Kurt Cobain stole my girl
Well, not really, but ... aw hell, just read the story
Early in the summer of 1991, I was playing guitar and singing in a band called Skysaw. (As the name indicates, we liked Brian Eno a lot, though we didn’t sound much like him.) Our first gig—and, I think, either my sixth or seventh public performance as a “professional” musician—took place at the Middle East in Central Square, Cambridge, which was and remains a key Boston-area rock venue. We had a decent crowd that night, not great, not terrible. At some point during our set, I noticed a young woman standing toward the right edge of the room. Her jeans were fashionably ripped, her top was tight, and her backlit, unruly mop of blonde hair resembled a big fuzzy cloud slowly drifting toward the hallway.
I didn’t know her, had no idea what her name was, but I’d seen her many times before. She was a busker, playing guitar and singing for spare change in the Boston subway, on the Red Line platform at Park Street or just outside the station in Harvard Square, near where I lived. She had a high wisp of a voice and impeccable taste in cover songs, a lot of which were new to me. The first time I heard Richard Thompson’s “When I Get to the Border,” Shawn Colvin’s “Steady On” and John Cale’s “Andalucia,” she was playing them. She was also super-cute, an adorable little indie-rock teddy bear. Yes, it’s fair to say I had a crush on her.
So imagine my delight when, after Skysaw’s segment ended, she walked up to me and started chatting. At this distant remove, I no longer recall the particulars of our conversation, but the main points were along these lines: She loved my guitar playing and the songs I sang, and she was looking for a collaborator. Songwriting was tough for her—that was part of the reason she played so many covers—but maybe we could figure something out together. As she spoke, she peered deeply into my eyes. We were standing near the back bar of a busy nightclub, but in my emotional memory, the landscape fades out and it’s just the two of us, alone under a single beam of light. She wrote her name (Mary Lou) and her phone number on a flyer and gave it to me. Then she raised her right hand and gently stroked my hair for a second or two. The smile on her face was warm and enticing. And with that, she walked away.
I was 19, still living with my parents, going to college at night and working part-time as a proofreader at Musician magazine. I’d barely even had a girlfriend. To be flirted with in this manner was beyond the beyond. My mind was quickly in a ferment. I kept thinking, This is just what everybody says will happen when you play in a rock band—and now I’m playing in a rock band, and it’s actually happening! To me!
Of course I called her. My recollection is that we talked on the phone a few times over the next several weeks. She told me that she was from Salem, Mass., and had gone to London for a while to study audio engineering. She was now working at a Harvard Square record store and living not that far away from the Middle East, in an apartment that belonged to the club’s booking agent Billy Ruane, a pal of hers and one of the Boston rock scene’s legendary lunatics (RIP).
Eventually we settled on a time and place for renewing our acquaintance in person. I met her one balmy evening by the Harvard T stop, where she’d just finished performing. Appropriately, we toted our acoustic guitars to Central Square on the Red Line. From there, we walked to her place, up a couple flights of stairs. She drank a beer; I didn’t. We listened to records and talked excitedly about music for hours. She introduced me to cool bands I’d never heard of: the Bevis Frond from England, Teenage Fanclub from Scotland, Tall Dwarfs from New Zealand. I liked the Bevis Frond album Any Gas Faster and the Teenage Fanclub EP God Knows It’s True so much that she said I could borrow them.
The subject of collaboration came up again. She said that trying to find a male co-writer had been frustrating, because “all these young guys just want to get laid.” I told myself that I wasn’t going to be another one of those young guys, that I had too much respect for her to do that, that I would conduct myself as any serious artist would.
I avoided telling her I was 19, because I was sure she was older than me. I didn’t learn for quite a while that she was 26, though.
We grabbed our guitars and started making music, sitting right up close on the floor of the apartment. I distinctly recall her giggling while singing the harmony part to “Nature’s Way” by Spirit. We sounded great together. I thought maybe we could be a duo. Maybe in more ways than one. Then we started working on a song of our own. She had a basic chord sequence she’d been kicking around for a while. I added a couple of fancy chords that impressed her, and we arrived at a rough melody for the chorus. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for me to take away, work on by myself, and bring back to her when it was more fully developed.
By now, the hands on the clock were well past midnight. The subway had stopped running. To my own surprise, I suddenly found myself fixating on the time of the last bus back to Harvard Square, around 1 a.m. I didn’t want to miss it.
I told Mary Lou that I was sorry, but I had to head home. She looked puzzled. “You’re sure?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said, and packed up quickly.
She followed me halfway down the stairs and kept talking to me until I reached the door. Her words were friendly and kind, but the way she held her body had changed, and the almost panicky tone of her voice suggested that what had just happened was not something she was expecting.
I walked briskly to the bus stop at Central Square, carrying my guitar and the records she’d lent me. But I didn’t walk briskly enough. The last bus was long gone. For some reason I didn’t think of calling a cab. I just started walking back up Mass. Ave. to Harvard Square. It was going to take me about half an hour to get home.
The internal warfare started then. And it was vicious.
What the hell is wrong with me? Isn’t this exactly what I’ve wanted for years? We’re clearly attracted to each other. She’d already made the first move, back at the Middle East, and she was just waiting for me to make the next one. I’ve disappointed her. She thinks I’m rejecting her. At the moment of truth, I was no man. I was a silly, weak little boy.
No, not true. I was smart. I was playing the long game. She lent me the records, didn’t she? She did that because she’s expecting to see me again. When she does, I’ll have a song for her. That will make me irresistible. And remember what she said about the young guys all wanting to get laid? I wasn’t going to be that way. I was a gentleman, I behaved honorably, and she’ll appreciate me even more because of that.
And maybe she gave me that line about getting laid because she was dropping a hint? I wasn’t honorable at all! I was just scared.
This last observation was true, and in fairness to teenage me, I had reason to be scared. I hardly knew this woman. We were living in the age of AIDS. Sex could get you killed, and it didn’t take much to make me paranoid.
Still, my belief—my hope—was that this was only the beginning of something. So I finished the music for our song, and then I wrote lyrics, which explained why I’d walked out on her and apologized for it. “I didn’t want to leave you,” the climactic conclusion went, “but I couldn’t let my feelings show.” I thought this was a pretty clever move.
The only problem was that she never seemed to be home when I called. I left messages. They weren’t returned.
Weeks went by. August turned to September. Skysaw ceased to exist after playing a grand total of two live shows. (We’d been booked to play a third but then got dropped from the bill a couple of weeks beforehand. That situation and our response to it—not good—precipitated the breakup.)
Finally, I reached her. She was apologetic. Her life had been totally crazy, she said. She’d met this guy, and the guy was in a band, and they’d hit it off, and she’d basically put everything on pause and headed out on the road with him for a while. I mentioned the song I’d finished, but it didn’t make much of an impression. It was evident that this other guy had gone where I had not. That was my final conversation with Mary Lou.
You’ve probably figured this out by now, but in case you haven’t: The other guy’s name was Kurt, and the name of his band was Nirvana.
It may not surprise you to learn that the subsequent rise of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Nevermind left me with conflicted feelings.
Mary Lou’s affair with Kurt was brief, and she soon gained semi-notoriety as the “other woman” standing between him and Courtney Love. You can read about the painful details elsewhere; what’s relevant to this story is what happened to me next. In short, I obsessed over Mary Lou and how callous she was (I thought) and how idiotic I was (I knew) for more than a year. Just as I thought I was getting over it, she appeared on the front page of The Boston Globe’s Living/Arts section as an exemplar of indie-rock fashion, and that set me off all over again. I wrote almost two dozen songs that, either directly or indirectly, analyzed every possible aspect of our non-relationship. Some of those songs were good. Many were melodramatic.
Something else happened too. I asked Bill Flanagan, the editor of Musician, whether he’d heard of a band called the Bevis Frond. He hadn’t, so I told him what I knew: that they were led by a thirtysomething dude named Nick Saloman, who’d played in a bunch of groups in the ’70s and ’80s with no success. One day, while riding his motorcycle in London, Saloman ran into an unexpected hole in the street and cracked up, seriously injuring himself. He took legal action against the Camden borough council, which was supposed to be in charge of road maintenance, and won. With the money he received from that judgment, he bought himself some recording gear and started making albums as a one-man band. This was the music that had caught listeners’ attention and won him cult fame at last.
Bill loved my pitch and assigned me to write a short article, for which I called Saloman up at his Walthamstow home and interviewed him for about an hour. The piece ran in Musician’s February ’92 issue. It was my first interview-based feature for a national magazine, the real beginning of my career in music journalism. And the only reason I knew enough about the band to pitch and write the story was because of that one summer night with Mary Lou.
The Bevis Frond are still a going concern, by the way. They’re currently on their first tour of the United States in more than 25 years. I saw them a few days ago when they stopped at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and they were superb. The place was packed, and I noticed some familiar faces in the audience. One of them I hadn’t seen in more than three decades.
It wasn’t surprising that Mary Lou was there. She and Nick are close friends, and he’s played a significant role in her rather episodic career as a recording artist, producing, writing and playing guitar for her at various times. But I didn’t really expect her to walk past me. Twice.
The first time she passed by, she looked right at me. Either she didn’t recognize me, or she did recognize me but didn’t want to acknowledge me, or she’d completely forgotten me. I had to admit that any of these possibilities could be considered likely.
As she passed me the second time, I asked myself whether I should say something. But what was there to say? That I still have the records she lent me nearly 34 years ago? (I do.) That the night we spent together in Billy Ruane’s apartment turned out to be one of the formative events of my life? (It did.) That I was sorry I’d freaked out and left her alone that night? (I was. And then again I wasn’t.)
It was at this point that I surprised myself a little: I had a firm answer to my own question. After years of anxiety, self-blame and second-, third- and fourth-guessing, there was nothing more to say. All that connected the two of us occurred long, long ago, in a very different time and place. And I no longer feel the need to go back there.
I stood in silence and watched my ex-non-girlfriend disappear into the crowd.
Good story, Mac. I came up a few years prior to you in Boston, and had a semi-related story at Manray, where Nirvana played. I was on an early date with a girl and had done a story on the band. I took them to Bertucci's down the street (my treat!). Later at the club, before Nirvana's set (with the Fluid opening, I think), I introduced Kurt to my date and we chatted. I don't think it had anything to do with Kurt, but we'd later get married… Fond memories created in Central Square.