Dropped me off at Grandpa Joe’s

“Thoughts on Montage of Heck?” my friend Eric tweeted me the other day. “It might be my favorite rock doc ever — totally overpowering and draining emotionally.”

Load up on grunge

This is very silly, but quite droll*:

Sell the kids for food

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Watching a world through a windshield, there’s no looking back. We’d left everything behind. … We had no idea that the next 16 days were going to change our world forever. But I remember pulling into the parking lot and thinking, ‘Really? This is Sound City?!’

With the release of the new Foo Fighters album, Sonic Highways, just round the corner,* I finally got round recently to watching Sound City, Dave Grohl’s 2013 documentary about the famed California recording studio.

Sound City is dear to Grohl’s heart: it’s where Nirvana recorded Nevermind back in May 1991, and the quote above is spoken by Grohl over the beginning of the documentary, as the camera shows a van replicating Nirvana’s road trip from Seattle down the west coast to Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley.

You could do anything

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The August Bank Holiday has swung round with its usual, startling annual regularity, so that means it’s time again for the Reading Festival (these days strictly the Reading and Leeds festival, doubtless brought to you by some bland and ubiquitous corporate lager – the spirit of alt rock endures). This year’s main stage headliners are Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys and Blink 182. (Blink 182 headlining? For the second time?!?)

Inevitably, as a greying fortysomething nostalgist blogging about music that was most in vogue twenty years ago, without even a madeleine moment my mind drifts back to Readings past. I’ve just spent a few minutes losing myself in these old line-ups, both the festivals I attended (92, 94, 98, 03) and those I missed (err, the others).

Above us only sky

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Eddie Vedder stirred up a minor controversy at the end of Pearl Jam‘s 2014 European tour. Over the outro of ‘Daughter’, he got the crowd chanting ‘no more war’, before launching into an angry anti-war tirade, and then leading the crowd into the chorus of Edwin Starr‘s famed pacifist song ‘War’. It’s not the Gettysburg Address, but it’s undeniably impassioned (and red wine-fuelled). If you’re offended by the f-word, you may wish to look away.

What else should I be?

Nirvana were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Brooklyn, NY, on 10 April. This Hall of Fame malarkey doesn’t typically interest me a great deal (Americans seem to have halls of fame for just about everything – there’s probably a Hall of Fame Hall of Fame tucked away in Poughkeepsie – it just doesn’t cross the Atlantic particularly well), but Nirvana’s induction was a noteworthy one.

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Use just once and destroy

A coda to my recent(ish) posts on In Utero and Unplugged:

Last Thursday would have been Kurt Cobain’s 47th birthday, and this reminded me that Radio Seattle‘s bassist Richard sent me this link a while back. It’s a letter from Steve Albini to Nirvana, discussing the possibility of producing In Utero, as of course he went on to do in February 1993 (at the Pachyderm Studio mentioned in the letter).

Nothing to add, beyond read the letter: Albini comes across as everything you would ask for from a record producer (and a human being, more importantly).

(Depending on where you are, you may have to click on the “watch on youtube” link to access this.)

Shiver the whole night through

Nirvana Unplugged. Check shirts aplenty in the crowd.

Last December saw the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana‘s Unplugged* recording, so, with my customary whippet-like speed (albeit an elderly, three-legged whippet with no sense of urgency or direction), a post on the highly regarded album, the band’s last release before Kurt Cobain’s tragic suicide. Or, at least, a few random thoughts. I found this excellent article about the making of Unplugged by Andrew Wallace Chamings in The Atlantic: well worth a read. He even published it on time too.

Teenage angst has paid off well

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of In Utero, Nirvana‘s third and final studio album. Inevitably, therefore, this month also sees the release of a deluxe reissue, one that includes all manner of goodies that I’m too lazy to cut and paste from a recent Nirvana marketing email, let alone type out.*

Ready for the interview with the Geffen marketing dept.

I have mixed feelings towards the (relatively) recent phenomenon of deluxe reissues of classic albums. At the most basic level, record labels are aiming through them to claw back some of the lost revenue and reduced profit margins of recent years caused by the explosion of easily available digital musical content on the web. Quite apart from ‘deluxe’ being a smug, ungainly word, redolent of 70s prawn cocktail sophistication and ‘positional goods’ one-upmanship, the concept is arguably more about record label economics than about music as artistic expression. Done badly, the deluxe reissue is little more than an upgraded exploitation of backlist, with demos and alternate takes of album tracks tacked on the end that were never intended to see the light of day and are of interest to only completist fans and the band’s closest relatives (and the latter possibly only out of politeness), and an unnecessary remastering of the original mix that does little more than compress the sound and make it louder.

All the pretty songs

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s the 20th anniversary of Nevermind. In Bloom is an exhibition of Nirvana photos and memorabilia, showing at the Loading Bay Gallery, East London.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2011/sep/13/nirvana-nevermind-20-exhibition?INTCMP=SRCH

Worth checking out. Seeing the photos reminds you how much they were just three guys in a band (some band!). No artifice, no pretence, just raw, direct, honest music. That’s the essence of grunge for me. All the Cobain iconography (and hagiography) since then needs stripping away.