Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  The song also proves that Kurt wasn’t above penning a few lyrical clinkers—“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you” is a pretty hoary coffee mug adage.

  “Never met a wise man, if so it’s a woman.” “The biggest piece of proof that I have is that there are hardly any women who have been in charge of starting a war,” Kurt says. “They’re actually less violent.” By this time, one begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all. His first response is revealing. “I don’t know,” he says. “Castration.” Later on in “On a Plain,” he is “neutered and spayed”; in “Come as You Are,” he doesn’t “have a gun.”

  It’s been pointed out many times that the first three songs on the album mention guns. “Dave Grohl’s father tried to make an analogy about that,” Kurt says. “Something about how I tie guns with my penis. I don’t know why. I wasn’t conscious of the fact that I mentioned guns three times. I’ve tried to figure out an explanation for it myself and I can’t. I really can’t.” To paraphrase Dr. Freud, sometimes a gun is just a gun. But not this time.

  “Drain You” is a love song, or rather a song about love. In Kurt’s universe, the two babies of the song represent two people reduced to a state of perfect innocence by their love. “I always thought of two brat kids who are in the same hospital bed,” he says. The lyrics mix the utter dependence of infants with their narcissism—“I don’t care what you think/ Unless it is about me,” one of them says. Although there is an obvious sexual connotation, the image of draining off an infection mainly has to do with relieving the other of bad feelings, like sucking out the venom from a snake bite. The medical theme—the song is rife with fluids, infection, and vitamins—would dominate the next album.

  The title of “Lounge Act” came from the fact that “We just thought that song sounded like such a lounge song,” says Kurt, “like some bar band would play.” But the lyrics are nothing of the kind. “That song is mostly about … having a certain vision and being smothered by a relationship and not being able to finish what you wanted to do artistically because the other person gets in your way,” Kurt says.

  The line that goes “I’ve got this friend you see who makes me feel … refers to some of Kurt’s Olympia friends and the Riot Grrl movement who inspired Kurt to surrender his misanthropy and break out of what he calls the “nihilistic monk world” that he had made for himself in his little shoe box of an apartment.

  “Stay Away” undoubtedly began as an indictment of the Calvinist scene in Olympia, but in a broader sense, it could apply to any conformist clique—“Monkey see monkey do/ I don’t know why I’d rather be dead than cool.”

  The title of “On a Plain” could be read as a pun, as in “airplane.” Although he was otherwise miserable, Kurt had realized his dreams by the time he had written that song. He was getting flown to L.A. and New York because big record companies desperately wanted to sign his band. “I suppose it’s some way of me saying I’m still complaining and bitching about things but I really have it better off than I had ever expected to be,” Kurt admits.

  Part of the lyrical motif of “On a Plain” is the construction of the song itself. “I’ll start this off without any words,” Kurt begins. He explains the line “Somewhere I have heard this before/ In a dream my memory has stored” by saying that “I’d heard that bridge in some other song, I don’t know what it is,” Kurt says. “I’ll find out some day,” he adds, with enough sarcasm in his voice to imply that he means that the original author will slap him with a copyright suit. When he wrote “One more special message to go, then I’m done and I can go home,” he meant that “On a Plain” was the last song that he had to write lyrics for.

  “It is now time to make it unclear/ To write off lines that don’t make any sense.” “That was my way of saying the first couple of lines seem like statements but they don’t have any meaning,” says Kurt. “I’m just making it obvious that there’s really no meaning in it, so don’t take it too seriously.”

  But perhaps he’s protesting too much. “My mother died every night” and “the black sheep got blackmailed again” are loaded with personal resonance for Kurt. The former line sounds like a reference to Wendy’s traumatic experience with her abusive boyfriend; Kurt often refers to himself as a black sheep. Make these points to him and he shrugs, laughs quietly, and mumbles “I don’t know …” After such revealing lines, “It is now time to make it unclear” seems like an attempt by Kurt to cover his tracks, as if he’s given too much away.

  For all his disavowal of most of the other songs on the record, Kurt does acknowledge that “Something in the Way” is about his experiences living under the bridge in Aberdeen. It’s exaggerated for effect, though. “That was like if I was living under the bridge and I was dying of AIDS, if I was sick and I couldn’t move and I was a total street person,” he says. “That was kind of the fantasy of it.”

  * * *

  Although Kurt roundly rejected the “spokesperson for a generation” tag, he will admit that the album did crystallize something about his peers. “Oh definitely,” he says. “We’re a perfect example of the average uneducated twentysomething in America in the nineties, definitely.”

  And the twentysomethings are the generation that’s been led to believe that they missed out on all the best times. “That’s pretty much the definition of what we are, is punk rockers who weren’t into punk rock when it was thriving,” Kurt says. “All my life, that’s been the case, because when I got into the Beatles, the Beatles had been broken up for years and I didn’t know it. I was real excited about going to see the Beatles and I found out they had broken up. Same thing with Led Zeppelin. They’d been broken up for years already.”

  But there’s more to it than that. “I think there’s a universal display of psychological damage that everyone my age has acquired,” Kurt says. “I notice a lot of people a lot like me who are neurotic in certain social situations. I just notice that everyone in their early twenties have been damaged by their parents equally.” Kurt describes a scenario in which his generation’s parents grew up in the bland, conformist fifties and early sixties, then had kids just as the late sixties began. The onslaught of new ideas threw their old values into a tailspin and they reacted by drinking and doing drugs. And getting divorces.

  “Every parent made the same mistake,” Kurt says. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but my story is exactly the same as 90 percent of everyone my age. Everyone’s parents got divorced, their kids smoked pot all through high school, they grew up during the era when there was a massive Communist threat and everyone thought we were going to die from nuclear war, and more and more violence started to infuse into our society, and everyone’s reaction is the same. And everyone’s personalities are practically the same. There’s just a handful of people my age, there’s maybe five different personalities and they’re all kind of intertwined with one another.

  “I don’t think our musical version of that is any different than any of the other bands that have come out at the same time we have,” Kurt says. “I don’t think we’re more special as far as having that same kind of damage that our parents or our society gave us. It’s the same. We got more attention because our songs have hooks and they kind of stick in people’s minds. The majority of any bands you interview would have divorced parents. All these kids my age found themselves asking the same question at the same time—why the fuck are my parents getting divorced? What’s going on? Something’s not right. Something about the way our parents were brought up isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. They fucked up somewhere. They’re living in a fantasy world. They must have done something wrong.” Those are some tough thoughts to have, especially if, like Kurt, you were eight years old.

  Analyzing his own songs at length reminded Kurt of something. “I’m just starting to realize why I had such a hard time with interviews when this record came out,” he said. “People were going through the songs and trying to get me to explain them and I just d
on’t even have any opinions on them. They are all basically saying the same thing: I have this conflict between good and evil and man and woman and that’s about it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  A CROSS-FORMAT PHENOMENON

  The massive success of Nevermind was a complete surprise, but in retrospect, there were plenty of warning signs. Copies of the Smart sessions tracks had been circulating throughout the industry and on bootlegs for well over a year before Nevermind came out, so industry tastemakers and music aficionados were already spreading the word about the band; the line for the Nevermind release party wound around the block. Nirvana’s “CRACK SMOKIN’, KITTY PETTIN’ ” T-shirts were very popular, providing massive amounts of free advertising. The band had done three U.S. tours and visited Europe twice; they’d gotten the enthusiastic blessing of the influential U.K. music weeklies, not to mention the all-important Sonic Youth seal of approval.

  Sub Pop succeeded because Pavitt and Poneman had studied the successes and failures of other labels and cannily exploited the infrastructure they had already built. In the same way, the infrastructure was already set up for Nirvana to succeed as well. Promoters and booking agents now knew how to deal with this new breed of bands and several even specialized exclusively in them. Nirvana retained top lawyer Alan Mintz, who had built up expertise and contacts by winning excellent deals for Jane’s Addiction, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and a host of other new bands; Nirvana saw Sonic Youth’s satisfaction with Gold Mountain, Geffen, and even video director Kevin Kerslake, and eventually followed them to all three. R.E.M. opened up the doors at radio for the band; these days, Kurt even uses R.E.M.’s accountant.

  By September 24, 1991, Sub Pop and grunge rock had begun to bubble their way into mass consciousness, but most consumers didn’t know how to find the records, and the music wasn’t being written up in the mainstream music press or played on big radio stations or MTV, so no one knew what grunge to buy even if they did find it. The miracle of major label distribution gave Nevermind a major leg up by making it one of the first grunge records—and that little Sub Pop logo made it official—to get distributed to the major record store chains, where anyone could (and did) buy a copy. Also, the album came out at the beginning of the academic year, when college radio programmers are energetically looking for material to beef up their play lists.

  The music itself was a refinement and amplification of what bands such as Hüsker Dü and the Replacements had done, although at root it plugged into a collective consciousness of both Black Sabbath and the Beatles. And then there was that smooth production.

  Nevermind was one of the first “alternative” records to sound good on the radio. Highly compressed—meaning the extremes of high and low volume were electronically limited—Andy Wallace’s mixes were custom-tailored for mainstream radio, which is, after all, still where sales campaigns are won or lost. Compared to the usual raw alternative recordings, Nevermind sounded like a Bon Jovi record—the production sugar-coated the band’s bitter punk pill.

  Steve Fisk, who produced the Blew sessions, feels that the record, with its heavily flanged bass and guitars and big reverberant drums, sounds very much like an early eighties British new wave record, hence what he calls “The Janet Theory.”

  “When Janet was fifteen, she was really into the Smiths,” Fisk begins. “They made her feel special about herself and she spent long hours in her room with her Walkman on and her parents couldn’t bug her and those morbid lyrics really reinforced all that. When they broke up it was very hard for her. Then Morrissey went solo but all her friends got into it and it was very hackneyed.”

  “At maybe sixteen or seventeen she went into her British death gloom phase for real,” Fisk continues. “Then she dyed her hair black and looked like Siouxsie, not understanding that it was a whole played-out cliché by that point. This is like 1986. It pissed off her parents and none of her friends were doing something that radical with their looks so it really made her feel good. Of course, that look came to the malls. And it got played out.

  “Somewhere along the line she got onto the Sub Pop Singles Club. And she found some music that would really piss people off and she became Grunge Girl. Collectively, that demographic was spring-loaded for a New Wave punk record like Nevermind.”

  “The lyrics are happy songs with sad lyrics—it’s the Cure, it’s Joy Division,” says Fisk. “So poor Janet, she couldn’t help but like it.”

  Kurt Cobain enjoys this theory very much. “It’s probably true,” he says, laughing.

  The media made much of the fact that Bill Clinton was America’s first baby boomer president, but they largely ignored the fact that boomers had already been dominating U.S. culture for years—especially the music biz. Baby boomers control virtually every aspect of the mainstream music industry, guiding the signing of acts, radio airplay, press coverage.

  So baby boomer totems such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan remain benchmarks; everything else is just a pale shadow. The boomers bombard the airwaves with classic rock. And when people get sick of hearing “Brown Sugar” for the 3,298th time, they slot in a “new” artist like the Black Crowes or the Spin Doctors who gladly caters to the same boomer standards, even as they claim to be “rebels.”

  But by the time Nevermind was released, a large new demographic had emerged. The twentysomethings hadn’t been raised on Let It Bleed, the White Album, and Blonde on Blonde—those were oldies. Some called them the Baby Busters, but they actually outnumber the Boomers. And they wanted some music they could call their own.

  Nevermind came along at exactly the right time. This was music by, for, and about a whole new group of young people who had been overlooked, ignored, or condescended to. As the twentysomething band Sloan sang in “Left of Centre,” “I really can’t remember the last time I was the center of the target of pop culture … I’m slightly left of centre/ of the bullseye you’ve created/ It’s sad to know that if you hit me/ it’s because you were not careful.”

  Ultimately, it wasn’t so much that Nirvana was saying anything new about growing up in America; it was the way they said it. It represented, as Los Angeles Times pop critic Robert Hilburn said, “the awakening voice of a new generation.” This had all sorts of implications, from consumer marketing to political demographics. It also marked the definitive end of the baby boomers, who prided themselves on their youth, as the sole arbiters of youth culture. A backlash was clearly in the cards.

  As if there was any doubt, Nevermind proved once and for all that indie rock had completely turned in on itself and become far from the unifying force that rock began as. Just as Kurt took the gutsy step of exploring his pop gift, Nevermind forced the denizens of the indie world to consider whether they could like music that everyone could like and to consider the possibility that one of their own could make popular music that withstood an unspoken indie loyalty test. Some felt Nirvana’s mere popularity disqualified them.

  It was also “alternative” music that mainstream people could like, too. Suddenly, alternative rock wasn’t just the province of jaded college kids—it began to reflect the social realities of a struggling, changing nation. Nevermind and the funk and roll phenomenon (the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Faith No More, etc.) then enjoying its first flowering renewed the inclusive power of rock. As Kurt came from working-class stock, the success of Nevermind was the ultimate expression of Sub Pop’s populist ideals—it figures that the band came from an unlikely place such as Aberdeen, rather than Seattle.

  Not only was the music compelling and catchy, but it captured the spirit of the age. In one of countless articles on the emerging twentysomething phenomenon, the Atlantic magazine commented in a December, 1992, cover story that “This generation—more accurately this generation’s reputation—has become a Boomer metaphor for America’s loss of purpose, disappointment with institutions, despair over the culture and fear for the future.” In that environment, it’s no wonder that a song featuring a young man screaming with rage
and pain could hit number one.

  Kurt screams in a code that millions can understand. He communicates in the same scattershot, intuitive way that his generation has been trained to assimilate and to express information, thanks to the usual litany of tens of thousands of hours of television advertising before they were even able to read, lousy schools, the glut of the information age, video games, etc. Kurt’s lyrics make unusual sense of chaos. When he screams “a denial, a denial” over and over again at the end of “Teen Spirit,” it’s something that is understood on a deep level. And either you get it or you don’t. It clearly draws the lines, even as it deals in universals. And it’s one of the most transcendent moments in rock music.

  The “Teen Spirit” single went out to radio on August 27, then it went on sale two weeks later on September 10. The single sold well but didn’t immediately explode, but meanwhile, MTV accepted the video and a buzz was growing—the song was all over college and alternative radio.

  “Teen Spirit” was not supposed to be the hit. The second single, “Come as You Are,” was supposed to be the track that would cross over to other radio formats; “Teen Spirit” was the base-building alternative cut. “None of us heard it as a crossover song,” says Gold Mountain’s Danny Goldberg, “but the public heard it and it was instantaneous. Right away, the then-emerging format of alternative radio began playing “Teen Spirit.” “They heard it on alternative radio,” says Goldberg, “and then they rushed out like lemmings to buy it.”

  It’s hard to believe that a song can become a hit simply because it’s very good, but this appears to be the case. “Every once in a while, a song is that powerful,” says Goldberg. “And in their instance, they not only had a song that was that powerful—it combined with an image that was very attractive to a certain subculture.”

  MTV did not begin pumping the “Teen Spirit” video immediately. The video did receive a prestigious world premiere (making Nirvana the first debut act since Bart Simpson to be so honored) on 120 Minutes, but only after Amy Finnerty, then a junior member of the programming department and a longtime supporter of new music at the channel, went into her boss’s office and threw “a little tantrum.” Thereafter, the clip languished in graveyard rotation until entering the Buzz Bin, where the video channel hypes new artists, on October 14, three weeks after the album was released. It stayed in the Buzz Bin for nine weeks, getting, as they say in the broadcast business, heavy phones. MTV market research revealed that “Teen Spirit” appealed to viewers across the demographic board.