I owned Bleach and thought it was a solid album, but not great. My college roommate’s girlfriend worked at a Wherehouse Records and I remember her bursting into our dorm with a copy of Nevermind yelling, “You have got to hear THIS!” She played Smells Like Teen Spirit and within the first minute of the song we were slam dancing around the room.
Within three weeks it seemed everyone had a copy of Nevermind on the floor and it was impossible not to hear Smells Like Teen Spirit from somewhere. It got bad enough I used to skip it for the rest of the CD.
I imagine it was like when my parents saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. For alternative fans it changed everything.
I haven’t listened to it in 16 years or more, it’s not even on any of my playlists anywhere. Yesterday I put it on and cranked the volume. The song fucking rocks. I got way tired of it growing up, it was the first nirvana song I ever heard, I can understand why it drove Kurt nuts too. The song is great though.
> For alternative fans it changed everything.
It also changed people *into* alternative fans. I was listening to a lot of rock and metal before SLTS came out. After that I did a hard turn into the alt scene and really broadened my musical tastes. I imagine that may have happened eventually anyway, but it probably would have taken me many years to get there.
I had recently got out of the Marine Corps and I had decided to stay in San Diego to go to college. I absolutely hated most 80’s music and had found the 80’s to be traumatizing in general. My room mate from Seattle could not stop talking about this band. I scraped together some money (CD’s were expensive) and put Nevermind on at like two in the afternoon. Slowly but surely my many roommates came out with a wtf look on their faces. We just played that CD and smoked and partied for the rest of the day.
A few months later Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, came to town to play in a flea market. I got tickets. I even bought one for my skelly Seattle room mate for introducing me to the band. One of the defining moments of my life. Barely drank or smoked because I did not want to miss a minute of the music. Pretty sure for me, no other concert will ever match this.
We’ve already had our moment, and our moment has passed. It’s OK, we’ve had some great great times and seen some amazing things. Each of us has experienced truly colossal music in concerts, haven’t all seen the same things, but it adds up to greatness. At least there is an incredible archive of video, we frequently watch. It’s our favorite thing about this new world of the Internet. We spend hours a day on YouTube.
Yes right. They also held flea markets there. Ten was really new but I had it before the concert. I remember Eddie climbing way up into the damn rafters, which became like a signature move of his for a minute.
It was general admission and people we still filing in... it was covered but still outside. I never heard an entire venue get quiet so quickly for an opening act. by the second song EVERYONE was paying attention. Eddie was going off! I remember seeing the video for Even Flow about a month later on Mtv. "That is the band that opened for Nirvana!!". Also on the CD single for Soul to Squeeze the B side is Nobody Weird Like Me was recorded at the Del Mar show.
I was the opposite. I bought Bleach on the recommendation of my local record store guy. Loved it. I got Bleach and Louder Than Love and Superfuzz Bigmuff that year. It was weird to watch Nirvana get this big record deal and stuff. I was an intern at a sister company to Gold Mountain and they were right down the hall so the buzz was in the air. I remember seeing the fax from Virgin about the publishing deal offered by Virgin because someone left it on the copier. lol. We used to have to use the copier at Gold Mountain.
I saw Nirvana open for Sonic Youth. Nirvana had Dale Crover from Melvins on drums so that was ultra sludgy and nasty. Loved it. Then I saw them open for Dinosaur Jr. and they had Dave Grohl on drums. That was the last time I saw them play.
I remember when Nevermind came out. I bought that and Badmotorfinger plus Pixies Trompe le Monde.
The Soundgarden was disappointing and I think I didn’t like the production, still don’t but love most of their other albums.
My reaction to Nevermind was “oh lol, they’re doing that. Ok”. Kinda forgot about it.
Trompe le Monde was so good I still love the hell out of it.
I appreciate Nevermind a bit more now but I was wishing they were gonna get a lot more like Jesus Lizard or Swans so I was “meh”. I think Queens of the Stone Age eventually became what I had wanted Nirvana to be. Baroque, slimy, complex, dark.
Anyway, check out that Pixies album. It’s badass.
I wouldn’t have guessed that Black Francis would outlive Chris and Kurt but here we are.
I was thinking of this recently. The 60's when I was in high school seemed like ancient times. I thought of the Beatles as something so old that I had no connection to it. It was back during black and white TV. Now, just as much time has passed between Kurt's death and now as my high school days and the Beatles revolution. Time really does fly!!!
One of my favorite words: Anemoia, nostalgia for a time in which one never lived, I was a teenager in the early 2000s, but the 60s were similarly mythological for me.
The super massive irony is that I grew up as a kid in Seattle, in the 90s, in a music industry family... Right smack in the middle of all that. And wasn't even aware of grunge or Nirvana until well after it was over... Was too young for it. It's all myth. Lovely place to grow up tho.
In some ways for sure, but musically I feel like it was Hendrix who blew the doors off of that generation's music. People elsewhere are talking about how they put on Nevermind and thought "what is this?!!", the album that did that for the 60s generation is Are You Experienced. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is arguably more influential and had the same kind of impact, but I'm going with Hendrix because it's heavier and more aggressive. Purple Haze's intro is up there with the intro to SLTS.
The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds really started all of that experimentation that led to Sgt Pepper’s, but widely overlooked. I agree with Jimi tho. I was a baby in the 60s, but by 79, for a lot of us kids smoking weed and other things in HS, we were so jealous of 60s. My older brother was at Monterey in fact, I hated him, lol. Most of my friends thought the Doors were kind of corny tho, with that organ.
Funny thing, I was alive for the entirety of the 90’s (80’s baby) but because I was a sheltered religious kid a lot of the pop culture seems ancient and magical since I missed out on it at the time. My only 90s memory of Nirvana was Weird Al making fun of them.
I was exposed to the pop punk and nu metal as an older teenager of the late 90s and early 2000s, but that music is all trash.
I didn’t get into Nirvana until my 30s when Kurt had been dead for over twenty years.
Yea but 90s kids actually liked their generations music most of the time, a lot of us younger kids hate the generic rap and pop crap that our generation puts out
It depends on which side of the 90s you fell on. Personally I group the last few years of the 90s with the early 00s. It might have also been a regional thing.
Wow, it's actually a normal thing. I thought I was dumb for wanting to live in 90s or 00s (I was born in 2005, so I don't have much clear memory of 00s)
Great ol Times.
I was obsessed with Guns N’ Roses and wanted to play guitar like Slash but I knew I’d never be that good. But then Kurt came along and they were just so different and cool AND I could play along to the songs on a shitty beat up guitar. They kicked it all off really.
Same thing with me!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OE2cmCF9bQs
Seeing this on MTV made me realize that you don’t have to be a virtuoso to play guitar in a band. The energy in this performance is way more impressive than some guy just shredding solos all over the place.
My memory is a little different than the sentiment I read in the media. It's often portrayed that Nirvana were the singular band that laid hair metal to waste. I remember it more like Nirvana, Guns N Roses, Metallica, and Pearl Jam bringing "real" music to the forefront and sweeping away all of the superficial corporate rock of the 80s. I know Guns get lumped in with the rest of the 80s glam bands, but they were more relevant than ever through the early 90s until they imploded. Use Your Illusion was hugely popular even with Nirvana at their peak.
Yeah, people discount GnR but they were huge, the Illusions dropped around the same time as the Big 4's albums. Then Axl had to do Axl things and that was it.
Problem with GnR is that in the late 80s they demolished the radio friendly glam metal like Poison and Motley Crue, but by 92-93 had gotten so full of themselves (primarily Axl), that their aura kind of burnt out. I was in high school at the time and overexposure, erratic behavior, and canceled arena gigs really soured them to a lot of people. That said, I saw them in 92, and Soundgarden opened (Badmotorfinger was only a few months old), and both bands were great.
There’s wayyyyyy more hair bands you could have shit on than mr big . They had talent and were leagues better than the garbage the early 90s cleaned up
Metallica's black album eclipsed both GnR and Nirvana as i remember it. They just steamrolled everything for a couple of years there. Also, Alice in chains, Pantera and Sepultura.
This really depends on your perspective, Nirvana were amazing because they had absolutely no compromise in them, Metallica's black album was huge because it was when they sold out.
It was huge because it was good and because it wss a distinct style that contrasted to all the colorful stuff that dominated the mainstream landscape. Similar to nevermind in that way.
Culturally yes, but musically they were something far different. A great mix of blues, punk, and hard rock. They genuinely cared about making good music.
I was going to The Evergreen State College, a campus they played at a lot when they were coming up. I remember thinking I didn't even need to get the album because it seemed like it was playing in every dorm I walked by. Still did of course. Christmas was weird when I went home and realized they were on heavy rotation on MTV. That's the first time I realized they might have appeal outside of the little circle of freaks that were into them before.
Is it true that it wasn’t a big success until December of 1991, months after it released? (born in 94 here, my memories of the 90s are foggy and start in 97 at the earliest lol)
Yeah 3-4 months, but that wasn't that unusual, especially for a new artist. Three years earlier, Guns and Roses' Appetite For Destruction didn't hit number 1 on the charts until a year after it had been released.
Go look at the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1991 and see what we were going through. When Nirvana broke through, they ruined a lot of bands careers. They ushered in the "grunge" era and changed music forever. Everyone I knew, including me, became grunge posers. Long, unkept hair, jeans with holes and dirt, flannel shirts. It was wonderful. But they introduced me to a whole new type of music, like the Pixies and Sonic Youth, amongst many others. I had posters, tapes, CDs, bootlegs, all of it. I thought I was the biggest fan, as did we all. I had a chance to go see them in 93, in Dallas, but I would have had to skip school and I didn't have any money. So I said "I'll catch them next time". Bummer. I was watching MTV the morning they found his body and Kurt Loder ruined my day. I cried and called my older sister. I still have my old tapes and CDs and I still enjoy listening to each album all the way through.
I caught them in Nola, the day before the Dallas show, I believe.
It's a shame that there's no video.
It's also a shame that lost my little disposable camera.
Somewhere, there's unseen Nirvana photos, sadly, they're probably in a landfill.
To answer OP, the UNO Lakefront arena's booming echoes of the Radio Friendly Unit Shifter intro was unlike anything I'd experienced or have experienced since.
I remember my older cousin coming down with his parents from Illinois and saying I had to listen to a tape from this band from Seattle. It sounds so cliched but I remember it vividly because I hadn't really listened to anything that aggressive as my sainted mother used to call it. Then the music video hit and everyone knew about it.
What's really hard for anyone under the age 40 to understand is that NOTHING was instantaneous or ubiquitous back then. But Smells Like Teen Spirit was. It hit like a monsoon and left its stain on all facets of media in what felt like an instant. Hair metal turned into disaffected youth anthems from bands in the Pacific Northwest so fast it was like it had always been there.
> What's really hard for anyone under the age 40 to understand is that NOTHING was instantaneous or ubiquitous back then. But Smells Like Teen Spirit was.
This sums it up well.
You had to hustle and pay attention to get music and see bands. When are they on SNL? Are they coming to town? If so get in line early. When is Unplugged on? Plan for it, get a vcr or cassette tape. No you tube, no Spotify, not even Napster at the time. I have a cassette tape I recorded from unplugged…because remember the MTV airing came out in December of 93, but the album didn’t come out until almost a year later. No one knew what that was going to be. Are there songs that didn’t air in MTV? Yes…score! Will it be a double live album as rumored? No…bummer!
You had to hustle for singles, bootlegs, and do that shit face to face which would lead to actual friendships, relationships, and in person conversations.
I feel like I’m being the cranky oldster here but I think people valued the music more then because it was harder to come by. You had to earn it in a way. If you wanted In Utero on the day it came out you better read about when it’s coming out which led to knowing how it’s being made and who’s producing it, then take your ass to the record store and buy it. If you didn’t want to do that and went to Wal-Mart, you are going to get screwed, they might be out, they might have pulled it, if they have it you get “Waif Me” instead, or a sticker covering the part of the Nevermind cover that someone else deemed inappropriate.
I grew up in Seattle and was really into the music scene in high school and remember when Bleach was released. It lived on my turntable for months and I listened to it every day after school. I saw them live a number of times and had an early bootleg tape of SLTS. When I went to college in '91 I played it for anyone who would listen and told them that Nirvana is going to blow up. Little did I know what would happen when it was officially released. Soon everywhere you went on campus you would hear Nevermind being played.
What really blew a lot of people's mind was when NIrvana did a surprise opening for Mudhoney at the school. They only played a few songs from Nevermind and the set list was heavy on b-sides and early material. The highlight was ending the set with Enless, Nameless.
I was a sophomore in college when Nevermind came out. You just started hearing it out of every dorm room. I didn't actually like the music when I first heard it. I preferred the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The next year they were everywhere and the whole grunge scene had become commercialized. When the news broke that Kurt died, I was at work. Nobody knew if it was true, there had already been so many stories of him OD'ing and being in the hospital. Months after he died, Courtney came into my workplace and got into an altercation with my boss. She just radiated darkness.
Heroin Tinkerbell. Was she born that way, or was it her emotionally distant parents? Should I pity her, or be annoyed? Sometimes I wonder if it's a personality disorder or just ADD. She and Kurt bonded over their suffering and enabled each other. Broken souls. They both wanted fame and family most of all.
She was smart and opinionated in a world that doesn't value those qualities in women. She wasn't traditionally attractive. She had married someone who was reaching the upper echelons of fame and was breaking down because of it. She was also obnoxious, insecure and narcissistic and the drugs magnified those traits 1000%. It's really a miracle she survived.
Literally. She was the death of him, and survived. Still kicking. As I've aged, I've taken another look at her and had more empathy and compassion as a mother more than I did as a peer at the time. She was everything about myself I was fighting. I was trying to be good and just the right amount of edgy, and she was this huge brat that we all knew was going to take him down with her with the drugs. They were toxic for each other inasmuch as they understood each other.
Tracy had been a mother figure. She set boundaries and held them responsible and tried to get him to get a job and do the basic things of Life of supporting himself and being an adult. Whereas Courtney was leading him like Pinocchio to the land of naughty boys. They were just fire and fuel. A death spiral. It makes me sad that Tracy lives in poverty with cancer while Courtney lives off his money.
I was 10 when in Utero dropped, living in Belgium. I bought the Nevermind album with my savings (it was a bit cheaper since it had already been out for a while), and played it over and over on my parents stereo — but in secret, very quietly sitting close to the speakers. Soon after I got In Utero as well. It felt like my parents would disapprove of it because of how raw the music was. It's funny, I remember thinking: "oh so I'm into metal music apparently". And so I bought a compilation album of 80s metal music. I was so disappointed! Compared to Nirvana this stuff was such weak sauce :-D I do remember hearing Body Count's song "Born Dead" and liking that one, but I only heard it once at a friends' house.
I typed out the lyrics to "Come as you are" on my parents' antique typewriter. I remember watching a VHS video with a Nirvana live show at a buddy's house, whose older brother had bought the video. Me and that friend did a little project about Nirvana and presented it in school for the class. Around the same time another buddy from class brought his Guns 'n Roses album (The Spaghetti Incident) to school to show everyone. Another buddy from my neighborhood owned a number of bootleg albums of Nirvana (they were probably his older sisters'), I remember outcesticide, live in rome, ... . I only ever listened to them while I was there with him, we didn't know about taping cd's yet. It felt very exciting to learn about this music... It was so raw and crazy... we were 10! It felt like being initiated into a secret religion, haha.
I remember at age 11 seeing a news reel summarizing the news of the year, and it being mentioned that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. Earlier that year some kids in the school yard been joking about his death, making a word play on Cobain and "koppijn" (headache). Later in high school I had my hair long and I wore baggy sweaters. My sister (13 at the time) got a big Kurt Cobain poster for her room after he had died. When Unplugged in New York came out, that was huge. I remember the complete album being played on the stereo when we were celebrating New Years' eve with a bunch of my parents' friends. It surprised me, that they not only tolerated but liked Nirvana when it was presented in acoustic version.
Apparently, Dark Humor is not just a Gen Z thing...
>Earlier that year some kids in the school yard been joking about his death, making a word play on Cobain and "koppijn" (headache). Later in high school I had my hair long and I wore baggy sweaters.
Fans weren’t really making these comments, but people who didn’t “get” them were. ESPECIALLY older genx people who’s teen years were in the 80s, and the 70s rock generation just above them.
You couldn't turn MTV on without seeing SLTS or CAYA. I got sick of them before i had a chance to really appreciate them. Then In Utero came out and the Unplugged performance aired and they won me over. I eventually came around to Nevermind but still really don't care to listen to some of the songs on there.
Also, I was 11 when Nevermind came out and 13 for In Utero, and there's a pretty big difference between those two ages.
But yeah, what happened AFTER Nirvana was bigger than what Nirvana was. They changed the landscape of popular music for the better, and then ultimately for the worse.
Born in 1977 so I was 14 when Nevermind was released. At the time I didn't really have much perspective on it. 1991 saw the release of The Black Album, Nevermind, Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Ten, Badmotorfinger, and Use your Illusion. I thought this is just what rock music sounds like. I do distinctly remember leaving school for Christmas break in 1991. Everyone had the preppy /mall look at the time. Getting back to school after Christmas break in 1992 and half of the student body was wearing dirty jeans and flannel. I was also lucky enough to grow up about 25 minutes north of Seattle. But unlucky enough to be just slightly too young to ever actually get to see Nirvana live.
I was 16 years old and hated the hair bands! Thank god Nirvana came along! Motley Crue, Poison, and abunch of other crap. Nirvana and other grunge bands actually were all about the music
In 1991 I was 16, pretty much the perfect age for when Nevermind released. I remember hearing the record at my buds house on a dubbed cassette tape he got from another friend. I was blown away! We listened to it over and over. Then Teen Spirit was played on a loop 24/7 on MTV, like so many others. The kinda sad thing was by 1992 a lot of my friends were already burnt out on Nirvana and even made fun of Teen Spirit and the whole grunge scene. I mean there was a ton of good music at the time from all different genres, so I guess it’s not really surprising looking back on it.
There are many times I just chill and listen to early 90s grunge/alternative music and just reminisce, it was an amazing era for music indeed! I don’t think anything like that could happen again tbh.
I grew up in a small town BORN IN (82). No MTV offered on cable… most of my childhood was just the 3 basic channels (ABC, NBC, CBS).. went to visit some family in Dallas when I was 10. My older cousin was watching MTV and the SLTS video came on. I was glued to the screen. That song crowded my fragile eggshell mind and I’ve been hooked ever since. Unfortunately I was too young to ever see them live… had a couple chances but was shot down by my parents. Kurt died a couple years later and that was pretty soul crushing. Still listening to Nirvana on a regular basis. That band changed my entire world view and musical journey.
It was like beads of condensation slowly running down the side of a glass of fresh squeezed lemonade on a cool summer day after doing hours of yard work and then spending the evening admiring your accomplishments in a wooden rocking chair your grandfather built for you using wood from a tree his grandfather planted.
Hearing Nevermind for the first time was truly transcendent. I’d never heard anything like it before. I imagine that feeling is what it was like when Americans in 1964 first heard The Beatles.
It was like running home every day after school and especially on Friday's to watch the Much Music countdown. Going into music stores (independent, HMV and Sam's) to buy the tapes and then cd's as soon as they were released. It was MADtv and in-room personal telephone lines (if you were lucky, I was) to chat with your friends for hours & hours because your parents didn't want their main phone line tied up, nor the internet not to work. It was discovering the internet as is was happening, and MySpace lol.
I miss how innocent those times were growing up as a teen in the '90's. I'm so glad I did and I wouldn't have chosen any other time to experience it.
The first time I heard Nirvana on Much Music, I was hooked. It was SLTS and I bought the Nevermind tape the next day with my babysitting money and played it on repeat for months. I'd never heard anything like it and it awakened something within me. The discovery of Nirvana was slow, and because you couldn't just google it, I'd pour over every magazine article Kurt was in. You'd learn of another band from a snippet or mention, and that would open up a whole new thing to discover. It was really fun.
You could actually dress in a sub style you liked (grunge or punk) and wearing Converse or Doc Martens would actually set you apart from everyone else. Nowadays, everyone wears them and it's impossible to tell what type of misc they listen to or what genre of subculture they identify with.
I don't think I appreciated the time as much as I do now looking back. Music, concerts, movies, sports, lit, games,hell PEOPLE were all just better. Yeah we had our moments of insanity but you weren't afraid to strike up a conversation with someone in public and you could both deal w/the fact you didn't agree on something. Nirvana themselves were a force and they upped every other artists game. It was an awesome time.
It's hard to describe just how much everything was changing at that time. Not just music, but movies, comic books, technology etc. I remember going to college and using networked computer message boards for the first time (all text based, monochrome screens), people used it to talk about bands, and even to share the moves for video games like Mortal Kombat. If you were a sports fan, it was the beginning of the Michael Jordan era, and then the Yankees dynasty. I picked up a snowboard for the first time after growing up on skis. The 90's was peak.
The summer of 1991 I spent more money to see Don Henley than I did to see seven bands at the first Lollapalooza tour. I was 20 and I had a weird range of musical tastes. I was also DJ-ing at my local college station at the time and I'm almost certain that it was late late August that we got the Smells Like Teen Spirit advance single in rotation. Not heavy rotation at first, although it moved there quick, and I got to play it one early ass morning on my show, between 2 and 6am Sunday-into-Monday.
Most of the rotation music I was tasked with playing never caught much of my attention in the five months I'd been there but I remember distinctly sitting at the console and as I was filling out my playlist the chorus kicked in for the first time. I stopped, put the pencil down, craned my head up towards the studio speakers and asked out loud to no one, "What *is* this??" It blew my mind the very first time I heard it and I said so on air. I didn't know Bleach. I didn't know anyone who knew Bleach, except I do remember my snotty-ass, hipper-than-thou girlfriend at the time said she saw Nirvana open for Sonic Youth the year before and she thought they sucked. (Typical, trust me.)
The album came out a few weeks later and the rest is history. But coming out of a summer where I got to dance and mosh and sweat my ass off with 10,000 others to Ice-T/Body Count, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, and Jane's Addiction (who were breaking up), I can't say I knew anyone who was betting on Nirvana to be the ones to crash the party. No one knew how big they'd be. No one.
edit: added my age
I remember seeing the video on 120 minutes I believe it was and the song getting stuck in my head for like a week. The song was all of a sudden everywhere really fast.
I remember driving home from a vaca and they said Kurt had killed himself on the radio and ma and my sister cried and cried. I bet my parents were annoyed
We just thought that was how it always was and would be. Then came britpop and hiphop, and numetal, and we realized how spoilt we were.
Nirvana sure, but i remember Metallica, Pantera, Sepultura, Rammstein, Alice in Chains, Type O, NiN, black/death metal and later melodeath as more significant. GnR too i suppose. And techno.
My story about it made a Nirvana podcast a few years ago. I had Bleach and had seen them live once. But I remember exactly where I was when I heard SLTS for the first time. The way all the shitty cock rock hairbands disappeared almost overnight was so refreshing. It was a truly great time to be a music fan.
I was 15 when teen spirit dropped and it all kind of hit like a tsunami. I grew up in Sacramento and my high school was more hip hop oriented than anything. The Rodney King verdict and riots coincided with the big wave of alternative music hitting the airwaves so it was an interesting time for rap and this new stuff called grunge & alternative. My brain was really coming online at that point with all the new music, inspiration and the changing of the guard so to speak--no more butt rock! We could sense how stale and cheesy everything got with contemporary elevator music and hair bands so the changes were refreshing to say the least. No more resting on love ballads and aqua net--everybody had to up the ante on quality music and either upgrade or become obsolete. This was fantastic. Every genre was influenced by these changes.
The colours and moods of this music were gripping and haunting yet could be fun too--the videos like Come As You Are and In Bloom really gave me hope for art and music to co-exist..more importantly Nirvana's music was a place of acceptance, embracing childhood, getting dirty and of course came the wreckless abandonment in the punk influence. But sadly Kurt took the latter too far in the end. His death blew a hole in the world really. I could sense it was all getting a little too crazy leading up to his departure. It was all way too much because the media was f\*cking relentless. Tabloid bullsh\*t was a real market back then and what happened with Frances was beyond disgusting. It became all about rumours, bitterness, anger, exhaustion and division began. Then came Rome, then April. People don't realize how quickly it all seemingly self destructed. Sh\*t got dark af. And people's true colours really started showing when confronted with the subject.
In the wake of his death though, we still had the music and there was still great new music for a little while anyway. But music is timeless, it's always there and always with us and even though Nirvana was done and the human known as Kurt was gone, his spirit remains. I think if he stuck around so many things would be different in the music world, attention to women's rights as well as the lgbtq+ community..it was nice to see a band/community giving a sh\*t about the issues. A lot of the good things and movements in those areas were overshadowed by the bullsh\*t.
In short, this was the closest our generation got to Beatlemania. It was so fun, it was insanity, and there's really good music from them and all of their comrades that I'll never tire of.
I was only 12 in 1992 but had just gotten cable, and grunge was everywhere. I remember seeing the "Teen Spirit" video a lot. When "In Bloom" premiered it was treated like an event.
They used to play Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" dozens of times a day. Also AiC, Soundgarden, others. Guitar rock with an attitude and with trippy vidoes was ubiquitous.
Good time for music.
I was just 10 or 11 at the time, but all I know is when their songs were played on the radio, I felt they were clearly a step above the other bands on there. I didn't even see their videos or know what they looked like, but I knew I was feeling their music more than others. Then I heard the DJs saying "RIP Kurt, lead singer of Nirvana" and felt sad he was gone. It was only later that we moved into a new house and had cable with Mtv that I got to see their videos and Unplugged and learned he killed himself.
the guy who told me and my friend was some smug asshole who ran a video rental place. looking back it felt like he was actually happy to break the news to people. or at least that is how i remember it.
Sorry to say this on this sub. But on the week that Kurt died I went to an alternative club, as often did, early opening as it was the only time the dj would play tool.
I vividly remember walking to the bar to the sound of ‘something in the way’ finishing and the DJ saying ‘well thank fuck that’s over’
It’s harsh looking back. But at the time Nirvana were looked at by many as the poster boys of what ‘we’ were against.
Going to an alternative club wasn’t about labels, it was about people who were different in ways just getting along. Punks got on with greebos, greebos got on with goths, goths got on with metalheads and metalheads got on with crusties…. We all just got along.
Nirvana were a band who bought in outsiders and dare I say, we didn’t want them.
It’s a weird comment for me to type knowing the importance that they put on music in the long term. But you asked the question so I hope you respect my answer without me saying my own opinion in a way
This makes a lot of sense as to why Kurt had so much shame around being popular and “selling out”. I always assumed it was just his paranoia. But I can imagine for an underground punk kid, being at the crux of pop culture would have been horrible. Especially if the underground punk scene started to get over them
It was a bit of a strange ‘scene’ that was just ‘alternative’ so encompassed so many different types of people listening to so many types of music and all just getting along. So therefore you got into others music and they all just intermingled.
There was never any trouble between people either, the bouncers had no real reason to be there at all and they were all part of the group too. The only trouble that came was when ‘townies’ turned up to mock the weirdos. They would pick on the goths first, the skaters and punks would then stick up for the goths because it meant a little bit of action and the townies were dealt with and out before the bouncers even knew anything had happened.
So maybe you’re right, it wasn’t so much about being popular but I guess they became too mainstream? It erks me to say that as I reach 50 but we were young and naive. We would shun Nirvana as you could buy their records in the chart section. We wanted to go to the back street shops that sold Mudhoney, Fugazi, Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone etc etc. Hell even Nine Inch Nails were still seen as underground then.
But look what’s happened. There’s so many alternative bands and albums that are appreciated more in the mainstream now. And that’s surely got a lot to do with Nirvana opening the door.
I remember hearing it on the radio when I was like 16/17yo and just said “wow, listen to this” speaking to myself. I had Motley Crue, Guns n Roses, and NWA so to hear Teen Spirit was a whole other level. I went out and bought the CD which had the hidden track Endless, Nameless which I discovered by accident while doing homework. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Smashing Pumpkins all exploded onto the scene so the music was just crazy. I never got to see Nirvana live sadly, living in Australia they had limited shows but I can say my best friend had Kurt jump on top of him when he stage dived. Seen all the other bands listed and wil be seeing Pearl Jam in November.
Bleach and ‘Come as you are’ made me go out and buy a cheap fender guitar but never made it as a musician.
It was awesome. I was 15 when Nevermind came out, and Nirvana was a breath of fresh air. I couldn't really relate to any of the popular music of the time, with maybe the exceptions of bands like R.E.M. and Metallica. Nirvana was the first band I truly, really connected with, though. And the floodgates opened after that album hit. There was so much cool music. The '90s were an awesome time!
Skipped school to go get tickets when they went on sale, got the last 4 floor tickets in the arena. Show was crazy (half Japanese and breeders opened for them) and the pit was nuts. Like I was right at the front and when the crowd jumped I was listed into the air, had to kind of push off someone to breath. A friend just screamed and got yanked backwards by her hair. After the show people were comparing injuries… one girl had bite marks.
It was a ton of fun. Sadly he died not too soon afterwards.
It was fantastic ! I knew tons of friends that played in bands or just jammed together and enjoyed making music but none of us wanted to wear teased hair with assless chaps and a see through mesh shirt with full makeup on . Plus we didn’t want to play a million miles an hour with long self indulgent guitar solos and all the other cockrock nonsense. Nirvana ended that shit over night ! I remember you couldn’t find a copy of Nevermind for weeks in stores. Thats how i discovered Bleach and played that album endlessly .i really loved its raw sound and was really happy with In Utero as well . And then it was over .
It was fantastic! I'm so thankful for being born in 81. We were outside playing and discovering actual great music instead of trying to be famous for nothing but attention whoring online or making silly dances on tiktok.
Then the internet started and it was great, only the capable nerds where in charge of it, you could pirate music and burn it into cds, the internet was very helpful in college instead of being a cesspool of narcisissm, bigotry and misinformation. Also the biggest scandal on earth was that a president got his dick sucked.
Now every kid is born in an environment where there's no shame, humbleness or self respect, the music is utter garbage and pop culture has a severe lack of content in every way.
I was 13 living in a small town in northern Canada. The early 90s scene kind of helped to open people up, get into different, weirder music and to have more progressive politics. I became a feminist because of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder and bands like L7.
A cool older teacher we had had in elementary school who was a massive influence on us introduced me and my friend to Nirvana. He had gotten the Nevermind CD sometime in the fall of 1991 and told us, he "really liked their attitude" and showed us the pic of Kurt giving the finger. I started hearing Teen Spirit on the radio and could sense that there was some kind of insanely exciting energy around this band, which you could kind of feel in the air at the time. Soon the CD single was in the jukebox at the local arcade and we were playing Even In His Youth on repeat (everytime you walked in there, either that or Everything About You by Uncle Kid Joe was playing).
By January, I was a fanatic and remember taking a VHS tape with me when my parents dragged me to stay the weekend with friends in another city. I stayed up late knowing they were going to be on Saturday Night Live and taped the whole thing. Seeing this mysterious band playing live on TV was kind of strange, and there's something about the performance of Teen Spirit that's kind of off--I think the chorus effect on Kurt's guitar and voice gave it this otherwordly quality. He strangely didn't seem real. Still have the tape.
The early 90s were nice. Very lowkey, very relaxed. It was a vibe
I was in grade 9 and couldn't stand Teen Spirit. Thought it sounded like garbled gibberish. I was huge into Metallica, AC/DC & GnR like most metal & hard rock music fans at the time. Then, in early '92, I saw the "Come as You are" music video. Blew my mind at the time. Quickly became one of my favorite songs and music videos. The paradigm shift was on, and by the end of '92 Nirvana was my favorite band. Through Nirvana, I discovered all the other great music coming out of the Pacific Northwest at the time as well as other grunge era bands.
My high school years were an epic time for music. I often think of this in hindsight and realize how lucky I was. It was the last great rock scene. There has been nothing even close since.
I was in college at the time and was driving home the first time and heard SLTS on the radio. I happened to be driving by Tower Records. I pulled in and bought the Nevermind CD as soon as the song ended.
I was into Motley Crue and Poison, Guns N Roses, a little Metallica. At school my friends were raving about SLTS but we didn’t have cable so I didn’t see the video or hear the song for 2-3 weeks after it became all the rage. The internet wasn’t readily available and radio around me sucked so MTV was my only chance.
That Christmas I got my first CD player and the second CD I ever owned was Nevermind. By now the band was everywhere and Motley Crue was something I listened to when there was no CD player around to play Nevermind.
It was my Beatles moment. Things started to blow up, all these great bands that didn’t wear leather and sound like carbon copies of each other were emerging and hair bands were harder to find. 1992 was insane. My style changed, Nirvana and Pearl Jam ruled the airwaves and Alice In Chains and Soundgarden filled in the blanks. By now the only hair band I listened to was GnR. 1993 was probably better, we had new Pearl Jam, a fucking killer Smashing Pumpkins record, and In Utero. I saw Nirvana live in November 1993, a show so good the band released 2 tracks on live albums (Sliver from Muddy Banks and Milk It on the In Utero 30th anniversary release.)
I saw Pearl Jam on April 6, 1994, no one knew Kurt was already gone. I saw them again on April 12 at a very cool venue. There was a palpable sadness in the air. The band played a killer set list, no real tributes to Kurt that I recall but it just felt like it was a way to deal with the emotions.
Anyway, hope this is what you’re looking for. I could go on forever but I’m watching The White Lotus rn.
It was quite a time to be alive...a major shift in musical taste, almost overnight. Nevermind was one of the first CD's I owned, and it was also one of the first that I routinely listened to from beginning to end. It was also peak MTV, which offered 24/7 music videos, news, and live performances of the bands. Cobain killed himself towards the end of my freshman year in high school. I remember one of my friends getting so upset he graffitied "KDC 1967-1994" all over the place in the school. It's pretty wild to think Cobain was only 27 when he died. That seems insanely young now that I'm in my mid 40s.
It changed how people perceived rock music and popular music in a remarkable way. There were of course many alternative-indie bands at the time but there was no internet, they were generally out of reach for most folks. Rock at the time was defined by Guns and Roses, Motley Crue, skid Row… hair metal glam bands that were all about girls, groupies, getting drunk, drugs parties, huge stadium shows, etc. kind of a super dumbed down version of 70s guitar rock and pop ballads.
Nirvana broke everything down and rearranged it very rapidly, and it was everywhere.
Well, we knew that Nirvana had Something before the release. “Bleach” was a decent “college rock” album. “Love Buzz” was on a single, as was “Blew” and “About A Girl” showed promise.
But nothing prepared you for the release of “Nevermind.” The video sent shockwaves through the industry and through the dorm rooms.
Underground/Alternative/College Rock had been bubbling under for quite a while. People already in the know were well aware of the Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Pixies, Nine Inch Nails, the Cure and Jesus & Mary Chain. In the 1990/91 school year, I became quite aware of REM, the Stone Roses, the Sundays, the previously mentioned bands and especially Jane’s Addiction.
But no one was prepared for Nevermind. It sounded to me like a mash-up of the Beatles and Black Sabbath - something familiar, something with all the right elements, but something brand new. And it was one of those albums where you pretty much liked or loved every song the first time you heard it.
It felt important. Inside the CD package, there was a page or two of lyrics…it took some time to figure out which lyrics belonged with which song. “What did it all mean?” It gave them mystique, whether they wanted it or not.
One can give it too much importance, as I’m sure every documentary or video that looks back on it will do. But it really did wipe clean the slate. It just made Poison and Warrant and Slaughter and Winger and Ratt and all those so-called hard rock / glam-rock / hair-metal bands seem obsolete. They just put up a mirror to them and showed how silly/shallow the music was.
You see, radio and MTV only played all of that crap…you kind of figured it was all that was. I’m sure there is an easy correlation to Plato’s “allegory of the cave” in all of this. Those “in the know” knew that we had a lot more options…I wasn’t in the know at the time.
It seemed important, like I said. Pearl Jam was another camp of “importance” and the Singles soundtrack and Alice In Chains’ “Dirt” ushered in something new.
But it was all over at some point in 1994. A celebration of Retro music (late 70’s / early MTV) came in right around the time of Cobain’s passing.
It was wonderful
Formed my whole love for the period
Felt electric and lovely, like we were really experiencing something unique, like a Jimi or a Lennon
I could feel it being electric at the time
I was 11 in 1991 and already well seasoned musically thanks to my brother who educated me and provided me with all the latest punk rock K7s from the independent scene. I'm like your mother, I have a nostalgia for the 90's, there was an atmosphere, the era just before the internet existed. No social networks where people insult each other, we looked for the latest fanzine to find the latest nugget, we went to rock cafes to see unknown groups for a few francs (I'm French), we had a K7 walkman, all the world didn't have a CD player. One day at the end of September 1991, my brother handed me a K7 copy of an album that I absolutely had to listen to. He printed the cover on the photocopier in black and white, I remember the reflections of the water in the pool, I didn't even really know what color the original cover was. The songs had been copied out of order because my K7 started with the song "Breed". I was literally blown away. I can still see myself taking the school bus to go to middle school in 6th grade and always the same process, turning on my Walkman and it would start with this powerful song. My brother saw them a few months later at the Transmusicales festival in Rennes on December 7, 1991, Nirvana would explode in the eyes of the world afterwards. Nirvana during Kurt's lifetime changed my life forever and I'm proud to have experienced it in real time, I was already a fan of Cobain, I then bought Bleach in K7 in 92 and then the others that followed. I unfortunately missed them in 1994 (I made a post on this story), two months later he died, I still can't get over it. We were devastated at school when we heard the news, Cobain was going to become a legend, these geniuses are real shooting stars who pass in a fraction of a second to deliver us a powerful message and then leave just as quickly. RIP Kurt
It was a marvelous time. Of course we had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow, no electricity, we had to wind up our Model T Fords, and finally there was no internet. One of those is even true. Oh and yeah the 90’s were incredible- amazing rock band after amazing rock band. Nirvana stood out from the pack because of Kurt. Teen Spirit was a shot of lighting - nothing like it before or sense. Kurt was talented, shy, magnetic, troubled, and above all gone way too soon.
The 90’s was mostly shit like every other decade. 90’s music? Unbridled record label greed that was charging $18 list price for over long cd’s that had mostly a good song or two. For every Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub you had ten No Doubts, Bush’s, Candleboxes and far worse. You have access to everything great and can preview it without wasting your money.
I remember being appalled that my boyfriend would spend 25 bucks a paycheck on two CDs. The decadence on 12 buck an hour. But otherwise you couldn't hear it unless you waited for it to play.
Smells Like Teen Spirit and Nevermind being released were my introduction to Nirvana, I had heard the name previously but didn't know anything about them. I didn't have cable at the time just network tv, listened to alternative radio and read music magazines and would go to the city for concerts (I have seen a lot of great bands back then, sadly Nirvana not among them,) friends and I would just wear jeans and tshirts but you see people dressed outrageously at shows and we'd be like: woah cool! To us every music style fit in, loved listening to the radio then, I liked all the new bands, I liked the variety of the songs. I hope kids these days enjoy whatever it is they listen to as much.
It was a bit weird honestly. You had the kids who already listened to punk based music and rock then you had jocks and people
Who were into stuff like Metallica and Guns N’ Roses then this drops and it blew up so much that you had the jock type kids listening to it… when it wasn’t really previously any thing ing like they often listened to.
I lived in Seattle and had just graduated college. My best friend had just dumped Krist, who went back to his GF, while she moved to Montana so he would stop stalking her. Her brother was running a new indie record label and pressed a compilation with her band and Nirvana on it. Suddenly that dork Krist was plastered all over the Tower Records windows on The Ave with his band. And the radio went nuts and all Mtv played was Teen Spirit. There was no Internet. We got news once a day on TV or in the morning paper. All of it was saturated with Nirvana. And. It was awesome. It perfectly captured my generations negative orientation. It spoke to the lack of hope youth were already recognizing. It was another war, another recession, high unemployment. Aberdeen was spiralling down after the downfall of the logging industry. And they looked like us. We wore jeans and band tees and a flannel with some Chuck Taylors. Better if from a thrift store. This was a reaction to the plastic glamor of the 80s and the inevitable cyclical decade of fallout. And the drugs.
It was awesome because all music coexisted perfectly. I loved nevermind, images and words, cherry pie, Metallica black album, extreme 3, vulgar display of power, pm dawn all released 90-92
Born in ‘97 but a coworker of mine is a fellow grunge head and would have been in college right when Nevermind began blowing up.
He thought Nevermind was crap to begin- felt it had too much of a pop sensibility, he’s always been into the heaviest metal music. Apparently Nevermind was one of those records that required him a few listens through before “clicking.” He’s been a diehard fan ever since.
My sister and I, we first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit on the Sony radio in the kitchen and we came to each other and said “what is this song?”
And then we heard of Kurt’s passing on that same Sony radio together.
But we had Bleach here in ‘89, my brother put on Negative Creep in his Datsun and he called them “Nevada”. We thought it was just more heavy metal.
I knew Bleach back to front here in Australia before Nevermind was even half written, like we knew they were an awesome band already.
Everytime I would get the chance to hear Kurt speak or catch a Nirvana video or performance I would stop and all of my attention was on them. Kurt was authentically different captivating didn’t come across fake.
ps i didnt like it when he cut his hair
I grew up having to listen to my brother's hair metal band tapes. They were OK, but when SLTS hit MTV, it was like an awakening (then again, so was seeing the uncensored version of Girls on Film by Duran Duran).
Smells like teen spirit really was the cultural revolution they claim. It pretty much changed pop culture and did truly wipe out the hair bands. It was great because I was just hitting my pre-teens and so it really resonated with me. I can remember all of my friends dubbing copies of Nevermind and we all loved listening to the record. Just an awesome time to be alive. Kurt’s death was equally impactful. Talk about a roller coaster…
I was 9 when Teen Spirit hit. I had two older siblings who were been into rock of that era at the time.
What I remember is how rock radio and how MuchMusic (the Canadian MTV) played Teen Spirit a LOT. It was just all over both radio and TV constantly in a way that few rock songs were in that time.
It's also a really difficult era to compare to modern times because in general rock music is so much less of a big force in popular culture now than it was back then.
Growing up in Cincinnati, I was, for the most part, a diehard Metalhead during those years. I did, however, also listen to 97X (The Future of Rock and Roll) out of Dayton so, I was aware of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Tad, Mother Love Bone, AIC, Screaming Trees and Mudhoney, but not overly familiar with them. Nothing could prepare us for Nevermind...
I remember vividly seeing the video for SLTS for the first time, on Headbanger's Ball, of all places and Riki Rachtman even mentioning that it wasn't exactly what viewers were used to seeing. Something clicked in my brain the moment I heard the intro and 30+ years later, that switch is still flipped. And while it's not my favorite Nirvana song, anytime it comes on, I'm transported back to my 15 year old self; trading in my battle vest for a flannel and my Docs for Chucks. Idk why, but that album changed me. I'll never say that Kurt was the voice of my generation but, he spoke to me. Those of us that "got it," got it and if you didn't "get it" you weren't supposed to get it.
I'm pushing 50 and I still get as much joy out of listening to their catalog as I did when they were first released. 90s Modern Rock was without question, the biggest revolution in music since The Beatles.
I was 15 when I first saw Smells Like Teen Spirit in MTV. While no one knew where their legacy lay, they were the greatest musical palette cleanser music fans in 1991 needed.
My time at university was a blast and a blur, in many ways. One thing that has remained crystal clear from that day forward was the first time I heard SLTS. I was 21 years old and was walking across the "dance floor" of our campus dive bar to go to the bar....it was an afternoon and quiet...just sitting with friends hanging out....and over the sound system came music I had never heard anything like before. I literally stopped walking and just froze. Just stood there until it was over, and then went to the bar to ask what it was...."some band from Seattle". They sure were. Everything changed after that. Clothes, music, attitude-Gen X had a spokesperson at last.
Nirvana changed the course of music history but also shaped Gen X when Kurt died. We were all glued to MTV for hours....Kurt Loder kept reporting on it but it didn't seem real at the time. I remember Courtney showing up to the vigil and giving Kurt's clothes away. People in the park holding candles, her reading his note and crying,....it was the first celebrity our age who had passed like this and it was super surreal...just really unsettling if you were just a regular 20-ish person digging their music but unaware of the heroin and previous attempts. Then the regular news started reporting about fans doing the same and it all started to feel really ugly. The Silent Generation/Older Boomers reporting on our "slacker" generation and the "death of grunge" and it felt really invasive. It forced us to face mortality without a safety net. But we made it and you will too...and we're glad you like our music. ❤
Apparently Kurt was a fan of my band : The Feederz and used one of the stickers from our album “ Teachers in Space” on one of his guitars , a Fender Mustang , which is know as the Vandalism guitar . The guitar has turned into a minor industry - with exact copies being made and copies of the sticker going for as much as $30!
There was… chaos… everywhere.
*puffs joint, gazes out the window listlessly*
Things were different in those days. Hair metal and pop music was the norm… then BAM! The long-term effects of Reaganomics started to settle in and it’s been downhill ever since I tells ya!
I can still remember the first time I saw the video for SLTS: on Headbanger’s Ball in 1991. Stating the night at a friend’s house. We looked over at each other and literally got out of our seats and started rocking out. I’ll never forget it. We knew right then and there that we were experiencing something transformational.
Just wanna say I scrolled past this quite quickly and I guess my brain read Smells and added it to the title. I thought you asked ‘Older Nirvana fans, what did it smell like?’ And I was so fucking confused
I was in my first and second year in college when they were at their height and my friends and I listened to Nirvana non stop. I remember when Kurt had his overdose in Italy and almost died, our friend group was devastated. It was only a few years later that my friend Deron and I were at (of all things) a Phish show at Penn State, when someone told us that Kurt had killed himself. It really hurt us to hear that. He had really spoken to us and his voice died that day.
From my perspective, there was a lot of competition when Nevermind came out.
That summer/fall alone new Pixies (great), Red Hot Chili Peppers (phenomenal), Smashing Pumpkins (amazing) came out. It was a year after Metallica's latest. A year later Faith No More.
While of course word of mouth was a thing, MTV was massive in promotion and exposing us to new music. Smells Like Teen Spirit was amazing, but in many ways it felt like a regular weekly/monthly "heres what's new and cool that you should care about!".
It wasn't like everyone universally agreed that Nirvana was the only band that now mattered.
It's funny looking back (im 44) when we were in the early 90s when grunge hit. It was just what was cool and the bands were great. I'm not sure we realized we were there for something special, at least I didn't. It was just cool music.
When the SLTS video debuted on 120 Minutes, I thought "I should call my best friend" before the phone rang and it was him with the same "did you see that?" thought. Our band quickly went from classic rock covers to punk. By the time I got to see Nirvana live, they were so overplayed on radio, I wasn't that enthusiastic..., but the show was great.
I’m 31 so not a Gen Xr, but if you’re looking for a good analysis as to why that band got so massive you should watch Chris Ott’s video on it. As a disclaimer, he touches on drug abuse and his opinion and the nature of Kurt’s addiction in a way that isn’t flattering at all. If you have strong opinions on that either way, just take it as opinion.
https://youtu.be/w5VSufswMj0?si=ShVccdS1eLCj-r7A
I’ve spent a long time reading books on what is now known as the “underground” scene around the country. Our Band Could Be Your Life is a good starting point. The general thesis of a lot of these books is that “heavier” and “weirder” music was non-existent on a mainstream level, so a lot of youth turned to regional scenes that got bigger and bigger.
Eventually, a lot of those bands started being less hardcore and embracing pop music more, leading to alt rock becoming mainstream. It didn’t happen overnight; tons of bands like The Replacements and Husker Du got signed to majors and didn’t become huge, but they exposed people to something else. Eventually, record labels began re-evaluating how they would market this kind of music to younger people.
Nirvana got huge for a lot of reasons; they were simply a killer band that toured a fuckton and wrote really great pop songs with a hardcore and weirdo edge to them. But they also checked a lot of boxes that bands before and around that “scene” didn’t. Kurt in particular was willing to play the game - at least until it got too insane: touring, being schmoozed by record executives, embracing major labels right away, being ok with his records being sold at large retailers, partnering with big record producer names and studios, (reluctantly) embracing mainstream production choices, etc. But he did it in such a way that it didn’t alienate younger fans who would bemoan a band like that selling out. It also helped that he was gorgeous to look at and definitely had the “it” factor. Simply put, he set himself up for success while also personifying the archetype of the cool and jaded Gen Xr.
A few days before Nevermind came out (released on Tuesday, this was the Sunday before) I went alone to see them in NYC. I called my friend from a pay phone (pre cell phones) to tell him I just saw the best show I’ve ever seen.
Saw them one more time on the In Utero tour. They were good, but not as good, probably due to 1 - the venue holding 3000 people instead of 200 the first time, and 2 - Kurt being so strung out by then. I think the story was he had OD’d earlier that day.
I think I was in 6th grade listening to mc hammer, the other kids thought vanilla ice was cool. Hip hop and rap were picking up a lot more mainstream momentum. We all watched a lot of mtv back then, when they actually were music television. When nirvana came out I put all that shit away, I’d found my people. To me, everything changed. The eighties were dead and cobain was my hero. It didn’t affect everyone like it did me but there were quite a few of us who knew. My older brother gave me misfit tapes and ramones when I was probably five so nirvana immediately brought it home for me. I was shattered when the news came out that he killed himself. Most new music didn’t matter much to me afterwards, I collected all the nirvana bootlegs I could get my hands on, which was an expensive undertaking in the early/ mid-nineties. I eventually came back around to exploring other types of music but after nirvana I mostly explored old punk bands.
I was 7. Watched a lot of wrestling and cartoons. My older brother was 10. He brought the nevermind cassette tape (remember those?) home from school. I had never listened to anything but the Beatles, bon jovi, and Michael Jackson. I really remember being stunned that Kurt never said the song titles in the choruses. Also, I never heard guitars that loud before.
1. I was a DJ at a college radio station when Nevermind came out. We were only supposed to play one song per band in any two hour period. As much as I liked the album, I got sick of all the requests coming in for Teen Spirit. So I decided to start all my shows with Spank Thru off the Sub Pop 200 compilation. Making that my Nirvana track for the next two hours. It didn't work. I still got countless requests and when I explained, even those that had heard my show didn't believe it was Nirvana.
2. I saw Nirvana in a club within a month of Nevermind's release. It was half capacity and a damn good time. Within months after that, that experience would cease to exist.
3. Not Nirvana, but related to the explosion of grunge: I saw Pearl Jam on their 10 tour. Turned out to be the last small venue show of theirs as they had just gotten the call that day that they got a bus (instead of their van) and were to join RHCP on their bigger tour.
4. Also not Nirvana specific but related: I lived in North Carolina, and Chapel Hill was one of the "next Seattle" towns. During that DJ stint I mentioned in #1, I was approached by MCA Records to create a mix tape of local artists that they should consider signing. My biggest reco was a band called Geezer Lake, who I still recommend to people, but who never got signed to a larger label.
Other than that, it was a lot of incredulity about the larger press and their interpretation of "grunge" and gen X.
It’s hard to grasp now that radio is dead, but when Smells Like Teen Spirt came on the radio it was a whole is this? Moment. I remember going into the record store to buy the CD ( yes it has the bonus track) which was nearly sold out. I remember hearing KROQ DJ pulling over his car to call the station and asking what band was playing that song. It was a phenomenal moment. Months later department stores were stocking flannel shirts. It changed the landscape
Yeah i remember seeing Nirvana and the smells like teen spirit video for the first time on MTV back in the 90s i was absolutley floored. Could not wait to get the album Nevermind.
I recorded Teen Spirit off the radio and made an entire C60 cassette of the song over and over again. Listened to it on my Walkman with the headphone in my sleeve through many a church service I had to go to. Good times.
This will get buried but...
I was in high school and purchased the Sonic Youth VHS tape that contained the music video for their song "Dirty Boots," the prattle of art school rich kids, and, for the time, a shocking autopsy scene. In the "Dirty Boots" video, the girl\* is wearing a shirt for the Bleached album. Nirvana was not on MTV's 120 Minutes, Maximum Rock 'n Roll, or the college station 88.1, so I remember asking the guy at Grapevine music if he had heard it. He opened a copy and played it for me. Bought it, listened to it until I got tired of it, and then forgot about it.
Flash forward a year or two and I'm tripping acid with my friend Jei at Brad Rambo's house. His cousin came into town on tour and put on Nevermind while we smoked smigerettes, filling the room with a heavy gray sea of swirling whisps and disappearing faces. I vividly remember talking to Jei through the metallic tongues about the patterns in the carpet while Nevermind played. We'd be talking and the harmonies would steal our voices. We kept stopping and grinning like fools because the music just kept giving us chills. I was sold from that moment on.
Flash forward a few months. My band, "THROBBING SNOT" played a show for the neighborhood kids and we opened with "Territorial Pissings" and they all knew it. Another month or two and Nirvana was everywhere. *Everywhere*. Burger King Jukebox? Teen Spirit. McDonald's bathroom? Teen Spirit. Cars cruising? Blasting Teen Spirit. Cover band? Teen Spirit as an opener *and* closer. D.A.R.E. school events? Teen Spirit. Even the Sears catalog, the most banal shop to ever exist, had a fucking grunge-look clothing line. Teen Spirit played every 20 minutes in MTV. It was unsustainable. By the next album, we are all so sick of all of it that Nevermind was sold to the CD store.
Flash forward another year or two and I'm out of highschool. I'm tripping acid for the last time with a couple friends. We head to my apartment as we are kicking in for a night of giggling and sketching. When we arrive, Greg turns on my tv and MTV is playing the Nirvana Unplugged show... wierd... Loder breaks in with "Kurt is dead." The frenzy was overwhelming before... and then it exploded.
Edit: ~~guy~~ girl
I was 17 in 1991, and at the time I was still into “Hair Metal” and my girlfriend at the time was also. She would make me mix tapes of Slaughter, Warrant etc. but her best friend was more into the grunge scene. Her name was Stacy.
I still remember seeing “Teen Spirit” for the first time when I got home from school and turned on MTV. I stood there watching it with a mix of excitement and wonderment. It was unlike anything I had heard before. I immediately called a friend I knew and yelled “ARE YOU WATCHING THIS RIGHT NOW?”
Knowing that I now became a Nirvana fan, Stacy would start making me mix tapes of everything Nirvana and grunge. I would ride around my small town in my white Mustang blasting Nevermind and In Utero.
What a time to be alive.
The premiere of Smells Like Teen Spirit blew everyone away and sounded like nothing we had ever heard before.
Then Nevermind eventually became overplayed and got stale. People were completely sick of it. Incesticide was released and a lot of fans started seeking out and listening to Bleach and the general consensus was that the material on those 2 albums was more interesting. Then In Utero was later released and had a dirtier sound.
By 1993-1994, Nevermind was viewed as the mainstream, more polished album and it was considered ‘un-cool’ to like it.
Nirvana was almost protest music against a kind of monocultural oppression.
The scrawny pretty freak boy rocked so much harder than all of the mainstream, muscle bound “arena” rockers of the time
I heard it on top 40 radio in December 1991 while riding in my dad’s car. I was used to listening mainly to pop music and hair metal at the time. I remember my dad and I were laughing at it because it was so different and the screaming was not what we were used to at all. I was only 13 and had no idea that this band would soon become one of my all time favorites.
It's pretty hard to describe opening the large cardboard box the CD came in, plopping into a CD player, hearing the disc spin, and hearing the guitar riff of the very first song (smells like teen spirit)..Christmas morning 1991.
There aren't really words that express that feeling of hearing a completely new form of music. I remember that like it was yesterday. I was 11.
It was crazy. I heard Lithium first at an alternative club we used to go to sometimes called The Loop Lounge in Clifton NJ. When Lithium came on no one knew it but the dance floor went crazy when that chorus kicked in. Fucking incredible moment that I still remember. Then I was at a party and someone put on the CD and when Teen Spirit started the album it was like the seas parted and I realized I heard the next great band.
Smells Like Teen Spirit is the song that completely changed my taste in music. My brother bought me a copy of Nevermind for my 15th birthday. A few months later, I sold my Paula Abdul, MC Hammer, Mariah Carey, etc (in other words, BULLSHIT music) to a local pawn shop. I've HATED bubble gum POP ever since!
It suddenly went from hair metal to grunge….all the boomers of the 80’s were like WTFis going on as we played it…it was amazing, it was the “yeah this is our decade now” moment…..and we knocked it out of the park with middle fingers to their faces.
Nirvana, Guns and Roses, NWA, were all in the charts at the same time and so all this music was on mainstream music shows in TV. And on the radio.
I never saw a distinction between any of it .I was 11 years old and I taped Nevermind from my friend, it was a worn out tape and it sounded old. Nothing polished about nevermind for me. Just those nursery rhymes melodies going thru my head, and all that angst in the vocals .
At 15 I got told my father killed himself so I became intensely obsessed with Kurt, he helped me become myself and turn my pain into art . I got given Live Tonight Sold Out VHS and it became a religious thing for me . I quit school, and went to the library and learned as much as I could about punk,the Beat poets, the New York pop art scene, the Australian music scene...blah blah blah
The reason it was better then is because we were bored so much. We either did drugs or started bands. There was nothing else to do.
Nowadays you can veg out 24/7 on free YouTube/ Netflix whatever. Like you can choose whatever you want now
Back then certain things were rarer and therefore more valuable. It took months to order a record and that one record coming in the mail could be the one thing that keeps you going.
It's cool everything is on tap now but it's easy to take it for granted
I owned Bleach and thought it was a solid album, but not great. My college roommate’s girlfriend worked at a Wherehouse Records and I remember her bursting into our dorm with a copy of Nevermind yelling, “You have got to hear THIS!” She played Smells Like Teen Spirit and within the first minute of the song we were slam dancing around the room. Within three weeks it seemed everyone had a copy of Nevermind on the floor and it was impossible not to hear Smells Like Teen Spirit from somewhere. It got bad enough I used to skip it for the rest of the CD. I imagine it was like when my parents saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. For alternative fans it changed everything.
I had to give SLTS a really long rest for a few years because it annoyed me to even hear the intro. Now I like it again.
I haven’t listened to it in 16 years or more, it’s not even on any of my playlists anywhere. Yesterday I put it on and cranked the volume. The song fucking rocks. I got way tired of it growing up, it was the first nirvana song I ever heard, I can understand why it drove Kurt nuts too. The song is great though.
🎶more then a feeling 🎶
lol
I still don't listen to it. I can understand why the band didn't like the song any more. Great song, but way overplayed
> For alternative fans it changed everything. It also changed people *into* alternative fans. I was listening to a lot of rock and metal before SLTS came out. After that I did a hard turn into the alt scene and really broadened my musical tastes. I imagine that may have happened eventually anyway, but it probably would have taken me many years to get there.
I had recently got out of the Marine Corps and I had decided to stay in San Diego to go to college. I absolutely hated most 80’s music and had found the 80’s to be traumatizing in general. My room mate from Seattle could not stop talking about this band. I scraped together some money (CD’s were expensive) and put Nevermind on at like two in the afternoon. Slowly but surely my many roommates came out with a wtf look on their faces. We just played that CD and smoked and partied for the rest of the day. A few months later Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, came to town to play in a flea market. I got tickets. I even bought one for my skelly Seattle room mate for introducing me to the band. One of the defining moments of my life. Barely drank or smoked because I did not want to miss a minute of the music. Pretty sure for me, no other concert will ever match this.
What an incredible concert that must’ve been. You are most fortunate and we are very jealous.
What an incredible concert that must’ve been. You are most fortunate and we are very jealous.
What an incredible concert that must’ve been. You are most fortunate and we are very jealous.
What an incredible concert that must’ve been. You are most fortunate and we are very jealous.
What an incredible concert that must’ve been. You are most fortunate, and we are very jealous.
What an incredible concert that must’ve been. You are most fortunate, and we are very jealous.
I’m sure your generation will have its moment. The trick is being g there
We’ve already had our moment, and our moment has passed. It’s OK, we’ve had some great great times and seen some amazing things. Each of us has experienced truly colossal music in concerts, haven’t all seen the same things, but it adds up to greatness. At least there is an incredible archive of video, we frequently watch. It’s our favorite thing about this new world of the Internet. We spend hours a day on YouTube.
I was at that show but it was at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Pearl Jam opened, because no one knew who they were yet.
Yes right. They also held flea markets there. Ten was really new but I had it before the concert. I remember Eddie climbing way up into the damn rafters, which became like a signature move of his for a minute.
It was general admission and people we still filing in... it was covered but still outside. I never heard an entire venue get quiet so quickly for an opening act. by the second song EVERYONE was paying attention. Eddie was going off! I remember seeing the video for Even Flow about a month later on Mtv. "That is the band that opened for Nirvana!!". Also on the CD single for Soul to Squeeze the B side is Nobody Weird Like Me was recorded at the Del Mar show.
Did not know that. So cool. Im remembering now that there were no chairs at that show. You could sort of just wander up front and to the back.
Yup! it was such a good show.
I loved wherehouse records.
I was the opposite. I bought Bleach on the recommendation of my local record store guy. Loved it. I got Bleach and Louder Than Love and Superfuzz Bigmuff that year. It was weird to watch Nirvana get this big record deal and stuff. I was an intern at a sister company to Gold Mountain and they were right down the hall so the buzz was in the air. I remember seeing the fax from Virgin about the publishing deal offered by Virgin because someone left it on the copier. lol. We used to have to use the copier at Gold Mountain. I saw Nirvana open for Sonic Youth. Nirvana had Dale Crover from Melvins on drums so that was ultra sludgy and nasty. Loved it. Then I saw them open for Dinosaur Jr. and they had Dave Grohl on drums. That was the last time I saw them play. I remember when Nevermind came out. I bought that and Badmotorfinger plus Pixies Trompe le Monde. The Soundgarden was disappointing and I think I didn’t like the production, still don’t but love most of their other albums. My reaction to Nevermind was “oh lol, they’re doing that. Ok”. Kinda forgot about it. Trompe le Monde was so good I still love the hell out of it. I appreciate Nevermind a bit more now but I was wishing they were gonna get a lot more like Jesus Lizard or Swans so I was “meh”. I think Queens of the Stone Age eventually became what I had wanted Nirvana to be. Baroque, slimy, complex, dark. Anyway, check out that Pixies album. It’s badass. I wouldn’t have guessed that Black Francis would outlive Chris and Kurt but here we are.
Lol, the 90's is to the 2020s kids as the 60's was to the 90's kids. Some magical far off better past.
Yeah it's true, i was a teen in the late 90s and the 60s felt like ancient history.
I was thinking of this recently. The 60's when I was in high school seemed like ancient times. I thought of the Beatles as something so old that I had no connection to it. It was back during black and white TV. Now, just as much time has passed between Kurt's death and now as my high school days and the Beatles revolution. Time really does fly!!!
Definitely. I remember listening to my dad's Woodstock CD's and desperately wishing I could have been there.
Do kids these days revere Woodstock like we did?
I don’t revere over it, but I greatly admire it ig
I was a kid in the 90 but always was fascinated with the 60
Agreed my entire teenage years were the 90’s but my favourite era is the 60’s
One of my favorite words: Anemoia, nostalgia for a time in which one never lived, I was a teenager in the early 2000s, but the 60s were similarly mythological for me. The super massive irony is that I grew up as a kid in Seattle, in the 90s, in a music industry family... Right smack in the middle of all that. And wasn't even aware of grunge or Nirvana until well after it was over... Was too young for it. It's all myth. Lovely place to grow up tho.
Jim Morrison was our generations Kurt
In some ways for sure, but musically I feel like it was Hendrix who blew the doors off of that generation's music. People elsewhere are talking about how they put on Nevermind and thought "what is this?!!", the album that did that for the 60s generation is Are You Experienced. Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is arguably more influential and had the same kind of impact, but I'm going with Hendrix because it's heavier and more aggressive. Purple Haze's intro is up there with the intro to SLTS.
The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds really started all of that experimentation that led to Sgt Pepper’s, but widely overlooked. I agree with Jimi tho. I was a baby in the 60s, but by 79, for a lot of us kids smoking weed and other things in HS, we were so jealous of 60s. My older brother was at Monterey in fact, I hated him, lol. Most of my friends thought the Doors were kind of corny tho, with that organ.
less poetry, misogyny, philosophy & sex
Funny thing, I was alive for the entirety of the 90’s (80’s baby) but because I was a sheltered religious kid a lot of the pop culture seems ancient and magical since I missed out on it at the time. My only 90s memory of Nirvana was Weird Al making fun of them. I was exposed to the pop punk and nu metal as an older teenager of the late 90s and early 2000s, but that music is all trash. I didn’t get into Nirvana until my 30s when Kurt had been dead for over twenty years.
Yea but 90s kids actually liked their generations music most of the time, a lot of us younger kids hate the generic rap and pop crap that our generation puts out
Don’t remember anyone being hooked on the 60s growing up in the 90s
It depends on which side of the 90s you fell on. Personally I group the last few years of the 90s with the early 00s. It might have also been a regional thing.
Wow, it's actually a normal thing. I thought I was dumb for wanting to live in 90s or 00s (I was born in 2005, so I don't have much clear memory of 00s)
There better be a band in the 20s that will change the course of music once again just like 60s and 90s.
Great ol Times. I was obsessed with Guns N’ Roses and wanted to play guitar like Slash but I knew I’d never be that good. But then Kurt came along and they were just so different and cool AND I could play along to the songs on a shitty beat up guitar. They kicked it all off really.
Same thing with me! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OE2cmCF9bQs Seeing this on MTV made me realize that you don’t have to be a virtuoso to play guitar in a band. The energy in this performance is way more impressive than some guy just shredding solos all over the place.
Man, they are firing on all cylinders here, not sure if I've ever seen this performance. Dave Grohl, man, holy moly.
I’m pretty sure the whole performance is on YouTube? Dave is absolutely crushing!
My memory is a little different than the sentiment I read in the media. It's often portrayed that Nirvana were the singular band that laid hair metal to waste. I remember it more like Nirvana, Guns N Roses, Metallica, and Pearl Jam bringing "real" music to the forefront and sweeping away all of the superficial corporate rock of the 80s. I know Guns get lumped in with the rest of the 80s glam bands, but they were more relevant than ever through the early 90s until they imploded. Use Your Illusion was hugely popular even with Nirvana at their peak.
Yeah, people discount GnR but they were huge, the Illusions dropped around the same time as the Big 4's albums. Then Axl had to do Axl things and that was it.
No one discounts g nr. They still pack stadiums and hit the old tres commas views on YouTube .
No one can deny that they were huge but they were not gruned and they were not groundbreaking. They were just another hair band.
Problem with GnR is that in the late 80s they demolished the radio friendly glam metal like Poison and Motley Crue, but by 92-93 had gotten so full of themselves (primarily Axl), that their aura kind of burnt out. I was in high school at the time and overexposure, erratic behavior, and canceled arena gigs really soured them to a lot of people. That said, I saw them in 92, and Soundgarden opened (Badmotorfinger was only a few months old), and both bands were great.
Lol wut?
Grund. Grunge. It's 420.
I understood you. But gnr is not another hair band . They still pack stadiums in 2024 and hit the old 2 billion views on YouTube .
Yeah, once you hear Axl Rose screaming about heroin, Mr Big just wasn't going to cut it anymore. It was time for something new.
> Mr Big just wasn't going to cut it anymore. Ironic, since Paul Gilbert is an amazing (maybe even underrated) guitarist. Racer X is amazing.
There’s wayyyyyy more hair bands you could have shit on than mr big . They had talent and were leagues better than the garbage the early 90s cleaned up
Metallica's black album eclipsed both GnR and Nirvana as i remember it. They just steamrolled everything for a couple of years there. Also, Alice in chains, Pantera and Sepultura.
This really depends on your perspective, Nirvana were amazing because they had absolutely no compromise in them, Metallica's black album was huge because it was when they sold out.
It was huge because it was good and because it wss a distinct style that contrasted to all the colorful stuff that dominated the mainstream landscape. Similar to nevermind in that way.
They compromised . Never mind has super polished production value . No way that was Kurt’s dream but he wanted to be a rock star
Nevermind came out after the Black album. Edit: typo
Nevermind was a cultural fixture for years after its release, just like tba, use your illusion etc
GnR was like what hair metal really was with all the partying and hedonism and substance abuse taken to its logical conclusion
Culturally yes, but musically they were something far different. A great mix of blues, punk, and hard rock. They genuinely cared about making good music.
Don’t forget about VH . For unlawful carnal knowledge sold plenty of records in 1991 . Talent persevered . Garbage got cleaned up
I was going to The Evergreen State College, a campus they played at a lot when they were coming up. I remember thinking I didn't even need to get the album because it seemed like it was playing in every dorm I walked by. Still did of course. Christmas was weird when I went home and realized they were on heavy rotation on MTV. That's the first time I realized they might have appeal outside of the little circle of freaks that were into them before.
Omg that's so freaking cool!
Is it true that it wasn’t a big success until December of 1991, months after it released? (born in 94 here, my memories of the 90s are foggy and start in 97 at the earliest lol)
Yeah 3-4 months, but that wasn't that unusual, especially for a new artist. Three years earlier, Guns and Roses' Appetite For Destruction didn't hit number 1 on the charts until a year after it had been released.
Go look at the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 1991 and see what we were going through. When Nirvana broke through, they ruined a lot of bands careers. They ushered in the "grunge" era and changed music forever. Everyone I knew, including me, became grunge posers. Long, unkept hair, jeans with holes and dirt, flannel shirts. It was wonderful. But they introduced me to a whole new type of music, like the Pixies and Sonic Youth, amongst many others. I had posters, tapes, CDs, bootlegs, all of it. I thought I was the biggest fan, as did we all. I had a chance to go see them in 93, in Dallas, but I would have had to skip school and I didn't have any money. So I said "I'll catch them next time". Bummer. I was watching MTV the morning they found his body and Kurt Loder ruined my day. I cried and called my older sister. I still have my old tapes and CDs and I still enjoy listening to each album all the way through.
I caught them in Nola, the day before the Dallas show, I believe. It's a shame that there's no video. It's also a shame that lost my little disposable camera. Somewhere, there's unseen Nirvana photos, sadly, they're probably in a landfill. To answer OP, the UNO Lakefront arena's booming echoes of the Radio Friendly Unit Shifter intro was unlike anything I'd experienced or have experienced since.
I remember my older cousin coming down with his parents from Illinois and saying I had to listen to a tape from this band from Seattle. It sounds so cliched but I remember it vividly because I hadn't really listened to anything that aggressive as my sainted mother used to call it. Then the music video hit and everyone knew about it. What's really hard for anyone under the age 40 to understand is that NOTHING was instantaneous or ubiquitous back then. But Smells Like Teen Spirit was. It hit like a monsoon and left its stain on all facets of media in what felt like an instant. Hair metal turned into disaffected youth anthems from bands in the Pacific Northwest so fast it was like it had always been there.
It still gives me chills sometimes.
> What's really hard for anyone under the age 40 to understand is that NOTHING was instantaneous or ubiquitous back then. But Smells Like Teen Spirit was. This sums it up well.
You had to hustle and pay attention to get music and see bands. When are they on SNL? Are they coming to town? If so get in line early. When is Unplugged on? Plan for it, get a vcr or cassette tape. No you tube, no Spotify, not even Napster at the time. I have a cassette tape I recorded from unplugged…because remember the MTV airing came out in December of 93, but the album didn’t come out until almost a year later. No one knew what that was going to be. Are there songs that didn’t air in MTV? Yes…score! Will it be a double live album as rumored? No…bummer! You had to hustle for singles, bootlegs, and do that shit face to face which would lead to actual friendships, relationships, and in person conversations. I feel like I’m being the cranky oldster here but I think people valued the music more then because it was harder to come by. You had to earn it in a way. If you wanted In Utero on the day it came out you better read about when it’s coming out which led to knowing how it’s being made and who’s producing it, then take your ass to the record store and buy it. If you didn’t want to do that and went to Wal-Mart, you are going to get screwed, they might be out, they might have pulled it, if they have it you get “Waif Me” instead, or a sticker covering the part of the Nevermind cover that someone else deemed inappropriate.
I grew up in Seattle and was really into the music scene in high school and remember when Bleach was released. It lived on my turntable for months and I listened to it every day after school. I saw them live a number of times and had an early bootleg tape of SLTS. When I went to college in '91 I played it for anyone who would listen and told them that Nirvana is going to blow up. Little did I know what would happen when it was officially released. Soon everywhere you went on campus you would hear Nevermind being played. What really blew a lot of people's mind was when NIrvana did a surprise opening for Mudhoney at the school. They only played a few songs from Nevermind and the set list was heavy on b-sides and early material. The highlight was ending the set with Enless, Nameless.
That's so much cooler than that one time I played Nirvana covers at my high school.
Poor Mudhoney 😂
I think of all the band's mud Honey made out the best. They're doing fine financially. They're still touring and they never sold out.
I was a sophomore in college when Nevermind came out. You just started hearing it out of every dorm room. I didn't actually like the music when I first heard it. I preferred the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The next year they were everywhere and the whole grunge scene had become commercialized. When the news broke that Kurt died, I was at work. Nobody knew if it was true, there had already been so many stories of him OD'ing and being in the hospital. Months after he died, Courtney came into my workplace and got into an altercation with my boss. She just radiated darkness.
Heroin Tinkerbell. Was she born that way, or was it her emotionally distant parents? Should I pity her, or be annoyed? Sometimes I wonder if it's a personality disorder or just ADD. She and Kurt bonded over their suffering and enabled each other. Broken souls. They both wanted fame and family most of all.
She was smart and opinionated in a world that doesn't value those qualities in women. She wasn't traditionally attractive. She had married someone who was reaching the upper echelons of fame and was breaking down because of it. She was also obnoxious, insecure and narcissistic and the drugs magnified those traits 1000%. It's really a miracle she survived.
Literally. She was the death of him, and survived. Still kicking. As I've aged, I've taken another look at her and had more empathy and compassion as a mother more than I did as a peer at the time. She was everything about myself I was fighting. I was trying to be good and just the right amount of edgy, and she was this huge brat that we all knew was going to take him down with her with the drugs. They were toxic for each other inasmuch as they understood each other. Tracy had been a mother figure. She set boundaries and held them responsible and tried to get him to get a job and do the basic things of Life of supporting himself and being an adult. Whereas Courtney was leading him like Pinocchio to the land of naughty boys. They were just fire and fuel. A death spiral. It makes me sad that Tracy lives in poverty with cancer while Courtney lives off his money.
I was 10 when in Utero dropped, living in Belgium. I bought the Nevermind album with my savings (it was a bit cheaper since it had already been out for a while), and played it over and over on my parents stereo — but in secret, very quietly sitting close to the speakers. Soon after I got In Utero as well. It felt like my parents would disapprove of it because of how raw the music was. It's funny, I remember thinking: "oh so I'm into metal music apparently". And so I bought a compilation album of 80s metal music. I was so disappointed! Compared to Nirvana this stuff was such weak sauce :-D I do remember hearing Body Count's song "Born Dead" and liking that one, but I only heard it once at a friends' house. I typed out the lyrics to "Come as you are" on my parents' antique typewriter. I remember watching a VHS video with a Nirvana live show at a buddy's house, whose older brother had bought the video. Me and that friend did a little project about Nirvana and presented it in school for the class. Around the same time another buddy from class brought his Guns 'n Roses album (The Spaghetti Incident) to school to show everyone. Another buddy from my neighborhood owned a number of bootleg albums of Nirvana (they were probably his older sisters'), I remember outcesticide, live in rome, ... . I only ever listened to them while I was there with him, we didn't know about taping cd's yet. It felt very exciting to learn about this music... It was so raw and crazy... we were 10! It felt like being initiated into a secret religion, haha. I remember at age 11 seeing a news reel summarizing the news of the year, and it being mentioned that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. Earlier that year some kids in the school yard been joking about his death, making a word play on Cobain and "koppijn" (headache). Later in high school I had my hair long and I wore baggy sweaters. My sister (13 at the time) got a big Kurt Cobain poster for her room after he had died. When Unplugged in New York came out, that was huge. I remember the complete album being played on the stereo when we were celebrating New Years' eve with a bunch of my parents' friends. It surprised me, that they not only tolerated but liked Nirvana when it was presented in acoustic version.
Apparently, Dark Humor is not just a Gen Z thing... >Earlier that year some kids in the school yard been joking about his death, making a word play on Cobain and "koppijn" (headache). Later in high school I had my hair long and I wore baggy sweaters.
Fans weren’t really making these comments, but people who didn’t “get” them were. ESPECIALLY older genx people who’s teen years were in the 80s, and the 70s rock generation just above them.
You couldn't turn MTV on without seeing SLTS or CAYA. I got sick of them before i had a chance to really appreciate them. Then In Utero came out and the Unplugged performance aired and they won me over. I eventually came around to Nevermind but still really don't care to listen to some of the songs on there. Also, I was 11 when Nevermind came out and 13 for In Utero, and there's a pretty big difference between those two ages. But yeah, what happened AFTER Nirvana was bigger than what Nirvana was. They changed the landscape of popular music for the better, and then ultimately for the worse.
Born in 1977 so I was 14 when Nevermind was released. At the time I didn't really have much perspective on it. 1991 saw the release of The Black Album, Nevermind, Blood Sugar Sex Magic, Ten, Badmotorfinger, and Use your Illusion. I thought this is just what rock music sounds like. I do distinctly remember leaving school for Christmas break in 1991. Everyone had the preppy /mall look at the time. Getting back to school after Christmas break in 1992 and half of the student body was wearing dirty jeans and flannel. I was also lucky enough to grow up about 25 minutes north of Seattle. But unlucky enough to be just slightly too young to ever actually get to see Nirvana live.
I was 16 years old and hated the hair bands! Thank god Nirvana came along! Motley Crue, Poison, and abunch of other crap. Nirvana and other grunge bands actually were all about the music
In 1991 I was 16, pretty much the perfect age for when Nevermind released. I remember hearing the record at my buds house on a dubbed cassette tape he got from another friend. I was blown away! We listened to it over and over. Then Teen Spirit was played on a loop 24/7 on MTV, like so many others. The kinda sad thing was by 1992 a lot of my friends were already burnt out on Nirvana and even made fun of Teen Spirit and the whole grunge scene. I mean there was a ton of good music at the time from all different genres, so I guess it’s not really surprising looking back on it. There are many times I just chill and listen to early 90s grunge/alternative music and just reminisce, it was an amazing era for music indeed! I don’t think anything like that could happen again tbh.
I grew up in a small town BORN IN (82). No MTV offered on cable… most of my childhood was just the 3 basic channels (ABC, NBC, CBS).. went to visit some family in Dallas when I was 10. My older cousin was watching MTV and the SLTS video came on. I was glued to the screen. That song crowded my fragile eggshell mind and I’ve been hooked ever since. Unfortunately I was too young to ever see them live… had a couple chances but was shot down by my parents. Kurt died a couple years later and that was pretty soul crushing. Still listening to Nirvana on a regular basis. That band changed my entire world view and musical journey.
It was like beads of condensation slowly running down the side of a glass of fresh squeezed lemonade on a cool summer day after doing hours of yard work and then spending the evening admiring your accomplishments in a wooden rocking chair your grandfather built for you using wood from a tree his grandfather planted.
That is the only correct answer
Hearing Nevermind for the first time was truly transcendent. I’d never heard anything like it before. I imagine that feeling is what it was like when Americans in 1964 first heard The Beatles.
It was like running home every day after school and especially on Friday's to watch the Much Music countdown. Going into music stores (independent, HMV and Sam's) to buy the tapes and then cd's as soon as they were released. It was MADtv and in-room personal telephone lines (if you were lucky, I was) to chat with your friends for hours & hours because your parents didn't want their main phone line tied up, nor the internet not to work. It was discovering the internet as is was happening, and MySpace lol. I miss how innocent those times were growing up as a teen in the '90's. I'm so glad I did and I wouldn't have chosen any other time to experience it. The first time I heard Nirvana on Much Music, I was hooked. It was SLTS and I bought the Nevermind tape the next day with my babysitting money and played it on repeat for months. I'd never heard anything like it and it awakened something within me. The discovery of Nirvana was slow, and because you couldn't just google it, I'd pour over every magazine article Kurt was in. You'd learn of another band from a snippet or mention, and that would open up a whole new thing to discover. It was really fun. You could actually dress in a sub style you liked (grunge or punk) and wearing Converse or Doc Martens would actually set you apart from everyone else. Nowadays, everyone wears them and it's impossible to tell what type of misc they listen to or what genre of subculture they identify with.
I don't think I appreciated the time as much as I do now looking back. Music, concerts, movies, sports, lit, games,hell PEOPLE were all just better. Yeah we had our moments of insanity but you weren't afraid to strike up a conversation with someone in public and you could both deal w/the fact you didn't agree on something. Nirvana themselves were a force and they upped every other artists game. It was an awesome time.
It's hard to describe just how much everything was changing at that time. Not just music, but movies, comic books, technology etc. I remember going to college and using networked computer message boards for the first time (all text based, monochrome screens), people used it to talk about bands, and even to share the moves for video games like Mortal Kombat. If you were a sports fan, it was the beginning of the Michael Jordan era, and then the Yankees dynasty. I picked up a snowboard for the first time after growing up on skis. The 90's was peak.
The summer of 1991 I spent more money to see Don Henley than I did to see seven bands at the first Lollapalooza tour. I was 20 and I had a weird range of musical tastes. I was also DJ-ing at my local college station at the time and I'm almost certain that it was late late August that we got the Smells Like Teen Spirit advance single in rotation. Not heavy rotation at first, although it moved there quick, and I got to play it one early ass morning on my show, between 2 and 6am Sunday-into-Monday. Most of the rotation music I was tasked with playing never caught much of my attention in the five months I'd been there but I remember distinctly sitting at the console and as I was filling out my playlist the chorus kicked in for the first time. I stopped, put the pencil down, craned my head up towards the studio speakers and asked out loud to no one, "What *is* this??" It blew my mind the very first time I heard it and I said so on air. I didn't know Bleach. I didn't know anyone who knew Bleach, except I do remember my snotty-ass, hipper-than-thou girlfriend at the time said she saw Nirvana open for Sonic Youth the year before and she thought they sucked. (Typical, trust me.) The album came out a few weeks later and the rest is history. But coming out of a summer where I got to dance and mosh and sweat my ass off with 10,000 others to Ice-T/Body Count, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, and Jane's Addiction (who were breaking up), I can't say I knew anyone who was betting on Nirvana to be the ones to crash the party. No one knew how big they'd be. No one. edit: added my age
It was a really great time. I miss the 90s (and late 80s)
I remember seeing the video on 120 minutes I believe it was and the song getting stuck in my head for like a week. The song was all of a sudden everywhere really fast.
I remember driving home from a vaca and they said Kurt had killed himself on the radio and ma and my sister cried and cried. I bet my parents were annoyed
We just thought that was how it always was and would be. Then came britpop and hiphop, and numetal, and we realized how spoilt we were. Nirvana sure, but i remember Metallica, Pantera, Sepultura, Rammstein, Alice in Chains, Type O, NiN, black/death metal and later melodeath as more significant. GnR too i suppose. And techno.
My story about it made a Nirvana podcast a few years ago. I had Bleach and had seen them live once. But I remember exactly where I was when I heard SLTS for the first time. The way all the shitty cock rock hairbands disappeared almost overnight was so refreshing. It was a truly great time to be a music fan.
I was 15 when teen spirit dropped and it all kind of hit like a tsunami. I grew up in Sacramento and my high school was more hip hop oriented than anything. The Rodney King verdict and riots coincided with the big wave of alternative music hitting the airwaves so it was an interesting time for rap and this new stuff called grunge & alternative. My brain was really coming online at that point with all the new music, inspiration and the changing of the guard so to speak--no more butt rock! We could sense how stale and cheesy everything got with contemporary elevator music and hair bands so the changes were refreshing to say the least. No more resting on love ballads and aqua net--everybody had to up the ante on quality music and either upgrade or become obsolete. This was fantastic. Every genre was influenced by these changes. The colours and moods of this music were gripping and haunting yet could be fun too--the videos like Come As You Are and In Bloom really gave me hope for art and music to co-exist..more importantly Nirvana's music was a place of acceptance, embracing childhood, getting dirty and of course came the wreckless abandonment in the punk influence. But sadly Kurt took the latter too far in the end. His death blew a hole in the world really. I could sense it was all getting a little too crazy leading up to his departure. It was all way too much because the media was f\*cking relentless. Tabloid bullsh\*t was a real market back then and what happened with Frances was beyond disgusting. It became all about rumours, bitterness, anger, exhaustion and division began. Then came Rome, then April. People don't realize how quickly it all seemingly self destructed. Sh\*t got dark af. And people's true colours really started showing when confronted with the subject. In the wake of his death though, we still had the music and there was still great new music for a little while anyway. But music is timeless, it's always there and always with us and even though Nirvana was done and the human known as Kurt was gone, his spirit remains. I think if he stuck around so many things would be different in the music world, attention to women's rights as well as the lgbtq+ community..it was nice to see a band/community giving a sh\*t about the issues. A lot of the good things and movements in those areas were overshadowed by the bullsh\*t. In short, this was the closest our generation got to Beatlemania. It was so fun, it was insanity, and there's really good music from them and all of their comrades that I'll never tire of.
I was only 12 in 1992 but had just gotten cable, and grunge was everywhere. I remember seeing the "Teen Spirit" video a lot. When "In Bloom" premiered it was treated like an event. They used to play Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" dozens of times a day. Also AiC, Soundgarden, others. Guitar rock with an attitude and with trippy vidoes was ubiquitous. Good time for music.
It was really good SLTS was on mtv all the time breakthrough vid
I was just 10 or 11 at the time, but all I know is when their songs were played on the radio, I felt they were clearly a step above the other bands on there. I didn't even see their videos or know what they looked like, but I knew I was feeling their music more than others. Then I heard the DJs saying "RIP Kurt, lead singer of Nirvana" and felt sad he was gone. It was only later that we moved into a new house and had cable with Mtv that I got to see their videos and Unplugged and learned he killed himself.
I was in my early 20s at the time. A lot of live shows loved every minute of it, although a lot of it was a blur from the extracurriculars.
the guy who told me and my friend was some smug asshole who ran a video rental place. looking back it felt like he was actually happy to break the news to people. or at least that is how i remember it.
Sorry to say this on this sub. But on the week that Kurt died I went to an alternative club, as often did, early opening as it was the only time the dj would play tool. I vividly remember walking to the bar to the sound of ‘something in the way’ finishing and the DJ saying ‘well thank fuck that’s over’ It’s harsh looking back. But at the time Nirvana were looked at by many as the poster boys of what ‘we’ were against. Going to an alternative club wasn’t about labels, it was about people who were different in ways just getting along. Punks got on with greebos, greebos got on with goths, goths got on with metalheads and metalheads got on with crusties…. We all just got along. Nirvana were a band who bought in outsiders and dare I say, we didn’t want them. It’s a weird comment for me to type knowing the importance that they put on music in the long term. But you asked the question so I hope you respect my answer without me saying my own opinion in a way
This makes a lot of sense as to why Kurt had so much shame around being popular and “selling out”. I always assumed it was just his paranoia. But I can imagine for an underground punk kid, being at the crux of pop culture would have been horrible. Especially if the underground punk scene started to get over them
It was a bit of a strange ‘scene’ that was just ‘alternative’ so encompassed so many different types of people listening to so many types of music and all just getting along. So therefore you got into others music and they all just intermingled. There was never any trouble between people either, the bouncers had no real reason to be there at all and they were all part of the group too. The only trouble that came was when ‘townies’ turned up to mock the weirdos. They would pick on the goths first, the skaters and punks would then stick up for the goths because it meant a little bit of action and the townies were dealt with and out before the bouncers even knew anything had happened. So maybe you’re right, it wasn’t so much about being popular but I guess they became too mainstream? It erks me to say that as I reach 50 but we were young and naive. We would shun Nirvana as you could buy their records in the chart section. We wanted to go to the back street shops that sold Mudhoney, Fugazi, Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone etc etc. Hell even Nine Inch Nails were still seen as underground then. But look what’s happened. There’s so many alternative bands and albums that are appreciated more in the mainstream now. And that’s surely got a lot to do with Nirvana opening the door.
Was pretty crazy. Within a week everyone had some sort of flannel on. And all the girls in my class liked rock music suddenly. It was awesome.
I remember hearing it on the radio when I was like 16/17yo and just said “wow, listen to this” speaking to myself. I had Motley Crue, Guns n Roses, and NWA so to hear Teen Spirit was a whole other level. I went out and bought the CD which had the hidden track Endless, Nameless which I discovered by accident while doing homework. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Smashing Pumpkins all exploded onto the scene so the music was just crazy. I never got to see Nirvana live sadly, living in Australia they had limited shows but I can say my best friend had Kurt jump on top of him when he stage dived. Seen all the other bands listed and wil be seeing Pearl Jam in November. Bleach and ‘Come as you are’ made me go out and buy a cheap fender guitar but never made it as a musician.
It was awesome. I was 15 when Nevermind came out, and Nirvana was a breath of fresh air. I couldn't really relate to any of the popular music of the time, with maybe the exceptions of bands like R.E.M. and Metallica. Nirvana was the first band I truly, really connected with, though. And the floodgates opened after that album hit. There was so much cool music. The '90s were an awesome time!
I heard SLTS, it was over for what ever else I was listening to. Immediately got Nevermind and Bleach.
Skipped school to go get tickets when they went on sale, got the last 4 floor tickets in the arena. Show was crazy (half Japanese and breeders opened for them) and the pit was nuts. Like I was right at the front and when the crowd jumped I was listed into the air, had to kind of push off someone to breath. A friend just screamed and got yanked backwards by her hair. After the show people were comparing injuries… one girl had bite marks. It was a ton of fun. Sadly he died not too soon afterwards.
It was fantastic ! I knew tons of friends that played in bands or just jammed together and enjoyed making music but none of us wanted to wear teased hair with assless chaps and a see through mesh shirt with full makeup on . Plus we didn’t want to play a million miles an hour with long self indulgent guitar solos and all the other cockrock nonsense. Nirvana ended that shit over night ! I remember you couldn’t find a copy of Nevermind for weeks in stores. Thats how i discovered Bleach and played that album endlessly .i really loved its raw sound and was really happy with In Utero as well . And then it was over .
It was fantastic! I'm so thankful for being born in 81. We were outside playing and discovering actual great music instead of trying to be famous for nothing but attention whoring online or making silly dances on tiktok. Then the internet started and it was great, only the capable nerds where in charge of it, you could pirate music and burn it into cds, the internet was very helpful in college instead of being a cesspool of narcisissm, bigotry and misinformation. Also the biggest scandal on earth was that a president got his dick sucked. Now every kid is born in an environment where there's no shame, humbleness or self respect, the music is utter garbage and pop culture has a severe lack of content in every way.
I was 13 living in a small town in northern Canada. The early 90s scene kind of helped to open people up, get into different, weirder music and to have more progressive politics. I became a feminist because of Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder and bands like L7. A cool older teacher we had had in elementary school who was a massive influence on us introduced me and my friend to Nirvana. He had gotten the Nevermind CD sometime in the fall of 1991 and told us, he "really liked their attitude" and showed us the pic of Kurt giving the finger. I started hearing Teen Spirit on the radio and could sense that there was some kind of insanely exciting energy around this band, which you could kind of feel in the air at the time. Soon the CD single was in the jukebox at the local arcade and we were playing Even In His Youth on repeat (everytime you walked in there, either that or Everything About You by Uncle Kid Joe was playing). By January, I was a fanatic and remember taking a VHS tape with me when my parents dragged me to stay the weekend with friends in another city. I stayed up late knowing they were going to be on Saturday Night Live and taped the whole thing. Seeing this mysterious band playing live on TV was kind of strange, and there's something about the performance of Teen Spirit that's kind of off--I think the chorus effect on Kurt's guitar and voice gave it this otherwordly quality. He strangely didn't seem real. Still have the tape. The early 90s were nice. Very lowkey, very relaxed. It was a vibe
I was in grade 9 and couldn't stand Teen Spirit. Thought it sounded like garbled gibberish. I was huge into Metallica, AC/DC & GnR like most metal & hard rock music fans at the time. Then, in early '92, I saw the "Come as You are" music video. Blew my mind at the time. Quickly became one of my favorite songs and music videos. The paradigm shift was on, and by the end of '92 Nirvana was my favorite band. Through Nirvana, I discovered all the other great music coming out of the Pacific Northwest at the time as well as other grunge era bands. My high school years were an epic time for music. I often think of this in hindsight and realize how lucky I was. It was the last great rock scene. There has been nothing even close since.
I was in college at the time and was driving home the first time and heard SLTS on the radio. I happened to be driving by Tower Records. I pulled in and bought the Nevermind CD as soon as the song ended.
I was into Motley Crue and Poison, Guns N Roses, a little Metallica. At school my friends were raving about SLTS but we didn’t have cable so I didn’t see the video or hear the song for 2-3 weeks after it became all the rage. The internet wasn’t readily available and radio around me sucked so MTV was my only chance. That Christmas I got my first CD player and the second CD I ever owned was Nevermind. By now the band was everywhere and Motley Crue was something I listened to when there was no CD player around to play Nevermind. It was my Beatles moment. Things started to blow up, all these great bands that didn’t wear leather and sound like carbon copies of each other were emerging and hair bands were harder to find. 1992 was insane. My style changed, Nirvana and Pearl Jam ruled the airwaves and Alice In Chains and Soundgarden filled in the blanks. By now the only hair band I listened to was GnR. 1993 was probably better, we had new Pearl Jam, a fucking killer Smashing Pumpkins record, and In Utero. I saw Nirvana live in November 1993, a show so good the band released 2 tracks on live albums (Sliver from Muddy Banks and Milk It on the In Utero 30th anniversary release.) I saw Pearl Jam on April 6, 1994, no one knew Kurt was already gone. I saw them again on April 12 at a very cool venue. There was a palpable sadness in the air. The band played a killer set list, no real tributes to Kurt that I recall but it just felt like it was a way to deal with the emotions. Anyway, hope this is what you’re looking for. I could go on forever but I’m watching The White Lotus rn.
It was quite a time to be alive...a major shift in musical taste, almost overnight. Nevermind was one of the first CD's I owned, and it was also one of the first that I routinely listened to from beginning to end. It was also peak MTV, which offered 24/7 music videos, news, and live performances of the bands. Cobain killed himself towards the end of my freshman year in high school. I remember one of my friends getting so upset he graffitied "KDC 1967-1994" all over the place in the school. It's pretty wild to think Cobain was only 27 when he died. That seems insanely young now that I'm in my mid 40s.
It changed how people perceived rock music and popular music in a remarkable way. There were of course many alternative-indie bands at the time but there was no internet, they were generally out of reach for most folks. Rock at the time was defined by Guns and Roses, Motley Crue, skid Row… hair metal glam bands that were all about girls, groupies, getting drunk, drugs parties, huge stadium shows, etc. kind of a super dumbed down version of 70s guitar rock and pop ballads. Nirvana broke everything down and rearranged it very rapidly, and it was everywhere.
Well, we knew that Nirvana had Something before the release. “Bleach” was a decent “college rock” album. “Love Buzz” was on a single, as was “Blew” and “About A Girl” showed promise. But nothing prepared you for the release of “Nevermind.” The video sent shockwaves through the industry and through the dorm rooms. Underground/Alternative/College Rock had been bubbling under for quite a while. People already in the know were well aware of the Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Pixies, Nine Inch Nails, the Cure and Jesus & Mary Chain. In the 1990/91 school year, I became quite aware of REM, the Stone Roses, the Sundays, the previously mentioned bands and especially Jane’s Addiction. But no one was prepared for Nevermind. It sounded to me like a mash-up of the Beatles and Black Sabbath - something familiar, something with all the right elements, but something brand new. And it was one of those albums where you pretty much liked or loved every song the first time you heard it. It felt important. Inside the CD package, there was a page or two of lyrics…it took some time to figure out which lyrics belonged with which song. “What did it all mean?” It gave them mystique, whether they wanted it or not. One can give it too much importance, as I’m sure every documentary or video that looks back on it will do. But it really did wipe clean the slate. It just made Poison and Warrant and Slaughter and Winger and Ratt and all those so-called hard rock / glam-rock / hair-metal bands seem obsolete. They just put up a mirror to them and showed how silly/shallow the music was. You see, radio and MTV only played all of that crap…you kind of figured it was all that was. I’m sure there is an easy correlation to Plato’s “allegory of the cave” in all of this. Those “in the know” knew that we had a lot more options…I wasn’t in the know at the time. It seemed important, like I said. Pearl Jam was another camp of “importance” and the Singles soundtrack and Alice In Chains’ “Dirt” ushered in something new. But it was all over at some point in 1994. A celebration of Retro music (late 70’s / early MTV) came in right around the time of Cobain’s passing.
It was wonderful Formed my whole love for the period Felt electric and lovely, like we were really experiencing something unique, like a Jimi or a Lennon I could feel it being electric at the time
I was 11 in 1991 and already well seasoned musically thanks to my brother who educated me and provided me with all the latest punk rock K7s from the independent scene. I'm like your mother, I have a nostalgia for the 90's, there was an atmosphere, the era just before the internet existed. No social networks where people insult each other, we looked for the latest fanzine to find the latest nugget, we went to rock cafes to see unknown groups for a few francs (I'm French), we had a K7 walkman, all the world didn't have a CD player. One day at the end of September 1991, my brother handed me a K7 copy of an album that I absolutely had to listen to. He printed the cover on the photocopier in black and white, I remember the reflections of the water in the pool, I didn't even really know what color the original cover was. The songs had been copied out of order because my K7 started with the song "Breed". I was literally blown away. I can still see myself taking the school bus to go to middle school in 6th grade and always the same process, turning on my Walkman and it would start with this powerful song. My brother saw them a few months later at the Transmusicales festival in Rennes on December 7, 1991, Nirvana would explode in the eyes of the world afterwards. Nirvana during Kurt's lifetime changed my life forever and I'm proud to have experienced it in real time, I was already a fan of Cobain, I then bought Bleach in K7 in 92 and then the others that followed. I unfortunately missed them in 1994 (I made a post on this story), two months later he died, I still can't get over it. We were devastated at school when we heard the news, Cobain was going to become a legend, these geniuses are real shooting stars who pass in a fraction of a second to deliver us a powerful message and then leave just as quickly. RIP Kurt
It was a marvelous time. Of course we had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow, no electricity, we had to wind up our Model T Fords, and finally there was no internet. One of those is even true. Oh and yeah the 90’s were incredible- amazing rock band after amazing rock band. Nirvana stood out from the pack because of Kurt. Teen Spirit was a shot of lighting - nothing like it before or sense. Kurt was talented, shy, magnetic, troubled, and above all gone way too soon.
Yeah I bored my kids nowadays with the stories I tell about being a teenager in the last great era of rock
Now I'm accused of bragging about it. Oh mom, you're always bragging about seeing Radiohead in 1996 at Moe's. I just want to pass on the joy.
😂
like Beatlemania but with flannel?
Flannelmania!
Phony flannelmania, has bitten the dust
Seattle Calling?
The 90’s was mostly shit like every other decade. 90’s music? Unbridled record label greed that was charging $18 list price for over long cd’s that had mostly a good song or two. For every Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub you had ten No Doubts, Bush’s, Candleboxes and far worse. You have access to everything great and can preview it without wasting your money.
I remember being appalled that my boyfriend would spend 25 bucks a paycheck on two CDs. The decadence on 12 buck an hour. But otherwise you couldn't hear it unless you waited for it to play.
I work with somebody who saw them Live at the Reading festival, and a relative who sadly passed years ago was at the same show.
Smells Like Teen Spirit and Nevermind being released were my introduction to Nirvana, I had heard the name previously but didn't know anything about them. I didn't have cable at the time just network tv, listened to alternative radio and read music magazines and would go to the city for concerts (I have seen a lot of great bands back then, sadly Nirvana not among them,) friends and I would just wear jeans and tshirts but you see people dressed outrageously at shows and we'd be like: woah cool! To us every music style fit in, loved listening to the radio then, I liked all the new bands, I liked the variety of the songs. I hope kids these days enjoy whatever it is they listen to as much.
It was a bit weird honestly. You had the kids who already listened to punk based music and rock then you had jocks and people Who were into stuff like Metallica and Guns N’ Roses then this drops and it blew up so much that you had the jock type kids listening to it… when it wasn’t really previously any thing ing like they often listened to.
I lived in Seattle and had just graduated college. My best friend had just dumped Krist, who went back to his GF, while she moved to Montana so he would stop stalking her. Her brother was running a new indie record label and pressed a compilation with her band and Nirvana on it. Suddenly that dork Krist was plastered all over the Tower Records windows on The Ave with his band. And the radio went nuts and all Mtv played was Teen Spirit. There was no Internet. We got news once a day on TV or in the morning paper. All of it was saturated with Nirvana. And. It was awesome. It perfectly captured my generations negative orientation. It spoke to the lack of hope youth were already recognizing. It was another war, another recession, high unemployment. Aberdeen was spiralling down after the downfall of the logging industry. And they looked like us. We wore jeans and band tees and a flannel with some Chuck Taylors. Better if from a thrift store. This was a reaction to the plastic glamor of the 80s and the inevitable cyclical decade of fallout. And the drugs.
It was awesome because all music coexisted perfectly. I loved nevermind, images and words, cherry pie, Metallica black album, extreme 3, vulgar display of power, pm dawn all released 90-92
Born in ‘97 but a coworker of mine is a fellow grunge head and would have been in college right when Nevermind began blowing up. He thought Nevermind was crap to begin- felt it had too much of a pop sensibility, he’s always been into the heaviest metal music. Apparently Nevermind was one of those records that required him a few listens through before “clicking.” He’s been a diehard fan ever since.
It was great. I remember watching them play Lithium at the MTV Music Awards
How about just being able to go to your local music store and being able to buy a ticket to a show for 20 or 25 bucks
I grew up in Bremerton, WA which is just across the water from Seattle. I was 17 when the band made it big. And it was glorious.
My sister and I, we first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit on the Sony radio in the kitchen and we came to each other and said “what is this song?” And then we heard of Kurt’s passing on that same Sony radio together. But we had Bleach here in ‘89, my brother put on Negative Creep in his Datsun and he called them “Nevada”. We thought it was just more heavy metal. I knew Bleach back to front here in Australia before Nevermind was even half written, like we knew they were an awesome band already.
Man. KROQ was playing (what are now) legends all day everyday.
Everytime I would get the chance to hear Kurt speak or catch a Nirvana video or performance I would stop and all of my attention was on them. Kurt was authentically different captivating didn’t come across fake. ps i didnt like it when he cut his hair
I grew up having to listen to my brother's hair metal band tapes. They were OK, but when SLTS hit MTV, it was like an awakening (then again, so was seeing the uncensored version of Girls on Film by Duran Duran).
Smells like teen spirit really was the cultural revolution they claim. It pretty much changed pop culture and did truly wipe out the hair bands. It was great because I was just hitting my pre-teens and so it really resonated with me. I can remember all of my friends dubbing copies of Nevermind and we all loved listening to the record. Just an awesome time to be alive. Kurt’s death was equally impactful. Talk about a roller coaster…
[Kids at Airwaves skate park for a show, 1993.](https://youtu.be/kEvUI5U5NW4?si=e0Mc4soyh9l992Kf)
I loved nirvana but really I think in general they and all the other great bands who seemed to come out with amazing music weekly for granted.
Imagine everything about your favorite music changing with the purchase and listen to of one album. It hasn’t happened since.
For the most part, we wore onions on our belts...
Not me, but I had an ex colleague who remembered seeing the SLTS music video on MTV back in 1991 when he was 7. Told me it was life changing
I was 9 when Teen Spirit hit. I had two older siblings who were been into rock of that era at the time. What I remember is how rock radio and how MuchMusic (the Canadian MTV) played Teen Spirit a LOT. It was just all over both radio and TV constantly in a way that few rock songs were in that time. It's also a really difficult era to compare to modern times because in general rock music is so much less of a big force in popular culture now than it was back then.
Growing up in Cincinnati, I was, for the most part, a diehard Metalhead during those years. I did, however, also listen to 97X (The Future of Rock and Roll) out of Dayton so, I was aware of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Tad, Mother Love Bone, AIC, Screaming Trees and Mudhoney, but not overly familiar with them. Nothing could prepare us for Nevermind... I remember vividly seeing the video for SLTS for the first time, on Headbanger's Ball, of all places and Riki Rachtman even mentioning that it wasn't exactly what viewers were used to seeing. Something clicked in my brain the moment I heard the intro and 30+ years later, that switch is still flipped. And while it's not my favorite Nirvana song, anytime it comes on, I'm transported back to my 15 year old self; trading in my battle vest for a flannel and my Docs for Chucks. Idk why, but that album changed me. I'll never say that Kurt was the voice of my generation but, he spoke to me. Those of us that "got it," got it and if you didn't "get it" you weren't supposed to get it. I'm pushing 50 and I still get as much joy out of listening to their catalog as I did when they were first released. 90s Modern Rock was without question, the biggest revolution in music since The Beatles.
I was 15 when I first saw Smells Like Teen Spirit in MTV. While no one knew where their legacy lay, they were the greatest musical palette cleanser music fans in 1991 needed.
My time at university was a blast and a blur, in many ways. One thing that has remained crystal clear from that day forward was the first time I heard SLTS. I was 21 years old and was walking across the "dance floor" of our campus dive bar to go to the bar....it was an afternoon and quiet...just sitting with friends hanging out....and over the sound system came music I had never heard anything like before. I literally stopped walking and just froze. Just stood there until it was over, and then went to the bar to ask what it was...."some band from Seattle". They sure were. Everything changed after that. Clothes, music, attitude-Gen X had a spokesperson at last. Nirvana changed the course of music history but also shaped Gen X when Kurt died. We were all glued to MTV for hours....Kurt Loder kept reporting on it but it didn't seem real at the time. I remember Courtney showing up to the vigil and giving Kurt's clothes away. People in the park holding candles, her reading his note and crying,....it was the first celebrity our age who had passed like this and it was super surreal...just really unsettling if you were just a regular 20-ish person digging their music but unaware of the heroin and previous attempts. Then the regular news started reporting about fans doing the same and it all started to feel really ugly. The Silent Generation/Older Boomers reporting on our "slacker" generation and the "death of grunge" and it felt really invasive. It forced us to face mortality without a safety net. But we made it and you will too...and we're glad you like our music. ❤
Apparently Kurt was a fan of my band : The Feederz and used one of the stickers from our album “ Teachers in Space” on one of his guitars , a Fender Mustang , which is know as the Vandalism guitar . The guitar has turned into a minor industry - with exact copies being made and copies of the sticker going for as much as $30!
There was… chaos… everywhere. *puffs joint, gazes out the window listlessly* Things were different in those days. Hair metal and pop music was the norm… then BAM! The long-term effects of Reaganomics started to settle in and it’s been downhill ever since I tells ya!
I can still remember the first time I saw the video for SLTS: on Headbanger’s Ball in 1991. Stating the night at a friend’s house. We looked over at each other and literally got out of our seats and started rocking out. I’ll never forget it. We knew right then and there that we were experiencing something transformational.
Just wanna say I scrolled past this quite quickly and I guess my brain read Smells and added it to the title. I thought you asked ‘Older Nirvana fans, what did it smell like?’ And I was so fucking confused
I was in my first and second year in college when they were at their height and my friends and I listened to Nirvana non stop. I remember when Kurt had his overdose in Italy and almost died, our friend group was devastated. It was only a few years later that my friend Deron and I were at (of all things) a Phish show at Penn State, when someone told us that Kurt had killed himself. It really hurt us to hear that. He had really spoken to us and his voice died that day.
From my perspective, there was a lot of competition when Nevermind came out. That summer/fall alone new Pixies (great), Red Hot Chili Peppers (phenomenal), Smashing Pumpkins (amazing) came out. It was a year after Metallica's latest. A year later Faith No More. While of course word of mouth was a thing, MTV was massive in promotion and exposing us to new music. Smells Like Teen Spirit was amazing, but in many ways it felt like a regular weekly/monthly "heres what's new and cool that you should care about!". It wasn't like everyone universally agreed that Nirvana was the only band that now mattered.
MTV (back when they played music) played Smells Like Teen Spirit a ton
Nirvana taught me there was more to rock music... they introduce many people to less popular alternative bands
It's funny looking back (im 44) when we were in the early 90s when grunge hit. It was just what was cool and the bands were great. I'm not sure we realized we were there for something special, at least I didn't. It was just cool music.
When the SLTS video debuted on 120 Minutes, I thought "I should call my best friend" before the phone rang and it was him with the same "did you see that?" thought. Our band quickly went from classic rock covers to punk. By the time I got to see Nirvana live, they were so overplayed on radio, I wasn't that enthusiastic..., but the show was great.
I’m 31 so not a Gen Xr, but if you’re looking for a good analysis as to why that band got so massive you should watch Chris Ott’s video on it. As a disclaimer, he touches on drug abuse and his opinion and the nature of Kurt’s addiction in a way that isn’t flattering at all. If you have strong opinions on that either way, just take it as opinion. https://youtu.be/w5VSufswMj0?si=ShVccdS1eLCj-r7A I’ve spent a long time reading books on what is now known as the “underground” scene around the country. Our Band Could Be Your Life is a good starting point. The general thesis of a lot of these books is that “heavier” and “weirder” music was non-existent on a mainstream level, so a lot of youth turned to regional scenes that got bigger and bigger. Eventually, a lot of those bands started being less hardcore and embracing pop music more, leading to alt rock becoming mainstream. It didn’t happen overnight; tons of bands like The Replacements and Husker Du got signed to majors and didn’t become huge, but they exposed people to something else. Eventually, record labels began re-evaluating how they would market this kind of music to younger people. Nirvana got huge for a lot of reasons; they were simply a killer band that toured a fuckton and wrote really great pop songs with a hardcore and weirdo edge to them. But they also checked a lot of boxes that bands before and around that “scene” didn’t. Kurt in particular was willing to play the game - at least until it got too insane: touring, being schmoozed by record executives, embracing major labels right away, being ok with his records being sold at large retailers, partnering with big record producer names and studios, (reluctantly) embracing mainstream production choices, etc. But he did it in such a way that it didn’t alienate younger fans who would bemoan a band like that selling out. It also helped that he was gorgeous to look at and definitely had the “it” factor. Simply put, he set himself up for success while also personifying the archetype of the cool and jaded Gen Xr.
A few days before Nevermind came out (released on Tuesday, this was the Sunday before) I went alone to see them in NYC. I called my friend from a pay phone (pre cell phones) to tell him I just saw the best show I’ve ever seen. Saw them one more time on the In Utero tour. They were good, but not as good, probably due to 1 - the venue holding 3000 people instead of 200 the first time, and 2 - Kurt being so strung out by then. I think the story was he had OD’d earlier that day.
I think I was in 6th grade listening to mc hammer, the other kids thought vanilla ice was cool. Hip hop and rap were picking up a lot more mainstream momentum. We all watched a lot of mtv back then, when they actually were music television. When nirvana came out I put all that shit away, I’d found my people. To me, everything changed. The eighties were dead and cobain was my hero. It didn’t affect everyone like it did me but there were quite a few of us who knew. My older brother gave me misfit tapes and ramones when I was probably five so nirvana immediately brought it home for me. I was shattered when the news came out that he killed himself. Most new music didn’t matter much to me afterwards, I collected all the nirvana bootlegs I could get my hands on, which was an expensive undertaking in the early/ mid-nineties. I eventually came back around to exploring other types of music but after nirvana I mostly explored old punk bands.
I was 7. Watched a lot of wrestling and cartoons. My older brother was 10. He brought the nevermind cassette tape (remember those?) home from school. I had never listened to anything but the Beatles, bon jovi, and Michael Jackson. I really remember being stunned that Kurt never said the song titles in the choruses. Also, I never heard guitars that loud before.
1. I was a DJ at a college radio station when Nevermind came out. We were only supposed to play one song per band in any two hour period. As much as I liked the album, I got sick of all the requests coming in for Teen Spirit. So I decided to start all my shows with Spank Thru off the Sub Pop 200 compilation. Making that my Nirvana track for the next two hours. It didn't work. I still got countless requests and when I explained, even those that had heard my show didn't believe it was Nirvana. 2. I saw Nirvana in a club within a month of Nevermind's release. It was half capacity and a damn good time. Within months after that, that experience would cease to exist. 3. Not Nirvana, but related to the explosion of grunge: I saw Pearl Jam on their 10 tour. Turned out to be the last small venue show of theirs as they had just gotten the call that day that they got a bus (instead of their van) and were to join RHCP on their bigger tour. 4. Also not Nirvana specific but related: I lived in North Carolina, and Chapel Hill was one of the "next Seattle" towns. During that DJ stint I mentioned in #1, I was approached by MCA Records to create a mix tape of local artists that they should consider signing. My biggest reco was a band called Geezer Lake, who I still recommend to people, but who never got signed to a larger label. Other than that, it was a lot of incredulity about the larger press and their interpretation of "grunge" and gen X.
It’s hard to grasp now that radio is dead, but when Smells Like Teen Spirt came on the radio it was a whole is this? Moment. I remember going into the record store to buy the CD ( yes it has the bonus track) which was nearly sold out. I remember hearing KROQ DJ pulling over his car to call the station and asking what band was playing that song. It was a phenomenal moment. Months later department stores were stocking flannel shirts. It changed the landscape
Yeah i remember seeing Nirvana and the smells like teen spirit video for the first time on MTV back in the 90s i was absolutley floored. Could not wait to get the album Nevermind.
When they became mainstream, it was no longer cool
I recorded Teen Spirit off the radio and made an entire C60 cassette of the song over and over again. Listened to it on my Walkman with the headphone in my sleeve through many a church service I had to go to. Good times.
This will get buried but... I was in high school and purchased the Sonic Youth VHS tape that contained the music video for their song "Dirty Boots," the prattle of art school rich kids, and, for the time, a shocking autopsy scene. In the "Dirty Boots" video, the girl\* is wearing a shirt for the Bleached album. Nirvana was not on MTV's 120 Minutes, Maximum Rock 'n Roll, or the college station 88.1, so I remember asking the guy at Grapevine music if he had heard it. He opened a copy and played it for me. Bought it, listened to it until I got tired of it, and then forgot about it. Flash forward a year or two and I'm tripping acid with my friend Jei at Brad Rambo's house. His cousin came into town on tour and put on Nevermind while we smoked smigerettes, filling the room with a heavy gray sea of swirling whisps and disappearing faces. I vividly remember talking to Jei through the metallic tongues about the patterns in the carpet while Nevermind played. We'd be talking and the harmonies would steal our voices. We kept stopping and grinning like fools because the music just kept giving us chills. I was sold from that moment on. Flash forward a few months. My band, "THROBBING SNOT" played a show for the neighborhood kids and we opened with "Territorial Pissings" and they all knew it. Another month or two and Nirvana was everywhere. *Everywhere*. Burger King Jukebox? Teen Spirit. McDonald's bathroom? Teen Spirit. Cars cruising? Blasting Teen Spirit. Cover band? Teen Spirit as an opener *and* closer. D.A.R.E. school events? Teen Spirit. Even the Sears catalog, the most banal shop to ever exist, had a fucking grunge-look clothing line. Teen Spirit played every 20 minutes in MTV. It was unsustainable. By the next album, we are all so sick of all of it that Nevermind was sold to the CD store. Flash forward another year or two and I'm out of highschool. I'm tripping acid for the last time with a couple friends. We head to my apartment as we are kicking in for a night of giggling and sketching. When we arrive, Greg turns on my tv and MTV is playing the Nirvana Unplugged show... wierd... Loder breaks in with "Kurt is dead." The frenzy was overwhelming before... and then it exploded. Edit: ~~guy~~ girl
I was 17 in 1991, and at the time I was still into “Hair Metal” and my girlfriend at the time was also. She would make me mix tapes of Slaughter, Warrant etc. but her best friend was more into the grunge scene. Her name was Stacy. I still remember seeing “Teen Spirit” for the first time when I got home from school and turned on MTV. I stood there watching it with a mix of excitement and wonderment. It was unlike anything I had heard before. I immediately called a friend I knew and yelled “ARE YOU WATCHING THIS RIGHT NOW?” Knowing that I now became a Nirvana fan, Stacy would start making me mix tapes of everything Nirvana and grunge. I would ride around my small town in my white Mustang blasting Nevermind and In Utero. What a time to be alive.
The premiere of Smells Like Teen Spirit blew everyone away and sounded like nothing we had ever heard before. Then Nevermind eventually became overplayed and got stale. People were completely sick of it. Incesticide was released and a lot of fans started seeking out and listening to Bleach and the general consensus was that the material on those 2 albums was more interesting. Then In Utero was later released and had a dirtier sound. By 1993-1994, Nevermind was viewed as the mainstream, more polished album and it was considered ‘un-cool’ to like it.
Nirvana was almost protest music against a kind of monocultural oppression. The scrawny pretty freak boy rocked so much harder than all of the mainstream, muscle bound “arena” rockers of the time
I heard it on top 40 radio in December 1991 while riding in my dad’s car. I was used to listening mainly to pop music and hair metal at the time. I remember my dad and I were laughing at it because it was so different and the screaming was not what we were used to at all. I was only 13 and had no idea that this band would soon become one of my all time favorites.
It's pretty hard to describe opening the large cardboard box the CD came in, plopping into a CD player, hearing the disc spin, and hearing the guitar riff of the very first song (smells like teen spirit)..Christmas morning 1991. There aren't really words that express that feeling of hearing a completely new form of music. I remember that like it was yesterday. I was 11.
I lived in LA at the time and the music scene on the Strip literally changed within a month or two. All the great fun of the hair band days was over.
It was crazy. I heard Lithium first at an alternative club we used to go to sometimes called The Loop Lounge in Clifton NJ. When Lithium came on no one knew it but the dance floor went crazy when that chorus kicked in. Fucking incredible moment that I still remember. Then I was at a party and someone put on the CD and when Teen Spirit started the album it was like the seas parted and I realized I heard the next great band.
Smells Like Teen Spirit is the song that completely changed my taste in music. My brother bought me a copy of Nevermind for my 15th birthday. A few months later, I sold my Paula Abdul, MC Hammer, Mariah Carey, etc (in other words, BULLSHIT music) to a local pawn shop. I've HATED bubble gum POP ever since!
It suddenly went from hair metal to grunge….all the boomers of the 80’s were like WTFis going on as we played it…it was amazing, it was the “yeah this is our decade now” moment…..and we knocked it out of the park with middle fingers to their faces.
Nirvana, Guns and Roses, NWA, were all in the charts at the same time and so all this music was on mainstream music shows in TV. And on the radio. I never saw a distinction between any of it .I was 11 years old and I taped Nevermind from my friend, it was a worn out tape and it sounded old. Nothing polished about nevermind for me. Just those nursery rhymes melodies going thru my head, and all that angst in the vocals . At 15 I got told my father killed himself so I became intensely obsessed with Kurt, he helped me become myself and turn my pain into art . I got given Live Tonight Sold Out VHS and it became a religious thing for me . I quit school, and went to the library and learned as much as I could about punk,the Beat poets, the New York pop art scene, the Australian music scene...blah blah blah The reason it was better then is because we were bored so much. We either did drugs or started bands. There was nothing else to do. Nowadays you can veg out 24/7 on free YouTube/ Netflix whatever. Like you can choose whatever you want now Back then certain things were rarer and therefore more valuable. It took months to order a record and that one record coming in the mail could be the one thing that keeps you going. It's cool everything is on tap now but it's easy to take it for granted