Nirvana Nevermind (1991): 10 Things You Didn’t Know

From rollingstone.com

Nirvana‘s Nevermind remains one of the most exhilarating and pivotal albums of all time. Not only did the LP serve as the band’s own breakthrough; it also helped to usher in grunge and alternative rock as the dominant sounds on radio and MTV. Moreover, this hook-filled yet blisteringly intense burst of punk alienation introduced Kurt Cobain as the reluctant voice of a generation, a mantle that may have paved the way for his tragic end three years later.

The band’s rapid rise combined with Cobain’s wariness of fame led to much lore and mythology surrounding the iconic album, which was recorded over the course of a year with producer Butch Vig in both Wisconsin and Los Angeles. With more than 24 million copies sold worldwide, Nevermind continues to be a generation- and border-spanning favorite. Here are 10 things you might not know about Nirvana’s explosive masterpiece.

1. Nirvana began recording the songs in 1990 with Butch Vig for a planned second Sub Pop release.
The band began work on their follow-up to debut album Bleach more than a year before its official release. After being connected with Vig by Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt, the band recorded six songs with the producer for what was meant to be a second album on their independent label. At the time, and due to Nirvana’s increasing success after touring with Sonic Youth, Sub Pop was shopping around the idea of gaining a distribution deal with a major label. In Wisconsin with Vig, Nirvana recorded several early versions of songs like “Lithium” and “Polly” that would eventually make the album, which would later be finished in Los Angeles at Sound City after the band inked its major-label deal.

2. Sonic Youth encouraged DGC to sign Nirvana.
In Charles R. Cross’ Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, he notes that Kurt Cobain saw Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth as “just short of royalty.” Having been a huge fan of Sonic Youth, Cobain was honored to find Nirvana claiming the opening slot on their 1991 summer tour. The respect and admiration was mutual, and the legendary art-rock couple had been the impetus for the band not only to sign with their management company Gold Mountain but also to align with the major label DGC.

3. The album’s original title was Sheep.
While he retained his punk ethos after the band hit it big, Cobain was well aware of Nirvana’s potential to become one of the biggest acts in the world. Playing into that idea, he originally called the band’s sophomore effort Sheep, which was based off an inside joke about how the masses would flock to their album. He even mocked up a fake advertisement with the slogan “Because you want to not; because everyone else is” and fa ake but prophetic biography of the band that “cited” them as “Two times on the cover of Bowling Stoned, hailed as the most original, thought-provoking and important band of our decade by Thyme and Newsweak.”

4. Dave Grohl is not the only drummer on Nevermind.
When Nirvana began the original Smart Studios sessions with Vig,Chad Channing – the drummer featured on most of Nirvana’s 1989 debut, Bleach – was still in the band. His contribution to “Polly” remains on the album, though it was uncredited on the original release. Grohl would be the band’s fifth and final drummer.

5. Vig convinced Cobain to double-track his vocals because “John Lennon did it.”
Despiteits rougher edges, Nevermind boasts a sculpted, accessible feel: Cobain’s double-tracked vocals, for example, added heft to the songs and fullness to his lurching howls. Vig’s decision double-track the vocals was inspired by late Beatles producer George Martin, and John Lennon’s use of the technique was what convinced Cobain to feel comfortable with it. “He was reluctant to do so because he thought it sounded too fake,” Vig recalled in a recent tribute to Martin following his passing earlier this year. After the producer brought up the Lennon connection, Cobain “pretty much double-tracked all the vocals after that.”

6. Hidden track “Endless, Nameless” was accidentally left off initial pressings of the album.
“Endless, Nameless” was born from a frustrating recording session of “Lithium” where Cobain struggled to get his guitar parts correct. In the end, Vig decided to keep the noisy, aggressive recording and the band intended to tack it on to the end of the album as a hidden track following 10 minutes of silence once ballad “Something in the Way” wrapped. Howie Weinberg, the engineer who mastered the album, later noted that the decision to add “Endless, Nameless” had been a verbal one, contributing to his misunderstanding of the instructions. The song was re-added later.

7. Cobain was “embarrassed” by the final mix of Nevermind.
Nirvana brought in Andy Wallace, who had previously worked with Slayer, to do the album’s final mix. As noted by both Wallace and Vig, the band had nothing but compliments and love for Wallace’s work upon initially hearing the final versions of the songs. Cobain’s tune in particular changed dramatically once the album’s sales skyrocketed, with the musician deeming himself “embarrassed” by the final product during interviews with biographer Michael Azerrad. “It’s such a perfect mixture of cleanliness and nice, candy-ass production. … It may be extreme to some people who aren’t used to it, but I think it’s kind of lame, myself.”

8. The album cover was inspired by Cobain’s interest in water births.
Cobain’s fascination with birth and pregnancy is well-documented, visible in his journals and of course in the cover and name of Nirvana’s final album In Utero. After watching a documentary on water births with Grohl, Cobain wanted to feature a picture of a water birth on the cover, though it was deemed too graphic by the record label. Instead they went to a pool for babies with photographer Kirk Weddle, who captured a shot of his friend’s son Spencer Elden swimming toward a dollar bill on a hook. Cobain refused to compromise on editing out Elden’s penis for certain stores.

9. Cobain claimed that he hid a photo of Kiss on the back cover.
Next to the track listing on Nevermind‘s back cover is a photo of a rubber monkey in front of a bizarre collage created by Cobain. The collage features photographs of diseased genitals from his medical photo collection and paintings showing images from Dante’s Inferno, and according to the frontman, “If you look real close, there is a picture of Kiss in the back standing on a slab of beef.”

10. Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the charts.
Nirvana’s dominance reached a new, prophetic peak when they knocked the King of Pop’s Dangerous off the top of the charts in early 1992. Throughout their career, Nirvana vocally opposed Eighties-style glitz and the exact type of pop spectacle Jackson epitomized, and their chart takeover proved that their revolution was taking hold.

Nirvana Bleach (1989)

From popmatters.com

It’s amazing to note that it’s now been 20 years since Nirvana released its first album. It only seems like yesterday that the grunge group emerged from the American indie scene to knock Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard album charts, in the process bringing mass acceptance to the alternative rock genre and underground music in general. Despite this milestone, Sub Pop’s 20th anniversary Deluxe Edition reissue of the band’s debut album Bleach comes off as both unnecessary and oddly muted.

Bleach is generally considered more a historical footnote than a necessary addition to music lovers’ record collections. Illustrating a band only beginning to find its voice, the album pales in comparison to the artistic glories that the trio later reached with Nevermind (1991) and In Utero (1993). Sure, there have been enough curious Nirvana neophytes over the years to generate sales of 1.7 million copies in the US alone for the record. What these fans quickly discover, however, is an album that is raw, murky, and lacking the catchy songcraft that make Nevermind and In Utero indelible listens. Bear in mind that, solely based on SoundScan sales figures, nearly four times as many people have heard the MTV Unplugged in New York rendition of the Bleach track “About a Girl” than the original recording. And a greater number than that have never heard the rest of the album.

Furthermore, it’s not like Bleach was begging for a re-release. While it’s nowhere near the best-selling Nirvana album, it is Sub Pop’s biggest selling-record ever, and the indie label has long ensured that Bleach is always in print and available even at big box retailers. Hell, I bought my copy at Kmart nearly a decade ago. It’s quite likely record buyers decided years ago whether or not they want to own Bleach, and chances are that a disturbingly slight Deluxe Edition release that offers little more than new mastering job and the inclusion of an unreleased Nirvana live performance are not going to entice them to pick it up.

Regardless, this reissue does provide an opportunity for listeners to reexamine Nirvana’s early music. It may not have the instant appeal of Nevermind, but judged on its own merits, Bleach actually holds up pretty well. Bleach is very much a grunge album in the truest definition of the genre. Drawing inspiration from the drunken punk/metal fusion propagated by Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and the Melvins, Nirvana constructs song after song out of grinding riffs and lurching rhythms that move like conveyer belts. More than any other Nirvana release, Bleach prominently displays the trio’s metal influences. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath are the major reference points throughout Bleach, while the twisting riffs of “Swap Meet” could be mistaken for slowed-down Metallica. As a result, it’s the one Nirvana album better suited for headbanging than moshing.

Late Nirvana singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain admitted in the early 1990s that Bleach intentionally showcased the ‘70s-influenced heavy rock sound Sub Pop coveted at the time, but that by doing so it helped the band acknowledge its previously-underplayed metal roots and subsequently craft its own identity. Here, Cobain displays a preference for single note riffing and more conventional rock guitar soloing that is largely absent from later works. As the group had yet to develop its classic quiet verses/loud choruses dynamics, Nirvana’s song arrangements rely on a variety of riff changes to keep things interesting. Starting with Nevermind, Cobain intentionally simplified his compositions in order to emphasize their pop components. Less song-focused than later Nirvana works, Bleach acts as an interesting showcase of the band’s musical chops.

Aside from his able riffing, Cobain’s vocals deserve special notice. Cobain dismissed his lyrics on Bleach as little more than afterthoughts, completed the night before the group began recording. While that is a bit unfair (“School” may contain only two lines, but “Floyd the Barber” and “Swap Meet” are particularly interesting character sketches), the way Cobain sings the album’s words definitely bear greater scrutiny. Throughout, Cobain’s vocals are strangled and anguished, often sounding as if it takes monumental effort to wrench his songs out of his body. Cobain’s growling is indicative of a period when his delivery was far more important than what words or notes he sang. Bassist Krist Novoselic’s bass is weighty, but is also allowed to craft its own melodic path in counterpoint to Cobain’s guitar tracks. Over the years, drummers Chad Channing and Dale Crover (who appears on three tracks) have received unfair criticism about their drumming abilities on the album, when really their biggest crime is simply that neither of them are Dave Grohl, who joined Nirvana the year after Bleach came out. Channing and Crover lack Grohl’s sheer power, but they acquit themselves well in delivering the album’s thudding rhythms, laced with some nice fills.

Many of the songs on Bleach are quite good, and at least one — the jangly Beatles-esque anomaly “About a Girl” — is great. Still, the album has also has its share of flaws. Repetitiveness is a recurring problem on Bleach, namely in “School” and “Negative Creep”, the latter of which would be a far stronger track if the verse and chorus sections didn’t go on forever. A few tracks fail to hit the mark completely: “Papercuts” is an exercise in Melvins-style sludge that lacks charisma, while “Downer” is by Cobain’s admission an unsuccessful attempt to approximate the more politically-strident hardcore punk bands he favored.

As part of this Deluxe Edition release, Bleach has been remastered for a second time (the first was for the 1992 CD reissue). Typical of Sub Pop grunge recordings, Jack Endino’s production for Bleach was suitably murky and gnarled, almost claustrophobic at times. The remastering process (supervised by Endino) clarifies things a bit while still retaining the album’s dense sound. While Cobain’s vocals are virtually unaltered, the guitars have been sharpened and the low end has been turned up. This is most noticeable on “Floyd the Barber”, where the guitar and bass slam together like depth charges. In addition, the drums have a bit more weight and definition, with the snare in particular becoming more prominent. Still, the changes won’t be obvious to most listeners unless they are comparing past releases of Bleach side-by-side.

The true draw of this release is the inclusion of a complete Nirvana concert performance from February 1990. Featuring plenty of material from Bleach as well as contemporaneous compositions such as “Dive”, “Spank Thru”, and “Been a Son”, the live material is solid, although Endino’s mixing of the tapes makes the performances sound little different from the album versions. Consequently, it’s really of interest only to hardcore Nirvana fans. Beyond that, the Deluxe Edition offers little else. The set features a gatefold digipak that contains a single disc with both the album and the concert, as well as a thick booklet stored inconveniently in the middle section of the case. There are no liner notes at all in the booklet, just scores of pictures that can mostly be found elsewhere, along with a few curiosities like a reproduction of Nirvana’s original Sub Pop contract.

The lack of liner notes underscores one of the set’s biggest weaknesses: there’s no context, and thus this release exists on the notion that commemorating the 20th anniversary of the first Nirvana album is worthwhile without bothering to explain why. Certainly more could have been done to convey the historical importance of the group’s early work. Furthermore, given everything fits on a single disc on the CD release at least, Sub Pop could’ve easily included another disc that, in combination with what is already offered in the package, could have acted as a compendium of Nirvana’s material on the label. Where are the Blew EP, the “Sliver” single, and “Spank Thru”? In addition to detailed liner notes, adding these tracks would have made this reissue a more appealing purchase, as well as gone a ways towards demonstrating how Nirvana evolved into the group the world came to know them as (particularly in the case of the “Sliver”, the first song where Nirvana’s sound was fully realized). Compared to the royal treatment last year’s excellent Deluxe Edition reissue of Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff received, Sub Pop seems to have dropped the ball here.

Bleach is a stronger record than it is commonly perceived to be, and does deserve to be checked out in some form by fans of heavy riff-driven rock. Regardless, this reissue is underwhelming, seemingly more concerned with enticing Nirvana completists to purchase it for the live material than in illuminating why Nirvana’s first album was an important step in a career that has helped define rock music for the last two decades.

Nirvana In Utero (1993)

From rollingstone.com

This is the way Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain spells success: s-u-c-k-s-e-g-g-s. Never in the history of rock & roll overnight sensations has an artist, with the possible exception of John Lennon, been so emotionally overwhelmed by his sudden good fortune, despised it with such devilish vigor and exorcised his discontent on record with such bristling, bull’s-eye candor. In Utero is rife with gibes — some hilariously droll, others viciously direct — at life in the post-Nevermind fast lane, at the moneychangers who milked the grunge tit dry in record time and at the bandwagon sheep in the mosh pit who never caught on to the desperate irony of “Here we are now, entertain us.” The very first words out of Cobain’s mouth in “Serve the Servants,” In Utero‘s petulant, bludgeoning opener, are “Teenage angst has served me well/Now I’m bored and old,” sung in an irritated, marble-mouthed snarl that immediately derails any lingering expectations for a son of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

It gets better. In “Very Ape,” a two-minute corker cut from the same atomic-fuzz cloth as the band’s 1989 debut album, Bleach, Cobain gets right down to brass tacks, against a burning-rubber lead guitar squeal and the mantric rumble of bassist Chris Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl: “I am buried up to my neck in/Contradictionary lies.” (Nice pun, that.) The kiss-off quickly follows: “If you ever need anything, don’t hesitate/To ask someone else first.” Cobain slightly overplays his hand with the title of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” Nirvana have been called many things over the past two years; that, as far as I can tell, is not one of them. But Cobain cuts right to the heart of the mire with a torrent of death-throe guitar feedback and a brilliant metaphor for the head-turning speed with which one man can suddenly sire a nation: “This had nothing to do with what you think/If you ever think at all…. All of a sudden my water broke.”

Frankly, Nirvana as a band and Cobain as the point man have earned the right to spit in fortune’s eye. Generation X is really a generation hexed, caught in a spin cycle of updated 70s punk and heavy-metal aesthetics and cursed by the velocity with which even the most abrasive pop under-culture can be co-opted and compromised. One minute, Nevermind is jackbooting Michael Jackson out of the No. 1 slot; the next, grunge jock Dan Cortese is screaming, “I love this place!” on behalf of Burger King. Even the hippies got a summer or two to themselves in the mid-’60s before the dough-re-mi boys horned in. So it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that in “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” (a slash-and-burner named after the locally born actress, whose rebellious streak brought her to the brink of insanity), it is really Cobain who wants to torch the town and send the A&R hounds packing.

None of this unrepentantly self-obsessed rant & roll would be half as compelling or convincing if Nirvana weren’t such master blasters — Novoselic and Grohl deserve a few extra bows here — and Cobain wasn’t a songwriter of such ferocious honesty and focused musical smarts. Cobain essentially works according to one playbook, but it’s a winner no matter how he runs it. His songs invariably open with a slow-boil verse, usually sung in a plaintive groan over muted strumming and a tempered backbeat. Then Cobain vaporizes you with a chorus of immense power-chord static and primal howling. That, in a nutshell, is “Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are.” It also covers, to varying degrees, “Rape Me,” “Penny Royal Tea” and “Milk It” on In Utero.

But the devilry is in the details. “Rape Me” opens as a disquieting whisper, Cobain intoning the title verse in a battered croon, which sets you up beautifully to get blind-sided by the explosive hook line. In the sepulchral folk intro of “Penny Royal Tea,” Cobain almost sounds like Michael Stipe at the beginning of R.E.M.’s “Drive” — before the heaving, fuzz-burnt chorus comes lashing down with a vengeance.

Steve Albini’s production, an au naturel power-trio snort that is almost monophonic in its compressed intensity, is particularly effective during those dramatic cave-ins. The word grunge, of course, doesn’t do this kind of ravishing clatter justice. But Nirvana never bought into the simple Black Flag-cum-Sabbath hoodlum shtick anyway. From Bleach on, they have specialized in a kind of luminous roar and scarred beauty that has more to do with Patti Smith, the Buzzcocks and Plastic Ono-era John Lennon.

Actually, the icy tension of the part ballad, part punk-rock blues “Heart-Shaped Box” and the amorous chamber-punk urgency of “Dumb” (“My heart is broke/But I have some glue/Help me inhale/And mend it with you”) confirm that if Generation Hex is ever going to have its own Lennon — someone who genuinely believes in rock & roll salvation but doesn’t confuse mere catharsis with true deliverance — Cobain is damn near it. In “Heart-Shaped Box,” the kind of song Stone Temple Pilots couldn’t write even with detailed instructions, Cobain sets up a hypnotic coiled-spring tension between the frayed elegance of the verse melody and the strong Oedipal undertow of his obsession (“Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back”). The last track, “All Apologies,” is another stunning trump card, the fluid twining of cello and guitar hinting at a little fireside R.E.M. while the full-blaze pop glow of the chorus shows the debt of inspiration Cobain has always owed to Paul Westerberg and the vintage Replacements.

It’s the last thing most people would expect from Angst Central, and it’s an inspired sign-off that shows how Nirvana have been reborn in the face of suck-cess. In Utero is a lot of things — brilliant, corrosive, enraged and thoughtful, most of them all at once. But more than anything, it’s a triumph of the will.