Today is the birthday of French actress and director Mélanie Laurent.
Probably most American audiences (and international audiences, outside of France) were first introduced to the extraordinary Mélanie Laurent in her perfoƒrmance as the revolutionary Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds. Laurent had been working for years in France, “discovered” by Gérard Depardieu when she was 14 years old. Inglourious Basterds, though, was next level. It had giant American movie stars like Brad Pitt, but it also included fascinating “new” faces – now much more famous beCAUSE of their inclusion, people like Michael Fassbender, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger and Mélanie Laurent. Laurent is unforgettable.
Shoshanna is the center of the film, from the first scene to the final scene, where she – or a silvery nitrate version of her – laughs maniacally as the Nazi brass watching her go up in flames.
It was powerful, as an audience, to “meet” her through this role, as opposed to Tarantino casting a well-known American actress, someone already familiar to people. Most of us didn’t have any other associations with Laurent. We came to her pure.
I wrote an extended piece about the central scene, where Hans Landa (Waltz) lures Shoshanna to a meeting, a public meeting, and she has to keep up a cool front, not give away her plans, OR her background as a “fugitive”, OR her incandescent fury at being face to face with the man who ordered her family murdered. It’s such a brilliant piece of acting – and Tarantino knew it, and kept the camera on her without cutting away – so we could actually be a witness to her skill as an actress (Laurent’s and Shoshanna’s. It’s a scene ABOUT acting). The scene is a good object lesson for actors about trusting the moment, allowing make-believe circumstances to work on you (as opposed to the other way around). The piece I wrote is very actor-nerd-y and I am proud of it, so here it is.
Laurent has done other roles here and there (I really liked her in Beginners), but her interest in movies is more all-encompassing than just building a career for herself as an actress. She didn’t position herself to do a Marvel movie, for example. You can’t make more of a splash than she did in Inglourious Basterds: working with Tarantino was (and still is) a coup. But Laurent’s choices since show her seriousness as an artist, shows what she cares about. She decided to direct, and right from the jump she showed herself as a sensitive and thoughtful director, with a really interesting point of view (and good taste in material).
Breathe (2015)
A couple of her films didn’t get theatrical releases here – maybe the first one? I don’t know, but Breathe arrived in 2015, and I was assigned to review it. Having in mind the ferocious actress in Inglourious Basterds, it was thrilling to watch her direction – directing is almost more personal than acting. I loved Breathe – it really understands teenage girls – and I reviewed for Ebert.
Mad Women’s Ball (2021)
And then in 2021 came her next film, and what a thrill Mad Womens Ball was (here’s my review). I don’t mean to sound like an old fogey, but they don’t make ’em like that anymore. It’s an entertaining historically-based epic (adapted from a novel), and Laurent – who also acts in it – keeps the pace roiling and churning forward to the inevitable conclusion. It’s a very 1980s type film, the sort of thing Meryl Streep would have starred in. Mad Womens Ball is BIG, with BIG themes and a big cast, lots of period details, and a melodramatic tragic sweeping energy. I highly recommend it. Nobody really talked about it when it came out. This is frustrating. The world is so PACKED with “content” (evil word) and things vanish into the maw of online streaming … Nobody can stop long enough to look around and see what might be out there.
Last year, Netflix threw their power behind Laurent, helping her finance Wingwomen, a totally entertaining continent-spanning spy-heist flick, which I absolutely loved. It showed her special touch with interpersonal relationships, her attention to detail, her humor … but it also showed she could handle a massive undertaking on this scale. And it was just so well done. I adored it. Obviously, I’m a huge fan of her work.
I have been excited by Laurent’s career ever since Inglourious Basterds, and I admire her chosen path. You never know what she will do next, but you look forward to it anyway.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
In 1965, television producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider placed an ad in the Hollywood Reporter:
MADNESS!! AUDITIONS Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21”
Many are called, but few are chosen. In this case, the “4 insane boys” chosen were Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones. The idea was to create a pop group for a situation comedy, with built-in limitless merchandising and/or concert and/or opportunities. Glee 40 years before Glee. Predicting the wave of manufactured boy bands which overtook the pop industry, again, thirty years later. The wild thing about the Monkees, which sets them apart, is they weren’t just “4 insane boys”. They could write damn good pop songs, songs that still get radio play today, still show up in movie soundtracks, they just came together again and put out an album I love. And that’s all that matters. Their songs are catchy, the lyrics are humorous, and there’s a strain of melancholy in their chord arrangements, plus great hooks.
More about the Monkees – their life and their very public death – and Rafelson – and Five Easy Pieces – after the jump:
When Alan Rickman died, I paid tribute to him for Rogerebert.com, including my memory of seeing him in the unforgettable Broadway production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, opposite Lindsay Duncan. I still have the poster.
I cherish it, and cherish the memory.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
W.H. Auden was born on this day in York, England, 1907.
I first encountered Auden in my “Humanities” class, senior year in high school. I got a lot out of that class, and I remember we analyzed Auden’s famous most-anthologized “Musee des Beaux Arts”. It was a great opportunity for a Humanities class, because it allowed the teacher to kill two birds with one stone:
1. Analyze Auden’s poem
2. Study Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus, which Auden’s poem is about.
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I remember reading the poem, looking at the painting, going back to the poem, trying to see what Auden saw. In such a way do young teenage minds hone their analytical skills. I am grateful to Mrs. Stevenson, my Humanities teacher. Of course there’s way more to the poem than that (the first line spilling over into the second line? Perfection), and its observations about the meaningless of human suffering, and our indifference to one another (a topic Auden comes back to again and again.)
Peter Vack and Joanna Arnow in Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. It is not a funny movie but this made me laugh out loud.
“If someone puts up $100 million on a movie, they’re gonna be concerned about whether they’ll get it back. So they’re not gonna make a movie about three girls, you know?” — Lili Taylor
It’s her birthday today.
Like most of my generation, Lili Taylor first made an impression on me in Mystic Pizza. She’s basically the third lead, and she’s great throughout, but her monologue at the end – if you’ve seen the movie, you will know what I’m talking about – is when I was like, “Oh my God she is GREAT.” She basically steals the whole film. Fan for life from that day forward. A Gen-X avatar, although I would never have put it that way at the time.
“Joe lies … when he cries …” is a classic of American cinema.
Her “turn” on Six Feet Under HAUNTS me. It’s so messed up, so upsetting, so perfectly done. The character shows up and Nate thinks he can be another kind of person – a good person, a responsible person – if he marries her. Naturally, this does not go well. But then … things go even further south.
The “fate of Lisa” haunts the rest of the series, and that is due, in large part, to Lili Taylor’s performance, her misery, her heartbreak, her love – love that Nate doesn’t feel and doesn’t want. It’s so so good.
Here are two pieces I’ve written that deal with Lili Taylor specifically:
For my Film Comment column, I wrote about Arizona Dream, starring Lili Taylor, Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis and Vincent Gallo. It’s a lost masterpiece.
In 2011, Matt Zoller Seitz and I discussed Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight, a film we both love. The comments thread to that piece is EPIC, and people continue to find that post and leave comments. They discover the movie and NEED to talk about it.
I read a profile of Lili Taylor recently and the writer called Dogfight “unwatchable.”
Here’s the story of the first famous person I interviewed – an actor I had admired for a long time: Mr. Ron Eldard.
I saw the excellent Roadie at the Tribeca Film Festival. Eldard plays a roadie fired from his long-time gig with the Blue Oyster Cult. With supporting cast of Lois Smith, Bobby Cannavale and Jill Hennessey, Roadie is an excellent character-study with a great sense of place. I wrote a favorable review of it for what was then Capital New York (now rebuilt on my own site). The film hadn’t been released yet, so for a time, there, mine was the only review that came up when you searched the film. This is how the producer of Roadie, Mike Downey, found me. He reached out through email to thank me.
8 or so months later, Roadie was about to be released, and I suddenly got the idea that I should maybe ask for an interview with Eldard, sort of to point people towards the upcoming release of this little indie film. I decided to take a risk (or, it felt like a risk at the time) and reached out to Mike to see if he could set up an interview with Ron. (I had no PR contacts at the time, like I do now.)
This was all new for me. I had never done it before. I had no idea how things were supposed to work. I didn’t realize the “power” I had, as someone who loved this small film, who had reviewed it, who was championing it. Of COURSE they would want me to interview Ron – of COURSE they would say Yes, etc. But I didn’t really know this at the time. I almost felt shy asking for the interview. Mike, though, of course, was enthusiastic, and hooked up the two of us via text message.
I was not accustomed to any of this, and I tried to contain my nervousness and adolescent-type shyness. I texted Ron Eldard, saying “Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. Could we set up a time in the next couple of days?”
I had a slight sense of urgency about this because:
1. I wanted to interview him before the film opened – which was like 6 days away and
2. I was headed on a road trip to Memphis, and I wanted to get this in the bag before I left and
3. I now know that I was in a full-blown undiagnosed-mania. I had been sleeping 3 hours a night for months.
So I text Eldard, being so careful with my words – very shy – not really “getting” that I wasn’t bothering him at ALL. I wasn’t a fan, I was a writer who was looking to highlight his work in the film. All of that being said:
5 days go by. Ron Eldard does not respond to my text. I’m not sure what to do. It was my worst fear. I’m bothering him. I’m some rando weirdo texting him. He’s busy. But I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I text him AGAIN? But that put me into stalker mode. Mike had assured me “Ron” wanted to be interviewed. I was slightly in a panic.
Meanwhile, I head out to Memphis. I text Mike from the road on my first day of driving, saying – “Hi – I haven’t heard back from Ron and I’m not sure what to do …”
He texts me instantly, “I’ll text him. Hang on.”
Within seconds – SECONDS – I get a phone call from Ron Eldard. I am on a lonely road in West Virginia when the phone rings. I pull over. I answer.
“Hello?”
Ron’s voice, in a panic: “Sheila?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“It’s Ron Eldard.”
“Oh! HI!”
He says, frantic, “Did you text me?”
I said, “Yes, about 5 days ago.” (I said this with zero “attitude”. Totally chipper, trying to project “no big deal” to him through the phone.)
Eldard moans in dismay, “I must have missed it –”
“Oh, that’s okay –”
“Oh my God, you must have thought I was such a DICK.”
lol
I said, “No! No I just figured you were busy – no problem – ”
“I am SO sorry.”
Meanwhile, I was frantically fumbling through my purse for my voice recorder – which I had brought along with me – JUST IN CASE this moment occurred.
His horror at his own inadvertent rudeness was genuine. He was imagining me walking around seething, bad-mouthing him in my mind. Why am I so charmed by this? Meanwhile, though, I had been having an anxiety attack like I was stalking him, or like I was working up my courage to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I could tell he was a good egg by his response. He has integrity.
I am literally pulled off onto the grassy side of a country road, and I do the interview with him then and there. We talked for 45 minutes, way more than could ever be included in the interview. He was funny, forthcoming, smart, loved talking about the movie, loved answering my questions, he was awesome.
As it winds down, I thank him for his time and I don’t know why I told him this next thing – chalk it up to my single-minded mania which led me to drive to Memphis in the first place – I said, “I’m on my way to Graceland for Elvis’ birthday.”
He said, “Wait. What?”
“I am driving to Memphis right now for Elvis’ birthday.”
He exploded, “Holy shit you are gonna have so much fun!!”
“Have you been?”
“I’ve never been – but – I wrote a whole monologue from the perspective of the biggest Elvis fan in the world.”
Now it was my turn to say, “Wait. What?” He then told me the story of this monologue he wrote, from the perspective of an Elvis fan who had Elvis all worked out astrologically and numerically – how Elvis’ birthday aligned w/the planetary systems and how when you add it all up, it means this this and this. Wait. WHAT?
He was laughing as he told me all this – “So, Elvis was born on January 8, 1935, right?” (I was like, “Holy shit, yes, fanboy!”) “–and so if you add up all those numbers – 1 for January and then 8, 1, 9, 3, 5 … you get the same equation that adds up to blah blah blah…”
We talked for 20 more minutes about Elvis. He was not only “kind” about me blurting out this random information, he was INTO it, and had a LOT to say about Elvis!
Later that night, in my isolated motel on the edge of a thick forest, I drank whiskey out of a plastic cup and transcribed the interview. I had to write it all up that night and send it off to the editors, so it could go up before the movie opened.
As I listened to our voices coming out of the little recorder, I had a couple of moments hearing our laughter, our guffaws about Elvis-obsessions – and thought, “Wow. I pulled my shit together on this one.” I had been so nervous. There was no need to be nervous. None at all.
So that’s the story of my interview with Ron Eldard, on a bumpy lonely road in West Virginia.
It’s still the most fun I’ve had doing an interview. Since Capital New York vanished from the internet and was absorbed into Politico, I rebuilt the interview here on my own site. Interview with Ron Eldard about Roadie.
And see Roadie!
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
It’s Sidney Poitier’s birthday. Poitier was the first African-American to win a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Homer Smith, the drifter/handy-man in 1963’s Lilies of the Field (which also won Best Picture).
Poitier is a superstar in it, and I mean superstar in a very specific way. Poitier is a classic leading man, handsome and funny but also somewhat mysterious, all of which create natural charisma. Homer is given no backstory. He emerges from nowhere. He is like Hud (which came out the same year) and Hondo and Shane and other drifters, coming out of the wilderness like something out of Homer’s Odyssey. Hm. HOMER. Get it?
Homer Smith gets a job, almost by accident. In his wandering, he comes across a poverty-struck convent in the middle of the desert. The German nuns clustered there speak almost no English, struggle to make anything grow in their garden, and their chapel is in ruins. Homer Smith shows up looking for water, and through the persuasion of Mother Maria (Lilia Skala, nominated for Best Supporting) he stays to do some work around the place.
The going is tough. The nuns cannot pronounce his name and call him repeatedly “Homer Schmidt.” They want him to build a chapel. There aren’t enough bricks and the nuns have no money. He agrees. They provide makeshift compensations: He teaches them English. They feed him. But they don’t feed him much: the look on his face when he sees his breakfast – one boiled egg – is hilarious. Even though Homer insists he is a Baptist, they bring him to Catholic church. Because of the ruined chapel, they hold mass outside. (I love the priest wearing sunglasses during mass.)
Homer Smith keeps trying to leave. But somehow he just can’t. Something holds him there. He builds the chapel for the nuns. He feels proud ownership over his work. He has dreamt of being an engineer, he has dreamt of the bridges and buildings he will create. Life is not set up for dreamers like Homer Smith. He wanders the desert, perhaps because the world has not welcomed him, has not allowed him to pursue his dreams.
The chapel Homer builds is beautiful. A lily of the field blooming in the desert.
After he attaches the cross, high on top of the steeple, he stands there, allowing himself a brief moment of pride.
And then … he sticks his finger in the still-wet clay, and writes his name. He chooses a spot at the very top where no one can see it. But God can see it. It is there.
A powerful and personal act, Homer Smith’s “John Hancock”: This. This here. Me. I. I am here. I did this.
A small movie, about a small world, with strict boundaries: Poitier brought to it a sense of vastness, filling the inchoate atmosphere with dreams, longings, and a desire to be known, to be specific, to be counted. But he did so with a quiet sense of his own power, power dormant within him but so present we can feel it. It emanates off the screen.
That’s what I mean by a superstar. Paul Newman. Brad Pitt. Not everyone has it. Not everyone can just stand there and emanate the dreams and longings of everyone sitting out there in the dark.
What Poitier meant as an actor and public figure is an important part of the story. He changed the world. At times he felt it to be a heavy burden.
So I had to be careful. I recognized the responsibility that, whether I liked it or not, I had to accept whatever the obligation was. That was to behave in a manner, to carry myself in such a professional way, as if there ever is a reflection, it’s a positive one.
But, like Homer Smith, Sidney Poitier wrote his name in the wet clay, the wet clay of our culture. Unlike Homer Smith, he did it in plain view, where everyone could see it.
Here. I. I did this. I.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
“The kid has heart.” — Bob Dylan, after hearing Nirvana’s song “Polly” for the first time
Today is Kurt Cobain’s birthday. I’m not over it. There are defining moments in a generation, moments everyone remembers. For my generation it was the Challenger explosion and Kurt Cobain’s death. And maybe the fall of the Berlin Wall. Naturally when you speak in generalities, people get annoyed, and need to tell you what THEIR defining moment was, and how it had nothing to do with Cobain’s suicide. Well, good for you? I don’t know what to tell you. We’re talking in generalities because when you talk about a generation you’re always in the realm of the General. At any rate, the rise of Nirvana was a seismic event, a ferocious challenging of the status quo – and Cobain’s suicide was agonizing. He was mocked relentlessly by those who didn’t get it – the grown-ups, in other words – he was described as “whining” – the commentary was along the lines of “Stop whining. Be a man” – all of those lovely sentiments that keep men in a box, the “Boys don’t cry” contingency, which has just worked out SO WELL for us, hasn’t it. Yeah, tell a 5-year-old boy that “boys don’t cry” and then be totally BAFFLED at all the FURIOUS young men who can’t deal with their emotions. It is difficult to go back in time and describe Cobain’s importance, to describe what it was like when Nirvana arrived … And of course the flood-gates opened with Nirvana, letting in all of these other voices and sounds – which, of course, Nirvana didn’t START – they were PART of something, they didn’t INVENT something. But it went mainstream FAST. And then of course it all started to get ruined, as everything does when the mainstream gets a hold of it. But for a brief shining moment, Kurt Cobain emerged, and he was authentic, and he was OURS. You don’t forget someone like that.
And you never stop wishing that he could have just stuck around. You always miss someone like him. I had barely processed River Phoenix’s death when Kurt Cobain killed himself half a year later. These were my GUYS, my inspiration, I felt a sense of ownership/kinship – and they were both gone? It still seems unreal if I think about it for more than 10 seconds.
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.
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?
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.'”
… 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.”
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. The lines became headline news.
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, like Elvis, they don’t seem to “wear out” with repetition. “Rape Me”, “Lithium”, “Love Buzz”, “Aneurysm”, “Heart-Shaped Box”, “All Apologies”, “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. It still sounds fresh, it still sounds dangerous. You can still feel the risk in it.
Tori Amos describes the moment when she first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (a song which she immediately covered). She was in Iceland, touring. She had not “hit” yet. Little Earthquakes would come the following year. There was no place for her, either, in the world of radio at that time. She was a woman and a grand piano. She was unclassifiable. 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 going on back in the United States that THAT SONG was number one? It was a prescient moment for her. If there was a place for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the Top 40, then something wild had been loosed in music, something unpredictable … and so maybe there could 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.”
Yup. The wild thing – and what makes them unique – is it was apparent what was happening at the time. You think only OTHER generations get to have formative moments and/or formative figures. Everything is past tense. This was especially true for my generation, since we grew up in the shadow of the Boomers, our parents. Now it seems like the situation is reverse. NOTHING is past tense. If it didn’t happen last year, it might as well have never happened. But I remember experiencing the whole Nirvana thing – and, to be honest, it was more than just them – it was … the whole thing … Bikini Kill, Hole, Sleater-Kinney, Soundgarden, Liz Phair … we were a generation who came of age with young-Boomer pop stars dominating the charts. Madonna. Prince. 10 years older than we were. Sometimes even more than that. A craggy-faced Boomer like Huey Lewis was a huge star. No shade. I love Huey. But seen in perspective: he was popularizing doo-wop, the music of his own youth, to us, the kids. He was a very VERY successful nostalgia act. And square as hell. It’s “hip to be square.” I’m sorry, is it 1954 all over again? Nobody seemed to think any of this was weird at the time. I sure as hell didn’t notice it.
But then suddenly, when we reached our 20s, all at once it seemed like, our PEERS started speaking.
It changed everything. As the kids say today, it just hit different.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
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, by Charles Cross:
