Nirvana

My seventh and last post about this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees is about Nirvana, the band of most recent vintage, who were inducted in their first year of eligibility. There can be little controversy about their election, because even though they recorded only three studio albums, there impact on the music scene is immeasurable.

I've already written about their first two studio albums, Bleach and Nevermind, so this week I've been listening to the three other discs they made: their third and last studio album, In Utero; their live album, MTV Unplugged; and a collection of unreleased stuff, Incesticide. This only reinforces my belief that they were the best group to come out of the "grunge" scene of Seattle, and that they were the best band of the '90s.

It is especially poignant to write about them now, as it is just a few weeks shy of the 20th anniversary of Cobain's death (and the case has now been re-opened). Like many great artists, Cobain's was a tortured soul, reflected in his music. I have one friend who dismisses their music as "whining," which is certainly true, but I think the entire rock oeuvre is pretty much based on teen angst. Cobain's was much more extreme.

The band was formed by Cobain and Krist Novoselic in Seattle in the late '80s. They went through a series of drummers before alighting on Dave Grohl in 1990. Their first record, Bleach, didn't do much, but they exploded with Nevermind, prompted mostly by the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and its accompanying video of a high school janitor and a cheerleading squad.

Their music was a winning combination of punk and melody, which blossomed in Nevermind. In Utero, which isn't as strong a record in its entirety, does have the best songs they did, in my opinion: "Heart-Shaped Box," "Pennyroyal Tea,"  "All Apologies," and "Dumb." Ironically, the lyric from that last song, "I think I'm dumb, or maybe just happy," didn't seem to work for Cobain.

"Heart-Shaped Box" is my favorite Nirvana song, a sinister number with a creepy guitar riff that has a line, "I wish I could eat your cancer" that gets to me everytime. "Pennyroyal Tea," about Cobain's chronic stomach pains (that particular herb tea is said to be a tonic for stomach ailments) is raw and aching, and "All Apologies," done with acoustic guitar, is a breathtakingly beautiful lament about life in general, which gives us the great inscrutable phrase, "aqua seafoam shame."

Incesticide is a kind of odds and sods record of songs that are otherwise not an album. It includes a much more punk version of "Polly," the song about torture, and one of my favorites, "Sliver," about a young boy being dropped off at his grandparents' house and immediately chanting, "Grandma take me home." This silly little song has a perfect musical moment--it starts like a ditty, but then has a precisely placed squeal of guitar feedback that announces it's not a novelty song.

MTV, back in the day, was actually a relevant part of the music scene, unlike the cultural blight it is today. Many artists made live albums in their "Unplugged" series (though not all stuck to the title rule). Nirvana's is one of the best, and I listen to it often. It's not just for their owns songs that they do, but the interesting cover songs. They cover David Bowie ("The Man Who Sold the World"), The Vaselines ("Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam") and three songs by the obscure Meat Puppets, the highlight being "Lake of Fire"--"Where do bad folks go when they die, they don't go to heaven where the angels fly, they go a lake of fire and fry, see 'em again 'til the Fourth of July."

My favorite cut on the record is the last, a rendition of Ledbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night." That Cobain loved Ledbelly just seems so right, and he tells a short story about how the Ledbelly estate offered the late singer's guitar for $500,000. Cobain asked David Geffen to buy it for him, but was turned down.

Nirvana is a great what-if band. Grohl, who stepped out from Cobain's shadow, formed The Foo Fighters and has had great success. If Cobain had lived, one wonders if Grohl would have ever been given a voice. If so, they might have become the Lennon-McCartney of the era. But we will never know. We do have Cobain's short output, but it will last forever.