On the Billboard 200 dated 11 January 1992, Michael Jackson's Dangerous was replaced at number one by an album three young men from a soggy Washington logging town had recorded for $65,000 in a dusty Van Nuys studio. Nevermind had been out for four months. Its sales had crept up through the autumn, then surged, then become uncontainable. Geffen Records, which had hoped the record might eventually go gold, was selling roughly 300,000 copies a week and couldn't press them fast enough. Inside the band, nobody was entirely sure what to do about any of it.
The story of how those three men got there, though, is not a story about a meteoric rise. It is a story about dropped-out school kids, punk records borrowed from a friend's older brother, a band called Fecal Matter, a rehearsal room above an Aberdeen hair salon, and a debut album that cost exactly $606.17 to make.
Aberdeen, Washington
Kurt Donald Cobain was born on 20 February 1967 at Grays Harbor Hospital in Aberdeen, a working-class logging town about a hundred miles south-west of Seattle. His mother, Wendy, was a waitress. His father, Donald, was a mechanic. The early years were reportedly happy. There was a lot of music around him. His parents gave him a toy Mickey Mouse drum kit as a small child and he is said to have worn it out, marching up and down the street with it strapped to his chest.
Then, when he was nine, his parents divorced. The angry, withdrawn teenager who eventually wrote "Something in the Way" is the version of Kurt that started to take shape from that point onwards. He bounced between his mother's house, his father's house, relatives, friends, and more than one spell of sleeping rough. According to Kurt, he slept under the Young Street Bridge over the Wishkah River on the edge of Aberdeen. According to Krist Novoselic, who would later know him better than almost anyone, that wasn't really possible given the tides. What is certainly true is that by his late teens Kurt was not welcome in most of the places he had been staying, and nobody in Aberdeen seemed to think he would amount to much.
Two weeks before he was due to graduate from Aberdeen High School, he worked out that he didn't have enough credits. He dropped out. His mother gave him an ultimatum: find a job or leave. A week later he found his belongings packed into boxes in the hallway.
The friend with the Creem magazines
The single most important person in the pre-Nirvana story is Buzz Osborne. Buzz was the lead singer and guitarist of the Melvins, the Aberdeen sludge-rock band whose practice space Kurt haunted as a teenager. Buzz had older siblings and better music taste than almost anyone in a fifty-mile radius, and he took an interest in the lanky art-school kid who kept turning up wanting to hang around. He loaned Kurt records. He loaned him back-issues of the Detroit magazine Creem. He effectively ran a one-person punk education programme.
From Buzz he got Black Flag, Bad Brains, Flipper, Millions of Dead Cops. From his own teenage instincts he got a parallel love of the big seventies rock bands his punk friends were meant to despise: Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Queen. Cobain once admitted to draining the battery of a tour van by playing the same Queen cassette on repeat while everyone else slept. The first punk record he ever owned was The Clash's Sandinista!, though his journals would later describe the Sex Pistols as "one million times more important than the Clash."
At the Melvins' practice space Kurt also met a tall, quiet bass player called Krist Novoselic. Krist's mother ran a hair salon in Aberdeen, and there was a spare room upstairs. That room, above the chemical tang of perming solution and the buzz of clippers, is where the band that became Nirvana first rehearsed.
Fecal Matter and the CCR years
In 1985, a year before any of this properly took off, Kurt formed his first band. It was called Fecal Matter. Dale Crover, the drummer of the Melvins, played drums and occasionally bass. Their one demo tape was called Illiteracy Will Prevail, and one of its songs, "Spank Thru," would eventually make it onto a Nirvana record. Fecal Matter fell apart after a few months. Before Nirvana coalesced, Kurt and Krist also tried their hand at a Creedence Clearwater Revival covers band. That went nowhere.
By late 1986 Kurt was paying rent at a flat on the Washington coast by working at the Polynesian Resort in Ocean Shores, spending most of his time sleeping into the evening, watching television, and making increasingly strange collage art. He had a girlfriend, Tracy Marander, who worked in a cafeteria and, according to more than one account, stole food to keep them going. Her repeated pleas for him to get a proper job would eventually inspire "About a Girl."
The first gig
Nirvana's first live performance took place at 17 Nussbaum Road in Raymond, Washington, at a house party in March 1987. The drummer was Aaron Burckhard. The lineup was a trio. A surviving tape captures the band running through a handful of original songs and, in between, jamming on Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" and "How Many More Times." The turnout was, by all accounts, a couple of dozen people crammed into a single-storey house in the middle of nowhere.
They did not yet have a name. Over the following year they would try out several: Skid Row, then Bliss, then the wonderfully awful Ted Ed Fred. It was only on 19 March 1988, at the Community World Theater in Tacoma, that they played a gig billed as "Nirvana." Kurt had chosen the word deliberately to stand apart from all the aggressive, angry-sounding names on the local punk circuit. He wanted something peaceful.
Jack Endino, Sub Pop, and a debut that cost $606
In January 1988, Kurt, Krist, and Dale Crover (sitting in on drums) drove to Seattle to record a demo with a local engineer called Jack Endino. Endino worked out of Reciprocal Recording, a tiny studio in the city's Fremont neighbourhood, and he was already the go-to producer for the emerging Seattle scene. He taped the session for roughly thirty dollars an hour. Afterwards, struck by what he had heard, he passed the cassette to a couple of DJs at the local college radio station, KCMU, who also ran a new independent label out of an office above a print shop.
Those two DJs were Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman. The label was Sub Pop Records. Within months, Nirvana had a single deal.
"Love Buzz" came out as a Sub Pop Singles Club release in November 1988, in a pressing of just 1,000 copies. By the time the band returned to Reciprocal in December to record a full album, Chad Channing had replaced Aaron Burckhard on drums, and a rhythm guitarist called Jason Everman had been quietly added to bulk out the live sound. Everman never actually played on the record. But he did pay for it. The bill, itemised and submitted by Endino, came to exactly $606.17. Everman handed over the money and was credited on the sleeve as the guitarist anyway.
Bleach was released on 15 June 1989. The artwork — a grainy, inverted live photograph of the band, with that stark Sub Pop logo — is arguably the most distinctive thing about it. The record was darker and heavier than anything Nirvana would make again, a grinding document of the Aberdeen sludge-rock Kurt had grown up inside of, leavened only by a single, strange, Beatles-shaped pop song called "About a Girl." It sold in the low tens of thousands. In the UK, where the NME had already decided this Sub Pop thing was worth paying attention to, it did a little better.
Jason Everman did not last. After a miserable US tour during which he and Kurt barely spoke, he was quietly dropped from the band. Everman went on to join Soundgarden, then to serve as a US Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is one of the few people in rock history who was fired from two all-time-great bands and went on to have a more interesting life than either of them.
Butch Vig, Sound City, and the deodorant
By 1990, it was clear Nirvana needed a different drummer. Chad Channing was a kind, thoughtful man and an inventive player, but the band wanted someone who could hit harder. In the spring, Kurt and Krist travelled to Madison, Wisconsin, to record a handful of songs with a producer called Butch Vig at his Smart Studios. Those recordings — rough versions of "Lithium," "In Bloom," "Polly," and a song called "Pay to Play" that would later be renamed "Stay Away" — went nowhere officially, but they put Vig on the band's radar as the man who might actually be able to produce their second album.
What the band didn't yet have was a drummer. In September 1990, Buzz Osborne told them about a young man called Dave Grohl who had just arrived in Seattle after his previous band, the Washington DC hardcore outfit Scream, had imploded mid-tour. Grohl met Kurt and Krist. Within a few days he had joined. The lineup that would, within twelve months, rewrite the rules was in place.
The bidding war that followed over Nirvana's next album is now legend. Sub Pop, broke and unable to compete, sold the band's contract to DGC, a new subsidiary of Geffen Records. In May 1991 Nirvana moved down to Van Nuys, California, and set up in Sound City Studios — the same boxy, unglamorous room in which Fleetwood Mac had mixed parts of Rumours. Vig produced. The budget was $65,000 — roughly a hundred times what they had spent on Bleach.
The title of the first single, the one that broke the world open, came from a night in Olympia the previous year. A friend of Kurt's called Kathleen Hanna, who would go on to front the riot-grrrl band Bikini Kill, had spray-painted "KURT SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT" on his bedroom wall. It was a private joke. Kurt's then-girlfriend Tobi Vail wore a deodorant called Teen Spirit, and Hanna was teasing him for smelling of his girlfriend. Kurt, who didn't know the deodorant existed, took it to be something more poetic about youth and rebellion. He wrote the song accordingly.
The cover photograph of the naked five-month-old baby, Spencer Elden, swimming towards a dollar bill on a fish hook, was taken at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center in Pasadena. Elden's parents were paid $200 for the shoot. Geffen's lawyers asked, nervously, whether the penis could be covered up. The band said no.
The palace coup
Nevermind was released on 24 September 1991. Geffen pressed fewer than 50,000 copies and hoped it might match the sales of Sonic Youth's recent label debut, Goo. Instead it debuted at number 144 on the Billboard 200, climbed steadily through October, Top 40 by November, then took off so fast that nobody inside the label could keep up. Geffen's president, Ed Rosenblatt, would later tell the New York Times that the label's marketing strategy for Nevermind amounted to one sentence: "Get out of the way and duck."
The band toured Europe. Every show was oversold. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" played on every radio station in every country they visited. When Nirvana touched down back in the United States at Christmas, the record was on the verge of going diamond. On the Billboard 200 chart dated 11 January 1992 it rose from number six to number one, ending a four-week reign by Michael Jackson's Dangerous. Former Billboard editor Paul Grein called it "an astonishing palace coup." Geffen couldn't ship copies fast enough to meet the orders coming in from high-street record shops. For the rest of that winter, the album was selling at a pace of roughly 300,000 copies a week.
Aberdeen, the logging town that had once packed Kurt's clothes into boxes and put them in the hallway, would later adopt the lyrics of a different Nirvana song — "Come as You Are" — as its official town motto.
The difficult album
Kurt, in the middle of all of this, was deeply unwell. He had suffered since childhood from a chronic, undiagnosed stomach condition that had, in 1990, driven him towards heroin as a form of self-medication. The fame made everything worse. The record he had made as a Pixies fan in a suburban California studio was suddenly soundtracking cheerleader jokes on Saturday Night Live. The people screaming "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in arenas were, by his own bitter assessment in the liner notes of the later compilation Incesticide, often the exact kind of people he had spent his life trying to get away from.
At the Reading Festival in August 1992, in what is now one of the most famous performances in British festival history, Kurt was wheeled on stage in a hospital gown, ostensibly in mock-protest at UK tabloid rumours that he was too ill to perform. He collapsed theatrically on stage, then got up and led the band through one of the best sets of their career. It was meant to be a joke. It was also, as Krist would later acknowledge, not entirely a joke.
By the time the band came to record their third album, Kurt had decided he wanted to punish the new audience. He hired Steve Albini, a Chicago-based engineer famous for his abrasive, raw sound and his contempt for major labels. The sessions took place in February 1993 at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. They lasted two weeks. Albini billed $100,000 as a one-off fee and refused any royalties on principle.
What emerged was, depending on the listener, the best or the most difficult thing Nirvana ever made. Rumours spread that DGC might refuse to release it. The band, having doubts themselves, eventually hired Scott Litt of R.E.M. to remix the would-be singles "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies." In Utero came out in September 1993 and, despite the friction, went straight to number one on both the US and UK charts.
The Unplugged session
On 18 November 1993, Nirvana walked into Sony Music Studios in New York to record an acoustic episode of MTV Unplugged. Kurt had been dreading it. He was unwell, he had been arguing with MTV producers for weeks about the set-list (they wanted the hits; he wanted Meat Puppets covers and a Lead Belly song), and he had insisted the studio be dressed like a funeral, with black candles and stargazer lilies. "I want it to look like a funeral," he told the set designer, Alex Coletti, who assumed it was a joke.
The performance is, in retrospect, unbearable to watch. You can see the illness on Kurt's face. You can also see a songwriter entirely in command of his own material, performing a set that almost entirely avoids the hits. Half of it is covers: three Meat Puppets songs (with Cris and Curt Kirkwood joining in), a David Bowie song ("The Man Who Sold the World"), a Vaselines song, and the old Lead Belly blues "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," which Kurt ends with one of the most famous screams in rock history.
April 1994
On 5 April 1994, Kurt Cobain took his own life at his home in Seattle. He was 27. His body was found three days later by an electrician. The Seattle police report recorded a self-inflicted shotgun wound. A note was found, addressed in part to his childhood imaginary friend, Boddah, and in part to his daughter, Frances Bean.
Within six months, Geffen released the Unplugged recordings as an album. MTV Unplugged in New York went straight to number one on the Billboard 200 on release in November 1994. It won the 1996 Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance. It remains, thirty years later, the most-watched MTV Unplugged episode ever recorded.
What came after
Krist Novoselic went into politics and activism, campaigning on electoral reform in Washington State. Dave Grohl, who had written a handful of songs on his own during quiet Nirvana tours, started recording them under the provisional name Foo Fighters. The first Foo Fighters album came out in 1995, entirely written and performed by Grohl. He would go on to form one of the biggest rock bands of the next thirty years and, in a 2022 BBC interview, describe the two years between Nirvana and Foo Fighters as "learning how to live again."
Nirvana has sold more than 75 million albums worldwide. Nevermind alone has shifted more than 30 million copies. It still sits, quietly, on the Billboard 200 almost every week of the year, decades after its release. In Utero has gone six-times platinum in the US. Bleach, released on Sub Pop in a pressing of a few thousand, is now the best-selling album in that label's history.
Aberdeen, for its part, built a small park on the edge of the Wishkah River in 2011 and put a guitar-shaped statue of Kurt Cobain in it. In 2014, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, on their first year of eligibility. The ceremony was held, with the kind of symmetry that only rock history ever provides, in Brooklyn, a few miles from the studios where, twenty years earlier, a very ill young man from a soggy logging town had played a funeral-lit acoustic set for an MTV crew and ended it with a scream.
Part of the Backstory series. Read more: Backstory: The Cure · Behind the Label: Sub Pop Records · Backstory: Fleetwood Mac