This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  Spotting Grohl sniggering out of shot, Novoselic breaks away from his interviewer and hurls a fistful of lard across the stage in his direction. When Grohl gleefully lobs a wad of goo right back at the near-naked bassist, MTV’s exasperated director has seen enough. At his signal, the cameras stop turning over and the microphone is cut dead. It’s 23 September 1991 and Nirvana’s first MTV interview is over before it has really begun.

  A less patient man than Mark Kates might have thrown in the towel with his new charges at this point. Nirvana’s stay in Boston was not exactly stress-free for Geffen’s head of alternative music promotion. It was Kates’s decision to schedule the first US date of the band’s North American tour at the 1,000-capacity Axis club in his hometown that evening. The gig, at which Nirvana were to be sandwiched between Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins and local alternative rockers Bullet LaVolta, was a birthday bash for Boston radio station WFNX, and the Seattle band’s participation was intended as Geffen’s ‘thank you’ to station director Kurt St Thomas, Nirvana’s first and biggest champion at radio. But upon learning that the WFNX gig was to be a 21+ event, Cobain promptly demanded that Kates arrange a second show at the venue, an all-ages gig, the following night, giving the promoters just 24 hours to shift 1,000 tickets.

  That same evening Cobain met local singer-songwriter Mary Lou Lord at a Melvins gig at Boston’s Rat club and – without flagging his intentions up to Grohl, Novoselic or Kates – promptly decided to blow out all his scheduled promotional duties (including a hugely important interview with the New York Times’s Karen Schoemer) so he could spend the day hanging out with his cute new friend. On the eve of the release of Nevermind, the album he hoped would make him a star, Cobain’s disengagement from the process represented a pointed act of disobedience towards his new corporate paymasters, his own little foot-stamping punk rock declaration of independence.

  Still, any irritation Kates might have harboured towards Cobain was swept away the moment Nirvana took the stage at the Axis on 23 September. Kates knew Nirvana were good, but their performance this night was something else – explosive, chaotic, life-affirming, transcendent. As wave after wave of stage divers tumbled through air stale with perspiration, Cobain slashed wildly at his guitar strings and howled like his battered Converse trainers were on fire. ‘With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Here we are now, entertain us …’

  At the climax of the set, Monty Lee Wilkes, Nirvana’s tour manager, walked past Kates shaking his head.

  ‘This tour,’ he said, ‘is going to get crazy.’

  Nirvana began road-testing their new album just days after leaving Sound City. On 10 June 1991 the trio began an eight-date West Coast tour supporting J. Mascis’s Dinosaur Jr, a group Cobain held in high regard, and one from whom his own band had drawn inspiration. But from the tour’s opening night at the Gothic Theater in Denver, Colarado, it was painfully evident that the majority of those in attendance were more excited about seeing the opening band than the headliners.

  ‘They were smoking Dinosaur Jr every night, just blowing them away,’ recalls Franz Stahl, who’d landed a job teching for the trio on these dates. ‘By the time Dinosaur Jr came on more than half the audience would be gone, people didn’t even hang around.’

  ‘It was prior to Nevermind coming out and so the band had all these cassettes with them with different mixes of all the songs, and they’d listen to them throughout the trip and talk among themselves about this, that and the other. I’d just be sitting listening to these songs going, “God, this shit is great.” And Kurt would be going, “Er, it’s alright …” To be honest, I don’t recall “Teen Spirit”, that wasn’t one of the songs that I thought was going to blow up, but I was like, “Guys, this tape is insane, this is amazing!” They’d be like, “Yeah, yeah …” But I could see it, I could just see it. I’d talk to my brother and go, “Dude, this is going to be huge.”’

  ‘I heard “Teen Spirit” for the first time in that stinky van too,’ says Nirvana sound engineer Craig Montgomery. ‘We listened to it on the boombox and I remember that when it broke down into the quiet, chiming guitar part right after the intro, I said, “Wow … Pixies.” And Kurt said, “Do you think it sounds too much like the Pixies?” I said “No, no one is going to pick up on that …” But it was kinda a logical progression from what they were doing live: Kurt was trying to incorporate more of that pop influence into the songs because that’s what he was into at the time. After having spent a European tour in the van listening to Abba it wasn’t surprising to me that more of a pop sensibility would show up in the music.’

  Gold Mountain’s Danny Goldberg saw Nirvana play live for the first time when the tour rolled up to the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on 14 June. The music industry veteran remembers being ‘completely overwhelmed’ by his first sighting of his new act.

  ‘Kurt had a mystical and powerful connection with the audience that took my breath away,’ he recalled in his modestly titled memoir Bumping into Geniuses. ‘After years of increasing cynicism about what rock and roll had turned into, I felt the naïve excitement of a teenager. Somehow Kurt Cobain was able to be both on the stage and in the audience, rocking the crowd out and yet also among them. It was only then that I realised that Kurt Cobain was not just a smart, quirky rock artist but also a true genius.’

  ‘There are certain frontmen that don’t even consider that concept for one second,’ says Dave Grohl. ‘There are some people – whether that’s Ian Curtis or Bob Dylan or Kurt – whose message and lyrics and personality truly is bigger than a guitar and a stage and an audience. And that can be the most powerful thing. Some frontmen have a real powerful physical presence, like Henry Rollins or H.R. from Bad Brains, and then you have people that just have a huge emotional presence. I think Kurt had an incredibly deep and powerful emotional presence that made it so that he didn’t have to take one step in any direction, because the sound of his voice and the intention of what he was doing onstage was enough to blow an arena full of people away. Coming from the hardcore scene where most of the singers were just fucking insane – they were on top of your head and doing backflips and they were bleeding and covered in glass and peanut butter – to see someone that could just stand and scream his throat raw and have that be enough was really something. I’d never been in a band with someone like that. And I never will be again, I’m sure.’

  ‘It’s funny how oblivious they all were to what was about to happen,’ says Pete Stahl. ‘I remember sitting with Dave and Chris in their van outside the Hollywood Palladium and talking about the record getting ready to come out and they were saying, “Wow, we’ll never sell enough records to pay off this studio budget.” But you could tell something was going on. From the time I watched Kurt sing in the studio there was definitely something going on.

  ‘The next time they came back to LA, our band Wool opened up for them at the Roxy. And that was like a madhouse. I remember loading our gear out and someone came up to me and offered me like $200 for my wristband. I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” Things like that just didn’t happen in our world.’

  On 17 August, two days after the Nirvana/Wool show at the Roxy, Nirvana shot a video for Nevermind’s first single, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, at GMT Studios in Culver City, California. Loosely based upon two of Kurt Cobain’s favourite films, the Ramones’ Rock and Roll High School and cult teen rebellion flick Over the Edge, the concept of the video, which involved the band lip-synching in front of an anarchic ‘pep rally from Hell’, was all the singer’s own work. Cobain sketched out every single shot for the video in advance of the shoot: as an artist, he understood the power of visual imagery and the impact it could have.

  ‘I saw this movie Over the Edge,’ he told Melody Maker journalists the Stud Brothers in 1993. ‘I remember leaving that theatre and almost everyone who was in there came running out screaming their heads off and breaking windows and vandalising and wanting to get high. It totally affected them and influenced them.
It may not have been the intention of the person who made the movie, and it is a great movie, but that’s what happened.’

  With his meticulously plotted storyboard for the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video, Cobain’s own intention was simple: he wanted nothing less than to provoke that same level of mayhem in every suburban neighbourhood in America.

  Geffen chose unknown director Samuel Bayer, a recent graduate from New York’s School of Visual Arts, to helm the promo. It was his first gig in the music industry, a fact that soon became transparent even to Dave Grohl, himself a video virgin.

  ‘The director had a loud bullhorn thing,’ the drummer recalled to Newsweek in 1999, ‘and he was trying to explain the concept to the crowd, and saying, “Okay now, in the first verse you’re supposed to look bored and complacent and unhappy. Just sit in your seats and tap your foot and look, you know, distraught, whatever.” And then by the end of the song they’re supposed to be tearing the place to shreds. When they got to the first chorus the crowd was completely out of control, and the director was screaming at the top of his lungs for everyone to fucking calm down and be cool, or they’ll get kicked out. So it was pretty hilarious actually, seeing this man trying to control these children who just wanted to destroy.’

  As the shoot dragged on, tensions on the soundstage mounted. Cobain had made no secret of his desire to direct the video himself, and as he swallowed mouthfuls of Jim Beam whiskey between takes, watching Bayer strut around like a bargain basement Cecil B. DeMille, his mood got uglier and his frustration more tangible. When he screamed his lyrics into the rookie director’s lens, his anger was all too real. At the end of the evening, sensing that his own agitation was being mirrored among the increasingly restless teens watching the shoot, Cobain encouraged the extras to come down from the bleachers to thrash around his band as if they were at a real punk rock show. Cue mayhem.

  In the edit suite, Cobain reasserted his independence by changing the ending of Bayer’s cut of the video. Against the director’s wishes, he inserted a closing sequence of his own face leering into the camera in close-up. It was a masterstroke. Throughout the video Cobain had come across as every inch the brooding, agitated misfit, his fine features masked by his lank blond hair. But here, at the video’s violent, riotous dénouement, the mischievous expression on his handsome face offered an invitation to the dance, his eyes screaming ‘JOIN US!’ It was an invitation that would prove irresistible.

  With the ‘Teen Spirit’ video wrapped, Nirvana did what so many American bands do in the summer, and came to Europe for the festival season. That August the trio interspersed festival appearances at England’s Reading festival, the Monsters of Spex event in Cologne and Belgium’s Pukkelpop, with one-off club gigs supporting their new label mates and management stablemates Sonic Youth. On 20 August they launched their European tour with an appearance at Sir Henry’s in Cork; the following day they played the 500-capacity Top Hat club in Dún Laoghaire, a small seaside town south of Dublin. Grohl and Cobain were thrilled to be in Ireland: on his first morning in the country Dave Grohl phoned his mother Virginia and said, ‘Mom, all the women here look like you!’

  The Top Hat show was the pick of the two Irish dates. Twenty years on, one attendee, Colin Fennelly, then a schoolboy at St Kieran’s College in Kilkenny, later the bassist of Kerbdog, whose 1998 album On the Turn stands up as one of the finest alternative rock releases of the decade, has vivid memories of the evening.

  ‘Most of our gang were only there to see Sonic Youth,’ he says, ‘but my friend Cormac and I had been listening to Bleach in our house in Dublin over the previous year, and “Negative Creep” in particular was a big hit with us. We managed to get to the very front of the crowd with ease for the start of Nirvana’s set, but as soon as they kicked into “School”, their opening number, the whole crowd began to surge forward. I remember being blown away by the energy of the band, especially Dave: the way he just threw his body at the drum kit stays with me still. I can’t remember much about Sonic Youth that night: afterwards the Nirvana set was all we could talk about.”

  ‘It was the first time I had seen an audience so enthusiastic,’ Grohl told the Irish Independent in 2011. ‘They were going fucking bananas. And that was just before Nevermind came out. I hate to say it was the calm before the storm because it was pretty fucking insane, but if you can imagine that being the calm, try imagining the storm.’

  Nevermind was released in the US on 24 September 1991, and one day earlier in the UK. ‘There will not be a better straight ahead rock album than Nevermind released all year,’ Everett True predicted in his Melody Maker review of the album. In truth, there would not be a better straight ahead rock album than Nevermind released all decade.

  Twenty years after its release, Nirvana’s second album remains an indecently thrilling body of work, a collection of breath-robbing, heart-pounding songs infused with such edge-of-darkness desperation, soul, humanity and raw, inchoate anger that it seems to stop the clocks. At once antagonistic and approachable, Nevermind distils four decades of rock ’n’ roll history into twelve deathless shards of noise – part pop, part punk, part grandstanding classic rock – which switch back and forth between apathy and anger, self-loathing and sensitivity, humour and horror with such dizzying, quicksilver agility that the listener is never quite afforded comfort or security within its embrace. And yet one is drawn in time after time after time.

  The first ‘side’ of the album is pretty much untouchable in critical terms, with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ opening the record like an adrenaline spike to the heart. Cobain’s attempt to nail the perfect pop song, Nirvana’s most iconic anthem fuses Pixies’ whisper/scream, soothe/ slaughter dynamic and four breezeblock ‘Louie Louie’ powerchords in a lightning bolt pop moment which age cannot wither. ‘In Bloom’ follows, latterly interpreted as a condescending swipe at knucklehead jocks who’d lustily sing along to Nirvana’s ‘pretty songs’though originally conceived as a sincere(ish) tribute to Dylan Carlson, it mixes nursery rhyme melodies with a lurching, seasick sway, driven by Grohl’s head-caving rhythms. ‘Come As You Are’, Cobain’s open-armed invitation to the marginalised and misunderstood, those ‘outcast teens’ he instinctively empathised with, appropriates the bass riff from Killing Joke’s apocalyptic ‘Eighties’ for one of the album’s most infectious hooks: from its subject matter to its playground melodies, it’s the album’s most unashamed tilt at an underground anthem.

  Track four, ‘Breed’, originally demoed as ‘Immodium’ at Smart Studios, is darker and more gnarled, mixing scorched-earth guitar riffs with a thunderous, relentless rhythmic barrage which would weaken the most muscular air drummer. ‘Lithium’, originally mooted as the album’s first single, is a fragmented take on Cobain’s unhappy adolescence, piling disquieting images of depression, loneliness, insecurity and insanity against one of the sweetest melody lines on the album. On record, the song lopes along on a deceptively simple mid-pocket groove, but nailing the tempo proved to be a challenge for Grohl. In the end, the frustrated drummer reluctantly agreed to record to a click track for the sake of expediency, though the compromise rankled: ‘When you tell a drummer “I think you should use a click track” that’s basically like stabbing them in the heart with a fucking rusty knife,’ he later commented.

  The heartbreaking, graphic ‘Polly’ closes out the album’s opening half. Sung in the first person from the rapist’s perspective, it’s an uncomfortable, unsettling listen, but arguably the most powerful track on the album. First demoed in Madison with Cobain playing a five-string junk shop guitar, its stark, minimalist vibe was considered impossible to recreate at Sound City, so the original recording became the only track from Nirvana’s Smart Studio demo to be transferred intact to Nevermind.

  If side two of Nevermind can’t quite sustain the drama and drive of the album’s opening 23½ minutes, it’s not without strokes of genius. Recorded in just one take, ‘Territorial Pissings’ is a rudimentary, frenetic punk rock blitz upo
n male machismo, a theme which had obsessed Cobain lyrically since the Fecal Matter demo. ‘Drain You’, Cobain’s bitter reflection on the break-up of his relationship with Tobi Vail, was originally conceived as a track for a Cobain/Grohl/Dale Crover side-band called The Retards, and demoed at Crover’s home in San Francisco in 1991 with Grohl playing bass; quite why Cobain originally considered it unworthy of Nirvana is a mystery, as the version captured at Sound City is one of Nevermind’s stand-out moments. ‘Lounge Act’ is also about Vail: in an unsent letter to his ex Cobain once wrote, ‘I don’t write songs about you, except for “Lounge Act”, which I do not play, except when my wife is not around.’

  ‘Stay Away’ (demoed at Smart as ‘Pay to Play’) and ‘On a Plain’ are the album’s two least self-conscious tracks; they’re also arguably the weakest moments on Nevermind, though Cobain’s sweet melody on the latter and Dave Grohl’s flat-out fucked drumming on the former merit repeated listens. The album concludes not with a bang, but with a whisper, with the haunting, fragile ‘Something in the Way’, Cobain’s factually questionable but undeniably emotive tale of living under Young Street Bridge in Aberdeen as a homeless teenager: ‘It almost killed Dave to play so quietly,’ Butch Vig later noted.

  Nevermind also offered up one hidden surprise – ‘Endless Nameless’, a thirteenth track of buckling distortion and roaring feedback culled from a free-form jam at the end of one particularly frustrating take on ‘Lithium’. Towards the end of the track, a furious Cobain can be heard smashing his black Fender Stratocaster into pieces, an appropriately committed way on which to end his band’s punk rock masterpiece.

  In the twenty years that have passed since its release, Nevermind has been routinely acclaimed as one of the finest rock albums of all time. History, and the countless analytical articles devoted to its creation in the intervening years, may have robbed the disc of some of its mystery, but upon its release, like The Stooges, Never Mind the Bollocks and the Nervous Breakdown EP before it, this intoxicating tangle of angst, attitude, screaming guitars and fragmented lyrical riddles invited one compelling question: Who are these people and what do they want?