Once upon a time, I used to sing in a punk band. We would get gigs in community centers or at dive bars in Tampa at 2 AM on a Tuesday. Often, the sound would be so poorly mixed that my vocals couldn't be heard at all over the guitar and drums. Sometimes there would be fewer people in the audience than in the band.

This video- said to be the earliest known footage of Nirvana performing live- shows that even when they were just starting out, things were never as bad for them as for my long-forgotten punk band. The fact that they were immensely more talented musicians than we were probably had something to do with that.

In any case, even if they never had to suffer the indignity of performing for two or three sleeping ex-convicts at 2am, they did still have to do the struggling new band thing. They still had to play for tiny little crowds who had probably never heard of them, at whatever community center would let them perform.

It's nice, in some odd way, to see that not every immensely successful act springs fully-formed and freshly-scrubbed from the forehead of whatever Satanic music industry guy with an MBA cooked them up after a round of focus groups.

As this video shows, great bands are sometimes out there, working away and doing what they do- whether they ever get discovered or not. For every Nirvana that does eventually get discovered, how many equally talented bands do not?