The one Nirvana song with a glaring mistake in it
By the time the 1990s started, the ’80s had been going on for far too long. Even though hair metal was still going strong in the early ’90s, people were getting tired of the boring videos on MTV, which were becoming way too over the top for anyone to take seriously anymore. A new act needed to come along to wake everybody up, and that band’s name was Nirvana.
Towards the end of 1991, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ reshaped rock and roll, bringing things back to simplistic power chords and earnest songwriting that no one questioned for a second. Although Nirvana’s Nevermind may have sounded like one of the biggest and most important releases in the world at that time, there weren’t too many bells and whistles going into the production.
When asked about compiling the songs for the record, Dave Grohl remembered the mindset being to keep the tunes as simple as possible, telling Classic Album: “We wanted them to be almost like children’s songs. I remember we would always make that analogy. I didn’t throw a lot of drum fills in there. It was meant to be as simple as possible, and I remember that was sort of like an unspoken rule”. Despite their rudimentary structures, the melodies cut to the heart of Generation X, from the disaffected youth in ‘In Bloom’ to the raw frustration behind ‘Territorial Pissings’.
While Kurt Cobain was never the most lyrical songwriter, ‘Polly’ was the most story-driven song on the project. Written in response to a sexual assault that happened in Seattle at the time, Cobain was struck by the woman’s way of escaping her captor, choosing to see him as a person only to flee as soon as he let his guard down. Throughout the song, Cobain takes on the role of the aggressor, sticking to an acoustic guitar with only the occasional cymbal hits in the background.
When laying down the track’s final version, though, Butch Vig remembers the iconic ‘Polly said’ line being a mistake, saying, “There was one moment where Kurt came in too early, and we left it in”. Although Cobain might not have been thinking in these terms, the slight pause almost adds a layer of menace to the entire track. The main character of this song might be doing some despicable things to this woman, but the lazy delivery from Cobain makes it feel like it’s just any average day for him.
Cobain obviously liked the way it turned out, though, often using the mistake version when they played live and on their reworking of it for ‘(New Wave) Polly’ on Incesticide. Despite the spare sound of the song, each of these topics was very close to Cobain’s heart, always speaking out for women’s rights and even leaving messages in the liner notes of Nirvana records asking any bigots not to buy their records because he wanted nothing to do with them.
Cobain may have just lost his place when the tape was rolling, but it takes a true genius to distinguish between a mistake and a piece of magic that found its way onto the final mix.
