Truth, Technology, Nirvana…

I have a friend who was born in Aberdeen – I’ve seen his birth certificate – and he is a mine of information on Nirvana, the north west music scene and on Seattle’s other musical godhead son Jimi Hendrix. Yet, recently, reading comments on one of his Facebook pages, I saw the most bizarre thing: people simply declaring, on no basis whatsoever that he was lying about his place of birth. A complete stranger could declare, on instinct and cobbled together (and irrelevant) data, that my friend hadn’t been born or lived in Aberdeen, Washington. It was a telling moment for me: the Internet era (essentially 1994-2018 and ongoing) has brought us to a place where it’s harder than at any point in history for an individual to ‘slip off the radar’…While simultaneously making it easier than ever for strangers to claim authority over one another’s reality.

While Hollywood projects the possibility of vast corporate or governmental entities able to forge near anything given current technology, the vast majority of this kind of anti-truth approach is far less sophisticated. Ever mislabeled a photo accidentally? Fine, it happens. Now it’s possible to mislabel a photo and for that mislabel to be projected across the entire world with one batch of people using it to reinforce their cause and another lot claiming it’s a conspiracy while the more boring voices point out “it’s a mislabel!” only to be shouted down, told they’re wrong, tagged as conspirators or simply not noticed. As an example, a while back a Facebook page posted a photo claiming to show Kurt Cobain stood next to “his killer”…When in fact it was a mislabeled photo from 1993 of Cobain stood with some random dude. Any correction will have only a limited impact because the photo (with caption) will now become part of the lexicon of mistakes repeated forever.

One positive is that, ultimately, the sudden importance of online fact-checking like this is an indication of how placid most people’s lives are. It used to be of no relevance, day to day, whether what someone said was the absolute truth or not – who cared? Life was too full of one’s day-to-day needs and the real threats to one’s existence (poor medical care, minimal dental care, no nutrition, limited hygiene, little money, etc., etc.) to spend time weaving stories online. It did mean, sure, that people were more subservient to authority in the sense that the flow of information was heavily governed and ran down restricted channels (local authority figures, a limited number of media sources, word of mouth) but on the other hand it was all less observed and fewer people could intervene in your day-to-day life.

Ultimately, now, we’re all exposed to a higher number of interactions with other people’s opinions than ever before. By the same virtue we’re exposed to an astronomically higher scale of negative and positive interactions – but the former play on the mind more because day-to-day life isn’t a sea of insults, verbal aggression, confrontation, argument, challenges to self…

Anyways, there we go. The further we get from a historical situation (i.e., Nirvana as a living, breathing band) the more one version of the truth is solidified and simplified, while the space opens up below for ever more wild thoughts to fly about with no authority recognised and the possibility to just say “nope! Don’t believe you,” when faced with open questions, unknowables and/or things people just want to refuse. The potential has always been there in humanity, now the infrastructure exists to allow it to happen.

Tic Dolly Row: Chad Channing’s Pre-Nirvana Band

Back in 2016 I posted a conversation with John Hurd, a member of the band Tic Dolly Row/The Magnet Men, who shared a stage with Nirvana (then going by the name Bliss) at the Community World Theater in September 1987.

The Magnet Men, Chad Channing, John Hurd and Nirvana in 1987

Mysteriously, a cassette of the band performing on KAOS Radio in 1987 has surfaced with Chad on drums, John Hurd on guitar, Ben Shepherd (future Soundgarden) on vocals and Chris Karr on bass. The session took place under the auspices of John Goodmanson who hosted Nirvana for their first radio session in May of the same year.

Nirvana Interview Series on YouTube

Way back in 2013 I was in the midst of this weird outpouring of Nirvana-related analysis here on the blog: spreadsheets, estimated set-lists, mapped tours, aggregated tables of information, which song did Nirvana play live the most/the least, which titles of apparently unreleased songs still exist…

As part of that, I took the data from the Nirvana Live Guide and looked at the bands known to have supported Nirvana over the years:

My Friends: Nirvana and Live Support 1987-1994 Part One

My Friends: Nirvana and Live Support 1987-1994 Part Two

The crazy names, all the bands I’d never heard of, it fascinated me – so I ended up trying to track them down to interview them and the results turned into the I Found My Friends: The Oral History of Nirvana book (it’s $4 on Amazon.com at the moment – the publisher is clearing out their stock it seems.) Amidst it all, one of the people I was most privileged to meet was John Purkey and his friends Bob, Pat, Ryan, Sally, Mike (RIP) and Rochelle – my visit to Tacoma stays in my memory as one of the finest times of my past decade.

John was a friend of Kurt Cobain and he has recently commenced a YouTube series talking about his memories, playing the cassette tapes Cobain gave to him, generally describing a world n’ time some quarter of a century ago in a part of the world most of us know little of (though I recommend a visit).

I still treasure the memory of sitting in John’s front room and seeing how much it still affected him speaking of a lost friend – it was a privilege to be there.

If you’re interested, the videos are on YouTube under the channel ‘The Observer’ – all worth a watch.

The 5 Minute Nirvana Drum Anthology

I watch this and wonder if I’d be able to detect which song was being played purely from the drums without any further reference…Then I look at some of the isolated drum tracks present on YouTube and confess I often can’t see the overall track at all.

 

Caught this recently, the track ‘Salvation’ from Solar Twin’s new album Pink Noise. Lyrically there’s a lot going on, a musing on current state of music and world that’s worth following throughout. What hooked me the most, however, was the alliance of modern day pop music to the footage of Cobain in a heyday that passed some 29-to-23 years ago: genuinely an entire life time of separation. I couldn’t help but watch it and think when was the last time I saw a mainstream star genuinely acting out emotionally on stage to this extent? Sure, Cobain was aware of stage craft as anyone: seeing the impact smashing a guitar made in front of an audience in 1988 sparked a light bulb and so the reheated Who/Hendrix motif made it’s way through years of Nirvana’s live performances – but there was honesty shot through it at all times. Nirvana didn’t wreck their gear every night: it was a final ecstatic moment when happy or it was an expression of a pissed-off and rotten show – it could be both, it could be either, it was the emotion behind it that mattered. Something has definitely changed though because something so un-contrived, and that looks so right as oft-shaky handheld video footage, is rare at a time when every moment is made to be screened one way or another.

Nirvana’s Sept 1990 Motor Sports Garage Show Video

The Motor Sports International Garage show in full, Saturday September 22 1990 and the only show with Dan Peters (of Mudhoney fame) on drums. Kudos to the uploaders and all credit where due. 2 1/2 weeks later Dave Grohl would be Nirvana’s drummer and he was in the audience for this show. The turnaround was even faster than that: despite having told Peters he was a full member of Nirvana,  the chance at Grohl was too good to miss and Cobain was on KAOS Radio on Tuesday September 25 announcing Grohl was Nirvana’s new drummer.

It also ended a spell in which Nirvana had been relatively static. They’d auditioned around a dozen individuals for drums; they hadn’t yet concluded a major label deal; their output on vinyl/cassette was still strictly limited – Big Cheese/Love Buzz, Spank Thru, Bleach, the Blew EP, ‘Mexican Seafood’ on Teriyaki Asthma, ‘Do You Love Me?’ on a Kiss covers compilation, Sliver/Dive only just out that month. They’d been quiet on the live front too: since the end of the tour in May, they’d only played eight shows – Dale Crover on drums for a run with Sonic Youth and STP, an all-girl punk band from New York.

The show itself was a winner. Here’s a chunk from ‘I Found My Friends’ for fun:

Dan Peters’ anointing took place at a now-legendary September show at the Motor Sports International Garage in gloriously irreverent company guaranteed to ratchet up the excitement.

BLAG DAHLIA, THE DWARVES: We didn’t give a fuck about the Pixies or the Vaselines or David Bowie. What kind of dipshits would like that?! The Stooges, GG Allin, and Paula Abdul were our grunge-era heroes . . . Nirvana were big fans of the Dwarves’ bass player, Saltpeter; they knew he could really play. They never expressed any support for the rest of us that I am aware of, but Kurt never wore women’s clothes onstage or jumped into a drum kit until we had done both things numerous times in Seattle and nationwide.

DUANE LANCE BODENHEIMER, DERELICTS: The Dwarves, they borrowed our drum kit the first time they came up—destroyed it, and we got into a huge fight then made up the next day and became best friends. I think that was a Halloween show. I was dressed up as a girl and when the Dwarves were playing I lobbed a bottle at Blag and hit him right in the forehead. He chased me around . . . A lot of people didn’t like us just because we were dicks, not intentionally so but . . . when you’re drinking and stuff . . . We weren’t violent—it was mostly internal violence, we would fight with one another a lot. Me and Neil [Rogers] would get into it onstage—don’t know what caused that, love the guy to death, best friends, always were.

Certainly Nirvana playing in dresses wasn’t an uncommon move. Many minds thought alike.

DANA HATCH, CHEATER SLICKS: There used to be a big pile of trash in the back of that club and I’d look for some kind of prop to use onstage. That night I found this old Big Ethelt–ype dress and put that on. Merle [Allin, bassist at the time] gave me a wig he had and his girlfriend made up my face so I played in drag. When Kurt wore a dress on SNL a few years later I liked to say he got it from me, but it was hardly an original idea when I did it.

The show kicked in with the Derelicts.

DUANE LANCE BODENHEIMER: I’ve no idea how we ended up on the bill with them—we just said, “Yeah, OK, wow . . . we’re playing . . .” I had no idea how many people were going to be there—to us it was like a fucking arena . . . I remember walking out and seeing all those people, I got serious stage fright—it was awesome . . . When I came out there were a lot of rocker-type people there. I think I said some stuff like, “All right then, you long-haired hippies . . .” just talking some shit, stage banter, trying to be charming. A good show, a lot of our friends upfront yelling at us, calling us rock stars. There must have been over a thousand—to us that was . . . wow. To bands used to playing on average a hundred or less, that was scary.

Then the Dwarves kicked off.

BLAG DAHLIA: There was a charged atmosphere that night, that’s for sure. We were more concerned with getting enough gas money to get home, though. We drove up from San Francisco at Sub Pop’s suggestion for what turned out to be $100. None of the supposedly cool indie bands on the bill or allegedly cool Seattle promoters offered us anything else. But hey, they were the “nice” guys and we were a bunch of real “assholes” from California . . . I know that there was general fear of us because of the bloodshed at our shows, and a general fear of our onstage nudity and the female nudity on our record covers. Seattle was, and is, a very asexual place. Although, I always managed to get my dick sucked there!

DUANE LANCE BODENHEIMER: Somebody threw a whiskey bottle and hit the Dwarves’ bass player in the face—he started bleeding. They had that whole violent aura about them—very confrontational.

BLAG DAHLIA: I would have loved to have seen Nirvana that night. I had enjoyed their sets several other times all over the country. Unfortunately, our bassist was struck with a bottle thrown from the audience during our set and I spent the rest of the show at the emergency room with him. Concerned promoters, our label, and fellow bands on the bill all pitched in to help though, it was really beautiful . . . Psych! No one from Seattle helped out or gave a shit . . . The vibe around the band that night at Motor Sports was more like dumb-ass drunk ex-jocks from Aberdeen in Kmart flannel shirts. And because it was the Northwest, fat chicks.

The Melvins tore it up and finally Nirvana burned it down.

DUANE LANCE BODENHEIMER: Kurt was really passionate . . . lot of punks didn’t like them, hated that “grunge” word too—I can’t stand that word. But Kurt was a purist, he loved punk rock; what they did was honest rock ’n’ roll. He loved all types of music—loud, dirty, real, honest lyrically. The really hardcore punk rockers weren’t big fans. It was simple, raw rock ’n’ roll. Krist came up to me after the show and was like, “That was a great set!” He was really nice. There’s a story before that when he and I were at a show, Poison Idea was playing, a fight broke out—Krist got in a fight, I tried to step in and help and he told me, “Fuck you! Mind your own business!” so he got his ass kicked, he was hurt, and I walked up to him, “Yup . . . should have let me help ya.”

It was only here, in Autumn 1990, that Nirvana finally overtook their former mentors by ceasing to compete on someone else’s turf.

BEAU FREDERICKS, SAUCER: For me, Nirvana was a good live band then, but they could not match up to the Melvins as a heavy intense rock trio. The Melvins were consistently crushing it live, as I am sure Nirvana would agree. Nirvana came into their own when they tapped into their melodic gifts.

Nirvana at RadioShack, Aberdeen – January 24, 1988

Nirvana, the day after their first day in studio, recording their first band video material at the local RadioShack in Aberdeen, WA. The lip-syncing and over-acting is hilariously good fun. Best wishes to the discoverers of this material – gosh, 29 years old now…?

Think of it: when this was recorded Jimi Hendrix was less than 18 years dead; Sid Vicious was only 11 years gone; Ian Curtis only 8 years. The kind of generational gap between the current era and Cobain is a fair distance past any of that.

The amount of attention devoted in the video to ‘If You Must’ – a song Cobain disowned in his Journals, that existed in time for Nirvana’s first house party in ’87 but seems to have been an inconsistent presence in set-lists before a couple of run-throughs in early ’88 – should be seen in the context that its hardly the most serious effort.

The work on ‘Paper Cuts’ follows with the band, mostly, at least pretending to be performing. Dale Crover is having to actually play along with the tape as best he can. The tape will, presumably, have been a rough cassette mix passed to the band the previous day by Jack Endino.

The Art of Kurt Cobain and Maintaining Legacy

 

When faced with the consequences of his success, Kurt Cobain retreated from the public eye; retreated from music; and spent his time devoted to building some kind of family – and making art. It made sense: the thing he had been in control of, in a life with precious little else for many years, had suddenly become an obligation, a business, something fans and an industry felt they had a right to. His art, however, remained private.

It makes absolute sense, this far after his death, to bring this aspect of his life and works to wider attention. The essence of Cobain wasn’t music – that’s what brought him fame and took up a significant percentage of his time – but the music was just one expression of what he really wanted to do which was simply to create and express. He was, in essence, someone who wanted to be an artist in all areas of life.

Of course, for some, any posthumous sharing is already too much: if Cobain didn’t in his lifetime then they feel it equates to “Cobain wouldn’t,” and therefore that any posthumous decision is illegitimate. I disagree. The second article above, related to the work of Jeff Jampol, is intrinsically connected to the greater visibility of Cobain’s artwork and to the wider question of what one does to create a legacy.

Burying every leftover, refusing all exposure and release, burning whatever remains unseen so it remains ever thus IS an option. But relying on long ago glory to keep something alive is doomed to failure: who remembers who was no.1 in 1952? Who recalls the world’s top-selling albums prior to the arrival of The Beatles and other album artists? To stay alive, an artist must be spoken of and continually brought into the present.

In the case of a deceased artist, that means making fair and reasonable use of what remains to stoke renewed enthusiasm among fans; to create coverage and comment bringing fresh eyes to the individual; to make an artist who – in life would have promoted themselves – feature before the eyes and ears of young blood. By doing so, new relevance is fashioned: their position can’t remain the same as it was way back when and nor should it – the ‘tragically doomed’ Cobain figure of the mid-to-late Nineties imagining wasn’t the underground legend almost no one knew of prior to September 1991, nor was he the celebrated but troubled presence of 1992-1994.

My hope, naturally, is for the ongoing unveiling of lesser understood and lesser seen aspects of Cobain to counteract the tendency to dip him in amber, demand that he be only one thing at all times, to reduce the privileging of one aspect or another of his work and world.

Cobain Buying the Lead Belly Guitar / and ‘Nothing to Say’

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A small piece from the Smithsonian Folkways rather impressive volume on Lead Belly. So, in case you were wondering, in 1994 the guitar Cobain stated he was considering buying was donated as an exhibit to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame And Museum.

So…Chris Cornell. I’ve been asked a few times in the four weeks since May 18 why I hadn’t put up a post or whether I’d be game to do a brief article for this place or that…And I shrugged and said no thanks. It’s not because I was dismissing the sadness of Cornell’s death, or his meaning to his fans, or the reasonableness of the request.

Death is simultaneously universal and solitary. We will all undergo the transformation and when we do – no matter how many people are around us – we will communicate nothing of it to those around us, even the most basic confirmation “I am dead,” will be beyond us. That moment in time will belong to you, or I, alone, forever. Similarly, the observation of that moment will tell a spectator little beyond it’s basic unpleasantness; the arrival of ‘absence’ within a body; the mutual private sadness of those still living who stand or sit watching us watch. We can watch and confirm what happened but not feel its significance to each of us.

In its aftermath, those left will be able to recount their grief and touch us with its tangible impact…But we take only so much of their pain inside us – it is their private interior feeling and is ultimately incommunicable to us. The weight that comes with someone’s passing, cannot be handed onto anyone else’s shoulders; nor can we measure our weight against theirs – we each bear it alone, in our own way, work through it alone.

In some ways I find that a comforting thought: that in an over-observed, over-communicated, hyper-mediated world there is something of such ultimate and inescapable significance that it remains inarticulate to all who feel it. That’s why I had no great desire to comment at the time: the point of death is there is nothing to say.

So, sure, I don’t disrespect the flood of obituaries; video clips; tributes; top tens; photo selections; encounters; in memoria op-eds that emerge in the aftermath of any musician’s death. It’s the business of music journalism to report the events of music: it’s an impersonal machine with no moral right or wrong. I didn’t find the repetitive quick summaries of his career enlightening; I didn’t flinch much at the over-egging of Soundgarden’s influence (as opposed to relative popularity); I already have all the albums and enjoy them sporadically as the mood takes me. It was simply another conversion of emotion into product – there’s no harm in that but it is a conversation of the living withh the living, it has nothing to do with the deceased.

The only pieces that resonated with me were one making an initial inroad into reckoning with a historical musical movement that has, ultimately, seen the untimely deaths of a remarkable core of its premier exponents – the ‘death rock’ image of whatever was ‘grunge’ gains yet more reasonable support. The other was a piece reiterating the point about depression and its effect on an individual’s perception of what is normal or rational or sensible. Again, however, in both cases, it meant Cornell became an example for some other narrative or story someone wished to tell: conversion into an intellectual element, again, is a way around the incalculable hole left by a death.

A friend of mine, currently, has endured a tragic loss. I have no words I can give to him that cover the occurrence or provide comfort. Presence, when wished for, is all anyone can give in the end. I believe strongly that death takes something from those left behind. Once age has weakened us sufficiently, seeing/hearing that our friends and loved ones are gone, wrenches the body and mind until eventually we know we’re just waiting for our own without anything left to fight it. Seeing the death of our loved ones and the pain of others when we’re young, again, reminds us that there is no discussion to be had and that the clock is ticking.

But I believe our loved ones, if their deaths are worth anything to us, are worth the giving of a little bit of our own peace of mind; our own comfort; our own spirit. They’re worth a private pain that never gets better though it fades and the memory of it grows dimmer – at which point we feel dissatisfied with ourselves for how frail is human retention of a feeling and a moment.

So I’ve got nothing to say about the death of Chris Cornell. His experience of it was his alone; the feelings of his friends and family remain inside them; your feelings as a fan or casual observer are yours and I have no knowing of them. Death is that one moment that belongs to no one else. I would feel disrespectful in trying to pierce something so ultimately private with any words at all.

A Month of No Nirvana…

April is always holiday time. Birthday in March so always a good moment to pause, a third of the way into the year, see if there’s anything I need to remember for the next two-thirds… But plenty on.

http://thequietus.com/articles/22244-quietus-hour-special-with-thurston-moore?curator=MusicREDEF

A lonnnnnng Thurston Moore interview here: worth kicking in the background – around 1 hour, 47 he chats a bit about the book which is really sweet of him – while reading other things (there’s another piece here too: http://thequietus.com/articles/21673-thurston-moore-interview-2). I was lucky this past month to interview Arto Lindsay:

Caution, Madame! Back And Forth With Arto Lindsay

And then spent a very pleasant couple hours with Dylan Carlson and Kevin Martin at the Ninja Tune HQ in London:

City Of Fallen Angels: The Bug vs. Earth

A couple of reviews of We Sing A New Language came in, very good and fair stuff:

http://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/thurston-moore-sing-new-language

https://soundblab.com/reviews/books/17495-thurston-moore-we-sing-a-new-language-by-nick-soulsby

And, around it, listening to Thor & Friends; the new Seabuckthorn LP; the Bug Vs Earth record…