Nirvana Like You Never Heard Of Them Before (Full Documentary) | Amplified

i was standing right there she let go i was begging you please but you still said no i was washing my hair you were washing your hands on the whole affair [Music] [Music] here i [Applause] [Music] here i [Music] nirvana exploded onto the world rock scene seemingly from nowhere in the early 90s with their unique combination of sound looks and attitude nirvana's timing was just right for young audiences at the time the music scene of the late 80s were dominated by manufactured pop acts who had sat on the charts for the previous decade here was a band who tore up the pop rule book and introduced the world to the unique seattle grunge sound which the region had been secretly developing for many years the grunge sound had been nurtured by seattle punk bands such as soundgarden the melvins and mud honey and yet it was to be nirvana who would introduce this sound to a waiting world and in doing so change music forever here is their in a story [Music] the local seattle rock scene was developing the first rumblings of a new global sound away before nirvana appeared on the scene what we know now as grunge was a product of seattle's isolated northwestern location far from outside music influences washington state however was big enough to support a local rock club circuit and there were plenty of bands able to support themselves in this way so why was it nirvana that finally introduced the sound to an increasingly desperate waiting world i think ivana was successful because it was the best underground band ever [Music] in musical terms there is no punk band to match them cobain's songwriting is nonpareil i think that by the time they made it they were just good enough technically to pull it off and i think that this extreme moral seriousness and at the same time the anarchic goons like silliness of the band appealed to children of all ages you know it it fulfilled the original dream of rock and roll to keep us young forever catchy songs i mean you can hum them and you can play them on an acoustic guitar and sing them around the campfire that's how strong the melodies are and how simple the songs are i mean that's something that is really overlooked in a lot of popular music nowadays where people concentrate on the rhythm and the beat and the attitude and they forget about the hook and their songs were all hooks all about the hooks really a lot of that's nirvana music my wife collected it [Music] and uh every time i knew when they'd come out she'd buy it and uh i never did like it until i saw kurt i think it was on mtv where he uh was just sitting out there playing the guitar and singing then you didn't have all that noise and the drums and the other hollering hooting and stuff and i thought it was pretty good then i think it was the voice first lyric second the band was a good band but the band did several different kinds of music so i think the band was you know the band rock and the band was competent it was especially once dave joined the fact that kurt was a ratty guitar player kind of made it even better you know where maybe chad was a ratty drummer with a ratty guitar player and a ratty bass player so once they had a big drummer to hang all the ratty [ __ ] off of it made more sense people credit them for their innovation [Music] expression of emotion in his singing and in his voice that is like that's more unique than the music i think right but kurt you know wasn't necessarily a jimi hendrix [Music] he would get clear up on the fretboard and play bizarre distorted noises you know and mess around for a long time with noises like that didn't you think i don't know and then record it and then just early tapes of just him playing guitar and singing that he'd make to a boombox were really horrible and i didn't until he recorded that demo that became insesticide within dino i i thought yeah kurtz band you know that'll be great and he definitely talked about creating a band even as early as being 12 years old [Music] a lot of us talked about that at the time and so it was just kind of you know conversation more that you know you'd think he probably was more serious about it than a lot of people gave him credit for even at that time on nova scotia's part he is a very talented bass player but he also i think intuitively drove these songs he was kind of the glue that really held the band together dave grohl is just simply a tremendous drummer um in my opinion probably one of the greatest rock drummers certainly of modern times he hit the drums with such a power that you wondered that they weren't going to break and i saw a number of shows where he did break the drums kirk he's got he had the look he had the lyrics [Music] you know they had that type of sound that i think that you know people were waiting for that generation acts you know they were waiting for something like this to arrive and certainly it did and it blasted there aren't any other bands as far as i'm concerned just to come close to what they were and what they could have been for me individually it's true that kurt cobain was the the soul of nirvana in terms of his songwriting and his artistic vision but i think that all three of these individuals played a huge part in the success and creation of this band and uh without nova selgen growl this would not have been the same thing [Music] [Music] [Music] i'll move on to the next nirvana now no i'm not for just done kurt cobain was born in aberdeen washington in 1967. situated near the coast aberdeen lies a world away from the bright lights of the city surrounded by rolling mountains never-ending forests and continual rain the whole town is dominated by the region's one and only major industry logging during kurt's childhood the logging industry suffered enormously the impact from which permeates every aspect of the region but kurt grew up a happy kid who showed an artistic talent from an early age as his grandfather remembers there's curtains little guy there a little bit bigger right from the start he was boy a hell of an artist one time he come over to house when we lived in aberdeen him and his folks come over to house and he had a picture and he came up and he said look at grandpa he had a picture of mickey mouse that he drew he was six years old and i said i said you didn't draw that i said you traced that he got sort of mad he said that's what i did to draw that and he says he said i'll draw you another one he should only say i'll draw you donald duck and he sit down then on a piece of paper and drew me a donald duck i got it in here yet [Music] in 1976 at the age of nine kurt's parents divorced kirk moved to the nearby town of montecino with his father transferring to beacon elementary school here he met one of his long lasting school friends darren nevery when i first met kurt it was i want to say like 1975. we were in the fourth grade and he was just a new kid that came in and he was very shy but he did have a very good sense of humor and um you know he loved like saturday night live and you know all the comedy and things like that so he was you know quiet and reserved at times you know especially in his younger years but um you know the more you got to know him you know he was a lot of fun to be around i don't know i i remember him as a good kid the way i remember him he always helped around here when he lived with us he definitely had highs and lows he a lot of times he was a very happy kid but then there was a lot of times when uh his mood would would be um down in the dumps you know things would come up you know especially if it was around you know say something was focused around divorce you know like as parents or things like that he you know he did have some times where uh you know certain things he was uncomfortable about or just you know he'd have a hard time being a bad mood like most kids you know but uh but you know he had a lot of happy times too cursed dad when he was a little guy [Music] he took steel guitar lessons and we still had the guitar and we'd give it to kurt and but the amplifier didn't work right and he uh he finally i guess just tore it all up to see what it was made of and he's always pounding on the pots and pans beating them all we always thought he'd be a drummer instead of a guitar because kurt and i both were in school especially at that age where really small and stature were and uh to see him carrying that big snare drum and a case around was you know it was kind of funny but um but then just to hear him play that and beat on it you know you knew right then that he you know he he was musically talented and as we got older like the high school when he was in band you know we maybe have another class like pe that was close to the band room and you'd hear this drum plan i mean someone just beating the drums like you can't believe you know i mean it sounded like a rock drummer you know so you know people would actually go to the band room you know they'd hear this and you just follow the sound and you know here's kurt on the drums you know just going for it like between classes or something and you know right then i was like wow you know i figured he'd grow up to be a drummer you know [Music] kurt's obvious affinity for the drums made his family and friends think he would become a famous drummer but instead his musical interest moved towards the guitar when i first saw kurt play the guitar we must have been like 15 at the time you know he may have played some before that but you know probably kind of a closet player maybe as he was getting good and you could tell that every time you saw him he must have practiced an awful lot you know because he got better fairly quickly you know from going from that time period when he was just learning say learning how to play the guitar and just growing up around this area i don't think anybody ever envisioned how big he would become it was very amazing to see him progress and yeah just you know you don't know what kind of expectations to have for for that person you know at the time even knowing they're so talented it's you know especially when they get as big as nirvana got very you know no i don't think anybody could have predicted that christ nova select was born in california but moved to aberdeen after his parents too were divorced at six foot seven and of croatian descent christ was impossible to miss around aberdeen he started his lifelong friendship with kurt after being introduced by a friend jessie reed jesse kurt and chris all played the guitar together running through the usual kiss and led zeppelin covers nothing emerged from these initial sessions except a close and loyal friendship little did they know what the future would hold for them [Music] on moving back from montesano high school to his new school weather wax in aberdeen kurt hooked up with classmates steve and paul who shared his love of heavy metal i looked over and there's this other kid that i recognized little blonde guy sitting next to me and uh i could tell he wasn't in the 12th grade and he had motorhead written on his peachy with all the other bands of the day legs up winner black sabbath and such i said hey you like motorhead you opened this peachy and you had all these cut out pictures of different bands guitar players he had a picture of lenny kilminster from motorhead flipping off a ronald mcdonald statue and i said hey that's awesome from then on we just kind of hung out quite a bit [Music] he eventually began living at my house and he lived with me for about eight months he'd go see his mom quite often she always knew where he was he just didn't want to live by their rules there were virtually no opportunities for kurt economically in aberdeen i mean he considered joining the military because that was one of the only job prospects he worked for a while washing dishes at a you know resort type restaurant that was even down on its luck and he took a job at the ymca teaching kids how to swim but none of these were jobs that paid more than minimum wage and i was able to get a copy of kurt's resume in the context of doing my book and it was hilarious because he listed his employment and it was pitiful the young kurt and his friends steered well away from heavy duty drugs but like most of their peers smoked pot and sniffed gas there was a time when um you know like in ninth grade we're you know pretty disrespectful at times you know just being normal teenagers and and one time uh he had asked me if i wanted to go outside of the school and smoke some pot with him and you know at the time i wasn't i thought yeah why not you know so let's go and i thought we'd go hide somewhere to do it we'll follow him right out to the very front of the school and behind like a big rhododendron bush i mean it was probably about the stupidest thing you could do but of course we do it and he gets away with it you know and of course he thinks it's great and and you know it was so such a it was ballsy to do it and it was also um just kind of like you know he was showing that you know he would do things like that and how you know anti-authority he was we were really really really really heavy drinkers and heavy substance abusers at really young ages and kurt was too he made this big apparatus to huff isobutane out of the bottom of edge shaving grid gel and he was he declared himself addicted to edge shaving gel at one point at the age of 16 and not being able to settle at either of his parents or friend's homes kurt got his own house a move he was immensely proud of it was a horrible little house but he was really proud of it i remember that he was really hurt because he showed it to his mom who didn't live that far away at the time and she said that she didn't like her the idea of her son living in a rundown shack and it really hurt his feelings because he was really proud this was his house you know he was very possessive of it my house you know it's not a crummy apartment it's a house and it's like a little two-bedroom thing that he lived with lucan he applied for a job cleaning dog kennels essentially uh you know washing down dog feces and he was deemed not qualified for that job so you really have to say if you're not qualified to clean up dog crap what are you qualified for he worked as a janitor briefly he eventually was fired from that job he was not a very diligent hard worker for the most part but there was very little opportunity for him in any context kurt would buy pounds of potatoes and uh he had an old this gummy old dress shirt that he would use to soak the grease out of them and they live on french fries and and one day we were there we were high on acid and kurt decided he was going to make a lava lamp he said he knew how however he put a this old candle wax he melted it into the into the french fry oil and put it in this mason jar and uh put it under a light bulb and was trying to get it to work like a lava lamp and then we all got mad and he threw it on some girl from the neighborhood at one point he he was going to pretend he was mentally [ __ ] so he could get a free high school diploma and go to the [ __ ] class and he was he was sure that that would be an easy way to get through high school and not have to do anything but grunt and moan that never came to fruition [Music] [Music] after a succession of dead-end jobs it became obvious that there were a few opportunities around that fitted in with kurt and his lifestyle there was however a local aberdeen based band the melvins who inspired kurt and his friends enormously the melvin's influence was huge buzz osbourne not for just kurt but for anybody that wanted anything to do with music in a sort of punk rock underground sort of level not just in gray's harbor but in seattle as well it was buzz osborne's been a sort of a daunting shadow to live under and it probably affected nobody more than kurt cobain i remember the first time the melbourne went on a national tour we were bored as hell we didn't have anyone to hang around with there was no because it was like a ritual to go to band practice kurt and me and a few other people were allowed to actually sit in the room with them and totally deafen ourselves listening to the melons and uh one night there one afternoon pig and kurt and i were taking acid and curt said well we should just go and [ __ ] our way into krober's house and we'll jam and pig played a little guitar at the time i didn't play anything and uh kurt walked to the front door and pounded on the door and dale's dad came out and he was known to have a few and he was really drunk and kurt said we're the band we got a jam and he just moved out of the way and led us back into the back room he was an old dude we went back there and we i played drums and kurt played guitar and pigs screamed obscenities yeah and we taped them all over krover's uh jimi hendrix tapes we filled them full of this horrible horrendous noise and i remember krober got back from tour and he was like really pissed at us who did that kurt wanted really nothing more than to be a member of the melvins when he was growing up he was never offered that job so he ended up creating his own band that was uh you know more melvin-esque maybe than the melvins themselves he tried out for the melvins and totally totally lost it and couldn't do anything and choked yeah but you know he got together with a novi and novi in high school god was just a one-man entertainer yeah he was no such was the class clown that was older he was really ran for a student body vice president at one point and uh i remember my sister saying stay away from that guy he ate rhododendrons well kurt had met chris novoselich in high school and so they met when kurt was about 15 or so um chris was one year older they really didn't become friends until kurt had dropped out of high school nova stellich had graduated he always sort of jokingly said later that he managed a lot of advanced finances because he was the only one the high school education uh which is true uh so they became fast friends uh you know probably in about 1986 or so their friendship really began to blossom um and uh you know the band began in about 87 88 it's still hard to know when the genesis of it actually is nova selich was kurt's oldest friend and his bass playing while it's not uh he's not a virtuoso on the bass but he is very musical in a way that reminded me an old fart from the boomer era of uh paul mccartney well at first they jam above and uh it would just be party time and kurt would play the drums sometimes and they'd play a half-assed version of hey hey we're the monkeys with chris on guitar and kurt playing drums and then they were trying to find a drummer nova select you know brought in a number of the other players in the band kurt also knew chad channing the original drummer aaron burkhart was a neighbor so people were sort of in and out of the band at that point for a while greg hopkinson played bass and they were called fecal matter with kroger on the drums and then they went to seattle to kurt's aunt's house to record a four-track demo and they decided that hoganson was a misogynistic racist redneck hick and so kurt played the bass too on that and that tape still there's copy of it somewhere [Music] what's in us [Music] in 1987 a friend of the band ryan agner was instrumental in helping the band towards their first steps towards stardom the band used to practice and eat at ryan's house and unlike the rest of the band he held down a stable job and i would come by chris and shelley's house on my way home from work and one day chris says hey kurt and i have got this band together so we went to this little house over on the east side aberdeen so anyway we wandered on in and it was pretty scary borrowed equipment and all sort of set up in this living room and i started playing and uh it was good from the beginning kurt rarely worked and had little money and so before too long we we got to be friends and whatnot and i worked and i was comfortable and i would cook and eat well and so i'd invite him over for dinner and of course then we'd talk more about music kurt felt that [Music] that there wasn't a lot of new territory to be discovered this music particularly for himself because he had made probably what he considered to be a relatively thorough study of music for her age he was more interested in the melody and the way its counterpoint with the rest of the song how it worked the grand scheme the total package that's what he was delivering did it rock did it get you the hook more oxygen more oxygen more oxygen [Music] the band carried on developing their underground punk style and for the first time seriously considered playing to an audience in 1987 ryan got the band their first gig by suggesting they play at a small party thrown by his friends tony pakula and jeff forrest the now legendary performance took place in the front room of tony and jeff's house in the nearby small town of raymond and i ran into tony one day and i said you know there's just these dudes that i discovered this band and uh they're cool man they got this stuff going on and uh you guys jam once in a while down here don't you you know friday night party you know strike up the band that kind of thing he's like yeah yeah we do that and uh so well we ought to get these guys to come down because the the way it played in my head was you know these guys rocks [Music] it was to all intents and purposes the first nirvana show they played to a crowd of a dozen mullet-headed metal-loving teenagers the trio performed a chaotic set including downer spank through and aero zeppelin tony and his friends were all there on that infamous night i remember sitting in there and thinking wow this is really different than anything that we've been listening to and i liked it but then you would hear comments from other people yeah you know because they wanted you know the heavy metal hair bands they wanted us up there was different and they they didn't appreciate the difference and but there was a lot of people that that did yeah yeah chris was really into his guitar he wanted the feedback and he kind of laid his guitar down and we would all just yeah that was a big plug in our ears a different thing was that feedback yeah their performance didn't benefit from acoustics i mean it was uh yeah yeah yeah the thing that struck me was chris's bass playing i mean i picked that up first and he he was just a phenomenal uh bass player i just thought wow he was really good and uh i mean as far as talent goes like i i could see those guys going somewhere but at the time it's like i said you know we all thought that you know it's just a little band coming to play kirk's voice kind of struck me as unusual too i i remember thinking about his voice and it wasn't it wasn't melodious it was it was just a good it was good and it was different from anything that i've heard before and i was appreciating that also if you run the reel forward and look at the sort of classic nirvana performance it was all there everything same thing he did that night was uh same show he put on four or five years later but he terrorized the sound waves that night [Music] totally anti-social i don't remember him speaking the whole night looking up making eye contact with anybody even most of the pictures you see the hair covering his face chris was a different story yeah yeah he was much more so absolutely like he was in to more of the shock trying to shock everyone he was he had vampire blood and he was putting it on him and duct tape over here yeah they were jumping on the furniture standing on the coffee table jumping on the couch laying the guitar down and having the feedback and they didn't start off like that it kind of started out a little bit mellow and i think the more they got into the beer the more that they got rambunctious and that's when they started getting really the style came out and after a while like the sort of music side of the night petered out and i started kind of making sure where everybody was and that things were okay and that's when i noticed that things were not okay the two camps had gotten into this sort of harassment mode where you know chris was belligerent and doing things kurt was trying to upset people with his verbal abuse and whatnot they didn't have a lot of respect for anyone's property not that it was anything special but yeah aaron came up to me and said it's time to go okay i think you're right the atmosphere that night had got to the point that it was time for them to go and i just remembered them all jumping in the back of this van or carpet truck or whatever it was there was no lights in the back of it it was like a no windows no windows u-haul truck or something and i just remember them all jumping in the back of that thing and slamming the door down and off they went and i think we all just kind of came in to survey the damage by that point in the grand scheme of things for many years it was not one of my uh greater moments you know the beginning of nirvana was a shaky ordeal for everybody involved [Music] at a local level the band's determination paid off slowly developing a loyal fan base in aberdeen and the surrounding area but life was still hard for kurt taking on many poorly paid jobs to support his music and living rough for many months to come the community world theater on 56th street and m in tacoma washington it uh jim may's operation there and it it fulfilled a relatively vital need for the the growth of nirvana as as a performance band and as uh and for our audience well the first time that i really went to see his band was right after they recorded the endino demo with krover they played a show in tacoma community world theater or whatever it was a little teeny dumpy place it probably used to be a porn theater and uh they played with this straight edge hardcore band and they were really good there was a lot of local talent at that time that was really phenomenal and i think people need to understand that nirvana were one of a dozen bands that really were bands that were on the rise in 88 and 89. and then these were these were important gigs i remember [Music] kurt actually worrying about you know his wardrobe what was he going to wear he kind of wanted to wear these funky disco shoes he thought it'd be funny or something you know and would pine over the set and set it up just so and and you know he these were this is a big deal this was uh to go up there and play in front of people was was it there was you know there was nothing no consideration to what would ultimately happen and uh and it was painful you know because a lot of times nobody show up i mean just being in the place was painful they wouldn't have the heat on or anything and you know it was it wasn't it was pretty primitive in there that was the proving ground for nirvana their live shows were really hit or miss and i think that it's really hard when a band has become so successful and so powerful all the stories become apocryphal the story all becomes they were fantastic the first time i saw them i knew they were genius and anybody that tells that story is probably making it up because there were very few people in the seattle music scene that thought they were great live i always thought they were better on record their live shows at least early on later on they became a better live band than they were on record i think the natural progression for any band wanting to break out of aberdeen at the time was to base themselves in the nearby town of olympia kurt had visited olympia during 1987 while acting as an unpaid roadie for the melvins at the time it was a hip college town with a reputation for being a hotbed of artists freaks and underground musicians kurt was keen to move in straight away it was another friend of the band slim moon who recognized their combined talent and arranged for their first gig in olympia becoming an ardent follower of the band i've seen a lot of great nirvana shows and the one that stands out for me was a show on halloween one year they just really went all out and just smashed the crap out of their guitars and and just really it just felt so explosive after they had played such a great just really awesome powerful music and then they just like went crazy at the end it was also about the time that nirvana played at chaos that's the little college radio there at evergreen state college in olympia that show was important because a lot of bootlegs were made it was virtually the first recorded nirvana ever made other than the recording that i have of the raymond show that recording made the rounds and set the set the stage for what would later be the buzz [Music] [Music] the band continued to play at parties and small venues in the olympia area during this time however their drummer aaron burkhart dropped out leaving curt and christ with the thankless task of finding a replacement but the duo managed to persuade dale crover from the melvins to fill in temporarily and in january 1988 drove up to reciprocal studios in seattle to record their first demo tracks the big break had come after a phone call from kurt to local rock legend producer jack endino having been impressed by the chemistry formed by kurt crist and the already well-respected melvin's drummer endino agreed to record the band for a minuscule fee this resulted in the first tracks being recorded for the future nirvana album bleach i just got a phone call from a guy named kurt from aberdeen who said he was a friend of the melvins and he wanted to come up and record and he would have dale from the melvins playing drums with him and since i i held dale's drumming in very high regard i said yeah come on up let's do it you know how you know how much money do you want to spend how much time do you want to book i said well we've only got you know a few hundred dollars we just have time for one afternoon and we're just gonna record some songs and just mix them right on the spot as fast as we can you know you know you make a tape get some shows with it or whatever and he said well we don't really have a name yet we're still looking for a permanent drummer i said well whatever come on up so and that that led to the first um nirvana studio session which was january 23rd of 1988 [Music] [Music] chris and kurt had this sort of chemistry going where they just they just complimented each other very well it just seemed like a very strong if if young band and i really i something about kurt's voice really appealed to me i thought he had a very good rock scream kind of a raw throaty sort of it was a very enjoyable uh session i just liked it i thought it was good i thought they had some good good riffs you know some good rock songs kurt would come up with the song and chris would come up with the bass line uh that would sort of get that that sound that very distinct big simple to the points no beating around the bush baseline that he would come up with well i think that bleach for the most part is very much an album about kurt's circumstances at the time uh you know he's writing a lot of songs on that record that he'd been working on for several years so they're they're kind of his early sketchings um in my opinion there are a lot of songs on that record that that aren't as successful lyrically because i think kurt was so indebted to some of these lyrics that he'd crafted that he didn't feel like changing them a lot you know about a girl was kind of the odd song because it's sort of the melodic uh pop tune if you will and uh it sort of stuck out and kurt said you know i don't know if people will be ready for this song but i really want to do one pop song on this record so and i said i said hey you know i'm just the engineer here you know whatever i'll make it sound good you go ahead and for me about a girl which is such a simple song it's essentially about his girlfriend at the time and he said according to some of the friends that i interviewed his that he had listened to the beatles uh all day prior to writing that song and i think he it's very much sounds like a beatles song in terms of melody to me but the idea that he could write such a simple song you know i can see you anytime for free you know i mean uh it's it's a beautiful melody idea um i think with that song that was somewhat of a breakthrough for kurt because it was simplicity prior to that i think he was trying to write almost too complicated punk in rock songs they were able to afford one reel of half inch tape which was eight track tape it was about 33 minutes worth and they basically just filled up the tape with songs which wound up being about nine and a half songs and then once the tape had run out they said okay that's it let's do the vocals now so then they went back over the tape and he sang all the vocals in one take and then we mixed it and i said well do you mind if i give your tape to some people because i thought it was really good and some friends of mine would really enjoy hearing this so you know they said oh fine because we're just going to give cassettes out to people too we need to you know we want people to know about us so so i gave some tapes to people and one of them got to john poneman at subpop there's a reason why it doesn't say produced by jack and dino on the record because really i just engineered it i mean it was sort of produced by everybody or perhaps produced by nobody you know it's really almost a live document of what they were doing at the time i think indino was very important to creating that sound and partially because of the fact that he just got out of the way you know he he didn't try to stamp his individual artistic vision on it you know most of that tape we did actually wound up on the insisticide record in its original form i never had a chance to remix it of course it says produced by jack and dino on it so you know what it doesn't say is produced in about three hours but whatever it sounds okay i suppose [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] nirvana have always had a potted history with drummers with kurt and chris always striving for sonic perfection and often venting their fury at any performer not giving 100 this was exacerbated by kurt's own experience playing the drums for so long dale crover soon had to return to the melvins but recommended a local aberdeen drummer dave foster as a replacement after a problematic start however kurt decided dave was not up to the job and fired him leaving the band once again drummerless meanwhile jackendino had started passing the band's demo tapes around influential movers of the seattle rock scene jonathan poneman of seattle indie label subpop was impressed enough to add nirvana to the bill of their next sub-pop sunday showcase concert at seattle's tiny vogue club in june 1988 kurt and chris returned to reciprocal studios with new drummer chad channing to cut their debut single love buzz chad channing who was the drummer that was the longest drummer other than dave brawl uh was this little tiny short guy you know i mean i had some people describe him almost as an elf when i was working in my book and so the combination of him and kurt both these really short guys with really long hair it was it was a freak show it's a circuit scene this band you had two really short guys with long hair and you had this gigantic you know ogre of a guy almost that was taller than you could imagine um so they had quite a visual element and the sound that they created was not really what you expected they would create from their looks however they still didn't have a contract any money or indeed a fan base beyond a few kids in olympia who were gradually catching on to this increasingly intense young band they could tell something big was definitely stirring like most people producer steve fisk's first impressions were not that great yeah the first time i saw them i walked out on them i thought they were terrible but yeah they were trying to work the extra guitar player into the band and having a bad evening and and i was so up to here with all my friends screaming trees and everything you've got to see this band they're playing and they played in ellensburg the small town it's like they played at the at the community center and they they just had a bad night they weren't jerks they just really sucked and the pa was terrible and was hurting my ears and i said you know i think i'm 33 years old and i'm gonna go work on my own music right now instead of watch these guys suffer through a bad set you know just to say i saw nirvana but steve soon realized he'd seen the band on a bad day and was recommended to check them out again by enthusiastic fans and jonathan poneman from subpop and jonathan at subpop uh thought it would be nice for me to work with nirvana you know sort of after they did their bleach record being a son was probably where most of the work went and they were working on harmonies and trying to kind of maybe make that into kind of like a bigger sound you know we had a digital reverb that was sort of the trendy thing for the time period so i was showing them how to make the snare drum do the big kind of born in the usa thing or something well i think when kurt began to write about himself and his family another song from that era which steve fisk produced was been a son you know a song i think about his sister uh who in her gender struggles for identity uh when he began to turn to his own turf i think he really became a more powerful songwriter competition was really tough with a lot of young bands fighting for supremacy in those challenging early days nirvana performed better in the studio than live on the scene their reputation at first was not distinguished uh in performance they were not good performers until a couple years after at least a couple years after they began then they got good towards the end but uh they were not distinguished performers their their first performance at the vogue for instance uh which was attended by a very few distinguished seattle sinisters was not auspicious um it was on record that they were impressive and particularly cobain's songwriting gift was absolutely distinctive it was it was astounding i had listened to a number of records cut in seattle and nobody could match him it was a one-man phenomenon really uh at the start the seattle scene was kurt cobain after only 30 hours in the studio nirvana had finally managed to record enough material to release their first album taken from the bleach your works aids prevention poster bleach was released by subpop in june 89 with little ceremony and zero marketing spent nirvana found themselves on a series of ill-promoted west coast tours with other sub-pop stablemates mud honey and tad playing to tiny crowds sleeping on cold floors and virtually begging for food fruit didn't like the fact that subpop at the time mud honey was subpop's main project that was who they hyped to the ends of the earth he didn't like that i mean it's weird to even say it now because my time people a lot of people don't even know who my company is but at the time mud honey i remember kurt was the opening act on the lame fest more theater and tad and mud honey were up above him he didn't like that unsurprisingly the album bombed but salvation came from an unexpected corner subpop paid for a few british music journalists to fly over and witness the tour excited by what they had discovered a new musical next big thing buzz appeared in the uk music press ceremoniously labelled the seattle grunge scene they flew over who was that guy from melody maker from england everett true i think his name was or something like that he did a lot of hype in england so in britain all these subpop bands were supposedly huge mud honey and and things like that and so the kind of word of mouth kind of spread back to here and it made them bigger and bigger and then they were actually talking about yeah kurt's going to sign with geffen in truth nirvana were always a lot more pop than their sub pop hard punk colleagues but were happy for any exposure and julie went along with all the hype in some ways nirvana was actually one of the most unlikely bands to make it big partially because they came from aberdeen they weren't as tied into the seattle music scene and partially because by the music that they did it was a little bit different than some of the other bands they weren't quite as punk always they had more pop elements but of course that's what made them go huge because once you mix that pop element in and you can get ballads that can be on the radio like come as you are you suddenly have an album that's really a juggernaut [Music] [Music] nirvana continued to tour throughout 1990 which saw the departure of drummer chad channing as the band was developing its powerful sound kurt became dissatisfied with chad's style and commitment they wanted a far more powerful drum approach buzz osborne of the melvins introduced christ and kurt to a 21 year old drummer from virginia dave grohl from his first audition droll fitted in immediately hitting the drums with such ferocity that he would virtually break drum skins whenever he played this was more like it the jigsaw and the final nirvana lineup was now in place and history was about to be made they were never really great until dave paul joined the band because he was an incredibly strong drummer very loud and he could sing harmony beautifully he was a songwriter in his own right and the other thing to remember is that kurt cobain was a very delicate person his his mental health was always on the edge and he was kept creative by the efforts of his much more rooted friends who solved the everyday problems that would have overwhelmed him i mean washing his socks was something he couldn't handle and when he was rooming with dave craw groll handled it because as one of his friends said dave was raised in a van by wolves and so he could he could cope with life on the road and life in a band in a way that cobain could not i think by the time dave grohl joined the band in 90 the dynamics within the band began to shift a bit cobain became much more of a front man people wanted him to be the front man interviewers weren't as interested in talking to the other band members um it became more of the kurt show and i think it had run more as a democracy prior to that um part of that was just with success with success people demanded much more out of current when dave grohl joined the band things worked more smoothly partly because kurt didn't have to anymore throw himself in rage against the drum kit because he was no longer so dissatisfied with what the drum kit was putting out in concert he famously used to interrupt the show by smashing his guitar and then smashing up the drum set and it was because he was so angry at the the fact that the song that he had in his head was being ruined by a drummer that wasn't up to snuff as he saw it when debra joined the band the drummer most certainly was up to snow these were exciting times for nirvana and dave groll found himself touring england with the band literally weeks after joining them my senses is that uh many people perceive both knowledge and growl as fun-loving goofy guys because generally if there was an interview going on with kurt you would have one of them making you know putting fingers between his head or dancing around the background or that just sort of was the personality of the band that's been captured on video and certainly that was the way they were in concert very fun going let's just not take anything seriously but both of uh those players are very intelligent people and quite bright i like to describe dave as art garfunkel with balls imagine uh seriously he was the final element musically in in what made the band great and he was another stabilizing influence i think in uh the the psychology of the band and and the fact that it continued playing and you can see that right up uh until the the great uh mtv concert when at one point cobain is insecure about whether he can handle one of the songs and uh whether he should play the song solo or and and it was dave grohl who said go for it so i think that that uh it was that human uh interplay that helped make the band great musically growl was only with the band for their last you know few years um nova scelic and cobain really had about a 10-year relationship which you know was much deeper probably than anybody else kurt had ever dealt with in his life he probably was as close to chris as he was to anybody in 1990 kurt met courtney love for the first time at a concert in portland where the band were performing the two were immediately attracted to each other starting a tempestuous relationship that lasted for the next two years this finally led to marriage on a hawaiian beach in february 1992. six months later courtney gave birth to their daughter francis bean kurt and courtney's relationship was constantly tested to the limit with courtney often having to deal with the consequences of kurt's drug addiction depression suicide attempts and periods in drug rehab [Applause] [Music] by 1991 a huge buzz had built up around the band and after a massive record company bidding war nirvana signed with geffen records with this for the first time came money a new experience for the band and for kurt particularly this meant access to any drugs he desired [Music] nirvana were ensconced in sound city studios in la to record what would become one of the most important albums ever made there are only a handful of albums over the last 50 years that have really changed music never mind was to become one of them even by major level standards it was done fairly quickly uh and even on never mind from what i understand kurt probably didn't do more than one or two takes on any of the vocals what i think it came down to um i think butch vig was a little more meticulous about drum sounds uh about layering about you know he had a chance to see the band rehearse beforehand he had demos they basically spent more time on it and were more meticulous about the technical aspects of it i think performance wise the band probably didn't do anything terribly different in the studio from how they did bleach just they were a better band at that point and they you know they didn't have to do a whole album in three days they had a couple of weeks and again it's the fact that the songwriting was strong that makes it work like that uh it didn't need a lot of extra [ __ ] added to it so again butch just captured what they were about at the time and same way albini did later for the third record you know they've literally recorded it live and he did the vocals over and it was almost the same way we recorded bleach just you know albin's aesthetic is a little different from mine but uh he essentially did the same kind of job that i was trying to do on bleach which was just okay this is the band wants me to just capture what they're doing because they're so good at what they're doing they don't need a lot of production that's the funny thing about nirvana they were very good at what they were doing nobody really could produce them the timing of nevermind's release could not have been better the first single smells like teen spirit and its accompanying video were virtually on continual loop at mtv and radio stations across the world the album was a critical and commercial smash breaking records around the world and propelling nirvana to the top of both the rock and pop worlds by january of 92 his record was number one and he was a huge star so things changed almost overnight and uh but i don't think anyone could have predicted the level of success they had in some ways i don't think they even wanted that much success they wanted to be the biggest band in the world but they really didn't want the pressures the demands that came with that and so i think it surprised everybody it surprised occurred as much as anybody else there's this danger of revisionist talk where people claim that they always knew but if you go back to like the rolling stone review that that when rolling stones reviewed never mind the first time they called it basically a mediocre record you know you read number one now and they basically pretend that they always knew that nirvana was the most brilliant thing on the in on the planet you know after you know that nirvana left on tour to support never mind in 1991 with plans you know kurt talked about like i'm gonna take after this tour support this record i'm gonna take the money that i got and build a studio in olympia and he you know even had a building that he wanted to rent and then they just kept extending the tour and extending the tour and they never they never they basically never came back kurt's as a matter of fact his landlord evicted him for no for not coming back you know he didn't pay his rent he didn't move his stuff out and as i understand it his landlord just threw stuff out onto the street relentlessly toured and promoted nevermind in february 1993 the band hit the studio again this time to record tracks for their third album in utero for the first time nirvana were afforded the luxury of having as much time as they needed in the studio helmed by steve albini the session saw an altogether more thoughtful and experimental sound emerging i think in some ways that the last album that he made in utero is the most sophisticated in terms of the sound in terms of recording and uh in terms of the lyrics and and the the video for heart-shaped box i think could be considered uh his masterpiece i think because nova scots called it his last will and testament and it's an amazingly sophisticated and interesting piece of art personally i think in utero it's their best record uh artistically um and then you know again that record is almost start to finish about kurt it's autobiographical you know teenage angst has paid off well he begins you know talking about i mean this is his life it's not anyone else's it's too complicated to discuss i suppose but it is in some ways a portrait of his marriage originally this the song heart-shaped box was called a heart-shaped coffin i think courtney probably convinced him that that was a bit too downbeat for a description of a marriage and their marriage wasn't entirely downbeat he changed it to the heart-shaped box to celebrate the famous heart-shaped box that she gave him as a symbol of their love but it also expressed much more than that it was uh a a picture of his soul in the in in in the universe and uh it was a it was a portrait of the artist as a as a martyr and it was a beautiful rock and roll song uh it's it's i would say that's the the summation of his work but all the albums are worth listening to and i think they'll all last as a songwriter he found his groove when he began to write his own story and uh you know the shame is of course that we didn't get to see that story turn into maturity because i think there were a lot of great songs that he still had left [Music] [Music] in january 1994 following the inevitable commercial success of in utero nirvana started a recording session at robert lang studios in seattle the band recorded several songs including the now infamous you know you're right the one that's been in the the chords between courtney and and dave and chris and the attorneys you know you're right it was that song that we did here [Music] i like i say it it's just that song particularly really is a wonderful recording it just it went on really well here just they were so stoked the band from the tracks on that and some other tracks they did but that particular track got more attention from of course kurt's vocals were finished on that song tragically this was to be kurt's last time in a recording studio on the 8th of april 1994 he was found dead at his home in seattle a gunshot wound to his head and a gun by his side most of the material recorded at robert lang studios was subsequently withheld but in 2002 after many long legal wrangles a song from that session was finally released with many fans ecstatic to hear kurt's voice again i was one of the very first people to hear you know you're right other than the band members and i heard it a couple years into working on my book and i mean obviously that song was released last year and everybody got a chance to hear it but i assume that most people are going to have the same response when i heard it when i heard it what really surprised me is that was like i never thought i'd hear that voice again especially singing such a powerful emotionally latin song and i was almost in tears hearing it because i was just shocked that there was another great nirvana song that hadn't been released uh there was something about the way he sang that really moves me i think that kurt was able to put a lot of emotion in everything he did the impact of kurt cobain and nirvana on an unsuspecting world is still being felt as their musical influence even to this day continues to play a big part in contemporary rock and pop there are very few bands who simply change the face of music overnight so what will be their legacy and how should they be remembered i think nirvana should be remembered not for cobain's death but for the life of their music for the the the inspiration of his melodic gift for the extreme seriousness of his artistic enterprise uh for the the sense of play that he that he infused it with he was not by any means the most promising musician when things started out in the late 80s but he became the greatest and i think he will so remain [Music] in some ways i do look at his life and i see some level of heroism for the fact that he was able to take that pain of his childhood and is growing up and create art out of it most people that have that kind of inner pain sit in their la-z-boy recliner eat doritos watch television they don't do anything kurt took that pain and gave us a gift he gave us heart with it and to me that is in some ways even a way to admire him very few people are able to make those choices and be that courageous with their pain and so you know for that reason alone i admire his ability to take those kind of artistic risks yeah it was it was amazing feeling i was proud of him i i was happy for him and you know it's just fun to see someone that you're friends with be successful there they've been pegged as this band that changed the 80s to the 90s pretty much you know they've they knocked down all those barriers and you could just wear jeans and t-shirts and play guitars and they weren't all the glam rock stuff that they supposedly just pretty much took the bottom out of i think they'll always be remembered like that i used to think that it was going to end and people were going to stop they were going to be forgotten like kaja gugu or duran duran but now i'm pretty sure that they're they've got their place in history nirvana was was a band that connected with people the sensibilities i mean that whole uh beetles sort of get in there and hook them saying kurt was into that he knew how to do it like a master and none of the other bands had that going for him at that time they just happened to hit it right he had to hit the right tune just like uh glenn miller when he was getting his band ready what sold nirvana was nirvana they didn't he just had to hear him that's all you had to do you

Channel: Amplified - Classic Rock & Music History

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Keywords: full documentary, full episode, pop culture documentary, full length documentary, Amplified, amplified channel, music, pop culture, culture channel, documentaries, music documentaries, film documentary, channel 4, tv documentary, biographies, documentary movies - topic, nirvana documentary full, nirvana, documentary, kurt cobain, grunge, dave grohl, courtney love, krist novoselic, nevermind, cobain, seattle, nirvana (musical group), kurt cobain biography, the story of nirvana

Id: Nm_QmReOeRw

Length: 68min 45sec (4125 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022