The Roots of Nirvana

No band develops in the vacuum; every band starts out thinking, at the very least a lttle bit, of other musicians that they wish to take after or rebel against. But Nirvana was the very first great band of actual music snobs: record fiends who planned to ensure it is very clear exactly what they listened to. They all loved Grunge Music Led Zep and Aerosmith and CCR and Black Sabbath and Kiss and then some more Led Zep on top of that. Mostly, though, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic had grown up as Western punk rock kids. They hung out with the Melvins in Aberdeen, Washington, were required by circumstance to define their position with regards to K Records and the Olympia scene and carried Flipper and Bad Brains records like shields to defend against poseurs. (Dave Grohl had a roughly equivalent experience becoming an adult within the DC area.) After they hit the top time, they covered a common bands, got them to open for Nirvana, wore their T-shirts every chance they got. Kurt even oversaw reissues of his beloved Raincoats' lost work.



If you are unaware of the latest band news make sure you go through Breaking Band News and Hot Band News.

In the event that there were any ambiguity left about who Nirvana considered their ancestors, to make sure outlined in Kurt's Journals -- the scribblings associated with an inveterate listmaker who clearly loved even writing names of his favorite records, like talismans of good luck and good punk rock karma. Certain discs show up repeatedly in Kurt's pantheons of music: some are multiplatinum warhorses (Match the Beatles, Aerosmith's Rocks), other medication is hopelessly obscure (Fang's Land Shark, the self-titled Tales of Terror album). Most of them, though, are remarkable American indie-rock and hardcore albums from your '80s, with a few artier European post-punk records and also the inevitable Leadbelly album added too. They're worth investigating if you love Nirvana: these bankruptcies are not exactly the recycleables Cobain and Novoselic and Grohl transmuted into gold, they're just what the band aspired to.

The very best of Leadbelly
Artist: Lead Belly
Release Date: 2003

When Nirvana played their wrenching cover of Leadbelly's "Where Have you Sleep Yesterday evening?" (a.k.a. "In the Pines") on MTV Unplugged, it appeared to be an urgent gesture toward the blues blood that also courses so powerfully through rock's veins. Actually, though, Kurt doesn't appear to have been so into vintage blues normally -- he just loved Leadbelly obsessively (along previously recorded four Leadbelly songs with Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan). This collection can be a solid introduction to the "King in the Twelve-String Guitar," a roaring ex-con who miraculously pulled joyful music out of his personal horrors.

Surfer Rosa / Seriously Pilgrim
Artist: The Pixies
Release Date: 1988

Kurt called this 1988 album "a die-cast metal fossil from a spacecraft," plus some from the Pixies' favorite tricks -- endlessly looping riffs which in fact had never quite been used before, tense clean-toned verses that bloom into explosive, distorted choruses -- turned up on Nevermind a few years later. Steve Albini's drumstick-to-your-skull engineering work here pretty obviously inspired Nirvana to hire him for In Utero, too. Most of what Nirvana got in the Pixies was a mindset: the a feeling of being off-balance and screaming whilst keeping one foot in tightly controlled structure.

Over The Edge
Artist: Wipers
Release Date: 1983

Kurt's "Top 50" list ultimately included three albums by Portland, Oregon's Wipers: Are these claims Real?, Youth of America and 1983's In the Edge. Singer-guitar monster Greg Sage's band was ferociously chugging and deeply into a unique alienation -- and operated independently in the music-business machine -- years before anybody else inside the American Grunge Music realized their techniques. Nirvana and Hole both eventually covered Wipers songs; "So Young," because of this album, could effortlessly be mistaken for a Cobain original.

Singles 1-12
Artist: Melvins
Release Date: 1997

If you are unaware of the latest band news make sure you go through Breaking Band News and Hot Band News.

If you were a punk rock kid in Aberdeen, Washington inside the mid-'80s, the Melvins were IT: they spiked their hardcore with brutal metal, they can play scorchingly fast or tortuously slow, they were given to play in Olympia and Seattle as well as their practice space was the locus from the local punk scene. In addition they a knack for doing screwed-up things on their recordings, and the 1996 group of singles collected here's classic Melvins -- tributes towards the Germs, Flipper and Butthole Surfers Grunge Music, corrosive audio experiments and straight-up blasts of the grunge style they helped to invent.

Jamboree
Artist: Beat Happening
Release Date: 1988

Somewhat, Kurt never quite are part of Olympia's K Records, their flagship band Beat Happening and the "love-rock" scene around them -- an excessive amount of tummy-rubbing, inadequate gut-punch -- but he loved it enough that he got the K logo tattooed on his left arm, as well as passion for childhood fed his very own. 1988's Jamboree, evidently his favorite Beat Happening record, is half pastel nostalgia, half savage dread, a la-la pop album that collapses into a puddle of screeching noise by the end.

Bayou Country
Artist: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Release Date: 1969

Just like a lot of other punk bands, Nirvana adored classic rock; unlike nearly all of their peers, they embraced it -- among Cobain and Novoselic's first efforts to play the guitar together would have been a Creedence cover band. Kurt cited this 1969 album like a favorite of his, and you can hear plenty of John Fogerty's throaty bellow on "Born around the Bayou" in the way he taught himself to sing; you can also hear how Creedence's sturdy chording as well as simple melodies resurfaced in Nirvana's music. What Nirvana may also have picked up from Creedence, though, was the art of self-reinvention and presentation: remember, Fogerty's a legitimate Cali kid, not only a bayou native.

LiliPUT
Artist: Kleenex / LiliPUT
Release Date: 2003

"Anything by Kleenex" was the way in which Kurt usually wear it his lists of favorite records. The young Swiss ladies who recorded first as Kleenex then as LiLiPUT between 1978 and 1983 stood a garbled discography, and this compilation of all things by them didn't come in the usa until 2001. So commence with their delirious, glorious singles "Split," "Ain't You" and "Eisiger Wind," filled with shrieks and chirps, and powered by the rhythms of people which are going to play their way and nobody else's.

Kill Rock Stars
Artist: Various Artists - Kill Rock Stars
Release Date: 2003

During the summer time of 1991, Nirvana were just another well-loved Washington band, and also the other artists compiled here -- around the anthology that launched the label of the identical name -- were their contemporaries and scenemates: their old pals the Melvins, Bikini Kill (featuring Kurt's ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail), label owner Slim Moon's band Witchypoo, Steve Fisk (who'd recorded the Blew EP), Heavens to Betsy (having a very young Corin Tucker, later of Sleater-Kinney) plus a duo of Lois Maffeo and Pat Maley that passed the name of Courtney Love -- no relation... or almost none.

Extended Play
Artist: The Raincoats
Release Date: 1995

Inside the liner notes of Incesticide, Kurt told the storyline of methods he'd tracked down "that wonderfully classic scripture," the Raincoats' 1979 debut album, in England. Songwriters Ana da Silva and Gina Birch reformed the audience in 1994 to spread out for Nirvana on the tour that never happened. They did, however, tour America, and recorded this EP to get a BBC radio session: two new songs and 2 early favorites, performed with the sure-footed power and fresh-minded re-conception in the proper language, subject and sound for pop songs that have drawn Cobain for many years to begin with.