This is a Call (27 page)

The Top Hat show was the pick of the two Irish dates. Twenty years on, one attendee, Colin Fennelly, then a schoolboy at St Kieran’s College in Kilkenny, later the bassist of Kerbdog, whose 1998 album
On the Turn
stands up as one of the finest alternative rock releases of the decade, has vivid memories of the evening.

‘Most of our gang were only there to see Sonic Youth,’ he says, ‘but my friend Cormac and I had been listening to
Bleach
in our house in Dublin over the previous year, and “Negative Creep” in particular was a big hit with us. We managed to get to the very front of the crowd with ease for the start of Nirvana’s set, but as soon as they kicked into “School”, their opening number, the whole crowd began to surge forward. I remember being blown away by the energy of the band, especially Dave: the way he just threw his body at the drum kit stays with me still. I can’t remember much about Sonic Youth that night: afterwards the Nirvana set was all we could talk about.”

‘It was the first time I had seen an audience so enthusiastic,’ Grohl told the
Irish Independent
in 2011. ‘They were going fucking bananas. And that was just before
Nevermind
came out. I hate to say it was the calm before the storm because it was pretty fucking insane, but if you can imagine that being the calm, try imagining the storm.’

Nevermind
was released in the US on 24 September 1991, and one day earlier in the UK. ‘There will not be a better straight ahead rock album than
Nevermind
released all year,’ Everett True predicted in his
Melody Maker
review of the album. In truth, there would not be a better straight ahead rock album than
Nevermind
released all decade.

Twenty years after its release, Nirvana’s second album remains an indecently thrilling body of work, a collection of breath-robbing, heart-pounding songs infused with such edge-of-darkness desperation, soul, humanity and raw, inchoate anger that it seems to stop the clocks. At once antagonistic and approachable,
Nevermind
distils four decades of rock ’n’ roll history into twelve deathless shards of noise – part pop, part punk, part grandstanding classic rock – which switch back and forth between apathy and anger, self-loathing and sensitivity, humour and horror with such dizzying, quicksilver agility that the listener is never quite afforded comfort or security within its embrace. And yet one is drawn in time after time after time.

The first ‘side’ of the album is pretty much untouchable in critical terms, with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ opening the record like an adrenaline spike to the heart. Cobain’s attempt to nail the perfect pop song, Nirvana’s most iconic anthem fuses Pixies’ whisper/scream, soothe/ slaughter dynamic and four breezeblock ‘Louie Louie’ powerchords in a lightning bolt pop moment which age cannot wither. ‘In Bloom’ follows, latterly interpreted as a condescending swipe at knucklehead jocks who’d lustily sing along to Nirvana’s
‘pretty songs’
though originally conceived as a sincere(ish) tribute to Dylan Carlson, it mixes nursery rhyme melodies with a lurching, seasick sway, driven by Grohl’s head-caving rhythms. ‘Come As You Are’, Cobain’s open-armed invitation to the marginalised and misunderstood, those ‘outcast teens’ he instinctively empathised with, appropriates the bass riff from Killing Joke’s apocalyptic ‘Eighties’ for one of the album’s most infectious hooks: from its subject matter to its playground melodies, it’s the album’s most unashamed tilt at an underground anthem.

Track four, ‘Breed’, originally demoed as ‘Immodium’ at Smart Studios, is darker and more gnarled, mixing scorched-earth guitar riffs with a thunderous, relentless rhythmic barrage which would weaken the most muscular air drummer. ‘Lithium’, originally mooted as the album’s first single, is a fragmented take on Cobain’s unhappy adolescence, piling disquieting images of depression, loneliness, insecurity and insanity against one of the sweetest melody lines on the album. On record, the song lopes along on a deceptively simple mid-pocket groove, but nailing the tempo proved to be a challenge for Grohl. In the end, the frustrated drummer reluctantly agreed to record to a click track for the sake of expediency, though the compromise rankled: ‘When you tell a drummer “I think you should use a click track” that’s basically like stabbing them in the heart with a fucking rusty knife,’ he later commented.

The heartbreaking, graphic ‘Polly’ closes out the album’s opening half. Sung in the first person from the rapist’s perspective, it’s an uncomfortable, unsettling listen, but arguably the most powerful track on the album. First demoed in Madison with Cobain playing a five-string junk shop guitar, its stark, minimalist vibe was considered impossible to recreate at Sound City, so the original recording became the only track from Nirvana’s Smart Studio demo to be transferred intact to
Nevermind
.

If side two of
Nevermind
can’t quite sustain the drama and drive of the album’s opening 23½ minutes, it’s not without strokes of genius. Recorded in just one take, ‘Territorial Pissings’ is a rudimentary, frenetic punk rock blitz upon male machismo, a theme which had obsessed Cobain lyrically since the Fecal Matter demo. ‘Drain You’, Cobain’s bitter reflection on the break-up of his relationship with Tobi Vail, was originally conceived as a track for a Cobain/Grohl/Dale Crover side-band called The Retards, and demoed at Crover’s home in San Francisco in 1991 with Grohl playing bass; quite why Cobain originally considered it unworthy of Nirvana is a mystery, as the version captured at Sound City is one of
Nevermind
’s stand-out moments. ‘Lounge Act’ is also about Vail: in an unsent letter to his ex Cobain once wrote, ‘I don’t write songs about you, except for “Lounge Act”, which I do not play, except when my wife is not around.’

‘Stay Away’ (demoed at Smart as ‘Pay to Play’) and ‘On a Plain’ are the album’s two least self-conscious tracks; they’re also arguably the weakest moments on
Nevermind
, though Cobain’s sweet melody on the latter and Dave Grohl’s flat-out fucked drumming on the former merit repeated listens. The album concludes not with a bang, but with a whisper, with the haunting, fragile ‘Something in the Way’, Cobain’s factually questionable but undeniably emotive tale of living under Young Street Bridge in Aberdeen as a homeless teenager: ‘It almost killed Dave to play so quietly,’ Butch Vig later noted.

Nevermind
also offered up one hidden surprise – ‘Endless Nameless’, a thirteenth track of buckling distortion and roaring feedback culled from a free-form jam at the end of one particularly frustrating take on ‘Lithium’. Towards the end of the track, a furious Cobain can be heard smashing his black Fender Stratocaster into pieces, an appropriately committed way on which to end his band’s punk rock masterpiece.

In the twenty years that have passed since its release,
Nevermind
has been routinely acclaimed as one of the finest rock albums of all time. History, and the countless analytical articles devoted to its creation in the intervening years, may have robbed the disc of some of its mystery, but upon its release, like
The Stooges
,
Never Mind the Bollocks
and the
Nervous Breakdown
EP before it, this intoxicating tangle of angst, attitude, screaming guitars and fragmented lyrical riddles invited one compelling question: Who are these people and what do they want?

‘I had advance tapes of
Nevermind
,’ says Anton Brookes, ‘and it was bizarre, because whenever I went out to a gig I’d just get mobbed by people coming up to me going, “Oh, have you got a tape of that Nirvana album?” There was such a buzz about it. People would stop me in the streets sometimes and go, “Oh my God, so-and-so played me the Nirvana album, it’s incredible.” On the street
everybody
was talking about it.’

‘I first heard
Nevermind
on a cassette that had the first song slightly clipped,’ says Charles R. Cross. ‘I honestly think I made one hundred dubs of it and those dubs went out to probably thousands: years later I would talk to people who also had ended up with a dub of a tape with the clip.
Nevermind
was more than a huge leap forward: in many ways it didn’t even sound like the same band that made
Bleach
. Sonically it was a world apart. But it was the songs – ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Something in the Way’ – that made it. One can’t say enough about what a solid album it is. It may be the single last album that appealed to multiple genre lovers, and that everyone had in their collection. There hasn’t been anything like it since.’

‘I had a cassette copy of
Nevermind
because friends that booked them during the
Bleach
era were sent the advanced cassette of the album months before it came out,’ Dave Grohl’s future girfriend Melissa Auf der Maur, then a 19-year-old art student in her native Montreal, remembered in an interview for
Taking Punk to the Masses.
‘I put that thing on my tape player in my apartment and I cried. I invited every single person over and said, “Listen to this. The world is changed” … I was like, “Nobody is going to listen to anything but this record, because now the world has changed.”’

‘When you heard the first notes of the Nirvana record you just knew, you could just tell, that it was absolutely going to change
something
,’ says Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, who had helped kickstart the ‘Seattle Sound’ with Green River. ‘It was so obvious that it was the perfect balance of totally straight rock blues and punk rock. And sonically it had nothing to do with Mötley Crüe, which was so refreshing: as much as I loved the first Mötley Crüe record, I was ready for something new.’

Early reviews of
Nevermind
were overwhelmingly positive. In his 9/10
NME
review, writer (and future broadcaster) Steve Lamacq called it ‘a record for people who like Metallica, but can’t stomach their lack of melody’ and predicted the album would ‘stand up as a new reference point for the future post-hardcore generation’.
Kerrang!
’s Gordon Goldstein (aka former hardcore promoter/fanzine writer Mike Gitter) awarded the album a maximum KKKKK rating and hailed it as ‘a brutally frank record with a wounded soul’;
Rolling Stone
was more cautious, bestowing just three stars out of a possible five on the record (though a revisionist tweak on the magazine’s website now suggests
Nevermind
was granted four stars), but reviewer Ira Robbins recognised the album as a landmark release for the American rock underground.

Geffen pressed up 46,251 copies of the album in the US and 6,000 copies in the UK and hoped for the best. In truth, their focus was elsewhere: that same week Guns N’ Roses’ epic
Use Your Illusion I
and
Use Your Illusion II
albums débuted at numbers two and one respectively on the
Billboard
200 with first week sales of 685,000 for the first volume and 770,000 for volume two. Compared to the nation’s favourite hard rock band, Nirvana were very much a cult concern.

On the morning of 24 September, as part of their promotional campaign for the record, Dave Grohl, Chris Novoselic and Mark Kates visited Newbury Comics, Boston’s hippest independent record shop. They didn’t see a single person pick up a copy of the new Nirvana album. ‘We were expecting to see a line around the block, but there wasn’t,’ admits Kates. ‘There was no vibe whatsoever.’ The following morning the band and crew rose early, climbed into their trusty Dodge van and set out for Providence, Rhode Island to resume their tour at Club Babyhead. Among the touring party the vibe was very much business as usual.

‘The tour started in Toronto at the Opera House and it seemed like a fairly typical Nirvana gig,’ says Grohl. ‘There were maybe 500 or 600 people there. And to me you have to remember that was like making it – going from the 32 people who would usually come to see Scream in every city to like 500 people, I considered that to be the greatest success of my entire life. The capacities of a lot of the gigs that we were playing were low – we played a place in Portland, Maine or maybe Vermont where the legal capacity was 67, like a tiny little living room of a place, and it was chaotic. But when the video hit MTV it made a big difference.’