The Importance of Nirvana (and Josh)

When he was in tenth grade and I was a junior in high school, Josh carried around a navy blue (or was it red?) Mead notebook containing, according to him, every single Nirvana lyric, which he had presumably spent that summer transcribing. The first time or two I asked to see it he said no, but eventually acquiesced. The first inevitable thing I was struck by was Josh’s penmanship, which I had seen before but not to this degree. It was nearly impossible to differentiate between Josh’s handwriting and a typewriter. His small a’s and g’s, for example, were the kind a keyboard makes instead of how we learn in school. This was not hastily written and barely legible scrawl, but focused and pristine devotion, replete with bracketed alternate possibilities for words he was unsure of.

The content of these lyrics varied from angry, unfocused rants to stark, desperate pleads, most of them dealing with the inevitability of change, the restrictions imposed by our environment and the stress of trying to cope with these realities. This author wanted to let others know that he was totally screwed up, but not as screwed up as they are. A motif uniting these lyrics was a defiant mocking of everything: parents, teachers, popular kids, unpopular kids, the status quo, rebels, himself, etc. I wasn’t quite sucked into pretending Nirvana’s lyrics were remarkably insightful or well-constructed, but they offered something I could relate to. In contrast to nearly every song aimed for a teenage audience I’d ever heard, there was no bragging about sexual exploits or other conquests that I knew absolutely nothing about. In fact, these songs suggested he was as confused about that stuff as I was. This writer was helplessly trapped within his own mind, a predicament I understood all too well.

Here’s a verse from “Paper Cuts” which serves nicely as an example: (The last line before the chorus, which consists of repeating the word “Nirvana,” is pretty much incomprehensible, but I tried my best.)

Black windows of paint
I scratch with my nails
I see others just like me
Why do they not try to escape?

They bring out the older ones
They point in my way
They come with the flashing lights
And take my family away

And very later I have learned
To accept some friends of ridicule
My whole existence is for your amusement
And that is why I'm here with you
To tear me with your eye on her

I didn’t know much about contemporary music. My girlfriend listened to bad hip-hop, dance music and, well, for example, her favorite song was “Vogue,” by Madonna. I asked Josh if I could borrow a tape of… what were they called again? Josh was high-strung and easily annoyed. He also didn’t like me very much. I once tried going over to his house to play video games, and when he discovered that’s why I was there, he loudly and forcefully kicked me out, accusing me of “using” him. To this day I have no idea what purpose he wanted me to have for hanging out. Anyway, he wouldn’t let me borrow a tape, but he would let me listen to one inside a band practice room while he stood outside guarding the door so I couldn’t get caught and have the cassette confiscated.

He had me start by listening to Nirvana’s first album, Bleach (1989) and followed that up with a bootleg (a real one, not the excellent compilation of live material called Insecticide (1992), as this was a few months before it came out). After having read such neatly-written lyrics, I was startled to discover not only the music but also the insanely-strained lyrical delivery were heavily distorted and incomprehensible. I now realized how much time Josh had spent listening to this band. I couldn’t really make much out of it, so in an attempt to understand it, I did what I always do and sought to discover its roots. I asked my mom for bands with songs like “Louie, Louie” and “Helter Skelter.” It’s interesting to note that, looking back at this moment twenty years later, I must have known more about music than I generally give myself credit for back then, because that is a damn fine question. I don’t really remember what music my mom came up with to listen to, but it unfortunately wasn’t The Stooges or Syd Barrett. She did, however, have me read The Catcher and the Rye, which contained that exact same magic of offering a character that I felt I could closely relate to even though we had absolutely nothing in common.

After the success of Nevermind (1991), seemingly every band from Seattle got signed to a major label, and one thing the best of them had in common was being influenced by The Melvins, perhaps the most under-rated rock band of all time. They spent the mid-80’s churning out the best music at the time, and continue to do so today. No band from that region was worse than Pearl Jam. Little annoys me more than mediocre music with insipid melodies backing up a self-absorbed, pretentious frontman, and in those ways Pearl Jam has more in common with U2 than the so-called “Seattle Sound.”

The third Nirvana studio album, called In Utero (1993), was released as I began my senior year of high school. Although I feel like I know the lyrics to every one of its songs, another album was released by a group from Chicago at almost the same time which I would argue is one of the greatest rock albums of all time: Siamese Dream (1993), by The Smashing Pumpkins. There has been a copy sitting in a used bin at a thrift store for several weeks, which is absolutely appalling. In fact, that is what inspired me to write this homage to contemporary popular music from my high school years. Billy Corgan’s wall of perfectly overlayed guitars backing odd, strainy vocals was probably heavily influenced by REM, but sounds nothing like them. Ironically, I was introduced to The Smashing Pumpkins at church. Our pastor, apparently recycling a sermon from twenty years previous, contrasted the lyrics from Chuck Berry’s “School Days” with Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” in order to demonstrate how troubled and confused “kids today” were. He then offered hope that our misguided youths were seeking answers and vulnerable to be “saved” through “proper guidance” by presenting the Pumpkins song, “Quiet”:

Quiet, I am sleeping in here
We need a little hope

For years I've been sleeping
Helpless, couldn't tell a soul

Be ashamed of the mess you've made
My eyes never forget, you see…
Behind me

Silent, metal mercies castrate boys to the bone
Jesus, are you listening up there to anyone at all?

We are the fossils, the relics of our time
We mutilate the meanings so they're easy to deny

Be ashamed of the mess you've made
My eyes never forget, you see…
Behind me

Quiet!
I am sleeping
Quiet!
I am sleeping
Quiet!
I don't trust you
I can't hear you

Be ashamed of the mess you've made
My eyes never forget, you see…
Behind me

Behind me, the grace of falling snow
Cover up everything you know
Come save me from the awful sound…
Of nothing

I found this sermon so poignant that I went right out and purchased both Siamese Dream and a Chuck Berry two-disc compilation. (The Alice Cooper album covers were creepy enough that I figured I could take the preacher’s word about that one.) A large number of the Chuck Berry songs were preoccupied with the attractiveness of underage girls….

Part II
Shannon Hoon was born to sing. I’d put his voice up there with Roy Orbison and Freddy Mercury in terms of irreplicable natural ability. Rogers Stevens and Christopher Thorn have an uncanny symbiotic way of weaving deceptively sophisticated parallel guitar parts. This is not your grandma’s rhythm guitar/lead guitar duo. Brad Smith and Glen Graham are a rock-solid rhythm section, capable of understanding the nuances of any tempo. These musicians co-wrote both the music and lyrics as the band Blind Melon. Their big hit, “No Rain,” is probably the worst song they ever did, which is not to say that it’s a bad song. They were one of the few bands that could have lured me away from Star Trek: Next Generation or Northern Exposure to watch on that asinine David Letterman show, which is precisely what they did on April 8, 1994. After an absolutely sublime performance of “Change,” Hoon started talking seriously about I didn’t know what, until it ended with, “…goodbye to Kurt Cobain.” The blood rushed out of my head as I began flipping through all six channels in a futile attempt at making sense of this. All these years later, I still weep inconsolably when I hear that performance.

It seems like every revolution in American music is halted by drugs, especially heroin. The problem is so well-known that Eric Dolphy, whom I would argue is THE greatest musician of the 20th century, died after falling into a diabetic coma and being left untreated in a hospital bed because it was assumed he’d overdosed and they were waiting for the drugs to wear off. Even so, I’d suggest the problem is even worse than generally advertised. For whatever reason, my parents told me Janis Joplin died of alcohol poisoning even though it was really a heroin overdose. It has been stated by those that were there that Jim Morrison died of a heroin overdose. Vomit asphyxiation, which is how Jimi Hendrix died, is common with a heroin overdose, because the drug causes the lungs to cease working. Further, I’d be willing to bet that the same government employees encouraging heroin use among blacks to halt the Black Power movement have something to do with this. To borrow a Joseph Heller quote that I thought was Kurt Cobain because he used it in the song “Territorial Pissing,” “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Josh asked me what I did to become a member of National Honor Society. “Absolutely nothing,” I replied. He said he wanted to get in but hadn’t been chosen as a member. “It’s not really a thing. All you do is get a group picture taken once a year for the yearbook. That’s it.” But since he still seemed upset about it, I went and spoke to the teacher who coordinated the NHS photograph for our school. He explained that the voting board didn’t feel Josh demonstrated the community leadership required to be a member. I tried to retort that I didn’t have any community leadership abilities either, but he deftly cited the current conversation as an example that I did. When I graduated from high school, Josh had compiled over a hundred credit hours from Iowa State University and was the only one of the four of us in Advanced Computer Programming IV who actually succeeded in learning Fortran. I’m sure he became a successful person regardless of whether he was ever accepted into NHS or any other club.

When I got to college, I was completely confused by the omnipresent Nirvana t-shirts and posters, and assumed they must have jumped on the bandwagon after he died. In my high school, the popular kids listened to Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. I had never watched MTV, and honestly never realized Nirvana was a successful and popular band. I didn’t even know there was a version of Nevermind with a hidden track. It was only looking back that I realized there was a veritable army of kids scattered all over the country who had been united by an unkempt, flaxen-haired, awkward young man whose raspily screeching voice successfully expressed their sense of alienation while simultaneously obliterating it.

In 2006, Kurt Cobain became the highest-earning dead celebrity, unseating Elvis Presley. However, I just glanced at the current list, and Cobain’s name is nowhere to be found. I personally never cared for much that Elvis did other than his early Sun recordings, and even those are average at best, so I can totally understand how people today might listen to Nirvana and wonder what the big deal was. Some things are truly impossible to explain to anybody who didn’t live through it. From my perspective, I wonder how kids today survive high school at all if the crappy music on contemporary radio is any indication of what they’re listening to.

Although Shannon Hoon constantly altered the lyrics on live versions of this song, here is the transcription of “Change” from the debut album by Blind Melon (1992):

I don't feel the sun’s coming out today
It’s staying in, it’s gonna find another way
As I sit here in this misery
I don't think I'll ever, no Lord, see the sun from here

And oh, as I fade away
They'll all look at me and say, and they'll say
Hey look at him! I'll never live that way
And that's okay
They're just afraid to change

When you feel life ain't worth living
You got to stand up and take a look around and then you look up way to the sky
And when your deepest thoughts are broken
Keep on dreaming boy, ‘cause when you stop dreaming it's time to die

And as we all play parts of tomorrow
Some ways will work and other ways we'll play
But I know we can't all stay here forever
So I want to write my words on the face of today
And then they'll paint it

And oh, as I fade away
They'll all look at me and say, they’ll say
Hey look at him and where he is these days
When life is hard you have to change
When life is hard you have to change