Quote: Krist on Kurt's chronic illness (2008)

[rocknroll1968]

Novoselic: Jazz drug [referring to heroin]. Then you’re inclined for medication. I can see how it was attractive. You know, people medicating themselves …. And then there’s this whole whirlwind.

Hughes: About that stomach ailment that he was cursed with?

Novoselic: It was weird. It was real, I mean it was real. I remember he would throw up so much he couldn’t throw up any more. I took him to doctors, specialists.

Hughes: You would think that some of those specialists could have hit on something.

Novoselic: I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what, that’s a mystery. You’d think they’d find something. I think it was just the crap food. Here’s the deal, like, we don’t have a lot of money, OK. So we go to like AM/PM, in Olympia. Right behind the lottery office there was an AM/PM there. And it was like, OK at least I got a hot dog. We’re hungry, right. He gets a fucking ice-cream cone. And I’m like, “No wonder your stomach hurts. Why are you eating ice cream?” And then he looks at me and gets all pissed off , like I’m telling him what to do. But I’m the dude who drove him to the frickin’ hospital, or hanging out with him while he’s puking his guts, and trying to help him. So it’s just like, you know, “Oh, don’t do heroin.” And I’d get the same look. You know what I mean? So where the heck am I going to go? What am I going to do? What can I say? “You eat this greasy hot dog instead of the ice cream cone.”

-14 Oct 2008, Interviewed by John Hughes for the Washington State Heritage Center