Nirvana Legacy

First Day on a Brand New Planet: Seattle Thurs AM

Just while I’m making obscure references, all of you, everyone, seriously, you need to check out Urusei Yatsura. They’re one of those bands who should have been huge and never were — Scottish origins, pop sugar rush with a noisy lime slice to give it that gin n’ tonic tang. Try Hello Tiger as square one, then anything from the Yon Kyoku Iri EP.

Anyways, there are only two locations that I felt made sense if I was to do this tour of Seattle; one was to stay at the Four Seasons where Kurt n’ Courtney spent a chunk of 1992 in blissed out semi-consciousness but it’s ludicrously expensive…The other was at The Paramount Hotel from which I can see The Paramount Theatre.

I’m in luck too, The Weeknd is playing next week, think I better take a shot at catching that one. Yes, I admit it, I like The Weeknd — musically the best thing I heard last year, but best not to catch the lyrics usually given the appallingly retarded gender politics, I still find it scary that the idea of treating people as real human beings and with the same respect one would deserve for oneself seems to have no place in an awful lot of culture. Anyways, the Paramount, beautiful old building, reliefs in stone on the outer walls, gorgeous embellishments. On Saturday AM they do the first Saturday of the month tour of the interior and I’m going to get there for that. Heck, I’m 30 metres down the road, I’d feel like such a lazy bum if I failed.

Of course it’s been raining, the nice thing about Seattle is it really is similar to London in terms of its climate — I don’t have to change wardrobes for once. Normally when I’ve arrived in the U.S. I’ve always discovered I’m overdressed and that a predilection for wearing black is a recipe for excessive heat and clinging clothing — I was reminded of this experience during a brief halt at Charlotte on the way where I also failed to remember to switch the Clinique face scrub I’d purchased at Heathrow airport to my hold luggage before re-checking it…Darn…£30 of toiletries handed in to U.S. customs security staff…Yes, it’s OK, I feel dumb. I also forgot what my case looked like so watched it go round twice (OK, OK, I admit it, probably three or four times) before twigging it might be mine.

Popped into a corner shop here partly to buy an umbrella — yes, I forgot to bring one, shows you how well-prepared I was for this trip, my favourite jeans hadn’t finished drying so I took them wet so I’ve had to submit them to housekeeping for laundry service because they smell like pond slime after hours moldering in my case — but also because they still had their Sub Pop 25th Anniversary Silver Jubilee festival poster up…So they were kind enough to let me take it. More specifically I’d like to thank Clayton! A gentleman actually from England originally, his parents opened a record shop over here in Seattle with a recording studio (46 track) below it.

A brief conversation, Clayton recalls that his parent’s record store was opposite The Underground, one of the Seattle venues Nirvana played in their early days and venue for the Sub Pop 200 record release party in 1988. Hanging out there sometime over winter 1993-1994 one of the guys running the venue asked him to give someone a lift to a club called Rock Candy; “a heavy kinda place where people went to get ‘things’…” The someone was Kurt Cobain and Clayton remembers a strange journey “he sat in the car with me and said barely anything the whole ride, one or two words tops. In the club I’d seen him just standing off to the side watching everything, not talking to anyone, not doing anything.” These are my words recalled from our brief conversation so I’ll probably ask Clayton to correct me and I’ll update.
Next on the Nick agenda having acquired by flyer and an impromptu (and enjoyable) chat? Marking up my Rand McNally map and heading out again…

…Oh, did I mention my geeky collection of Starbucks cards? I’ve got 40-50 back home plus various limited edition wallets, a knitted sleeve, key ring, etc. I know. Geeky. Being in the U.S. is just an excuse to get hold of more…Oh my corporately owned taste buds…

Impressions from the flight last night? The sound of a child crying is among the most genetically effective communiqués, impossible to ignore, it’s tuned so perfectly to sound like pain and to make any onlooker’s soul twitch. I felt sorry for the child behind me, a 4-5 hour ride from Charlotte to Seattle, on top of whatever travel time had already been endured, was hard for an adult let alone for a three-year-old. The trick with sounds that disturb the ear is to dissect them, to turn them into something academic, or simply a deeper experience — the annoyance declines, calm is restored. She buried real words in her sounds but each was drawn out beyond the bounds of comprehension, like a soul singer wringing one of those multi-octave emotions, all that was left were syllables blending seamlessly into giggly hiccups of breath, nameless wails of unfathomable and incomprehensibly deep anguish, high toned peaks blurring as she tried to dredge up tears in that unreal young way, all reverting back to threaded screams that tore the cabin up ending only with the need to gulp for air.
All ended by her father and mother’s valiant ability to distract her momentarily. The Cloudbursts passed as suddenly as they’d arrived. Gone.

Nick’s Nirvana Tour of the Pacific North West Starts TODAY!

No prizes for guessing where I am or why I’ve been putting up these maps of State of Washington Nirvana-related locations the past few weeks. This is all thanks to an email from a gentleman in Indianapolis. I was sat considering summer holiday plans (really just wanted to get away and write) and in the midst of it received a message that simply said how much they enjoyed the book I wrote and asked if I’d ever been over this side of things. He pointed out that it was quite a distance for him but he’d made it up last year and had a great time seeing this side of the United States…So…I thought about it…And I told far too many people I was thinking about it…And I hate saying things and not doing them…So I went and booked and here I am.

Incidentally, technically speaking, I think the tour starts tomorrow. My excuse is that I set out from home at the equivalent of 11.30pm last night Seattle time and its 20.30 Seattle time now. And I just arrived at my hotel straight from the airport. I’m a lil’ teeny tiny bit sleepy…Just a little…

So! I bid you good night. One side bar – Americans are absolutely lovely. The crew on U.S. Airlines, both flights, were delightful throughout, it’s so different to the norm in Britain to deal with people who are genuinely interested, who ask questions, who engage with you as a human not just consumer/customer/process. The Americans kick the ass of any nation in Europe on that front.

The Kurt Cobain and Nirvana Tour Part 4: When I went to School…In Olympia…

Really, there are only three locations of utter significance to the Nirvana story; Aberdeen, Seattle AND Olympia. While Aberdeen/Hoquiam was the birthplace and halcyon origin of our ‘hero’ and Seattle the location that witnessed his demise, it was Olympia in which he found his only true home in adulthood:

As described before, 114 Pear Street (two flats therein) was the first stable home Kurt Cobain had after a lengthy period of youthful nomadism and even genuine homelessness; from the age of fifteen until he hit twenty years old he never spent a full year at any one address. Pear Street, by contrast and happy coincidence, served as his home from the time Nirvana commenced properly in spring 1987 until just before the Nevermind ball rolled down the hill in July 1991 – the only home he lived in longer was 1210 E. First Street, Aberdeen a phase which ended at his parents’ divorce. This is the true place of pilgrimage for Nirvana fans; this one building saw over 75% of Cobain’s song writing take place – it may be higher: https://nirvana-legacy.com/2013/01/30/four-walls-and-what-was-made/

This one location alone makes Olympia a worthy visitation…But, and this is an argument, in essence, Nirvana were always an Olympia band. Until the band exploded it was Olympia where Krist lived, where Kurt lived, where the band’s friends like Slim Moon lived, where K Records resided, where Kill Rock Stars resided, where so many of the band’s gigs took place. Seattle dominates because Sub Pop came to own the narrative of grunge and because Nirvana retreated there after fame when all eyes were on them. Prior to that, this was a solid Olympia band in ethos as well as home.

I admit though, the map doesn’t show too many places worthy of a visit. I’ve accidentally skipped Rignall Hall on 8131 Urquhart Rd NW plus the North Shore Surf Club on 5th Avenue. That still makes it the number two location in the world, behind Seattle, for Nirvana related sights.

Nirvana In Utero Build-Up Publicity Continues

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/31/nirvana-dave-grohl-krist-novoselic-in-utero

You’ll have to forgive me the absence these past two weeks, much going on that hasn’t much to do with Nirvana and the smooth regularity of life.

Anyways, courtesy of a dear friend of mine (thanks Emily!), this is an interview with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic taken from this weekend’s Guardian newspaper – a major British daily broadsheet.

It’s All (NOT) About the Music: Nirvana as Image

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583974-top-musicians-are-judged-much-their-movements-their-melodies

When chatting on in the pub I used to present the following theory; every successful musician exists only to write that one tune everyone agrees is a classic and they should give up there because they will write another song that everyone loves – no matter how many other good songs you write, no matter how long your career, there’ll be the one song that breaks into the popular imagination and then the moment is gone. That’s it, no more. That doesn’t mean that there an individual can’t like or even prefer other songs by that artist, but there’ll always be that one song everyone agrees is special and can compromise on.

As examples; Guns n’ Roses? Sweet Child of Mine. Nirvana? Smells Like Teen Spirit. Madonna? Like a Virgin. Queen? Bohemian Rhapsody. Pulp? Common People. Rolling Stones? Satisfaction. Aqua? Barbie Girl. Tchaikovsky? That one with the cannons.

Now, the best thing about saying something like that in the pub is that its always easy to identify a band’s peak moment – what’s harder to notice is I’m stating a self-fulfilling prophecy because what we’re discussing is not the quality of the music, nor the best representation of an artist’s aesthetic, nor their most personal, or meaningful work. All I’m stating is “everyone has one song that gains the greatest publicity and you can tell it’s ‘the one’ because all people know it or know of it.” Circular argument but good fun – the only band I’ve given up on trying this for is The Beatles.

Now, shifting direction, this article in The Economist points out that a lot of the judgement made on music, defining whether people think it’s a classic performance or not, comes not from the sounds created, not from the music, but from what wraps around the sounds. The article focuses just on one element, the movements an artist makes. The critical quotation is “what they seemed to be picking up on were gestures that they thought conveyed passion.” Music cannot be reduced down to sound and the impact and impression it makes comes from the human connection. A true artist is someone who can, like an actor, perform something over and over again and mimic endless emotion so that those watching can feel and share in some kind of internal response.

A comparison would be that, despite the existence of those ‘universal classics’, when we think of a band or a musician, what we would often describe if trying to explain the artist to someone else would be the image of the band, not the sounds they make. As an example, in the case of Nirvana, it was the goofing for the camera, the more active elements of their live performance (equipment smashing, guitar played lying on back, etc.), the persona of being a fun band. In the case of other artists its moments like The Who windmill action on the guitar, Hendrix setting it on fire, Johnny Rotten’s mad stare, Tupac’s middle digit…

The Grand Tour Part 3: Nirvana in Tacoma

There is one site only of major interest to Nirvana fans visiting Tacoma: 5441 South M Street, otherwise known as the Community World Theater. Mike Ziegler, a major name among long-time Nirvana fans online, has the most detailed resource regarding CWT: http://www.mikeziegler.com/cwt/ including a picture of the short-lived site back in its heyday while there’s a first hand discussion at this blog (from which I took the photo above – credit where due!) http://10thingszine.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/community-world-theater.html

This is a picture taken from Flickr (credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/justintron/7173805306/) and photographed in May 2012 of the former building – funny thinking how many identities this place has had. Compare it to Mike’s photo at the head of this page.

Incredibly, the venue had only opened in February 1987 but its all-ages-policy and willingness to put punk on stage meant that in a brief eighteen months of existence the venue staged some 130 shows including a significant number of underground stars. If the venue hadn’t closed in June 1988 Nirvana were scheduled to perform there in July with The Fluid and Blood Circus — a show that instead became Nirvana’s inaugural Sub Pop Sunday show at The Vogue in Seattle.

The Kurt Cobain and Nirvana Tour Part 2: Aberdeen, Hoquiam and Montesano

href=”https://nirvana-legacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/state-of-washington.png”> State of Washington

To tour the key Nirvana and Kurt Cobain locations in the State of Washington doesn’t require a car, merely some patience. Contrary to popular belief the United States of America does indeed run fairly regular public transport services that will serve most of the desired locations. There are some outlying places that probably aren’t worth the effort depending on how completist you wish to be; you could go see 17 Nussbaum Road, Raymond to get a sense of how tiny and ordinary Nirvana’s origins in 1987 were – you could visit the house at 33401 NE 78th Street, Carnation but it’s hard to see it without invading and trespassing on the property which is probably best avoid, meanwhile looking at old concert venues in Bellingham, Auburn or Ellensburg seems uninteresting.

There is, however, a decent cluster of sites in the area around Aberdeen, Hoquiam and Montesano over on the Pacific Coast. The maps below indicate locations, primarily of homes from early in Kurt Cobain’s life:

The Aberdeen map shows a couple of his early rented places, the house he lived in from 1968 through 1976, plus the hospital he was born at and briefly slept in during one of his spells of homelessness in his late teens.

Moving ever so slightly along the coast takes you to the house in which a newly born Kurt Cobain lived out his first year:

And finally, heading down the highway to the East takes you to Montesano and to the home Kurt shared with his father for a number of relatively unhappy and troubled years.

Kurt Cobain and the Atlas of the World’s Worst Natural Disasters

Presently been reading The Atlas of the World’s Worst Natural Disasters which concludes with what you’d imagine is a very handy section. The section in question consists of a set of regional maps. On each map are plotted the crucial natural disasters known to have hit that particular region. By looking at the preponderance one can basically work out which areas have a propensity for a particular type of disaster to hit.

The devil is in the detail, however. As a comparison, a couple months back I mentioned a study linking incident of childhood traumas (as identified via a widely used and accepted psychological test) as a predictor of adult difficulties including drug or alcohol abuse, a conviction for a criminal act, depression or psychological difficulties. The stand-out statistic was one stating that, among the test group – music stars of the last fifty years – possessing four or more of the eight key childhood traumas meant an individual was 80% more likely to endure adult difficulties; a compelling sound-bite. The obvious lesson to take was that kids having to endure bad things made them more likely to turn out badly. Again, let’s hold on.

In the case of the maps of world natural disasters, the addition of further information and detail complicates the simplicity of the map. As an example, the thousands of volcanoes worldwide are not necessarily a threat; the majority are dormant – but that doesn’t mean ‘dead’, it means resting. Therefore a decision about location based on volcano location has to accept that during the course of one’s own lifetime the chances of the volcano exploding beneath you are limited. Similarly, locating away from a volcano doesn’t necessarily mean being immune to their effects; an 1815 eruption of volcano Tambora destroyed marine life killing 80,000 from famine hundreds of miles away – the damage is often something that extends further than the reach of the visible danger. Similarly, how does one locate to evade the massive potential danger posed by outbreaks of disease – 90% of the former population of America was killed by Old World germs after the ‘discovery’; cholera originating in India in 1817 killed millions across the next twenty years including 100,000 in Hungary, 10,000 each in Stockholm and Paris, the 7,000 in London; Spanish Flu managed 22 million worldwide in 1918-1919? Simultaneously what would one have to give up in order to establish safety? No, instead, on a day-to-day basis we prioritise small securities on an ad-hoc and often ludicrously non-evidential basis traded off against convenience, social pressure and a sense of fitting-in.

On that level we don’t consider the silliness of repeatedly encasing ourselves in metal and glass boxes then hurtling ourselves along restricted passages at speeds the human body will have difficulty surviving if anything goes wrong with our decisions or, more importantly, with the hundreds of other decision-making entities (i.e., other people) each of which impacts our existence. Instead, we value the benefits that experience brings and then pinpoint other particular bogie-men to over-emphasise and fear.

And is this in anyway relevant to discussion of Kurt Cobain? Well, I’d argue what’s shared is a desire to reduce the world down to simple messages. Cobain’s life is written as a morality tale in which everyone has their “ah HA!” moment pointing toward a fatalistic and inevitable ending. It’s a statement of belief in destiny essentially to claim that Cobain’s fate was set by anyone element or by decisions often long previous to his ending. The culprits, ad infinitum, are parental break-up, unsettled youth, genetic predisposition to depression, the money and the fame, the choice of wife, the pressure, the drugs.

There is truth and responsibility in many of these elements, no dispute, but not one of them is an inevitability. In the case of life on the side of a volcano, all the joys and sadnesses of life proceed for whatever period of time, numerous deaths and injuries take place in numbers that, the majority of the time, outweigh any foreseeable eruption. Therefore, while drawing lessons from Cobain’s life, there’s a tendency to overlook the more likely endings — death in a car accident, eventually death from a medical condition, years of coping with depression — that outweigh the oft-pointed culprits in his life and to focus too heavily on the eventual spectacular.

As a fair example, Cobain is long held up as an example of the dangers of drugs and he successfully killed heroin-chic stone-dead. It’s extremely fair to point out the risks with that particular drug and that there are very fair public-health reasons to maintain its illegality regardless of statistics about the damage wrought by cigarettes and alcohol — yes, many risks should be up to informed individuals to choose for themselves but that’s no reason for governments to devolve all responsibility for their people to the mantra of ‘choice’ which has become a great way of doing nothing. But what is overlooked is that Cobain did not die as an accidental drug overdose, nor is it provable that the impact of drugs on his mental state is primarily responsible for his decision to commit suicide.
There’s also no definitive statement showing how much of his decline as an active song-writer was due to drugs, how much was due to the breakdown of his relationship with his band mates, how much was because of the work required for parenthood and so forth. Suggesting that is was a factor is not the same as declaring it the volcano that eliminated Kurt Cobain and we should be more cautious of such absolutist answers.

7 Corners: The Recording History of Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters

http://7corners.foofighterslive.com/

The lines between past and future are rarely absolute. In the case of Dave Grohl, the clock hands moved incrementally, a few halting ticks at a time, between his decision to dispel the ghost of Nirvana by walking back into Robert Lang Studios in late November 1994 and hammering out an album, the unveiling of Foo Fighters to friends and family on February 19, 1995 on a houseboat and the more public performances that followed from March starting on the home turf of Portland and Seattle. On March 4, just over a year since Nirvana’s final performance, Krist Novoselic stood and watched as his friends and fellow survivors, Grohl and Pat Smear, stepped out with their new identity.

But that wasn’t the start…The fifteen songs recorded at the November session had been seeping out of Mr. Grohl throughout his time in Nirvana – only four of the songs recorded were post-Cobain works. The background to Nirvana was always this guy’s evolution and progress as a musician and song-writer in his own right. And it turns out someone has taken the time to catalogue, explain and tell the story of that long process and the journey to the present day.

I’ve always been stunned by the energy and effort Nirvana fans have committed to documenting the band; the work that has gone into the Nirvana Live Guide, LiveNirvana and the Internet Nirvana Fan Club is astounding. And in the case of Simon Kilmore he’s consistently been a worthy presence in that world… But it turns out much more besides.

Simon runs http://www.foofighterslive.com/ which is, I say this without any shade of doubt whatsoever, the most crucial online resource for anyone wanting to get the fullest view of Foo Fighters. As what will become a continuously evolving further resource, Simon has taken the time to interview people involved with the band, to document over fifty known sessions, to pull together information stretching back as far as 1984 into a 263 page ebook demonstrating the full story. There’s a free sample on the site at the top of this post and its available in multiple formats so wherever you are in the world you’ll be able to settle back and take a read.

As ever, my support for those who decide to commit the time and energies needed to do put something like this together is absolute. Get up, DIY, may the punk message never die.

Courtney Love, Cobain Film Concepts…Ongoing

http://seattletimes.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2021368924_nicole21xml.html

An interesting interview with Courtney Love about her feelings toward Seattle, memories of past events, potential future intentions…Nothing to add to it really except its an indication of her way of living life to a background of noise and chaos – both an impressive thing and sometimes an oddity.

http://noisecreep.com/courtney-love-kurt-cobain-biopic/

This piece meanwhile indicates the ying-yang side to her nature; OK, a few years ago an official Cobain biopic might have been a possibility, then it changed direction and reasonably enough Courtney’s real-life present day feelings were a factor.