1. Smells Like Teen Spirit
2. In Bloom
3. Come as You Are
4. Breed
5. Lithium
6. Polly
7. Territorial Pissings
8. Drain You
9. Lounge Act
10. Stay Away
11. On a Plain
12. Something in the Way
13. Endless, Nameless
Alex is the Scotland editor of the Spectator, a columnist for The Times and a contributor to various other publications including the Scottish Daily Mail, the Scotsman and Foreign Policy. He mainly writes about politics and accepts that it looks unlikely that he’ll ever fulfil his childhood dream of being cricket correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. The world is a cruel place.
Live at the Old Quarter – Townes van Zandt
Blue Kentucky Girl – Emmylou Harris
Workers Playtime – Billy Bragg
In 1986, Kurt Cobain wrote a song about Spam (the pork-based meat product, not unwanted emails) and told anyone who would listen that, one day, he was going to release a record that would make him as famous as U2 and R.E.M.
It’s difficult to imagine anyone looking at the troubled, often homeless nineteen-year-old believed a word he said. Chances are they walked off and told themselves that he was a loser and Monty Python had already cornered the extremely niche ‘songs about Spam’ market.
Fast forward a year, and his ambitions seem even more unlikely.
In 1987 the would-be superstar finally gets his own place: a derelict shack in Aberdeen, in Washington state. Eager to make the place his own he adds a few personal touches – posters on the wall of his favourite bands and a bath in the living room full of turtles. Not one to waste a huge amount of time on housework, he drills holes in the bath so he doesn’t have to clean it out, the holes acting as a drainage system straight through to the floorboards. How lovely.
It’s also around this point that he starts to take LSD because there’s a grocery strike in Aberdeen which cuts off the supply of alcohol. Faced with the option of driving miles to Olympia or crossing a local picket line, neither of which he can be bothered with, he opts to take a load of acid instead.
Oh hang on, I’ve forgotten his pet rat Kitty. Yeah, he has a pet rat too. Of course he does.
There’s an incident around this time which perfectly illustrates the state Cobain was in.
One day he comes home and sees a spider on the ceiling. Deciding that he has enough animals in the house already, he summons Kitty the Rat and instructs her to kill the spider. Kitty, not fluent in the ramblings of a twenty-year-old Kurt Cobain on acid, just sits there. Taking matters into his own hands, he gets a can of Brut deodorant from his bedroom with the intention of spraying the spider so hard in the face that it eventually dies.
But, when he walks back into the living room, he accidentally treads on Kitty’s head.
Heartbroken, he wraps Kitty up in some dirty underwear, takes her out to the front yard and clubs her to death with a piece of wood, putting her out of her misery for good. Imagine seeing that as you go for a stroll: a twenty-year-old Kurt Cobain, in his front yard, hitting some pants with a bit of wood.
He then goes back into the house, screams ‘Fuck You!’ at the spider and goes to bed where, according to his journal, he lies awake waiting for the spider to crawl all over his face.
In less than four years, he will release a record that will make him as famous as U2 and R.E.M.
And this is how he does it.
He somehow manages to convince Krist Novoselic, a six-foot-seven bass player, to form a band with him, and they add Aaron Burckhard, the first in a series of drummers. What these two see in Cobain at this stage is anyone’s guess, but never mind (no pun intended), Nirvana is formed. They rehearse a bit, play a few poorly attended gigs in front of people with mullets, and then decide to make a demo tape with a local producer who thinks the singer’s name is Kurt Covain.
The demo recorded, Cobain sends it off to his favourite record labels, who either think it’s rubbish or can’t remember receiving it. Someone at SST says it’s ‘alternative by numbers’. Thankfully though, the producer sends a copy to a local independent label called Sub Pop, where it receives a favourable reception. So much so that they get in touch and ask the band if they’d like to record a single.
So far so good. In less than a year since he killed his rat by mistake, Cobain is about to make an actual record with an actual record company.
And then the drummer gets promoted to assistant manager at the Burger King in Aberdeen, and decides to dedicate himself to his new career instead.
Refusing to let Burger King ruin his dreams, Cobain gets some bloke called Dave Foster to play drums and they record ‘Love Buzz’ – their first single. Cobain is so excited that, when it’s released, he listens to the local radio station all day waiting to hear it. Annoyed they never play it, he phones up the station and requests his own single. Of course he does. Finally, a few hours later, he hears it while driving and pulls over with a great big ‘that’s my song they’re playing on the radio’ smile on his face.
Sub Pop then suggest an album to follow up the single.
So far so good. If there ever was a plan, it seems to be working.
And then the new drummer gets arrested for beating up the mayor’s son and is put in jail. Cobain fires him and brings back Burckhard, the original drummer, who realises that making an album might be better than working in Burger King after all. But then he gets arrested for driving without insurance in Cobain’s car, so he gets fired too. Honestly, I could write this whole piece about Nirvana’s mad drummers.
Next up on drums is Chad Channing. At this point Nirvana also become a four-piece when they recruit guitarist Jason Everman, who happens to have the money to pay Sub Pop the $600 they need to record the album. Not that he was being used or anything.
While writing the album, a pivotal moment occurs which points the way to so much of what happens next. Cobain listens to the Meet the Beatles album seven times on the spin and, immediately afterwards, writes his first pop song.
He takes it to the rest of the band and they say, ‘That’s great, what’s it called?’
Cobain says, ‘I dunno.’
The band say, ‘What’s it about?’
Cobain says, ‘It’s about a girl. I know, I’ll call it “About a Girl”.’
You can see why people called him a spokesman for his generation.
Bleach, the first album, is subsequently released to good reviews, particularly in the UK, and Nirvana hit the road, playing over a hundred shows in 1989. While obviously a massive achievement for the Kurt Cobain we met at the start of the story, it’s important to state here how much Nirvana were just another American band that made loads of noise and look liked psycho lumberjacks. When they toured the UK with TAD in October of 1989, me and a couple of mates had tickets to see them at the Astoria but couldn’t even be bothered to leave the pub around the corner, so we missed them. One of them where you’ve had a few and the gig becomes an inconvenience. Lol @ me and my mates.
When Nirvana return to America and realise they’ve spent what little money they’ve made, they start to think the whole ‘being in a band’ idea was maybe a waste of time after all. So they start looking for work. At one point Cobain, along with Novoselic, sets up his own cleaning company called Pine Tree Janitorial and produces a load of flyers with drawings of them both pushing brooms around. Imagine that. They advertise all around Olympia and, thankfully, no one calls them. Thankfully because, if they had, this story might have ended with Nirvana setting up a highly successful cleaning company in northwest America.
But it doesn’t. They decide to make another record instead.
Nirvana wouldn’t be Nirvana unless they fired a couple of people first though. Jason Everman is first to go because Cobain decides there’s room for only one person playing guitar and looking cool. Next is Chad Channing, after Cobain decides that he’s not a very good drummer and is affronted when Channing suggests that he would like to contribute his own songs to the band. The last thing Cobain needs is a highly ambitious drummer who eventually wants to write his own songs.
So they replace him with Dave Grohl.
Apparently when Grohl was first in a room with Nirvana, he was so shocked by what he saw that he said ‘What, that little dude and that big motherfucker?’ Meanwhile, Cobain’s first impression of Grohl, noted in his journal, reads, ‘This new kid on the block can’t dance as good as your MTV favourites, but he beats the drums like he’s beating the shit out of their heads.’ Upon such words, the now legendary lineup is formed. They’ve found their man and can stop firing people for a bit.
Cobain goes for it.
Realising that the likes of U2 and R.E.M. aren’t messing about with a small label like Sub Pop, he decides to throw them in the bin and tout his band around the major labels with a tape of new songs. A flurry of interest is duly generated which leads to them signing with Geffen. Deal signed, album on the way, they return to the UK to play Reading Festival in 1991, where I, eventually, see them for the first time. They’re sixth on the bill on the Friday afternoon, just below other ‘era-defining’ bands like Chapterhouse and Pop Will Eat Itself.
And then on 10 September, just a couple of weeks after that performance at Reading, they release the first single from the album – ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’.
So far so good.
And everyone knows what happens next. Geffen originally hoped that Nevermind would sell 250,000 copies in total but, by the turn of the year, it’s selling 400,000 copies a week. Nirvana has made the loudest pop album ever, an album of single syllables that reveals itself best on the first few listens. Trust me on the single syllable thing. The first twenty-two words of ‘Come As You Are’ all have one syllable. The chorus of ‘In Bloom’ has thirty-eight words, and thirty-six of them have just one syllable. It’s mad, as if they’ve been written by a child – albeit a really talented angry child that knows the occasional big word and shouts a lot. Even the drums and the bass are in single syllables. It’s probably why Nirvana songs worked as ringtones on Nokia phones in the nineties when the Sonic Youth ones very much didn’t.
And it went on to sell thirty million copies. Cobain had done it. This most unlikely of winners had done it.
I loved Nirvana, I really loved them, but so much of what is said now seems bizarre to me. All that stuff about Cobain being a spokesperson; all those other bands that weren’t Nirvana but somehow get thrown into their orbit. Those pictures where he looks dead sad and those where he plays with guns. Somehow, as is often the case with these stories, the glory has been lost in the retelling. In the Amy Winehouse film that signposts her death from the first scene; in the Cobain film that trawls his childhood in a search for ‘meaning’. ‘Back to Black’. ‘Nevermind’. The big choruses, the way you felt when you first heard them and didn’t know what happened next. That’s the glory and somehow it’s been lost.
Which is a shame, because it’s the best part of the story.
In 1986 Kurt Cobain wrote a song about Spam and told anyone who would listen that, one day, he was going to release a record that would make him as famous as U2 and R.E.M.
And in 1991, after accidentally killing his rat, firing a load of drummers and failing to get Pine Tree Janitorial off the ground, that’s exactly what he did.
This most unlikely of winners had done it.
Because it’s music.
I don’t really do music. Except country music because that’s whisky poetry, really. Before I drowned my iPod, 80 per cent of the stuff on it was country. You know, Townes and Johnny and Waylon and Emmylou and Dolly and Hank and Merle and all the other guys and girls in the gang. I had a spell when I was deeply in love with The Smiths and have retained a fondness for Billy Bragg but, really, that’s about it for music recorded in the last thirty years.
Music and me fell out at an early age, you see. I was expelled – for insolence – from recorder class aged five. Later, there was a compulsory singing evaluation to see whether we should be in the school choir. We had to sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. My audition was terminated at ‘Roy’.
As teenagers, incarcerated in an exclusive educational penitentiary, we’d sit up late swilling illicit home-brew, smoking roll-ups and listening to Serge Gainsbourg. When we weren’t playing bridge, that is. Insufferable, I suppose, but there you have it.
Anyway that would have been the same year Nirvana made their mark. The year my mother gave me a fetching dressing gown for Christmas, I think.
So I don’t think I was Nirvana’s target audience and little – nothing, actually – has since caused me to reconsider that view. I can’t pretend their absence from my life has caused me any great inconvenience.
Basically, you can sum up what I know about them in three words: Seattle, Grunge, Dead. If I think really hard about it I can remember that they had a song called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and that Mr Nirvana was, for a spell, married to a big, dirty girl of the type for whom Brendan Behan would have felt a certain tenderness.
That’s enough, isn’t it?
This is an assignment that deserved to be taken seriously. Consequently, I listened to this album in each of life’s three states: sober, drunk and hungover. Sober was the worst, I assure you. I mean, expectations were low but it’s easy to cope with not liking the music, rather harder to endure the fact that it is so crushingly, crashingly boring.
Most of the songs sound exactly the same and the ones that don’t are even worse. Take ‘Endless, Nameless’ for instance. On paper, the lyrics offer some momentary promise. Sure, it’s cod late-period Beckett – ‘Silence/Here I am/Here I am/Silent/Bright and clear/It’s what I am/I have/Died’ – but there are worse things to impersonate than that. But the music – to use the term in its loosest sense – appears to involve nothing so much as recording a motorcycle crashing into a ten-tonne truck. Fine if you like that sort of thing, I suppose, and if you do it is the kind of thing you like. But there’s six minutes of this. It’s the sort of music they should play in dentists’ waiting rooms just to warn you of the horrors ahead.
Still, those are some of the better lyrics. ‘Something in the Way’ begins by being like something Ringo Starr might have written but then you realise the inspiration is actually Adrian Mole – ‘It’s OK to eat fish/’Cause they don’t have any feelings’. OK. Music should have a higher goal than simply rebuking or trolling Yoko Ono.
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ has its moments, I guess, but shouting ‘entertain us’ over and over again reminds me that it’s basically what would have happened if you’d given Harry Enfield a guitar. It’s all very Kevin the Teenager, which works well as a joke but loses its appeal the moment you realise, Christ, these people actually want to be taken seriously. As for lyrics like ‘I found it hard/It’s hard to find’ I mean, come on, get tae fuck. This is writing in the same way that rearranging fridge magnets is writing.
And the sound! Sweet Mary, mother of God, the sound. Most of the time setting fire to an aardvark would produce a similar sensation. The more he shouts and screams – and there’s a lot of shouting and screaming – the worse Cobain sounds. Smells like teen spirit, perhaps, but it sounds like he’s got throat cancer.
The best bits are the quiet, introductory bits but then the guitars start grinding away and everything just becomes a wall of noise. ‘Lithium’ and ‘Lounge Act’ are a bit better but most of the songs are ruined by never-ending, banal choruses. Choruses that are whiny whiny whiny when they’re not busy being whiny and shouty shouty shouty.
And that, in fact, is another problem with Nevermind. It is soaked in self-pity, which is rarely an attractive state. Sure, you may object, but that’s because it’s an album about teenage angst or something and, OK, perhaps it is but Cobain was twenty-four when it was released and old enough to have known better.
It’s all one note too. Not, perhaps, literally, but certainly figuratively. There’s precious little light and shade, no sense of movement or development. Grace, obviously, is impossible. It’s just one damn thing after another, all performed in a dreary monotone that makes you wonder if Cobain is secretly as bored of it all as the listener swiftly becomes.
I wanted to like it and not just out of contrariness but, in the end, claiming to have enjoyed the experience is a dishonesty too far. Sure, there’s the occasional good bit of guitaring – hooks, I believe they’re called – but that’s not enough to sustain the entire enterprise.
An enterprise that is, ultimately, just dull. Bad music is entirely forgivable but dull music is much worse than that. It rains a lot in Seattle and you can tell that from this album. It’s the sound of bored teenagers trapped in a garage waiting for the rain to stop. Which it never does. If that’s the effect they were striving for then, fine, it succeeds on its own terms and bully for Kurt and the boys. But the novelty of all that passes pretty bloody quickly. Bored teenagers are never much fun. They should shut up and do something useful. Like, read a book.
I hope not.
3.