Keepsake #1: Nirvana's Nevermind

2011-05-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

I was late to almost everything. Late to parties. Late to sports. Late to writing music and to figure out what I wanted out of life. And late to Nirvana.

I first heard Nirvana in November, 1991, on a dark and cold night around 7 PM. I was living with my mother temporarily, and she had an old console stereo that was as big as a couch and could play LPs and cassettes. She was listening to something on our classic rock radio station when I heard it. I had never heard anything quite like it on the radio before. And it was like magic. I knew that something had changed or was about to change. The watery sound of the intro led into a nice, tight rhythm in the verses and then a louder chorus. To cap it off, the crescendo of a middle 8, as the Beatles used to call it, was dirty and was overlaid with the same watery sound funneled through a guitar solo. When the track finished, I was more excited than I had ever been when listening to the radio. It was authentic, intelligent, and damned good. I mean great. It was "Come As You Are."

No, that was not the first single released from 1991's Nevermind (DGC, September 24). It was the first one I heard, however. I was late to the game. I did not have MTV, I was not dialed into the indie or alt music underground, and I had never heard 1989’s Bleach. I was also heavily distracted with other music. In September, 1991, I was busy securing copies of Use Your Illusion (September 17) and Metallica's self-titled release, otherwise known as the black album (August 12). These were the artists that dominated my life, but that would soon change.

I eventually saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video at a TV on my university campus and went out to buy the record. At least I did so before it hit number one in January, 1992, and I purchased one that had the super secret hidden track, which I thought was cool even if the song was not one that I liked very much. And, in fact, a few other songs on Nevermind were not my favorites or strong either in an absolute sense, but taken as a whole, they lent a lot of credibility and vibe to the gems, which should be considered pure power pop at its best. Songs like “Territorial Pissings”, “Breed” and “Lounge Act” are faint shadows when compared to “Come As You Are”, but they have an anger and a growl that belie the state of the adolescent or twenty-something coming out of the conservative decade of Reagan and Bush 41. The world of the stagnation and decadence of the middle class, SDI, Iran-Contra, Cold War victory and actor presidents sucked, and Kurt Cobain knew that everyone else with a brain that was his age felt this way and was not afraid to sing about it so the rest would hear. That was the revolution of Nevermind, that the new form of pop music was packaged with dirty, growling, dangerous, and intentionally alienating and subversive songs. It was at once a sweet hug and a bitter smack in the face. And that was Kurt Cobain.

Cobain intentionally tried to hug people with this record, to the point of being formulaic. “Teen Spirit”, “In Bloom” and “Lithium” bare this out with the quiet-loud-quiet motif and the early Beatles’ sing-along qualities and hooks in the choruses, especially in “In Bloom” when he chants, over and over again, “He’s the one/Who likes all our pretty songs/And he likes to sing along/And he likes to shoot his gun.” The next track, “Come As You Are”, is Nirvana at its popular best, and this was to be the great crossover hit, into the mainstream. But “Teen Spirit” changed the plan. Apparently, there was much more anger among the peons than previously thought by the elitist marketers at Geffen.

The real potential and depth for Cobain as a songwriter was in “Polly” and “Something in the Way.” On such a blockbuster album, here we have a song about rape, or something, and then deadly isolation in which the voice’s friends include only the animals under a bridge. In both, spare acoustic guitars and even a violin support a voice as fragile as a pane of glass or a slender mirror dangling from a piece of dental floss from a tree branch during a rainstorm. We can breech the hard shell of the exterior and see through it to the other side, where Kurt Cobain’s soul is exposed for all of us to see that, despite the rage and disaffection, he was incredibly prescient and aware of the shortcomings that affected him. But also, like a mirror, he wanted us to see in ourselves the attributes that lead many of us to marginalize others, innocently or otherwise, and he wanted us to perhaps consider all of society’s artifices that prevent us from being who we really are and prevent us from seeing others as they are. For ultimately, we are all complex human beings and not simply “geeks” or “nerds” or “jocks” or “preppies” or other labels we seem to pick up throughout the school years and beyond. Why can’t we just be, which is why Cobain pleads, “Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be.”

Nevermind, more than any other album, helped me to become the person I really was. Directly, it helped me to break free of previous ways of thinking and question many things about my upbringing, society, the world, and more. Interestingly, its musical impact on me was more indirect. I have never obsessed on Nirvana’s music like I have with other bands like Pearl Jam, Radiohead, or the Smashing Pumpkins, and I never saw Nirvana in concert like I have so many others, including the ones listed above. Yet Nirvana, through Nevermind, was the gateway drug for me and they led me to the Seattle bands, Chicago, Minneapolis, Athens, Britain and more. Through these bands and the 1990s, I eventually discovered that I needed to play the guitar and, ultimately, write my own songs. Today, in 2011, I thank Nevermind for being the seed of this revolution in my life.

A bandmate and friend of mine made the following remark one night after a practice. “Nirvana,” he said, “stole all the credit for all the other bands that had been toiling away in the Seattle scene for years.” This was an unfair analysis. Sure, there were many bands in Seattle and elsewhere that deserved national recognition. One need only mention names like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone/Pearl Jam, or the Pixies. But only Nirvana had the capacity to craft alienation into a pop song that could be mass consumed. Only Nirvana truly merited the status of “most popular” and “most acclaimed”, a phenomenon that had not happened since the Beatles. Therefore, instead of “stealing the credit”, Nirvana actually created the conditions that would allow those bands to get the credit they deserved. Because of Nevermind, grunge and alt rock became the genre that record companies wanted to market, and between 1992 and 1995, at the very least, exposure occurred to the saturation point. Any band with a grungy sound got a deal, and as the model played itself out, the bands became mere pastiche – copycats of Nirvana or Pearl Jam or some conglomeration of the two. These conditions would also cause a negative reaction, and indie rock, indie-folk and other genres would begin to attract more and more artists as the decade ended. Cobain saw all of this coming too, for on “Serve the Servants”, the opening track of 1993’s In Utero, he sang, “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old.”

In his true essence, Cobain was more indie than grunge, more songwriter than pop star, and leaving Nevermind behind was evidence of this. In Utero was a better album and demonstrated, through depth, structure, and noise, that Cobain had matured as a songwriter. Nirvana’s delicate and memorable swan song, MTV Unplugged in New York (1994), showed how Nirvana had matured as artists. And while I listen to these records more now, as a 39 year-old adult and songwriter, I cannot ever state that these records were more important to me or to the culture that was in 1991. Nevermind was the record that taught Generation X what we were and who we wanted to be. It allowed us and encouraged us to come as we are.

Coming Up: Keepsake #1

2011-05-17T02:26:00.000-07:00

I will soon post my first discussion of an album that impacted me in a tremendous, but indirect, way. Stay tuned.

The Mission

2011-05-14T19:33:00.000-07:00

There has always been music. When I was young, it was the music of my brother that shaped me. The bands that filled the still, fearful air of my mother's house included The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Queen, and AC/DC. Then through the 1980s I drifted from rental house to rental house, hoping to find myself, hoping that the dreadfully insecure person I saw in the mirror was not the person I would become. My music reflected this, and so I listened to Duran Duran, Prince and the Revolution, Madonna, Guns N' Roses, INXS and NWA to finish out the decade. So unsure of myself, and who I was in music, and who I was because of music. But eventually I did grow up and find myself in the 1990s, and I am not sure if the music I gravitated toward made me grow up or if growing up led me to the music I now label as "mine." A classic chicken and egg story.

Regardless of the cause and effect, music is as much a part of me as anything else, and probably more so. I have a master's degree, a decent job, and I speak a second language fluently, but none of it is as valuable as music. When I am on Cloud 9, or when I feel like jumping off the nearest bridge, I reach for my iPod and find an album that speaks to me, that encourages me to go higher or that talks me off that bridge. Or, in the very least, the albums of my life have entered into conversation with me, convincing me to at least take pause and think things through, convincing me that I am not alone.

Years have gone by years, and album after album has collected in my emotional memory bank, staking a unique claim on territory in my subconscious. It is such that I cannot remember certain events, people and places without thinking of the album I attached to them by obsessively listening to it over and over again until the events, and the album, faded away.

Perhaps this blog is about obsessions as much as memories. I intend to discuss the albums that have impacted my life by not only reviewing them from a pseudo-critic's point of view but also by conveying the emotional memories I have attached to each. However, if each of my memories is the result of an obsession, then in the end I might simply be revealing the innocent targets of a personality that cannot separate music from history, dream from obsession, or them from me.

Musical Keepsakes

Keepsake #1: Nirvana's Nevermind

Coming Up: Keepsake #1

The Mission