Guitar World Presents Nirvana and the Grunge Revolution

And it’ll look like something from the Fifties

know that some day, after this Seattle-scene thing is just completely dead and buried and the most unhip thing in the world—which will happen—at some point in my forties, there’s gonna be a resurgence and they’re going to start playing all our old videos again

Everybody loves us/we’re getting pretty old/can’t hold a regular job/long live rock and roll!” Classic! [laughs]

I was in a bohemian photography stage, you know?” Cobain later said. “If you look real close, there’s also a picture of Kiss, in the back, standing on a slab of beef.”

One day Dave and I were sitting around watching a documentary on babies being born under water,” said Cobain in his Australian radio interview. “I thought that was a really neat image, so we decided, ‘Let’s put that on the album cover.’ Then when we got back a picture of a baby underwater, I thought it would look nice [to add] a fish hook with a dollar bill on it. And so an image was born.”

I know they were getting a big kick out of staying there because the band Europe was staying next to them. That was the band that had a big hit in the Eighties with ‘The Final Countdown.’ The guys in Europe would all go sit out with their girlfriends by the pool everyday. And I remember Chris and Dave and Kurt making fun of them. They were not big Europe fans.”

“A friend of mine and I were goofing around my house one night. We were kinda drunk, and we were writing graffiti all over the walls of my house. And she wrote, ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.’ Earlier on, we’d been having this discussion about teen revolution and stuff like that. And I took [what she wrote] as a compliment. I thought she was saying that I was a person who could inspire. I just thought it was a nice little title. And it turns out she just meant that I smelled like that deodorant [called Teen Spirit]. I didn’t even know that deodorant existed until after the song was written.”

Just because I say ‘I’ in a song doesn’t necessarily mean it’s me,” Cobain later commented. “A lot of people have a problem with that. It’s just the way I write, usually—taking on someone else’s personality or character. I’d rather just use someone else’s example, because, I dunno, my life is kinda boring. So I take stories from television, and things I’ve read and heard.”

Half of the songs on Nevermind were written at the time of Bleach, but didn’t make it onto the album,” Cobain told journalist Roy Trakin. “So there really isn’t an obvious change. We’ve always been fans of pop music.”

Our music, especially on this album, is so slick-sounding. A few years ago, I would have hated our band, to tell you the truth.”