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20 Years Ago Today - Nirvana's 'Nevermind'
INTERVIEW: Nirvana's Nevermind album turns 20
CBC News
When Nevermind was released 20 years ago, even the members of Nirvana didn't foresee its massive success nor the incredible influence the rock album would eventually have on the wider music scene.
"We had no idea what Nevermind was going to achieve," bassist and co-founder Krist Novoselic told CBC Radio's cultural affairs show Q in a recent interview.
The album's initial print run of 40,000 copies was already a coup for the Washington state-based rock trio comprised of Novoselic, singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain and drummer Dave Grohl.
"That's indie gold. That was supposed to last us a year or so," Novoselic recalled of the sophomore record (the band's first was Bleach, released by Seattle indie label Sub Pop).
After the music video for Smells Like Teen Spirit began getting heavy play on MTV and rave reviews of Nevermind spread beyond the trio's devoted, grassroots fans, record stores couldn't keep the album in stock.
Songs like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are had crossover appeal and quickly become cultural anthems that helped kick off a mainstream thirst for alt and grunge rock that continued through the 1990s. To date, Nevermind has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
"It was a new era. The world was changing" and moving away from the '80s definition of rock music, Novoselic recalled.
Ultimately, Nirvana's appeal lay in its melodies, the strength of its trio of musicians and the diversity of its songs, which were inspired not just by punk but a wide variety of rock predecessors, according to the 46-year-old.
"We had a pretty broad knowledge of music. We weren't dogmatic punk rockers, even though we came out of the American hardcore scene. We loved the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Flipper, punk rock bands," he said.
"It all came together and that's what we have. The document of that is Nevermind."
According to Novoselic, it was Nevermind's producer, Butch Vig, who first recognized how good — and how big — the album could be.
"The album holds up really well. It's timeless. I think part of that is because the songs are really good. The production isn't gimmicky. It's just bass, drums and guitar. There's not any sort of trendy sound," Vig told The Associated Press in a recent interview.
"There's a feel on the record that you can't really manipulate. These days, I love computers and moving stuff around and [messing] with the sound. I feel technology would somehow get in the way of the kind of record we made back then. I know it wouldn't make it better. It's impossible to imagine that happening now."
For album's 20th anniversary, Universal Music is reissuing several special editions of the remastered album on Sept. 27, with extras to include obscure tracks, live recordings and alternate mixes.
Various exhibits and tribute concerts celebrating the album and Nirvana itself have rolled out in the U.S. and Canada, with more scheduled over the next few weeks — something that's inspired bittersweet feelings for Novoselic.
"I know about the power of music. When I was a teenager and I heard [certain] bands ... that spoke to me, so I can relate to that [from fans]. When somebody expresses that sentiment [to me today], that's when I remember Kurt Cobain," he said of his former bandmate, who committed suicide in 1994.
The wild success of Nirvana and other grunge pioneers spawned a multitude of imitators, but Novoselic welcomes their existence.
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Just listen to Nevermind," he said. "It's like the Bay City Rollers, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, the Beatles — it's all there. It was this recipe of rock and roll and our experience with it."
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By Tony Sclafani
TODAY.com contributor
It was one of the most influential rock albums of all time and arguably the last rock album to drastically change the course of popular music. And come Sept. 24, the album in question, Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” will mark its 20th anniversary with as much fanfare as you’d expect from such a significant piece of pop culture history.
For starters, the album is getting re-released in two versions. There’s a two-CD “deluxe edition” which has the remastered album plus B-sides, live cuts and studio sessions. There’s also a four-CD “super deluxe edition” with all of the above, plus the first official release of the pre-“Nevermind” demos, an alternate mix of the album, a pair of previously unreleased BBC recordings, and a recording of a live 1991 show at Seattle’s Paramount Theater featured on both CD and DVD.
“Nevermind” has been credited over the years with commercializing grunge and alternative rock, ushering in a more serious era of hard rock, helping to kill off hair metal and establishing Seattle as a musical force (even though Nirvana itself was from Aberdeen, Wash.)
But two decades later, it's still unclear why “Nevermind,” of all albums, became so “contagious,” to quote its lead single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Why didn’t albums by Nirvana’s peers, like Alice in Chains, or predecessors like Husker Du, set the world alight?
According to Charles R. Cross, the author of “Heavier Than Heaven,” a biography of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, both musical and non-musical factors led to the mega-success of “Nevermind.”
“It’s an incredible album,” Cross said. “It would have been a hit whenever it was released. But at the same time, the timing was right for there to be a superstar act like Nirvana. It came right at the end of the death knell of hair metal and the world was screaming for rock music that would be meaningful again. And the timing for a new generation wanting a voice was also ideal.
“It just so happened that everything came together at the exact right moment when rock needed a revolution,” Cross said.
Bands from Seattle had already landed some albums on the charts and the city’s music scene was poised for a mainstream breakthrough, said Jack Endino, who produced Nirvana’s debut album “Bleach.”
“People were starting to pay attention to the Seattle thing,” Endino said. “People don’t remember that before ‘Nevermind’ came out we already had Soundgarden on the charts and we had (the Top 50 album) “Facelift” by Alice in Chains and “Uncle Anesthesia” by Screaming Trees. People were already beginning to pay attention to what was coming out of Seattle because it was kind of unprecedented for a place like Seattle to suddenly have rock albums on the album charts — not just one band but two, three or four bands.”
What Endino said Seattle needed at the time was “one really big breakthrough album to come through to really get people to focus on it.” And that’s what “Nevermind” did, he said.
“What the ‘Nevermind’ record had was good melodies,” said Endino. “People forget that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ has a very Beatlesque melody. That’s not a trivial melody. That’s a very sort of sophisticated melody to actually hear in a rock ’n’ roll song, especially at that point in time when hip hop was coming along which was not particularly melodic.”
Said rock writer Chuck Eddy: “It had a great chord progression that worked in ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘More Than a Feeling.’ And it had a great video. Not only was (Cobain) a pretty guy, but he also wrote pretty melodies.”
Few at the time predicted such success for the album, Nirvana’s first effort for a major record label, Geffen Records. According to Chad Channing, who drummed on “Bleach,” and worked on some of the early “Nevermind” songs, the album’s explosion on the pop charts wasn't foreseen by either the band or its core audience.
“Playing live, I couldn’t really discern any difference between stuff that we were playing from the ‘Bleach’ record and then the new stuff,” Channing said. “They seemed to like it all.”
Story: 12 unlikely covers of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
In the studio, Channing said, “we didn’t really get a lot of feedback per se about the stuff we were recording. So there wasn’t, ‘Oh yeah, this is totally awesome.’ But we were liking it.”
Yet when a friend brought an advanced copy of the finished “Nevermind” to Channing, the drummer said he heard potential he hadn’t noticed before.
“I remember thinking when I got done listening to it, ‘God, this is a great record. I’ll bet this is gonna do pretty well,’” he said. “And, of course, later it got so huge it was like ‘Whoa, I didn’t think it’d get this big.’”
Brandon Geist, the editor of the rock and heavy metal magazine Revolver, was 13 years old when “Nevermind” came out. He said the main reason it had an impact on him and his generation was the seriousness of its lyrics.
“I remember hearing ‘Come As You Are’ on the radio,” Geist said. “It was one of those magic moments where it was like ‘What is this? This speaks to me in a way that nothing I’d heard before had.’”
Geist said that before “Nevermind,” commercial hard rock was “a very sort of macho genre,” where glam rock bands would sing about partying and women, thrash metal bands sang of political and social issues, and straight-up heavy metal bands sang about “Dungeons and Dragons” themes.
“But after ‘Nevermind’ hit, suddenly it was cool to be in a hard rock band and to sing about your feelings — and to sing about your feelings in a complex way,” Geist said. “Hard rock became inward-looking. You can see that influence in the nu metal bands like Korn or Slipknot. All of a sudden it was acceptable to be in a metal band and to sing about your neighbor molesting you or something. Hard rock really became cathartic as opposed to escapist.”
Inward-looking lyrical couplets like “I’m so lonely, and that’s OK” (from “Lithium”) also resonated with Nirvana’s musical peers — to the point where the focus of hard rock music was permanently changed — for better or worse, according to Eddy.
Grunge no more: Seattle's tourist transformation
“Once Nirvana hit, there was this assumption that you had to present yourself seriously,” Eddy said. “So this kind of dreariness set into commercial hard rock that has not abated in the 20 years since, all the way up to the post-grunge bands Staind and Nickelback.”
Regardless of any detrimental influence Nirvana may have had on artists that came afterwards, new generations of listeners have been able to connect with the band’s music in much the same way the original grunge fans did back in 1991, Cross believes.
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