The singer Kurt Cobain called better than any rock band: “My favourite of all time”
Kurt Cobain never claimed to have the most pop-friendly record collection in the world.
He had a lot of great pieces in his back catalogue that he would pull from when writing Nirvana’s greatest tunes, but he was far more accustomed to making mixtapes of bands that no one would have ever heard of. Not all of them were going to see the same kind of acclaim that he did when the grunge explosion started, but the least he could do was provide some lip service to his favourite acts whenever he had the chance.
Then again, Cobain didn’t really need to tell people that he worshipped at the altar of people like John Lennon. The Beatles had been one of his first loves growing up, and you can hear a lot of the vocal inflections that he inherited from Lennon when he started singing on Nevermind. But beyond the classic rock realm, there was a lot more for him to explore once he got used to the underground punk rock scene.
When you break it down, Nirvana was always a punk band that had a bit of a sweet tooth, and it’s easy to hear the kind of band that Cobain wanted to be when making In Utero. Everything is incredibly dry-sounding, and while Steve Albini’s production can be an acquired taste for some people, it was worth it for Cobain to hear the sound that he heard on some of the early Pixies records coming out of the speakers whenever he heard tunes like ‘Heart Shaped Box’ taking shape.
And while some fans may have been disappointed to see him prop up bands like the Meat Puppets instead of Pearl Jam, that didn’t really matter to Cobain. He called it as he saw it most of the time, but if there was one thing that could earn a singer points in his book, it was singing from the heart rather than trying to get attention. But if anyone wanted that kind of music, they needed to go beyond rock and roll altogether.
The biggest names of the time may have been crying out in pain once Cobain kicked the door down, but the greatest blues performers had a lot more grit behind their delivery. You had no doubt that some of the biggest names in blues had done some hard living before they started making their classics, and Lead Belly was the real deal as far as Cobain could tell whenever he heard his records.
This was someone who had truly lived the blues, and he felt that those records mattered to him more than anything else on Earth after being introduced to them by William Burroughs, saying, “I remember him saying in an interview, ‘These new rock and roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul like Leadbelly.’ I’d never heard about Leadbelly before so I bought a couple of his records, and now he turns out to be my favourite of all time in music. I love it more than any rock and roll I’ve ever heard.”
But if you look at the way that Cobain sings and Leadbelly sang in his prime, there are a lot more similarities than you would imagine. Cobain didn’t have the same kind of vocal technique that you heard out of every other wannabe rock star at the time, but you could feel the pain in his voice when singing ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ the same way that Leadbelly did when he sang the song back in the pre-rock and roll days.
The blues may have been the conduit to rock and roll, but Cobain learned pretty quickly that there was no real substitution for the real thing whenever he heard it out in the wild. The true blues legends were truly in a class of their own, and there was no way of stopping someone like Leadbelly from crying out in pain whenever writing some of his classics.
