Nevermind

Certain Songs #1349: Nirvana – “Something in the Way (BBC 1991)”

October 21, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Nevermind
Year: 1991

Nirvana was always going to be heavily bootlegged no matter what: there was just too much demand and too little supply. And naturally, the demand skyrocketed in the wake of Cobain’s suicide, and so we got MTV Unplugged and Live from the Muddy Banks of the Wishkiah, and eventually the With The Lights Out box set.

But, of course, there was a lot more stuff out there. Not so much studio recordings, but plenty of live shows, radio dates and other ephemera that got collected on bootlegs with titles as Outcesticide or A Season in Hell, as every single thing that Kurt Cobain had played on felt like it was interested to those of us who felt like he was a generational talent who took himself away too soon.

Certain Songs #1348: Nirvana – “On a Plain”

October 20, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Nevermind
Year: 1991

While the back half of Nevermind didn’t have any commercially released singles, it still had a plethora of amazing songs, the amazingest being the penultimate track, “On a Plain,” which on a lesser album would have been the lead single, instead of stuck all in the back near the end.

And of course, as part of the juggernaut that Nevermind ended up becoming, “On a Plain” was released to radio stations as a promotional single, and getting a pretty decent amount of airplay in the process, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s right up there with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or “Come as You Are” in terms of their greatest songs.

Certain Songs #1347: Nirvana – “Drain You”

October 19, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Nevermind
Year: 1991

I got lucky: even though I didn’t buy Nevermind, until mid-December, 1991 I was early enough to not get a version with the “bonus” hidden track “Endless Nameless.”

On the balance, I always kinda hated the hidden tracks on CDs, often squirreled away several minutes after the album proper ended, meaning that if you wanted to listen to a CD over and over again, or had a multi-disc changer, there would be several minutes of silence between songs. And so while I appreciated the willingness to experiment with the format — Dramarama’s Hi-Fi Sci-Fi used the magic of the digital format to seamlessly spread a single song over several tracks — the reality is that the vast majority of these songs sucked.

Certain Songs #1346: Nirvana – “Breed”

October 18, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Nevermind
Year: 1991

It’s hard to explain just how thoroughly Nevermind took over the world — or at least my little slice of it — in 1992, but let me give a few examples.

I remember calling a friend and his answering machine message went “Nobody can come to the phone right now because we’re all too busy listening to our Nevermind CDs.”

There was also a point when the Wild Blue started doing their DJ dance music nights, and in the middle of all of the techno, electronica and flat-out funk, the DJ would put on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the place would go crazy.

Certain Songs #1345: Nirvana – “Come As You Are”

October 17, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Nevermind
Year: 1991

And so while “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the catalyst, the door-kicker-opener, I eventually got sick of it after years and years and years of ubiquity. Not so with the follow-up single, “Come As You Are.”

Spooky, dark and forboding, “Come As You Are” was actually Geffen’s expected breakout single from “Nevermind,” not “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” though I’m not sure why they thought that, as “Come as You Are” has always come across as a mood piece than a hit single. And in fact it’s the mysterious aspect of “Come As You Are,” the nagging feeling that it’s still hiding something underneath all of those layers of murk, that keeps it compelling.

Certain Songs #1344: Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

October 16, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Nevermind
Year: 1991

The “Stairway to Heaven” of Generation X, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has been dissected, analyzed, parodied, discussed and played so many times over the past quarter-century that there’s probably no way for me to say anything new about it. It’s one of those songs that is almost impossible to hear fresh, to hear without the baggage of what it represented back then and the baggage of what it may or may not represent today.

But that doesn’t mean I ain’t gonna try!