Nevermind Cover Shoot
June 1991

Ten-year-old Spencer Elden claims he actually has a memory of the day in June 1991 — when he was four months old — that he went swimming for the first time. "I remember being put into a Jacuzzi after going in the pool," he says. "My parents told me later that they took me out because the lifeguard said I couldn't be in there with my diaper on."

The reason for the naked dip was the photo shoot for the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind. The shoot took place at a children's pool in Pasadena, California. Originally, Kurt Cobain had wanted a picture of a woman giving birth underwater, but the art was deemed too graphic. "Then I found a stock photo of a baby underwater," says Robert Fisher, who was the art director at Geffen Records. "I took it to Kurt, and he loved it."

Fisher hired Los Angeles photographer Kirk Weddle, who specializes in underwater imagery. Weddle was friends with Spencer's mother, Renee, and she agreed to let her infant boy make his modeling debut. "The whole shoot took about ten minutes," says Weddle. "We took the little guy, gave him a dunk, and he cruised by the camera real mellow. We tried it one more time, but then he started crying, so we called it a wrap." The fishhook with the dollar bill was stripped into the image later, and Fisher took a mock-up of the cover to the band, who approved it immediately.

Fisher says that as he got to know Cobain, he realized that the singer was fascinated with childbirth. "It was almost like he was jealous of women because they had that privilege of carrying a baby and letting it grow inside," he says. "That shows up on In Utero and on the cover of the 'All Apologies' single, which contains sea horses. They're the only living beings on earth where the male carries the baby. There's a little blurb in the jacket that Kurt wrote about how the male gets the privilege of bearing the young."

Spencer and his family received $250 for appearing on the cover. The surrealness of it all kicked in when the Elden family returned from a European vacation in late 1991 to find a giant version of the album cover plastered high above Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. "My husband thought they should have airbrushed his penis out," says Renee. "I was like, 'But then he'll be a girl!'"

Spencer seems unaffected by the attention given to the cover. "I like Nirvana's music a little, but Blink-182 are my favorite," he says, adding, "When I tell my friends it's me on the cover, they say, 'Yeah, right.' But then I show them my platinum-record plaque."

MATT HENDRICKSON

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" Video
August 17th, 1991

Director Samuel Bayer had just moved to Los Angeles with nothing but a reel of "pretty crap images" and a contact at Geffen Records. "I took her out to lunch and said, 'Look, I'm starving, I'll do anything, I'll do it for free,' and she sent me Nirvana," Bayer recalls. "I'd never heard of the band. I didn't really like alternative music. I was a big Guns n' Roses fan." "Teen Spirit" was the first video Bayer ever directed.

The budget was only $25,000 — minuscule even ten years ago. Conceived as a pep rally gone horribly wrong, the video was a dark twist on the idea of "teen spirit," with cheerleaders romping in slow motion through a grimly art-directed high school auditorium. Bayer and Kurt Cobain took an immediate dislike to each other. Cobain didn't want pretty cheerleaders; Bayer had hired strippers to play the part. Cobain had also envisioned a more anarchic scene overall, complete with smashed cars in the parking lot, a bonfire and kids emptying their wallets into the flames.

"It was my job to rein things in," Bayer says. "It wasn't the greatest mix. Kurt was so pissed off with me, he refused to lip-sync! So I went to management and said, 'If Kurt doesn't pretend to sing the song, we don't have a video.' That look in his eye, the way he pushed his face into the camera at the end of the take — which was very antagonistic, and kind of directed at me — it created something quite wonderful."

MARK BINELLI

Tower Records In-Store Performance
September 27th, 1991

Nirvana's acoustic performance at New York's Tower Records store on Broadway was supposed to be a major event. Nevermind had been released three days prior, and the folks at Geffen Records were expecting fans to be lining up around the block. "There's a legendary story about the Depeche Mode in-store in L.A. where kids broke the windows," says Mike Maska, who was handling regional marketing for Geffen at the time. "We thought maybe this was gonna be like that one." But when Nirvana's van rolled up to the store, tugging a small trailer of gear behind it, there were less than fifty fans to greet them.

There was a more immediate problem: Kurt Cobain was nowhere to be found. "I remember walking down Broadway looking for him," says Ross Zapin, who worked in promotions for Geffen at the time. "We had to sort of scrape him off the curb," Maska says. "He was so high, he was hardly interested in performing. They had a hard time taking it seriously, and they were deliberately not playing well."

The band's cavalier attitude pissed off some store employees, who began yelling insults. In response, the group — "mostly Krist and Dave," Maska says — started throwing Oreo cookies from the catering trays at onlookers. Says Maska, "I'm sure that now there are far more people who say they were there than actually were."

JENNY ELISCU