Notes on Nirvana

Nevermind (1991) displaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous at the top of the Billboard chart. Kurt Cobain shot himself on 4 April 1994, the day before my birthday. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one of the most energising pop songs ever and one of the most compelling riffs of the Nineties. Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl’s initial solo project and then full time band after Nirvana came to an end, has probably sold more records than Nirvana ever did but may never be as legendary. Suicide or untimely death of a front man ensures longevity.

I’d read about Nirvana before I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and by all accounts Nirvana sounded like the kind of band I would like because I was a teenager when the late Seventies punk and New Wave scenes arose and demolished the dinosaurs of rock and I have always liked  primitive rock and roll. When I first heard “Teen Spirit” on the radio I absolutely loved it though I must admit that I would probably have loved it regardless of how it actually sounded purely because I was committed to the ideology of it.

As soon as I could in 1991, I bought Nevermind. Ragtime Records was then Cape Town’s premier music store and it always had a special deal for certain brand new releases. There was a limited offer of R60 for a CD album if you bought it in the week of release and as long as stocks lasted. If memory serves CD albums were generally priced at around R75 at the time and low initial offer was a really good bargain.  The year 1991 was a good year for rock: I bought Achtung Baby and Use Your Illusion I and II in the same year, each at the same low price as Nevermind.

I truly wanted to love Nevermind as much as I liked the lead single but it just did not happen. The thrash, noisy rockers for the most part were just too unsatisfactory. My earliest experience of punk was the Sex Pistols and Clash, and I had a grounding in the Nuggets and Pebbles type American Pacific Northwest punk sounds and those bands had something more to offer than the grunge Nirvana purveyed, for all of Kurt Cobain’s vaunted melodic sensibilities. To a degree I was probably listening to a music for which I was too old. If I had been a disaffected youth growing up in Seattle in the Eighties it might have been different.

The production values of Nevermind were high but the sheen could not overcome the limitations I heard.

A little while later I bought Bleach (1989), the debut album, and was even more disappointed by this extreme blast of tuneless grunge. This was truly unlovely music and not something I wanted to listen to all that much. It was stolen from my flat in 1993, along with half my then CD collection, which included Nevermind.  I replaced the latter album quite quickly, mostly because I found a copy (which I fondly imagined having been my stolen CD) in a second hand shop in Observatory but even though I had the opportunity I have never replaced Bleach and I doubt that I ever will.

In Utero (1993) was a couple of years old by the time I bought it. I knew “Heart Shaped Box” from radio play and this song seemed to be a logical successor to the pop smarts of “Teen Spirit.” On the whole In Utero is more satisfying than Nevermind because it has a consistency of purpose the earlier album does not have and the production by Steve Albini actually creates a better rock album than the radio friendly polished effort created by Butch Vig who kind of dressed up a lot of mutton as lamb. The song writing had improved and the 

band seemed to have more focus.

In between buying the CDs I was given a copy of the cassette version of Incesticide, a rarities album. I was going out with Cherise Matthews who was a PR for NuMetro and knew a rep or two from the record companies who gave her free promo copies of various current albums.  She did not want Incesticide because the music was not to her taste. I grabbed it.

The rarities comprised a mix of early singles, mostly sounding like outtakes from Bleach and cover versions of songs by Cobain’s favourite UK bands. The Britsongs were the tuneful ones; the Cobain originals were the noisefests.

There have been a few Nirvana releases since 1994, like Unplugged in New York, the “electric” live album, From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah, and various compilations, all intended to recover a record company investment in what turned out to be a truncated career and perhaps also to illuminate the Cobain psyche and creative process. In about 1991 and 1992 I could have bought a number of bootleg CDs of various shows on the Nevermind tour; I never knew how legitimate these artefacts were but I also did not see the point in buying live versions of songs I did not much like in the studio versions.

I guess Nirvana will always be regarded as significant because they kick started grunge, because they fought Michael Jackson and won and because of Cobain’s suicide. Maybe Courtney Love would have been as famous without the association with Kurt Cobain (she was certainly ambitious enough) but the connection did not hurt and this means that at least indirectly Nirvana was responsible for at least a part of the so-called riot girl revolution; the slightly more commercial part of it.

The thing is that I cannot say I unreservedly love Nirvana’s music because I don’t. it is not even an acquired taste. I bought the albums mostly out of curiosity and because it seemed that they were an important contemporary band one should not ignore. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” belongs on every and any “greatest rock tunes ever “compilation, whether one calls it modern rock or classic rock and the Nevermind album cover is striking and amongst the best ever. I can even see the album featuring on many a “100 most significant rock albums” list and perhaps it influenced a generation of aspiring musicians to take up guitars and develop their own soft-loud mannerisms. I just do not see either Nevermind or In Utero as well-loved albums in my own collection.

I was 32 when Nirvana broke out of the Seattle scene and this must have made a difference. The bands that really got me were the acts I discovered when I was in my late teens and early twenties, and if Nirvana appealed to alienated and disaffected teen boys, I was no longer one, though I was still pretty well alienated and disaffected. The thing was that rock music did not give me an identity or a purpose and I absolutely did not absorb Cobain’s lyrics or became obsessive over his angst, whether or not it mirrored mine. If that was not a motivation to adore Nirvana, the music was not enough by itself to create a bond.

After a while Cobain and Love became tabloid fodder, the first couple of grunge, and after his death the soap opera continued for a few years but nowadays Courtney Love is pushing 50, Frances Bean Cobain must be almost 20 years old and I guess the Cobain estate must be ticking over nicely from royalties and residuals although there does not seem to be a Jimi Hendrix-like vault of unreleased recordings. Not that I would be interested.

Nirvana was briefly the most important band in the world, more for what it represented on a symbolic level for and in the music industry than for its actual achievements. Cobain was a talented fuck up who could not maintain the strain. At least he did not have to become a careerist. Was he destined to burn out rather than rust? With hindsight the answer is yes, but not every apparently self-loathing, self-destructive musician checks out early. My guess is that Cobain realised that it was likely that he was just a one trick pony with no second act, or any other act, and could not face the effort of moving on from grunge into something that 

more closely resembled maturity.

In December 2011, I have acquired Unplugged in New York (1994), the set of songs the band, with some assistance from guest musicians, recorded as part of the MTV “unplugged” series. It was released after Cobain's death and is apparently the most successful of the post death Nirvana releases.

Unplugged in New York is a very apt recording for the kings of grunge to have made. The commercial breakthrough in 1991 of the amalgam of punk and metal that was grunge was soon followed by a reactionary movement towards more acoustic based music, toning down the electric guitars and increasing the sensitivity count. 

Kurt Cobain was nothing if not sensitive, perhaps over sensitive, and he had always been lauded for writing tuneful pop songs even if the grunge overcoat obscured the beautiful figure within.

Take as example opening cut, “About A Girl” from Bleach, one of the most unlistenable albums I've ever owned. The arrogant punk noise of that album totally obscured the tuneful wistfulness of the song unveiled here. The unplugged Cobain is also revealed as a passable acoustic guitarist. All in all the performance is a delight, one of many on this record, and shows that Cobain could well have been reinvented as a folkie if he had decided to leave behind the outraged howls and feedback of his take on grunge. 

Six of the fourteen tracks are cover versions of songs by the  likes of The Vaselines, The Meat Puppets, David Bowie and, most peculiarly, Leadbelly. The Kirkwood brothers from the Meat Puppets also join Nirvana on stage for their three songs included in the set. The Meat Puppets tunes are really quite excellent and in a way better than Cobain's own; they certainly lift the live set to a level it would not have attained if we only had the Cobain compositions to contend with.

Apparently, the concept behind the set list was to perform mostly lesser known Nirvana songs, and no hits, hence the absence of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Heart Shaped Box”. The inclusions are nonetheless pretty strong and the acoustic setting allows one to  listen more closely to the lyrics. They do not make Cobain sound like the spokesman of his generation; his is a vastly more personal angst.

It is always tempting to read significance into otherwise insignificant acts that precede an untimely death, especially one by suicide. Was this subdued live set a harbinger of the forthcoming extinction of Nirvana as life force in the rock firmament?  Cobain seems to be in good cheer, though he was apparently going through drug withdrawal and was not completely comfortable with playing a naked, accounting guitar.  The music is enjoyable and the patter entertaining. The wry tone of Cobain's stage comments is very reminiscent of the tone adopted by Neil Young in the solo acoustic Massey Hall show recently released as part of the Neil Young Archive Series. Cobain was about 5 months away from his suicide yet gives no clue that such a thing is in the offing.  Having said that, the quiet intensity displayed in this acoustic setting not only serve the songs better but also prove that there was rather more emotional depth to Cobain's music than the soft / loud dichotomy of the electric performances let on.

In much the same way as I find Eric Clapton's unplugged set much more palatable, and very enjoyable, than his output from the Eighties,  Unplugged in New York says more to me as a whole than the earlier Nirvana albums.   Neither Nevermind nor In Utero appeal as complete sets of songs. I prefer the latter album to the former, as Nevermind seems to have too much filler.  As for Bleach, I can only confess that I find it to be a horrible noise that I was probably already too old for, at about 32, when I first heard it. The unplugged songs are more melodic and have a warmth lacking in the electric albums. The acoustic setting also gives more of an indication that Cobain's songs may well have the legs to become standards of a sort, though I would think that only “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would be a lucrative cover version for the Cobain estate.

Who knows who will rediscover Nirvana and Cobain's other songs in the next few years. Nevermind has already been repackaged as a 20^th anniversary set, with the usual outtakes and demos to contextualise the original release and maybe the same will happen to In Utero. The record company is going to scrape as much of the barrel as it can to continue earning from the Cobain legacy.