“Let’s start a band”: The song that formed Nirvana
Most of the biggest groups in the world tend to have that one moment where everything clicks. Even if they weren’t the best musicians by any stretch, hearing something coming out of the amplifiers that sounds great for the first time is the kind of feeling that would sell for millions if it were bottled up for people to experience. While Kurt Cobain didn’t have as many aspirations for Nirvana as he let on, there was always going to be some tune that was bound to get the ball rolling.
When listening to Cobain talk about his backstory, though, becoming one of the next kings of rock and roll didn’t seem like it was guaranteed. The whole point behind his songwriting was to make strange art pieces in his spare time, and considering how much he wanted to join Melvins before he put his own band together, he wasn’t exactly looking to be the next John Lennon of his generation.
But Nirvana was built on something stronger than Kurt Cobain. Even if he wrote all the songs, it took three people to get them to the top of the charts, and while Dave Grohl has been considered one of the leading voices in rock and roll ever since the group split up, Krist Novoselic should be considered the glue that held everything together when they were barely scraping by.
Outside of being one of the most neglected bass players, Novoselic was the reason Cobain was able to stay alive for as long as he did. He couldn’t get him to quit his heroin fixation, but the bassist helped make sure that Cobain never suffered during their salad days, even feeding a heater to his car when the frontman slept it in to make sure he didn’t freeze to death in the winter.
While Novoselic had known Cobain as a friend from school for the longest time, he didn’t really think much of his music until he heard the song ‘Spank Thru’. The final version is far from the greatest thing that Cobain would ever write, but considering the rest of the artsy bands that were clogging up Seattle, there is a certain magic within the riff that Novoselic could see.
When listening back to it, the bassist remembered suggesting to start a band on the spot, saying, “We just kinda hung out, y’know, talked about things, and then, one thing led to another; Kurt did a tape with Dale Crover from the Melvins, and one of the songs on it was ‘Spank Thru,’ and he turned me on to it, and I kinda liked it, it got me excited, so I go “Hey man, let’s start a band!”. We scrounged up a drummer, and we started practising….took it very seriously too.”
Although much of what turned up on Bleach was a lot more feral than what fans were used to, Novoselic did help carve out his own niche with the group. He may not have written in the traditional sense, but listening to him follow different pieces of the melody was his way of playing around with the tune, especially when they reached In Utero and developed the nastiest bass tone known to man on ‘Heart Shaped Box.’
Still, ‘Spank Thru’ should be considered among the most important Nirvana songs of all time for helping get the ball rolling. Anyone can try to write music in their basement, but once you get that one person to see the magic behind your material, that’s when things start moving a lot faster.
