A Self-Indulgent Musical History Lesson

Last night while watching another channel that I didn’t have before Greg moved in (MMM), I stumbled across their “Classic Albums” show. Which normally bores the piss outta me, but this one peaked me interest, as it was Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Now I won’t bore you with a little diatribe about how it was a supposed groundbreaking album, setting a new music scene and ostensibly killing “Metal” as we knew it….mostly because that is revisionist history.

“What? Blasphemy!”, you say?

Consider the following:

1. Pearl Jam actually came out first, and while Nevermind beat out Ten (in sales, alone…they are basically a wash musically, in my mind), Vs. absolutely killed In Utero. Mostly because In Utero sucked.

2. The unmitigated sell-out that was MTV Unplugged which was excellent, but basically went against somewhere between 98% and 99% of what Nirvana stood for. That last 1-2% being the snazzy little cardigan Kurt wore.

3. Let’s be honest…if Billy Corgan had killed himself, and Kurt Cobain had not, wouldn’t they have basically traded places on the musical history timeline? Siamese Dream was damned good…but the ridiculous self-indulgence of the Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness double album (which could have easily been just a kick-ass “normal” album), followed by the recent trainwreck known as Zwan kinda ruined poor Billy. Granted, A Perfect Circle is pretty fucking cool, but that has a lot to do with Maynard from Tool, not to mention the (seemingly) dozen other musicians on the band…

All that said, I would still contend that Nevermind was one of the best in a two-year span that saw (as Neil and I have contended many times) some of the best albums of our time. Approximately 1990-92 saw (in no particular order) Nirvana’s Nevermind, U2’s Achtung Baby, STP’s Core, Green Day’s Dookie, Metallica’s Black Album, hell…I think Use Your Illusions I & II even came out in that time! Soundgarden’s Superunknown came out a year or so later, but does at least deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. I’m sure there are some I’m missing, but screw it….moving on….

I just found it really really cool to hear what Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Butch Vig (the album’s producer) all had to say about the album…and really, hearing Butch cut tracks in and out of the songs from the board was really quite interesting. I’ve heard similar treatments on other versions of this show, but never relating to an album I know quite so intimately. It was incredible! I never knew that they doubled a lot of the vocals in choruses (chrorii?), and I also didn’t know that Dave sang a lot of falsetto back ups, and stuff. I had assumed it was all Kurt. I also enjoyed how they were all fawning over Cobain’s vocal abilities…how he really sang with tremendous pitch for having so much “gravelly” sound in his voice. Dave talks about Kurt’s screaming parts, saying that they sound like he’s “gargling with nails.” Yet, on some of the quieter tracks (“Something in the Way”, for example) Kurt and Butch almost couldn’t get Dave and Krist’s drums and bass, respectively, quiet enough to match Kurt’s voice and guitar.

But anyway, Grohl continues and actually addresses one of the biggest criticisms of Nirvana, and that’s the fact that their songs were soooooo simple. He contends that Kurt intended it like that. Dave didn’t add extra drum fills and such because they wanted to make “children’s songs”, meaning that they were simple…not over done. Butch Vig contended that Cobain wanted to have such loud guitar and pounding drums on the album to cover up the fact that they were basically catchy pop songs with great hooks - a point that speaks to the somewhat unexpected mass appeal of the album.

One interesting thing I didn’t know was that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was apparently written only a short time before Nevermind’s release (I believe they said the “newest” song on the album), which put it a stark contrast to “Lithium” and “In Bloom”, for example, which were apparently written much earlier.

Arguably the funniest part of the show was when Krist seems to feign some kind of revelation when he says “that album was likely the greatest thing I’ve done in my life.”

I just about died laughing at that one... :)