(Continuaçao)

Cobain: Well, apparenty Axl was in a really bad mood. Something set him off, probably just minutes before our encounter with him. We were in the food tent and I was holdong my daughter, Frances, and he came strutting by with five of his hugge bodyguards and a person with a movie camera. Courtney jokingly screamed at him, "Axl, will you be the godfather of our child?" Everyone laughed. We had a few friends around us, and he just stopped dead in his tracks and started screaming these abusive words at us. He told me I should shut my bitch up, so I looked at Courtney and said, "Shut up, bitch, heh!" Everyone started howling with laughter and Axl just kind of blushed and went away. Afterward, we heard that Duff [McKagan GNR bassist] wanted to beat Chris up.

GW: I thought it was great when Chris hit his head with the guitar at the end of your performance that evening. You're all trying to be cool and smashing your instruments, and he really fucked it up-it's really good!

Cobain: That's happened so many times.

GW: An impressive finale, and you end up looking really stupid, but that's great too.

Cobain: It was so expected, you know? Should we just walk off stage, or should we break our equipment again? We went through so many emotions that day, because up until just minutes before we played, we weren't sure we were going to go on. We wanted to play "Rape Me," and MTV wouldn't let us. They were going to replace us if we didn't play "Teen Spirit." We compromised and ended up playing "Lithium." I spat on Axl's keyboards when we were sitting on the stage. It was either that or beat him up. We're down on this platform that brought us up hydraulically, you know? I saw his piano there, and I just had to take this opportunity and spit big goobers all over his keyboards. I hope he didn't get it off in time.

GW: Tell me, I have to ask what happened with the gun thing. Was all that Bullshit? [On June 4, 1993, police arrived at the Cobain home after being summoned to break up a domestic dispute. Love told police they had been arguing over guns in the house.-ED.]

Cobain: Oh yeah. Total bullshit. That's another thing that just made me want to give up. I never choked my wife, but every report even Rolling Stone, said that I did. Courtney was wearing a choker. I ripped it off her, and it turned out on the police report that I choked her. We weren't even figghting. We weren't even arguing, we were playing music too loud, and the neighbors complained and called the police on us. It was the first time that they had ever complained, and we've been practicing in the house for a long time.

GW: That's the way they expect you to behave, because you're a controversial rock star.

Cobain: The police were really nice about it, though. I couldn't believe it. See there's this new law, which was passed that month in Seattle, that says when there's a domestic violence call, they have to take one party or the other to jail. So the only argument Courntney and I got into was who was going to go to jail for a few hours. And they asked us out of the blue, "Are there any guns in the house?" I said no because I  didn't want them to know that there were guns in the house. I have a M-16 and two handguns. They're put away, there are no bullets in them, they're up in the closet, and they took them away. I can get them back now. I haven't bothered to get them back yet, but it was all just a ridiculous little situation. It was nothing. And it's been blown out of proportion. It's just like I feel like people don't believe me. Like I'm a pathological liar. I'm constantly defending myself. people still haven't envolved enough to question anything that's printed. I'm really bad at that, too. I still don't believe lots of things that I read.

GW: But you must behave badly sometimes.

Cobain: Sure. Courtney and I fight. We argue a lot. But I've never choked my wife. It's an awful fucking thing to be printed, to be thought of you. You know, we haven't any problems, any bad reports, any negative articles written about us in a long time. We thought we were finally over it-that our curse had worn itself out.

GW: It must also be because people have percieved you as a threat.

Cobain: I think Courtney is more of a threat than I am.

GW: What have been the worst temptations engendered by your success?

Cobain: Nothing I can think of, except Lollapalooza. They offered us a guarentee of like six million dollars, and that's way more money than. . . We're going to break even on this tour because we're playing theaters , and the production is so expensive at this level. But other than that, I've never though of the Guns N' Roses, Metallica and U2 offers as any kind of legitimate offer. They just never were a reality to me.

GW: So what are the plans for In Utero? How much are you touring to promote it?

Cobain: We'll tour for about six weeks in the states, starting in October. Then I don't want to commit to anything until we see how I feel physically after that. Maybe we'll go to Europe. I'm sure we'll be over in Europe to support this record within a year, but I'm not sure then. I don't want to set a whole year's worth of touring up.

GW:There seems to be a tension, in that you defined as being influenced by punk, and part of punk was
that it wasn't cool to be successful. Did you feel that tension, and has it caused you problems?

Cobain: That's not how I perceived early punk. I thought that the Sex Pistols wanted to rule the world, and I was rooting for them. But then American punk rock in the mid-Eighties became totally stagnant and elitist. It was a big turn-off for me. I didn't like that at all. But at the same time, I had been thinking that way for so long that it was really hard for me to come to terms with success. But I don't  care about it now. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm not going to put out a shitty record on purpose. That would be ridiculous. But I would probably have done that a year-and-a-half ago-I would have gone out of my way to make sure that the new album was even noisier than it is. I know we're not going to have a fringe millions who don't enjoy our music, who aren't into our band for any reason than as a tool to fuck. But we did this record the way we wanted to. I'm glad about that.

GW: It worried me a bit that you might get   into the trap, because its not interesting.

Cobain: That defeats the whole reason for making music. I've been a validation beyond anything. But I would gladly go back to the point of selling out the Vogue in Seattle, which holds about three hundred people. I'll gladly go back to playing in front of 20 poeple-if I'm still enjoying it. *