In many ways, the astonishing success of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” — an album released 10 years ago Monday — was 15 years in the making. Nearly as astonishing was how quickly that album’s message of rebellion through noise, sarcasm and droll indifference was co-opted, its attitude repackaged into a new kind of corporate rock.
“Nevermind” represented a new beginning for rock ‘n’ roll, but it had nothing to do with the brilliance of the album’s music or its galvanizing stream-of-consciousness lyricism. It had everything to do with the album’s strikingly prophetic cover art: the lost innocent, submerged in an alien world of dollar bills, grasping the bait.
It was the band poking fun at itself on the occasion of its major-label debut, but it might as well have been a symbol for the entire alternative-rock movement. By the time Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain killed himself in April 1994 — less than three years after the release and triumphant rise up the charts of “Nevermind” — alternative rock was already dead, its future in the hands of air-brushed corporate creations like Bush’s Gavin Rossdale, instead of scruffy outsiders like Cobain.
But at one time, “Nevermind” did bum-rush the corporate rock party, topple the punch bowl and kick Bon Jovi and Michael Jackson down the pop charts. Nobody saw it coming.
Nirvana’s record label, DGC, hoped for 50,000 sales when it released “Nevermind” on Sept. 24, 1991. At a time when hair metal bands Motley Crue and Warrant and cartoon rappers Hammer and Vanilla Ice defined mainstream taste, it appeared that a trio of noise-mongering guttersnipes
from the Pacific Northwest didn’t have a chance of being heard. In the previous year, 1990, not a single rock release topped the album chart.
Little wonder the respected music critic Ira Robbins was unenthusiastic about the album’s prospects in his Rolling Stone review: “More often than not, ambitious left-of-the-dial bands gallantly cling to their principles as they plunge into the depths of commercial failure. . . . Nirvana is the latest underground bonus baby to test mainstream tolerance for alternative music. Given the small corner of public taste that non-metal guitar rock now commands, the Washington State trio’s version of the truth is probably as credible as anyone’s.”
Yet within weeks of its release, “Nevermind” was rocketing up the charts. By early November it had sold a million copies, and in January 1992 it climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200; Nirvana had swept past Jackson to be crowned the new Kings of Pop. Today, “Nevermind” ranks as one of the most successful rock albums of all time, with sales of 20 million.
It was a signal moment for rock culture, or so it seemed: The climax of punk’s long uphill climb from the hinterlands to the summit. The rise of Nirvana and rock festivals such as Lollapalooza that celebrated the “left-of-the-dial bands” and “alternative music” Robbins had acknowledged in his review coincided with the emergence of a generation that viewed life much the way Cobain did: These were the smart, smart-aleck outsiders facing a world of shrinking possibilities. It was a generational portrait that Nirvana singer-guitarist Cobain captured in his caustic, cutting and self-mocking music, and it had very little to do with traditional music-industry notions of careerism, let alone rock stardom.
In that sense, “Nevermind” was a culmination of a sound and sensibility that had been germinating since the mid-’70s and the first generation of punks raised on Ramones and Sex Pistols albums.
“When Nirvana became popular, people would ask me, `What’s the recipe for this new kind of music?'” former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl once recalled in an interview with the Tribune. “And I’d think, `Gee, haven’t you heard of Husker Du?’ To us, it was just sort of natural playing loud, fast, melodic pop music.”
Louder, faster, poppier
To Grohl, Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic, the music of their youth had been the underground rock of the ’80s, the bands who had been influenced by punk’s first wave: Husker Du, the Minutemen, Naked Raygun, the Pixies. But they were also shaped by the mainstream rock that no teenager who lived in a blue-collar community like Aberdeen, Wash., could escape: Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Black Sabbath. Cobain said his punk-rock awakening was a mid-’80s concert by the Melvins, a band that played with such exaggerated heaviness and deliberate slowness that it verged on a parody of metal. At the same time, he could not get enough of “Get the Knack,” the 1979 debut album by The Knack, who were reviled for their power-pop friendliness in the underground circles the Melvins traveled in. Between those two worlds — the alienating thud of the Melvins and the cheerful catchiness of the Knack — Cobain found his voice.
“After hard-core punk exhausted itself in 1985-86, we kind of admitted to ourselves that we liked bands like KISS, Alice Cooper and the MC5,” Cobain once said in an interview with the Tribune. “It was almost taboo to say that around the punks, but my reaction was to dye my hair green and say `[expletive] you’ to everyone else. We were just paying homage to the music we loved as kids.”
After Nirvana’s raw 1989 debut album, “Bleach,” buried his songs in guitar fuzz, Cobain developed so rapidly as a songwriter that by April 1990 he and the band entered a recording studio with drummer Butch Vig in Madison, Wis., and knocked out eight songs in six days; five of those songs, including “In Bloom,” “Stay Away” and “Polly,” would form the core of “Nevermind” the next year. A few months after those sessions, Grohl joined the band and ended Cobain and Novoselic’s endless search for the perfect drummer.
Grohl’s controlled power, coupled with Novoselic’s thick, melodic bass lines, provided a full-bodied backdrop for Cobain’s songs, which lulled the listener with lullaby softness in the verses before erupting like hand grenades in the choruses. It was a dynamic that Cobain did not invent, only perfected: The soft-loud contrasts were central to the minimalist new-wave sound of the Cars’ 1978 self-titled debut album and the Pixies’ maniacal “Surfer Rosa” (1988). Though Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” provided the core riff for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and British postpunk band Killing Joke accused Nirvana of lifting from its song “Eighties” in “Come As You Are,” Cobain transcended his source material with performances that boiled over with passion and black humor.
Many of his “Nevermind” tunes were inspired by a romantic breakup, but the singer’s puzzlelike lyrics rarely allowed such literal interpretation. Instead, the tunes burst with multiple meanings and possibilities, the words flying like shrapnel from an explosion of guitar, bass and drums.
Laughing at despair
When the band finally re-entered the recording studio with Vig to record its major-label debut in May 1991, it was primed to uncork a masterpiece. Cobain had a stockpile of songs brimming with forget-me-not moments; virtually every second of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is packed with some melodic phrase, riff or passage that hooks the listener deeper into its world of alienated shrugs and off-the-cuff sarcasm. The emotional spectrum of his writing was broad, encompassing “Territorial Pissings,” which sounded like a runaway roller-coaster ride that ends in the destruction of the amusement park; the eerily subdued “Polly,” a harrowing anti-rape theme, sung from the vantage of a rapist; and the elegaic “Something in the Way,” which presaged the Beatles-like sophistication that would grace some of Cobain’s songs on the 1993 follow-up, “In Utero.”
The circumstances in which “Nevermind” was created were dire. Much has been made of Cobain’s troubled childhood and dysfunctional family; the hard drugs he used in increasingly elephantine doses to subdue his persistent and medically unexplained stomach pain; and the almost casual turmoil, malnutrition and homelessness that became a routine part of his life.
In the weeks before the release of “Nevermind,” on the verge of becoming the world’s biggest rock stars, Cobain was living in his car; even at the height of his fame his ailments and addictions quelled his appetite to such an extent that at one point he barely weighed 100 pounds.
Yet “Nevermind” never wallows in its bleakness. Instead it almost seems to be laughing at it. Even at his most troubled and troubling as a songwriter, Cobain refuses to take himself too seriously, and finds a dark double-edged humor to knock the stuffing out of his targets: The redneck denizens of his hometown in “In Bloom” are willing to “sell the kids for food”; the protagonist in “Lithium” takes solace in his alienation by declaring, “I’m so ugly, but that’s okay, ’cause so are you”; and the partygoer in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” satirizes and celebrates his generation by chirping, “Here we are now, entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious.”
It was that deep reserve of sarcasm that enabled Cobain to briefly level the playing field for himself and his misfit followers. They are serenaded on “Come as You Are,” a rare moment of unadorned empathy and poignance on an album rife with double meanings and coded language. At the time, Cobain had no idea that he would be singing to more than just devoted indie-rock fans. But soon millions of listeners who only a year or two before might have been buying Poison albums came along for the ride. Nirvana was no longer just a band, it was a bandwagon.
“We had modest expectations after recording the album,” Grohl once said. “We hoped it would be successful enough so we didn’t have to sell our equipment for food. It still feels weird to think how fast it became so big.”
Beginning of the end
Yet Nirvana not only took the major-label bait offered on the album cover, it nearly upended the fishing boat. Its success knocked down the walls of the mainstream for the underground, and even Cobain’s boyhood heroes the Melvins found themselves signed to a major label for a brief time. But the moment wouldn’t last. It took only a few years for the movement to become co-opted, with Nirvana knockoffs such as Bush and Seven Mary Three ascending the charts. “Alternative” was no longer synonymous with hip, quirky and dangerous underground music; it became a lucrative marketing category with a commercial radio-format all its own.
It could be argued that Nirvana’s breakthrough album made snarling voices and feedback-drenched guitars acceptable on commercial rock radio. But it’s merely a faint echo of what the band’s music represented; a vestige of its sound, but a repudiation of its essential spirit. Cobain gave the impression of becoming a rock star by default; “I wouldn’t take me too seriously,” he once said. Bush’s Rossdale suggests that becoming a rock star was his sole priority.
Cobain’s conflicted ideas about fame quickly turned to despair, exacerbated by a lethal combination of depression, heroin addiction and chronic stomach pain. His suicide, at age 27, in April 1994 brought a symbolic and tragic end to the “Nevermind” era, a time when the “stupid and contagious” denizens of the underground briefly took over the music-industry asylum, only to pay for their transgressions soon after.
Ten years after: A book, no box set
Nirvana sold millions of records in its short career, so it wouldn’t be surprising to find Geffen, the band’s record label, planning a major release to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the release of the band’s “Nevermind.”
But legal battles may block a planned Nirvana box set (which had been set for Oct. 23 release) for years to come.
Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain’s former bandmates, are locked in what may be a protracted legal battle with Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow, over the band’s legacy. Love, Novoselic and Grohl had formed a partnership in 1997 to guide the legacy of the band, but that partnership is in tatters. In June, a judge granted Love an injunction that bars the release of any Nirvana songs; the next hearing on the case is set for September 2002.
A settlement may be brokered before then, but given the acrimony between the parties, it could take years before any Nirvana reissues see the light of day.
Love never had warm relationships with her husband’s bandmates, as is clear from reading “Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain” (Hyperion), a fine new book published in time for the 10-year anniversary of the release of “Nevermind.”
Charles Cross, former editor of The Rocket, a Seattle music magazine, drew on Cobain’s own journals and 400 interviews to delineate a definitive portrait of the short, unhappy life of alternative rock’s patron saint.
— Maureen Ryan
