The almost ‘Nevermind’ baby - a girl.
“I went to this school where they teach babies to swim and offered $50 to bring their kids to try out and $200 if we picked them as a model. This one girl was like a machine — couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, but she would just motor around underwater. I have no idea at all who the girl was or where she is now. I’d like to know what happened to that chick.” - Kirk Weddle (Photographer)
“The first time Kurt and I slept together was at a Days Inn in Chicago, we were having our first postcoital moment, and we’re watching MTV and the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video came on. I pulled away from him because it was his video, his moment, he was the king of the fucking world, he put his arm around me and pulled me closer. Which was symbolic, like, I’m letting you into my life. That really endeared him to me,” - Courtney Love.
The Record - Kurt Cobain talks about the songs on ‘Nevermind.’
Smells Like Teen Spirit: “My generation’s apathy. I’m disgusted with it. I’m disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism, and all those other isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.”
In Bloom: “Reproduction.”
Come As You Are: “An old-fashioned love song coming down in three-part harmony.”
Breed: “Getting into Middle America. Marrying at age 18, getting pregnant, stuck with a baby - and not wanting it.”
Lithium: “People who are secluded for too long go insane and as a last resort they often use religion to keep alive. In the song, a guy’s lost his girl and his friends and he’s brooding. He’s decided to find God before he kills himself. It’s hard for me to understand the need for a vice like that but I can appreciate it too. People need vices.”
Polly: “Rape.”
Territorial Pissings: “In the animal kingdom, the male will often piss in certain areas to claim his territory, and I see macho men reacting towards sex and power in the same way. I’d like to see these lost souls strung up by their balls with pages of scum manifesto stapled to their bodies.”
Drain You: “Almost all of the songs on the album are about love - or confusion, which usually is the result of love. Outcries of confusion about love and not understanding relationships, not just with your mate but with anybody, with yourself, with animals, etc.”
Lounge Act: “Love, problems.”
Stay Away: “Bitching and complaining.”
On A Plain: “Love again.”
Something In The Way: “Love - plain and simple.”
“It’s such a cliche thing to say: ‘Once we’re not having fun anymore we’re just going to quit.’ Everyone says that. It happens when you reach a certain age. But there’s still people like Neil Young. There’s still a handful of people like that who’ve never lost their sights. To mature, to me, to use examples of other bands, is to wimp out. To put up an image that isn’t sincere anymore. That’s why I hope to destroy my career before it’s too late. Before I look ridiculous. There are plenty of things I would like to do when I’m older.” - Kurt Cobain.
“I had a shitty life till I was about 17. I sat in my room for 90 per cent of the time. I’d go home after school, play my guitar and listen to music. The States seemed so big to me that I thought I’d never leave the region. At a younger age, everything seemed so simple and easy, I thought I could be President. By the age of nine, I pretty much gave up any idea of ever even surviving the age of 21 because I felt so completely alienated. I probably alienated myself more than the other way round. I was always trying find someone who liked art or music, but it was always sports.” - Kurt Cobain.
Someone came up with the idea of doing a Nirvana song with PJ Harvey. Kurt loved her and we love her and we thought, ‘Yeah, what would we do?’ I said: ‘God, what if we were to do ‘Milk It’ from ‘In Utero’ with Polly singing?’ We all looked at each other like, ‘Woah, that would be amazing…’ and then she couldn’t do it!”
“I know a lot of people who are simpletons, y’know? They’re very simple, they can enjoy their lives and be totally happy and secure just watching sports on television and having a beer every once in a while, so, I’ve always felt too complicated, so I envied those people. I’m not saying that I’m smarter than those people, it’s just that I’m too sensitive. I wish sometimes that I could just enjoy the simple things in life, and just forget about everything else.” - Kurt Cobain, 1993.
![“Kurt was an artist [laughs] - he was always expressing himself. He would do these Scooby-Doo cartoons, he lived in this apartment for a while and he defaced the hallway with this pornographic Scooby-Doo. It was like penises and Scooby and Shaggy [laughs] - it was like really, really bad. It was well done, like it was Shaggy from Scooby-Doo! He was an amazing illustrator, very talented.” - Krist Novoselic.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/40fff349df3306342c89a2e3c73cead9/tumblr_mjgl1ndNia1qir6ydo1_500.jpg)
“Kurt was an artist [laughs] - he was always expressing himself. He would do these Scooby-Doo cartoons, he lived in this apartment for a while and he defaced the hallway with this pornographic Scooby-Doo. It was like penises and Scooby and Shaggy [laughs] - it was like really, really bad. It was well done, like it was Shaggy from Scooby-Doo! He was an amazing illustrator, very talented.” - Krist Novoselic.
Interviewer: “You guys are known, actually, as being a “SubPop band. What do you think of that?”
Kurt Cobain: “Well, when someone walks up to me and says, “You’re my favorite SubPop band,” I think, geez, we’re you’re favorite out of five bands? What about the rest of the country? I don’t know. It just scares me. I wonder whether they like us because we’re a SubPop band or because we’re ourselves.”
Interviewer: “So, what’s your objective as a band?”
Kurt Cobain: “To write really good music, to write the best music we possibly can. That comes before anything else; it comes before philosophy, image or playing live. It’s always been the main point. Just songs.”
The band gets rudely interrupted by a giant Cockroach which the interviewer promptly stomps into the pavement.
Interviewer: “I hate those motherfuckers!”
Chad: “You can freeze those things, then put them into water and they come back to life.”
Krist: “You can take a fly and put it into the refrigerator for a minute or two until it gets really slow, then you take it out and get a hair and tie it around it and when it comes back to life you’ll have it on a leash!”
Kurt: “We won’t pull our hair out, we’ll just tie a fly onto the end of each hair.”
Jason: “It will be kinda like GBH, but more like a Van Der Graft Generator effect.”
Interviewer: “But when you head bang you’ll smash them all together.”
Krist: “Then they’ll all calm down for a minute.”
Kurt: “Yeah but they only live for like 3 days.”
Krist: “That’s only some flies, some of them live a little longer.”
Interviewer: “4 days.”
Jason: “I had a fly die in my hand once.”
Interviewer: “So what kind of a name is Nirvana for a kick ass rock and roll band?”
Jason: “It has a nice ring to it.”
Krist: “It does you know, it’s a real effective name. There’s two other bands named Nirvana. Nirvana means..”
Kurt: “Freedom from pain and suffering in the external world.”
Krist Novoselic: “Maybe the next record will be the one where we can judge how much impact we’ve actually made.”
Kurt Cobain: “Yeah, but we know that at least 50 per cent of people who like us now aren’t going to like our next record if it has a lot of abrasive, inaccessible songs on it. If they do, man, that proves our theory that you can shove anything down the mainstream’s throat and they’ll eat it up.”
