![]() ![]() Still, Cobain quickly faced the effects of the Faustian bargain he had struck with the majors. To his credit, Cobain took an approach to spreading the wealth, whether by wearing a Daniel Johnston T-shirt or praising the work of lesser-known bands like Shonen Knife, the Vaselines, and the Raincoats. On the other hand, financial security had its benefits, as it did for any artist. This understanding formed the essential ethos of punk rock. Artistic credibility depended on outsider status and the social criticism that could be levied from such a position. Yet, the fact that such a recalcitrant attitude was quickly exploited for monetary gain by record labels became a dilemma that Cobain could never fully reconcile. It was a statement of attitude against such commercial demands. ![]() The LP wasn’t a crass bid for commercial success. But the insouciant album title said it all. ![]() The inside joke was that Cobain himself had worked as a janitor. However, only several weeks later, he could openly mock his own poverty and detrimental high school years in the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with its demented pep rally and mosh pit dancing janitor. Evicted from his apartment in Olympia, Cobain had slept in his car in the weeks just prior to the final mixing of the album in Los Angeles. (Grohl also dated Kathleen Hanna at the time.) Cobain wanted to be part of the esteemed K Records crowd of Olympia, but his working-class roots contributed to insecure feelings of unworthiness amidst this elite, college-educated clique. The resulting songs on Nevermind were partly inspired by his relationship with Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon had encouraged Cobain to sign with their major label, DGC Records, and had invited Nirvana to open for Sonic Youth during a European tour in the summer of 1991. David Grohl joined in 1990, bringing steadiness and a new onslaught to the backbeat. By then, Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach (1989), had received significant critical attention. Nevermind had high expectations attached to it. Epitomizing his ambition, Cobain hand delivered it to KCMU (now KEXP), the University of Washington’s radio station, and then called in anonymously to request it when it wasn’t aired. Their debut single, “Love Buzz” (1988), was not an original composition but a cover of a 1969 psych-rock tune by the Dutch band Shocking Blue. Nirvana went through the usual rites of passage for a rock band starting out – lineup changes, frat party gigs, low-budget regional tours, and a fraught relationship with their record label, Sub Pop. Cobain had fortuitously met Buzz Osborne of Melvins while still a teenager, providing inspiration as to what might be possible. Nirvana, which Cobain started in 1987 at the age of 20 with bassist Krist Novoselic, provided a source of focus and stability. Cobain’s claim that he slept under the Young Street Bridge, which inspired the Nevermind song “Something in the Way”, is reflective of his perspective on this period, though this story has since proven to be apocryphal. Cross’s excellent biography, Heavier Than Heaven (2001), Cobain faced a litany of challenges that began with childhood in his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington: a broken home defined by an acrimonious divorce working-class parents with little wealth to spare a period of informal foster care and sleeping in hospital emergency rooms when he had nowhere else to go, among other details. The pressures of stardom provided another set of anxieties rather than a balm to those he had grappled with his entire life. Yet, this hard-won success proved not enough. In the space of 17 months, from the release of Nevermind in September 1991 to the recording of In Utero in February 1993, Cobain had achieved essentially everything he wanted – critical acclaim, financial security, and family life through his marriage to Courtney Love in February 1992 and the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean, in August 1992. The story has been told many times before, but the extraordinary success of Nirvana‘s sophomore effort and major label debut, Nevermind(1991), had been extremely taxing on the social world, physical energy, and psychological stability of Cobain. ![]()
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