Category: Nirvana

20 years later, ‘Nevermind’ box set is true nirvana

Smells Like Teen Spirit opens with Kurt Cobain firing off a simple riff. But it fast became the F-chord heard round the musical world.

The ‘Nevermind’ album cover features a baby swimming toward a dollar bill that is on a fishhook.

Twenty years ago this month, Nirvana released its Teen Spirit-anchored major-label debut, Nevermind. Expectations were modest; only 45,000 copies were pressed. To date, 30 million have sold worldwide.

“Nobody saw it coming,” says Dave Grohl, 42, who founded Foo Fighters after drumming in Nirvana. “Not the label, the band, the management. Some of our friends said, ‘You’re going to be huge.’ We said, ‘Like Sonic Youth? Awesome! Woo!'”

With a sonic vibe and video look that few expected to go mainstream, Nevermind ushered in a grungy era that saw rock’s creative envelope pushed to new extremes. “You can hear where we come from, American hard-core music,” says bassist Krist Novoselic, 46. “On Nevermind, we were promoting bands we liked.”

Fans looking for insights into the creation of this seminal album can dive into a four-CD, one-DVD set ($136, out Sept. 27 and exclusive to Best Buy through Oct. 24). The bundle includes everything from a remastered original album to boombox recordings of rehearsals in a Tacoma, Wash., barn. A two-CD deluxe edition ($20) and a remastered Nevermind ($11) also are available.

“In Utero (1993) is arguably a better album, but the reason we’re talking about Nevermind still is because it caused a generational shift from label-orchestrated music to an era with more artistic freedom,” says Charles R. Cross, author of the Cobain biographies Heavier Than Heaven and Cobain Unseen. “This album has a special place in music history.”

For album producer Butch Vig, 56, revisiting the past proved bittersweet.

“Hearing Teen Spirit again floored me, and reminded me that when I heard it for the first time (in May 1991 rehearsals at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, just outside Los Angeles), I got up and just started pacing,” he says. “It was just so loud and so tight.”

But he also was overwhelmed by the absence of the band’s creative touchstone, who took his own life in 1994 at age 27. “I wish Kurt was still here, because he’d be doing amazing things,” says Vig.

The five-disc set provides a forensic look at the ultimate Seattle grunge band in its heyday.
The first CD offers a sonically sizzling Nevermind, plus a range of B-sides. But the real fun starts on Disc 2, which finds the penniless band, back in 1990, burning through early versions of In Bloom and Polly at Vig’s Smart Studios in Madison, Wis.

Disc 3 features Vig’s first mixes of the album before Slayer producer Andy Wallace got involved. “I was cool with (Wallace stepping in),” says Vig. “I had gotten frustrated. Kurt kept asking me to turn the treble down. He wanted it all to sound like Black Sabbath.”

Disc 4 is the band playing a Halloween gig at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre (the concert featured in the set’s DVD) — just before Nevermind, propelled by the incessant playing of the Teen Spirit video on MTV, blew up and turned Nirvana’s once-insular world inside out.

“It was pretty shocking to become really famous, and Kurt being the head dude and all, he was naturally conflicted,” says Novoselic. “What I like about this (re-release) is that it all goes back to the beginning, back to the music.”

Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic talk Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ 20th anniversary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It’s been 20 years since the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” The album, which included cultural anthems like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are,” marked the beginning of the alt-rock movement of the 1990s and transformed drummer Dave Grohl, bassist Krist Novoselic and singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain into the poster boys of Generation X, until Cobain’s tragic suicide in 1994.

On a recent afternoon inside 606 Studio, the sprawling headquarters for Grohl’s band Foo Fighters, Grohl and Novoselic, while slumped on a couch near the same soundboard that they used to record “Nevermind,” reminisced with producer Butch Vig about how they made the album that forever changed their lives and what impact it had on the world.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of “Nevermind,” which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, Universal is re-issuing the remastered album Sept. 27 with various special editions. Bonus material includes obscure B-sides, alternate mixes, live recordings and video of the band’s 1991 Halloween concert at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre.

A limited super deluxe edition features rehearsal recordings captured on a boombox (“It was in the bottom of a box of stuff that was gonna get thrown out,” Novoselic recalls) and the original unused “Nevermind” mixes that Vig hoarded until the group began planning for the album’s anniversary last year.

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AP: What was your a-ha moment when you realized that “Nevermind” had become bigger than you?

Grohl: I’d say “Saturday Night Live.” Being asked to be on “SNL” was without a doubt that moment for me. That’s when I thought, “Oh my God. We’re one of THOSE bands now.” Then, in the dressing room, that’s when (expletive) “Weird Al” Yankovic calls and asks if he can do a parody of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That was a weird weekend. That was it for me.

Novoselic: It was shocking to be famous. I bought a house to deal with it. Then, of course, there was Kurt, who was thrust into being the spokesman of a generation. That was hard for him. He had some personal things going on that were happening just as fast. He was in a whirlwind. Kurt didn’t necessarily identify with Generation X or mainstream values.

AP: What was it like going back and listening to “Nevermind” after all these years?

Vig: It’s still out there. It’s omnipresent, but this is the first time I’ve listened to it from a critical perspective. The remastering sounds great. The album holds up really well. It’s timeless. I think part of that is because the songs are really good. The production isn’t gimmicky. It’s just bass, drums and guitar. There’s not any sort of trendy sound.

Grohl: “Nevermind” represents more than just an album with music on it to me. It was a specific, exciting time in my life. Personally, my life is split by the release of that album. My entire life is pre-“Nevermind” and post-“Nevermind.” When it came out, my whole (expletive) world was changed forever. There’s something about the innocence of it all.

AP: How do you think music has changed since “Nevermind” was released?

Grohl: Honestly, if you look at what was going on back then, outside of technology, all of that stupid (expletive) that was going on is still going on today. You’ve got stupid shows on TV to make people famous so they can sell records. The top 10 is full of crap. It’s the same (expletive). You’ve got all these rock bands trying to make it in a van somewhere.

Vig: With information moving so fast, the whole world has A.D.D. You only grab onto something for a second before you discard it. When “Nevermind” happened, it was still a slower time. That record really took off from a grass roots level. The label printed something like 40,000 copies. Word of mouth was faster than the Geffen publicity machine could handle.

AP: How do you feel about the impact “Nevermind” had not just on music but on culture?

Grohl: I have this shut-off valve. When I start getting to that place where I consider the impact of the album, I just turn off because it’s hard to imagine something so innocent and simple turning into something that’s out of your hands. I think that album came out at a time when a lot of kids didn’t have anything to believe in and Nivrana was entirely real.

Novoselic: I remember at the time when Nirvana was just breaking and we were still very idealistic about it. We thought, “Yeah, we’re gonna change the world!” It’s like when I first heard punk rock music and even hard rock music, it spoke to me, but then again, revolutions get co-opted, and it never really turns out the way you think it would turn out.

AP: If there was some rip in the space-time continuum, do you think you could have made “Nevermind” today?

Vig: I don’t think it would sound the same. There’s a feel on the record that you can’t really manipulate. These days, I love computers and moving stuff around and (expletive) with the sound. I feel technology would somehow get in the way of the kind of record we made back then. I know it wouldn’t make it better. It’s impossible to imagine that happening now.

Grohl: With technology these days, we could have been one of those bands who recorded it by ourselves in a garage and uploaded it to YouTube and bypassed any of the conventional industry routes. Who knows? I know that if Krist and I went in that booth right now and recorded on that board, we could sound exactly the same. That’s how simple the whole thing was.

REM’s Michael Stipe: ‘I tried to save Kurt Cobain’s life’ Singer says he tried to get Cobain to record with him
Michael Stipe has said he tried to get Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain to record a duet with him in order to “save his life.”
Speaking to Interview Magazine, Stipe said he sent a plane ticket and driver to Cobain’s home in Seattle to try and get him to come and record with him, but that the singer wouldn’t leave his house.
Asked about his failed attempt to record with Cobain, Stipe said: “I was doing that to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.”
He continued: “I constructed a project to try to snap Kurt out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t answer the phone.”
Stipe denied that the collaboration was part of an album, saying that it had “become part of mythology.”
The REM frontman also opened up about when he suffered from bulimia in the early 1980s, describing it as “a complete meltdown.”
He said: “I went through this difficult time when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That’s when the bulimia kicked in. And that’s when I got really freaky.”
Stipe described the illness as “a control thing” and said it lasted for “about a year.”

Sonic Youth/Nirvana 1991 Tour Documentary Coming to DVD
In 1991, Sonic Youth was on tour tearing through Europe. Opening for the band was a rising grunge outfit from Seattle called Nirvana.
The tour became the focus of documentary film 1991: The Year Punk Broke. While Sonic Youth is the main subject of the doc, Nirvana gets plenty of screentime, while Dinosaur Jr., The Ramones, Babes in Toyland and Gumball are featured as well.
According to director Dave Markey, Universal Music is planning an extended 20th anniversary edition of the movie on DVD later this year. As a bonus, the DVD will include a 42-minute film called (This Is Known As) The Blues Scale, which contains never before seen performances from Sonic Youth (ìInhumanî, ìWhite Krossî, ìOrange Rolls/Angelís Spitî, and ìEricís Tripî) and Nirvana (ìIn Bloomî). Other features include footage of a 2003 panel discussion with Sonic Youthís Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley, Dinosaur Jr.ís J Mascis, and Markey, as well as supplemental performance material and feature-length commentary from Markey and Moore.
No official release date has been announced yet.

Kurt Cobain guitar sculpture dedicated in Wash.
ABERDEEN, Wash. ñ A sculpted guitar memorial to Kurt Cobain has been unveiled in a park in the Nirvana frontman’s Washington state hometown.
The dedication in Aberdeen on Tuesday marked the 17th anniversary of Cobain’s suicide in Seattle. A diverse group of fans and Aberdeen residents, many born after Cobain’s 1994 death, attended the ceremony.
The sculpture was placed in a park near the Young Street bridge where Cobain spent time while growing up. The bridge attracts Cobain fans because it’s mentioned in his song “Something in the Way.”
Besides the concrete guitar, there’s a steel ribbon dangling in the air with lyrics from the Nirvana song “On a Plain” that say: “One more special message to go and then I’m done and I can go home.”

Dave Grohl: ‘I’ve spent my career trying to step out of Nirvana’s shadow’
Dave Grohl has said he invited his ex-Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic to play on the band’s new album as he feels he’s moved “out of the shadow” of his old band.
Novoselic contributes to Foo Fighters’ new album ‘Wasting Light’, on the song ‘I Should Have Known’.
Grohl said he invited him to play as the album was being produced by Butch Vig, who also was at the control desk for Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’.
He told The Sun: “I invited Krist to come down as we were making it with Butch, we haven’t been in the studio together for 20 years.”
He added that he felt comfortable doing so as he believes Foo Fighters are so well established in their own right now, 17 years into their career.
“I’ve tried to establish this band in its own right and try to get out of the shadow of Nirvana and I do that in the most respectful way,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Nirvana, I owe everything to that band.”
He also said that recording the track brought back many memories of being in Nirvana. “‘I Should Have Known’ is a Foo Fighters song, not a Nirvana song, but there were moments that really reminded me of 1991,” he said.
‘Wasting Light’ is released on April 11.