by Everett True
“It was an unannounced show – we only heard about it that afternoon,” remembers Rich Jensen. “I was working hard at my spreadsheets and didn’t get down there till seven o’clock. It was all sold out. There were these giant dudes, older motorbike gang type guys at the door. I actually bribed one of them, I gave him 20 bucks and he let me in. That was significant. It was not a fey, Olympia-style rock crowd. It was ‘in the know’ people so it had to be friends and family, and somehow fans, and the vibe was ‘biker gang’. It was a lowlife scene. There were 500 people there and there were all kinds of people. It was a lower, more criminal element than you’d expect at a hipster type club show. It was definitely one of the great experiences. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ just slayed; it was incredible. The song fit the crowd really well.”
Dees denies that the show was last minute, or a benefit: “The show was already booked,” the Fitz singer says, “and we were leaving on a tour soon, with the Melvins. Afterwards, Kurt graciously gave us an extra $250 from their take, to help us get tabs for the van, and yes . . . pay off a few traffic tickets. But I don’t recall the show being organised for the sole benefit of the Fitz, or facing prosecution.”
“When Nirvana were great, they were like beauty coming out of the darkness,” explains James Burdyshaw. “They were a weird, nasty, dirty metal band but they were also a sweet pop band. They were the amalgamation of the darkest sludge that the Melvins could produce with the sweetest harmonies of a John Lennon or the stuff that Kurt was really into, like The Vaselines and The Meat Puppets. In some ways, Nirvana was like a folk band too. There was a lot of depth in their simplicity. The songs hit you so hard because he had this amazing voice.
“I can’t think of anybody else from our era who could write nonsense lyrics in the van on the way to the studio and have them be brilliant,” Burdyshaw continues. “I heard ‘Teen Spirit’ was written like that. The fact he could come up with these deathly dark and eerie, psychedelic chord progressions simultaneously was really cool.”
The week after the OK Hotel show, Nirvana headed down to Van Nuys, California, to begin recording their second album at Sound City Studios with Butch Vig. Vig was, by his own admission, an eleventh hour choice: “It sounded like Don Dixon7 was going to produce and I’d engineer,” he told Gillian G. Gaar. “I was very unknown at the time. It was my first major label album.”
“Somebody should give Killdozer credit for the whole Butch Vig connection,” comments Tom Hazelmyer. “Up till then he hadn’t done shit, just a guy sitting in a teeny little studio up in Madison, but those Killdozer records blew everyone’s heads off. They were the first guys who took that sound and made the drums big and meaty, and got that separation between the bass and guitar and big pounding drums. Production values were not at the top of anyone’s list back then. People probably wanted them, but then hit the studio for $150.”
At the end of April, Butch received a rough tape of the songs: “A really, really raw boom-box cassette recording,” he related. “It distorted so badly that you could barely make out what they’re playing. But I was very enthused hearing ‘Teen Spirit’ for the first time. I just wanted them to play that as often as possible.”
Krist and Shelli took the Volkswagen van with the band’s equipment; Dave and Kurt left a few days earlier, in Kurt’s battered Datsun car. A hundred miles out of Olympia, however, they had to turn back because the car kept overheating – so they drove it back to Tacoma, where they dumped it in a quarry and hurled rocks at it for 30 minutes, before going over to Krist’s and picking up the white Dodge.
On the way to Sound City – known for its work with Foreigner, Jackson 5 and Cheap Trick; even Evel Knievel had recorded there8 – Dave and Kurt stopped off in San Francisco for a couple of days, to visit Dale Crover and Debbi Shane, and then in LA at the Universal Studios theme park.
“They wanted to see Flipper play live,” recalls Debbi. The San Francisco proto-punks had briefly re-formed. “At the time, Kurt was into starting bands with everybody, so we went to the practice space my band Dumbhead shared with the Melvins, and formed The Retards for two days. We played some of my songs, some of Dave’s, some of Dale’s and some of Kurt’s. The odd one out looked after the four-track. Kurt announced he had a song, which wasn’t a Nirvana song because it didn’t have a drum part. When Dale started playing drums, he was like, ‘Wow, we have a drum part.’ The next day he sat down and finished the vocals. The song eventually became ‘Drain You’, after it had a new middle part added – it changed from metal to a more Sonic Youth noise thing.”
Nirvana moved into the Oakwood Apartments for six weeks, close to Sound City. The building was in an upmarket, suburban part of LA, all mauve and powder blue walls, framed pictures of flowers and leafy lanes. The trio quickly began ‘humanising’ their new lodgings, graffiti-ing the walls, rearranging the furniture and staying out all night at Venice Beach. Nirvana were slightly overwhelmed by this plush new world: tropical weather instead of constant drizzle, and the panelled wooden corridors of Sound City were lined with gold records for Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, a far cry from Reciprocal’s peeling paint. So they acted accordingly – at one point, John Silva had to bail out Krist Novoselic who’d been arrested for drink-driving and thrown in the drunk tank.
“ Krist’s craziness gets overlooked a lot – and he’s so frickin’ big!” exclaims Carrie. “There was this one show in April 1991 where Sonic Youth was opening for Neil Young. The backstage area was a series of cement tunnels like a maze, grey and sterile. The hospitality people had this huge handcart piled high with different beverages – and here comes Krist barrelling out of Sonic Youth’s room and he just lays himself out on the cart. We’re like, ‘Why would you want to do that to the beverage cart? We like beverages.’ Everything was off the cart, Krist was laughing, rolling on the ground . . . so they kick him out of the whole venue, and rumour has it they pass his photo around to the security people. Half an hour later, he’s back. He’d somehow crawled underneath the stage to get backstage. He’s six foot seven! How could you miss this crazy mountain man from Aberdeen, drunk off his ass, shimmying under the stage to get back? But the sweetest guy, not a mean bone in his body. He was just so big. That’s why it was so funny, him and Kurt together . . .”
Like a comedy team . . .
“A bit,” agrees Carrie. “They were like a married couple, but they adored each other. They loved each other like almost no other male friendship I’ve seen. It was so endearing. But hate also, I’m sure. They could be the meanest to each other and the most protective of each other. It was surprising to me at the time – I didn’t give men that much credit.”
On May 2, the group rented a set of drums for Dave Grohl, including an incredibly loud brass snare nicknamed ‘The Terminator’, from LA’s Drum Doctor – the 10-day rental cost $1,542 (over twice the total cost of Bleach) – and began recording. Work was slow: the budget was set at around $65,000 but came in at over $120,000, the band frequently not showing up till three in the afternoon, preferring to play pinball and sleep in while Vig sorted out the drum sound on the old Neve mixing board. By the end of the first week, only basic tracks had been recorded. By the end of the second week, 10 songs were in the can – but hardly any with Kurt’s vocals.
“We downed a lot of hypodermic cough syrup and Jack Daniel’s and lounged on the couch in the recreation area of the studio for days on end, writing down a few lyrics here and there,” Kurt told Melody Maker’s Ann Scanlon before adding jokingly, “If we hadn’t met our time commitments at the end of our recording period, we would have bought our songs from Gloria Estefan or Warrant [the hair metal band had just finished recording at Sound City] or J. Mascis. J’s got a shit-load of songs he’s always trying to palm off on people: ‘Here, you wanna buy a song for a quarter?’ That’s a quarter of a million dollars – that’s what we mean when we say a quarter – and we can afford that cos we’re on a major label now.”
Nirvana settled down into a routine,
working between eight and 10 hours a day, changing drum heads every other song, Butch always trying to talk Kurt into doing a second take. “There weren’t any major arguments,” Vig said, “but I could tell when I was pushing him a little too far. A couple of times, he just put his guitar down or walked away from the mic, and I knew I wouldn’t get anything else out of him.”
Krist and Dave recorded their parts fairly quickly. As ever, it was the words that caused the most problems: “Before I moved from DC to Seattle,” Barrett Jones recalls, “I flew out to LA. I was there in the studio when Kurt was writing the lyrics to ‘Teen Spirit’. I remember when ‘Stay Away’ was still ‘Pay To Play’. I’m actually the one who suggested ‘stay away’ as a lyric. They’d take forever to do anything. Like nothing happened. They’d spend the whole day there and record one guitar part!”
Smoking a lot of weed, I bet. It goes hand in hand with being at a big studio. It seems like the more money you spend on the studio, the more time you waste. Maybe it’s so nice you don’t want to get out of there too fast. Maybe we need more shitty studios. I’ve seen the studio that The White Stripes recorded their first few albums in, and you wouldn’t want to stay there any longer than you had to.
“I was blown away by how good everything sounded,” retorts Barrett. “I made a bet with Kurt that they’d be on the cover of Rolling Stone within six months. I won that bet.”
There are so many great songs on Nevermind it’s difficult to know where to start. Perhaps with the album’s closer, the cello-sweetened torch song ‘Something In The Way’, so breathy and intimate you feel as if you’re in the studio right next to Kurt, fingers delicately plucking at guitar strings as the night closes in.
“ ‘Something In The Way’ is the quietest song on Nevermind and the most intense,” Butch Vig told Rolling Stone in 1996. “We attempted to record it live, but Kurt was singing and playing the guitar so quietly, all I could hear through his microphones was the bleed from the bass and drums. I suggested we isolate him in the control room and record his performance separately. Kurt decided to use his old, beat-up five-string acoustic guitar, which he never bothered to tune. He slumped down on the couch and began strumming the guitar while I was setting up the mics, and he was pretty soon flat on his back. I unplugged the telephones, hung a Do Not Disturb sign, turned off the lights, locked the door and hit record. His performance stunned me. He had gone deep inside himself and brought out a haunting portrait of desolation, weariness and paranoia.”
There’s the intoxicated-crazy spontaneity of ‘Territorial Pissings’, the song that opens side two of the original vinyl release in a blister of indignation and a lifted Youngbloods refrain9, screamed with cheerleading fervour by Novoselic, “ C’mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together and try to love one another, right now” – the drums pounding their way into oblivion, Kurt’s voice red raw and throbbing. It was loosely inspired by militant feminist Valerie Solanas’ searing indictment of the male race in the late Sixties, The SCUM Manifesto. SCUM was an acronym: the society for cutting up men – Solanas followed her own teachings by shooting pop culture icon Andy Warhol in 1968. Kurt was moved by, and sympathetic to, her idea that women should rule the earth, by whatever means necessary.
There’s ‘Polly’, the song referred to when critics talk about Kurt’s more feminine side – but in reality a chilling evocation of the dark side of maleness, its alienated narrative refusing to take sides. ‘Polly’ is often held up by commentators as the most ‘mature’ example of Kurt’s songwriting craft – as if maturity had anything to do with it. It was inspired by a newspaper story of a real-life rape wherein a young girl was tortured with a blowtorch. Kurt took the part of its perpetrators, a common literary device but one rarely used within popular song – see also Detroit rapper Eminem’s astonishing ‘Stan’ – to explore both the horror and motivation of the act. The final line, “It amazes me/ The will of instinct” stands in bleak contrast to the remainder – and also to the overtly melodic feel of the song. Years later, Kurt would regret writing such a memorable, poppy song with such unsettling sentiments when Nirvana played to 20,000 fans who sang lustily along, obscuring any meaning whatsoever. But it was a typically contrary Cobain act, to match beautiful chords to such jarring words.
‘In Bloom’, meanwhile, was a powerhouse of a single, relentless and surging.
“I think some of Chad’s drum parts on Nevermind are amazing, but he doesn’t get credit for ’em, which kills me,” comments Dan Peters. “ Gotta give credit where credit is due. The crucial songs like ‘In Bloom’, that’s a Chad song.”
‘Lithium’ is pure genius with its Big Muff fuzz sound and dark call-to-arms about turning to religion when all else fails. “In the song, a guy’s lost his girl and his friends and he’s brooding,” Kurt explained – clearly reflecting his own state of mind. “He’s decided to find God before he kills himself. It’s hard for me to understand the need for a vice like that,” he added, conveniently forgetting his own fondness for heroin, “but I can appreciate it too. People need vices.”
It was during a take of ‘Lithium’, where Kurt got so frustrated at his own inability to get his part right that he smashed his guitar on the studio floor, that Vig left the mic running and used the resulting noise as a bonus track, ‘Endless, Nameless’ – put on the finished version of the album, hidden at the end. It appears 13 minutes and 51 seconds after the end of ‘Something In The Way’10: “a cool, loud prank,” according to Novoselic. The methodology of the song’s inclusion was partly inspired by Kurt’s old friend Jesse Reed: back when the pair were sharing a flat in Aberdeen, Kurt recorded himself one time saying, “Jesse . . . Jesse . . . I’mcoming to get you,” towards the end of a blank 90-minute cassette. Just as Jesse was about to go to bed, Kurt put the tape into the stereo and pressed ‘play’ . . .
‘Breed’ is old school Aberdeen – it wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Bleach. Dale Crover’s influence is to the fore, as Grohl hammers his way through several skins in support of Krist and Kurt’s battering rhythm. The guitar solo is twisted and atonal, and out of key. “I never practise solos,” Kurt said. “For every guitar solo I’ve ever recorded, I’ve always just played what I wanted to at the time and then just picked the best takes.”
‘Come As You Are’, meanwhile, is tricksy; a booming Eighties production masking a heartfelt plea for companionship, Kurt’s voice so plaintive and hurt that even now it feels painful to hear him, 15 years on.
“[The songs] are just ideas I’ve had, different scenarios, stuff from television, books and characters I meet,” Cobain told journalist Karen Bliss in ’91. “I have a lot of notebooks that I use as reference. I take lines out of things that were written before, when I write poetry and stuff like that. But a lot of the lyrics were written minutes before we recorded the vocals. I don’t like to take my time on things. I like to be as spontaneous as I can. It usually adds to a better creative force.”
And then there’s THAT single. Right from the opening stuttered refrain it sounds like pure adrenalin, a revolution waiting to happen. Kurt’s brief guitar solo is a masterpiece of restraint, remaining note-faithful to the melody, driving it deeper into your brain.
“Pull up a chair, there won’t be a warmer sound for years,” I wrote in Melody Maker, November 9. “Heck, I know this is a week early and everything, but I couldn’t resist. I rushed out and bought this on import like it was the very first time.
“The part I like best for tonight occurs third time through when Kurt sings, ‘I found it hard/ So hard to find/ Oh well/ Whatever . . . never mind’ and nearly gives up, sounding all bruised and little boy hurt, like a favourite toy truck battered and chipped, hidden ’ neath your brother’s bed. He’s this close to chucking it all in, but then the inexhaustible chorus breaks through, the bravado guitars rush in, and you start wondering if the world’s turned mad, that people like Axl Rose and Perry Farrell and Mötley Crüe can dig something as poppy, as puritanical, as pa
ssionate as this. The metal world must be yearning for credibility real bad if they’re willing to embrace such avowed anti-rockers.
“Single of the year, in case you were wondering how to fill in those Readers’ Polls.”
“All of us when we heard the rough mixes knew it was an incredible song,” confirms Danny Goldberg. “It was not clear it would be the pop song it became. We thought it could be a massive rock song, like Nirvana’s identity song, but it wouldn’t be the first single off the album – it wasn’t crossover enough. It was too edgy. It should be the first track, but ‘Come As You Are’ should be the first single. No one thought it would be a number one, but it was the one that jumped out at everyone.”
“I was trying to write the ultimate pop song,” Kurt admitted to Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke in 1994. “I was trying to rip off the Pixies. When I heard the Pixies for the first time I connected so heavily I should have been in that band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard. ‘Teen Spirit’ is such a clichéd riff. When I first came up with it, Krist looked at me and said, ‘That is so ridiculous.’ ”
“I was completely nihilistic up until about four or five years ago,” Kurt told me in 1992. “When I first heard [Pixies’ second album] Surfer Rosa, it changed my attitude. It made me finally admit, after being into punk rock for so many years, that I liked other styles of music as well. It made me finally admit that I’m a music lover. Their music reminded me of the music that I always wanted to do – and was doing – before I got into punk rock. When I started writing songs, they were a mixture of punk rock and The Beatles, but then I abandoned that and did nothing but Black Flag rip-offs.