Nirvana

Certain Songs #1354: Nirvana – “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For a Sunbeam (MTV Unplugged)”

October 26, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: MTV Unplugged
Year: 1993

Coming full circle with Nirvana in a way: I opened these posts with one of their obscure covers, and I’m closing it with the greatest cover they ever did.

It goes without saying that even in 1993, the original Vaselines version of “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam” was pretty fucking obscure. Hell, I’d bought The Way of The Vaselines in 1992, and I had totally missed it. So when it popped up as the third song on the MTV Unplugged broadcast, it was a beautiful surprise.

Certain Songs #1353: Nirvana – “About a Girl (MTV Unplugged)”

October 25, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: MTV Unplugged in New York
Year: 1993

Recorded in November of 1993, and airing a month later as a Christmas present, Nirvana’s appearance on MTV Unplugged encapsulated almost everything that made them a great band — only the noise was missing — and provided a tantalizing glimpse to the future as well.

Like all things Nirvana, it’s nearly impossible these days to look at it as a performance in and of itself without trying to dissect it for clues, but I’m convinced that it would still be remembered as a classic performance even if it hadn’t become a inadvertent self-provided eulogy.

Certain Songs #1352: Nirvana – “All Apologies”

October 24, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: In Utero
Year: 1993

“All Apologies” is my favorite Nirvana song.

“All Apologies” is the song that I most associate with Kurt Cobain blowing his brains out with a shotgun.

I’m not sure what it says about me that the Nirvana song that makes me the happiest is also the Nirvana song that makes me the saddest, but somewhere in the Leonard Cohen afterworld, I’m guessing that Kurt Cobain is nodding his head in recognition.

Certain Songs #1351: Nirvana – “Pennyroyal Tea”

October 23, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: In Utero
Year: 1993

Originally scheduled to be the third single from In Utero, but withdrawn because, you know, suicide, “Pennyroyal Tea” is perhaps the song on In Utero that would have fit the most on Nevermind, both structurally and sonically.

The irony, of course, it that “Pennyroyal Tea” was the one song where Kurt publicly said that he was dissatisfied with how Steve Albini’s mix came out, because he knew that it needed more of the sheen that glossed up the Nevermind singles.

Certain Songs #1350: Nirvana – “Dumb”

October 22, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: In Utero
Year: 1993

To say that the run-up to In Utero was tumultuous would be an insult to the concept of tumult. Nirvana was caught in between having to follow an massive and unexpected hit record with yet another hit record and the nagging feeling that having another hit record was the worst possible thing that could possibly happen.

So naturally, coming from the punk rock side of things, where any kind of success was frowned upon, they went with Steve Albini to record In Utero, knowing that the supersonic sheen that Butch Vig & Andy Wallace gave Nevermind would be nowhere to be found. In addition, Cobain wrote a bunch of songs that weren’t nearly as melodic, delving into the more abrasive side of his songwriting, and doubling down on his personal punk rock bona fides.

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.