1270. Nirvana / MTV Unplugged in New York. 1994. 4/5

Nirvana had been the face of the grunge movement since they had crashed upon the music scene with their second album “Nevermind” in 1991, and had been riding the wave ever since. With the release of their third album “In Utero” in 1993 saw this trend continue, despite an album that was far from mainstream in content. The tour that followed this was their first of the United States for two years, and included the addition of Pat Smear as a second guitarist to increase the impact of their music.
In November of 1993 Nirvana agreed to record a performance for MTV Unplugged, which had been a popular addition to their music channels programming. Although the band had been negotiating to be on the program for some months, they also wanted to do something different from what most bands did when they recorded the show. Whereas other bands still wanted to be loud and energetic, Nirvana wanted it to be the intimate setting that the style suggested it should be, and to incorporate songs that suited the style that weren’t their own.
The band rehearsed for two days prior to the recording, that from reports were tense in all quarters, production, executives and band. Kurt had wanted to miss the rehearsals but eventually turned up, though the two days were said to be little fun for anyone with no humour or banter occurring during the sessions. The show was then recorded on November 18, 1993, and aired on MTV the following month.
How much would have happened following this had not Kurt Cobain taken his own life on April 8, 1994? Apart from the shock that was felt worldwide, it also led to this performance being rerun on MTV many times over the coming weeks. It also led to the record company announcing that a double album would be released, with one CD full of live performances of the band, and the other the entire MTV Unplugged performance. As it turned out, it was only a week later that this was canned, with the difficulty of the bands remaining members Krist Novaselic and Dave Grohl to be able to emotionally put together the live album cited as the reason. Instead, it was decided that just the MTV Unplugged performance would be released, as the final embodiment of what the band achieved in its short time together.

Given that there was a controversy at the time over the song choices the band made for this performance, one of the main features about this album is how well it all fits together. There may not have been the proliferation of hits that the executives had wanted, or that many fans of the band wanted. And though the and did incorporate cover songs in the performance, they are all terrific. Also, unlike most of the artists who performed on MTV Unplugged, Nirvana performed their entire 14 song setlist in one take, whereas other bands often did two or more takes of a song to choose the best performance.
Eight of the 14 songs are Nirvana songs. They open with the best known of the songs from their debut album "Bleach", the seminal "About a Girl", perhaps the ideal version of this track in the band's repertoire. This is then followed by their hit single "Come as You Are", thus allowed the performance (and the album) to begin with recognisable tracks to drag the fans in. There are three other songs from the band's best known album "Nevermind", "Polly", "On a Plain" and "Something in the Way". All three of these songs are well suited to the unplugged format, even "On a Plain" whose studio version is quite electrified and bombastic, and yet it translates well to this format. Of course, this is helped and improved by the fact that Kurt Cobain insisted on running his acoustic guitar through his amp and pedals, thus helping to create the Nirvana sound of his guitar even as an acoustic. A cheat code perhaps? Maybe, but the end result does allow the band to be who they are even in this setting. "Something in the Way" also sounds amazing on this recording. Joining these songs are three from their then current, and as it turns out final, album "In Utero". "Pennyroyal Tea" is promoted by Kurt's vocals without any other vocal backing, and sounds all the better here for it. The studio version sometimes gets drowned out by all of the instruments, but this version highlights his vocal which is superb. "Dumb" is a surprisingly good subdued version of the original studio track, while "All Apologies" comes towards the end of the set.
Beyond these Nirvana tracks, six others are played and mixed into the setlist. The cover of The Vaselines track "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam", which Cobain retitled "Jesus DOESN'T Want Me for a Sunbeam" for this performance, was the first, and is one of the songs here that probably divides fans of the band and the album the most. It's fine, but it is nothing outstanding, as a song or the performance. It is followed directly after however by one of the best tracks, the cover of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World". So good is this version, and so perfect is Cobain's vocal to Bowie's original, that I still meet people today who think this is a Nirvana song not a David Bowie song, and I've even had people say to me "wow, how good is Bowie's cover version of that Nirvana song?!" I mean, Cobain even says at the end of the song "That was a David Bowie song". It is one of the outstanding tracks of this album, and shows that the odd cover song in this environment can be a great thing.
Another of the butting heads episodes for this was Cobain's insistence that they cover three songs by the Meat Puppets, who had been supporting Nirvana on their current tour. But, not only did they cover the songs "Plateau", "Oh Me" and "Lake of Fire", they also had Cris and Curt Kirkwood join them on stage to help perform them. An interesting decision, another one that Cobain insisted on and got his way with. And the final cover was the last song of the performance, the traditional American folk song "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", again one that showcases Cobain's vocal rather than anything else, and one that he was so pleased with as a show closer that when the producers tries to insiste on an encore he refused, saying nothing could possibly top that as the closing song. There's no doubt that the band and his own popularity in the music world gave him the power to refuse things that most other bands would have had to accede to.

Kurt Cobain's death and the eventual demise of Nirvana as a result was a massive thing back in 1994. It's difficult to explain to anyone who wasn't around 30 years ago just how massive that news was when it was relayed around the world. And while the MTV Unplugged episode had been recorded at the end of the previous year and been broadcast, it suddenly got played a LOT on MTV, and then the eventual release of this album with the full set list was really what fans were after. It was a melancholy time when it was however. Listening to it at the time of its release was always tinged with the regret that we would have no more music from Cobain and the band, and that this was in fact the final memoir of a band that had influenced so much.
Like most people of my age I got this album on its release, and did indeed immerse myself in it for some months. It was interesting that the following year, the dreaded and best forgotten dark year of 1995, I was often asked if I was listening to too much Nirvana and if it might be invading my thoughts. I always laughed this off, because if anything Cobain's final fate was more than enough to turn me well away from that, and in fact listening to Nirvana at the time, and this album in particular, I found rather cathartic.
For my own tastes however, I would generally get nine songs in, and then change to another album. To me, "Something in the Way" was the perfect way to stop this album, and basically ignore the songs that came after it. The Meat Puppets songs never did anything for me, and the other two songs I could take or leave. And while I don't disagree with those people who wished for more of the bands songs to be played on this album, most of those would have been very difficult to pull off. I mean, why would anyone want to hear them play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" unplugged? I mean, that would be like hearing Metallica play "Motorbreath" and "Damage Inc" unplugged, a disaster I am sad to say I had to witness at one of their concerts in 1999... I still shudder when I think of it today...
Even though the MTV Unplugged formula had been around for a few years at this time, it was this performance that actually exploded the concept, and showed that super popular enigmatic bands could do this and not be seen as sellouts or of changing their own style to suit. Some bands of course were more suited to the format, and while this album is rightly hailed as one of the best of the unplugged features, it pales into insignificance against one that was released by another band from Seattle just two years later, one that had their own tragedies occurring around them such that Nirvana had. Again, that's a story for another day.

1252. Nirvana / Bleach. 1989. 3/5

In another one of those ‘school bands made good’ stories, vocalist and guitarist Kurt Cobain and bass guitarist Krist Novaselic met when they were at high school together. Their band, and the lineup, went through a number of changes over their initial period together. In fact, they started out as a Creedence Clearwater Revival covers band, with Cobain on drums and Novaselic on guitar and vocals. Eventually they began to write their own songs, and rotating through drummers like spinning tops, almost as many as different bands names that they played under. Some of their names included Skid Row, Ted Ed Fred, Pen Cap Chew, and Bliss, before they finally settled on the name Nirvana. Around this time, having collated a football team full of former drummers, Cobain and Novaselic were introduced to Chad Channing, who became their next, and longest serving to that point in time, full time drummer.
After six months of playing together, the band recorded their first single release for the Seattle independent record label Sub Pop. It was a cover of the song “Love Buzz” by the band Shocking Blue, a Dutch band from the late 1960’s. Following this, the band practiced for two to three weeks in preparation for recording a full-length album, even though Sub Pop had only requested an EP. The band went back into the studio in the final week of December in 1988, to record their debut album, with the main sessions taking place at Reciprocal Recording Studios in Seattle, with local producer Jack Endino. Combined with three tracks that had been written and recorded in January 1988, these came together to form what would become Nirvana’s debut studio album, titled “Bleach”.

As mentioned in the first part of the episode, three of the album's songs were recorded during a previous session at Reciprocal Studios in January 1988. These recordings all featured Dale Crover on drums, who was the drummer from the band The Melvins. The band did try to re-record them with Channing but eventually decided to just release those original versions. Those tracks all have a similar vibe as well, but the most obvious one is ”Paper Cuts” which is difficult to take for several reasons, but one of the main ones for me is the amazing similarity in a 16 bar snatch of the song, on two occasions, that sounds almost exactly like the song “Angry Chair” by Alice in Chains. Of course, this song came before that song, so it begs the question – was the Alice in Chains song a direct rip off of this? Or is it just an amazing coincidence? That’s for you to work out I guess, but it is uncanny just how similar the music and vocals sound between the two. I also know which is the better song. “Downer” only appeared as a bonus track, while the other song was “Floyd the Barber”, whose lyrics are somewhat strangled while the riff and drumbeat retain the same medium throughout. An early example on the album of less lyrics and more repetition.
In the back half of the album, you have songs such as “Scoff” which continue in this tradition of five or six lines of lyrics that still fill four minutes of the song through constant rotation. “Swap Meet” also does this, and with the less refined way that Kurt sings in only to keys all the way through the song. And the closing track “Sifting” repeats this style once again.
Elsewhere, “Blew” opens the album on a positive note with Cobain’s warbling guitar and early grungy guitar riff. The band’s first single, the cover track “Love Buzz”, also found its way onto the album, and is an immediate obvious different track from those written by the band. It is almost a freeform psychedelic journey, with those changing qualities from the rest of the album. There is a lot of buzz coming out of the speakers on this track.
The upbeat songs for me generally come across the best. “Negative Creep” is one of them, though the lyrics again aren’t anything to write home about, pretty much four lines repeated ad nauseum. The same goes for “School”, a song from the same lyrical song book, with the music banged out for Cobain to sing over. It mightn’t be imaginative, but again here the riff chords and drum lines are excellent and enjoyable to listen to. And “Mr Moustache” is perhaps the best of them all, finally breaking out into a faster tempo, allowing the guitar to speak, and Kurt actually sounding like he wants to break into a more energetic vocal line.
The star attraction of the album is “About a Girl”, with almost no distortion, the drums perfectly played and recorded, and Cobain’s best clear vocal melody. It is still difficult to comprehend that this song comes from the same band and the same recording sessions, so different is it from pretty much every other song on the album.

While I did pick this up on CD at some point following the demise of the band in the mid-1990's, my best guess is that it was after the demise of Cobain, and a point at which I had played both “Nevermind” and “In Utero” to death and went back to find this album as a stop gap. I was also eventually gifted this on vinyl by a work colleague, who had a still shrink wrapped second edition vinyl on the Sub Pop label, unopened and unplayed, which he claimed he would never listen to because he didn’t have a turntable. So that was an absolute bonus. Cheers Trent.
One of the problems with re-listening to this album over the past couple of weeks has been that at the same time I have been listening to an album that was released just five days after this, one that got a far greater exposure around the world, one which I knew a lot more of on its entry point to the world, and is a far superior release in every way, shape and form. And that episode is coming up next, on Music from a Lifetime. Stay tuned!
The other major problem that this album always holds, is that there are very few people who could honestly say that they knew of this album, and had heard this album, prior to the release of the band’s follow up effort, the slightly better known “Nevermind”. Indeed, if you meet one of these people who say they DID know of “Bleach” before hearing “Nevermind”, I’d suggest you make them take a lie-detector test. So, it is easy for people’s thoughts on TIS album to be swayed by what they thought of the sophomore effort.
And to be perfectly honest, I have never really been a fan of “Bleach”. There are a few songs here that I enjoy, but for the most part, the songwriting and performance is light years better on the next album and trying to judge this album having listened to “Nevermind” for so long before that, always made this a difficult job. Especially as it really has none of the spark and energy that that album has.
So did this have much going for it? Honestly, no. It cannot be compared to the other albums the band released. It is a perfectly reasonable debut album, one that probably offered a glimpse into what could possibly occur in the future. For me though, it's an album that I might put on for a couple of songs. And that’s about it.

1131. Nirvana / Nevermind. 1991. 5/5

Nirvana was a band that since its inception had gone through several drummers in its short existence, and had also had an extra guitarist at one point, but in essence was a two-piece with hired guns as drummers. Guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Kurt Cobain along with bass guitarist Krist Novaselic eventually brought in new drummer Dave Grohl just before the band went into the studio to write and record Nevermind, a fortuitous move for both parties as it turned out. Prior to 1991 I didn’t have a clue who Nirvana was. Most people didn’t. They had released their debut album Bleach back in 1989, but I, like I guess 90% of people who ended up buying that album, did so sometime from 1992 onwards. My introduction to the band was, as happened on a few occasions in those days, by some friends in the band I was playing in at the time saying “Have you heard this band? Check out this album. It’s insane!”, at which point they threw it on and we listened. And I can still remember my first impressions being – ‘ok… it’s raw, it’s an interesting guitar sound… the singer has a real bipolar attitude… the drummer is hitting those things REALLY HARD…. yeah, it’s ok I guess…’ So just so you know that it wasn’t something that grabbed everyone the first time they heard it. Indeed, it was really when the first single from the album took off on radio, and begun to be played every couple of hours on constant rotation, and when the video for that song was never off the air on MTV and Rage and all of the other music video shows around the world, that the album itself began to be popularised. Because it was the success of that song that really drew people to the album, and once they had been drawn into the album… they began to discover that it wasn’t just a one-hit wonder.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was that first single. You know that. In fact it is probably embedded in your memory so hard that even if you lost all of your sense sometime down the track, you would still remember the opening few bars to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It became the anthem of a generation – not so much mine I don’t think, but to anyone who was a teenager in 1991 and 1992 this would be the song that would remind them all so much of those years. It saturated radio and video shows. It drove the popularity of this album. This was followed by the second single “Come As You Are”, a song of a different tempo and style, which mightn’t have become the dance club anthem that the first single did, but it still proved so popular because of the drone of Cobain’s vocals over his low strung guitar. “Lithium” and “In Bloom” were the other two singles that were drawn from the album and both did good sales as well, but by this time it was more just a task of keeping the band in the headlights of the oncoming swarm as they kept coming into record stores everywhere in droves to buy the album.
Once you get past those four singles that created the hysteria of Nevermind, you come to a collection of songs that range from the rage to the sublime. Songs that are on the extreme such as “Territorial Pissings” and “Stay Away” are there for the punk rock and fast paced song lovers, whereas there are the acoustically driven quieter songs such as “Polly” and “Something in the Way” also in the mix.
What has always interested me about this album is how much some people trawl for the meanings of the words Cobain wrote in each of the songs. Well, for a start, trying to interpret what he is singing is the first problem faced with that, because Cobain was never the clearest when it came to annunciating when he was singing. Once that has been achieved (the best way it can), just reading the lyrics doesn’t always shine much light on anything. It is obvious that many of the songs had lyrics that were personal to Cobain himself, and often complained about journalists trying to interpret more from what he was singing than what he had put there, as if there was an underlying reason beneath his words.
Despite being held as a beacon of the grunge genre, Nevermind to me had more to do with punk rock than it did with any other genre at the time. It is heralded as one of the leaders of the grunge movement that had its base in the bands from Seattle. Alice in Chains had the harmony vocals and greater structure, Soundgarden was closer to heavy metal, while Nirvana channelled that punk groove for the majority of their balance.

I often ask myself the question – how much longer could this style of music have continued if Nirvana had kept going, if Cobain hadn’t offed himself and they had kept making albums. Because I’m not really sure how much versatility this band had, and of course that statement is an anomaly given the range of material in the songs here. We have seen with Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters how adaptable they have been over the last 25+ years, not just sticking to the sound that came from their first album, and indeed maturing in a billion selling way since. Did Nirvana and Kurt Cobain have that versatility? Indeed, is Nevermind still as universally loved as an album today simply because the band only released three studio albums, and didn’t have the chance to stuff it all up by creating a couple of average albums as the 90’s decade progressed into nu-metal territory. In essence, does this album have an immunity because it is surrounded by so little else from the band to compare it to? Almost everyone probably has a copy of Nevermind, but how many own copies of Bleach and In utero? I guess what I’m saying is that Nevermind has not been polluted by having material released beyond it that wasn’t up to the same standard, or was so different from the songs here that the fans who had come into the band on the back of this album left again in a hurry one or two releases later. The memories that Nevermind recall are caught in that moment of time. Does the fact that the band dissolved two and a half years after this album was released exacerbate that?

In the long run, your love or tepid acceptance of this album will depend on just where and when it entered your life. My kids are pretty much non-plussed about it. They’ll listen to it, enjoy it to some degree, but not find any of it is life changing. I still love the album, and having had it on rotation again for the past couple of weeks in preparation for this episode I have sung along in all the right places. But I know that I have also felt a need to move on to other music for a lot of that time too, in that while listening to the album two or three times was good, but that was enough. Which, is how an album from 30 years ago should be taken. But is that an indication of what I have been talking about? That beyond Nevermind, more of this would have been too much? The answer to me lies in the answer to this question – what is the better album, Nirvana’s Nevermind or Foo Fighters The Colour and the Shape? Your answer to that will decide for YOU where this album stands in the annals of music history.

548. Nirvana / In Utero. 1993. 3.5/5

Every person listening to this episode know who Nirvana were, and probably own or have owned a copy of their second album “Nevermind” and know the songs and perhaps even the story behind it. If not, you should check out the episode of this podcast dedicated to it in Season 1.
By the time the tour behind that album had finished, several question marks had begun to be raised. Cobain sought to have the royalty's distribution, which to that point in time had been divided equally, changed to reflect that he composed almost all of the band’s material. Though both Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl did not argue this, it came to a head when Cobain tried to make it retroactive to include the royalties for “Nevermind”. Depending on whose opinion you listen to, there was either little chance of this affecting the band morale, or in fact the band was close to ending at that point. Though an agreement was made where Cobain did receive 75% of those earlier recording's royalties, it did seem that this angst was present for the remaining time the band was together.
Cobain’s health at this time also led to rumours of the band’s demise, before they put together two of their most memorable performances, firstly at the 1992 Reading Festival, and then a few days later at the MTV Video Music Awards.
While the band’s record company had been hoping for a new album to release towards the end of 1992, they had instead released a compilation album contain rare live performances, B-sides and bootleg songs to appease the fans who were all looking for more material. From this point the band looked forward to the next album. Armed with a new producer in Steve Albini, some songs already written and others in an unfinished form, the band went into the studio in February 1993, and recorded their new album, “In Utero”, in just two weeks. Despite this, it took almost another seven months for the album to be released. Despite initially liking how the album sounded, the band and their record company soon had reservations about it, and then spent a number of months arguing about whether it needed to be remixed or re-recorded, while Albini adamantly refused to budge on what he felt was an iron-clad agreement not to change anything about the album’s recording. There was also concerns about whether the large American markets would put the album on their shelves, over the song “Rape Me” and what they felt it was portraying to the public. It seems almost ludicrous in this modern world that an album took two weeks to produce, but seven months for it to be released. Especially given that it profited all parties involved to get it out into the public's hands as soon as possible.

The whole vibe of “In Utero” is a different breed form both of the two preceding albums. There is a real divide between the way the songs are recorded and played here on this album that the others, something that both producer and writer was looking for. There is a true raw vocal sound from Cobain on many songs on the album, including the opening tracks “Serve the Servants” and "Scentless Apprentice". Unlike most Nirvana songs, the guitar riff on “Scentless Apprentice” was written by Dave Grohl, and though Cobain professed not to like it he wrote the song to accommodate it, while Krist Novoselic helped compose the song's second section. It is the only song on In Utero on which all three band members received songwriting credits. For some reason, this gets high praise in fan circles, and supposedly Cobain wanted to release this as the second single from the album. I admit I don’t get it. The track seems off, the screams are over wrought, and to me it just isn’t a very accessible track. Perhaps that’s why he was so keen to get it out there.
In polar opposite from those tracks, the next two have Cobain at his crooning best. “Heart Shaped Box” came from a riff that Courtney Love claims was the only riff she ever asked if Kurt wanted, because she wanted to use it for her band. After the previous song, this is much more back in the NIrvana groove, with the brooding vocals and loaded drum work from Dave. “Rape Me” was actually written before the release of “Nevermind” and was literally written lyrically as an anti-rape song, but the addition of lyrics in the middle of the song months later also gave it a twist of being against the litany of fame and the increased desire of the media and public to want every part of the artist and his family. “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” continued down the path of those drawbacks to fame and the mental fatigue it caused especially Cobain at this time.
The remainder of the album continues in this vein of coarse vocalled tracks and the most recognisable Cobain croon, while the music morphs as is necessary. The hasher verdicts of songs such as “Milk It” are measured out by the less frantic and less audible tones of songs like “Dumb” and “Pennyroyal Tea” and “All Apologies”
Nevermind’s success was built off the opening single, a song that captured the imagination of the listening public around the globe and blew up all over the world. There’s no doubt that many fans came into “In Utero” and were looking for another “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to light the fire again, and that the album would follow down the same path as “Nevermind” did. The fact that it didn’t, and that the opening single to this album “Heart Shaped Box” was perhaps more of a brooder and a creeper than the raw energy of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” always felt from my perspective that it threw a massive curveball at the fans of the time.

My view of “In Utero” has always been in a comparison, much the same way as Faith No More’s album “Angel Dust“ was on a completely different level from their multi-million selling commercial breakthrough “The Real Thing“. Just like “Angel Dust” this is the ugly duckling of the discography. “In Utero” is a different beast, which is the way that Kurt Cobain wanted it. He didn’t want an album that was as slickly produced as the previous album was, which was why he changed producer from the acclaimed Butch Vig to using Steve Albini. He wanted a more raw and abrasive sound for the album, one that harked back to their debut album “Bleach”, while still being able to have those other more subtle sounding songs where he could use the quiet emotion of the band to express that side of their sound as well.
The end result was “In Utero”, an album that Cobain was quoted as saying was “impersonal” in interviews on its release, but surely nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the songs here lyrically are dealing with depression, and dealing with the trappings of fame, and dealing with life itself. There are people – overly obsessed people to be sure – who have spent years dissecting the words of the songs here, and trying to interpret just what Kurt was trying to say – what he was REALLY trying to say, and looking for doble meanings and hidden truths amongst what he wrote and sang. Which, really, is madness. Everything Kurt Cobain was feeling is right there in his lyrics, at the surface. He’s not trying to be clever or make songs difficult to derive meaning from.
When I first bought this album, I was no different from the other hordes of people who climbed aboard. I was not necessarily looking for, but probably expected, another “Nevermind”. And that definitely is NOT what this album is. And it definitely took some getting used to, because it isn’t as easily accessible as that album was. But once you wade in past the change in mood, the change in vocal sound and the change in expectation, what I found was a really interesting album. It is , probably surprisingly, not as aggressive an album musically as its predecessor, something that I had been anticipated and even looking forward to. Instead, it is an album that draws a lot of introspection instead. It was an album I expected was going to be great to play at parties loud and sing along to loud. And instead it is an album that seems better utilised by sitting in a lounge chair and considering the lyrics and admiring the musical work. And that’s where my enjoyment of this album comes from. It’s a different piece of art, that’s for sure, but one worth admiring nonetheless.
Kurt Cobain has been called a genius in the years since his demise for the way he wrote songs and lyrics and the way he sang to exhort the maximum amount of emotion from each track. To me, that really is overdoing it and making his work more than it actually is. Kurt Cobain was obviously a person who had trouble dealing with a lot of things in his life, but most especially the fame that came with his band’s amazing popularity, and the things he had to deal with as a result of this explosion in fame. He suffered from depression, and as a result drug dependency. And he wrote about these things in his music. And his music and words, on this album and the only other two albums the band produced, is amazing and ground breaking and iconic. Whether that makes him a genius or someone to be pitied is a completely different conversation.