Nirvana Music

Now this is how to do a cover. I've only heard a few tracks by New Jersey punk band Titus Andronicus, but this cover of “Breed” by Nirvana just might make a fan out of me. According to the band itself, their influences include Pulp and Neutral Milk Hotel, but I have heard exactly one song by Pulp and nothing whatsoever by Neutral Milk Hotel, so that really doesn't tell me much- you can make of it what you will.

Here's an amusing video of a Nirvana performance in 1992, in which they did a parody cover of “The End” by the Doors. The End was part of a much longer work about the Lizard King, Jim Morrison's tribute to Frazer's “The Golden Bough.” The Golden Bough was a rather speculative anthropological work about ancient fertility rituals and sacred kingship, and Jim Morison imagined himself as a ritual king who had to be sacrificed to ensure the fertility of the land.

Long before he joined Nirvana in 1993, Pat Smear was the guitarist for one of the most influential early punk bands, the Germs.

The band formed in 1977 with Pat Smear on guitar, Lorna Doom on bass, and Belinda Carlisle on drums- yes, that Belinda Carlisle! The singer was Darby Crash, who made himself into a punk rock legend due to his appearance in the documentary “Decline of Western Civilization,” his hilariously incompetent performances and his eventual suicide. On the Germs' first album (by which time Belinda Carlisle had been replaced by Don Bolles), they actually sound like a real band, at least by the raw standards of punk rock:

Their live shows however, sounded more like this, largely due to Darby's extreme intoxication and apparent hatred of the microphone:

Oddly enough, considering Darby's belligerent and seemingly anything but intellectual attitude, their lyrics were actually unusually intelligent and poetic. Here are some of the words to the song “Manimal”:

“Evolution is a process

Too slow to save my soul

I've got this creature on my back

It just won't let go...



If I am only an animal

Then I can do no wrong

But they say I'm something better

So I've got to hang on.”

Like Kurt Cobain nearly twenty years later, Darby Crash did not succeed in holding on. The Germs might not have been the most talented of that first generation of L.A. Hardcore bands, but they did leave their mark on every band that followed in their footsteps, including Nirvana.

The first time I ever heard the music of Nirvana, I was living in a $40 per week YMCA room in Auburn, Maine. Having grown up and gone to High School in the 1980s, the only thing I knew about punk rock was that the kids with the Mohawks seemed to be angry all the time. I didn't have more than the vaguest notion of what punk or hardcore music actually sounded like, and had never been exposed to the DIY ethos that made punk what it was.