While he was alive Kurt Cobain was a walking (or shuffling, rather) contradiction. He gave off an air of sloth, but spent hours on his musical and visual art. He was sensitive artist and feminist who was also prone to fits of rage and destruction. In death he became an easy symbol of a generation’s apathy and frustration. The reality of Generation X was more complicated: a disparate group of twenty-somethings attempting to reconcile the idealistic 60’s dreams of their parents’ youth to the yuppie reality of their parents’ adulthood as they moved into adulthood themselves. In the years since his suicide the media has tried to cast Kurt as the voice of his generation, but these empty labels fall short. Cobain is far more compelling on his own terms, as a remarkably talented but fucked-up kid unable to cope with debilitating depression and addiction.
The defining moment in Cobain’s transformation from happy drummer boy to slouching rebel was the divorce of his parents, Don and Wendy Cobain, when he was eight years old. Their split left Kurt permanently wounded. According to his mother, the divorce “just destroyed his life. He changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very inward-he just held everything. He became real shy.” Kurt was shuffled off to either parent at different periods growing up, which made him feel like he didn’t belong in either place. “I just remember all of a sudden not being the same person,” he said, and described feeling as if he “wasn’t worthy anymore.”
His parent’s divorce caused Kurt to question authority and expect the worst of people. Kurt had always understood that he was different from others. From a young age he had an artists’ sensibility, which separated him from his classmates. Growing up in the rural logging town of Aberdeen, Washington only exacerbated Kurt’s alienation. By his teenage years Kurt was an angry loner. The girls loved his clear blue eyes and rebel attitude, but Kurt avoided them and their jock boyfriends, making friends with the fuck-ups and burnouts instead. Cobain described his attitude in high school as, “a mixture of hating people so much because they didn’t live up to my expectations and just being fed up with being around the same kind of idiot all the time.”
Kurt found refuge in music. As he grew older he moved away from Monkees and Beatles toward music that he could channel his aggression into. After reading about The Sex Pistols in Creem magazine he became fascinated by punk music. The local record store didn’t carry any punk albums, so Kurt spent hours in his room playing what he imagined punk to sound like, which he described as “three chords and a lot of screaming”. When he heard actual punk music he found it less aggressive than he anticipated, but admired the “Do It Yourself” ethos of the bands.
Cobain would spend the rest of his life trying to make the kind of music that he expected punk to be. The resulting sound was chaotic and melodic at the same time. The “loud-quiet-loud” dynamic of Nirvana’s songs was partly inspired by the spastic fury of Boston college-rock band The Pixies. When he first heard their major label debut, Surfer Rosa, Cobain was impressed with their artistic bravery. Cobain would later say, “I heard songs on Surfer Rosa that I’d written but thrown out because I was too afraid to play them for anybody”.
Kurt first met future Nivana bassist Krist Novoselic at high school in Aberdeen, but neither made an impression on the other. Later the two met again because they were both friends of the local punk band The Melvins. Kurt gave Novoselic copies of some demo tapes he had produced, a project he had titled “Fecal Matter”, and suggested that they form a band. It took two years for Novoselic to actually listen to the tape, but when he finally did he reached out to Cobain. The two formed a band, going through a series of names (including Skid Row, Pen Cap Chew, and Bliss) and drummers. Cobain settled on the name Nirvana because he “wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk rock name”.
The band began playing local gigs in late 1987, and eventually gained the attention of fledgling local record label Sub Pop. Sub Pop had started as a fanzine called Subterranean Pop in the early 1980’s. By the time Nirvana was shopping their early demos, the label was ready to emerge as a major player in the record industry, releasing some of the albums from bands like Sonic Youth and Soundgarden. The Seattle scene was ready to explode, and Sub Pop was lucky enough to be at the center of it.
Nirvana’s sound and artistry grew out of more than just the right influences, and more than just their attachment to the booming Seattle music scene. Cobain had always had a drive to succeed. After Kurt’s suicide his uncle Larry Smith shared a story that highlighted Cobain’s dedication to his music, even on a family fishing trip:
“We were spread out a few hundred feet apart along the Wenatchee River. All of a sudden we heard this horrendous combination of screaming, warbling, and yodeling from Kurt, who was upstream and out of sight. Gramps told me to run up there and help Kurt who must have hooked into a big fish. When I reached Kurt he didn’t even have his line in the water. When I asked him what was going on he just looked at me with those piercing eyes and a huge grin and he said, ‘I’m just trying to thicken my vocal cords so I can scream better.’”
Those screaming lessons created a singular voice-a delicate rasp that could erupt with violence at any moment. Cobain had trained himself to scream on pitch. It was that power which first attracted the attention of Sub Pop co-founders Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt. Poneman said of Nirvana’s demos, “I was just thoroughly blown away by the guy’s voice...the band obviously had a lot of raw power. I just remember hearing that tape and going, ‘Oh my God’.”
Sub Pop released Nirvana’s first single, “Love Buzz”, in November of 1988. The song was a cover of single by 1960’s Dutch rock band Shocking Blue, and would also appear the following June on Nirvana’s first album. “Love Buzz” is a serviceable introduction to the band, but not much more. The tune is catchy, driven by a great lead guitar riff. Like much of Nirvana’s late 80’s work, the song shows how influenced they were by bands like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin that they would later disavow themselves of. Considering that it was Kurt’s vocals that initially drew Sub Pop to sign them, it’s interesting to note that his vocal on “Love Buzz” seems hesitant. It’s as if covering another person’s song led Kurt to play a character. He sings in a vaguely European accent.
Nirvana recorded their first album in short bursts of studio time from December of 1988 to January of the following year. The total studio time was about 30 hours, which set them back $606.17, money they had to borrow from a friend because no one in the band could cover the cost. After recording the album the band began a two-week tour of the West Coast. While on tour in San Francisco Poneman and Bruce Pavitt noticed signs for a public information campaign encouraging heroin addicts to “bleach your works”, as a way to fight the spread of AIDS. The two began to theorize that “bleach could become the most valuable substance on earth”. The as-yet untitled first Nirvana album was soon titled Bleach.
The songs on Bleach are all supported by thick layers of Kurt’s lead guitar fuzz, backed with Novoselic’s thick bass lines and competent but uninspired drumming. The resulting sound is sludgy, the musical equivalent of tires spinning in mud. Kurt’s D.I.Y. philosophy, mixed with the Sub Pop’s low budget, gives the record a tossed off, inconsequential feel. When this raw vibe reoccurs in the Nirvana catalog, on In Utero, it adds a fresh dimension to their sound.On Bleach the fuzz only distances Kurt from the listener.
There are strong songs on the album, but as a whole they blend together. Even after multiple listens there are few tracks that stand on their own. The album has energy to spare, but no focus. Songs like “Floyd the Barber” and “Paper Cuts” are forgettable death rock. Metal-edged songs like “Negative Creep” played well live, as Kurt and the band wailed and destroyed the stage and their instruments, but on record there’s not much to them.
In many of the songs, like “Scoff” and “Swap Meet”, you sense Kurt trying to push the boundaries of the scene that he’d ended up in. Growing up with the Beatles and Monkees had given Kurt such an ear for melody that even his hardest songs feature great pop hooks. These songs are recognizable as grunge, but are as catchy as any Top 40 hit.
The poppiest song on the record is also the best: the Beatlesque“About a Girl”. “About a Girl” is the only song on Bleach that feels fully developed. Its melody is catchy and familiar from the opening notes. The song offers the first glimpse of Kurt’s developing songwriting chops, and the mix of guitars and harmony that would become Nirvana’s trademark. It’s Kurt’s first great pop song.
For years Kurt had been obsessed with creating his own version of punk rock. Now that he had a band and a record deal, was he more attracted to the punk sound or the punk attitude? Just how poppy could his music get and retain a punk sensibility? As much as Cobain admired the intelligence and credibility of the punk scene, he seemed destined to exceed the boundaries of the genre.
Matthew Guerruckey is an English major at Los Angeles Valley College and Editor-in-Chief of Drunk Monkeys.
He can be reached at steorr1979@yahoo.com or on Twitter @guerruckey
Sources:
Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad
Wikipedia
1 comments:
This is a nice retrospective. I especially enjoyed reading about how he played punk music without ever hearing it. Thanks for posting it.
Post a Comment