Nirvana stuff everywhere at the moment…Guardian is having a bonanza…
Category: In Utero 1992-1993
Miscalculating: Nirvana in Argentina, October 30, 1992
Apparently a new source has surfaced featuring a chunk of the misbegotten performance Nirvana turned in on January 16, 1993 in Brazil…Anyways, it reminded me that I’d been thinking about the Argentina concert and why it was such a mess.
Obviously Nirvana made a deliberate choice and were very overt about saying so around that time – audience sexism toward Calamity Jane being the suggestion. One thing that struck me though, in my ever over-thinking way, is that if the set-list played that night wasn’t an on-the-spot and deliberate act of aggression toward the audience, then it was still a poorly chosen cluster of songs that were almost bound to create an underwhelmed reaction.
Why do I say so? Well, Nirvana seem to have gone to Argentina with little idea about how limited the penetration of underground and indie music into that continent had been. They had complained in 1989-1990 that barely anyone in U.S. could find their Sub Pop releases – well imagine how much worse that situation was in South America; MTV had only just started broadcasting locally, the only songs the audience knew were those from Nevermind because there was no local Sub Pop distribution.
Much comment has always been made of Nirvana’s improvised opening song – a real declaration of intent toward the audience that night. Problem is, only nine other songs were drawn from Nevermind – the rest of the set was utterly unknown to the crowd. Imagine that experience, going to a show at which almost everything played is a mystery so no one can tell the difference between errors on stage, deliberate laxity (i.e., his mumblings of Beeswax) or the way songs were meant to be. The other ten songs played that night consisted of four songs from Bleach (it’s unclear if even the Geffen reissue in April 1992 had made much inroad in this market by October), four songs that would only see wide release on Incesticide which wasn’t out yet, Spank Thru from the Sub Pop 200 compilation and a later single neither of which would have been seen, plus All Apologies, which obviously wouldn’t emerge on record until In Utero a year later. While to a U.S. audience this would have been a perfectly fine line up, it was an odd choice for their first South American gig because for over half the night the audience wouldn’t have known what they were hearing. I don’t know about you, I like hearing something new, something off-the-cuff, something unreleased…But most of a night being dedicated to it?
Christmas…And Every Best Wish to Nirvana Fans One n’ All
Strewth December goes by on spiked trainers…
Highlights of the year?
Just found this up online – the red bass guitar? That’s Pat – once upon a time member of Yellow Snow, one of the first bands to ever play alongside Nirvana way back at the Community World Theater, on drums is Bob – a charming and mellow fella – and closest to us is John Purkey formerly of Machine and Subvert among others who was queried by Kurt Cobain as a potential Nirvana drummer and who set up the show at Legends in 1990 with Melvins, Nirvana and the Rhino Humpers. My highlight of the year was sitting in the basement you see on this video watching the band play for me. I was looking for my song of the year, Dharma, by Sleeper Cell which I finally have on CD-R (package arrived the other day) but found this clip instead.
Other good musical moments? Adam Harding’s take on Do Re Mi was wicked too – likewise the dreamy Dumb Numbers debut. The Soundgarden Screaming Life/Fopp reissue finally emerging was nice to see. There’s a band called Sam Kazakgascar who may count as the release that most surprised this year – I wasn’t sure what to expect but this was genuinely different stuff, loved it.
Where next in general? Well, here’s hoping the Cobain twentieth anniversary year features something of note. I’ve a few plans of my own but I’ll just keep plugging away at them and tell all once I’ve reached the necessary critical mass – hate talking about things before they’ve come true just in case they don’t…We’ll see.
Have a great Christmas and catch y’all soon.
Cobain Nearly Turned Down Grohl’s Participation in MTV Unplugged?
http://loudwire.com/kurt-cobain-nearly-banned-dave-grohl-nirvana-unplugged-concert/
Conversational treats from MTV To we faithful denizens of the Internet age… My feeling is that the description of Grohl nearly not playing is overstated – can you honestly imagine a prominent TV performance of Nirvana taking place with one third (or one quarter depending on your rating of Mr Smear’s position – to be fair, he was pretty well a full member at least soon after this) of the band absent…? Kurt Cobain was a man newly enlightened to the intrusive tittle-tattle of the media and how things might appear and what people might say to such a public division. It’s just a guess but I’m not sure it’d be worth the potential disruption to peace and quiet.
What it does reveal, however, is that even at this late stage Cobain was concerned about how the band looked and sounded to an intense level of detail. While his desire to spend time in studio had completely disintegrated, he was certainly paying a keen eye to business when the band had to make it happen. That awareness of public attention also occured at the Live n’ Loud performance – another well choreographed, carefully chosen piece of work. Getting his drummer new sticks was vital.
Similarly, it indicates his deep awareness of the activities of ‘HIS’ drummers in the desire to soften Grohl’s sound even if it meant doing so against his will – it shows a degree of ownership over the performance of the drummers that had continued throughout his career. He had dictated the terms of involvement to his first couple of drummers (excluding Dale Crover), had criticised and denigrated Chad Channing’s performance then finally found a drummer with the muscle he required…Until that muscle and heft of performance was a problem.
Still, I can’t imagine the talk of dispensing with Grohl for the night was more than that – talk, grumpy mutterings…There’s a world of things said that never happened.
Nirvana In Utero Deluxe Editions at Two Months Distance
Wondered how everyone was feeling about their Nirvana In Utero deluxe and super-deluxe editions now there’s been time for it to soak in?
In the run-up I was pretty contented – some material I’d never heard, a potentially intriguing remix job, the Litt/Albini originals of a few pieces, the one surprise instrumental from a rehearsal, the bonus footage pieces. I’m very much on the glass half-full side of things, especially given I know it was feeding a hole that can never be filled meaning that anything that emerges was, and is, welcomed and appreciated.
At this point…Well, I’d still rate myself satisfied – the remastering was perfectly decent and I see no great reasons for anyone to complain about the slight ‘pumping up’ of the original album, the remix had a few points of intrigue, the bonuses made sense and Live and Loud is still a quality performance – love the long outro…More of this kinda chaos please!
But. On the other hand, I admit the randomness of including certain instrumentals and not others, of including certain early takes and not others…That definitely grates on me. When all the additional material is filler for fanatics hearing that someone somewhere has decided that certain material is ‘even more filler than other filler’ and that I’d definitely not want to hear it…It’s just irksome. I’m trying my best to think of it as the equivalent of the hierarchy of eBay, then second hand and charity shops, then finally bric-a-brac stores and carboot sales – that there are differing levels among pieces someone gets rid of but still…Unless an outtake is unavailable or genuinely wrecked I’ve no idea why one outtake should be deemed of any greater value than another.
Also, the 2013 remix did disappoint – I was hoping to hear far more wrenching changes to a greater number of songs. Instead, a few peaks do stand out but too few to fundamentally alter my listening experience or to distinguish the remix greatly from the original album. I’ve tried it with headphones, I’ve tried it with the original album playing alongside…Ultimately I think one problem may be that an exercise like this being in the hands of music producers/engineers fails to recognise the difference between the aural depth heard by those experts versus what might be distinguishable to an untrained individual who can’t isolate the audio tracks and doesn’t have such sensitive hearing. I was hoping for more. I’d have been more than happy, as an experiment, to hear them drop out backing, chop vocals, restructure songs…Isn’t it funny? I’m happy to consider sacrilege so long as it made for something fresh!
Ultimately there’s a touch of realisation to the whole experience, for me. The reason that there are not many deep cuts or intriguing diversions on the release is simply because that absence is a realistic portrait of what was going on in terms of Nirvana in the 1992-1993 period. Nirvana entered the studio in October 1992 and did barely one day’s work, they managed at most two days playing together as a band in January 1993, then in February they hammered out the album and all additional takes and so forth in, at most, a single week. This wasn’t a band taking time to evolve, develop or experiment with their songs – they were walking in, hammering out takes, then heading home where Cobain might work on something to order the band to do next time they got together. The compilers of the In Utero twentieth anniversary releases had the unenviable task of fleshing out a mildly depressing period of time for Nirvana and I feel they did so subtly (for example, the pieces in the Super-Deluxe book that emphasise the business and product aspects of an album) and accurately (in terms of the overall paucity of revelations or substantially different material.)
It does make me wonder though, whether Courtney Love has plans for the remaining tapes of Cobain demos given there have now been several occasions between 2009 and 2013 for further use to be made of whatever remains in that archive. On the one hand it makes me think that the rift opened way back in the early 2000s has never even reached the point at which she’s involved in any of the anniversary releases. On the other, it still lends me hope that there’s more to be made of material from her side of things – material that isn’t sitting with the label, or with Krist and Dave, or in the bands of Nirvana’s various producers.
That’s what I feel fans really have to look forward to; more Cobain material, a lot less Nirvana releases of real note.
Making a Good Music Box Set (with no Comment on Nirvana In Utero)
As ever, no personal reviews of specific releases (plenty of people giving their tuppence whether professionally or non-professionally) but over the past few months I’ve been musing on what makes the difference between a box-set release that satisfies me and one that doesn’t. As usual this is, of course, personal opinion.
A box set or super deluxe or whatever they want to call it next, is an attempt to monetise leftovers and archived remains – at least that’s what it means to the companies who sell them. Artistic integrity, of course, plays a role and the artists involved (usually) have to be persuaded that they aren’t tarnishing their credibility and reputation with the release – they have to believe there’s something more at stake. The marketing personnel sitting in between the management decision that there may be money to be made and the artist’s decision that there’s an untold story or a tale to be better told are more concerned with making sure there’s something exclusive or something novel involved. They examine the aspects of the ‘package’ that they can use as tools to create exclusivity and/or novelty and essentially there are only a pair of options; (a) content or (b) packaging.
DVD additions, live recordings, unreleased songs, specially commissioned new tunes, remixes, alternative versions, instrumentals – whatever. It’s all a form of novelty-creation and there’s a balance between the investment versus the expected return – getting a band to record an entirely new album to accompany a release would clearly be the ultimate novelty but sinking tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands would be a poor return given this kind of recording is reserved for bands lacking a current strength of output – even the Greatest Hits is the refuge of an outfit losing momentum. Getting more mileage out of the old stuff is both the raison d’etre of these releases and a commercial necessity if they’re going to be a profitable venture.
The packaging front similarly expands and advances with ever more intricate liner notes, booklets, recording notes, reviews, commentary – preferably by someone with a brand name cachet that resonates with the target audience (“Thurston Moore has been supplied with a pencil…Prepare for content…Go!”) Advancing the art work and including memorabilia counts within this category and reinforces the case. A further element beyond the physical product is things like the creation of promo videos and other activity engaged in by the band to market and sell the release – its an extension of that item at the core.
So. What makes a good one? When creating albums artists often dedicate time to choosing the right songs, positioning them, making sense of them as a unit – but ultimately, with the exception of concept albums – there’s a fairly arbitrary set of decisions occuring related to such amorphous things as ‘flow’, ‘progression’, ‘the story’, whatever. With box set style releases, the material is all things that was rejected from or excluded during that previous conceptualisation. But there still needs to be a reason to bring it altogether – a box set always has a reason or meaning. Examples I could point to here would be (a) Siouxsie and the Banshees At the BBC, a collection compiling their radio/TV appearances (b) Jimi Hendrix West Coast Seattle Boy showing Jimi Hendrix’s progression and the phases of his musical existence (c) the Stooges Complete Funhouse Sessions bringing together the complete archive of material recorded for the Funhouse album (d) anniversary releases, commemorations, compilations of singles…It allows someone to say what an object is about.
A box set – sorry to call it this, quicker than Super Deluxe or whatever – already circumvents the simple issue of quality. The material contained is a complilation of previously released (the new box set by the Clash compiling the majority of their albums) or previously rejected material. If the release is an archive release of stuff not intended for formal release or not considered fit to be released (the Jesus and Mary Chain’s The Power of Negative Thinking box) it’s possible to try to say ‘good/bad’ but the motivations for the purchase are not based on that – there may be a minimum level of acceptable quality but the real mover is based on the ideas of secret knowledge, completion, revealed mysteries. If it isn’t about quality in that case then another option – particularly with compilations compiling previously released material such as the Jesus and Mary Chain’s 21 Singles compilation or the Nirvana box-set of singles released in 1995, is convenience. But what turns a utilitarian package, or a package of scrap material into a ‘good’ release?
There are two ways, essentially, that a box set can be a winner. The first is based on a sense of occasion – something often lacking in the flood of media these days. A higher degree of randomness in the selection can be tolerated with releases that satisfy a pent-up demand for ‘something’. Therefore, the belief that Nirvana had a bottomless vault of leftover Cobain material led to the success of the With the Lights Out release. The fact that criticisms could be levelled at its selections/non-selections, the fact that higher quality versions of some songs existed, or that other unreleased material not released officially in any other version existed, or that some of the pieces could have done with some polishing up…This didn’t matter. Ten years worth of waiting meant the audience were ready for it and pushed it to ‘best selling box set of all time’ status. Deferred gratification created a winner and criticisms seemed like sour grapes given there genuinely was a wealth of impressive, unique, unheard and excellent material there. When married to frustrated desire, to a sense of ‘the moment’, good enough was as good as perfect.
The other way a box set can win is more fundamental, it can do so by answering the questions in the mind of the audience. If a boxset declares that it is The Complete Miles Davis at Montreaux 1973-1991 then the best way for it to create satisfaction is for it to deliver precisely what it claims to; i.e, it better bloody well be every performance from Montreaux. Columbia Records, to their credit, did an excellent job of this with a twenty disc deep release and good packaging and notes. This is crucial – if the release has any kind of unifying reason or purpose then that purpose needs to be explicit, clearly expressed and obvious. Having taken control of the release and set the terms of its success, the next step is to fulfill what the declared intention or implied intention is. At the lower end of the market, kicking out a deluxe edition just by wedging on tracks off singles and some live material is fine because deluxe editions have lost their prestige and are simply intended to drive someone to repurchase. For the larger items we’re discussing here, the box sets and super deluxe editions, there’s got to be a something far greater. Lacking a precise ‘meaning’ to a release it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy that an audience won’t be highly motivated.
The second way in which a box set can succeed and inspire is by being comprehensive. Decisions on an archive box set motivated by the supposed quality of a leftover, alternative version or demo are made ridiculous because by their very nature these items are all throw-aways, none of them was good enough so declaring one to be a superior-inferior doesn’t hold much water. Likewise, if the purchase isn’t motivated by long anticipation and ‘give us anything’ buying, then the motivation is simply because people want to see what’s there. In that situation, if a release only provides a certain piece of what could be shown, the result is a tease – it creates the question “but why didn’t you go all the way? Why didn’t you tell all?” Having planted that question in the minds of the audience the release has automatically failed to satisfy. That’s why it’s crucial to a good release to frame the terms of its success in order that the release can be declared complete.
There’s the issue of glut with any box set – to be complete, for example, a Sex Pistols box set would need to include multiple redundant versions of the same songs recorded over and over at multiple studio occasions, in some cases half a dozen or more. Rather than declaring defeat, however, the better solution would be to use this to justify more than one such box-set and simply declare that as the intention. Instead the Sex Box set would be better served by being shorter and therefore only containing the main studio album plus the songs that didn’t make it onto albums, while the more recent anniversary edition of Nevermind the Bollocks could have featured all the outtakes of the songs from that album. Its one possibility. By cutting it randomly with some in one place, some in another, it left each release open to criticism. Joy Division did a much better job with the Heart and Soul box set given it excludes (but acknowledges) the band’s previous punk recordings as Warsaw, excludes most of the session for their first album, but contains pretty well every other unique studio track they recorded – the exclusions are versions or in specific places rather than leaving them open to the charge of randomness.
The Jimi Hendrix compilation of BBC recordings, again, has a central reason and focus – then sets about fulfilling that purpose admirably. It can be declared a success because its there for a reason and gives the fans what it says they will. Another example would be the confined terms of Rage Against the Machine’s first album as the XX box-set. I’m biased because I adore this album but the inclusion of the complete demos from the first session makes total sense – the DVD inclusions are then added extras but, again, have a comprehensive sense of occasion with one being their first ever performance and the other being the performance given in the U.K. after Killing in the Name reached UK number one Christmas 18 or so years after first release – that book-ending of the DVDs was an excellent move and again contributed to the unified nature of the product. Without that sense of loss, or of purpose, or of completion, a release ends up unsatisfying particularly if significant information is known about the band and about what could have been included.
An unsatisfactory box set is easy to identify. It leaves out things that people want. Or it teases fans by showing that all of something exists…But then only gives them part of it for no apparent reason. It doesn’t live up to billing because it isn’t as enlightening or as dramatically different or new as has been claimed or as audiences have been led to believe. If it has no narrative, nothing that makes it OK to add one thing and drop another – no storyline – then it makes it harder to comprehend why one thing is there and not another.
Interval for In Utero
I keep trying to judge if I’m getting away from my initial decisions about this blog; essentially I don’t have any desire to share myself and my world with the universe — though I’ve enjoyed very much sharing more back-and-forth with a cluster of fellow fans who have taken the time to wave my way and share their own enthusiasms. When I started this blog I decided (a) no personal stuff (b) focus on Nirvana, simple as that (c) no petty personal ‘reviews’ of releases that are simply a personal aesthetic commentary and could as easily be rendered on Amazon or someplace (d) stick to analysis, stick to segmenting and sorting information. So that’s what goes through my head and influences how I end up writing about topics. Today’s post drips over the line into personal, circles around (b), tries to avoid being (c) and barely touches (d.)
Anyways, yes, back home but not finished writing up the excursion to the Pacific North-West yet — I’ll get on with the next piece tomorrow. Today I wanted to take a moment for the In Utero Twentieth Anniversary release; I mean, heck, it genuinely is a Christmas reminder for me; that cassette at the front? That’s my 1993 Christmas present from mum and dad. And the CD alongside it? That’s the 1995 gift from my aunt and the first CD anyone else ever bought me (my first ever CD purchase was a month or so earlier when I bought the Nirvana singles box-set.) The In Utero album, on a personal level, has a significantly festive vibe to it.
I admit, of course, that overall what makes Nirvana special for me is that it’s a remnant of my childhood and that direct-plug-in back to my thirteen/fourteen year old self. This allows me to easily fall back into the kind of tensely excited ‘waiting for miracles’ that used to accompany birthdays, Christmas, trips to the chip shop on a Saturday or down town with pocket-money (I like to think I was an enthusiastic kid and readily entertained and amused.) This proviso is offered to explain why I worked from home the other day so I could more or less hang out of the window and await the delivery truck. Gods it was a long day. Thank God the plumbers arrived so I could tell myself I wasn’t just running downstairs to check the front door mat. It made me hyper-aware of noise in the neighbourhood today; every time I recognised the purr of a van heading down the street I was there peering out, each motorbike murmuring by had me straining to see if it was heading this way. And then! Suddenly! A van pulled up, a delivery guy got out, he opened the back doors of the van…
…And he was getting out a vacuum cleaner for some bloke down the street. Darn.
Anyways, after a very long day exhibiting my comprehensive gift for patience (re: I have no patience whatsoever, I’m no good at delayed gratification whatsoever), finally it got here just before 7pm. Heck, I even washed my hands before opening the package so now I feel bad about my fetishisation of the product too.
Any comment on the booklet/brochure? It’s a nice item like all these artistically done box-sets tend to be and in terms of its content there are a few points that stuck out for me. Firstly, the inclusion of the studio bill and, more so, of the scribbled sheet explaining the PR plans for the release acknowledge the way in which an album is one expression of an overall master-plan of activities and separate deliverables designed to deliver a business plan and ultimately sales. Wedging these items into a commemorative package celebrating In Utero breaks the focus on it as purely an artistic or personal statement and starkly declares the corporate, commercial reality of the album — this isn’t just a work of art, it’s simultaneously just another product. While that might seem a sad or a grim decision to take I’d argue it has a Cobainesque quality to it; it’s a posthumous echo of his plans for an album called Sheep; it’s as blunt as his Radio Friendly Unit Shifter title — the man at the centre of all this was decisively aware of these currents to what he was doing and whoever designed the Super-Deluxe box-set was sharp enough to integrate that disquieting element here.
The other comment on the brochure is the acknowledgement of Pat Smear’s elevation to full band member. I don’t remember his presence as tour guitarist being so thoroughly open and declared as it is these days at twenty years distance. Again, at first, I wondered whether including him in the line-up of band member photos in the brochure made sense given this album is a pre-Smear product. But, then again, this isn’t In Utero — this is an expanded package at twenty years distance and he’s a presence on the entire DVD element and the accompanying CD version of Live and Loud. He’s a legitimate presence on something that is fundamentally a 2013 item not to be confused or considered synonymous with the 1993 album that ‘inspired’ it and led to this thorough re-rendering.
Anyways, no comment on the songs, everyone will make up their own mind on the remixes and remasterings and demo-worthiness and so on and so forth. I admit I find the 2013 mix a fascinating concept; I’m usually suspicious of remixes because they reek of posthumous tinkering and artificiality. The exercise of inserting material recorded at the time but excluded, switching valid takes for others, that somehow seems to have more legitimacy and a value because what’s being delivered is more original music by the original band — not producer mix effects and not post-hoc material. In a small declaration, while Jack Endino was chatting at breakfast the other week he did say that Michael Meisel who was working on this for Universal, was really pleased to hear that some scrap of vocals was available on the January 1991 take of All Apologies – that made a decisive difference to whether it was included or not apparently, they wanted Kurt’s voice included where possible. In terms of the recording unfortunately, the original masters are lost and so what’s being worked with is a version the band asked for so that they could hear the songs as close to instrumentally as possible so they could examine the music – hence why Cobain’s vocals are pushed down so low. Just a little detail which I think it’s cool to mention at this point.
My big decision was whether to do what I did in 2004 and just listen to two songs a night or just to give up the ghost on that idea and swallow it whole…I’ll let people go find all the reviews online, there are tonnes – Pitchfork says great, another one says the package is just silly, others say the original album is great but they’re not sure about this or that element, what the heck, can’t please anyone. I’m still sitting here thinking its Christmas and that’s good enough for me. Thank you to whomsoever made it happen.
Nirvana Tour: Aaron Burckhard Whipped Me at Pool
I’ll let this stand alone. I can’t believe it!
…As in, I can’t believe I lost at pool. As I said to Aaron, “I don’t care if you were Nirvana’s first drummer, I still wanna beat you!” And I didn’t. Slim margins but he was a deserved 2-1 victor, he should have beat in the first game too if the black ball hadn’t gone down along with the white. We had driven over to a bar on Fourth Avenue in Olympia and after time spent in the yard enjoying the warm night we moved inside to play a bit longer.
Wish I was feeling more photogenic by the time we took a brief photo, I kid myself I ever look better than that in photos; a whole day trekking round in the car with Mitch had left both of us sun-fried and fuzzy-eyed. An excellent tour.
Anyways, Aaron has just been brought onboard as drummer for Under Sin with the gentleman who had been handling drums for them preferring to move to guitar. The band’s first show with him will be in October and there are a couple of radio sessions coming up — look out for them, link up to them and enjoy. Aaron played a couple of the band’s songs in the car stereo, we’re talking a more metallic edge than Nirvana, a heavier sound built around precise riffage — you’ll like it. Aaron was very clearly delighted to be involved with them, a sea of compliments about the talent of his new band members, incapable of not drumming along on top of his bag while sat in the back of the car, talking about the plans ahead of them…That’s the impression I’ll take with me, a guy who clearly takes drumming seriously, love to be involved with good musicians and wants to make sure his contribution is pin-perfect. It’ll always be a shame there isn’t more on record of his work (and Dave Foster’s work too actually) with Nirvana.
And I’m still not happy I lost; this is a holiday sulk! It’s not often I get competitive, and part of me wants to claim I’d have won if it was British pool not American pool we were playing (yeah, right…!), but…Nah, I’ll stop joking. It was fun just shooting the breeze, downing a few beers, enjoying the good company of Aaron and Mitch and just being real people rather than tourist, former Nirvana drummer and former childhood friend of Kurt and Krist.
‘Since Last We Spoke’ In Utero Round-Up: Live n’ Loud DVD Revealed
The nicest thing about this In Utero release is that they’re doing a lovely job beating my expectations everytime new information emerges, it’s a lovely build-up to the actual release next month!
Rolling Stone have put up the full track-listing:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/inside-nirvanas-rarities-packed-in-utero-reissue-20130813
I’m looking back over the prediction from last week and gosh, it seems the version of Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle is the Laundry Room Studios version, lovely! Nice to see that.
The more exciting news for rare Nirvana song hounds, the latest information is that the ‘Forgotten Tune’ is an unreleased and genuinely unheard rehearsal session track from 1993. Now, OK, the fact it was never proceeded with, the fact they didn’t even remember it existed until recently doesn’t suggest You Know You’re Right or even Mrs Butterworth levels of genius…But to still be surprised twenty years after the fact? That’s a warm and fuzzy feeling for me. I’d still like to hear Lullaby someday, or settle the Song in D discussion, or hear the Sound City Sappy…But heck, something more from Nirvana’s late-era? I’ll take it! It’s doubly significant simply because so little is left dated after the early 1993 spell of creations.
The real boost is from the addition of the Live n’ Loud tracklisting for the DVD, the CD is purely the performance but the DVD has more than delivered on desires:
The Live n’ Loud rehearsals are a neat piece of unheard material, the Paris TV performance is a worthy addition and hopefully in better quality than I’ve been watching for years, one of the songs from Italian TV is a welcome presence (shame not to take the full performance but what the hell) and finally, the real surprise was the willingness to use the footage from the March 1, 1994 performance in Munich. Nice to see the rendition of My Best Friend’s Girl rather than just having the audio on bootleg.
So, that’s it – a final count up of 89 tracks when the 12 bonus DVD selections are included – of course the next hunt will be for Easter Eggs but we’ll get to that whenever information arises. Anyways, as ever, for the most up-to-date round-up join the Forum at LiveNirvana, virtually round-the-clock coverage and far more than one human being could ever do.
On that forgotten track issue, its bittersweet as with most moments of a long gone band, it’s lovely there are still surprises…But, the fact that its likely to be an instrumental of, at best, moderate sound quality is just the way the future is likely to be. That’s no reason to be saddened, no point being upset by reality – the cupboard is bare. And I’ll still be thrilled to hear whatever else is still to emerge from it. Years of bootleg listening and a taste for the noise scene has given me a high tolerance of static and hiss. More please! Bring on the Nirvana boombox boxset!
In Utero 20th Anniversary Track Listing: First Glance
A massive merci to Laurent Beck over at LiveNirvana (and a shoutout to the ever readable and engaging Mr. Adrian Karlson) for hunting down the post on Amazon.fr listing out what is likely to be (though not as yet confirmed to be) the track listing for the Nirvana In Utero Twentieth Anniversary Super-Deluxe. Here’s the link:
And here we go – note it doesn’t yet list the tracklisting of Live n’ Loud let alone the bonus DVD content – Disc One first:
You’ll note that where it says All Apologies/Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip twice over what I ‘think’ it means is track 12 All Apologies, track 13 Gallons… And now for Disc Two:
Now…You may notice a few oddities here, interesting huh? OK, All Apologies was not demo’ed in either October 1992 or January 1993 as far as is known thus making the January 1991 rendition the main known source…Though this does leave the door open to finding out that this is indeed the long rumoured ‘Song in D’ from the Nevermind sessions of 1991. We’ll see, I believe the former, I’d be fascinated by the latter.
Scentless Apprentice has been confirmed as coming from January 1993 while Very Ape wasn’t demo’ed until Rio in January making that a relatively easy judgment unless there’s an error in LiveNirvana’s so far flawless records. The five instrumentals from October 1992 were confirmed last week also so that’s an easy selection.
You’ll have noted that the slightly eccentric order in which the demos are positioned deliberately mimics the positioning of songs on the In Utero album thus ‘side A’ Scentless, Frances, Dumb then ‘side B’ Very Ape, Pennyroyal, RFUS, Tourette’s…Oh. Note the gap? Suddenly the listing diverts to Marigold then to All Apologies. This may be simply laziness or it may indicate that we’re looking at the early draft of All Apologies which is so different as to barely be recognisable as the same song, prior to the two oddities at the end.
Jam is, I’d assume, the jam from October 1992…But there’s no proof. Likewise, forgotten tune isn’t the same as ‘forgotten song’ so I’m not expecting a fully fledged You Know You’re Right moment, I’m expecting that either this is ‘The Other Improv’ again (much though I love it, God forbid) or this is Lullaby from February 1993…Or I’m completely clueless. It could also be that, remembering the attention to song order, we’re looking at Marigold (1990), All Apologies (Jan 1991), Song in D (mid-1991) then Jam (1992). Nice to know there’s some mystery left here…
Anyways, so, next count up:
Disc 1: 13 track original album, plus Marigold, MV, I Hate Myself & I Want to Die, Verse Chorus Verse (Sappy), plus different takes of Pennyroyal Tea, Heart Shaped Box and All Apologies – 20 tracks
Disc 2: 12 track original album, plus Scentless and Very Ape from Rio, 1990 Marigold, Word of Mouth instrumentals x 5, plus All Apologies (1991?) plus two unknowns = 23
Live n’ Loud: 17 tracks times two = 34, plus a clutch of bonus video footage
Total: a magisterial and impressive SEVENTY SEVEN
…And that’s even before we get to the bonus DVD footage. Time for plenty of smileys methinks. It’s getting better alllllll the time!
Nirvana Legacy 