Nirvana (band)

• 1. Introduction

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  Nirvana formed in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1987, and by January 1992 had displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the top of the Billboard album charts. That moment captured something few people saw coming. A trio from the Pacific Northwest, with no formal musical training and a budget so slim that a friend had to pay for their debut album, had rewritten the rules of what rock music could be and who it could reach. How did an act that nearly broke up over drummer arguments in 1988 end up selling more than 75 million records worldwide? And what happens to a band when the culture needs it to be something larger than it ever intended?

• 2. Aberdeen to Sub Pop

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  Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic met at Aberdeen High School in Washington state, both drawn to the practice space of a local band called the Melvins. Their friendship was slow to ignite. Cobain gave Novoselic a demo tape of his earlier project, Fecal Matter, but Novoselic did not listen to it for three years. When he finally did, he suggested they start a band. Their first attempt was a Creedence Clearwater Revival tribute group called the Sellouts, which lasted only a short time.

  Cobain cycled through drummers throughout 1987 and 1988, working briefly with Aaron Burckhard and Dale Crover before settling on Chad Channing. The band ran through a string of names, including Skid Row, Pen Cap Chew, Bliss, and Ted Ed Fred, before performing as Nirvana for the first time on the 19th of March 1988, at Community World Theater in Tacoma, Washington. Cobain designed the concert flyer himself, listing all the previous names beneath the new one. He later explained he chose Nirvana because he wanted a name that was "kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk name like the Angry Samoans."

  A British band also called Nirvana sued over the name, but the dispute was resolved out of court. Meanwhile, the band had begun recording with local producer Jack Endino. The sessions for their debut album, Bleach, were financed by guitarist Jason Everman, who was subsequently brought into the group. Everman did not actually play on the album, but Novoselic explained they gave him a credit anyway to make him feel more at home. Bleach, released in June 1989 on the independent Seattle label Sub Pop, drew on the heavy dirge-rock of the Melvins, the punk of Mudhoney, and the metal of Black Sabbath. Initial sales reached 40,000 copies, driven largely by college radio. Nirvana had become the first band to sign an extended contract with Sub Pop, though Cobain grew frustrated by the label's limited promotion and distribution.

• 3. Nevermind and the Mainstream

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  In April 1990, Nirvana began sessions with producer Butch Vig at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. Bootlegs of these demos began circulating in the music industry, drawing interest from major labels. Channing, who had grown frustrated at being excluded from songwriting decisions, departed the band around this time. That September, Buzz Osborne of the Melvins introduced the band to Dave Grohl, whose Washington, D.C. band Scream had just broken up. Grohl auditioned within days of arriving in Seattle. Novoselic later said, "We knew in two minutes that he was the right drummer."

  Seeking a major label deal, Cobain and Novoselic consulted Soundgarden and Alice in Chains manager Susan Silver, who introduced them to agent Don Muller and attorney Alan Mintz, a specialist in placing new bands. Following repeated recommendations from Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Nirvana signed to DGC Records in 1990. Recording of Nevermind shifted from Vig's Madison studio to Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Los Angeles. After the sessions ran behind schedule and the initial mixes were deemed unsatisfactory, Slayer mixer Andy Wallace was brought in to create the final version. Nirvana members later expressed dissatisfaction with the polished sound Wallace had given the album.

  DGC hoped to sell 250,000 copies of Nevermind, matching what the label had achieved with Sonic Youth's Goo. Instead, the first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", gained momentum through heavy MTV airplay. While the band toured Europe in late 1991, its shows were dangerously oversold. By Christmas 1991, Nevermind was selling 400,000 copies a week in the US alone. In January 1992, the album displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous at number one on the Billboard charts and reached the top spot in numerous other countries. It eventually sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Billboard declared that month, "Nirvana is that rare band that has everything: critical acclaim, industry respect, pop radio appeal, and a rock-solid college/alternative base."

• 4. The Band Behind the Sound

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  Cobain described Nirvana's initial sound as "a Gang of Four and Scratch Acid ripoff". He wanted to mix what he called being "totally Led Zeppelin" with extreme punk rock and then "real wimpy pop songs". The band built its signature approach on dynamic contrasts, moving between quiet verses and loud, distorted choruses. Cobain said he heard that balance fully realized when he encountered the Pixies' 1988 album, Surfer Rosa, after recording Bleach. He had wanted that sound but had been too intimidated to attempt it.

  Cobain's guitar style relied on power chords and low-note riffs played with a loose left-handed technique. He rarely played standard solos, preferring single-note variations on the song's main melody. Music writer Jon Chappell described this approach as "almost an iconoclastic parody of the traditional instrumental break". The band had no formal musical training. Cobain said: "I have no concept of knowing how to be a musician at all whatsoever... I couldn't even pass Guitar 101."

  Biographer Michael Azerrad argued that Grohl's drumming "propelled the band to a whole new plane, visually as well as musically", noting that even without the rest of the band playing, you could identify the song from Grohl's parts alone. Onstage, the band made a habit of destroying equipment after shows. Novoselic said he and Cobain created the practice to get off stage sooner. Cobain traced it to frustration with Channing's habit of making mistakes and dropping out during performances. The lyrics followed a similarly unconventional path. Cobain told Spin in 1993 that he had not cared what the words on Bleach meant, while the lyrics to Nevermind were assembled from two years of accumulated poetry that he cut up and selected lines from.

• 5. In Utero and the Final Tour

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  For their third album, Nirvana chose producer Steve Albini, known for his principled stance on indie recording. Cobain said the choice came down to Albini's "natural" recording style, free of studio trickery. Albini and the band recorded the album in two weeks at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in February 1993. Shortly after, the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek ran stories quoting unnamed sources who claimed DGC considered the album "unreleasable". The stories proved untrue, but the band's own concerns about Albini's mixes led them to bring in R.E.M. producer Scott Litt to remix "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies", with Cobain adding more instrumentation and backing vocals.

  In Utero topped both the US and UK album charts and sold more than five million copies in the United States. Time critic Christopher John Farley wrote in his review, "Despite the fears of some alternative-music fans, Nirvana hasn't gone mainstream, though this potent new album may once again force the mainstream to go Nirvana." That October, the band embarked on its first US tour in two years, with Pat Smear of the punk band Germs added as a second guitarist, and support from Half Japanese and the Breeders.

  In November, Nirvana recorded an MTV Unplugged performance, augmented by Smear and cellist Lori Goldston. Rather than play their best-known songs, the band performed several covers and invited Cris and Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets to join them for three Meat Puppets songs. It was a deliberate departure from what audiences expected. Their final concert took place in Munich, Germany, on the 1st of March 1994. Three days later, in Rome, Courtney Love found Cobain unconscious in their hotel room after he had reacted to a combination of prescribed rohypnol and alcohol. The rest of the European tour was canceled.

• 6. Cobain's Death and Aftermath

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  After returning to Seattle following a brief stay in drug rehabilitation, Cobain was found dead on the 8th of April 1994, of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head at his home in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood. He had died approximately three days earlier. On April 10, a public vigil at a park at Seattle Center drew approximately 7,000 mourners.

  Within hours of the news breaking, stocks of Nirvana records ran low in stores. In the United Kingdom, sales rose dramatically. Unused concert tickets sold on the secondary market at inflated prices, a situation worsened when the manager of Brixton Academy falsely claimed on BBC Radio 1 that fans were buying tickets as a "piece of history" to avoid issuing refunds. Plans for a live album called Verse Chorus Verse were abandoned when Novoselic and Grohl found assembling the material emotionally overwhelming so soon after Cobain's death. DGC instead released the MTV Unplugged recording as MTV Unplugged in New York in November 1994. It debuted at number one on the Billboard charts and won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album at the 1996 ceremony.

  Grohl founded the Foo Fighters in 1994. Novoselic turned to political activism. In 1997, Novoselic, Grohl, and Courtney Love formed Nirvana LLC to manage future projects. The partnership collapsed in 2001 when Love filed a suit to dissolve it and block new releases. The dispute was settled the day before it was set to go to trial in October 2002. That November, the best-of compilation Nirvana was released, featuring "You Know You're Right", the last song the band ever recorded.

• 7. Legacy and Recognition

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  Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote that before Nirvana, alternative music was "consigned to specialty sections of record stores, and major labels considered it to be, at the very most, a tax write-off". After Nevermind, Erlewine argued, Nirvana "broke down the doors forever", not by eliminating the underground but by giving it exposure on a scale that had not existed before. Jon Pareles of The New York Times reported in 1992 that Nirvana's success had made other alternative acts impatient: "Suddenly, all bets are off. No one has the inside track on which of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ornery, obstreperous, unkempt bands might next appeal to the mall-walking millions."

  Biographer Michael Azerrad, in his 1993 book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, compared Nevermind's impact to the rock-and-roll explosion of the 1950s, writing that the album "came along at exactly the right time" for a generation that had been "overlooked, ignored, or condescended to". Fugazi frontman Guy Picciotto said the release made his own band's work feel as audible as "a hobo pissing in the forest".

  The Library of Congress added Nevermind to the National Recording Registry in 2005, collecting recordings deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically important. Rolling Stone ranked "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ninth on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2011. Nevermind placed first on the magazine's list of the 100 Best Albums of the Nineties, and Time labeled it "the finest album of the 1990s". Nirvana were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, their first year of eligibility. Former drummer Chad Channing was not included in the induction and learned of his omission by text message. He attended the ceremony, where Grohl publicly thanked him and acknowledged that he had written some of the band's most recognized drum parts.