When I got the tape back to my office at The Rocket I began dubbing cassettes of Nevermind for my friends. This was certainly illegal, but I justified that decision knowing that all my friends would buy the album when it officially came out on September 24. That was almost a month away, and it would have been torture to wait. My advance cassette with the clipped “Teen Spirit” spread through Seattle like a fast-moving storm, and by week’s end there were hundreds, if not thousands, of dubs.
Sometime around 2004, after Kurt had been dead for a decade, I was with a friend at an open house in Tacoma, thirty miles south of Seattle. The house owner had a homemade cassette of Nevermind on the shelf, and it looked like my handwriting on the insert. When the listing agent wasn’t looking, I put it into the stereo, hit play, and heard the telltale clipped “Teen Spirit.” My early advance tape had flown south.
So much of the story of Nevermind, and of Kurt Cobain, has become apocryphal over the years, as his shadow has become bigger than life. Many pundits today suggest they knew in advance that Nevermind was going to be a monster hit. But none could have truly predicted the success it had. I certainly didn’t have a clue. Listening to it that first time in the parking lot of Tower Records, I loved it, but I thought it too loud, too raw, and too edgy to be a mainstream smash. “Teen Spirit” blew me away, but I couldn’t imagine, given where music had been the previous decade, that mainstream radio would play it. To my ears, “Lithium” was the hit on the album, and I thought that “Teen Spirit” would serve only as a kind of advance clarion. I was wrong, of course, but so was DGC/Geffen Records. The label pressed only 46,251 copies of Nevermind initially, and that entire first pressing sold out by October. If Geffen had any idea the album was going to be the success it became, they would have made more, since the economy of scale would have lowered their per-disc costs significantly.
A week before Nevermind was officially released, a record-release party was held at a Seattle bar. At that party, I put forth the outrageous prediction that the album could sell one hundred thousand copies. That figure was so fantastic, and so outside of what seemed like the realm of possibility at the time, that it earned a quizzical eyebrow raise from Kurt Cobain and the other members of the band. I wasn’t the only one forecasting wild success: the guys from Sub Pop Records, who owned a minority interest in Nevermind, were touting the same figures. That one-hundred-thousand mark, which was what Sonic Youth’s Goo had sold in 1990, was considered the upper threshold of the possible for any band playing what we had just begun to call “alternative rock.” Though the term “alternative” was loosely applied to any band that didn’t fit into mainstream rock—Tom Waits could end up on an alternative radio chart right next to the Cure, though their music had little in common—the name fit for Nirvana, who were certainly not mainstream.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” changed alternative rock, and changed even the very definition of what mainstream music could encompass. “Teen Spirit” first became an MTV video hit, then a radio smash, and it continued to gain extraordinary momentum. One of Geffen’s top executives said that even the label brass were surprised at how fast it climbed the sales charts. All the label had to do, he said, was “get out of the way.” The single eventually sold more than a million copies, and that was in a pre-download world where music could only be purchased as a physical item, from a store. On radio, the song topped airplay charts. Billboard didn’t begin to break down “alternative rock” radio play as a separate category until just after Nevermind, but applying their sales-to-airplay chart computation to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” puts that particular song as the most-played alternative rock track ever. Even on mainstream Top 40 radio, where R&B usually dominated, the song went to No. 6.
After that initial pressing of Nevermind sold out, it took Geffen time to get more copies printed and delivered to stores. For one of the first times in the modern record business, there was an actual shortage of an album, and Nevermind became, for a couple of weeks, impossible to find. The album had debuted at No. 144 on Billboard’s chart, so despite its ultimate success, it was not an out-of-the-box smash. The album didn’t hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 200 sales charts for four months. It would ultimately spend 253 consecutive weeks on the charts, though.
Kurt did not immediately become rich off the album. I examined his 1991 federal tax return, and in that year, with a hit album and a sold-out tour, he earned just $29,541, mostly from concert fees. That’s evidence of how slow record labels are to pay royalties, but also illustrates how poor Kurt was prior to Nevermind’s success. Kurt’s paltry income in a banner year also explains why even as a success he was fearful he would be penniless again. He only became rich during the last two years of his life, which is why his fear of scarcity and poverty were ever present. Having been poor for so long, he felt any money he did earn would disappear. Those fears would play a big role in his desire to run away from the world and, ultimately, in his death.
Record sales and airplay are two ways to quantify success in the music business, but those numbers aren’t the only measure. Nirvana also changed the music industry because they were an organic runaway success in an era when hit bands were usually heavily shaped, promoted, and marketed by record labels. Before Nevermind, it was not uncommon for label brass to pick the songs that would go on a rock album, or to bring in outside musicians to supplement the band in the studio. And while that practice continued in pop, in alternative rock Nirvana, at least temporarily, shifted that. Nirvana’s triumph transferred power from the labels to the individual artists, who in the post-Nirvana era had more creative control (for the most part, within rock music). Because of Nirvana, the industry had to rethink where the next rock stars might come from. Labels began to look for talent outside of New York and Los Angeles. Kurt Cobain’s success was a breakthrough for bands in Portland, Chapel Hill, Omaha, and countless other places that had been off the radar of the industry. The underdogs were now running the show.
Brian Eno is often credited with saying that the first Velvet Underground album sold only ten thousand copies, “but everyone who bought it formed a band.” Listening to rock radio now, two decades after Kurt’s death, it sometimes feels as if Eno’s paradigm could be far truer for million-copy-selling Nirvana, who possibly spawned a million bands. A wide array of acts, famous and unknown, bring the sound of Nirvana to mind, or at the very least their use of loud/soft dynamics within one song. Major-label bands who it could be argued were influenced by Nirvana include Bush, Weezer, Stone Temple Pilots, Green Day, Feeder, Blink 182, Matchbox 20, Linkin Park, Creed, the White Stripes, Three Days Grace, Puddle of Mudd, Cage the Elephant, Rise Against, A Perfect Circle, Thirty Seconds to Mars, OK Go, System of a Down, Nickelback, Muse, Evanescence, Jet, Three Doors Down, Fuel, Breaking Benjamin, and, of course, Dave Grohl’s own Foo Fighters. And these are just the obvious ones, leaving out the hundreds of bands with an obvious Nirvana influence successful enough to have landed record deals, but who aren’t as known.
Nevermind transformed rock radio entirely, often making the alternative station the highest rated in a given market. In Los Angeles that was KROQ; in Seattle KNDD; in Atlanta 99X; and in Boston there were two alternative powerhouses, WFNX and WBCN, both of which played Nirvana what seemed like hourly. “Kurt had, and has, the single biggest influence on alternative rock, and certainly on alternative rock radio, of any artist of the past two decades,” Marco Collins told me. Collins should know: as a DJ at Seattle station KNDD, he was one of the first to champion “Teen Spirit,” helping break the song. “Alternative radio grew to become an actual format because of Kurt’s influence. Many of the younger bands getting airplay today went to the school of Kurt and Nirvana. You almost can’t overstate his influence. It is, in many ways, even bigger today than it was in the fall of 1991. That sound is everywhere.”
To understand Nevermind’s impact, and Kurt’s, you have to first remember what music was popular in the decade prior. Rock in the eighties had gone in a highly formulaic d
irection, dominated by soft rock ballads in which style was often put before substance. Almost every hit eighties song was about girls, cars, romance, heartbreak, and partying. Among the top ten singles of that decade were “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, “Call Me” by Blondie, “Lady” by Kenny Rogers, “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band, “Flashdance” by Irene Cara, “Endless Love” by Diana Ross, and “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. Those well-known chestnuts now sound like they came from an entirely different planet than “Teen Spirit.”
Even looking just at the rock genre, the field was dominated by “soft” metal bands who topped the radio charts and MTV play lists from the eighties through the early nineties. Poison, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Winger, Loverboy, Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses, and Van Halen all could “rock,” and consistently filled arenas with screaming teenage girls, but they often scored their biggest hits with ballads made into sexed-up videos. They were called “hair bands” because of their giant hairstyles, generally far bigger than the scope of their talent or critical success. Their videos became more important than their songs. Mainstream rock music was so bad in the eighties and early nineties, and so driven by image over substance, that Nirvana enjoyed what was fortuitous timing: they had something to rebel against.
Nirvana recorded Nevermind at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, in the spring of 1991, and the band that preceded them in the studio, with a couple days’ overlap mixing in a smaller room, was perhaps the most maligned hair-metal band of all, Warrant. Warrant were best known for their cheesy, highly sexualized “Cherry Pie” video, which dominated MTV for a few months in 1990. Kurt grabbed the studio’s in-house address system during the days the bands overlapped and belted that song’s chorus over the studio’s speakers: “She’s my cherry pie!” While he was poking fun, Kurt was also putting Warrant on notice that music was shifting. Rolling Stone once declared that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” managed a nearly impossible task and “wiped the lingering jive of the Eighties off the pop map overnight.” It was hello Nirvana, good-bye Warrant.
Even to those who weren’t fans of Nirvana, one aspect of Kurt’s impact is simply that his band shifted entirely what music was on the radio or on MTV. “For those turned off by the saccharine pop and hair-metal excess topping the music charts, ‘Teen Spirit’ was a godsend,” Jacob McMurray of Seattle’s Experience Music Project museum told me. “Kurt’s primal screams, nonlinear prose, and general disdain for the ‘meaning’ behind his lyrics mirrored an angst-driven pushback.” Kurt changed the sound—and the culture—of music.
There was still manufactured pop music after Nirvana, but when Kurt sang about angst and anger, with lyrics that included “an albino, a mosquito, my libido,” he changed preconceptions about what topics a song on the radio could cover. A wider—and darker—emotional spectrum opened. Sonically, musical styles that had previously been found only in punk rock, at rock’s fringes, became the dominant force. Much has been made about how Nirvana took punk rock to the masses, but Krist Novoselic told me in 1999 that that’s not exactly what happened. “We didn’t bring punk to the mainstream,” Krist said, “we brought the mainstream to punk.” Nirvana was not just a flash-in-the-pan band with one hit song that crossed over. Instead, the influence of the band was so great, they opened the minds and ears of the unexpected fan, and indeed the masses.
By the mid-nineties, even Warrant had shifted their music to try to sound like Nirvana.
Legacies in music are preserved not just by sales charts or radio plays but also by articles, essays, and endless lists of the “best” music compiled by critics for magazines, television shows, and websites. Within rock ’n’ roll, that critical zeitgeist plays an oversize role in how a band stands in history. For example, take Big Star, who never were commercially successful, but whose critical reputation kept them touring, their albums in print, and in 2013 spawned a documentary film. Usually critics’ darlings never sell well, but Nirvana are the rare case of a band that enjoyed high standing with critics and simultaneous runaway commercial success.
Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, and usually Nevermind appear on the upper reaches of virtually every critic’s best-of list of the past twenty years. Both Spin and Rolling Stone named Nevermind the top album of the nineties. A 2000 list compiled by Rolling Stone and MTV of the one hundred best pop songs of all time ranked “Smells Like Teen Spirit” third, behind “Yesterday” by the Beatles and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. In Rolling Stone’s 2004 list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” with a slightly different set of voting critics than in 2000, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came in ninth, and it was the only song in the top ten that came out after 1971.
Critics and fans in the United Kingdom have always held Kurt in even higher esteem. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was picked by Q magazine’s contributors as the third-best song of all time, behind only U2’s “One” and Aretha Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer” (and, surprisingly, ahead of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” the usual UK top choice). In 2002, New Musical Express ranked “Smells Like Teen Spirit” the second-greatest song ever, after only Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” The video to “Teen Spirit” almost always shows up in the upper reaches of any critic’s list, and it was VH1’s pick for the best video of the nineties. Nevermind gets the love from not just music magazines: Entertainment Weekly named the album the tenth best of all time in 2013.
These accolades go on and on, and they put Kurt and Nirvana in rarefied air. And as time goes by, the band’s standing doesn’t diminish, which is often the case as new talent and fresh recordings dilute the potential pool of great albums. Nevermind now competes with not just albums by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, but also Adele. In several more recent polls, Nirvana have ranked higher than they did a decade ago, and significantly higher than when Nevermind came out in 1991.
When Nevermind was first released, it earned mixed reviews. Most of them were positive, but only a few were raves. The Rocket published one of those raves, calling the album “the kind of music that you fell in love with.” The Boston Globe review was on the other end of the spectrum, criticizing it as “generic pop-punk that’s been done better by countless acts,” with lyrics that were “moronic ramblings by singer-lyricist Cobain, who has an idiotic tendency to sound like the Rod McKuen of hard rock.” Rolling Stone’s review, written by former Trouser Press editor Ira Robbins, was favorable but far from glowing. “Nevermind boasts an adrenalized pop heart and incomparably superior material [to Bleach],” Robbins wrote.
Rolling Stone gave Nevermind only three out of five stars, which translates in their rating guide to an “average” album. The review section editor assigns star ratings in Rolling Stone, with input from the writer. In a bit of revisionist history, the magazine has since reassigned Nevermind a four-star rating in its archived online copy of that original review. In other words, the same album with the same review was later assigned another star by the editors. That’s the equivalent of the Michelin Guide changing the historical star rating of a restaurant from two to three stars, not for the current food but retroactively for a course served twenty years prior.
Music critics and editors, like baseball umpires, are known to blow a call (this writer included). But Nevermind’s critical rise has gone well beyond that one additional star. In 2003 Rolling Stone’s critics and editors ranked it as the seventeenth-greatest album “of all time,” ahead of anything by Led Zeppelin, Chuck Berry, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, the Who, or James Brown. The CD of Nevermind that was reviewed in 1991 plays the same music as it did in 2003, and it plays the same music today (though the 2011 reissue has slightly improved sound quality due to remastering). The music on the album didn’t change, but in the passing years it somehow got better, or at least the perception of the music shifted, and the importance of the record looms larger.
And Rolling Stone’s poll is just one of many where Nevermind has improved
with age. Spin magazine’s 1991 year-end list had Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque as the top album, R.E.M.’s Out of Time as second, and Nevermind third. Nine years later Spin would name Nevermind the best album of the decade. Rolling Stone’s 1991 year-end list also rated Nevermind third, after R.E.M. and U2.
Those jumps—from being a three-star album upon release, to the third best at the end of 1991, to a four-star album online by the late nineties, to the best of the decade by 1999, before vaulting to seventh-best album of all time a dozen years after it was first released—are the absolute proof of Kurt Cobain’s enduring legacy. Those leaps in critical standings also prove that Kurt’s artistic work grew in perceived significance after his death, even as the music itself didn’t change. Some of that is common in rock ’n’ roll and happened as well to some rock stars who died young—including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and even, recently, Amy Winehouse. Their short lives magnified their relatively small bodies of work, and they are revered in death beyond their fame in life. But even those music legends—all but Winehouse are now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—didn’t enjoy the rise in reputation Kurt has experienced. Part of that is simply where Kurt appears on the continuum of rock. Kurt followed Jimi Hendrix, and thus Hendrix had to, at least posthumously, compete with Kurt, just as Nevermind now competes with Adele’s 21, in critic poll lists. There have been talented rock stars in the last twenty years, including Adele, but so far, in my opinion, none of them would win a critical cage match with Kurt if you compared their full catalog of songs. So he sits at the end of the line, for the moment.
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