Out of the Closet

After a few minutes, an off-duty police officer escorted Van Blarcum outside. Novaselic climbed off the stage and went out front to look for the security guard to make sure he was OK. Grohl wandered off toward the back of the club. Cobain stood by himself onstage for five minutes making a screeching and horrible noise with his guitar, seemingly waiting for his pissed-off band members to come back and finish the show.

Finally, he heaved his guitar into the drum set. This was not good. A four-song set is not a full concert, and five more minutes went by before I realized that unless I got the guys playing again, I would have 1,000 very pissed-off audience members. They started chanting: "BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!" I scrambled downstairs and found the shirtless Grohl leaning on the pinball machine. I begged him to get back onstage. He said, "No problem. Find the other guys. I'll be right there."

A couple of minutes later I saw Novaselic come back through the front door, his body covered in Van Blarcum's blood. He told me to call an ambulance. I begged him to get back onstage and that I would make sure we would take care of our employee. Krist was pissed at Kurt, but he was willing to finish the show anyway.

Now where the fuck was Cobain? I looked everywhere, wading through the hundreds of arms and legs and bodies sprawled all over the place, and finally found him in a closet upstairs in the very back of the club. He was in there with this long-haired creep who was trying to give him smack. Kurt was trying to hand-roll a cigarette, but he could barely move. I took it out of his hands, rolled it in about three seconds, then put it in his mouth and said, "You come with me."

I dragged Cobain through the crowd and pushed him back onstage. The three band members stood there looking at each other for more than five minutes. Nobody wanted to start playing. I made it back up to the DJ booth, where Robert Wilonsky from the Dallas Observer was waiting for me. "Man, what are you gonna do?" The crowd was getting anxious. It was almost as if the band had brought them there to take their money and insult them to their faces.

We both spied my CD copy of Nevermind. Wilonsky was thinking the same thing that I was thinking--whatever it takes to get this train back on track.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" came blazing out of the PA at full volume. The crowd went bozo--throwing bottles and chairs, people diving on top of each other, all kinds of crazy shit. Monte the Mullet came running into the DJ booth. "WRONG SONG, ASSHOLE. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?!"

I looked him and said, "I think the question is, what the fuck are you doing? That guy has already destroyed a monitor console, attacked one of our employees and now they're just going to stand there and make fun of the audience? MAKE THEM FINISH THE SHOW, MOTHERFUCKER."

He ran back down the stairs, climbed onstage and begged the band to start playing again. Somehow, they got it together. The rest of the show was great, and the audience stumbled out of the building feeling like they had witnessed a real once-in-a-lifetime event.

Still, there was the matter of getting the band out of the club. Van Blarcum was waiting for Cobain outside and was hell-bent on beating his ass. I called a taxi service and told the dispatcher to have a car come to the back door of the venue. The taxi was there less than five minutes later, and I shuffled the band into the back seat (Grohl and Novaselic still shirtless from the show). I told the driver, "Get these guys the fuck out of here," and they took off down the alley behind Trees.

Monte the Mullet chased after them. "They don't know what hotel we're staying at! They don't know where to go!" Fuck.

The cab stopped and made a left into the parking lot by the side of the building. The driver was oblivious as to what happened inside the club and pulled up right to where, holy shit, Turner was standing. Van Blarcum spotted them and broke the glass out of the cab's back window with his fist. By the time I ran over there the three guys in the back seat were freaking out, covered in jagged shards of glass, and the driver was screaming, while trying to pull Van Blarcum away from his cab, "Who is going to pay for this?" By this time, there was a huge mob of people watching it all go down. It took an improvised police escort to get them out alive.