Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #148416

When:

Short story:

Nirvana release their second LP, Nevermind, on DGC Records in the USA.

Full article:

NIRVANA'S NEVERMIND AND THE BIRTH OF GRUNGE
by Johnny Black

Unquestionably the most influential rock album of the 90s, Nevermind signalled the arrival of the decade’s most enduring youth culture movement – grunge.

Like virtually every revolutionary album before it, Nevermind came out of left field and was roundly dismissed by many American critics who heard it only as a dirtier, simpler form of heavy metal. It took interest from the UK to launch Nevermind on its way to achieving ten-times platinum status before the start of the new millennium.

Their debut album, Bleach, had much of the same raw yet melodic sound as Nevermind, and a couple of great Kurt Cobain compositions, About A Girl and Negative Creep, that should have alerted critics to the fact that something fresh was happening. What Bleach lacked, however, was Dave Grohl’s drumming.

When Grohl replaced Chad Channing, producer Butch Vig immediately noticed how, “Dave was incredibly powerful and dead on the groove. I could tell from the way Kurt and Chris were playing with him that they had definitely kicked their music up another notch in terms of intensity.” Now they had the sound that Cobain once described as, “the Bay City Rollers getting molested by Black Flag”, and all they had to do was get it on tape.

Cobain described the process of creating songs for Nevermind by saying, “We downed a lot of hypodermic cough syrup and jack Daniels and just lounged on the couch in the recreation area of the studio for days on end, just writing down a few lyrics here and there.”

In stark contrast, Vig recalls that Cobain was in good spirits during the making of Nevermind, and worked long days, beginning around noon and ending after midnight. “I think it took five or six days in all,” says Vig. “Dave was set up in the middle of the room. We built a big drum tunnel on the front of his bass drum, so we could mike it from a distance and still isolate it from all the bleed in the rest of the room. Chris had his SVT bass rig off to the side, but he could play in the room. His headphones were set up next to the drums. Kurt's amps were in a little isolation area, but he was also in the room and he could sing into a mike.” Most tracks, he reckons, required only two or three takes.

Smells Like Teen Spirit, the song that would rocket them into the US Top Ten singles chart, came about as the result of a misunderstanding between Cobain and a girlfriend. “We were kinda drunk, and we were writing graffiti all over the walls of my house,” he explained. “She wrote ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit’. And earlier on, we were having this discussion on teen revolution and stuff like that, and I took that as a compliment. I thought she was saying I was a person who could inspire. I just thought that was a nice little title. And it turns out she just meant that I smelt like the deodorant, I didn't even know that deodorant existed, until after the song was written.”

Surprisingly, given Teen Spirit’s elemental passion, Cobain’s musical inspiration for the track is said to have been Boston’s bombastic pomp-rock classic, More Than A Feeling. Vig was immediately impressed by Teen Spirit, and insisted that they play it over and over again. “There wasn't much that needed to be done with the song,” he points out. “I think we did a little arranging. At the end of each chorus, there's a little ad lib thing Kurt did with the guitar. Originally that only happened at the end of the song; he did it a whole bunch of times. I suggested moving that up into each chorus and cutting the choruses down a little bit.”

The album’s other best-known cut, the chilly but compelling Come As You Are, is much harder to get a handle on. Is it, as some Nirvana-watchers have suggested, an open invitation to the band’s fans to join in their fun, or is it something much more sinister? “The lines in the song are really contradictory,” said Cobain. “Y'know, one after another, they're kind of a rebuttal, to each line, and they're just kinda confusing I guess. It's just about people, and uh, what they're expected to act like.”

He has also claimed that, “At the time I was writing those song, I really didn’t know what I was trying to say. There’s no point in my even trying to analyse or explain it.” Given that the songs, although oblique, seem to be the work of an intelligent lyricist, it’s hard to know how serious Cobain was being when he made these kinds of comments

There’s so much variety on the album, from the punky thrash of Territorial Pissings to the richly melodic Lithium, or the acoustic strum of the nightmarish Polly, detailing a horrific rape he’d read about in a newspaper, that it’s hard to accept Nevermind as anything other than the work of a rational, self-aware songwriter.

Like Bob Dylan, Cobain saw no merit creating a perfect take, preferring instead to leave each song fresh and vital, mistakes and all. “He really wanted to do everything on the first or second take,” says Vig. “He'd do a couple of takes and say, 'That's it. I'm not gonna do it any more.' The tricky part was trying to figure out how to motivate him to give really good performances.” The resourceful Vig, however, would record every word Cobain sang, including warm-ups, and would then piece a final take together from the best sung lines in three or four versions.

Sweetened with some re-mixing by Andy Wallace, Vig’s production was undeniably a major factor in the success of Nevermind. Although he would no doubt have preferred Cobain’s vocals to be higher in the mix, he was able to create a sound that was balanced beautifully between grunge distortion and pop clarity. It was a combination that worked equally well for hi-fi quality FM stereo radio and for lo-fi student or underground stations, and it appealed to pop fans and metalheads alike.

Just about the only person in America who didn’t like it, was Kurt Cobain. “Our music, especially on this album, is so slick-sounding,” he grumbled. “A few years ago, I would have hated our band, to tell you the truth.”

This lack of respect for his own achievements would soon escalate into an undisguised loathing for the trappings of success, and for the music industry as a whole. The fact that his musical abilities were now miring him ever deeper in a world he hated would soon become a contributing factor in his rapid decline.

From the outside though, everything looked fine, and when the little band from Aberdeen, Washington, reached No1 in the US album chart on 11 January, 1992, it sparked an explosion of interest in the so-called Seattle Sound that would change the lives of dozens of local musicians, not least among them being the five members of Pearl Jam.

The core of Pearl Jam lay in 80s Seattle favourites Mother Love Bone, whose promising career ended with the heroin-related death of singer Andrew Wood. While guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament were struggling to re-group, Jack Irons, former drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, suggested they should consider recruiting a young San Diego surfer, Eddie Vedder, who also wrote songs.

As Vedder recalls it, “Jeff sent me a tape of three songs, and I sent him back a mini-opera.” The tape he received consisted of instrumental backing tracks, which he transformed into complete songs with the addition of lyrics and vocal melodies. Among them were Once and Alive, both of which wound up on Ten. It was clear that Vedder worked well with Gossard and Ament, so they played a few gigs and recorded a bunch of demos as Mookie Blaylock, a name borrowed from a favourite basketball player, which they soon realised was too much of a joke to be taken seriously.

So, on 11 May 1991, when the now re-named Pearl Jam began recording their Epic Records debut album at London Bridge studios, Seattle, Washington, with producer Rick Parashar, the old Mookie demos were re-recorded without too much alteration, because the band had been playing them live for months and knew exactly how they should be done.

Musically, Pearl Jam and Nirvana had very little in common, beyond a raw raging power that had been missing from rock for too long. Where Nirvana kept things deliberately simple and grungy, Pearl Jam sounded more like a souped-up, socially-aware, essence of Led Zeppelin with a hint of Southern rock thrown in for good measure, all topped off with Vedder’s heart-stoppingly, spine-tinglingly powerful vocals.

The first track they completed was Alive, the stirring twin-guitar powered rocker which would become their first single. The cut that would put them on the map however, was Jeremy, based round the true story of Jeremy Wade Delle, a seriously disturbed sixteen year old student at Richardson High School in Dallas, Texas, who shot himself dead in front of his class on January 8, 1991.

Vedder combined Jeremy’s story with his own recollection of a fellow-student in junior high school, in San Diego, California, who had taken a gun to class and gone on a shooting spree – although with less disastrous results. He and Pearl Jam guitarist Jeff Ament then put music to the words and, although it was never a huge hit,
The accompanying video walked off with no less than four MTV Video Music Awards including Video of the Year, Best Group Video, Best Metal/Hard Rock Video, and Best Direction.

Producer Rick Parashar’s contribution to the album extended beyond faithfully recording the band’s music, into helping them actually make it. “Rick's a super talented engineer/musician,” notes Jeff Ament, but he adds that on a day when guitarist Stone Gossard was sick, “Ed, Rick and I conjured up the art piece that opens and closes the record.  That was so fun, I wanted to make a whole record of that kind of stuff.”

When the album was released on August 27, 1991, insiders realised that Mookie Blaylock might be gone, but it wasn’t forgotten, because Ten had been the number on his New Jersey Mets shirt.

“I think we all felt pretty good about the record,” remembers Gossard, “but we didn't feel like it was the end-all recording, by any means. And I think we kind of felt like, wow, we set the deal up the way we wanted, people seem to be into hearing us play, and at that point Mother Love Bone was helping us get some attention. So we were feeling positive.”

Epic Records secured an attention-grabbing promotion for Alive, by having it pre-released via a Coca Cola promotion, but Vedder soon found himself dismayed by the machinations of the industry, hating the endless round of hand-shaking, back-slapping company functions the band had to attend. It must have stung him badly when Kurt Cobain dismissed Pearl Jam as ‘corporate’ rockers.

A slow-burner, the album didn’t peak until almost a year later, when it hit No2 on the Billboard chart in the week of August 22, 1992, and went on to eclipse Nevermind with its rapid progression to five-times platinum status, making Pearl Jam, briefly, more popular than Nirvana.

Tragically, one curious side-effect of the popularity of Seattle’s grunge-era bands was the, presumably unintended, glamourisation of self-loathing. Cobain seemed to feel he had betrayed his own integrity by finding fame and fortune, and Vedder clearly felt tainted by the embracing tentacles of the business without which he would never have become a superstar. Other Seattle bands, notably Alice In Chains, expressed similarly self-destructive negative feelings about themselves, and when significant numbers of high-profile icons all seem to share the same philosophy, some of it will inevitably rub off on their fans.

The horrific circumstances of Kurt Cobain’s death sent shock waves around the world, but the media glamourisation of that pathetic waste of an enormous talent simply shored up the impression that self-loathing and self-destruction were, somehow, the epitome of cool.

(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2005)