We opened for Nirvana on April Fools’ Day 1989. Even though it wasn’t billed as a “benefit show,” Nirvana let us keep the money they would’ve made, which kept us afloat for months. Kurt Cobain suggested we go grab a drink and let things cool off. We went to a bar in the back of a restaurant called the Chinatown. Kurt came to our rescue again in June. Tobi kept things local and specific, and she shared the stuff she was in love with (the Go-Go’s, the Pandoras, the Go-Betweens, the Raincoats, the Slits). She also made up words like “hypocrobrats” and “apokalipstick.”
When I finally made it back to Olympia, I moved into the same apartment building as Tobi. Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it. When Bikini Kill formed, I was closer with Tobi, but I always saw Kathi as the gravity that kept us tethered to the ground.
Tobi and I are both complete hotheads, though she is more subtle about it than I am. I can count the times I’ve seen Kathi angry on less than one hand. Darren was a tan mountain biker with a short GQ haircut who talked like a Valley girl, so everyone thought he was gay. He was a few years older than me and had a cute squishy baby nose that was the perfect counterpoint for his fitness-model physique. Darren was always exercising outdoors. He was a great cook and started inviting me to eat with him a few times a week. “It’s hard cooking for one, easier for two,” he’d say. He taught me how to make his potato leek soup, which was so good I could smell it a block away.
Darren was super supportive of Bikini Kill. I don’t think he loved the music, but he loved the politics. He was a sounding board for me when everyone was calling us man haters and telling us feminism didn’t matter in the punk scene. He loaned me books about race, class, and gender that we’d talk about over the many meals we ate at his desk. He lived in apartment #5, which was a tiny studio.
Darren may’ve looked like a square, but he did the brattiest punk shit I’d ever seen.
I’d sneak out of the building and walk up Fourth Avenue to Slim Moon’s house. Kurt from Nirvana lived in the apartment behind Slim’s, so when Slim wasn’t around I started hanging out at Kurt’s place. Spending time with Kurt took my mind off the whole stupid drama with my ex-boyfriend Luke. We’d drink beer and write lyrics on legal pads, handing them back and forth, underlining the parts we liked, and discussing possible changes. When we listened to music together, Kurt was obsessive. He would take the needle off a Vaselines record and place it back like he was sampling it, to hear the perfect intro or the perfect verse over and over again. He studied songs like they were medical journals and he was a doctor, always looking for new techniques he could use at practice.
Kurt asked me if I’d want to put some writing in the liner notes and maybe do the cover art for Nirvana’s upcoming album, so he came to my apartment one day to see my ideas. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw Luke standing in the hallway. Kurt knew about Luke’s behavior and he asked Luke what he was doing there. Luke said he could be wherever he wanted. I was working at my desk drinking a beer when I heard Kurt shouting in the hallway, “Why don’t you just leave Kathleen alone?!” I opened my door to see Kurt about to physically fight Luke. I pulled him away and into my apartment. After drinking probably my fifth beer, I showed Kurt some album art ideas and tried to act cool, but I was secretly elated that someone had stood up for me.
I wasn’t attracted to Kurt, but he definitely glowed. Like he had sounds bouncing off his skin. I always picture his sunken chest barely filling out his white T-shirt as he giggled at some stupid shit on TV. Kurt’s apartment became my escape hatch over time. The bubble I wrapped myself in to get away from Luke. Kurt used to joke that we were brother and sister and the Brawny paper towel guy was our dad. We would smoke pot while watching his turtle walk around his tiny living room. He was the first feminist man I ever met who never thought being an ally meant you couldn’t defend a woman in bold strokes because she was supposed to do it all for herself. He never even flinched. “SCUM” is said to stand for “the Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the book itself is super violent and funny as hell, which reminded me of Kurt. A few days after giving the book to him, I went to a barbecue in his backyard, but every time I came close to him, he’d go into his apartment “to get something.” I came by a few nights later and Kurt let me in. I asked him point-blank if he was mad at me.
“I don’t need you to buy me books,” he said. “I’m not fucking stupid. I can pick out my own books.” It wasn’t the content that offended him, it was me. I was acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt. And then it hit me. Kurt probably wasn’t financially able to go to college, even though he was one of the most intellectually curious people I knew. He was also treated like a local in Olympia even though he was from Aberdeen, because the town was divided that way—college students vs. locals. And now someone he thought of as a friend was telling him, “Here, let me educate you with this cool book because I’m so smart and you need my guidance.” Having being put down as a woman had blinded me to my own power to hurt people. I never would’ve guessed Kurt cared what I thought of him until that moment. I told him I was sorry but I didn’t ask him to forgive me. A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back:
Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead. Kurt and I continued listening to records and hanging out. On one of those nights, we got drunk and talked about everything from how white the scene in Oly was to the massive new building that had just been put up down the street from his apartment on Pear Street. The sign on the building read, “Pregnancy Help,” but when I called to find out more, they let me know what they really were: a pro-life place that wanted to show me videos of infants in trash bags to scare me out of having an abortion. Kurt agreed we needed to take action via spray paint. Of course, he always had tons of stuff in his apartment—all kinds of art supplies. We went to the wooded area across the street from the fake abortion clinic like wasted feminist vigilantes. Once hidden, we staked out the “clinic” with Kurt’s binoculars and put on gloves so we wouldn’t have spray paint on our hands if the cops appeared. When the coast was clear, I yelled, “No cars!” Kurt ran across the street with his Kermit the Frog–in–jeans legs and spray-painted “GOD IS GAY” in ten-foot-tall letters.
After we did our “activism” on the building, we picked up Dave and headed downtown to my apartment in the Martin because I always had forty-ouncers in my fridge. It was springtime and my windows were open. My living room had two things in it, a shitty futon couch and a massive drafting table. That table was my HQ. I wrote both Bikini Kill zines there while listening to Rites of Spring and the Slits on heavy rotation. Pages of “Girl Power,” the second issue of our zine, were meticulously laid out on its massive surface. When Dave tried to touch it, I told him to step the fuck back. At some point, Kurt left Dave and me alone at the drafting table, talking drunk talk. Dave said he used to be in a band called Dain Bramage. And then I saw Kurt climbing through my window. He was holding yellow daffodils that I recognized instantly. “I picked them for you,” he said, like I was Darla in The Little Rascals and he was Alfalfa. “Oh shit, those are Darren’s,” I said. “He’s been trying to grow them for months. Oh shit, you got those from his window box!” Kurt dropped them. I explained loudly not to worry. “Darren is this guy who decided to take care of me,” I said. “He makes me dinner all the time. He’s my caretaker, basically.”
I was a young feminist and I was trying to sound cool, trying to fit into the tough-girl persona I assumed Kurt and Dave had of me. The undertone was: I hate and use all men except you, which makes you special. “I’ve got him wrapped around my finger. He takes care of me so I can make art.” Really Darren was one of my closest friends, my confidant and my lifeline. But I went on to describe him as if he were some loser I was just using. I wanted to give them what I thought they wanted—and I also wanted to make Kurt feel okay about rooting up the three flowers Darren had worked months to produce. We left my apartment and went back to Kurt’s. Kurt and I turned the lights off in his bedroom and went on a rampage, drunkenly destroying everything. We wrecked every inch of his room—his paintings, his blanket, the wall—because it was dark. Because we were drunk. Because we were young and angry and broke. I scribbled above his bed with the Sharpie from my back pocket: “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel. . . Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Earlier in the day, Tobi and I had been at the local supermarket looking at deodorants, and we both laughed hysterically when we saw one called Teen Spirit. What the fuck does teen spirit smell like? we wondered. Capitalism apparently knew no bounds.
After our rampage, I fell asleep fully clothed next to Kurt with the Sharpie marker still in my hand and woke up with the kind of hangover I can only describe as Did we kill someone last night? Kurt called a few months later asking if he could use the line “Smells like Teen Spirit” in a song. I was immediately transported back to that terrible night and wanted to get off the phone as fast as I could, so I just said, “Sure,” thinking it was no big deal. Outside, after the show, a guy walked up to me and said he wanted to make a record with Bikini Kill. He said he loved the show and felt we needed to record something ASAP. I assumed he was a creep. As I walked away, Kathi and Tobi said, “What did Ian MacKaye just say to you?” I was a big Fugazi fan but hadn’t recognized him. We were obnoxious feminist punks, and in the summer of 1991, DC embraced us. “Suggestion” wasn’t a perfect song. I never liked that Ian used the word “I” repeatedly in the lyrics, since it implied he was speaking as a woman. But when I first heard Fugazi play it in Seattle, it was a watershed moment for me. I had never seen punk men stick their necks out for feminism before.
Tobi and Kurt had broken up, but it seemed like they were on good terms. We wore pajamas at the show I’d invited Joan Jett to. It was at the Wetlands in New York City. The owner put us in a room downstairs, and I immediately began snooping around, looking for a sneaky vault of chocolate bars, vintage records, or band shirts left behind. Joan Jett came to see us play that night, just like she said she would. She took me aside after the show and told me she could hear how she would produce us while we were playing. She wanted to make a record with us. The woman who’d produced the Germs’ first album wanted to work with us! She didn’t even ask about the pajama thing. It was like she already knew. Riot Grrrl had become like a hydra monster—super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive. In LA Weekly, Emily White referred to it as “an underground with no mecca, built of paper.” In a way, she was right. Many of us had written the outlines of places where we could be heard in our zines and were now using physical locations like punk clubs and meetings to realize our imperfect dreams. In the punk tradition, we weren’t meant to have a mecca, a center, or a hierarchy. Except we did.
And whether I liked it or not, I’d become the de facto leader. Not knowing what to do, I asked Ian MacKaye for advice. His answer was simple: “Keep your head down and do the work.” Tim Green had quit the Nation of Ulysses and had some downtime, so he offered to teach me to play guitar. But when he encouraged me after I made a mistake, I mistook his patience for condescension, put the guitar down, and stormed off. The thing is, Tim was genuinely trying to help me. He had this way of putting chords together that made me think of angels flying around with sunglasses on. He could bring everything great about Rites of Spring, the Wipers, and the Pandoras into one song. Tim lived at a punk house near the post office called the Red House. He converted the garage into a combination bedroom/music studio and we made a record, Real Fiction, there under the name The Fakes. Joan Jett made good on her promise to record us and we met her in Seattle to lay down our new songs, “Demirep” and “New Radio.” She loved “Rebel Girl” when we played it at Wetlands and had specific ideas about how it could sound better than it had on our album Pussy Whipped.
Joan and her manager Kenny Laguna had me in the vocal booth for hours. I was also sick of being in the fishbowl Olympia had become since I’d become indie famous. Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so just the three of us met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. Needless to say, we did not sign with Interscope. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Their first hit for him: “Just a Girl.” Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.” Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, who I’d met on a previous New York trip when I was writing with Joan. Kim was working on lyrics for the first Free Kitten record. She would sit at their kitchen table for hours with headphones on, listening to instrumentals with mock vocals, writing and rewriting lyrics—a technique I quickly added to my repertoire. Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana, so I tried to get info from Kim and Thurston about how Kurt was doing.
