25 years ago: Nirvana release ‘bleach’
When Nirvana released their debut album, ‘Bleach,’ on June 15, 1989, few could have predicted that the Kurt Cobain-led group would eventually change the world.
The band — who at that time included Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Chad Channing — recorded most of the album with Jack Endino in December 1988 and January 1989, during a series of sessions that cost a whopping $606.17. Live guitarist Jason Everman ponied up the cash for this bill, which earned him a credit on ‘Bleach.’
The surroundings were rather low-key. In Michael Azerrad’s book ‘Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana,’ Endino’s Reciprocal Recording Studios was described as a place where “the paint peeled off the particle-board walls, there were cigarette burns all over every horizontal surface, and it didn’t matter a bit if you spilled your beer on the carpet.”
Nirvana added this Endino work to three songs dating from an earlier recording session, which featured Melvins‘ Dale Crover on drums instead of Channing. What emerged was an album full of primitive, brittle grunge dirges (‘Sifting,’ ‘Paper Cuts’), scuzz-metal mayhem (‘Negative Creep,’ ‘Mr. Moustache’) and the occasional college-pop oasis (‘About a Girl,’ ‘Love Buzz’).
Cobain’s hoarse-throat lyrics were mostly unintelligible, although a few choice phrases emerged to add angst and despair — or, in the case of ‘School,’ levity: “Won’t you believe it / It’s just my luck / No recess.”
What was perhaps so striking about the greyscale rock ‘n’ roll found on ‘Bleach’ was how familiar it sounded. The record wasn’t transformative; it was rooted in tradition. As Azerrad notes: “Nirvana’s new wave sound — Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers, and the like — was derivative. It wasn’t until they acknowledged the fact that they had grown up on Aerosmith and Black Sabbath that their music found its voice.”
Although ‘Bleach’ is now a landmark release — in fact, it went Platinum and is label Sub Pop’s biggest seller — at the time, reaction to the album was mixed. It didn’t appear on the Billboard 200, although the British music press was much kinder. “If you find yourself nodding off to Guns N’ Roses‘ occasional acoustic noodlings then wake up to Nirvana,” wrote the NME. “Scrap all that Soft Metal crap and get behind these brats!”
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