Tag: Inner Avenger

Nirvana opens for Mudhoney at Satyricon, January 6, 1989

This show keeps coming back to me, with more and more unusual details. I notice it’s the date (32 years earlier) of the insurrection at the US capitol. It is the first show that Nirvana played outside of Washington state, although the following month they would play San Francisco and then San José.

The show took place on a Friday night. There are posters circulating, with Nirvana’s name misspelled. However, it was only this year that I saw that there was a third band listed for that night, Inner Anger. If you look at the Satyricon calendar, Inner Anger is mentioned, but Nirvana is not.

True to the pattern I described, Napalm Beach plays the following Friday night. The Friday after that is the Dharma Bums. In some versions of the “when Kurt met Courtney” story, it takes place at a Dharma Bums show at Satyricon (not sure what year). In the Charles Cross version of the story it happens in January 1990 at a Nirvana show at Satyricon, and in the Everett True version, it’s the following year, 1991, in Los Angeles. But I’m starting to think the entire “controversy” over this is a shaggy dog story intended to distract from the real issue: that Courtney Love was a honey trap, and that her mission always included the demise of Kurt Cobain, Chris Newman and anyone else who might stand in the way (Erika Meyer, for example – thus, Op Anne Boleyn) of the continuation of a crime which has been illegally and inappropriately sustaining a number of people and financial entities.

Back to January 1989. David Ackerman and I were pals for a while. I ultimately stopped interacting with people because they couldn’t or wouldn’t be honest with me. When Ackerman and I were pals, I made him a photo website with the intent of helping him license his photos and/or sell them as fine art prints. To this end, I posted some photos from this show, but they were relatively small, with the idea that if they were swiped, as tends to happen online, they’d be to small to do much with. I tried to make sure he’d get credit so that people could trace the images back to him. However, it looks like since that time, someone under the user name “braunnoser” posted a much higher resolution version of the photo to reddit. David had these images on negatives which, when we were working together, he had scanned and put on CD. He gave me the CD so I could use it for his website, and he may have also kept a copy of the CD. There’s only two ways, that I know of, that this high resolution image could have gotten onto reddit: either David gave “braunnoser” a copy of the CD or the image from the CD (and I could totally see him doing this. He was a lot less protective of his work than I was) or, it was swiped from the CD I had stored, because in fact my stuff gets swiped all the time, and the CD of images from that show has “mysteriously” gone missing and been replaced in different areas probably more than once. Also, one of the admins of the Pacific Northwest Music Archives site from which I was booted is named Karl Braun.

To me, it looks like the photo was taken between sets, where one band was breaking down and another setting up. The set list belongs to Inner Anger who would release an album that year called My Head Hurts.

detail image showing set list behind Courtney posing near stage

Silent
Life Out
Don’t Leave
Cob Webs
The Tide
Divorce
Tears
Chance
Murders
Reality
Days’d

There’s more – there are newer versions of the posters associated with this show that are much clearer than what I’ve seen in years past. Here are two I found today:

Clearly, the version of the poster which includes Inner Anger is closer to the original. A question is, why Inner Anger appears one version and not the other – and is there a reason why the version with Inner Anger was not posted online anywhere until, as far as I can tell, this year. Also, now that I can see the poster with more detail, a few things stand out – there are not one, but two women on this poster, one black, one white, in this kind of occult twins formation. Also, they appear to have what looks like nipples over their butts. There was a band in Portland called Sweaty Nipples that seemed to play a lot of these same clubs. You can see them on this same January 1989 calendar, twice – once – on January 12 – opening for Burdyshaw’s Cat Butt. This looks to me like a link to the Mudhoney poster (nipples on a butt). January 12 is also the date, the following year, that Courtney would claim to first meet Kurt Cobain. Weird, right?

Also, and this I find particularly interesting – the style of the female figure on this poster is very close to art that Courtney Love would make. I think it’s even possible that it is her artwork. Even to this day she tends to draw these female figures with blonde bobbed hair, full lips, big eyes.

Courtney Love artwork

Finally, what is that stuff at the top of the flyer about THE WET SCENE? I googled the phrase and came up with a scene from he 1984 movie “Gremlins” on YouTube where water is spilled on a gremlin (Gizmo) and several more gremlins pop out, seemingly from its butt. This seems to contradict what happens, for example, to the witch in Wizard of Oz, when water is spilled on her. Rather than melting away, the Gremlins multiply. On this video someone commented “Gizmo knew from the start how this would end….” a phrase from the Hole song “Asking For It”

Do you see what I mean by “set ups”?

Other thoughts about the calendar – in addition to Kurtz Project (Trés Shannon of Voodoo Doughnut) – there’s what appears to be a band called Heart of Darkness playing on Tuesday the 17th. Drawing a parallel to my own life – Courtney had recently been in Minneapolis. It seems like she must have left Minnesota almost the same time as my honey trap boyfriend Mike Payne – he left in November 1988. I now wonder if maybe part of the reason he was there at all was to connect with Courtney Love in some way, because they both knew my friend Erika Schlaeger – in this situation, honey traps aren’t always romantic partners – they can be, and are, trusted friends too. That’s what Erika Schaeger was.

Around this period of time I’d been reading Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick for my college classes. The idea of Heart of Darkness links with Napalm Beach (Apocalypse Now being based on Heart of Darkness) and with what I was doing, as well as what this crew was up to. I feel like many of the bands on this particular calendar may have been linked in a web or net of sorts. I know that Courtney Love was plotting promotion strategies of various local bands going back to 1981 (because I saw a couple of her diaries) – and that the things she plotted out, she generally achieved. Satyricon owner George Touhouliotis seemed to be fairly close to her, so it makes me wonder if this entire January 1989 calendar involved her in some way.

Sept 19, 2022 update: I re-edited this entry today to correct mistakes around the band name Inner Anger. Also, found a set list for Nirvana:

6 January 1989 Nirvana set list

School
Love Buzz
Floyd the Barber
Mr Mustache
Paper Cuts
Mexican Seafood
Spank Thru
Aerozeppelin
Sifting
Hairspray Queen
Big Cheese

BLEW