CONTENTS

Information Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NEVERMIND

IN BLOOM

BREED

COME AS YOU ARE

THE SONGS: SMART SESSIONS

HERE SHE COMES NOW

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

MEXICAN SEAFOOD

THE SONGS: SOUND CITY SESSIONS

STAY AWAY

LITHIUM

SAPPY

SPANK THRU

SOMETHING IN THE WAY

SCHOOL

TERRITORIAL PISSINGS

ON A PLAIN

DIVE

SELECTED OFFICIAL NIRVANA DISCOGRAPHY

PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank all those who helped us with the extensive research and numerous interviews required to write this book. Particularly generous with their time and help were Chad Channing, Jack Endino, Krist Novoselic, John Silva, Butch Vig, Andy Wallace, and Howie Weinberg. Special thanks to: Loren Albert; Yeda Baker; Holly; Rebecca and Bradley Berkenstadt; Lois and Edward Berkenstadt; Gene and Laurie Berkenstadt; Edon Berkenstadt; The Big 0; Janet Billig; Tom Blain; Jonas Blank; Kelsy Boyd; Jamie Brown; Lenny Burnett; Kelly Canary; Rosemary Carroll; Richard Carlin; Leo Cailleteau; Joy and Jack Charney; Marco Collins; Ernie Conner; Helen and Garvin Cremer; Scott Cremer; David Day; Carla and David DeSantis; Helen English, Esq.; Joe Ehrbar; Lisa Fancher; Scott and Lynne Faulkner; Jeff Fenster; Erik Flannigan; Deborah Frost; Gillian Gaar; Ross Garfield; Lisa Gladfelter-Bell; Clinton Heylin; Steve and Erica Hill; Bill Holdship; Daniel House; Mark Kates; Bonnie Laviron; Debbie Letterman; Darcy Little; Courtney Love; Patrick MacDonald; Leanne Martin; Guy Kenneth McArthur; Jerry McCulley; Carl Miller; Mike Musburger; Shivaun O’Brien; Jacque Oldenburg; Jay Olsen; Doug Olson; Charles Peterson; Christopher Phillips; Michelle Puddester; Bill Reid; The Rocket; Jeff Ross; Pauli Ryan; Rex Rystedt; Smart Studios; James Smith; Mark Smith; Sound City Studios; Damon Stewart; Denise Sullivan; Susie Tennant; Kim Thayil; John Troutman; Jaan Uhelszki; Scott Vanderpool; Chris and Renee Vig; Patty Vig; Tess Welch, Esq.; Daryl Westmoreland; Alice Wheeler; Ellen Whitman; Mark Zappasodi; Bob Zimmerman; Mike Zirkel; and anyone whose name we forgot or who helped out at the last minute.

NEVERMIND

It was one minute before seven on the evening of September 16, 1991, and the world of rock ‘n’ roll was about to change forever. The place was Seattle, Washington. The setting was a small record store in the University District named Beehive. (For years it had been called Peaches, but a recent lawsuit from a record chain in the South had forced a name change. Locals still called it Peaches). The band was a three-piece, and the lead singer had on a gray flannel shirt.

In an early draft of his song “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Kurt Cobain had posed the question, “Who will be the king and the queen of the out-casted teens?”, and though he never sang the song with those lyrics, one can only wonder if they ran through his head that early autumn day at Beehive. The answer—being shouted back at the three-piece band by their screaming fans—was loud and clear. It was the name of the band; it was “Nirvana!”

What had been planned as a low-key meet-and-greet at one of Seattle’s smaller record stores had turned into a crowd-control nightmare. An “in-store” is traditionally a small party put on by a record label to celebrate the release of a new album, and, in theory, it’s designed to boost sales by introducing the band to influential record-store buyers. In practice, store promotions are rarely more than opportunities for labels to butter up the bands on their roster, where the group’s friends have a chance to sample a free buffet of cheese and crackers paid for by the label. Even in the burgeoning Seattle scene of 1991, it was rare for any m-store to draw more than 100 fans. When the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at the time an up-and-coming national band with a huge following in the Northwest, did an in-store at Beehive, they drew 150 fans. And though the warning signs in the case of Nirvana had been visible for some time—within the underground post-punk world people had been talking about their upcoming major-label debut for months—no one could have predicted what happened on that September day and what would happen in the next six months.

“Kids started showing up at 2 P.M. for a 7 P.M. scheduled appearance,” recalls Jamie Brown, promotions manager for Beehive and organizer of the in-store. “We thought there would be a big crowd, but we had no idea they’d be there all day. By 4 P.M. it was jam-packed with about three hundred kids and you couldn’t get in the store. The kids just sat on the floor.”

By 4:30 P.M., when the band arrived, the three members of Nirvana—Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic,^* and Dave Grohl—found a record store so crowded that no more people were being allowed in. There was also a crowd of two hundred people milling around outside the store in the small parking lot. The trio immediately retreated across the street to the Blue Moon Tavern to escape. Even that did not provide much privacy, as dozens of kids followed the group to the Blue Moon and stared at them through the windows (Washington’s liquor laws allowing only those twenty-one and over to enter taverns).

One wonders if, sitting there in the Blue Moon that day—a tavern famous as one of the birthplaces of Seattle’s first countercultural revolution during the ‘60s, and a place where Jack Kerouac once drank— the members of Nirvana had any idea what was about to happen to them. In the five years that the group had been together (that’s how long Kurt Cobain had been jamming with Krist Novoselic; Dave Grohl was already the band’s fifth drummer), Nirvana had witnessed a steady growth in popularity. They’d gone from playing for twenty uninterested alcoholics at Seattle’s Central Tavern to headlining gigs drawing as many as a thousand people. Their first record, Bleach, had received positive reviews, and if it hadn’t sold tremendously to that point—the Sub Pop label estimates that they had sold forty thousand copies of Bleach by September 1991—it had sold enough to create a buzz that fueled a major-label bidding war for their follow-up album. That album, Nevermind, was due to be released officially in eight days, but stores in the Northwest like Beehive would begin selling copies later that evening, selling them almost as fast as they could cut open the boxes. Drinking Rainier beer that day in the Blue Moon, the band could be confident that their new record would be a success by the standards of alternative rock at the time.

The reason the band drew such a large crowd to Beehive that day was because they’d played so many shows in the Northwest that they had a huge following already; their fans were willing to stand for hours and wait in a cramped record store. Yet what was decidedly different about this new album, and about the show that Nirvana put on that day at Beehive, was that it didn’t just impress people: it left many listeners stunned. Some, including Jamie Brown, were shocked that Nirvana had agreed to turn what had been advertised as a meet-and-greet into an impromptu performance. But if most in the crowd were surprised to see the band actually playing inside this small record store, they were even more moved by the performance the band put on at Beehive. “We just jammed,” recalls Krist Novoselic, Nirvana’s bass player, of the Beehive show. “We were totally on.”

His sentiments are echoed by those who were in the crowd that day. “It was stunning and it was beautiful,” says John Troutman, an early fan who worked for a different record company at the time but still dubbed dozens of copies of Nevermind for friends. “It was simply amazing,” says Susie Tennant, the local rep for Nirvana’s label, DGC. “I just didn’t know what to think,” remembers Erik Flannigan, a Seattle journalist who witnessed the event. Flannigan says the performance, like the album itself, left many in the audience in awe: “I don’t know that anyone was prepared for it.” While most good rock records leave listeners tapping their feet, Nevermind left people dazed and confused.

During the show at Beehive you could see that amazement in the stunned expressions on people’s faces; a crude bootleg video of the event illustrates that the few fans who weren’t moshing were simply staring in wonder. Two teenagers stood in the front row, literally six feet away from Kurt Cobain, and their jaws hung three to four inches below their noses, as if they had no control over their bodies. That “dropped jaw” reaction was something that would be repeated all over the world in the next few months.

If the band had any idea whatsoever of their power, it wasn’t apparent to anyone who talked to them during that month of September 1991, and it certainly didn’t show at Beehive. When the band finally left the Blue Moon Tavern—fortified with beer to better handle their first promotional efforts at pushing their new major-label album—they snuck in the back way at Beehive and hung out in the basement lunchroom of the small record store. “I remember sneaking down to the lunch room just to catch a glimpse of them,” recalls Mike Musburger, one of the many Beehive employees who was also a local musician (at the time, his band, the Posies, were considered more successful than Nirvana). “Kurt was just kneeling there in the middle of the room, writing the set list out on a sheet of paper. There was no hype and they didn’t act like big shots or anything. But there still was this air about him. Of course, he didn’t create that air—it came more from all the other employees who were watching him.”

Though most of the store’s workers just stood around and stared at Cobain, Brown says that wasn’t because the singer was unfriendly. “At the time, the Seattle scene was such a close-knit thing, even for people who weren’t necessarily playing music, that it wasn’t like anybody was unapproachable,” he says. “Everybody prided themselves on being down to earth and not acting like rock stars. Yet the buzz that Kurt created with Nirvana made him that way whether he liked it or not. People were in awe of him and what he was doing.” Not that Cobain would have noticed. “None of the band seemed particularly nervous,” remembers Susie Tennant, who ushered them around that day. “It wasn’t like Kurt to get a big head. But when we all went upstairs, it was a madhouse. I’m not sure anyone was ready for that.”

“That” was a record store overflowing with fans, at this point perched any- and everywhere. There were so many people outside the store who couldn’t get in that employees eventually shooed them away from the glass, fearing that it might break from all the leaning and pressing against it. “Inside the store there were people standing on top of the racks of albums,” recalls David Day, one of Beehive’s employees. “There were kids everywhere.” The store was so jammed that Day and Brown remember urging the owner of Beehive to go home, fearing that he would cancel the show if he realized how much damage was being done.

Within the crowd of three hundred that Brown estimates were packed into the store was a virtual “who’s who” of the Seattle music scene. Members of Tad, the Screaming Trees, the Posies, the Fastbacks, Love Battery, and several other Seattle bands were there to root on Nirvana. Even the members of Soundgarden stopped by—and at that point they were arguably the biggest band in town, themselves preparing for their own major-label album, Badmotorfinger. But like many local industry types, the Soundgarden members left because it was simply too crowded. “We were coming from rehearsal, and we were in the area, so we thought, ‘Let’s go see those guys,’” remembers Kim Thayil, guitarist for Soundgarden. “But it was so damn crowded that we decided to go do something else. It was pretty unbelievable that it was that crowded.”

The show began with Kurt softly muttering “Thanks for coming,” though that introduction was followed by two minutes of tuning. A few people clapped; this was an audience made up of fans of Bleach. There was no stage normally set up in Beehive, so the group played on the same level with most of the audience, which meant that the vast majority of the crowd couldn’t see; most people in the back couldn’t hear, either, because a wall of people is an effective muffling device. “The crowd actually was on a slightly higher platform than the band,” remembers Flannigan. “And since Kurt was short to begin with, it made it impossible to see him, and if you were at the back, you couldn’t hear much, except the bass and drums, because the crowd insulated much of the sound.” But none of this stopped the audience from getting excited. In the front row, the audience was so close to the band that Krist Novoselic had to make sure he didn’t bean anyone with his bass as he swung it around.

Nirvana began with “Drain You,” and from that moment on the crowd slam-danced their way around Beehive, forgetting that this was a record store filled with compact discs, albums, and videos, forgetting that there were light fixtures and display racks everywhere, forgetting that the crude PA system wasn’t set up to re-create a true concert experience. But even if the conditions were less than optimal, the band made up for it with their performance, playing like they were in an arena rather than a record store. This was no unplugged Nirvana: Kurt began the show by turning up his amplifier to the highest setting, and several times during the performance he tried turning it up higher. He broke a string halfway through “Drain You,” though that didn’t diminish his intensity, as he played with a ferocity that seemed at times almost demonic.

“The performance was amazing,” recalls Kelly Canary, a Beehive employee at the time and also a member of the legendary Northwest punk band Dickless. “In a record store with neon lights on, and in an overall bad place to play, they played great. I’d seen them many times before, but I don’t know if they were ever better.”

Most of the songs the band played that day were from the yet-to-be released Nevermind. Though Nirvana had done a short European tour earlier that summer, much of the material was still new to them. Since recording the album in the spring, they had not played live in Seattle, which was ostensibly their hometown, though in September 1991 none of them lived there. Yet even though Nevermind hadn’t officially been released, every song they played that day was met with a cheer of recognition from the audience, and many in the crowd sang along. And when the group broke into the first bars of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” it was almost like explosives going off in the room.

“What I remember being most struck by,” says Flannigan, “was the fact that the album wasn’t even out yet, but that every kid in that store knew the lyrics and sang along to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I’d heard an advance copy of the album and I knew it relatively well, but I just couldn’t believe that all these kids already knew the song way before the album had even come out. And I knew at that point that we were talking about a song that wasn’t just your ordinary rock song. It was something else altogether.”

The band’s performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that day was subpar by any technical standard: Cobain didn’t play the first notes of the introduction, and the microphone in front of him kept slipping from its stand. Eventually Kurt had to lean down and crane his neck as low as possible, because the microphone was pointing at the ground and was parallel to his stomach. Mercifully, an audience member stepped forward and held the microphone steady for the rest of the song. But Nirvana was never a band that aspired to play technically perfect music. They sought to capture the passion behind the song rather than hit every note. “Punk rock should mean freedom,” Cobain would tell a French television station six months later. “It means playing whatever you want as sloppy as you want as long as it’s good and has passion.”

The band had debuted “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in Seattle at a surprise show six months earlier at the O.K. Hotel. That first performance got the audience jumping up and down, but the tune still wasn’t honed enough at that point to make the room explode. But by the time of the Beehive in-store, the song hit the room like a hurricane. “When they played ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” says Jamie Brown, “the crowd went completely and totally nuts. You could see the stars in the eyes of the kids. By that point, by that day, Nirvana had already broken Seattle. As of that moment, they were superstars in Seattle. They had changed the lives of those kids. These kids had gotten there early and staked out their places, and on that day their lives had been forever changed by this band. For some of the older people, it wasn’t that easy because their brains got involved.”

Forty-five minutes after they began, the band put down their instruments, walked into the crowd, and began to sign copies of the CD, which is usually the only activity that happens at in-store record release parties. A little after 8 P.M. on September 16, 1991, Seattle teenagers walked into the darkening night holding the first copies of Nevermind to be sold, emblazoned with autographs from Kurt, Krist, and Dave.

IN BLOOM

In May 1991, producer Butch Vig sat behind the recording console at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, adjusting his volume control to what he describes as a level called “stun.” It was the first time Vig had ever worked in a large studio, and one of the few times he’d ever recorded any project outside the confines of his own Madison, Wisconsin, recording facility, Smart Studios. The thirty-five-year-old Vig had just finished recording the new Smashing Pumpkins album, Gish, at Smart, but now he found himself called in at the eleventh hour to record a major-label album. Though Vig’s résumé already included forty-eight different independent albums prior to Nevermind, this was to be his first major-label credit. Once he’d set his levels at stun, Vig stood behind the studio glass observing Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic, collectively Nirvana. The trio was attempting another take of the song “Lithium.”

Nirvana were recording the album for DGC, a label many in the industry referred to as the “punk” arm of Geffen Records. Geffen had beaten out numerous other labels and had recently purchased the contract rights of Nirvana from the Seattle-based independent label Sub Pop for a reported $75,000 cash and a potential share of the profits from Nevermind if the album’s sales exceeded two hundred thousand units. Nirvana’s 1989 inaugural release, Bleach, on Sub Pop, had been produced for the tidy sum of $606.17 and had sold a considerable amount for an alternative rock band—it was Sub Pop’s biggest-selling title at the time. Other than Nirvana, Sub Pop was best known for a roster that included Mudhoney, the Afghan Whigs, and Tad—all bands with tremendous critical reputations but with modest sales. At the time Nirvana was the closest thing to a pop band on Sub Pop’s roster, and a few major labels had tried to buy the entire indie label just to sign Nirvana. With new songs, major-label distribution, and lengthy touring, most insiders expected sales of Nevermind to reach a respectable one hundred thousand units, which, by the standards set in alternative rock at the time, would have been a big hit. Sales of Nevermind would, in fact, eventually surpass ten million copies worldwide.

Vig recalls the sessions for Nevermind as being laid-back, without high expectations. “They had a kind of casual attitude toward making the record,” he says. “There was not a lot of pressure. I felt more pressure making that record than they did, because it was really the first major-label record I was making.”

Nirvana had been trying to track a live-in-the-studio take of “Lithium,” a song that already was being talked about as potentially the first hit from the album. However, the session was not coming along easily. The mood in studio A that afternoon was relaxed as the session began, but as the day progressed the atmosphere started to tighten up. As yet another take for “Lithium” got under way, the third attempt of the day, it became clear to the band that this one was not a keeper. The band basically gave up and did what they usually did whenever a studio session wasn’t going well: they started jamming, a process that had marked most of their songwriting and rehearsal efforts in the past. For Bleach, their studio time had been so limited that they’d rehearsed for two solid weeks before going near the studio. Whenever those rehearsals would break down, the band would jam on something they could easily play, to build up their confidence level again.

“We would always break into stuff like the ‘Lithium’ jam,” bassist Krist Novoselic recalls. “Sometimes at rehearsal we wouldn’t even go into the set, we’d just play stuff like [that jam]. We might even play something like that for the whole rehearsal, mostly just to get stuff out of our systems. So that day, we just started busting into that. It was really about trying to find a groove. We were trying to make this wall of noise and to turn it into something.”

Though “Lithium” was over for the moment, Vig had the foresight to keep the tapes rolling. The band continued to jam, churn, and thrash on one of their rehearsal grooves. But this time around, the jamming was having the opposite effect from what it usually accomplished—rather than giving the band more confidence to help them move on and eventually tackle the song again, it was enraging Cobain. He began to lose his patience as Grohl and Novoselic continued to play. A volcanic musical reaction was about to spew forth in the studio, and this unexpected eruption was captured live on the session tape.

Vig watched all this from his control booth, looking down on the scene with amazement, listening to the noise blasting through the studio monitors. Six minutes and twenty seconds into the jam, in a ferocious orgasmic explosion, Cobain pulled his guitar high overhead and smashed his left-handed Mosrite in anger, screaming out a bloodcurdling cry of frustration.

“Kurt got so into it that day that he smashed his guitar,” remembers Novoselic. “There was nobody there—no audience or anything. Kurt was in a trance or something. He just flipped out and broke his guitar.”

In shock, Vig continued to roll the tape, capturing even the last sounds of feedback noise dying out. It was to be the last song the band would cut that day, as everyone present thought it might be best to end the session early. Though the day had come to an apocalyptic ending, this aborted jam would end up as the “hidden track” on Nevermind, sonically buried at the end of the CD. The track would come to be known as “Endless, Nameless.”

The electricity that shot through the mixing console that day is reflected in Vig’s eyes as he recalls the Nevermind sessions. “Kurt didn’t have much patience,” Vig remembers, “but there was a ton of passion to Nevermind. And a lot of it boiled down to Kurt’s vocal performance and the persona you got from his voice.” And the other significant thing that Vig observed Nirvana’s craft of songwriting: “They wrote killer songs. I know that Kurt was always really leery about his pop sensibility, but I totally encouraged it.”

It was not, however, pop music that Cobain created that day at Sound City, because “Endless, Nameless” is nothing if not a punk anthem: a deconstruction of the rock song replacing any crafting of melody. Vig remembers being the last person in the studio that night—he’d gone back to listen to the day’s work and to fill out his tracking sheets—and he recalls looking out from the control room into the large studio. Sitting in the middle of the room, highlighted by the spotlights that were set to illuminate the band members, was Kurt’s smashed guitar. For Nevermind, the album that would go on to smash all sales records for a debut major-label release, it would be a good omen. For Nirvana, the lengthy historical trip—from chance encounter; high school bands; weeks of rehearsal above a beauty salon; a revolving-door drummer saga; to pop stardom—was approaching its zenith. When Cobain smashed his left-handed Mosrite that day, it wasn’t just the frustration of recording “Lithium” that surged up in him: it was the frustration of years of bitter struggle, personal turmoil, and bone-crushing demoralization that had begun two decades earlier in Aberdeen, Washington.

BREED

Aberdeen, Washington, was a strange place to serve as the breeding ground for what would become the defining band of a generation, but then all great albums come from unusual confines, from the margins of society rather than from the hub. The most influential band of the ‘60s, the Beatles, came from Liverpool, which, in a way, is the Aberdeen, Washington, of the United Kingdom. Like Aberdeen, it was a place that time forgot, where economic struggle was a part of daily existence and blue-collar workers were the norm. The most potent record of the ‘70s, the Sex Pistols’ epochal Never Mind the Bollocks, was from a band that lived in London, where the postimperial youth culture produced its own marginalized culture. And though the ‘80s may not have provided any singular album that so changed music, it did serve as an incubation period for a number of U.S. bands hailing from the East and Midwest who created a music underground on small independently owned labels. These bands—including Sonic Youth, Killdozer, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M., Soul Asylum, Smashing Pumpkins, and the Replacements—began to modify the punk sound that had come out of England in the late ‘70s and to transform it into their own alterna-rock universe. Artistically, Nevermind would combine the pop sensibilities of the Beatles with the punk aesthetic the Sex Pistols offered up on Never Mind the Bollocks. It would be no small irony that the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album of the ‘90s would share part of a title with the Sex Pistols’ long player.

But the members of Nirvana looked not only to the Beatles and the Sex Pistols as influences; they also looked in their own backyard. The Northwest region had already seen a small musical explosion of its own in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s when bands like the Wailers, the Sonics, and the Kingsmen had invented the original grunge sound popularized by “Louie, Louie.” Though the first wave of what locals call “the original Northwest sound” had met with limited commercial success (the exception being the Kingsmen’s hit single “Louie, Louie,” which went as high as Number 2 on the Billboard charts), these pioneering bands did have a tremendous impact on the local music scene. Two decades later Mudhoney, the Melvins, and Nirvana would discover these homegrown releases in used-record bins and be influenced by the raw, Northwest, protopunk sound.

“The connection that I see between Nirvana and the Sonics and Wailers is an appreciation for noise,” says Peter Blecha, curator at the Experience Music Project. “While other bands in the early to mid-’60s—specifically Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys—were attempting to get pure and clean sounds, the garage bands of that era from the Northwest were heading in the opposite direction. You had the Sonics up here slitting their speakers or poking them with pencils to get that ratty-sounding distortion. That was really one of the beginnings of an appreciation for distortion and noise-making, and it was a central thread that linked the two generations.” Blecha says that Courtney Love told him that Cobain’s record collection included numerous albums by the Sonics, Wailers, and Galaxies, along with copies of The Rocket, the Northwest music magazine that wrote about both the region’s current groups and its musical history. “By listening to those records and reading about it in those magazines, Kurt must have picked up some respect for local and regional traditions,” Blecha speculates.

The same geographic factors that helped isolate the Northwest culturally helped spawn the second Northwest musical explosion in the late ‘80s. One of the reasons cited most often by Seattleites for forming their own bands was simply the lack of concerts for them to attend: both Seattle and Portland are so far away from any other large metropolitan cities that most underground bands didn’t include the Northwest on their tour itineraries. When a few national bands took the risk of long drives from San Francisco or Minneapolis—groups like Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, and the Avengers—they found enthusiastic audiences and packed houses.