NIRVANA

On Sunday, January 30, 1994, Kurt Cobain walked into Robert Lang Studios in northern Seattle
and recorded the first song on this album. It would be Kurts final session with Nirvana, and he
made it count. He was also late. Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl had been at Langs for two days:
waiting for Kurt, using the time to fill tape with some of Daves songs. But when Kurt finally
rolled up on the third day, with no particular explanation, the real work was done in minutes.
Nirvana had already performed You Know Youre Right in concert on October 23, 1993, at the
Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and fired it around in soundchecks that fall, under different names
(Autopilot, On a Mountain), with touring guitarist Pat Smear. Strangely, two night after that
Aragon show, Kurt practically denied even writing the song. I dont have any new songs right
now, he told me. I have absolutely nothing left. Im starting from scratch for the first time. I
dont know what were going to do. That Sunday at Langs was Kurts first, formal recording
date with Nirvana in nearly a year, since the In Utero sessions with Steve Albini in February of
93. The band played all day but finished only this one song.
It was enough. Kurt, Krist and Dave connected with a fierce telepathy, tearing through You
Know Youre Right in one live take, Kurt then put down a few vocal tracks and a little extra
guitar. There was no need for more. You Know Youre Right was a perfect storm, consummated
with a prophetic urgency and although it seems crazy and cruel to say it now something that
sound a lot like joy, the kind you get when a band has it whipped-raw back to the wall but plenty
of fuck you left, ready to fly. You could drown in the black rains of distortion and sarcasm:
Things have never been so swell/And I have never been so well. We know that everything was
wrong and getting worse.
But you can live in this noise too: in Kurts prayer-bell harmonics, plucked from behind the
bridge of his guitar in monastery echo; in the spears of feed-back and the saving blaze of the
chorus, where Kurt belts and holds the single word pain in one long murderous bath; in the
brotherly lock of Krists marching bass and Daves fighting drums; and in the diamond-hard
melodies that always cut through the chaos.
To Kurt, music was shelter, because he never enjoyed or truly knew any other kind as a child,
raised in a broken home, and an isolated uprooted teenager. On Nirvanas 1990 Sub Pop single
Sliver, he turned a mundane slice of boyhood getting dropped off with is grandparents for a
night of mashed potatoes and television into searing flashback, acute memories of desertion
intensified by the mounting tensions in Kurts vocals; the grainy doubled harmonies; the way he
jumps into a higher strained register. Even as a star, Kurt never made peace with the material
rewards that hit him like a ton of bricks. If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked
to take it, he said that night in Chicago. It might have helped me.
Kurt recognized the power of myth, of a juicy twisted truth: He long claimed that he really lived
for a time under that bridge in the first line of Something in the Way on Nevermind. But Kurt
slept in abandoned buildings and on a long line of couches, in Aberdeen and Olympia,
Washington, on his way to Nirvana. His thing was, build your own world, Krist once said of
Kurt. Wherever he lived, hed have all this stuff on the walls, drawings or music or things he
had collected. The floods of impulse lyrics, letters, artwork that he poured into his
journals; the songs he wrote to put on records; the shows and tour-van rides; those three-and-
a-half minutes of You Know Youre Right at the end of January, 1994 for Kurt that was
home.
The absolute magic and democracy of rock & roll is that anyone with a good hook and a fighting
heart can change the world overnight. Kurt did it twice: on September 24, 1991, the day
Nevermind, Nirvanas second album, went on sale and loudly announced that Michael Jackson
was toast and rock was a weapon again; and on April 8, 1994, when Kurts body was found,
dead by his own hand, in a room over his garage in Seattle. The gaping hole he left in the belief
that rock & roll saves lives is still there. So is the fear of going all the way that has paralyzed so
much of the music ever since.
But this record is about what happened before, and between, the turning point. It tells us how
Kurt was reborn, and bloomed, inside his writings and singing. And it makes brutally, brilliantly
clear how Kurt and Krist bonded since high school in Aberdeen and Ohio-born Dave, a
D.C.-hardcore veteran who joined on the eve of Nevermind, made the music a living thing, along
with those who passed through the early bedlam: the Melvins and Mudhoneys Dan Peters. All
the albums I ever liked, Kurt said, were albums that delivered a great song, one after another:
Aerosmiths Rocks, the Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks, Led Zeppelin II, Back in Black by
AC/DC. Thats exactly what you get on Nirvana.
Rightly, the last great song Kurt wrote is followed here by the first. About a Girl, track three on
Nirvanas 1989 debut album, Bleach, is a conflicted love song draped in spidery jangle and hung
on a bewitching see-saw melody, invented one night after Kurt spent hours listening nonstop to
Meet the Beatles! Kurt later complained that Nirvana had not done enough with the power of
quiet, that hed waited too long until Dumb and All Apologies in In Utero to show how
much he loved and learned from the Beatles and R.E.M.. But in the clean swing of About a Girl
and the Gregorian-garage spell of Kurts double-tracked singing, with that extra haunted vocal
floating just over his shoulder, Nirvana proved that punk and grunge were very small words for
the pop in Kurts head.
The amazing thing about these songs, and the recordings, is the force of subversive detail,
especially on Nevermind; the tidal crash of Daves tom-tom roll at the front of Smells Like Teen
Spirit the literal sound of a revolution at birth; Krists watery bass intro to Come As You Are
and the way Kurt reconfigures the word memory with a long Spanish sigh at the end, as if
hypnotized by need; the whiplash contrast in Lithium between Daves jazzy restrain in the
verses (tingling cymbal, the one-two doorknock of his kick drum) and the power-trio avalanche
in the chorus. Kurt remembered first playing In Bloom at practices, like a Bad Brains song.
But then Kurt went home and he hammered it. When Kurt was done, he called Krist and played
the song over the phone. The nuclear sugar inside had come out.
Success made Kurt distrust that gift. He responded with In Utero: made at breakneck speed with
Albini, the kind of live fuzz-box verite. Nirvana cut the album in two weeks; Kurt sang most of
his vocals in a day, in one sever-hour stretch. But the haste bothered him. Heart-Shaped Box
was given to R.E.M. producer Scott Litt for a remix. Even after the album was released in
September, 1993, as Nirvana played the new sons on tour, Kurt openly spoke of his
disappointment. Definitely Pennyroyal Tea that was not recorded right I know thats a
strong song, a hit single. Litt remixed Pennyroyal Tea for a 1994 release, but Kurts death
ended all promotion for the album, and the single was cancelled. Eight years later, Litts
treatment is finally on record, and we can hear Pennyroyal Tea the way Kurt wanted to hear
it.
Kurt also felt that, with In Utero, he had worn out the soft/loud dynamic in his writing, gutting it
of all worth and fun. He was wrong. Heart-Shaped Box is an explosive tabgle of devotion and
exhaustion: the heat and worry jammed into the sharp sudden shout, Hey! Wait!, the raw
hopeful arc of Kurts guitar break. In Rape Me, the jolt from droning surrender in the verse
nothing that Dumb was first recorded as an electric-trio whisper for the BBC in the fall of 91,
before Nirvana-mania. Here, with de combined melancholy of cello and Kurts vocal harmonies,
the song carries the added weight of those two years with a cracked-leather grace. I think Im
dumb, maybe just happy: Kurt was never the former, still aching for the latter.
A confession: I did not watch the original broadcast of Nirvanas performance on MTV
Unplugged. I have never seen it on video. I dont need to. I was there, at the Sony Studios in
New York on November 18, 1993, and I keep that hour in my head, with a clarity unspoiled by
jumping camera angles and commercial brakes: the garlands and candlelight; the hushed
strength of Krist, Dave, Pat Smear and cellist Lori Goldston; the hint of dare in the way Kurt
opened the show with About a Girl (This is off our first record. Most people dont own it) and
how All Apologies, near the end, affirmed that early promise. And I recall my own gasp of
recognition when I heard the slithering-cobra guitar of The Man Who Sold the World, David
Bowies 1970 reverie on power, celebrity and death. I guarantee you, I will screw this up, Kurt
said. But he slipped into Bowies silken ambiguity and the unmistakable parallels to his own
life like second skin. Kurt did not sound bummed or bitter, just painfully wise, willing to laugh
at himself and comfortable in a good song.
Its easy to remember him being sad, Dave told me last year. But the things that I like to
think about are his happiness, and how much he loved music, whether it was sitting in a living
room and playing an acoustic guitar, or playing at the Off Ramp in Seattle. He really, really loved
creating music
This is the world Kurt built for himself, when the real world was not enough. Listen again if you
think you know it; listen loud if you dont know it yet.
Then build your own.

David Fricke (New York City. October, 2002).