Urge Overkill: Life Is Stranger Than Pulp Fiction
After Tarantino’s film brought his band to the world’s attention, a near-fatal drugs mix-up nearly did for singer Nash Kato.
URGE OVERKILL MIGHT be closely associated with Pulp Fiction in many people’s minds, but for the band the connection almost became fatally close.
Quentin Tarantino helped to bring the Chicago band to a wider audience in the 1990s after including their cover of Neil Diamond’s Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon on the soundtrack of his 1994 film.
However, as a blizzard of excess threatened to engulf the band, frontman Nash Kato inadvertently recreated one of the movie’s most iconic scenes: when Uma Thurman’s character overdoses after confusing her ‘powders’ and has to be revived via a giant needle to the heart. In 1996 Kato – real name Nathan Katruud – was similarly mistaken after being offered a ‘line’ at a party.
“I rationalised, ‘Well, it would never be that big if it was heroin…’” he explains in the new issue of MOJO (August 14 / #261). Cue a life-saving adrenalin shot – sans John Travolta – and Kato found himself waking up in hospital face to face with Urge bandmate Eddie “King” Roeser.
“I rationalised, ‘it would never be that big if it was heroin…’.”
Nash Kato
“Me and Nash weren’t on speaking terms any more, but I got the call to come to the hospital,” says Roeser today. “There he was. The nurse told me, ‘This guy, he almost died.’ Nash almost went out in the most inopportune way…”
Get the new issue of MOJO for Keith Cameron’s scintillating account, embracing their Kurt Cobain-assisted rise, heroin-related fall, plus their recent reunion and upcoming Wrigley Field redemption, where they support Foo Fighters next month at Dave Grohl’s request.
Along the way, they recall the creation of that Neil Diamond cover, so here it is in all its Pulp Fiction-referencing glory.
And here they are in more typically glam rock Hüsker Dü form...
PHOTO: Getty Images