“Negative Creep” is a first-person narrative from an antisocial person—“I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned,” goes the chanted chorus—the kind that hangs out on the smoker’s porch, scowling and sporting long greasy hair and black T-shirts touting dubious metal bands. According to Kurt, that person is himself. “I just thought of myself as a negative person” is his simple explanation. Kurt caught some flak from the Seattle music community for the line “Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more” because it was dangerously close to Mudhoney’s “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More.” Kurt claims it was merely a subconscious theft.
By the end, it was very late and Kurt was getting burned out. He wrote “Scoff” and “Sifting” at this point. In “Scoff,” Kurt listlessly wails “In my eyes, I’m not lazy” “In your eyes, I’m not worth it.” It’s a little bit of a stretch, but lines like that may be addressed to either Don or Wendy, who didn’t consider Kurt’s musical aspirations particularly worthwhile. With its mentions of teachers and preachers, “Sifting” seems to take on authority figures of all stripes, but as far as what it’s about—it’s anyone’s guess, including Kurt’s.
Two tracks (three on the CD version of Bleach) were taken straight from the Crover demo. With its slow, lurching beat, roared vocals, and ponderous chord progression, the eerie “Paper Cuts” is probably the most Melvins-influenced of all the tracks on the album. Part of the lyrics are based on a true story about an Aberdeen family who kept their children locked up in a room with the windows painted over, opening the door only to feed them—or remove the pile of newspapers they used for a latrine. Kurt actually knew one of the kids—he was his old dealer Grunt’s sidekick.
But the song is also apparently quite autobiographical—Kurt can only be describing his alienation from Wendy when he sings, “The lady whom I feel a maternal love for/ cannot look me in the eyes/ but I see hers and they are blue/ and they cock and twitch and masturbate.” Although it’s quite a melodramatic comparison, Kurt seems to be making an analogy between the neglect the imprisoned children endured and the neglect he suffered from Wendy. “And very later I have learned to accept some friends of ridicule,” he sings in the last verse, which seems to describe the outcasts he eventually befriended in Olympia. “Nirvana,” Kurt moans five times on the chorus.
“Floyd the Barber” is another Melvins-styled number from the Crover demo. Floyd the Barber, of course, is a character from the early sixties sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show.” It’s not hard to divine the claustrophobic provincial theme. “It’s just a small town gone bad,” says Kurt. “Everyone turns into a mass murderer and they’re all in cahoots with one another.” But it’s more than that—it’s a Freudian castration nightmare, as the narrator is tied to a barber’s chair and cut with a razor. “I was shaved/ I was shamed,” Kurt wails. Andy, Barney, Aunt Bee, and Opie all join in on the slashing.
“Downer” was included on the CD version of the album and also came from the Crover tape. It was an old song that Kurt wrote after being politicized by some of the more socially oriented punk rock bands. “I was trying to be Mr. Political Punk Rock Black Flag Guy,” says Kurt. “I really didn’t know what I was talking about. I was just throwing together words.”
The album didn’t sound as big and heavy as the band had hoped. It has a strangely claustrophobic, almost implosive feel that apparently unintentionally fits the general cast of the lyrics. Kurt is the first to point out that the album is one-dimensional—mostly slow, leaden, with not much melody. “We purposely made that record one-dimensional, more ‘rock’ than it should have been,” he says.
Kurt purposely suppressed both his more melodic tendencies and his more arty, “new wave” streak because he knew the Sub Pop crowd wouldn’t accept either. He figured Nirvana would have to make a grungy Sub Pop—style record to mobilize a fan base before he could get to do what he really wanted to do. “There was this pressure from Sub Pop and the scene to play ‘rock music,’ ” says Kurt. “Strip it down and make it sound like Aerosmith. We knew that that was the thing to do. We had been doing it and we started doing that stuff on our own and now that it’s a popular thing, we might as well cash in on it and become popular that way, because eventually we’ll be able to do anything. We wanted to try to please people at first, to see what would happen.”
Kurt had written a Vaselines-influenced song called “Beans,” based on the Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums. “Beans, beans, beans/ Jackie ate some beans/ And he was happy and naked in the woods” went the chorus. He wanted to put it on the upcoming album, but Poneman didn’t. “He thought it was stupid,” says Kurt, who adds that the band wanted to be more diverse and experimental on their debut album, yet met with heavy resistance from Sub Pop, both stated and unstated. Since the band had no contract, they just didn’t know how much they could ignore Poneman’s wishes and still get to put their record out.
“Beans” was part of a four-song demo of “weird, quirky songs” that the band wanted to include on the record. Says Kurt, “[Poneman] thought we were retarded.”
Ironically, the restrictions of the Sub Pop sound helped the band find its musical identity. Nirvana’s new wave sound—Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers, and the like—was derivative. It wasn’t until they acknowledged the fact that they had grown up on Aerosmith and Black Sabbath that their music found its voice. “We just found ourselves reestablishing our songwriting within a couple of months,” says Kurt. “It really was a great learning experience because that’s really more where my roots are at anyhow—in rock, rather than the weird quirky new wave stuff that we were trying to do.” This took a lot of nerve, especially in a climate where even the Sex Pistols were considered an oldies band.
Fessing up to liking working man’s hard rock was an act of uncommon honesty in a world where arty poses were the norm, but it was something that needed to be said. When punk rock first erupted, it was necessary to play punk rock and only punk rock—that was the point. Once punk had made that point, it was ripe for assimilation, like any other source music.
Kurt saw only one hitch. “At that point I didn’t think we had a unique sound,” he says. “I didn’t think we were really original enough to pull it off.”
Bleach certainly has it moments, but there’s no question that Kurt’s songwriting is mired in grunge. That attracted a slightly different audience from the one the band expected—a relatively mainstream hard rock audience—a problem which dogs them to this day. “We were never that alternative,” Chris says in retrospect. “Bleach, all the hair on the front of that record and all those fuckin’ rock riff songs—people always knew we had a pretty accessible appeal. We were just basically a rock band.”
Like many Seattle bands, Nirvana sported a serious Black Sabbath streak. Kurt dug Black Sabbath, but he dug the pop side as much as the heavy side. Sabbath classics like “Paranoid” and “Looking for Today” have a catchy verse-chorus structure; they even have bridges. “I remember years ago asking Eric Shillinger, ‘How successful do you think a band could be if they mixed really heavy Black Sabbath with the Beatles? What could you do with that?’ ” says Kurt. “I wanted to be totally Led Zeppelin in a way and then be totally extreme punk rock and then do real wimpy pop songs.” He’d have to wait four years to do that.
Kurt first heard the Pixies’ classic 1988 Surfer Rosa album after recording Bleach. An amalgam of blood-curdling screams, grinding guitars, and nascent but clearly discernible pop-style melodies, it sounded exactly like what he had been wanting to do, but had been too intimidated to attempt. Up until then, it just wasn’t cool to play pop music if you were a punk rock band. “I heard songs off of Surfer Rosa that I’d written but threw out because I was too afraid to play them for anybody,” he says. The Pixies’ popularity both in the U.K. and on American college radio helped give Kurt the encouragement to follow his instincts.
Bruce Pavitt and the band haggled for weeks over the cover shot. The band wanted a photo Tracy had taken of them at a show at
Reko/Muse, a tiny club/art gallery in Olympia. It had been a very eventful night. Ben Shepherd induced the audience to do the Worm, a punk “dance” in which the participants roll around on the floor, trying to knock over everyone else. At that same gig, Chris threw his bass up in the air and it came straight down on Chad’s head. “I was sitting there,” says Chad, “and boom, it sent me right to the floor immediately. I don’t remember anything. I came out of it and I was like, ‘Whoah, everything’s gettin’ all radical.’ ”
Photos for the proposed Bleach cover taken backstage after a February 1989 show at the HUB Ballroom. “We looked like mutants,” Kurt says. (© 1993 by Alice Wheeler)
A limited edition poster included in early LP copies of Bleach.
It was also a big night for Chris and Shelli. All the time they had been apart, Shelli missed Chris terribly. She realized she loved him. Chris had gotten a new girlfriend, but he still couldn’t keep Shelli off his mind. So when Shelli heard that Chris’s girlfriend had just gone to college in Montana, she swooped right in. She called him up and asked what he was doing, and he said they were playing a show that night and to come on over. They got back together after the show and moved in together for good.
Pavitt, Sub Pop’s image czar, wanted a series of intimate, unflattering shots that photographer Alice Wheeler had taken of the individual band members backstage under fluorescent lights after a show. Pavitt liked the shots because they fit with Sub Pop’s populist theories. “You could really see the acne and the stubble and it was so real,” says Pavitt. “These guys were ugly—this was the most un-L.A. look you could come up with. I really wanted to use these photos to dramatize the fact that these people are real.”
“We looked like mutants,” says Kurt.
“But to me that was part of the story,” Pavitt replies. “If you look at it in context, everything was Spandex and hairspray and we were trying to create something that was the polar opposite to that, something that we felt people could relate to. The major labels were going the exact opposite way. To me, that’s folk music—when you have common folk making music.”
For the back cover, Pavitt wanted a photo that Charles Peterson had taken of Jason with his hair swinging in textbook Sub Pop style. Kurt didn’t like that idea, so a compromise was reached, with the Jason shot featured on a limited edition poster which was included in the first two thousand copies of Bleach to be produced after the initial run of one thousand white vinyl pressings.
The shot on the inside of the CD version of Kurt splayed all over Chad’s drum set was taken at the L.A. club Raji’s in February of 1990. The shot was part of a sequence that also yielded the photo on the back of the “Sliver” single. Bleach also marked the debut of the Nirvana logo—set in Bodoni Extra Bold Condensed type. Because the typesetter was so rushed, the spacing was not graphically correct—there are large gaps on either side of the “V”, for instance, that never did get fixed.
Kurt’s original draft of Nirvana’s Sub Pop bio.
The credits on Bleach listed “Kurdt Kobain” on vocals and guitar, the first of several variations that Kurt made on his name. “I think I wanted to be anonymous at first,” he explains. “I was really thinking about changing my name for the Nevermind record. But then I just decided to spell it the right way. I just wanted it to be confusing. I wish I would have done the same thing that Black Francis did. He’s changed his name so many times that nobody really knows who he is. I wish nobody ever knew what my real name was. So I could some day be a normal citizen again. I have no real reason. I just didn’t bother with spelling it correctly. I didn’t care. I wanted people to spell it differently all the time.”
From a publicity photo session with Charles Peterson. (© Charles Peterson)
A Sub Pop bio at the time listed the band’s influences as “H. R. Puffnstuff, Speed Racer, divorces, drugs, sound effects records, the Beatles, rednecks, hard rock, punk rock, Leadbelly, Slayer and of course, the Stooges.”
“Nirvana sees the underground scene as becoming stagnant and more accessible to big league capitalist pig major record labels,” the bio continued. “But does Nirvana fell [sic] a moral duty to fight this cancerous evil? NO WAY! We want to cash in and suck up to the big wigs in hopes that we too can GET HIGH AND FUCK. GET HIGH AND FUCK. GET HIGH AND FUCK.”
On June 9, Nirvana played “Lamefest ’89” at the Moore Theater, opening for TAD and Mudhoney. It was a landmark event—local bands had never packed such a large place before. The Seattle scene was starting to explode. The reviewer for Backlash bemoaned the bad sound treatment Nirvana received, because “the band utilizes a lot of melody within their grunge.” “As for their performance—totally intense,” the review continued. “Hair explosions, prat falls, jumps, body writhing and a trash-a-thon finale that left instruments and bodies strewn about the stage.”
In an article in the University of Washington newspaper, Kurt said the band’s music had a “gloomy, vengeful element based on hatred.” The piece added that Kurt’s outlook had improved of late, leading to what Kurt called “a gay pop song phase that will eventually die,” although there would probably be more such tunes on the next album. “I’d like to live off the band,” Kurt added. “I can’t handle work.”
They did a session at Evergreen State College which yielded an early version of “Dive” and a cover of Kiss’s “Do You Love Me,” which wound up on a tribute album, on the Seattle indie label C/Z Records, called Hard to Believe.
Around this time, Nirvana decided that they needed a contract with Sub Pop. They wanted to make sure they would get accurate and timely accounting statements. “We thought if we signed a contract,” says Kurt, “we’d be able to hold it up against them in the future if we wanted to get out of their contract.” Ironically, the contract eventually had the opposite effect.
As it happened, Sub Pop had been thinking along the same lines, and Poneman had been reading This Business of Music for tips on a standard contract for all of the label’s roster (only Soundgarden had signed one at that point). Poneman had not yet drafted anything when one summer night, Pavitt had thrown a “wild disco party” for the visiting Babes in Toyland. As Pavitt recalls, the party got a little out of hand so he booted everybody out and they all went next door, where the Babes were staying. Meanwhile, an inebriated Chris Novoselic walked up to Pavitt’s house, banged on the window, hollered, “You fuckers, we want a contract!” and fell backward into some bushes. He got up to leave and by sheer coincidence, bumped into Pavitt, who was going back to his house. “I often wonder,” says Pavitt, “what if I had stayed next door one more minute.”
They talked for about forty-five minutes or so, after which Pavitt called Poneman and told him Nirvana wanted a contract. Poneman stayed up all night typing a document. Legally speaking, it was a blunt instrument, but it would serve the label in good stead soon enough. Soon, Kurt, Chris, Chad, and Jason were up at Sub Pop’s offices signing the contract, making them the first band to sign an extended contract with the label. “I remember thinking, ‘This could be important,’ ” says Pavitt.
At first, the album didn’t make a seismic impact on the indie scene or even on Sub Pop, for that matter. “Bleach sounded really good, but all [our] stuff sounded really good to me,” says Poneman. “I was caught up with a lot of stuff we were putting out,” adds Pavitt. “We were putting out a lot of really good records.”
But then people started buying it. “We put out Bleach,” says Pavitt, “and gosh, it just kept selling. Never ever in the history of our company have I seen a record just sell and sell and sell. They did tour, but a lot of bands tour. The word of mouth was there. There was something special there.”
After Bleach was released in June of 1989, they went on their first U.S. tour, “a total hungry punk rock tour,” says Chris, of twenty-six dates, starting June 22 at the Covered Wagon in San Francisco. This was the inaugural run of their trusty white Dodge van, soon nicknamed “The Van.” Through three U.S. tours and seventy thousand miles, it ne
ver did break down. When it got too hot to drive, they’d pull into a parking garage and just hang out in the van until sundown.
Kurt, Chris, Chad, and Jason were their own road managers—they decided where they’d stay, when they’d leave. Of course, the accommodations weren’t that great—most of the time, they’d end up sleeping outside or in the van, and if they were lucky, some fan gave them a floor to sleep on. A few dates into the tour, they were deep in the heart of Texas. They parked near a national park, which Chris recalls was essentially a swamp. A sign near their parking spot read “Caution: alligators,” so they dug up a baseball bat and some two-by-fours that were kicking around the back of the van and kept them close by in case of reptilian attack. But eventually, they got hungry and decided to eat some of their canned soup. So they doused the bat and the two-by-fours in motor oil, set them on fire, and cooked the soup over the flames.
They were excited about being on tour and going to places like New Mexico, Illinois, and Pennsylvania and playing to new faces. They played the very lowest tier of the underground circuit, mostly bars; the band got a free case of beer and never more than one hundred dollars a night. “Every time we played a show,” says Chad, “it seemed like we got just enough money to put gas in the tank and food in our stomach to make it to the next friggin’ gig.” Despite the marathon drives, the low pay, and often sparse audiences, morale was high. And attendance started to pick up halfway through the tour, when college radio began playing Bleach tracks like “School,” “About a Girl” or “Blew.” By the time they got out to the Midwest, they almost felt famous.
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