Friday, May 16, 2008
Was Nirvana's angry, culture-shifting 1991 anthem really a revolution? Maybe not. But it changed my life.
Apr 15, 2002 | The first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I was sitting in the passenger seat of a pickup truck in Tampa, Fla. It was the fall of 1991 and I was a washed-up baseball player who had just graduated from college.
My next idea was to become a writer. I played in a band, wrote in my journal and went drinking with my buddies every night. This was on my parents' bill. America was locked in a deepening recession and I was a slacker, in the days before slackerdom became a viable marketing demographic.
There was more missing in my life than a steady job. College had been a great disappointment. All we did was sit around and talk about other times. I listened to Bob Dylan and wished I had been alive in the early 1960s. The Gulf War had stirred things up briefly, but how can you aim your discontent at a video game? I had been bred to believe that I had been born at the wrong time, that nothing happened in my generation and that the last real cultural and artistic revolution was at least 20 years in the past. I was thinking about getting a job in sales.
The stereo system in my friend's pickup was the ultimate. He was the drummer in his own band and he needed sound, loud sound, to surround him at all times.
"Listen to these guys," he said, putting on the album "Nevermind" by Nirvana. "Teen Spirit" clinked its first guitar riff, then roared to life. It was easy not to listen to music then. The Milli Vanillis and Tiffanys seemed to have drained the life out of the record charts.
But halfway through "Teen Spirit," I sat up in my seat. Clearly, the singer was pissed off, though I couldn't understand a word he was saying. But he was also reaching into the melodic stratosphere and coming back with a simple tune that made you want to do something, even if you were a washed-up ballplayer who thought you just wanted to drink beer.
"Jesus," I said to my friend. "Who are these guys?" I was probably more alarmed than impressed.
He handed me the CD case. The cover's picture of a naked baby swimming underwater, reaching for a dollar bill hung on a hook, seemed to say, "Nothing is sacred." I opened it, and on the inside, there they were: Nirvana. And the blond guy was shooting me the bird.
The story of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and the success that this five minutes and two seconds attained, is the story of rock 'n' roll: ugly and beautiful and triumphant and tragic.
Music fans know about its writer, Kurt Donald Cobain of Aberdeen, Wash., by now. The product of divorce and other family dysfunction, heroin addiction and his own apparent psychological problems, Cobain in hindsight seems predestined for suicide, which came at the age of 27, at his Seattle home, with material success all around him.
Long before that, Cobain was a familiar character to anyone who attended high school in the United States. He was the skinny burnout, the guy who would pick a fight with a redneck, then get his ass kicked. He was Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," but with an intellect and a venomous bite.
Cobain was different from the stereotypical burners in one crucial way. For whatever reason -- practice, God's gift, random fate -- he was able to churn his cauldron of discontent into delicious, consumable music.
In the spring of 1991, Cobain's rock 'n' roll dream was about to come true. Since his teenage days, when he was bouncing through foster homes and other shelters not his own, he had wanted to be a rock star. And anybody who was anyone in the music industry knew about his Geffen-signed band, Nirvana, and how it was about to break out.
Nirvana's first record, 1989's "Bleach," was produced for a little over $600 and became the scuffed jewel of the alternative world (this being when "alternative" was something slightly more than a meaningless marketing label). Songs like "Blew," "School," "About a Girl," "Floyd the Barber," "Negative Creep" and a roaring cover of "Love Buzz" had a decidedly raw sound, a guttural collage of grunts and screams that every once in a while found middle ground in gorgeous melodies powered by Cobain's sugary, coarse vocals.
Cobain was 24 years old in the spring of '91, and his songwriting had hit that plateau that merges confidence and wisdom. He had become consistent with structure, sardonically tailoring a song around verse-chorus-verse, packaging the whole thing in Beatles-esque singalong. Spurred by the carrot of rock success, delving into his depression and addictions, he was writing the best lyrics of his life.
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