A one year old site, 298 posts in 17 categories stretching back to the first post on October 30, 2012. Yay! I admit I didn’t think I’d be doing anything at all by this point in time, I started writing the Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide book back in January/February that year, concluded writing it in mid-October, spent the next month and a half on 2am calls with my designer in Oregon prepping the book for publication and from that point on just kept working to a tight schedule that demanded six posts per week (I took Sundays off.)
Did you know there’s around 400,000 words up here plus over 150 graphics and 100 original photos from the Nirvana Tour? That’s the equivalent of four decent length novels splurged on here hopefully for Nirvana fans to enjoy and consider. Certainly no belief that I’m an ‘authority’, I admit I rather like it when people write in and either add to what I’m saying, correct what I’m saying or dispute or debate my perspective – it’s healthy, it’s fun, I learn something! As a Nirvana fan since I was a teenager I’m regularly enthralled and stunned by what people bring here – I hope its helped keep the enthusiasm alive for people, given a few different ways to look at the topic and stayed true to a desire to take an original cut on things.
The rules stayed the same throughout; who cares about my personal life and feelings and why would I want to share them with complete strangers? For a post to pass muster I wanted it to have a direct connection to the topic of Nirvana. Secondly, there are enough professional and amateur album reviews and song reviews out there – I’m not interested in saying “good/bad” given such things are entirely personal, I’m more interested in the universal and the demonstrable. For the same reason, there are vast numbers of photo archives out there loading, sharing and duplicating pictures of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana – to be really frank, I find them utterly tedious. An image without a story means nothing to me so my priority was to include or add an illustration only where it was relevant to the commentary being provided – I like content, a photo is worthless if it isn’t a part of a wider tale.
Nirvana benefits from an astounding quantity of work done by fans to provide readily accessible information ranging from past interviews, to easily downloadable bootlegs and live recordings, to archives showing set-lists, venues and dates. Having this quantity of raw data is a very rare thing and without it I simply couldn’t have done a lot of the work I’ve enjoyed the most on here. There are a lot of far better story-tellers than I out there, but I felt that, as a fan and therefore someone not working due to a profit motive, I could spill a lot more time to track down the messages within that information. That data-driven approach to the topic is what I felt I brought that was different. Here’s hoping I’ve provided enough of worth…
…The future? I’ve massively reduced my amount of posting entirely due to a need to put time into a Nirvana project I’ve been working on since April – apologies, I’ll keep coming up with blog material but for the next nine weeks until the Christmas break I’ll be at two/three posts a week, after that, let’s see shall we? I think I’ll have a new series of material I can start sharing on here…
Anyways, I hope the Nirvana tour was enjoyable to read, I hope there’s been sufficient data work that it gave people food for thought and please, if you’ve a question about Nirvana or a suspicion or a theory you’d like me to help examine I’m always open to suggestion!
Nirvana Legacy 
Speaking of books, there are ways to have your blog printed into books, too, should you ever want to do that. I’ve had one blog for several years, and I try to have a book made from it every year or two–sometimes time gets away from me. I’ve used Blog2Print, which I’ve liked, but there are others and it probably pays to shop around.
Gosh, thanks Barb – I’ll definitely look at that, there’s certainly some of this stuff here I think it worth while and that I’m proud of.
I’m still sure I’ll get round to making a free PDF booklet of the Nirvana tour – just hope it’ll help Nirvana fans plot and plan their own trips to the North-West!
Salutations and all the best to you.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on the basement demos that were supposedly recorded in March of ’94. Cobain on drums with Eric and Pat and all that. Why haven’t we seen anything from this session if it actually had been recorded? I thought by now we would have some scrap since we now have a full box set and 2 super deluxe editions. If they do in fact exist, what are they waiting for????
Hey ya fella! Nooooo problem! Click on the ABOUT tab of this site and, apart from a photo of me ignoring an awful lot of glasses, you’ll also find a sample chapter from Dark Slivers where I basically give my opinions on the whole discussion of 1994 Cobain demos…
My opinion would be that the reason these things haven’t been released is that they aren’t NIRVANA. It’s the same reason all the supposed collaborations with Courtney Love haven’t emerged either when its those home duets that potentially offer the most significant source of leftovers.