as hard as she could go 77
It was about the Princess Ina 99
The shower of stars falling on the blanket made her
121
think of the star-flower
"Take it back!" 165
MISS SANTA CLAUS OF
THE PULLMAN
 CHAPTER I

T HE last half hour had seemed endless to Will'm, almost as long

as the whole four years of his life. With his stubby little shoes
drawn up under him, and his soft bobbed hair flapping over his ears
every time the rockers tilted forward, he sat all alone in the sitting-
room behind the shop, waiting and rocking.
It seemed as if everybody at the Junction wanted something that
afternoon; thread or buttons or yarn, or the home-made doughnuts
which helped out the slim stock of goods in the little notion store
which had once been the parlor. And it seemed as if Grandma Neal
never would finish waiting on the customers and come back to tell
the rest of the story about the Camels and the Star; for no sooner
did one person go out than another one came in. He knew by the
tinkling of the bell over the front door, every time it opened or shut.
The door between the shop and sitting-room being closed, Will'm
could not hear much that was said, but several times he caught the
word "Christmas," and once somebody said "Santa Claus," in such a
loud happy-sounding voice that he slipped down from the chair and
ran across the room to open the door a crack. It was only lately that
he had begun to hear much about Santa Claus. Not until Libby
started to school that fall did they know that there is such a
wonderful person in the world. Of course they had heard his name,
as they had heard Jack Frost's, and had seen his picture in story-
books and advertisements, but they hadn't known that he is really
true till the other children told Libby. Now nearly every day she came
home with something new she had learned about him.
Will'm must have known always about Christmas though, for he
still had a piece of a rubber dog which his father had sent him on his
first one, and—a Teddy Bear on his second. And while he couldn't
recall anything about those first two festivals except what Libby told
him, he could remember the last one perfectly. There had been a
sled, and a fire-engine that wound up with a key, and Grandma Neal
had made him some cooky soldiers with red cinnamon-drop buttons
on their coats.
She wasn't his own grandmother, but she had taken the place of
one to Libby and him, all the years he had been in the world. Their
father paid their board, to be sure, and sent them presents and
came to see them at long intervals when he could get away from his
work, but that was so seldom that Will'm did not feel very well
acquainted with him; not so well as Libby did. She was three years
older, and could even remember a little bit about their mother before
she went off to heaven to get well. Mrs. Neal wasn't like a real
grandmother in many ways. She was almost too young, for one
thing. She was always very brisk and very busy, and, as she
frequently remarked, she meant what she said and she would be
minded.
That is why Will'm turned the knob so softly that no one noticed
for a moment that the door was ajar. A black-bearded man in a
rough overcoat was examining a row of dolls which dangled by their
necks from a line above the show case. He was saying jokingly:
"Well, Mrs. Neal, I'll have to be buying some of these jimcracks
before long. If this mud keeps up, no reindeer living could get out to
my place, and it wouldn't do for the young'uns to be disappointed
Christmas morning."
Then he caught sight of a section of a small boy peeping through
the door, for all that showed of Will'm through the crack was a
narrow strip of blue overalls which covered him from neck to ankles,
a round pink cheek and one solemn eye peering out from under his
thatch of straight flaxen hair like a little Skye terrier's. When the man
saw that eye he hurried to say: "Of course mud oughtn't to make
any difference to Santy's reindeer. They take the Sky Road, right
over the house tops and all."
 The crack widened till two eyes peeped in, shining with interest,
and both stubby shoes ventured over the threshold. A familiar sniffle
made Grandma Neal turn around.
"Go back to the fire, William," she said briskly. "It isn't warm
enough in here for you with that cold of yours."
The order was obeyed as promptly as it was given, but with a
bang of the door so rebellious and unexpected that the man
laughed. There was an amused expression on the woman's face,
too, as she glanced up from the package she was tying, to explain
with an indulgent smile.
"That wasn't all temper, Mr. Woods. It was part embarrassment
that made him slam the door. Usually he doesn't mind strangers, but
he takes spells like that sometimes."
"That's only natural," was the drawling answer. "But it isn't
everybody who knows how to manage children, Mrs. Neal. I hope
now that his stepmother when he gets her, will understand him as
well as you do. My wife tells me that the poor little kids are going to
have one soon. How do they take to the notion?"
Mrs. Neal stiffened a little at the question, although he was an old
friend, and his interest was natural under the circumstances. There
was a slight pause, then she said:
"I haven't mentioned the subject to them yet. No use to make
them cross their bridge before they get to it. I've no doubt Molly will
be good to them. She was a nice little thing when she used to go to
school here at the Junction."
"It's queer," mused the man, "how she and Bill Branfield used to
think so much of each other, from their First Reader days till both
families moved away from here, and then that they should come
across each other after all these years, from different states, too."
Instinctively they had lowered their voices, but Will'm on the
other side of the closed door was making too much noise of his own
to hear anything they were saying. Lying full length on the rug in
front of the fire, he battered his heels up and down on the floor and
pouted. His cold made him miserable, and being sent out of the
shop made him cross. If he had been allowed to stay there's no
telling what he might have heard about those reindeer to repeat to
Libby when she came home from school.
Suddenly Will'm remembered the last bit of information which she
had brought home to him, and, scrambling hastily up from the floor,
he climbed into the rocking chair as if something were after him:
"Santa Claus is apt to be looking down the chimney any minute to
see how you're behaving. And no matter if your lips don't show it
outside, he knows when you're all puckered up with crossness and
pouting on the inside!"
At that terrible thought Will'm began to rock violently back and
forth and sing. It was a choky, sniffling little tune that he sang. His
voice sounded thin and far away even to his own ears, because his
cold was so bad. But the thought that Santa might be listening, and
would write him down as a good little boy, kept him valiantly at it for
several minutes. Then because he had a way of chanting his
thoughts out loud sometimes, instead of thinking them to himself, he
went on, half chanting, half talking the story of the Camels and the
Star, which he was waiting for Grandma Neal to come back and
finish. He knew it as well as she did, because she had told it to him
so often in the last week.
"An' the wise men rode through the night, an' they rode an' they
rode, an' the bells on the bridles went ting-a-ling! just like the bell
on Dranma's shop door. An' the drate big Star shined down on 'em
and went ahead to show 'em the way. An' the drate big reindeer
runned along the Sky Road"—he was mixing Grandma Neal's story
now with what he had heard through the crack in the door, and he
found the mixture much more thrilling than the original recital. "An'
they runned an' they runned an' the sleighbells went ting-a-ling! just
like the bell on Dranma's shop door. An' after a long time they all
comed to the house where the baby king was at. Nen the wise men
jumped off their camels and knelt down and opened all their boxes
of pretty things for Him to play with. An' the reindeer knelt down on
the roof where the drate big shining star stood still, so Santy could
empty all his pack down the baby king's chimney."
It was a queer procession which wandered through Will'm's
sniffling, sing-song account. To the camels, sages and herald angels,
to the shepherds and the little woolly white lambs of the Judean
hills, were added not only Bo Peep and her flock, but Baa the black
sheep, and the reindeer team of an unscriptural Saint Nicholas. But
it was all Holy Writ to Will'm. Presently the mere thought of angels
and stars and silver bells gave him such a big warm feeling inside,
that he was brimming over with good-will to everybody.
When Libby came home from school a few minutes later, he was
in the midst of his favorite game, one which he played at intervals all
through the day. The game was Railroad Train, suggested naturally
enough by the constant switching of cars and snorting of engines
which went on all day and night at this busy Junction. It was one in
which he could be a star performer in each part, as he personated
fireman, engineer, conductor and passenger in turn. At the moment
Libby came in he was the engine itself, backing, puffing and
whistling, his arms going like piston-rods, and his pursed up little
mouth giving a very fair imitation of "letting off steam."
"Look out!" he called warningly. "You'll get runned over."
But instead of heeding his warning, Libby planted herself directly
in the path of the oncoming engine, ignoring so completely the part
he was playing that he stopped short in surprise. Ordinarily she
would have fallen in with the game, but now she seemed blind and
deaf to the fact that he was playing anything at all. Usually, coming
in the back way, she left her muddy overshoes on the latticed porch,
her lunch basket on the kitchen table, her wraps on their particular
hook in the entry. She was an orderly little soul. But to-day she came
in, her coat half off, her hood trailing down her back by its strings,
and her thin little tails of tightly braided hair fuzzy and untied, from
running bare-headed all the way home to tell the exciting news. She
told it in gasps.
"You can write letters to Santa Claus—for whatever you want—
and put them up the chimney—and he gets them—and whatever
you ask for he'll bring you—if you're good!"
Instantly the engine was a little boy again all a-tingle with this
new delicious mystery of Christmastide. He climbed up into the
rocking chair and listened, the rapt look on his face deepening. In
proof of what she told, Libby had a letter all written and addressed,
ready to send. One of the older girls had helped her with it at noon,
and she had spent the entire afternoon recess copying it. Because
she was just learning to write, she made so many mistakes that it
had to be copied several times. She read it aloud to Will'm.

"Dear Santa Claus:—Please bring me a little shiny gold ring

like the one that Maudie Peters wears. Yours truly, Libby
Branfield."

"Now you watch, and you'll see me send it up the chimney when
I get my muddy overshoes off and my hands washed. This might be
one of the times when he'd be looking down, and it'd be better for
me to be all clean and tidy."
Breathlessly Will'm waited till she came back from the kitchen, her
hands and face shining from the scrubbing she had given them with
yellow laundry soap, her hair brushed primly back on each side of its
parting and her hair ribbons freshly tied. Then she knelt on the rug,
the fateful missive in her hand.
"Maudie is going to ask for 'most a dozen presents," she said.
"But as long as this will be Santy's first visit to this house I'm not
going to ask for more than one thing, and you mustn't either. It
wouldn't be polite."
 "But we can ask him to bring a ring to Dranma," Will'm
suggested, his face beaming at the thought. The answer was
positive and terrible out of her wisdom newly gained at both church
and school.
"No, we can't! He only brings things to people who bleeve in him.
It's the same way it is about going to Heaven. Only those who
bleeve will be saved and get in."
"Dranma and Uncle Neal will go to Heaven," insisted Will'm
loyally, and in a tone which suggested his willingness to hurt her if
she contradicted him. Uncle Neal was "Dranma's" husband.
"Oh, of course, they'll go to Heaven all right," was Libby's
impatient answer. "They've got faith in the Bible and the minister
and the heathen and such things. But they won't get anything in
their stockings because they aren't sure about there even being a
Santa Claus! So there!"
"Well, if Santa Claus won't put anything in my Dranma Neal's
stocking, he's a mean old thing, and I don't want him to put
anything in mine," began Will'm defiantly, but was silenced by the
sight of Libby's horrified face.
"Oh, brother! Hush!" she cried, darting a frightened glance over
her shoulder towards the chimney. Then in a shocked whisper which
scared Will'm worse than a loud yell would have done, she said
impressively, "Oh, I hope he hasn't heard you! He never would come
to this house as long as he lives! And I couldn't bear for us to find
just empty stockings Christmas morning."
There was a tense silence. And then, still on her knees, her hands
still clasped over the letter, she moved a few inches nearer the
fireplace. The next instant Will'm heard her call imploringly up the
chimney, "Oh, dear Santa Claus, if you're up there looking down,
please don't mind what Will'm said. He's so little he doesn't know
any better. Please forgive him and send us what we ask for, for
Jesus' sake, Amen!"
 Fascinated, Will'm watched the letter flutter up past the flames,
drawn by the strong draught of the flue. Then suddenly shamed by
the thought that he had been publicly prayed for, out loud and in the
daytime, he ran to cast himself on the old lounge, face downward
among the cushions.
Libby herself felt a
trifle constrained after
her unusual
performance, and to
cover her
embarrassment seized
the hearth broom and
vigorously swept up
the scraps of half-dried
mud which she had
tracked in a little while
before. Then she
stood and drummed
on the window pane a
long time, looking out
into the dusk which
always came so
surprisingly fast these
short winter days,
almost the very
moment after the sun
dropped down behind
the cedar trees.
It was a relief to
both children when
Grandma Neal came in "Oh, dear Santa Claus"
with a lighted lamp.
Her cheerful call to
know who was going to help her set the supper table, gave Will'm
an excuse to spring up from the lounge cushions and face his little
world once more in a natural and matter-of-course way. He felt safer
out in the bright warm kitchen. No stern displeased eye could
possibly peer at him around the bend of that black shining stove-
pipe. There was comfort in the savory steam puffing out from under
the lid of the stew-pan on the stove. There was reassurance in the
clatter of the knives and forks and dishes which he and Libby put
noisily in place on the table. But when Grandma Neal started where
she had left off, to finish the story of the Camels and the Star, he
interrupted quickly to ask instead for the tale of Goldilocks and the
Three Bears. The Christmas Spirit had gone out of him. He could not
listen to the story of the Star. It lighted the way not only of the
camel caravan, but of the Sky Road too, and he didn't want to be
reminded of that Sky Road now. He was fearful that a cold
displeasure might be filling the throat of the sitting-room chimney. If
Santa Claus had happened to be listening when he called him a
mean old thing, then had he ruined not only his own chances, but
Libby's too. That fear followed him all evening. It made him vaguely
uncomfortable. Even when they sat down to supper it did something
to his appetite, for the dumpling stew did not taste as good as usual.
 CHAPTER II

I T was several days before Will'm lost that haunting fear of

having displeased the great power up the chimney past all
forgiveness. It began to leave him gradually as Libby grew more and
more sure of her own state of favor. She was so good in school now
that even the teacher said nobody could be better, no matter how
hard he tried. She stayed every day to help clean the blackboards
and collect the pencils. She never missed a syllable nor stepped off
the line in spelling class, nor asked for a drink in lesson time. And
she and Maudie Peters had made it up between them not to whisper
a single word until after Christmas. She was sure now that even if
Santa Claus had overheard Will'm, her explanation that he was too
little to know any better had made it all right.
It is probable, too, that Will'm's state of body helped his state of
mind, for about this time his cold was well enough for him to play
out of doors, and the thought of stars and angels and silver bells
began to be agreeable again. They gave him that big, warm feeling
inside again; the Christmas feeling of good-will to everybody.
One morning he was sitting up on a post of the side yard fence,
when the passenger train Number Four came rushing in to the
station, and was switched back on a side track right across the road
from him. It was behind time and had to wait there for orders or till
the Western Flyer passed it, or for some such reason. It was a happy
morning for Will'm. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as
having one of these long Pullman trains stop where he could watch
it. Night after night he and Libby had flattened their faces against
the sitting-room window to watch the seven o'clock limited pass by.
Through its brilliantly lighted windows they loved to see the
passengers at dinner. The white tables with their gleam of glass and
shine of silver and glow of shaded lights seemed wonderful to them.
More wonderful still was it to be eating as unconcernedly as if one
were at home, with the train jiggling the tables while it leaped
across the country at its highest speed. The people who could do
such things must be wonderful too.
There were times when passengers flattening their faces against
the glass to see why the train had stopped, caught the gleam of a
cheerful home window across the road, and holding shielding hands
at either side of their eyes, as they peered through the darkness,
smiled to discover those two eager little watchers, who counted the
stopping of the Pullman at this Junction as the greatest event of the
day.
Will'm and Libby knew nearly every engineer and conductor on
the road by sight, and had their own names for them. The engineer
on this morning train they called Mr. Smiley, because he always had
a cheerful grin for them, and sometimes a wave of his big grimy
hand. This time Mr. Smiley was too busy and too provoked by the
delay to pay any attention to the small boy perched on the fence
post. Some of the passengers finding that they might have to wait
half an hour or more began to climb out and walk up and down the
road past him. Several of them attracted by the wares in the window
of the little notion shop which had once been a parlor, sauntered in
and came out again, eating some of Grandma Neal's doughnuts.
Presently Will'm noticed that everybody who passed a certain
sleeping coach, stooped down and looked under it. He felt impelled
to look under it himself and discover why. So he climbed down from
the post and trudged along the road, kicking the rocks out of his
way with stubby little shoes already scuffed from much previous
kicking. At the same moment the steward of the dining-car stepped
down from the vestibuled platform, and strolled towards him, with
his hands in his trousers' pockets.
"Hullo, son!" he remarked good-humoredly in passing, giving an
amused glance at the solemn child stuffed into a gray sweater and
blue mittens, with a toboggan cap pulled down over his soft bobbed
hair. Usually Will'm responded to such greetings. So many people
came into the shop that he was not often abashed by strangers. But
this time he was so busy looking at something that dangled from the
steward's vest pocket that he failed to say "Hullo" back at him. It
was what seemed to be the smallest gold watch he had ever seen,
and it impressed him as very queer that the man should wear it on
the outside of his pocket instead of the inside. He stopped still in the
road and stared at it until the man passed him, then he turned and
followed him slowly at a distance.
A few rods further on, the steward stooped and looked under the
coach, and spoke to a man who was out of sight, but who was
hammering on the other side. A voice called back something about a
hot-box and cutting out that coach, and reminded of his original
purpose, Will'm followed on and looked, likewise. Although he
squatted down and looked for a long time he couldn't see a single
box, only the legs of the man who was hammering on the other
side. But just as he straightened up again he caught the gleam of
something round and shiningly golden, something no bigger than a
quarter, lying almost between his feet. It was a tiny baby watch like
the one that swung from the steward's vest pocket.
Thrilled by the discovery, Will'm picked it up and fondled it with
both little blue mittens. It didn't tick when he held it to his ear, and
he couldn't open it, but he was sure that Uncle Neal could open it
and start it to going, and he was sure that it was the littlest watch in
the world. It never occurred to him that finding it hadn't made it his
own to have and to carry home, just like the rainbow-lined mussel
shells that he sometimes picked up on the creek bank, or the silver
dime he had once found in a wagon rut.
Then he looked up to see the steward strolling back towards him
again, his hands still in his trousers' pockets. But this time no
fascinating baby watch bobbed back and forth against his vest as he
walked, and Will'm knew with a sudden stab of disappointment that
was as bad as earache, that the watch he was fondling could never
be his to carry home and show proudly to Uncle Neal. It belonged to
the man.
 "Here!" he said,
holding it out in the
blue mitten.
"Well, I vow!"
exclaimed the
steward, looking
down at his watchfob,
and then snatching
the little disk of gold
from the outstretched
hand. "I wouldn't
have lost that for
hardly anything. It
must have come
loose when I stooped
to look under the car.
I think more of that
than almost anything
I've got. See?"
And then Will'm
saw that it was not a
watch, but a little
locket made to hang
from a bar that was
fastened to a wide
black ribbon fob. The "Here!" he said
man pulled out the
fob, and there on the other end, where it had been in his pocket all
the time, was a big watch, as big as Will'm's fist. The locket flew
open when he touched a spring, and there were two pictures inside.
One of a lady and one of a jolly, fat-cheeked baby.
"Well, little man!" exclaimed the steward, with a hearty clap on
the shoulder that nearly upset him. "You don't know how big a favor
you've done me by finding that locket. You're just about the nicest
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