This is a Call by Paul Brannigan

Author:Paul Brannigan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780306820519
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-11-10T10:00:00+00:00

On 11 January 1992 Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album from the top of the Billboard 200. Nirvana were now the nation’s favourite, and most bewildered, new pop stars. That same weekend the band were in New York City to perform on Saturday Night Live, America’s highest-rating TV programme, and the show on which Dave Grohl had first stumbled upon the existence of punk rock twelve years previously. It was a weekend no one in the Nirvana camp would ever forget.

On the morning of 11 January, Danny Goldberg received a phone call at home from Courtney Love, asking if he could deliver $5,000 in cash to her at the Omni Hotel in midtown Manhattan, as she and Cobain were of a mind to do some shopping before the SNL taping. Nirvana’s manager dropped off the money in $100 bills later that morning. That afternoon Love and Cobain strolled down to ‘Alphabet City’ on Manhattan’s scuzzy Lower East Side and scored a quantity of China White heroin, returned to their hotel suite and locked the door.

According to Come As You Are, Cobain and Love first did heroin together in Amsterdam during Nirvana’s winter ’91 European tour. Both had dabbled with the drug previously – Cobain started using on a casual basis in Olympia, while Love later claimed to have first shot up at a party at actor Charlie Sheen’s house – but using together helped the couple spin their own little cocoon in which to shelter from an increasingly turbulent outside world. The next time they took drugs together, one week later in London, the pair decided to get engaged. Cobain would later maintain that he used heroin only as a painkiller to cope with debilitating stomach pains, but even his closest drug buddy could see that he was in denial about his habit.

‘He was an oblivion seeker, a fucking lotus eater,’ Courtney stated in 2010. ‘I never wanted that. I was the kind of drug addict that just wanted to be comfortable in my skin. Escapism once in a blue moon, but it wasn’t for me. Kurt would just go on until he dropped.’

As discreet as Cobain initially was about his drug habit, he wasn’t always able to disguise the symptoms associated with heroin use. On 10 January 1992 the Californian music paper Bam ran an interview with the singer, conducted backstage at the Los Angeles Sports Arena two weeks previously, which alluded to the possibility that Cobain was using heroin. Writer Jerry McCulley noted that Cobain was ‘nodding off occasionally in mid-sentence …’ and wrote, ‘He’s had but an hour’s sleep, he says blearily. But the pinned pupils, sunken cheeks and scabbed, sallow skin suggest something more serious than mere fatigue. The haggard visage and frail frame make him appear more like 40 than 24.’

Nirvana’s ‘people’ initially dismissed McCulley’s story as tawdry gossip-mongering, but events in New York City that weekend were less easy to ignore.

In the early hours of 12 January, as Dave Grohl and his mother Virginia

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