The Roots of Nirvana
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No band develops in a vacuum; every band starts out
thinking, at least a bit, of other musicians that they want to take after or
rebel against. But Nirvana was the first great band of actual music snobs:
record fiends who wanted to make it very clear exactly what they listened to.
They all loved Led Zep and Aerosmith and CCR and Black Sabbath and Kiss and
then some more Led Zep on top of that. Mostly, though, Kurt Cobain and Krist
Novoselic had grown up as
punk rock kids. They hung out with the Melvins in
define their position with respect to K Records and the
Brains records like shields to ward off poseurs. (Dave Grohl had a roughly
equivalent experience growing up in the DC area.) When they hit the big time,
they covered their favorite bands, got them to open for Nirvana, wore their
T-shirts every chance they got. Kurt even oversaw reissues of his beloved
Raincoats' lost work.
In case there was any ambiguity left about who Nirvana considered their
ancestors, it's all laid out in Kurt's Journals
-- the scribblings of an inveterate listmaker who clearly loved even writing
the names of his favorite records, like talismans of good luck and good punk
rock karma. Certain discs turn up again and again in Kurt's pantheons of music:
some are multiplatinum warhorses (Meet
the Beatles, Aerosmith's Rocks),
others are hopelessly obscure (Fang's Land
Shark, the self-titled Tales of Terror album). Most of them,
though, are remarkable American indie-rock and hardcore albums from the '80s,
with a few artier European post-punk records and the inevitable Leadbelly album
thrown in. They're worth investigating for anyone who loves Nirvana: these are
not just the raw materials Cobain and Novoselic and Grohl transmuted into gold,
they're what the band aspired to.
The Best Of Leadbelly
Artist: Lead Belly
Release Date: 2003
When
Nirvana played their wrenching cover of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep
Last Night?" (a.k.a. "In the Pines") on MTV Unplugged, it looked like an
unexpected gesture toward the blues blood that still courses so powerfully
through rock's veins. Actually, though, Kurt doesn't seem to have been so into
vintage blues in general -- he just loved Leadbelly obsessively (and had
previously recorded four Leadbelly songs with Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan).
This collection is a solid introduction to the "King of the Twelve-String
Guitar," a roaring ex-con who miraculously pulled joyful music out of his
personal horrors.
Surfer
Pilgrim
Artist: The Pixies
Release Date: 1988
Kurt
called this 1988 album "a die-cast metal fossil from a spacecraft,"
and some of the Pixies' favorite tricks -- endlessly looping riffs that had
never quite been used before, tense clean-toned verses that bloom into
explosive, distorted choruses -- showed up on Nevermind a few years later. Steve Albini's
drumstick-to-your-skull engineering work here pretty obviously inspired Nirvana
to hire him for In Utero,
too. But most of what Nirvana got from the Pixies was an attitude: the sense of
being off-balance and screaming while keeping one foot in tightly controlled
structure.
Over The Edge
Artist: Wipers
Release Date: 1983
Kurt's
"Top 50" list ultimately included three albums by
of
and 1983's Over the Edge.
Singer-guitar monster Greg Sage's band was ferociously chugging and deeply into
its own alienation -- and operated independently of the music-business machine
-- years before anyone else in the
caught on to their techniques. Nirvana and Hole both eventually covered Wipers
songs; "So Young," from this album, could very easily be mistaken for
a Cobain original.
Singles 1-12
Artist: Melvins
Release Date: 1997
If you
were a punk rock kid in Aberdeen, Washington in the mid-'80s, the Melvins were
IT: they spiked their hardcore with brutal metal, they could play scorchingly
fast or tortuously slow, they got to play in Olympia and Seattle and their
practice space was the locus of the local punk scene. They also had a knack for
doing screwed-up things on their recordings, and the 1996 series of singles
collected here is classic Melvins -- tributes to the Germs, Flipper and
Butthole Surfers, corrosive audio experiments and straight-up blasts of the
grunge style they helped to invent.
Jamboree
Artist: Beat Happening
Release Date: 1988
In some
ways, Kurt never quite fit in with Olympia's K Records, their flagship band
Beat Happening and the "love-rock" scene around them -- too much
tummy-rubbing, not enough gut-punch -- but he loved it enough that he got the K
logo tattooed on his left arm, and its fascination with childhood fed his own.
1988's Jamboree, evidently
his favorite Beat Happening record, is half pastel nostalgia, half savage
dread, a la-la pop album that collapses into a puddle of screeching noise at
the end.
Bayou Country
Artist: Creedence
Release Date: 1969
Like a
lot of other punk bands, Nirvana adored classic rock; unlike most of their
peers, they embraced it -- one of Cobain and Novoselic's first attempts to play
music together was a Creedence cover band. Kurt cited this 1969 album as a
favorite of his, and you can hear a lot of John Fogerty's throaty bellow on
"Born on the Bayou" in the way he taught himself to sing; you can
also hear how Creedence's sturdy chording and simple melodies resurfaced in
Nirvana's music. What Nirvana might also have picked up from Creedence, though,
was the art of self-reinvention and presentation: remember, Fogerty's really a
native.
LiliPUT
Artist: Kleenex / LiliPUT
Release Date: 2003
"Anything
by Kleenex" was the way Kurt usually put it on his lists of favorite
records. The young Swiss women who recorded first as Kleenex and then as
LiLiPUT between 1978 and 1983 had a garbled discography, and this compilation
of everything by them didn't appear in the
delirious, glorious singles "Split," "Ain't You" and
"Eisiger Wind," full of shrieks and chirps, and powered by the
rhythms of people who are determined to play their way and nobody else's.
Kill Rock Stars
Artist: Various Artists - Kill Rock Stars
Release Date: 2003
In the
summer of 1991, Nirvana were just another well-loved Washington band, and the
other bands compiled here -- on the anthology that launched the label of the
same name -- were their contemporaries and scenemates: their old pals the
Melvins, Bikini Kill (featuring Kurt's ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail), label owner
Slim Moon's band Witchypoo, Steve Fisk (who'd recorded the Blew EP), Heavens to Betsy (with a very
young Corin Tucker, later of Sleater-Kinney) and a duo of Lois Maffeo and Pat
Maley that went by the name of Courtney Love -- no relation... or almost none.
Extended Play
Artist: The Raincoats
Release Date: 1995
In the
liner notes of Incesticide,
Kurt told the story of how he'd tracked down "that wonderfully classic
scripture," the Raincoats' 1979 debut album, in
and Gina Birch reformed the group in 1994 to open for Nirvana on the tour that
never happened. They did, however, tour
BBC radio session: two new songs and two early favorites, performed with the
sure-footed power and fresh-minded re-conception of the proper language,
subject and sound for pop songs that had drawn Cobain to them in the first
place.
About the Author
Here author Douglas Wolk writes about the “Nirvana”, the first great band of actual music snobs.
Read more about its albums, enjoy the real taste and much more with E-Music that brings in free
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