1. NIRVANA REGULARLY SWAM WITH SEA LIONS
Kurt Cobain was a notorious swimmer. At home his walls were studded with 2nd and 3rd place trophies and ribbons from competitions he had entered as a boy. Fuelled by his love for the ocean, competition and big eyes, Kurt instigated a routine of swimming with sea lions, and in typical lead-singer histrionics, all but forced the other two members of Nirvana to attend. In 1993 Novoselic, clearly numb from his experience said, “I got pulled out by a riptide and something poked out at me, it was a sea lion”. Friends later remarked that the most prosaic expression of Cobain’s sea lion obsession came in the form of the Jackie O sunglasses he became famous for.
2. KURT COBAIN WAS BORN MARCH 1, 1964
Kurt Cobain was essentially made twice. The session that began in March 1964 with man-mountain Andre the Giant at Wishkah, Washington, was remarkably similar to the session Cobain’s mother had in February 1967 with Donald in Aberdeen. Andre the Giant made several parts of Cobain from bits of straw, safety pins and homemade glue, five of which ended up on Cobain, though most were new versions of those initial ideas. The major difference between the Wishkah sessions and those parts made in Aberdeen was the inclusion of wool. So while most of Kurt was made in ’67, his genesis really began three years earlier.
3. ‘FRANCES FARMER WILL HAVE HER REVENGE ON SEATTLE’ WAS WRITTEN ABOUT FRANK FORMER
A common fallacy regarding this track from the Nevermind follow up In Utero is that it relates to lobotomised actress Francis Farmer, born in 1913. In fact the name is a corruption of a secret brethren’s moniker, Frank Former. A nudist and socio-political maleficent, Frank Former headed up the controversial SAD group, acolytes of which were called ‘a SAD’, though often dropping the indefinite article. Cobain’s name appears on a register for SAD (Seattleites Against Disinterest), whose activities included, ‘walks through places of interest’ and ‘learning about interesting things that may or may not be true to learn about the world and which you didn’t really need to know anyway but may just cheer you up’, SAD were a public education charity working in advantaged homes around Washington, a group Cobain obviously found some comfort in. His secret work with SAD was international news, yet no one seemed to notice its relevance.
4. NIRVANA ORIGINALLY MADE ‘SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT’ ON A ZITHER TO PROVE IT WASN’T A ROCK SONG
Nirvana first recorded ‘Teen Spirit’ on a zither at a rehearsal, a recording that was tragically lost and so will not appear on the forthcoming Nevermind boxset. But even though the band liked the riff, no one in the group knew it was a rock song. Butch Vig said he knew it was one the moment he heard it in early ’91. But the real reason Nirvana started recording their demos on a zither, according to Grohl, was because they kept forgetting how to play the guitar on several songs they’d written. “So many songs got thrown away, until we finally said, ‘Maybe we should start recording them on a zither’,” he said.
Bonus trivia: In 1896 in Seattle, Washington a 150-foot-long arm from an octopus was found in a whale’s stomach.
5. COBAIN LIVED UNDER BRIDGES MAKING MONEY AS AN UNLICENCED TOLL OPERATOR
Many people believe that the tradition of unlicensed and illegal tolling dates back to ancient Norway, beginning perhaps with the Jotunn tribe who would dress in muddy tarps and extract money for safe passage. But however it began, over the centuries its practice has become an underground tradition, one most often passed on to a favoured but estranged neighbour. Cobain had been initiated into the art of tolling, by an estranged neighbour, at the tender age of five, a calling he found difficult to cast off as his fame increased and sales of un-ripped jeans plummeted. In point of fact, and despite his burgeoning wealth, Cobain was still living under wooden bridges, by railway sidings and in the darkened corners of arches until late ’92, wayfaring strangers and taking from them a customary copper piece or farthing. A childhood friend was quoted as saying, “Kurt could get under anything! He was remarkably subtle and fleet”. The oft slighted ‘Something In The Way’ became a fitting tribute to his early career.
6. THE LYRICS OF ‘COME AS YOU ARE’ WERE PLAGARISED
The lyrical hook that forms the title of the well-known popular classic ‘Come As You Are’ was first used in 1977 by Det Insikt, an early underground punk band from Stockholm, Sweden. A follower of the band said, “ I couldn’t believe it when I heard the song on the radio. And it wasn’t just the lyric, they’d even used quite a few of the same notes and instruments.” A Nirvana insider remarked, “That Kurt heard the song when he was 10 and was able to reproduce some of it a decade later is yet another testament to his genius”. Little is known about Det Insikt and they have long since disbanded, but singer Nick Rubato, who also suffered long term addiction, reputedly stubbed his toe when told. Unfortunately, because no recordings exist of the original, Det Insikt were unable to bring legal actions against Nirvana, though they have since become “different kinds of people” anyway.
Bonus trivia: Krist Novoselic is the honorary mayor of Zadar and regularly receives Dalmatians in recognition of his office.
7. THE TERM GRUNGE DATES BACK TO THE 16TH CENTURY
It is an uncommonly held fallacy that the term GRUNGE emerged somewhere around the 50s. The word actually comes to us from the fledgling coal mining industries of 16th Century Britain, where various forms of coal dust and dirt would mingle around the feet of workers creating a sticky ‘grunge’. By the following century it had entered general use to refer to any ‘slag’ like substance formed through mixing. Around the same time, it was used as a performance direction on John Dowland composition ‘Flow My Tears’ and an untitled madrigal by Francis Pilkington, and meant simply ‘with noise’. In the intervening years the term lost favour and it wasn’t until the late 80s that it underwent something of a revival and inverted to its current meaning of ‘shiny’ or by extension ‘marketable’.
8. COBAIN WROTE NEVERMIND ABOUT FARMING
Farming references do spring up in several songs on Nevermind, but Kurt’s muse was complicated, and his full-scale farming addiction didn’t start until after the album was recorded. Before Nevermind, he had experimented with animal husbandry, but he wasn’t a full-blown addict. Most of the record, however, was written about his land, animals, or his favourite pastimes. His initial plan was to break the album up into an ‘animal’ side and a ‘vegetable’ side. The ‘animal’ side would consist of songs like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Breed’, and ‘Polly’, most inspired by Cobain’s love of fish. The ‘vegetable’ side would contain a variety of songs, including ‘On A Plain’, and ‘In Bloom’, which was inspired by his favourite flowers ‘Stargazer Lilies’.
9. THE COVER OF NEVERMIND WASN’T COBAIN’S IDEA
Kurt didn’t come up with the cover idea for Nevermind. His idea had little in common with the final image of a floating naked baby chasing a bank note. He had seen late night television shows on banking and soldiers of fortune, and wanted a photograph of Dirk Benedict’s head smashing a local branch of the Bank of America – he went as far as to sketch out the image in his journal. Yet when Kurt tried to approach Dirk to set up the gory and bloody photograph, he refused on account of ill health. The naked baby photo was the back-up plan. Charles Bukowski said, “Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink”.
10. COBAIN DIDN’T WANT A DRUMMER
It could be argued that the drum sound on any given record is an important ingredient in defining its overall sound, and nowhere is this more truer than on the glitzy-classic-rock-hit-recording-opus that is Nevermind. So it may be a surprise to learn that Monsieur Cobain didn’t even want a conventional drummer for Nirvana. Drawing further inspiration from the East, he first hoped to use classical Indian tabla genius Pandit Taranath Ram Rao Hattiangadi, and run the instrument through the carburettor of a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and into an old sock to get that “authentic ‘grunge’ sound”. Cobain said, “I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time. Something different from heavy metal, a different attitude.” However, Kurt’s dream quickly faded when Chad Channing told him that he was sorry but Pandit Taranath Ram Rao Hattiangadi just didn’t like him. Chad was subsequently hired to fill the part but couldn’t play tablas and so reverted to bashing plastic covered wooden tubs instead.
Bonus trivia: A.G.H.O.S.T., the most advanced technical paranormal research group in the Pacific Northwest, are based in Seattle.
Originally published on
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