Goldberg says the album was virtually gold before MTV started playing the “Teen Spirit” video with any frequency. MTV, he says was just a “multiplier.” “It was really obvious that it was just the music—the song and the desire on the part of the audience for a band to emerge did it,” says Goldberg. “R.E.M. maybe created that yearning, Jane’s Addiction maybe created that yearning, but whatever it was, Nirvana was definitely in the right place at the right time.”
Nevermind grossed $50 million for Geffen, not bad for an initial investment of $550,000. Still, no one rushes forward to take the credit. As Geffen president Ed Rosenblatt said to the New York Times, “We didn’t do anything. It was just one of those ‘get out of the way and duck’ records.” The phrase “Get out of the way and duck” is repeated over and over again like a mantra by Geffen execs. What they mean is that as records hit certain sales plateaus, different marketing approaches kick in; for the first million or so sales, Nevermind sold too fast for the marketing force to implement any approach. “It was almost disappointing how fast it was going,” says Goldberg. “We were just trying to experience it because we knew it was a very rare occurrence.”
The success of Nevermind was reminiscent of the massive word of mouth campaign that had launched Bruce Springsteen a decade and a half earlier. What happened to Nirvana has certainly happened before in less glamorous instances—no one anticipated that Peter Frampton would sell over ten million copies of 1975’s Frampton Comes Alive!, while Vanilla Ice’s ten-times-platinum major label debut also came out of nowhere, garnering very little initial radio or MTV exposure and exploding largely through word of mouth.
Nevermind did eventually get some goosing, however. DGC added the record to cooperative advertising programs with record store chains, stepped up distribution of promo items like posters and mobiles, gave certain retailers a discount on the wholesale price of the album, and then gave them more time to pay for the ones they bought. Sales kept exploding.
Soundscan, a new system for charting records, was another factor. Based strictly on sales instead of an easily manipulated system of reporting, Soundscan revealed what people were actually buying, instead of what the major labels wanted people to buy. The New York Times reported that Geffen/DGC used Soundscan as a marketing tool for Nevermind. Soundscan revealed that in certain markets, Nirvana was outselling Metallica four to one, information Geffen/DGC used to get Nirvana onto radio stations that were playing Metallica.
“Between September 24 and Christmas, it just had a life of its own,” says Gary Gersh. By January, newsstands were packed with Nirvana stories and the January 11 “Saturday Night Live” appearance further pushed sales. By this point, Nevermind was selling over 300,000 copies a week—including 373,250 in the last week of December, as kids went out and spent their Christmas cash and gift certificates on the album all their friends were talking about. That was when Nirvana unseated Michael Jackson at the number-one spot on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart. The band was selling better than Garth Brooks, Metallica, U2, Guns n’ Roses and Hammer.
Billboard magazine called Nevermind “a cross-format phenomenon,” appearing on hard rock, modern rock, college, and AOR stations, and eventually CHR.
The fact that the album went to number one was something of a freak, however. As luck would have it, U2 had decided to release its version of an art-rock record, Michael Jackson continued his artistic slide and Guns n’ Roses saw fit to release two albums at once. “They went up against some bad competition, so it wasn’t hard for them to do great,” says Steve Fisk. “Whenever music gets bad enough, that creates a window of opportunity and shit happens.”
As Nirvana went out on a U.S. tour of venues that were far too small for their skyrocketing sales, it created an effect not unlike the one created by putting out their first single as a limited edition of one thousand. It made the ticket that much hotter, ratcheting up curiosity about the group and boosting sales.
The Nevermind phenomenon symbolized a sea-change in rock music. The so-called “hair farmer” bands—Poison, Warrant, Winger, etc.—that the Hollywood music establishment cranked out were perceived as mere entertainers, corporate employees, poseurs, fakes. And their substandard music and the pervasive sexism and machismo that invariably went hand-in-hand with it were getting very played out. And although they may have made a catchy song here and there, they didn’t have any resonance.
Part of the excitement was the excitement itself—it had been a long time since a rock band mattered, when an album seemed to define such a large and imminent cultural moment. There was something in the air and Nirvana turned it into music.
Buying a Nirvana album was something of a consumer insurrection. People were rejecting the old guard and going with what they felt instead of what a large and well-oiled hype machine was telling them to buy. People were choosing substance over image. It was a somewhat tenuous connection, but there was a feeling in the bones that something surprising was going to happen in the election that November.
The success of the album coincided with a general yen for “reality,” encompassing things like MTV’s “Unplugged” show, renewed interest in additive-free foods, the advent of network news segments that punctured the artifice of political advertising. “We weren’t doing any posing and we weren’t trying to be something that we weren’t,” Dave Grohl says. “It was sort of a package deal—you’ve got good music, you’ve got normal-looking people, just like Bruce Springsteen can sell out the Enormodome in New Jersey because he’s ‘a fuckin’ average Joe.’ I think it had a lot to do with something like that, maybe—people seeing normal people and appreciating that.”
“Nirvana embodied the yearning for a moral universe that was more real and more sincere than what was going on in the conventional rock world at the time,” says Goldberg, “and I think that resonates with a yearning in the culture for the post-Reagan set of values. There is a connection between their desire for authenticity and sincerity and ethics—it’s a real commitment to an attitude that is very attractive. They convey a set of values that’s egalitarian and ethics-driven and less macho, power-driven. All that stuff, combined with the musical genius, is what they are.”
Although Dave denies he is “Mr. Analysis,” he has an excellent grasp of the circumstances which gave rise to Nevermind’s success. “There was a weird lull, a void in rock,” he says. “If you looked at the Top 10 in the year before Nevermind, there was rarely any rock music in it except for bad heavy metal shit that no one could relate to. When our music came out, I think it was a combination of stoners, skaters, of derelict kids who saw a group of derelict kids playing music that sounded like we were pissed. And I think a lot of people related to that. And the songs were good songs. Kurt has a great voice. The songs were catchy and they were simple, just like an ABC song when you were a kid.”
An unstated goal of rock music is to bug one’s parents. But twentysomethings’ parents were raised on rock and roll themselves, so the job had become a lot tougher than it was in the sixties. With its ravaged screaming, pervasive distortion, and bludgeoning attack, Nevermind fulfilled that goal admirably.
But beneath all that, there was no denying that the music was simply extraordinary. It captured all the energy and excitement of punk and applied it to songs that people could hum long after the album was finished playing. Unlike so many albums that consist of one or two singles and a bunch of filler, Nevermind is a really good album from front to back. You can put the CD on and listen to the whole thing and not skip over anything. “The key to Nirvana is the songs are great, truly great,” says the fiftysomething Ed Rosenblatt. “I’m talking on a level with R.E.M., on a level with Paul Simon.”
Strangely, the press and the public don’t think of him as such, but Kurt Cobain is a songwriter’s songwriter. In one fell swoop, Kurt reclaimed pop songwriting from the convoluted, inbred freak it had become. This wasn’t songwriting for its own sake, as practiced by the likes of Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw, and Michael
Penn, who lately seemed to take special pleasure in obscuring the very emotions they so very artfully claimed to convey. Kurt’s music went simply and directly to the soul. His lyrics weren’t tortured wordplay aimed at tickling the fancy of some jaded rock critic, the chord progressions weren’t designed to impress a Juilliard student; instead, the words heightened the total sensation of the music. Like a cool guitar sound or a riff, they made it rock. The music was ingenious in its economy, the melodies were indelible.
Butch Vig chalks a lot of it up to Kurt’s voice. “If you took all his songs and had someone else sing them, it wouldn’t be the same,” he says. “There’s something in Kurt’s persona that takes them to another level. There’s mystery and passion and intensity and something that’s almost otherworldly in his voice. You hear his voice and it conjures up some kind of image in your mind.”
It’s a phenomenon that Rolling Stone critic Ralph J. Gleason once identified as the “yarrrrragh,” a Gaelic word that refers to that rare quality that some voices have, an edge, an ability to say something about the human condition that goes far beyond merely singing the right lyrics and hitting the right notes. Semiologist Roland Bartles called it “the grain of the voice.” Either you have it or you don’t. Robert Johnson had it, Hank Williams had it; these days, it’s people like the Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan and Kurt Cobain.
But each member brought something to the band. While Kurt’s contributions are perhaps more obvious, Chris was for a long time the sole liaison between the band and the press, his business sense is indispensable and early on, his outspoken political sensibility helped to lend the band critical weight. Chris’s onstage chemistry with Kurt is indefinable but clear. And not to be overlooked is his steadfast support of Kurt over the years in pursuing his musical vision.
Dave’s contribution to the band has largely been unsung. His powerful drumming propelled the band to a whole new plane, visually as well as musically. Try to imagine “Come as You Are” without the inspired cymbal bashing near the end that simply sends the track through the roof, the mighty snare rolls that machine-gun the band into the chorus of “In Bloom.” Although Dave is a merciless basher, his parts are also distinctly musical—it wouldn’t be difficult to figure out what song he was playing even without the rest of the music. His personal contribution is also essential. “Pretty much under every circumstance, David’s the one who’s rock-solid the whole time,” says Alex Macleod. “He’s a good influence on both of them.”
“They’ve got it all, basically—great drummer, great singer, great image, great songs, great sense of the media, great live band,” says Danny Goldberg. “It all kind of worked. They excelled in a half-dozen areas.”
The album’s impact was such that nowadays, industry pundits talk about the “post-Nirvana music business.” One impact, as Matt Lukin puts it, is that after Nirvana, “The underground isn’t as underground as it used to be.”
Nirvana’s success also demonstrated to the music business the snowballing power of the indie network. Nirvana could not have broken without all the years of hard work by labels like SST, Twin/Tone, and Touch & Go, as well as bands like Sonic Youth, Black Flag, the Minutemen, the Replacements, and R.E.M., all of whom built a system by which kids could catch the indie buzz—outside of the influence of the major labels.
Consequently, labels began paying more attention to bands with a following—i.e., bands that people actually liked—rather than creating one out of promotional dollars. They ceded some—though hardly all—of the control of what gets signed and promoted to a grass-roots level. As regional music scenes gained power, they began to decentralize the music business.
It shifted a fair amount of power from the corporate rock factions at the major labels to the people who had been following the indie rock scene. “There’s no question that there’s fifteen or twenty A&R people who can sign acts now who couldn’t do that two years ago,” says Goldberg. Those people began catching the next plane to Seattle and pretty soon any musician from the area with long hair and a flannel shirt could get signed for $350,000. At one point in early 1992, Northwest bands were getting signed at the incredible rate of one a week. The industry will be working all the bands that the new wave of A&R people is signing for years to come.
Post-Nirvana, some hotly pursued alternative bands commanded a much higher advance than before. And since the labels didn’t quite understand their music or their milieu, the bands were granted complete creative control.
As boomers get older, they buy fewer records. Nevermind heralded this changing of the music consumer guard. The major labels knew they had to begin addressing this emerging market. And that market suddenly became polarized between the people who would buy Def Leppard records, for instance, and those who wouldn’t.
Mainstream radio got taught a lesson because a record caught on without it. And everyone knew it wasn’t a fluke because Nevermind was an undeniably great record. And there was an army of like-minded bands right behind Nirvana.
By making a great album within the confines of a major label superstructure, keeping their integrity while acknowledging mainstream sonic tastes, Nirvana made a point. Perhaps the ultimate message of the success of Nevermind was that even one little band (or person) can make big changes in a large and seemingly immovable institution.
(© Michael Lavine)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SLAM-DANCING WITH MR. BROWNSTONE
Kurt and Courtney had done heroin together in Amsterdam for two days around Thanksgiving of 1991. “It was my idea,” says Kurt. “I was the one that instigated it. But I didn’t really know how to get it, so Courtney was the one who would be able to somehow get it. She would be the one who would take me to the place where we might have a chance of being able to find it. We only did it twice on the whole tour.” They found a guy on the street who took them to the city’s infamous red light district, where they scored. Later, they did some more in London.
Kurt’s stomach pain had been driving him insane on the European tour, making him chronically irritable and antisocial. “A lot of the hatred would surface because I was in such a fucked-up mental state,” he says. “I was so angry with my body that I couldn’t deal with anyone socially. I was just totally neurotic because I was in pain all the time. People had no idea I was in pain and I couldn’t complain about it twenty-four hours a day.”
He says the pain made him suicidal, so he simply chose his poison. “I just decided I wanted to have a life,” he says. “If I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to kill myself for a reason instead of some stupid stomach problem. So I decided to take everything in excess all at once.”
In early December, when Kurt returned to Seattle after the tour and Courtney was still in Europe with Hole, he began hanging out with a recovering addict. He soon sweet-talked her into getting him heroin. At first, she’d cop for him only when she felt like it, but soon she was getting heroin for him every day.
Soon, Kurt and his supplier got a scare. “I didn’t OD,” he maintains. “She thought that I was OD’ing and so she started giving me mouth to mouth but I had just stood up too fast and fell down. She was giving me mouth to mouth and said I was turning blue but I wasn’t out for very long at all—maybe half a minute. It was just kind of scary to her. She overexaggerated on it.”
Kurt eventually met the dealer and scored on his own. “I was determined to get a habit,” he says. “I wanted to. It was my choice. I said, ‘This is the only thing that’s saving me from blowing my head off right now. I’ve been to ten doctors and nothing they can do about it. I’ve got to do something to stop this pain.’ ” He also admits there was the simple pleasure of getting high, but that wasn’t the point.
“It started with three days in a row of doing heroin and I don’t have a stomach pain,” he says. “That was such a relief. I decided, ‘Fuck, I’m going to do this for a whole year. I’ll eventually stop. I can’t do it forever because I’ll fucking die.’ I don’t regret it at all because it was such
a relief from not having stomach pain every day. My mental state just went totally up. I healed myself.” Except for a long and profound relapse when he detoxed, the mysterious stomach pain has largely disappeared.
It was probably two weeks or so, but Kurt has little idea how long he was in Seattle or where he stayed before going down to L.A. “God, I don’t even know,” he says. “I wasn’t there for very long. Jesus, where did I sleep?”
When Courtney came home to Los Angeles from her tour with Hole later in December, Kurt called and said, “Let’s live together.” They briefly lived in an apartment Courtney shared with Hole guitarist Eric Erlandeon and another friend until it was made apparent that they weren’t welcome because of their drug use.
They bounced from hotel to hotel, doing what Courtney calls “bad Mexican L.A. heroin.” Kurl would do the lion’s share of the drugs. Courtney never quite got the hang of injecting drugs, so Kurt would often shoot her up “whenever she’d beg me hard enough.” She already had a dark little scar on the inside of her elbow from when other people had botched injections.
What were those weeks like? “I don’t really remember,” Kurt replies, even though it’s only a little over a year later. “I just remember us both being total slobs.”
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