This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

NIRVANA sees the underground music SEEN as becoming stagnant and more accessible towards commercialised major label interests.

  Does NIRVANA feel a moral duty to change this cancerous evil?

  No way! We want to cash in and suck butt of the big wigs in hopes that we too can GET HIGH and FUCK. GET HIGH and FUCK. GET HIGH and FUCK.

  American rock bands who could deliver sarcasm and black humour as deftly as they harnessed volume and distortion were thin on the ground in 1988. American rock bands who could deliver sarcasm and black humour and land themselves a Single of the Week accolade in not one but two influential British music magazines in the same week were even more rare. Reviewing the Love Buzz/Big Cheese single in Melody Maker and Sounds respectively, writers Everett True and John Robb both hailed Nirvana as one of the finest new acts to emerge from the US underground scene in years. With the release of Bleach seven months later, the buzz around the band only intensified.

  Sub Pop heralded the release of the album in its typically low-key manner. Hyping Bleach as ‘hypnotic and righteous heaviness’ and hailing the band as ‘Olympia pop stars’, they crowed, ‘They’re young, they own their own van and they’re going to make us rich!’

  ‘In our press releases we would announce that the Nirvana album was gonna go double platinum and stuff like that, never believing for a minute that would actually happen,’ Bruce Pavitt admitted in 2008. ‘By 1988 selling five to ten thousand copies a record was considered doing very good business. The idea of selling millions of records was almost inconceivable. A lot of what Jon and I were doing was living in this hyper-fantasy realm where we were pretending – it was almost like we were five years old – let’s play record label!’

  In the wake of the phenomenal success of Nevermind, it became fashionable to argue that Bleach was a much superior manifestation of Kurt Cobain’s songwriting. This is nonsense. As the respected US rock critic Ira Robbins noted in his review for Trouser Press, Bleach is ‘a punk album of its time, class and place’, and nothing more. Kurt Cobain’s own assessment of the album was equally blunt: for Cobain, Bleach was slow, grungey and ‘one-dimensional’, deliberately dumbed down to fit the Sub Pop aesthetic.

  The album was recorded with Jack Endino over six studio sessions at Reciprocal between Christmas Eve 1988 and 24 January 1989. Its opening track ‘Blew’ is a testament to just how raw Nirvana were at the time: inspired by the doomy sounds of avant-garde Swiss metal collective Celtic Frost, on their first day in the studio Cobain and Novoselic tuned their guitars down two notes, forgetting that they had already tuned down two steps from a standard E setting to a ‘drop D’ tuning. As a result, ‘Blew’, a bleak rumination on entrapment, sounds even sludgier and more oppressive than originally intended.

  The track sets the tone for much of what follows. ‘Floyd the Barber’, a tale of small-town fear and loathing, sounds choked and claustrophobic. ‘Mr Moustache’, in which Cobain lashes out at both the hyper-masculine culture of Aberdeen and the self-righteous political correctness he found in Olympia, eddies woozily around one circular six-note riff repeated ad nauseam. ‘Big Cheese’ lumbers and lurches to no great purpose, as Cobain vents his spleen against Jonathan Poneman’s attempts to meddle with his art. And ‘Sifting’ is a sub-Melvins grind that should never have made it out of Nirvana’s rehearsal room.

  There were diamonds in the dirt, however. ‘Love Buzz’ remains a thrilling slab of grime-pop, with Cobain’s reckless guitar slashes cutting across his bruised, ugly/beautiful vocals. ‘Negative Creep’ is a fabulously dead-eyed wail of self-loathing and self-pity (‘I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned’). ‘Swap Meet’ is an atypically perky, if typically twisted, white trash love song, in which Cobain cleverly masks concerns about his own faltering relationship with girlfriend Tracy Marander in a lyric ostensibly detailing the shared passions of a couple scrambling to make ends meet below the poverty line. And while on a musical level ‘School’ is clichéd sub-Stooges sludge, its biting lyric lashes out at the cliquey, incestuous Seattle music community, giving welcome early evidence of Cobain’s stubborn nonconformist mindset.

  ‘About a Girl’ is the album’s undoubted highlight, however, the one genuine indication that Nirvana had more to offer than standard-issue Sub Pop misanthropy and negativity. Cobain’s most pure, open-hearted and unconditional love song, it was written for Tracy Marander following a heated domestic argument in which the singer was threatened with eviction from the couple’s Pear Street home if he didn’t find himself a job. Cobain would later claim that he listened to Meet the Beatles for three hours straight before writing the song’s delicate melody for his girl. Wherever his inspiration came from, it had the desired effect: while he would never admit that the song was about Marander, his girlfriend saw through his sheepish, blushing denials and it bought him one more rent-free year.

  Reviews of the album were largely positive. Writing in The Rocket, Gillian G. Gaar highlighted the album’s potential to reach a broad church of rock fans, noting that Bleach drew its elemental power from ‘garage grunge, alternative noise and hell-raising metal, without swearing allegiance to any of them’. NME’s Edwin Pouncey, another long-time supporter of the band, was even more effusive in his praise.

  ‘This is the biggest, baddest sound that Sub Pop have so far managed to unearth,’ he raved. ‘So primitive that they manage to make labelmates Mudhoney sound like Genesis, Nirvana turn up the volume and spit and claw their way to the top of the musical garbage heap.’

  The album cost $606.17 to record, a tiny amount compared to major label recording budgets, but more money than the members of Nirvana had access to at the time. Chad Channing’s friend Jason Everman ended up covering the studio costs; in return he was credited with playing guitar on the album, though he didn’t commit a single note to tape. On 22 June 1989, just one week after the album’s release, the band piled into their Dodge van to begin their first ever national tour, scheduled to take in 26 shows. Everman was with them, on board as a second guitarist to beef up their live sound. The experiment didn’t work out and the guitarist left the band after they returned home to Olympia.

  Cobain’s idea of adding a second guitarist into the mix was shelved as Sub Pop packed Nirvana off to Europe with labelmates Tad for a six-week co-headlining tour, billed as the Heavier Than Heaven tour. There was a genuine buzz surrounding the dates: Mudhoney had just blown through Europe with a series of incendiary shows that justified all the hype around Sub Pop, Bleach was in the Top Ten of the UK indie label charts and John Peel was airing cuts from both bands nightly on Radio 1. Sounds magazine previewed the UK leg of the tour with a Tad/ Nirvana cover feature … though it was Tad, then receiving rave reviews for their Jack Endino-produced God’s Balls début, not Nirvana, who were chosen as the main cover image. When the tour hit London on 27 October 1989, 1,000 people packed into the 700-capacity School of Oriental and African Studies to see the show. On their own US tour one month previously, Nirvana were often incapable of drawing flies, so it’s little wonder that the band were fired up for the gig. The following week Melody Maker hailed their performance as ‘superb, cranked-up, desperate and loud’.

  Transcendent nights such as this were not the norm, however. The Heavier Than Heaven tour schedule was brutal, encompassing 36 shows in 42 days across 9 countries, and Nirvana didn’t even have their own van: rather they shared a rented 10-seat Fiat with the four members of Tad, tour manager Alex MacLeod, sound engineer Craig Montgomery and both bands’ merchandise and equipment. The group had to contend with long overnight drives in sub-zero temperatures, their lodgings were spartan, showers were rare and food was a luxury. Almost everyone in the van fell ill during the tour. All three members of Nirvana vowed to quit the band at separate points.

  The tour wound up back in London on 3 December 1989, where Nirvana and Tad were joined at the 2,000-capacity Astoria theatre by Mudhoney for a special Sub Pop showcase dubbed the Lame Fest. Nirvana were now homesick,
road-weary and mentally fried: after missing their ferry from Belgium, they arrived at the venue just 30 minutes before the doors opened, with no time to soundcheck. Popular legend has it that Cobain and Tad Doyle flipped a coin to see who would open the show: Nirvana lost. This didn’t bother their frontman, who by now just wanted the misery to end as quickly as possible.

  Depending on who you talk to, Nirvana’s ragged, nerve-shredding Lame Fest set was either an unmitigated disaster or one of the defining moments in their career. The trio tore through 15 songs, including a cover of The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and two new Cobain originals titled ‘Polly’ and ‘Breed’, as their equipment threatened to flatline at any given second. At the climax of set closer ‘Blew’, Cobain took off his guitar and hurled it at Novoselic, who swung his bass at the incoming instrument and smashed it into pieces with one single swipe. Cobain was off the stage before his guitar hit the ground. It was a beautifully brutal conclusion to a messy, tension-filled night.

  ‘The Lame Fest show was what really put Nirvana on the map in the UK,’ says Anton Brookes, then a young publicist with his own company, Bad Moon, who represented Nirvana among other Sub Pop bands. ‘The reviews the next week were like, “Forget Mudhoney, forget Tad, this is the band. This is the band, this is special.” Everybody in the audience was stood there going “Wow”. Everybody was just like, “This is amazing.”’

  Phil Alexander, then a contributor to heavy rock magazine Raw, now Editor-in-Chief of MOJO magazine, interviewed Cobain and Novoselic before they returned to the USA. He remembers the pair as articulate, thoughtful and affable young men, bearing scant resemblance to their Sub Pop-manufactured image as happy-go-lucky backwoods knuckledraggers. Cobain had long since tired of Sub Pop’s gamesmanship and hype – ‘I feel like we’ve been tagged as illiterate, redneck, cousin-fucking kids that have no idea what’s going on at all,’ he complained to journalist Nils Bernstein from The Rocket that same month. ‘That’s completely untrue’ – and as he spoke to Alexander over bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale in The Clachan bar on Kingly Street in Soho, Nirvana’s singer made no secret of his ambition to transcend the scene which had spawned his band.

  ‘I had just reviewed an album by an obscure band on SST called Slovenly, which seemed to pique Kurt’s interest,’ Alexander recalls. ‘“So you’re the alternative rock guy?” he asked. I told him that I wasn’t really sure that I was, but that also forced Krist into asking me what I thought of Bleach. I was fairly honest, and I told them that I was far more of a fan of God’s Balls. “Everyone’s got an opinion, everyone’s got an asshole!” countered Krist, looking a little upset. But that set us off on a conversation about where the band were heading and what their ambitions were. It was at that point that Kurt told me unequivocally that he wanted to be in the biggest band in the world. It wasn’t a boast, but neither did he mumble: he just said it as if this was the most normal thing in the world. In hindsight, you tend to think: be careful what you wish for …’

  As the new decade dawned, Sub Pop were keen to capitalise upon the growing buzz on Nirvana by getting the band back into the studio to make a second album. Jonathan Poneman targeted Butch Vig, an up-and-coming producer from Madison, Wisconsin, then making a name for himself in the underground thanks to his work on albums by Killdozer, Die Kreuzen and Urge Overkill, as the man to bottle Nirvana’s magic.

  ‘At the time I’d been doing a bunch of projects for Sub Pop,’ says Vig, ‘and so when Jonathan called and said, “Do you want to do a project with this band Nirvana?” I was like “Okay, cool.” He said, “They could be the next Beatles.” And I just sort of laughed and went, “Yeah, right.”

  ‘I’d heard Bleach before, and to be honest I was not that impressed. I liked a couple of songs on it, I thought “School” was pretty cool, but the one song that stood out to me, that I think everybody has recognised, was “About a Girl”. Most of the record was very one-dimensional, but that song showed someone capable of writing a brilliant pop song; with the melodies and the lyrics and the chord progression, it was like a Beatles song. And looking back now, that was sort of the shape of what was to come, because Kurt’s songwriting had started to grow a bit more sophisticated.’

  Nirvana arrived at Vig’s Smart Studios in Madison on the morning of 2 April 1990, after an overnight drive from Chicago, where they’d kicked off an eight-week national tour with a show at the city’s Metro club the previous evening. The producer recalls three ‘scraggly-looking, greasy, dirty kids’ tumbling out of the Sub Pop van, unaccompanied by any road crew. As they lugged their gear into the studio, the producer remembers Novoselic and Channing being ‘super-friendly, funny and out-going’: their pal Kurt was rather harder to read.

  ‘From day one, Kurt was somewhat of an enigma,’ says Vig. ‘He came in and said, “Hey, my name’s Kurt,” and he loaded in his amp and his guitar and then he just sat in the corner and didn’t say anything for about half an hour. I thought something was wrong, either he didn’t want to be there, or maybe he didn’t like me from the second he saw me. I had no idea. But finally Chris pulled me aside and said, “It’s okay, Kurt gets that way, he gets in these funks but he always snaps out of it.” And I said, “Okay, well, I won’t take anything personal, I’ll just roll with it.” And sure enough Kurt slowly came out of his shell.

  ‘As it turned out it was great working with him. He was smart and funny and we developed a really good rapport. But it was just kinda strange that first day. I realised over the course of the week that he just had these incredible mood swings but that that was just a big part of his personality.’

  The first song Nirvana played for Vig was a new track entitled ‘In Bloom’, a song Cobain had penned in tribute to his friend Dylan Carlson, which had received its live première the previous night. They then ran through a further six originals – ‘Dive’, ‘Lithium’, ‘Immodium’ (titled after the anti-diarrhoea medicine Tad Doyle had used on their European tour), ‘Pay to Play’, ‘Sappy’ and a stark acoustic track called ‘Polly’ (originally titled ‘Hitchhiker’) based upon the harrowing story of a 14-year-old girl who’d been abducted, raped and tortured at gunpoint following a punk rock show in Tacoma in 1987. Vig could scarcely believe that this was the same band who’d made Bleach.

  ‘I realised, “God, there’s some great, great, great songs here,” and I was excited,’ he recalls. ‘Once they started playing they were a powerful-sounding band.’

  Over the next four days the trio committed Cobain’s new songs, plus a cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Here She Comes Now’, to tape. Vig was impressed by their work ethic and professionalism.

  ‘The only tension really that came from the session was that Kurt was arguing with Chad about the drumming a lot,’ he recalls. ‘Either it didn’t sound intense enough or he didn’t like the parts. Sometimes Kurt, who couldn’t really play drums, would get behind the kit and go “Play it like this” or “Play this part” and he’d half be able to do it, but it was enough that Chad would get it.’

  On 7 April, following a headline show at Madison’s Club Underground, Nirvana climbed back into the Sub Pop van and headed for Milwaukee to resume their tour. Vig mixed the tracks the following week and sent the master tapes to Jonathan Poneman and cassette copies to the band. The plan was that Nirvana would return to Madison in June to finish the album, which was to be called Sheep, a title Cobain intended as a barbed joke on hipsters who would pick up the album based on Sub Pop’s bullshit alone. But the Sub Pop van never reappeared in Madison, and as months passed without any communication from the label Vig feared he’d screwed up.

  In reality, Sub Pop was facing its own problems. Always a hand-to-mouth operation – famously Poneman and Pavitt once had T-shirts printed up reading WHAT PART OF ‘WE HAVE NO MONEY’ DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? – by the summer of 1990 the label was in serious danger of bankruptcy. Behind the scenes, Poneman and Pavitt were seeking to secure a licensing deal with a major label, using Nirvana’s brilliant new demo as
bait. Unbeknownst to the pair, initially at least, their brightest young stars were shopping the demo around too.

  The notion that Kurt Cobain negotiated the music industry as a wide-eyed, guileless naïf is a lie. The publication of the singer’s diaries as Journals in 2002 revealed that he plotted and planned his every musical and career move far in advance of their execution, and knew exactly how the industry worked. He was more than aware that Sub Pop viewed his band as a valuable commodity; his plan now was to cut out the middlemen and approach the labels directly. Nirvana’s stint at Smart Studios also convinced him of another cold hard fact – that his drummer was not good enough to take the step up to the next level with him.

  One week after the end of the band’s US tour, he and Novoselic drove out to Bainbridge Island and told Channing he was out of the band. That same week he also broke off his relationship with Tracy Marander. It was time for the singer to look after number one.

  On 11 July 1990 Cobain and Novoselic borrowed Mudhoney’s drummer and Tad’s gear to record a one-off song, ‘Sliver’, at Reciprocal for a Sub Pop single. A loosely autobiographical tale of an unhappy boy dropped off with his grandparents while his parents attended a rock show, it was Cobain’s most immediate song to date, employing a quiet/ loud dynamic which saw stripped-back verses exploding into a distorted wall-of-sound chorus as Dan Peters’s drums kicked in hard. A class apart from the rough-hewn sludge on Bleach, the Sliver single dropped into the underground rock scene like a grenade.

  ‘Sub Pop has yet to find anything to top Nirvana’s massive fusion of rock and perfect pop,’ declared NME, hailing the single as ‘The best record this label has put out since Mudhoney’s Touch Me I’m Sick’.

  ‘It wasn’t until “Sliver” that anyone thought Nirvana could be a commercially successful band,’ says Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross, then Editor of Seattle’s The Rocket. ‘Even as late as 1990 most people in Seattle thought Mudhoney would be the first band to break huge. Nirvana were the dark horse.’