ruises onon thethe fruitfruit B A BRIEF HISTORY OF NIRVANA & THE EVOLUTION OF THEIR MUSIC by Gary Vehar From the moment Nirvana’s landmark CD Nevermind was released, the world of rock music has never been the same. I for one will always be thankful that that album came out when it did, slightly over a week before my eighteenth birthday. I was a still-wet-behind-the-ears college freshman, away from home for the first time. Just as my life was changing drastically, so was the culture. Music, politics, fashion and art underwent an enormous change as the 90’s sloughed off the last vestiges of the 80’s. Concealed as I was in the quiet town of Ellensburg, Washington, within the tiny confines of my third-floor door room, it was the change in musical guard that first caught my attention. Friends from Seattle regularly brought over dubbed tapes to share with those of us here in college, and among one batch was an advance tape for a band called Nirvana. Nevermind was already causing excitement before its official release of September 24th, 1991. Leaving my friends for the night, I couldn’t get the songs, the sounds, out of my head. About a week later I was in yet another dorm room, listening to a brutish lout rave about the same album. Even at this early date it was obvious Nirvana was crossing all boundaries, even if the fellow who owned this copy (the real CD, this time) made fun of the over-the-top screams that so captivated me. I studied the CD booklet, memorizing the pertinent info for a later date. That time came a little over a week later. Armed with my birthday swag, I proceeded at once to the local record store to purchase my copy. CD’s in those days still came in long cardboard boxes, and I walked home studying the track list on the back. I was confident that this would be yet another alt-punk-metal release, with one excellent radio-friendly song (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”) and a number of lesser album tracks– I had yet to hear the whole album. Upon playing the whole album I was pleasantly surprised to find that each track was just as powerful as the last. Repeated listenings soon had me hooked; that album became a part of me, and I was just as much a part of it. I will always remember my college days, with “Teen Spirit” blasting out of my stereo, and my hippie neighbors (in a band called Paisley Schoolbus, no less) banging futilely on the walls. Nevermind was everything I had always been looking for in music, without knowing it: punk-tinged pop, hard rock, grunge and metal mixed with generous helpings of angst, longing, vulnerability, and anger. The music had the unerring ability to do exactly what the band wanted it to, to be exactly what it was wanted to be– a rare gift that few other bands had at their command. 2 Having said that, let’s move on to examine the music’s primordial roots, shall we? The band as we know it formed in 1987, with Kurt as guitarist/vocalist, and Chris Novoselic on bass, changing band names and drummers as it suited them. Twenty-year-old Kurt Cobain already showed a remarkable talent for music. Witness the off-the-cuff solos Kurt throws about during a house party gig caught on tape and known simply as the 87 House Party, and later on at a 1988 Hoquiam, WA, show. This was the result of a lifetime of backwoods Aerosmith/Zeppelin absorption, later tempered and suppressed when Kurt was bitten by the Punk Rock bug. At this point Kurt had such songs as “Downer”, “Spank Thru” and “If You Must” written, offsetting the Zeppelin jams “Heartbreaker” and “How Many More Times.” Even though the band was still very young, the 87 House Party recording shows Kurt’s original songs as striking and very distinct from one another, and the performance is a strong one. Some time before that, in April of 1987, the band recorded a session for Olympia’s KAOS radio station. It would be the start of Nirvana’s association with the Olympian scene, spearheaded by Calvin Johnson’s K records and his flagship band Beat Happening. During that session, which can be found on Outcesticide 5, the band recorded nine songs with drummer Aaron Burkhardt. Six would end up re-recorded on the 1/88 Reciprocal demo; of the remainder, two were cover songs and the final, “Anorexorcist,” was an original song never formally recorded anywhere else. The covers, “White Lace and Strange” by Thunder and Roses and “Love Buzz” by Shocking Blue (of “Venus” fame), show a band picking their covers with an ironic– and unusually tasteful– sense of humor. This session became the band’s first informal demo, sent to any and every label they could think of. The tapes received nary a response. The decision to cover “Love Buzz” was perhaps the most crucial choice the band could have made at this early stage in their career. Though Kurt may have agreed to perform it to humor Chris, who was always the hippie of the band, “Love Buzz” was the one song on the tape that caught the attention of Sup Pop, leading to their first single as a recording band. The Reciprocal demo established the band in Sub Pop’s eyes, but it was only “Love Buzz” that warranted a single at that point. Unfortunately, the KAOS show and the 87 House Party bootleg are the only aural documents we have from 1987 so far, but they show a band slowly establishing themselves on the fringe of the Northwest scene. It’s important to note that Nirvana was never really a part of the Seattle scene. Their homebase in the early years was Tacoma, WA, and then Olympia. The band played Seattle often enough, but sonically (at this early point, at least) and ideologically the band belonged to the naive, do-it-yourself movement that was uniquely Olympian in origin. The first major event of 1988 is obviously the Crover demo, recorded at Reciprocal Studios on January 23rd, so-called because Melvins drummer Dale Crover sat in until a permanent replacement could be found. At times mock-pop (“Spank Thru”), noisy belligerence (“Beeswax,” “Hairspray Queen”) and pure underground rock (“Aero Zeppelin” & “Floyd the Barber”), the demo established the band (named Ted Ed Fred, but soon to become Nirvana) as an original presence in Seattle’s own backyard. The lyrics are often hard to discern, and even when written down can be indecipherable at times. Lyrical ambiguity would be the major identifying trait in Kurt’s music for the rest of his career. Ted Ed Fred played a set at the Community World Theater in Tacoma the night of the Reciprocal recording. The bulk of the set consisted of the ten songs recorded earlier that day, in the exact same order. “Hairspray Queen” had to be stopped and redone towards the end of the set, owing to a broken bass string. Two more songs were played that night; one, another version of “Anorexorcist,” the other possibly called “Raunchola,” after a title mentioned in the band’s biography Come As You Are. The finale was a raucous attempt at Led Zep’s “Moby Dick.” It is rumored that had the tape not run out during the day’s recording (in the middle of “Pen Cap Chew”), the band would also have cut “Anorexorcist” and “Raunchola.” Their position towards the end of the set bears this out, but the loss is not so great. Both songs, even allowing for the rough quality of the bootleg, are cruder than the rest of the Crover demo, neither as memorable nor distinct. 3 Sometime after this show, the band settled on the name that would come to define them (and cause them some grief in the future from no less than two other bands of the same name), Nirvana. The name derives from the Hindu concept of total bliss after death, but it is interesting to note its usage as the chorus in the creepy, lurching “Paper Cuts.” Is it possible Kurt simply cribbed the line from this song, then came up with the explanation, as he took the title Nevermind from “Teen Spirit”’s third verse? Knowing the band’s history of acting on an impulse, it is certainly plausible; Kurt could have appropriated the name in order to have something to place on the fliers for an upcoming show– and then found that the name appealed to his love of the innocent and the beautiful. Chad Channing joined the band sometime in May of 1989, playing his first show with the band in June. Nirvana’s dynamic changed subtly with his addition; whether it was a coincidence or whether Chad exerted that much influence on Nirvana is unknown. With Chad, the songs became simpler and more direct, getting from A to B with more of a groove. Songs like “School” and “Mr. Moustache” (especially the drop D-tuned version of this song) are but one step above the material on the Crover demo, but it is a large step in terms of execution and attitude. Not a second of “School” is wasted; its churning verse riff and clever chorus propel the song inevitably forward to its urgent conclusion. The solo is an improvisational blues affair that starts out intentionally awkward, then straightens itself out, conveying the listener from lofty heights back down to the rumbling bass line for a muted, rapidly building crescendo during the song’s bridge.