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.

My primary exposure to loud rock n roll was from 80s hair bands like White Snake, Poison and so on. I couldn't relate at all to that type of music, but I did appreciate its drive and energy if not the often moronic lyrics. The first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” I remember thinking “This sounds like hard rock but with interesting lyrics.”

I was intrigued, so I bought the album, and pretty soon I was getting complaints at the YMCA for playing it ten times a day at the highest volume setting. Then I read in a music magazine that Nirvana's sound derived from earlier bands like Black Flag and the Germs, and this lead me to check out L.A. hardcore. I never looked back, and for the next few years I didn't want to listen to anything except punk rock music, to the extent that I stopped listening to Nirvana for a while because they weren't “hardcore” enough. Looking back on it all these years later, it's obvious what an important band they actually were, and my period of punk rock puritanism seems silly in retrospect. I'm still grateful to Nirvana for opening my eyes to the world of punk hardcore, but even more so for just making a lot of great music.