He’d worked with Killdozer, Smashing Pumpkins and Tad for boutique labels. It was just too risky.”īutch Vig was an all-around nice guy who was something of a veteran of the underground punk scene. But there was nothing that they could do to change my mind. I kind of felt like the enemy at the time. “I felt guilty because I wanted to be on their label still, because they’re people who share similar thoughts. “We decided to cut out the middle man,” said Kurt, as Sub Pop looked into distribution details with a couple of major labels. Their original drummer, Dale Crover, helped out on a seven-date tour of the West Coast Mudhoney’s Dan Peters played on the Sliver single. Nirvana’s drummer, Chad Channing, also left, and Kurt and Krist found it very hard to replace him. Nirvana brought in a second guitarist, Jason Everman, who quickly left and joined Soundgarden. Kurt dated and then broke up with Tobi Vail of the band Bikini Kill. They undertook their first domestic and international tours. The band went through a two-year period of upheaval. And if Cobain had any of the glorious pop sensibilities of Nevermind in his early writing, he was quick to bury them under the feedback and angst. It was nothing more than a minor hit for a hip little label. Their first record, Bleach, cost precisely $606.15 (less than £450) to make.
It seemed like we were about to make another pass through the underground.”īefore the band began the sessions with Butch Vig in April 1990 for what was planned as the band’s second full album for Seattle’s Sub Pop label, there was nothing in Nirvana’s recent history that suggested superstardom. “The charts were filled with fucking Mariah Carey and Michael Bolton. “It didn’t seem possible,” Grohl contended. Nevermind was such an unlikely hit that even as the band were making it – aware that they were signed to a major label in Geffen, and that they had some quite spectacular songs – they found it impossible to conceive that it could be such a thing. You can chase after this idea or that concept, but this was stripped down, with a lot of feeling. It could have come out in the 1970s or 1980s. Pepper with symphony orchestras, it was just a rock’n’roll record. “There’s a lot of power in the record, but it wasn’t a Sgt. "It’s hard to believe it’s such a revolutionary record – for people in the band, around the band, in the world,” Krist Novoselic told David Fricke. Kurt tried hard to escape from the impact of Nevermind, tried hard to play it down, to deny its greatness and even to disparage it, but it remains the centrepiece of his career. Only recently, with the desire for information having been sated, have thoughts turned back to his musical legacy, and what it will mean. We know pretty much all we’re ever going to know about his death. We know where he bought the gun, where he bought his last hit, and we’ve retraced his last steps. We’ve read the many books, seen the documentaries. We’ve read his suicide note, seen his dead body, watched his wife grieve, heard about his drug addiction. We know far more about the last years of his life than we do about almost every other star of similar stature. More has been written about Kurt Cobain’s suicide than about his greatest record. And all it does is make me feel old, like Neil Young or something.” When the Foo Fighters play shows, kids will walk up – kids from new bands who are huge, who are 22, the same age I was when we did Nevermind – and they tell me that I was a great influence on them.
“I’m proud that I was a part of that band, that I had an opportunity to mean so much to so many people. “That would be far too egotistical,” Grohl said.
Having us on the cover isn’t going to make Rolling Stone any cooler”) asked Dave Grohl whether he felt that Nevermind had an impact on the music he was hearing today. Rolling Stone writer David Fricke, who had conducted some of the best-known interviews with Nirvana in the early 90s (despite Kurt’s view that “ Rolling Stone sucks, has always sucked, and still sucks. Hedonism was back on top, and the rain and doom of Kurt’s day seemed like a long, long time ago. As they spoke, the era of Guns N’ Roses, Sunset Strip and style-over-content had become a faded holiday snapshot now the industry love-buzz was all about rock’n’roll again: the Strokes, White Stripes and the rest of the new wave of trashy, disposable good-time music.