The '91 Dallas Show
From Come As You Are by Michael Azzerad
Kurt's bronchitis has been acting up for the past week and he was quite ill. That day, a doctor visited the hotel and gave Kurt some potent antibiotic shots, but neglected to warn him not to drink that night. "I started drinking and I just felt insane," he says, "like I did a whole bunch of speed or something. I just wasn't very rational at all."
Kurt had been complaining all along the tour that he couldn't hear himself in the monitors, but no one seemed to be doing anything about it. He was losing his voice and it made performing miserable. "That night I just decided to do something about it," Kurt says. "I decided to throw a start fit."
The club was alarmingly overcrowded; people could barely breathe, let alone move. In the middle of a song, Kurt suddenly took off his guitar and started tomahawking the monitor board by the side of the stage. He broke his favorite Mustang guitar, but he also broke the monitor board. After a long delay the crowd chanted "bullSHIT! BullSHIT!" they got the monitor to work again through one speaker and the band resumed the set.
Unfortunately, the monitor system belonged to the best friend of one of the bouncers at the show, a heavily tattooed, mohawked gentleman with the regulation butt-crack peering above the back of his jeans. During "Love Buzz" Kurt jumped into the audience and although the bouncer made it seem as if he was trying to pull Kurt out of the audience he was actually holding him by the hair and hitting him. "I decided to get one good blow in before he beat me up after the show," Kurt says. "So I smacked him in the face with my guitar. He got a big gash on his forehead." The bouncer punched Kurt in the back of the head while his back was turned and Kurt crumpled; then he kicked him while he was down. In a flash, Dave vaulted over the front of his drum set; two roadies held the bouncer, rivulets of blood streaming down his face, while Chris stood between him and Kurt and told him to cool out.
Eventually, the band came back and played another half-hour. Someone had placed a wooden loading palette over the monitor board in case Kurt got any more wild ideas.
After the show, the bouncer was waiting outside for the band with a couple of his friends. "They all happened to be wearing Carcass and S.O.D. T-shirts," Kurt says, "like speed metal meatheads." "He was totally violent and macho," Kurt continues. "He was screaming, beet red with blood all over himself. 'I'm gonna kill you!'" The band took off in a cab, only to get caught in a traffic jam right in front of the club, like some nightmare version of A Hard Day's Night. The bouncer and his friends began thumping on the cab and eventually one of them kicked in a window and tried to grab Kurt just as the cab pulled away.
A littler later, the cabdriver pulled over, took a joint down from his sun visor, and they took a few tokes to calm down.
In the meantime, Nevermind has jumped thirty-five places to #109.
Pages: 200-201
Date of show: October 19, 1991
Place of show: Dallas, Texas
Buy Come As You Are at
Amazon.com