‘Before the Storm: The Formative Years of America’s Last Great Band’ author Robert Boyd discussed Nirvana’s second guitarist, Jason Everman, and the band’s attitude toward him in an interview with Booked on Rock.
Everman was a member of the band for the first half of 1989 and only played on a cover of Kiss’ ‘Do You Love Me.’
The author highlighted that Everman financed the Bleach album but was only with the band for a short time, explaining: “He financed ‘Bleach. ‘Bleach’ cost a little over $600.00, multiple days at Reciprocal Recording. And he financed that after he had kind of entered Nirvana’s universe. Kurt thought, ‘Well, we could use a guitarist for touring,’ and he fit the bill. They didn’t really know him well. Chad Channing did know him because they both were from Bainbridge Island, but Krist and Kurt did not know him.”
Boyd also revealed that Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic considered abandoning Everman during a tour because they couldn’t get along with him. After the band canceled the remainder of the tour, Everman joined Soundgarden as a bassist in 1990, but he didn’t last there either.
“They quickly learned that their personalities did not mesh once the tour began in the summer of ’89. So, they played throughout June and July, made it to New York, and Kurt and Krist had actually had the plan to just leave him there. They didn’t want him in the band, they wanted to just flee. Flee in the night. And they thought better of it. But they canceled the remainder of the tour. They just could not deal with Jason Everman anymore.”
Boyd also described Everman’s stage presence, which clashed with Nirvana’s aesthetic. “And I’ve seen some of the footage from shows from that summer, and he is very animated on stage,” Boyd continued. “A lot of headbanging, he’s a ‘metal guy.’ There’s a few shows from that particular tour, there’s one show where he actually dives off the stage, it might have been in New Jersey. And he assaults someone in the crowd, so it was those type of things that they didn’t fit with the Nirvana that everyone knows and would eventually know.”
Everman later abandoned music altogether. In recent years, it was revealed that he served in the U.S. Army as an Army Ranger and Green Beret, completing tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
