2013 – Page 10 – Nirvana Legacy

Much on With Nirvana’s Legacy…? Do Re Mi as Dream Pop

Just enjoying perusing my copy of the Cause & Effect Vol.1 triple 7″ set. I was made aware of the release, and of the Joyful Noise label, via Adam Harding of Dumb Numbers. This bloke has done a lot for my listening habits this year – a few months he even gifted me a link to this little beauty:

I admit I actually stated that I prefer it to the Cobain solo demo; it was such a surprising reconfiguration, the muscular backing rhythm giving some heft even as the vocals retain the fragility of the original effort, while still using backing vocals to give the song a gorgeous dreamy effect. It’s light and heavy all at the same time and I totally adore it.

As for the Cause & Effect set, heck what’s not to like? There’s something lush about vinyl and the packaging on this one is wonderfully intricate – outer package, inner sleeves decorated with images of the various artists, coloured vinyl on the inside… I don’t want to fetishise the object(s) but it did give me pleasure studying these this morning and seeing how much effort had gone into them. Buy it! Go buy it! You’ll also find the new LP from David Yow (former Scratch Acid, formerly The Jesus Lizard, definite vocal influence on early era Kurt Cobain) and the new EP from Sebadoh too. Goodies!

Meanwhile Duluth, Minnesota’s finest – Trampled by Turtles – are playing a batch of shows in the U.S. and have an entertaining new video up which made me chuckle:

http://trampledbyturtles.com/

And what of my 2012 meisterwerk, Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide? Well, it rolls on alongside my efforts on the blog front, alongside fresh ideas germinating and generally sprouting in a way that makes it hard to find time around work to translate it all into full-blooded words on paper… I admit, on the topic of object-focused fetishism, a normal Saturday morning topic, that people often asked me last year whether I’d considered just doing it as an e-book. I was very firm that given I was writing, ultimately, out of pride and ego, that I wanted to hold the physical object in my hand, I wanted a book, not just data on a screen. It was the right choice. OK, it meant I worked hard to make the words what I wished of them, to make something I felt said new, interesting stuff about Nirvana, about Incesticide, about Kurt Cobain – but it felt great seeing the book. I’ve got about 20 copies of the second print run left now, not bad, not bad. Just drop me an email at nirvanadarkslivers@gmail.com if you want to inquire about it.

The Most Popular Nirvana Songs: Another Measure

Yesterday I pointed out the eighteen Nirvana songs that were played more than one hundred times, today, I want to cut the information a different way to illuminate a slightly different result.

I took the spreadsheet I’m working with — prepared my genius of a comrade Shrikant Kabule of Mumbai — and replaced the numbers recording how many times in each month each song was played between 1987-1994. Instead I inserted a 1, so that the total added up was simply a record of each month in which a song appeared at least once. The total live history of Nirvana extends for a total of 58 months so coming even close to that theoretical maximum is impressive; here’s the number of songs performed in more than twenty individual months:

There’s an obvious similarity and coincidence with the list of the Nirvana songs played more than one hundred times — and, of course, my decision to draw the lines at one hundred plays and twenty months are arbitrary and worth baring in mind — but there are differences; the arrival of Sliver, Stain and Dive into the top fifteen means there’s now five non-album tracks on the list. The reason? Well, I believe it’s down to the long spell in 1989-1990 when Nirvana were working up new songs for a 1990 album that never happened. Nirvana may not have played as many shows as they did in 1990-1991, Nirvana set-lists may have been considerably and consistently shorter prior to reaching headliner status in 1992-1994, but certain songs had a relatively earlier start at a time when the shorter set-lists meant Nirvana were more selective about repeating songs and more likely to chop-and-change.

What we’re looking at here is the difference between quantity and longevity; some songs were of declining persistence and made way for the In Utero era songs, others seem to have been readily usable no matter how the set-lists changed and/or solidified over the years. The songs at the top of the list were played from the first month in which they made an appearance and almost within exception right until the end on March 1, 1994. To emphasise that point, here’s the list of songs from the list above that were on Nirvana’s final set-list:

Eleven of the twenty most persistent songs made it all the way to the end.

Which Songs Did Nirvana Play the Most? The Top X

As mentioned last week, it was Sappy that received the most notice in studio with multiple takes across four separate sessions placing it in a class of its own when it comes to Nirvana songs. Meanwhile, in another category of records, I was curious which songs were the staple diet of the Nirvana set-list between 1987-1994. The result was that, thanks to my colleague Shrikant Kabule, we created the full table of how many known performances were made across the years. This selection is the list of those songs known to have been played more than one hundred times.

Examining set lists had already identified Blew, About a Girl and School as the three tracks that survived from Bleach right through until Nirvana’s 1994 shows. School is the most impressive performer after all only 241 of Nirvana’s 369 known gigs possess full and complete set-lists; essentially, from the time it was written School featured including on quite a few partial set-lists. Tales of how nervous Kurt Cobain was of playing About a Girl don’t stop it being a similarly highly featured and beloved song for the band.

In past months I ranted about the way Nirvana gave near complete primacy to Side A rather than Side B of their albums when playing them live. The table below of most played songs shows that pattern holds in relation to Bleach where, of the six songs from that album that are played more than one hundred times, all are from Side A. The picture with Nevermind is slightly more mixed but not unsurprisingly. Firstly, the popularity of Drain You in concert is absolutely clear, in fact it’s only just behind Smells Like Teen Spirit, secondly, Territorial Pissings surprised me a little more but still, there it is as the seventeenth most played song. Just as noticeable though, the whole of Side A of Nevermind features on the list — Polly, Breed, SLTS, Lithium, CAYA, In Bloom.

To some extent it’s still true that age makes a difference — the Bleach era songs, written prior to the big gap in set-lists in early 1989, are the only ones with sufficient opportunity to feature 200+ times — Polly was written as far back as 1987 and played from May 1989, Breed came along later in 1989. Yet, the tangle of creativity, Kurt Cobain’s peak writing years in 1990-1991, coincided with an explosion of touring allowing the appearances of his other songs to evade mere chronology; preferences begin to play a role. This, for example, explains why SLTS and Drain You, relatively late productions, should appear more than Lithium or In Bloom which, though featuring on the same album, made their first appearances a full year earlier — April 1990 as opposed to April 1991.

The gradual increase in Nirvana’s average set-list length also influences the results; head-liner status meant that even while many older songs were squeezed out to accomodate the In Utero era songs, a lot of songs survived because the set-lists in 1993-1994 were more than half a dozen songs longer than in 1990. The shorter set-lists and lower expectations in the early era made it more likely for songs to be flipped in and out regularly. Despite the lower number of shows after 1991, the set-lists had a greater regularity (particularly on the In Utero tour) so a core set of songs were able to rack up large numbers of appearances.

The table also emphasises how firmly focused on their albums Nirvana were; Spank Thru and Been a Son are the only non-album tracks to enter the list of songs played more than one hundred times. The popularity of the relatively slight Been a Son remains a mild mystery to me; it’s a song with the most solid presence on Nirvana posthumous releases on top of its multiple releases during Nirvana’s lifespan.

Bad News: Jonathan Poneman…

http://seattletimes.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2021082565_nicole02xml.html

Some sad news affecting another of the crucial figures in the Nirvana/Sub Pop story.

It’s a reminder that, beyond the abnormal mortal end of Kurt Cobain, we’re entering the era where more and more regularly the people who lived through the age, who contributed some part of the tale, are going to leave us. Naturally first thoughts are a hope that Mr. Poneman is well looked after, comfortable and also feels a deep satisfaction with his life works so far.

Ultimately, while this blog is centred around Nirvana and the figure of Kurt Cobain it’s also intended to celebrate the many others who have some small piece of the story.

Branding and Marketing the Alternative Generation

One of the tragic findings of market research firms and sociologists is that when enough people are lined up under an overall guidance, personality makes surprisingly little difference. Individual morality and beliefs fade, not because the group imposes will on the individual, but because the individual and the group work together to find the point of agreement at which they can coexist while the central decision of the group remains unchanged. It’s simply a case that there are significant boundaries to how exceptional an individual can be – on multiple levels the choices available are constrained by social norms, educational structures, physical requirements, the need to exchange/interact. We’re only exceptional by comparison to a norm, the depth of our exceptionalism relies on what the norm is and can stretch to. It’s why a modern western society can be so accepting of a diversity of life choices and still pull toward an imaginary centre, even without laws mandating a set social reality, and simultaneously why most “alternative lifestyles” aren’t more than a few steps from the norm, they’re expressions of an accepted consensus. That doesn’t mean individuals disappear, it just means the overall significance of individuals fades within wider moments.

That’s where the purveyors of the idea of an ‘alternative nation’ and Kurt Cobain, with his oft-expressed annoyance at the nature of his audiences, both proved tragically deceived. What they were, in fact, doing was observing an overall cultural moment then trying to claim that the music should mean the audience was a specific and unified phenomenon. This meant attempting to place a box round an amorphous and ill-defined component of the whole of late Eighties-early Nineties youth then painting music over the top of them as if music was so clearly decisive in defining social values. Too much energy was invested in setting up an imaginary conflict between those listening to heavy metal, who as a consequence were supposedly macho and sexist; versus those who listened to the next fashion trend in music who were apparently purveyors of enlightenment. Essentially distinguishing aspects of the front-men, characteristics of the band identities, were observed and then assigned uncritically to the audience as if one was a standardised reflection of the other. It produced a simplistic vision in which you, individual music consumer, were not simply listening to Axl Rose or Kurt Cobain, you were a mere blank template on which the media-distorted and accentuated aspects of their personas were projected.

As an aside, the false nature of the ‘alternative nation’ hypothesis set up a moment in which Axl Rose, as a huge fan of Nirvana’s music and of up-and-coming currents of alternative music such as industrial, was fundamentally precisely the alternative consumer being tagged as the ‘alternative nation’ at the same time as being held up as the pantomime villain the ‘alternative nation’ was attempting to topple. The ‘alternative nation’ was a ragged tarpaulin hung over a very broad tent of people and saying nothing about those within its confines. Instead of seeing the gap with reality and then reacting by halting the lazy attempt to read the characteristics of the audience from the item hung over their heads, the challenge was resolved by an appeal to invisible enemies; the claim that some parts of the audience were illegitimate, unworthy, untrue. Of course, as usual with these kinds of witch-hunts, no one actually believed that they could possibly be the person being targeted. It would have been a lot more true to simply recognise that whatever comments could be made about the actions and beliefs of Kurt Cobain or Axl Rose, those actions and beliefs belonged to those individuals and were true or untrue of most of either audience because those two individuals were inherently just part of the generation making up the audience rather than superior to it.

The idea of an ‘alternative nation’ fundamentally undervalued the audiences. The bands tagged as the representative voices of a new generation didn’t arise and then create the audience; those bands arose because that audience was already in existence – the fact it took the means of music production, distribution and promotion time to recognise that there was a music consuming audience, with liberal social values, that would be interested in listening to something more than Genesis, is the crux of the issue. The audience itself was already there and consisted, like any audience, of those who can critically listen and distinguish between fact and fiction and who do think about the perspectives the bands are relaying; plus those who critically listen but primarily to the music rather than the lyrical philosophies and intent; plus those who could give a darn either way. The idea of ‘alternative nation’ was essentially an elitist view in which the masses slavishly follow the ‘great men of history’ and therefore are defined as a single bloc, with a single intent – rather than a temporary accretion of a range of individuals with a range of reasons for listening. It suggested that you, as a member of that audience, regardless of whether you were in a music venue or listening in a public or private location, were indistinguishable from someone in a completely different location.

To reemphasise, it relied on overrating the unified nature of music audiences; a few thousand people in a room pledged to deliver a particular social/political change is a movement, a few thousand people with nothing else to do on a Saturday night and a desire to pump fist/head is just a crowd. Consequently, whether that audience listened to Guns n’ Roses or to Nirvana was a foolish distinction to make; the audience listening to either band didn’t base their views on gender, race or sexual orientation wholesale on the politics of the band they were observing.

The belief that there was ever one single audience for grunge, or more specifically for the music of Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Alice in Chains et al., and that it wasn’t, at least from 1991 onward, primarily a mainstream rock audience, relied on an overestimation of the difference between rock music and this particular sub-category. The music had fed – just as Guns n’ Roses, Poison, Whitesnake did – on Led Zeppelin, on the Beatles, on Black Sabbath, on punk and emerged with a different sound but a vast range of shared characteristics that made them close brethren. If you wanted to state that those specifically pledged to the K Records DIY scene, or those ascribing to Riot Grrl principles, or who were living within one of the small local scenes of any music subgenre that defined itself not by sound but by a particular methodology or philosophy, therefore derived actions or behaviour or opinions from the music – you’d have a case. But within the melting pot of the mainstream, a non-‘scene’ with no core pledge or commitment, trying to distinguish the fans was ridiculous…

…Except it did serve a purpose. Kurt Cobain felt at times he had been rejected and spurned as a sell-out by those who remained in the K Records circle; to what extent this was true versus being representative of his own inner conflicts is hard to say but I’ve yet to see any comments attributed to any of the key figures in the underground scene doing anything other than celebrating Nirvana. From mid-1992 Nirvana’s sound was refocused, attempting to push away from the mainstream tone into which the band had dived. In the background, launching attacks on both Guns n’ Roses and Pearl Jam simultaneously set up a distinction between a supposed ‘past’ generation, represented by Guns n’ Roses who were busy selling seven million of each volume of Use Your Illusion at precisely the same time Nirvana was declaring them irrelevant, and a ‘false’ generation of fans who preferred Pearl Jam and therefore weren’t real fans. The fact that Nevermind (and In Utero) were selling to precisely the same hard rock audience as Use Your Illusion I and II or Ten or Vs was the background reality; the fact that listening to a record isn’t the same as endorsing all its views was reality; the fact that Kurt Cobain despised the sexist, homophobic, racist and macho element of his audience; none of these made the existence of a cohesive or coherent ‘alternative nation’ a reality.

It also makes explicit how silly it is to accept ‘music journalist reality’. That’s not meant to be derogatory, each group of commentators in society formulates a vision of life in which their particular priority is at the centre whether that places economic uber alles, or politics, etc. Kurt Cobain himself was someone for whom music was of vast importance and who explicitly seemed to define friend or foe through their musical choices and tastes. The result was he was extremely open to a vision of the world in which the young were not individual personalities with a vast range of drivers, motivations, views and visions but could instead be defined according to their music tastes.

Instead, that idea rests in the realms of utopia, like the Leninist idea that a bourgeois vanguard could spark the ‘natural proletariat’ to rise up and take over the revolution; or that anyone and everyone will become an entrepreneur if they’re simply encouraged by changes to the tax system; or that creating a monotone nation with a unifying strand of race, religion or creed will miraculously remove all social tension. Kurt Cobain’s demand in the original liner notes for fans to “leave us the fuck alone!” was always a hopeless request for people to deselect themselves and felt more like a sop to the conscience of the writer than a genuine avenue of progress. The myth of the ‘alternative nation’, unlocatable, hidden, impossible to distinguish from simply ‘the young’ laid a heavy burden on Kurt’s shoulders at the same time as fuelling a good many playground battles but it was always destined for disappointment as reality warmed the Earth and the idea evaporated.

Saturday Salute to True Originals: The Dwarves

The early Eighties saw the original punk confrontational edge taken to its (il)logical extreme. Stories abound of Michael Gira (Swans) punching a man in the audience for “having too much fun”, James Chance (The Cortortions) regularly ending up in fights — it echoed but barely expanded on Iggy Pop’s actions of a decade before. Simultaneously, however, confrontation within the music (both the aforementioned bands being fair examples) had exploded with punk-influenced bands wedging an ever increasing openness to avant-garde noise, no wave noise, industrial noise into the gears of their guitar playing. The one element that hadn’t been recalibrated for this new age was the theatre of horrors element represented, at his peak, by Alice Cooper and, to a certain degree, by KISS — it had perhaps become too much a part of the hair metal androgyny and make-up vibe to be immediately swallowed whole.

http://thedwarves.bandcamp.com/album/the-dwarves-must-die

But then it happened. The combination of punk rock, openness to new music, stage performance as truly a performance and not just a lo-fi rehash of songs that would end up polished definitively in studio, the aggressive, transgressive, often violent stage presence all came together with The Dwarves, alongside the notorious GG Allin, being a crucial purveyor. These acts deserve credit for creating something that, through its recombination of elements, was indeed something new, fresh and original.

That’s what has often been underappreciated when speaking of the bands that emphasised the performance element — every band that has found success in the live arena has required a degree of gimmick even if the gimmick has been a po-faced, minimal movement or a supposed ‘natural’ style. The examples are well-known; burning guitars, smashing guitars, windmill chords, matching outfits, extended solos, extended/intro/outro jams, set destruction, self-harm, stage diving, stage invasion — whatever, it’s all a form of performance. To make it crucial to the identity of a band then wrap that identity in grotesqueness was no more nor less a quality approach than the musical switches of a band like Nirvana.

The Dwarves, with their rabid on-stage quality tore a new and refreshing hole somewhere between the po-faced early Eighties hardcore scene and the drunken but surprisingly straight-edged North-West scene.
The Dwarves are an ongoing concern, still pushing forward, moving on — its nice seeing another long-term survivor alongside the Sonic Youth (R.I.P.), Mudhoney, Pearl Jam contingent; not just another reheated nostalgia trip, but then, The Dwarves never seem to have been about adhering to the norm or paying too much notice to peoples’ comfort levels. I mean this as an absolute compliment! Now enjoy the music…

Roots Bloody Roots

http://www.breakingnews.ie/discover/from-cork-kurt-cobain-595334.html

A pleasantly whimsical post today, a piece from an Irish website discussing Kurt Cobain’s statements about bonding with Cork.

It’s hard for any individual to feel unmoved or uninterested when their past threads are brought to light — it’s slightly more unusual in the case of Kurt Cobain. The reason I say that is simply that, outwardly at least, Kurt Cobain’s most immediate roots, his mother and father, were a cause of significant pain and dismay. For a man who deliberately seems to have avoided all contact with the latter (barring one well-known encounter in 1992) and who limited contact with the former, to feel tears at discovering the Irish roots behind his name seems over-elaborate.

Except there he is saying it. It’s significant because, despite Nirvana’s extensive travelling, Kurt Cobain’s affections for other countries seems to have been limited — there are no tour diary tunes, the only physical locations in his songs are either fictitious or are firmly State of Washington, he seemed thoroughly unhappy in South America, has lashed the British, was barely awake or undrugged enough to notice Australasia. It’s also remarkable for the fact that his memorialisation of Seattle/Olympia/home in song wasn’t nostalgic or happy — images of poison and revenge were the primary links. But he had love for Ireland…

My take is that the answer lies in blood. Kurt Cobain’s view, expressed in his suicide note, expressed in his repeated linkage of sex, love, enslavement and family through his songs, seems to have been that genetics essentially dictated the resulting human being. The theme of biology ranks as probably the most significant core within his music and, while significantly conflicted over his parents, their importance (though malevolent) in his eyes was undeniable. Ireland was, therefore, something more than a tourist experience, more than just another gig stopover. Instead of being a journey out into the world, it was a journey into himself.

I despise it when people talk about travel broadening the mind. Most people I know come home precisely as ignorant or ignorable as they were when they went out — most come back with a pretty photo collection and some knickknacks to show for it — it’s rare that brief work breaks in a foreign culture for two-three weeks blossoms into a true insight into international togetherness or cultural difference. Travel alone doesn’t do much for the mind; it’s meaningful journeys, one’s that mean something to the person involved, that make the difference. This means setting out with a purpose, something to be reinforced, discovered, made flesh. In the case of Kurt Cobain, journeys all over the world led him no closer to comfort either with home or away.

Kurt Cobain’s words are remarkable, “I walked around in a daze…I’d never felt more spiritual in my life…I was almost in tears the whole day…Since that tour, which was about two years ago, I’ve had a sense that I was from Ireland.” He’s determined as well to emphasise the reality of what seems like hyperbole; “I have a friend who was with me who could testify to this…”

A tour guide in Egypt complained that each time a cluster of tourists joined him he was beset by “half a dozen Cleopatras and a good few pharaohs.” Essentially statements about one’s ancestors are as much a present-day gesture of identity as they are a record of truth — that’s why so many adherents of reincarnation are beset by grandiose visions of past glory (a similar phenomena is the British love of period costume dramas about the upper classes — when times are hard the British like to forget that most of their ancestors were poverty stricken miners choking on coal dust, itinerant labourers dying in their forties, or part of the many thousands of women who took to prostitution either as a trade or a temporary measure.)

In the case of Kurt Cobain, the Irish connection provides him with an alternative root — one located thousands of miles from the U.S. working class and from the alcoholism and depression that seems to have haunted the roots of Cobain’s immediate family. By looking beyond his immediate circumstance, toward a past that he could base on his sanitised modern tourist experience of Cork, he was able to remove himself from the current circumstance of his family. It’s a repeat of his desire, as a child, to imagine he was an alien baby from outer space, or images of being adopted. Visiting Cork, Ireland gave him a way of alienating himself from his real life.

It also didn’t require him to get in touch with the earthy reality of what life in Ireland, during the period his forbearers left Cork, was like. He wasn’t imagining ‘being’ his ancestors, he was imagining being himself, in the present-day, simultaneously a thousand miles from his real life and a hundred and something years after his closest Irish heritage. He didn’t have to acknowledge the squalor or misery of nineteenth century Ireland because it’s not what he was yearning for, he was just imagining being a young man who might have grown up differently. It’s the same trick pulled by those who wish to imagine a past as Cleopatra — they’re not asking to experience the dirt, dust and relative (compared to modern day) poverty of even royal life in Ancient Egypt, they’re just after a talisman of power to ward off the demons around them today. There’s a constant underestimation of how much behaviour and activity in the here and now is nothing more than a statement of “here I am and this is who I am”; the past is present as a way for people to declare their chosen alternative and mythical identities.

Leland Cobain, Kurt Cobain’s Grandfather, Passes Away

http://loudwire.com/late-nirvana-frontman-kurt-cobain-grandfather-leland-cobain-dies-89/

This’ll be round everyone imminently I’m sure but R.I.P. Leland Cobain, an apparently decent man, someone his grandson trusted and seems to have held onto as a connection within his family despite the breaking of links to his father. He’s been a warm and open presence for Nirvana fans in the decades since. It’s nice to see people embracing the world in that way and these simple courtesies deserve remembrance in a world where they sometimes don’t get enough credit.

Spendthrift Studio Hounds Versus Miserly Efficiency

Hands down the balance in Nirvana’s relationship was toward the latter by virtue of simple poverty. Books make much of Jack Endino’s shrugged remarks over the song Sappy and Nirvana’s lengthy time spent with it in January 1990 because it was such an exceptional event.

How exceptional? Well, Sappy received four takes, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter three takes, twenty-nine songs received two shots (list? Floyd the Barber, Spank Thru, Sifting, Mr. Moustache, Blew, Paper Cuts, Hairspray Queen, Dive, Polly, In Bloom, Lithium, Stay Away, On a Plain, Token Eastern Song, Even in his Youth, the whole of In Utero barring the aforementioned RFUS plus Serve the Servants, M.V. and I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.) In other words, Sappy is double the norm for a Nirvana song — one of only two songs Nirvana ever took more than two visits to pin down.

At first I did also think that, of the songs requiring two takes, songs that Nirvana ultimately used as b-sides (Spank Thru, Dive, Token Eastern Song, Even in his Youth, Sappy, M.V. and I Hate Myself and I Want to Die) were actually over-represented, that maybe there was a correlation between dissatisfaction with a piece and the number of tries the band had at it. That could be reinforced, as an argument, by suggesting that dissatisfaction with All Apologies and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter in January 1991 leads to them being ignored until long after the Nevermind sessions that spring/summer. It would suggest that Kurt Cobain’s preference was for songs that felt right in the moment, that having been honed in rehearsal came together rapidly in studio. Alternatively it would suggest that less practised songs were glued onto sessions as b-side fodder but often lead to frustrating underwhelming tracks needing a second shot regardless. Overall, however, I don’t think there’s enough to that as a suggestion.

What is visible is how few of Nirvana’s studio efforts required significant alteration or honing to give them their final shape. There are differences in attack and approach to pieces, lyrics shift lightly, some songs move tone but of those twenty-nine songs we’re looking at a bare handful that merit mention as substantially different takes.

The core are the shots at Sifting, Mr Moustache and Blew — all three were laid down in summer 1988 simply because the opportunity presented itself to whip up first shots at work in progress. Those three songs are radically different in lyrical approach as formulated on Bleach, Sifting moves from an extended instrumental to curtailed focused grunge song. Dive’s first take stands out for the video footage existing of the song being honed in studio, the band facing one another to take their cues as they’d not practised it so well it was yet together. The difference, however, is basically a minute of extra instrumental work partially accounted for by a slower approach. Lithium lost its acoustic vibe, Token Eastern Song gained added flourishes and jangly guitar in January 1991 while All Apologies was similarly buried in K Records pop territory. Is there much more to say about the duplicate takes? Not unless something revolutionary shows up on the In Utero Deluxe Edition this Autumn.

Again, look to Sappy for the big shifts in muscle and mood across Nirvana’s active years, it tracks the band’s motion so well. And, in terms of ‘missing material’, I think it suggests it’s the non-studio rehearsal sessions and the band’s ‘home work’ that hides any significant redevelopments and growth from first sketch to final piece.

Kurt Cobain Musical: Jazz Hands on Broadway

http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2013/05/19/courtney_love_claims_owning_nirvana_ca

Phew…A nice quotation from Madame Love putting to rest the talk of Nirvana musicals and also pointing out a desire to prevent the wholesale exploitation of Kurt Cobain’s compositions. As usual, there’s a tendency to attribute exploitative ideas to Courtney Love — not helped by the tinge of self-righteousness in most comments from her regarding Nirvana — which seems untrue and unfair. The storm around the musical idea blew up during a court action last year and was solidly knocked on the head. A similar wave took place a few years back with Courtney Love apparently unhappy at discovering the use of Cobain’s music on the Guitar Hero; she was fairly vociferous; “this is necrophilic, this is vile…for the record I did not approve Kurt’s avatar for Guitar Hero 5…I think Kurt would despise this game alone let alone this avatar.”

Of course, in each case, there’s a counter-argument in the ever muddy waters around Mrs Love. In the case of Guitar Hero 5, Activision were pretty plain-spoken; ““Guitar Hero secured the necessary licensing rights from the Cobain estate in a written agreement signed by Courtney Love to use Kurt Cobain’s likeness as a fully playable character in Guitar Hero 5.” Similarly, in the case of the musical, it was Courtney’s manager who mentioned the idea. Certainly, despite any anti-corporate vibes people might want to chuck around (and that I do on occasion), I can believe a corporation buying rights far more than I can buy the idea of them acting illicitly and opening themselves up to a law suit.

Which all leaves me in two minds about the entire business of the use of Kurt Cobain’s estate. It’s very true that full scale conversion of his works into commercial library music for product placement and enslavement hasn’t, as yet, taken place. There’s barely been more than an occasional glimpse of Nirvana’s sound let alone Kurt Cobain’s image near a major product and yet, without clearer records from the present custodians it’s hard to tally what has been turned down or refused, and therefore hard to see whether it’s a lack of demand or a lack of willingness to sell that is creating that scenario.

I have a suspicion that most brands aren’t entirely sure about wedding themselves to a man associated, in the popular mind, as much with heroin-fuelled self-destruction, as with potent distillations of youth energy. Still, least there’s no equivalent of Keith Richards schilling for Louis Vuitton — a move that sticks in my head so well that I twitch with disgust anytime I see anyone carrying something with their logo.