Reflecting on Nirvana 20 Years Later

After much prodding I finally told the barista that I’m here tonight toggling between writing a book about economics and another about my time in the record business. When she mentioned the Foo Fighters I reminded her that tomorrow is the 20^th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. I said, “I know I don’t look old enough for this to be true, but I was working in the business when the album came out.” Then I grabbed a table and set out to reach my goal of another 2,000-word evening.

1991 was a horrible year. After the alleged “war” with Iraq failed to revive the economy, proving once and for all that the “war is good for the economy” theory is total bullshit. I was in my fourth year in the sales department at a Connecticut distributor that sold compact discs to independent record stores, a job I backed into at age 21 with no college degree but an encyclopedia-like memory of popular music. I started there in 1988 in a 20-by-20 boiler room of a dozen salespeople and the computer guy. By 1991, we were in a 200,000 square foot facility and our sales force had tripled.

We were big players in the business. Because we had first contact with thousands of record stores, he major labels were happy to make the 50 mile drive north from Manhattan to pitch us on their latest no-talent ass clowns. Few of them ever did anything. And the ones who weren’t marketed proved to be the artists with hit records.

That year we planned for the most anticipated album of my tenure – the new Guns n Roses, which was rumored to be a two CD set. Rumors that it was complete and ready for shipment surfaced in the summer, and we finally learned it would be two individual records called Use Your Illusion 1 and Use Your Illusion 2.

I think ultimately we bought 50,000 of each for the initial release. We staged them at two opposite corners of the warehouse to ensure there would be no mispicked orders. Even our smallest stores ordered this release by the box lot. And at the end of the day, we had sold through about half our inventory.

About a month earlier, I drove with my co-worker Tom to Toad’s Place in New Haven for a show. We were both on the guest list, but I don’t recall the act. We talked about the upcoming GnR album and I was of course ranting about how much I hated them as a band and was hoping the record would be a stiff. But I vividly recall him saying “if the industry didn’t need it so bad, I’d be pulling for it to flop.”

Use Your Illusion was released on September 17, 1991, a week before Nevermind. Both albums were on the same label*. Nobody has marked the anniversary of Use Your Illusion’s release because literally a week later, Guns n Roses were yesterday’s news.

Because every release had a Tuesday street date, Mondays were our busiest days of the week. Wednesdays were the slowest. Thursdays were second busiest so we could get orders into the stores for the weekends. We typically covered the following week’s releases on Fridays, put those orders on hold, add to them on Monday, and start the cycle over again. By the middle of that week, maybe the day after Use Your Illusion hit the streets, my accounts began asking when the Nirvana album was coming out. For months I had one account asking me for Nirvana's "Bletch" album because that's what he had written on his special order sheet.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” had hit the radio two weeks earlier and, using a term from 15 years hence, had gone viral.

It was on college radio, MTV, and some classic rock stations had begun playing it. I heard it on WXCI, the local college station in northern Fairfield County and as a wannabe A&R man thought, “if it gets to the right outlets, this is a hit if I’ve ever heard one.” Personally I had spent much of 1991 in the recording studio with my own projects trying to craft the perfect pop/alternative/crossover single. But by then, Nirvana had already done it.

We must have ordered about a thousand units in time for Friday’s preorder and by the end of the day our buyers had already quadrupled the order in time for Monday. I don’t recall what that Monday was like. We were all still pretty hungover from Guns n Roses week. And while I liked the Nirvana track that was hitting the radio, and I could sense the excitement that was brewing over Nevermind, I was more excited that week for two albums that would get considerably more headphone time in my world over the next six months. Primal Scream’s Screamadelica and St. Etienne’s Foxbase Alpha were also released the same day as Nevermind and those two records rose to the top of my personal chart supplanting Julian Cope’s Peggy Suicide, which still remains one of my favorite albums to this day.

Nevermind was released on a Tuesday. That Thursday the band played at The Moon in New Haven. I was on the guest list but didn’t go because my friend Danny and I had plans to take our girlfriends out to the Hamptons for the weekend. We left on Thursday night, and debated whether to go to the show or get an early start on the three hour drive, we opted for the vacation. I figured in a year or so I’d be seeing Nirvana at a small venue like Toad’s Place, or they’d probably stop by the distributor some time in the next year.

So I missed the show, although we did have a great weekend in the abandoned Hamptons flying kites during the day and having bonfires on the Atlantic beach in the crisp autumn air.

My brother, recently relocated to California, had been following the Subpop scene for a while. Of the many promo copies of Nevermind I received, several found their way out there. The first week of January they played Saturday Night Live. I recall calling my brother, this was before email, to say that when the next copy of Billboard comes out Nirvana would have the No. 1 album. He was shocked. I said there’s also a great write-up about them in The New York Times.

There’s an interesting phenomenon about this time in the music business. Prior to the summer of 1991, the Billboard charts were essentially paid for. The labels wanted an album or single to chart, they’d fax “reporting priorities” to all who reported sales, including many of my accounts. But that summer, Billboard switched to using Soundscan, which was a real-time automated system for reporting every CD sale based on barcodes. Suddenly, the charts were far more reflective of what was actually being sold. Nevermind was one of the first great success stories of this new, more accurate charting.

Cobain was an anomaly of a songwriter. His tunes did something none before or since had done. Here comes the science. For most songs with which we are familiar, the key is typically the first chord of any verse. A song in E-minor will start with the E-minor chord. Cobain’s were out of phase. In his songs the third chord was typically the root. This is most obvious in songs like “Heart Shaped Box.” I noticed it almost immediately.

I went at least a decade without listening to Nirvana mostly because it was too sad. For me it’s akin to watching film of President Kennedy knowing in many ways it was all for naught. I had sold off all but one of my Nevermind promo copies, and as me and the wife split up our belongings in the divorce, I left the Nirvana behind and took Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? because I knew how much she loved that album. Eventually I just torrented all their stuff and now it’s permanently in my library. Their two major label albums are better to me then they were back then. These things have stood the test of time the same as Harvest, Who’s Next and Dark Side of the Moon.

As someone the same age as Kurt Cobain, someone who loved playing, writing and performing music, I remain saddened by his loss and ultimately how Nirvana ended. I know his death at the height of their career has made them legendary. Had he lived there’s no saying what would have become of him or the band. Knowing all I know about music, the business, and people, my best guess says that Cobain would have been the American version of Paul Weller – a terrific, talented songwriter and performer who burst onto the scene with tremendous impact then faded into the background. He never seemed like a guy comfortable with the stardom. He was more like Bob Dylan than he was like his idol John Lennon. Whoever he was or could have been, thanks for the memories and rest in peace, buddy.

*technically Guns n Roses were on Geffen Records and Nirvana were still signed to Subpop, but Nevermind was the property of DGC Records. DGC stood for David Geffen Company.

That’s Entertainment

You’re on vacation with the family that raised you for the past several decades. They only know what they knew. Beyond passing on their DNA, they’ve also passed on their conditioning – a pattern for which you spend nearly every ounce of energy to spare the next generation. But it’s nearly impossible.

Despite the stupid jokes of “needing a vacation to recover from your vacation” or the bitter irony of the scrambling and stressing your system to simply go on vacation, you realize it really is the same amount of work. You’re doing the same things, reinforcing the same habits, only this time it’s with a pool, a spa, lots of restaurants, and immigrants cleaning up after you.

Instead of going to the office, executing other people’s ideas, you replace that time temporarily by pissing away your savings on boat rides, amusement parks, restaurants and the occasional slot machine. At the end of each day, you return to your temporary home for some opium of the masses – television.

Your family was conditioned to consume, but they were also conditioned to be entertained. The more cynical among us call it “programmed.” Television, radio and the media do not exist to entertain or inform, they exist to program us. Just as every inch of the planet is owned and paid for, just as every moment in our lives has a price to it, just as every item we encounter was worked for and sold, nearly every second of your life you are being sold something.

When you’re not being blasted with blatant advertisements, you’re being sold images. Every second of television is promoting either a style or a fantasy. You drive, surrounded by other cars, each with focus-grouped logos – Ford, Chevy, Cadillac, Toyota. Many are drenched with stickers proclaiming political preferences or half-baked opinions. Their license plates, a further reminder that we are all cataloged, are wrapped in brackets advertising the dealer who sold the car. When you go to the grocery, to buy life’s necessities, your shopping buddies are wearing logoed apparel. They paid money to advertise clothing lines for Ed, Eddie, Aero and Old Navy.

These are the system’s little minions.

So when you go on vacation, it’s just an extension of this. And why be surprised when you’re sharing downtime with those who raised you. They don’t know it, but this is all they know. Your entire world is a casino. An amusement park. A billboard.

All you know is distraction, which leads to programming, which leads to consumption. You know that anything that makes you money is good, regardless of whether you care about it, identify with it, or believe in it. You know this because you’ve never known anything else. That’s what they taught you. Earn money and buy leisure.

Get the Lead Out

or How The Medical Establishment Turned A 7 Year Old Boy Into A Dope Fiend

Next week I get the last of my lead fillings replaced. For most of my life these toxic placeholders have stood as daily reminders of my sweet, dreamy childhood, filled with sugar and drugs. Never mind these could have redistributed the weight in my mouth causing my jaw to never shut properly; that could be simply explained by the theory that kids from fucked up families (read, “Catholic”) often fall victim to TMJ.

I must have been seven; couldn’t have been much older. My afternoons were spent at my retired grandmother’s house downing boxes of Drake’s cakes while watching The Flintstones, Bugs Bunny and Gilligan’s Island on New York’s then independent Channel 5. (Later it would become the first Fox affiliate.) It was the precursor to my becoming a latchkey kid after my grandmother’s passing. By the time that happened when I was eleven, I had replaced the sweets with weed and the reruns with headphones.

All the processed sugar had a predictable outcome – cavities. I was told I set a record with eighteen cavities in nine teeth. Nobody’s sure why I hadn’t learned to use a toothbrush yet.

The memories are patchy at best. It seemed like I spent the entire year in that chair, as if the bus dropped me off at his home office just down the block. I was like the kid with a dog bite who had to get the dreaded rabies shot every day for two weeks. We were told back then if you got rabies you had to get daily shots with a twelve inch needle into your stomach – that was the suburban myth but nobody ever verified it.

My fate was worse. Countless hours numbed up on Novocain and nitrous while this sadist drilled into my skull only to replace the holes with poisonous mercury and…wait. Nitrous. Holy Christ that shit was good.

Years later as all us neighborhood kids traded holes in our teeth for holes in our individual psyches, we all disclosed the same story of our neighborhood dentist. Even my older siblings had the same experience in that chair.

I don’t know if this guy had a strong mixture going, whether he was liberal in handing it out, or if it was just the fact that I was seven years old and all but fifty pounds. But I can say for sure that my first out of body experience happened in his chair, while he drilled away at my nine rotting teeth.

There is one distinct memory of floating down the hall, into the waiting room and looking at the people sitting there reading magazines. I was on the ceiling. This was a seven-year-old’s hallucination. This was where it started.

My friends told similar stories years later. After I moved away, the poor guy was in a horrible accident. In the house off of which was his dental practice, he got too close to the open flame of the furnace with some flammable tile remover. The furnace exploded, putting him into a coma from which he’d never recover.

So next week the lead will be drilled out of my head and flushed into the city sewers two thousand miles from where they we put into my skull, replaced with a modern silicone mixture that will no longer weigh down my jaw (and last until my own death). They serve as the last remnants of his craft; a dental career tragically cut short by a horrific accident. But it was this dentist who, nearly a decade after Lennon sang it, taught me how to “turn off [my] mind, relax and float downstream…”