Nirvana
Nevermind: Deluxe Edition
(Geffen/Universal)
I’ve listened to Nevermind maybe twice since the 1990s. No need to visit it more often: I had it memorised, and the feelings it brought back were overwhelming. Like so many, I had my impressionable young world turned upside-down by Nirvana, and from there I was too busy devouring new bands to look back much. Maybe I’d still have become a music critic without the nuclear blast of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but it’s hard to imagine another one song rearranging the DNA of a generation.
Twenty years later, here I sit swamped again in that riotous cataloguing of disaffection and narcissism, thanks to Nevermind’s big-event two-disc reissue. First comes the original album, at once unchanged and alien. The choruses strike me as ridiculously effective: pop sing-alongs hidden in the outsider sneer of punk. That radioactive pop core can’t be contained – not by dank effects, fragmented lyrics or even a mocking self-awareness about underground rock bands making major-label debuts. Butch Vig’s radio-glossed production has taken its share of lashes – and certainly the faint echo on Kurt Cobain’s voice during ‘Breed’ seems silly now – but he brings out the crossover potential of these songs even when they’re infected by groggy angst and vague sentiments. Like those loping verses and ravenous choruses, Vig’s pro sheen is a roadworthy vehicle for Cobain’s musing-venting-musing streaks.
Any other revelations? Just a few. Even now the watery glisten in the chorus of ‘Teen Spirit’ can’t be separated from the pool-set album sleeve. ‘Drain You’ has more space to breathe than other songs, and “It is now my duty to completely drain you” is still my favourite line on the record. The hidden track ‘Endless, Nameless’ is as close to The Jesus Lizard as Nirvana let themselves get on Nevermind, and the song was only included on certain runs of the album. And as knowing about image as ‘Come As You Are’ and ‘In Bloom’ are, Cobain prickly self-obsession makes him sound as needy and uncertain as he probably was. No wonder the world’s teenagers ate this up.
Then march the album’s B-sides, starting with my old favourite ‘Even in His Youth’ (originally released on the Australian-only Hormoaning EP), another slice of dead-end life. ‘Aneurysm’ tips it hat to early rock, while the grind and gristle of ‘Curmudgeon’ is doused with more soggy effects. A Peel Session cover of The Wipers’ ‘D-7’ touches on Cobainian themes of “rejects” and “defects.” This first disc is capped by a string of live songs circa 1991, from another serrated hook and casually surging chorus in ‘Been A Son’ to the jangle-to-fuzz and extended bridge of ‘Drain You’. Two tunes from a second gig aren’t as revealing, though.
More interesting is the second disc, which kicks off with Vig sessions from 1990, when Chad Channing was still drumming. You can tell why Nirvana thought ‘In Bloom’ would be their breakout song, but Channing simply doesn’t have that explosive style of drumming Dave Grohl brought to the band. He sounds helplessly subdued on ‘Lithium’ and even on the standout ‘Dive’, never providing the snap that teamed with Vig’s production to propel these songs into the stratosphere. A tingling take on The Velvet Underground’s ‘Here She Comes Now’ betrays the underground pop fixation that also gave us some fantastic Vaselines covers, and ‘Sappy’ and ‘Pay to Play’ (an early version of ‘Stay Away’) already sit firmly in Nirvana mythology.
Then come the “Boombox Rehearsals” demos from the trio’s Tacoma, Washington practise space in spring 1991. With Grohl now on board, Nirvana sounds like a literal garage band: bratty and terribly recorded. The non-album orphans ‘Verse Chorus Verse’ and ‘Old Age’ get an airing, and ‘Teen Spirit’ comes through just fine in the din. No surprise that ‘Territorial Pissings’ is missing its Youngbloods reference, or that Cobain’s voice speaks more of shredded vocal chords than of a future icon. In all its crude glory, ‘On a Plain’ transmits best, with ‘Lounge Act’ a close second.
Finally, if one needs yet another way of viewing this material and era, BBC sessions of ‘Drain You’ and ‘Something in the Way’ show a Nirvana that’s cleaner and tighter than those demos but also without Vig’s studio tricks. Both versions are terrific.
Does any of this bring us that much closer to a band and album that have long since been examined to death? Yes and no. Most of the boombox stuff is previously unreleased, as are some of the early Vig sessions and those two BBC versions. If anything, they shed light on all the variables that played into Nevermind’s success. With a different drummer or different producer, or with its songs in their earlier forms, it might have been a mere cult classic instead of a game-changing juggernaut.
On the other hand, listening to the eerie power of these songs today, maybe it was always only a matter of time before the world bowed at Nirvana’s feet. And with them, an endless stream of fans – including a certain 12-year-old still recovering from the ’80s – who didn’t know how ready they were for the game to be changed.
Doug Wallen