Here We Are Now. Entertain Us.

Today is the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death.

Excerpt from Cobain’s journal:

In the summer of 1983 … I remember hanging out at a Montesano, Washington Thriftway when this short-haired employee box-boy, who kind [of] looked like the guy in Air Supply, handed me a flyer that read: “The Them Festival. Tomorrow night in the parking lot behind Thriftway. Free live rock music.” Monte was a place not accustomed to having live rock acts in their little village, a population of a few thousand loggers and their subservient wives. I showed up with stoner friends in a van. And there stood the Air Supply box-boy holding a Les Paul with a picture from a magazine of Kool Cigarettes on it. They played faster than I ever imagined music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden records could provide. This was what I was looking for. Ah, punk rock. The other stoners were bored and kept shouting, “Play some Def Leppard.” God, I hated those fucks more than ever. I came to the promised land of a grocery store parking lot and I found my special purpose.

1989 review of Nirvana’s show, written by Gillian Gaar in The Rocket:

Nirvana careens from one end of the thrash spectrum to the other, giving a nod towards garage grunge, alternative noise, and hell-raising metal without swearing allegiance to any of them.

1989 journal entry, Kurt Cobain:

My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They’re split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have, and sarcastic, hopeful, humorous rebuttals towards cliche, bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork.

Bob Dylan, after hearing the song “Polly” for the first time:

The kid has heart.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

During one rambunctious night of partying at Kurt’s house, Hanna spray-painted “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on the bedroom wall. She was referring to a deodorant for teenage girls, so her graffiti was not without implication: Tobi used Teen Spirit, and by writing this on the wall, Kathleen was taunting Kurt about sleeping with her, implying that he was marked by her scent.

Line from the first draft of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”:

Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

On November 25 [1990], Nirvana played a show at Seattle’s Off Ramp that attracted more A&R representatives than any concert in Northwest history. Representatives from Columbia, Capitol, Slash, RCA, and several other labels were bumping into each other. “The A & R guys were in full-court press,” observed Sony’s Damon Stewart. The sheer number of A & R reps altered the way the band was perceived in Seattle. “By that time,” explained Susan Silver, “there was a competitive feeding frenzy going on around them.”

The show itself was remarkable – Kurt later told a friend it was his favorite Nirvana performance. During an eighteen-song set, the band played twelve unreleased tunes. They opened with the powerful “Aneurysm,” the first time it was played in public, and the crowd slam-danced and body-surfed until they broke the light bulbs on the ceiling. “I thought the show was amazing,” recalled Kim Thayil of Soundgarden. “They did a cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Here She Comes Now’ that I thought was brilliant. And then, when I heard ‘Lithium’, it stuck in my mind. Ben, our bass player, came up to me and said, ‘That’s the hit. That’s a Top 40 hit right there.'”

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

… but the surprise came [at the show played in Seattle in April, 1991] when the band played a new composition. Kurt slurred the vocals, perhaps not even knowing all the words, but the guitar part was already in place, as was the tremendous driving drum beat. “I didn’t know what they were playing,” recalled Susie Tennant, DGC promotion rep, “but I knew it was amazing. I remember jumping up and down and asking everyone next to me, ‘What is this song?’ ”

Tennant’s words mimicked what Novoselic and Grohl had said just three weeks earlier, when Kurt brought a new riff into rehearsal. “It’s called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,'” Kurt announced to his bandmates, stealing the Kathleen Hanna graffiti. At the time, no one in the band knew of the deodorant, and it wasn’t until the song was recorded and mastered that anyone pointed out it had the name of a product in it. When Kurt first brought the song into the studio, it ha a faster beat and less focus on the bridge. “Kurt was playing just the chorus,” Krist remembered. It was Krist’s idea to slow the tune down, and Grohl instinctively added a powerful beat.

At the O.K. Hotel, Kurt just hummed a couple of the verses. He was changing the lyrics to all his songs during this period, and “Teen Spirit” had about a dozen drafts. One of the final drafts featured the chorus: “A denial and from strangers / A revival and from favors / Here we are now, we’re so famous / We’re so stupid and from Vegas.” Another began with: “Come out and play, make up the rules / Have lots of fun, we know we’ll lose.” Later in the same version was a line that had no rhyming couplet: “The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came.”

September, 1991 – letter written by Cobain to a friend, the same week that “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the single, would go on sale:

I got evicted from my apartment. I’m living in my car so I have no address, but here’s Krist’s phone number for messages.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

Two days later [September 15, 1991], Nirvana held an “in-store” at Beehive Records. DGC expected about 50 patrons, but when over 200 kids were lined up by two in the afternoon – for an event scheduled to start at seven – it began to dawn on them that perhaps the band’s popularity was greater than first thought. Kurt had decided that rather than simply sign albums and shake people’s hands – the usual business of an in-store – Nirvana would play. When he saw the line at the store that afternoon, it marked the first time he was heard to utter the words “holy shit” in response to his popularity. The band retreated to the Blue Moon Tavern and began drinking, but when they looked out the window and saw dozens of fans looking in, they felt like they were in the movie A Hard Day’s Night. When the show began, Beehive was so crowded that kids were standing on racks of albums and sawhorses had to be lined up in front of the store’s glass windows to protect them. Nirvana played a 45-minute set – performing on the store floor – until the crowd began smashing into the band like the pep rally in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.

Kurt was bewildered by just how big a deal it had all become. Looking into the crowd, he saw half of the Seattle music scene and dozens of his friends. It was particularly unnerving for him to see two of his ex-girlfriends – Tobi and Tracy – there, bopping away to the songs. Even these intimates were now part of an audience he felt pressure to serve. The store was selling the first copies of Nevermind the public had a chance at, and they quickly sold out. “People were ripping posters off the wall,” remembered store manager Jamie Brown, “just so they’d have a piece of paper for Kurt to autograph.” Kurt kept shaking his head in amazement …

Though he had always wanted to be famous – and back when he was in school in Monte, he had promised his classmates one day he would be – the actual culmination of his dreams deeply unnerved him.

On September 24, 1991, Nevermind went on sale nationwide.

Lines began forming at record stores across the country.

Mark Kates, representative from DGC, was with Novoselic and Grohl in Boston, on that day, and they went to Newbury Comics, and passed by a record store with a line around the block. Kates said:

It was amazing. There were like a thousand kids trying to buy this record.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

It took two weeks for Nevermind to register in the Billboard Top 200, but when it did chart, the album entered at No. 144. By the second week it rose to No. 109; by the third week it was at No. 65; and after four weeks, on the second of November [1991], it was at No. 35, with a bullet. Few bands have had such a quick ascendancy to the Top 40 with their debuts. Nevermind would have registered even higher if DGC had been more prepared – due to their modest expectations, the label had initially pressed only 46,251 copies. For several weeks, the record was sold out.

Usually a quick rise on the charts is attributable to a well-orchestrated promotional effort, backed by marketing muscle, yet Nevermind achieved its early success without such grease. During its first few weeks, the record had little help from radio except in a few selected cities. When DGC’s promotion staff tried to convince programmers to play “Teen Spirit”, they initially met with resistance. “People at rock radio, even in Seattle, told me, ‘We cant play this. I can’t understand what the guy is saying,'” recalled DGC’s Susie Tennant. Most stations that added the single slated it late at night, thinking it “too aggressive” to put on during the day.

I continue to listen to Nirvana regularly, and, like the Beatles, they don’t seem to “wear out” with repetition. It hasn’t happened yet, anyway. “Rape Me”, “Lithium”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” still, after all this time, make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Tori Amos describes a similar moment to what my brother describes (in his essay here) when she first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (a song which she immediately covered). She was in Iceland, touring (with just her piano and herself). She had not “hit” yet. That would come the following year. There was no place for her, either, in the world of radio at that time. She was unclassifiable. Perhaps she was okay with that, who knows – but she says she was in Iceland in a little bar, and suddenly she felt goosebumps go all over her body, as she heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” start playing. What the hell was that song? What the hell was going on back in the United States that that was number one? It was a prescient moment for her. She had this strange prickly sixth sense that “it” could happen for her now. If there was a place for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the Top 40, then something had been unloosed in music, something unleashed … and so there would be a place for her, too.

She says,

“‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was really like an injection. It propelled people to choose what they wanted to do with themselves and their questioning, and it gave a generation some juice.”