I perhaps over-thought each element of this book…But at least I was thinking and I love the result too! I mentioned the front cover previously? It’s an echo of the incident in 1992 when Kurt Cobain returned from tour to discover all the stuff he was storing in his bathtub, including journals full of song ideas, had been destroyed by a sewage leak. This simple accident means we’ll never know if he had enough stored up in there for a few more quality songs, a few more lyrics that would have compared to his best, music turned to lost dreams. In a world full of generic Kurt Cobain/Nirvana covers I wanted to put a bit more work in and do something a little different to the (tedious) norm; that desire drove me throughout the writing too.
Now, the chapters…Again, taking a Nirvana song title as a chapter heading, it had been done. Sometime early in the process I had an album title stuck in my head, no clue why. A little later, as I was frantically scribbling notes as fast as they poured out my mind I kept using album titles to help me break them up — one of the first, and most obvious, was using The Hammer Party to head up a note suggesting comparing Nirvana’s drummers (eventually used in a post on this site rather than in the book: https://nirvana-legacy.com/2012/11/03/the-hammer-party-nirvanas-drummers/). I eventually realised that, given Incesticide was essentially a record of Eighties’ underground derived sounds and styles, using albums from that scene made absolute sense. Also, it felt good, to me, to be able to pay some small tribute (a tip of the hat) to a series of albums that I adore also and that Nirvana had led me to.
So, why each title? What do they mean…? Well, I’ve left Foreword, Acknowledgements and Reading Nirvana: A Bibliographical Note to one side…
Nirvana Legacy 