6. Nirvana, "Nevermind"
There are very few songs where I can remember exactly where I was the first time I heard it and one of those songs is "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the opening track of this album, and I was driving on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge approaching San Francisco when it came on Live 105, which used to be the "alternative rock" radio station in SF. I distinctly remember being immediately floored. Then I remember wanting to hear it again, immediately. I didn't buy the album right away because I had no way to play albums at the time.
It's hard to conceptualize now how much this album changed popular music at the time it was released, but one of my favorite facts is that it displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the number 1 spot on Billboard, and if that isn't symbolic enough I don't know. In an instant, the hair-metal bands that had strode the landscape like dinosaurs met their asteroid in the form of a kid with a shitty attitude from Aberdeen, Washington.
Those opening chords of "Teen Spirit" (the name, by the way, was a phrase scrawled on Kurt Cobain's wall by Kathleen Hanna; hilariously, Cobain didn't know it was the name of a deodorant until after the song came out) are instantly recognizable. It's similar, of course, to "More Than a Feeling" by Boston, but Cobain said he was trying to write a song that sounded like the Pixies. What he did was write an all-time classic, instantly hummable and unforgettable, its inscrutable lyrics open to enough interpretations that pretty much whatever you want to think it's about fits. The melodic sensibility of the song is what makes it, and the album as a whole, stand out from its punk roots. Maybe Nirvana wasn't the first to fuse pop and punk, but they did it in a way that made everyone suddenly wake up and realize we were on to something here.
Let's jump to song 9, "Lounge Act," another great example of the pop sensibilities that make this album so alluring. It's got a complex melody that weaves up and down against the guitar and Dave Grohl's brilliantly executed drums. It starts at 10 and then goes up and up and ends with Cobain's tortured screams on the final chorus. It's about Tobi Vail, the drummer for Bikini Kill and Cobain's girlfriend during much of the time Nevermind was recorded. It's not exactly a love song?
Afraid of never knowing fear
Experience anything you need
I'll keep fighting jealousy
Until it's fucking gone
They're not all thrash rockers. "Come As You Are" is dirgy, driven by an echoey guitar riff and Cobain's typically fractured vocals. It has the quiet verse/loud chorus thing that Cobain freely copped to lifting from the Pixies, along with a guitar riff that seems to be lifted from Killing Joke's "Eighties" (slowed down quite a bit; I clearly remember the Killing Joke song from the titular 80s). "Polly," one of the most disturbing songs in rock history, is also slower (and which I've written about before, when we did Unplugged).
The album was recorded with producer Butch Vig in Van Nuys on a budget of $65,000 over the course of about two months. I am not the first person to point out that one of the many brilliant features of this album is that it sounds like an explosion of raw emotion when in fact it was the product of months or years of painstaking work. Cobain crafted the songs and honed them and the band parcticed endlessly and played tons of shows to get their sound right, and Vig might have been the perfect producer for the moment. The radio-friendly (well, sort of) sound is largely due to Andy Wallace, who refined the guitar and, by all accounts, polished the sound overall.
Like I said, this record changed everything. It was selling something like 300,000 copies a week when it hit number 1, and has gone on to sell around 30 million overall, making Frances Bean Cobain presumably very wealthy. (Frances, Cobain's daughter with Courtney Love, is a model and visual artist.) Although I didn't buy it when it first came out, I think it was one of the first CDs I bought when I got my first CD player in the mid-90s. I was probably the perfect audience; not a big punk guy, but someone who loved melodic rock, the Pixies, and R.E.M., two bands Cobain said were huge influences.
The cover was shot by photographer Kirk Weddle at a baby pool; the kid is Spencer Elden, the son of one of Weddle's friends who, after probably a lifetime of getting drinks and laid off that story, sued in 2021, claiming the cover exploited him. (The case was thrown out because the statute of limitations had long expired; maybe it doesn't help that Elden has "Nevermind" tattooed on his chest.)
This album is my generation's Rumours.
Is this album in my personal Top 100? Yes of course.
Top 5 starts next week! I can't believe we're finally wrapping this up.
Funny, I had always thought/heard that Killing Joke sued over Come As You Are, but they did not.
ReplyDeleteI imagine the connection probably boosted Killing Joke's sales, plus they don't really seem the litigious types. Did you know Dave Grohl played drums on their 2003 s/t slbum?
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