Kerrang Radio

The 24th September marks the 20th anniversary of the one of the most important albums of recent times - Nirvana’s Nevermind. From the era-defining music to its iconic artwork, Nevermind is fully entrenched in rock folklore and still sounds as vital as ever today. To celebrate the landmark occasion we’ve collated 20 meaty facts about the album for you to feast your eyes upon:

1. Over the past two decades Nevermind has shifted an incredible 30million copies worldwide including 10million in the band’s native America. It’s one of just 28 albums to surpass the 30million sales mark globally. In terms of rock music only AC/DC’s Back In Black, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell, The Eagles’ Greatest Hits, Led Zeppelin IV, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper & 1 and (somewhat depressingly) Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill have sold more.

2. In 1990 when work on Nevermind was still in its embryonic stages it went under the title of Sheep. It’s claimed that Kurt came up with the moniker as a cheeky swipe at the potential buyers of the record, however, Krist Novoselic later said that it summed up the band’s cynicism towards the Gulf War. Ultimately, Sheep was ditched in favour of Nevermind; a title with a purposeful disregard for grammar that served as a metaphor for Nirvana’s defiant attitude.

3. As noted in Michael Azzerad’s 1993 biopic Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, DGC Records were concerned about the cover image of 3-month-old Spencer Elden and prepared an alternative sleeve censoring the baby’s penis. However, the label’s idea was shelved when Kurt said he would only compromise if the covering sticker said ‘If you are offended by this you must be a closet paedophile.’

4. Despite the record label abiding by Kurt’s wishes, several major US supermarket chains - including the giants Wal-Mart and K-Mart – initially refused to stock the album due to the artwork. Eventually, however, they relented due to commercial pressure and stocked the Nevermind with a promotional sticker.

5. It may be one of the iconic images in rock history but the parents of cover star Spencer Elden were paid a mere $200 flat fee for the photo. Originally DGC Records planned to use a stock photograph of a swimming baby but when that came with a hefty price tag of $7,500 they decided to hire the services of photographer Kirk Weddle. Upon Weddle’s persuasion, his friends Renata and Rick Elden agreed to allow their son to be photographed underwater and the rest, they say, is history.

6. Nevermind isn’t the only record that Spencer Elden has appeared on the cover of. In 1993, aged 12, Spencer modelled for the sleeve of Skinny Puppy member cEvin Key’s solo album The Dragon Experience. Spencer has also recreated the Nirvana sleeve on two separate occasions – once for the Rolling Stones’ Nevermind 10th Anniversary edition in 2001 and the other for a photoshoot in 2008.

7. Although he isn’t credited on the sleeve notes, former Nirvana drummer Chad Channing does in fact appear on Nevermind providing the minimal cymbals on Polly. The recording dates back to sessions at producer Butch Vig’s Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin in April 1990 shortly before Channing left the band. Of the five songs from that early session that made it onto Nevermind, Polly is the only one that didn’t get reworked with new sticksman Dave Grohl at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California.

8. Nevermind was made on a relative shoestring budget of just $65,000. As Nirvana’s debut Bleach had only sold 40,000 copies in the US in the two years up to September 1991, their new imprint DGC didn’t foresee in their wildest dreams that Nevermind would be such a phenomenal success. According to Nathaniel Wice’s book How Nirvana Made It, DGC hoped for sales around the 250,000 mark in parallel with Sonic Youth’s Goo – it went on to sell 40 times that number in the States alone.

9. Kurt isn’t the sole voice on Nevermind as the opening lines of Territorial Pissings are in fact sung by Krist: a high-pitched, purposefully dorky interpretation of The Youngbloods’ 1967 song Get Together. The vitriolic song is a 2 minute 25 second lambasting of macho men with Kurt taunting his subject “Just because you're paranoid /Don’t mean they're not after you.” Kurt’s feminism also comes to the fore (something which surfaces greatly on In Utero) with the brilliant line “Never met a wise man / If so it was a woman”.

10. Kurt didn’t want Come As You Are to be released as a single as he was wary that the main riff bore a resemblance to Killing Joke’s 1984 track Eighties. David Goldberg, head honcho of Nirvana’s management company Gold Mountain, explained in 2008: “Kurt was nervous because it was too similar to a Killing Joke song… and, he was right, Killing Joke later did complain about it.” Various reports have claimed that Killing Joke threatened legal action against Nirvana but ultimately this never materialised.

In a 2004 article for The Big Takeover magazine, journalist Jack Rabid pointed out that The Damned’s 1982 cover of the Captain Sensible song Life Goes On also "features the exact same, extremely unique riff as both 'Eighties' and 'Come as You Are'" thus negating Killing Joke’s claims. We’ll let you decide:
Nirvana: Come As You Are
Killing Joke: Eighties
The Damned: Life Goes On

11. In 2005, Nevermind was inducted into the National Recording Registry; a coveted list of sound recordings that “are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States." Since the archive’s inception by the Library of Congress at the turn of the millennium there have been 350 recordings submitting ranging from Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech to The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds to Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man” lines when he first landed on the moon.

12. Nevermind is the sixth greatest record of all time. Well that is if you want to believe aggregator website besteveralbums.com which ranks records based on the results of over 2,700 different ‘greatest album charts’ across a variety of magazines, websites, radio stations and other media outlets. In Utero sits at number 41, Unplugged In New York is at number 89 while Bleach is down at #344. In case you’re wondering, according to the site’s algorithm, Radiohead’s OK Computer is the greatest album ever.

13. Contrary to widespread media reports this summer, Facebook did not ban the Nevermind artwork from their site. Various publications alleged that Facebook withdrew the image as it violated their Terms of Use due to Spencer Elden’s nudity; however, the social network site strongly denied this, saying in a statement to NME: “The photo on the cover of 'Nevermind' album does not actually violate Facebook’s terms. Facebook does allow photos of naked children 'that are clearly unable to stand on their own' in a non-sexual situation – so in other words, babies. Why? Put it this way – if a parent wanted to share some photos of a newborn with their grandparents, we wouldn’t want them to not be able to share them on Facebook.”

14. Two tracks on Nevermind had different working titles. A live favourite since 1989, Stay Away was originally known as Pay To Play while Breed went under the rather fetching moniker of Imodium.  As an aside, On a Plain features two lines ("I got so high, I scratched 'til I bled" and “Black sheep got blackmailed again”) from another song called Verse Chorus Verse that was performed live and rehearsed during the Nevermind sessions.

15. Polly was penned by Kurt after he read a newspaper article about a girl (Polly) who was abducted in Tacoma, Washington state in 1987 and tortured by her captor. Despite the horrors of her ordeal, she managed to gain the trust of the man by pretending she enjoyed the experience and eventually managed to escape when he let his guard down and stopped for petrol. Inspired by Polly’s immense bravery, the lyrics in Kurt’s song directly allude to the ordeal: “She caught me off my guard / It amazes me, the will of instinct”. The song is not about 12-year-old American murder victim Polly Klaas whose sickening case gained blanket media attention. She died two years after the song’s release.

16. It’s no secret that Kurt was a fervent admirer fan of the Pixies, in fact he repeatedly stated in interviews that Nirvana’s career was indebted to them. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1993, Kurt admitted that Smells Like Teen Spirit was the band’s attempt at “trying to rip off the Pixies” in particular Doolittle’s closing track Gouge Away. Elucidating on the similarities, Kurt added: “We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard." Have a listen to the two below:
Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
Pixies - Gouge Away

17. Several songs on Nevermind were written in the wake of Kurt’s breakup with Tobi Vail. In interviews Krist has said that Lounge Act references the relationship’s demise with the line "I'll arrest myself, I'll wear a shield" alluding to the K Records shield tattoo Kurt had on his left arm to impress Vail. Elsewhere, ‘Drain You’ opens with "One baby to another said 'I'm lucky to have met you’” – words Vail apparently said to Cobain - and later contains the lyrics “"It is now my duty to completely drain you" hinting at the exhausting relationship. Some lyrics on Lithium were also changed after the separation.

18. Completely unintentionally on Kurt’s part, Smells Like Teen Spirit is circuitously named after a women’s deodorant brand. Kurt took the title from a line of graffiti his friend Kathleen Hanna had written on his bedroom wall – “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” – in reference to his then girlfriend Tobi Vail’s anti-perspirant of choice. Unaware of the brand, Kurt thought that the slogan nicely surmised the lyrical content of the song and used it. Sales of Teen Spirit duly rocketed when the song hit the big time and by 1992 it was reportedly used by a quarter of girls in the US.

19. The abrasive hidden track at the end of Nevermind 10 minutes after Something In The Way finishes is called Endless, Nameless. The track doesn’t have a transparent meaning – in fact that band themselves have admitted that some songs have no meaning at all – however the decipherable lyrics have negative connotations including “go to hell”, “death”, “violence”, “crime”, “death” and “die”. Due to an apparent mix-up early pressings of ‘Nevermind’ didn’t come with the bonus song.

20. The monkey on the back cover of Nevermind goes by the name of Chim Chim and is named after the chimpanzee that appeared in Kurt’s favourite cartoon, Speed Racer. Behind Chim Chim is a collage created by Kurt featuring raw beef, images from Dante’s Inferno and somewhat bizarrely pictures of diseased vaginas lifted from medical magazines. If you look really hard there’s also an obscured picture of KISS at the top of the collage.

The 20th Anniversary edition of Nevermind is released digitally and in a deluxe and super-deluxe format on Monday 26th September.

In Bloom: The Nirvana Nevermind Exhibition runs at the Loading Bay Gallery on Brick Lane, London until Sunday 25th September.

Photos: Steve Double
Tony Mottrom / Iconicpix

Tags: Nirvana | Nevermind | Kurt Cobain | Dave Grohl | Krist Novoselic |