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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
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"Teen Spirit" Erupts in Chicago
October 12th, 1991
"That was the first time Dave Grohl trashed his drum kit, and the first night Courtney Love hooked up with Kurt," recalls Nash Kato of Urge Overkill, who was touring with Nirvana when the band rolled into Chicago on October 12th, 1991, to play at the 1,100-capacity Cabaret Metro. "At every show along the way, the crowds kept getting bigger and crazier," says Katie Campbell, then the music director of the Smith College radio station WOZQ. Campbell had ditched school to catch most of the Midwest leg of the tour. "In Chicago, the crowd totally destroyed the security barricade when they started playing 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' and everybody was right up along the stage. Nirvana encouraged it. At the end, Kurt smashed his guitar — of course — and they crashed through the drums. We were standing in the front, and after the show one of the bouncers gave me a volume knob off Kurt's guitar."
The backstage scene was mayhem, too. "Everybody was there," says Craig Montgomery, Nirvana's sound engineer. "Courtney, Urge Overkill, Smashing Pumpkins, but not Billy [Corgan] — apparently Courtney and Billy broke up that night." According to Kato, Love "was not going to leave Chicago without Kurt. 'Where's Kurt?' is all she would say."
For Campbell, the Nevermind tour proved how much Nirvana cared for their fans. She and two friends had hijacked a minivan from school to follow Nirvana, when they found themselves stuck in Minneapolis on a frigid night. "We slept in the van — a blue minivan with the Smith College seal — and lived on food from gas stations," Campbell says. "In Minneapolis, after the show, Dave was like, 'Where are you guys going?' We told him we were going to sleep in our van, and he was like, 'Fuck that, it's way too cold. Come sleep in Kurt's and my room.' We were like, 'Oh, OK!' We then went to a drive-through White Castle, and when it came time to pay, we all scrounged for our money, and Dave was like, 'Oh, let me pay, I'm a big rock star.' But it was a joke, because at the time, he wasn't. Then we went back to their hotel, and we all slept on the floor because no one wanted to sleep in the other bed in case Kurt came back. But he never came back that night."
MATT DIEHL
Chaos in St. Louis
October 16th, 1991
St. Louis was already tense about safety at rock shows before Nirvana came to town: Three months earlier, a Guns n' Roses concert had ended in a riot after Axl Rose hit a camera-toting audience member. According to Tim Mullen, a bartender at Mississippi Nights, the club Nirvana played, some security guards working the Nirvana show had also worked the Guns n' Roses concert. They were ready for trouble. "Kurt was aggravated at the bouncers, who were aggressive in their pent-up, frustrated, take-it-out-on-the-kids mook manhandling," says Leigh Lust, at the time a Capitol Records A&R exec who attended the show.
Adds Craig Montgomery, "It would only take Kurt to see one incident of a security guy mistreating a kid, and he would think, 'All security guys are assholes, let's fuck this show up.'"
This night was no different. Midway through the show, "Kurt said, 'Fuck it, everybody come onstage,'" Lust recalls, "and everybody wanted to be a part of the party." More than 100 people rushed the stage. "The bouncers wanted to throw them off," says Nash Kato, "the band wanted them to stay, and that set Krist off on a whole political-revolution tangent that almost incited a riot." Things got so bad that the band fled the stage and hid out in Urge Overkill's dressing room.
"Nirvana saw themselves as anti-rock stars," Montgomery says. "Like, 'We're just like you, we're not Axl Rose.' But in the moment, it was just to stir up some trouble. Kurt would do anything to create chaos, to relieve the tedium of playing the same show every night. It was a typical Nirvana tour moment: twenty-three hours of sheer boredom, and one hour of sheer terror."
MATT DIEHL
A Battle in Dallas
October 19th, 1991
"Debacles were business as usual with Nirvana shows," recalls sound engineer Craig Montgomery. But nothing matched the trouble at the club Trees in Dallas. "The vibe was insane," says Clint Phillips, a Dallas musician and current employee of Trees. "It was one of the craziest shows I'd ever seen, and it's become legendary in Dallas." The tension began, as it usually did during Nirvana shows, with the sound. "A big problem for Nirvana playing small clubs was that they always played really loud, but Kurt still wanted to hear his vocals," Montgomery recalls. "We could never get the monitors loud enough with the crappy little monitors that existed in clubs at that time. That day, we really had a problem with it."
The sound was so bad that a few songs into the set, Cobain freaked. "He got so mad, he smashed the monitor board with his guitar," Montgomery says. "It was a shitty thing to do. But it was a source of amusement for him."
What happened next is a matter of dispute. According to Montgomery, Cobain dived off the stage to go crowd-surfing and was chased down by a bouncer, who started punching him. Montgomery says Cobain tried to ward the guy off and accidentally hit him in the head with his guitar. "The guy started bleeding profusely," Montgomery says, "and at the sight of his own blood he turned into an enraged bull. Kurt didn't hit him first. I actually saw this with my own eyes."
The security guard, Turner Scott Van Blarcum, tells another story. "When he smashed the monitor board, it was like, 'There goes our rent,'" Van Blarcum says. "He was kicking it in, so I pulled him off, and he cracked me over the head with his guitar. I just took care of business. I could give a fuck if a rock star wants to smash something — they could stick it up their ass — but you mess with the house PA, you're dealing with working-class guys."
"Dave Grohl jumped up from his drums, stepped in the middle and was like, 'It's cool, please don't kill him,'" says Phillips. The band ran backstage and made it to a waiting taxi, but the driver, unaware of the urgency of their escape, pulled around to the front of the club and got stuck in a traffic jam. "Turner was out there on the curb, going, 'Where are those motherfuckers? I'm gonna kill them!'" Phillips says. "The crowd spilled out on the street to see what was happening, and we could see the band yelling at the driver, 'Go! Go!,' but they had nowhere to go because of gridlock. So Turner runs up and smashes the back windshield with his fist. Somehow they got away."
Van Blarcum claims that Nirvana's label, Geffen Records, paid him $3,000 to go away. (Geffen reps decline to comment.) "When I saw the envelope, I thought they were gonna sue me," he says. "But when I opened it up, they sent me three grand — they were afraid I was going to sue [Cobain] for splitting my head open. I took the money — I didn't give a shit. My ex-wife has whupped my ass worse than he even tried!"
Nirvana also got a souvenir. "The band ended up buying that monitor board," Montgomery says. "For a long time it was in their rehearsal room."
MATT DIEHL
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Halloween in Seattle
October 31st, 1991
In the last week of October, Nirvana concluded a national tour by driving up the West Coast. "Every day, it escalated," remembers Nils Bernstein, who was the head of publicity at Sub Pop at the time. "In one week, it went from, 'Gee, I wonder if Nirvana will do as well as the Posies did on Geffen?' to going gold." On Halloween night — two days after Nevermind went gold — the band played a homecoming show at Seattle's Paramount Theater. A gothic movie palace from the Twenties, the Paramount seats 3,000 - at that point, Nirvana's largest audience ever. It was their first show in Seattle after the release of Nevermind.
"There was this electricity in the air," says Nikki McClure, a friend of the band. "These people were breaking beyond the limits of what we knew."
Bikini Kill and Mudhoney opened up, and Nirvana did a powerful eighteen-song set, beginning with "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam" and finishing with "Endless, Nameless." At the end of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," six songs into the set, Kurt Cobain pounded his guitar on the floor, stuck it into an electric fan and then hurled it toward the ceiling. When it landed, it broke in two; Krist Novoselic then whacked at it with his bass, fungo style. Ian Dickson, a former housemate of Cobain, remembers, "After that show, they got too big. The next time they played Seattle, it was the Coliseum, and everything had fallen apart. But the Paramount show was them at their best."
Dickson and McClure spent the whole show onstage go-go dancing. The show was filmed for a home video, and according to Dickson, Nirvana manager John Silva tried to stop the dancers from going onstage. "He said, 'I didn't spend a quarter of a million dollars on this video for you to fuck it up!'" (Cobain interceded on the dancers' behalf.) The concert video was never released in full, but in July 1992 the footage was edited into the "Lithium" video.
GAVIN EDWARDS
Nevermind Goes Platinum
November 11th, 1991
Nirvana got the news that Nevermind was going platinum backstage at Hamburg's Markthalle, in the middle of a five-week European tour. Kurt Cobain had just added to the Markthalle's graffiti-filled wall with a scribble responding to a joke comparing women to cows: "You will be strung up by your balls and submerged into a vat of razor blades and sperm." There was a Guns n' Roses poster on the door, covered with salami — Dave Grohl had used it for target practice.
Weary from the constant travel and the endless questions about what Seattle is like, Nirvana sat around, not saying much. They were not greeting the news of their platinum success with champagne and cheers. From their viewpoint, this meant even more interviews.
Cobain hunched in a corner, wearing a sweater with holes poked in the sleeves for his thumbs. Speaking just a little louder than a whisper, he complained about how he couldn't even watch opening act Urge Overkill anymore; everyone wanted autographs. "Now that our album's gone platinum, it's going to get even worse," he said. "But we don't have the right to complain. We all decided to do this. And we could decide to end this every day. I don't know how — it might end me in jail — but we could do it." Krist Novoselic proposed a solution: "We don't try very hard. But we're going to start trying a lot less."
GAVIN EDWARDS
"Saturday Night Live"
January 11th, 1992
The day Nirvana appeared on "Saturday Night Live," Nevermind hit Number One on the Billboard charts for the first time. (Garth Brooks' Ropin' the Wind was Number Two, Hammer's Too Legit to Quit Number Three.) Still, Nirvana weren't well-known by the SNL crew: When Kurt Cobain wandered the hallways in a tattered turquoise sweater, a security guard didn't believe he was on the show and tried to kick him out.
Cobain had been scoring heroin all week in New York. "He was listless, he was nodding off, he didn't seem to care," says a source who was then on staff at SNL. Cobain even vomited on Lisa Gladfelter, the band's Geffen publicist. For an audience of 25 million, Cobain wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the punk band Flipper. He made it onstage, but when Nirvana played "Smells Like Teen Spirit," his voice was noticeably ragged. After the second song, "Territorial Pissings," Nirvana destroyed their gear, which had been rented by NBC. Cobain methodically put his guitar neck through sixteen speaker cones. (An SNL staffer had been tipped off that they might dismember their equipment and had substituted cheaper amps.)
At the end of the show, as the cast stood waving goodbye to America, Cobain made a gesture designed to alienate any homophobic Nirvana fans: He kissed both Novoselic and Dave Grohl on the mouth.
GAVIN EDWARDS
Rolling Stone Cover Shoot
January 25th, 1992
"You don't tell somebody who's defiant in nature not to do something — that's the surest way they'll do it, and probably in a big way," says Rolling Stone chief photographer Mark Seliger in recalling his 1992 shoot with Nirvana that produced one of the magazine's most notorious and cherished cover photos. "I learned my lesson."
That somebody, of course, was Kurt Cobain. On strict deadline and with little notice, Seliger had arrived in Melbourne, Australia — where Nirvana were in the midst of a two-week tour — after a thirty-two-hour flight. On the day of the cover shoot, Cobain showed up wearing "bigass fly sunglasses and a buttoned-up sweater, even though it's probably ninety degrees outside," Seliger remembers.
"Kurt walks over, unbuttons his sweater and says, 'Read it.' I'm like, 'Oh, Corporate Magazines Still Suck.' I laughed." The homemade T-shirt played on the slogan of SST Records (which had released albums by Soundgarden, Sonic Youth and Screaming Trees): "Corporate rock still sucks." Seliger continues, "I was pretty new to doing magazine covers, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do — how was I going to convince him we should try something different with the T-shirt? I knew it was hopeless, but it never hurts to ask, so I said, 'I think the shirt's great. What do you say we keep the shirt but lose the glasses?' Kurt says, 'No, I'm leaving the sunglasses on.'
"Then I say, 'How about we trade sunglasses for T-shirt?' And he says, 'No, I like it, I want to keep it on, too.' So I winked at him and said, 'OK, here we go.'"
Despite the obstacles, Seliger says, the shoot went smoothly. "Kurt could not have been happier while we were shooting," he says, "and he had this great hunched-over authority about him, like, 'Fuck you!'" Still, Seliger was plagued with doubts about the results. "I went into a sulking, depressed, I-can't-believe-I-blew-it phase," Seliger recalls. Then I send the film over [to Rolling Stone], and I'm a hero! I could not have been closer to the mark - bull's-eye! To me, it was a transformation: I now understood that breaking the rules is what it's about. I thank Kurt and Nirvana for helping me shed a skin I needed to shed."
MATT DIEHL