Watch a pre-fame Nirvana deliver a powerhouse performance back in 1989
Though much has been made of Nirvana’s career post-Nevermind, we tend to ignore the chapter that preceded the release of that iconic sophomore album. Their dizzying rise to fame, the drugs, the carnage and the eventual tragedy have been the fodder of music papers for years. Less known are the years in which Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Co. were just another group of angsty teens in Aberdeen, Washington’s murky no-wave scene.
Cobain bumped into bassist Krist Novoselic while hanging out with the Melvins in their rehearsal space. Wanting to start a band of his own, Cobain handed Novoselic a tape of demos of his project Fecal Matter and instructed him to listen and get back to him with a response. Krist was clearly insufficiently moved because it took another three years for him to listen to the tape and suggest they form a band.
Over the next few years, Cobain and Novoselic started and then abandoned numerous projects, the first of which, The Sellouts, was a Creedence Clearwater Revival covers band. It wasn’t until the pair recruited Aaron Burckhard that they began practising the songs from Fecal Matter, which they replaced with new material shortly after forming.
Content with the guitar, bass, drums format, Cobain and his bandmates experimented with a variety of names. Skid Row was a particular favourite but nearly landed the band a lawsuit from the New Jersey hair metal band of the same name. Eventually, they ditched the likes of Pen Cap Chew and Ted Ed Fred for the infinitely slicker Nirvana, which Cobain suggested after growing weary of the angry punk names they’d been trying on for size.
By 1989, when the below footage was recorded, Nirvana had cycled through another set of drummers and settled on Chad Channing, who played his first concert with the band just a few months after they recorded their first demos in 1988. The following year, they recorded and released their debut album, Bleach, which Nevermind producer Butch Vig would later label “pretty one-dimensional”.
The album was followed by a string of shows in America and an extensive UK and EU tour. The above footage shows Nirvana opening for TAD on December 1st, 1989, at a venue called Fahrenheit in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. Keep an eye out for an early version of Nevermind highlight ‘Polly’ featuring the much-underrated drumming of Chad Channing.
