Re: Nirvana Nevermind Full Album Download
Josephine Heathershaw
Nirvana artifacts and exhibits are seen at the opening of "In Bloom: The Nirvana Exhibition," marking the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana's Nevermind album, in 2011 at the Loading Bay Gallery in London. Samir Hussein/Getty Images hide caption
Spencer Elden sued former members of the band in August 2021 for child exploitation and pornography, saying the band knowingly distributed a naked photo of him as a baby on the 1991 album cover and profited from it. Elden was just 4 months old when he was photographed for the cover. Now 30, he was seeking $150,000 in damages.
"Elden has spent three decades profiting from his celebrity as the self-anointed 'Nirvana Baby.' He has re-enacted the photograph in exchange for a fee, many times; he has had the album title Nevermind tattooed across his chest; he has appeared on a talk show wearing a self-parodying, nude-colored onesie; he has autographed copies of the album cover for sale on eBay; and he has used the connection to try to pick up women," the defendants say.
Funnily enough, the song was embraced by mainstream audiences and became their most popular track. With the popularity of the album, the once unique grunge rock style subverted to overpriced fashion trend. The original meaning behind their messages was lost only to the ideology that grunge originally stood against. Ironically, this could be seen as both a hegemonic and counter hegemonic move for Nirvana.
Despite its tremendous influence on the mainstream rock that followed, it's hard to think of another album that sounds much like Nirvana's Nevermind, a record with so much more pop and punk punch than any music it inspired. Of course, no diamond-certified, canonical treasure hitting the two-decade mark can be left well enough alone in 2011-- especially one that changed the lives of a lot people now approaching middle age, with the discretionary income to prove it. After all, "super deluxe" reissues of classic albums don't even have to be tied to an anniversary these days. But Nevermind is 20 this week, still a pretty respectable number in a world where any milestone marks an excuse to shift a few more units. The only question is whether these reissues-- a single-disc remaster, a 2xCD "deluxe" version, and a 4xCD+DVD "super-deluxe" edition-- are that rare essential repurchase that makes you hear an album you've possibly exhausted in new ways, or if it's just another mediocre jumble of odds and ends that inadvertently reveals the flaws and blemishes carefully excised from the original 12-song set.
Sadly, both expanded versions fall into the latter category, with material ranging from "interesting" to "historical curiosity" to "of zero value to even superfans." But this mish-mash of sketches, practice-space woodshedding, and alternate-but-not-very mixes does help explain what makes Nevermind so unique. Nirvana certainly never made another album like it. The precocious Bleach still has its partisans, folks who think its primal bash-and-howl is the be-all-end-all of rock, while In Utero stands as the band's most harrowing statement, where it's a toss-up as to whether the riffs or the lyrics hurt more. But Nevermind was and remains an unrepeatable object. It retains the gleeful pummel of the first album while hinting at the bleakness of the third. Yet there's also a concision and clarity that Nirvana hadn't quite mastered on the gnarly-by-necessity Bleach and wouldn't allow themselves on the stark and caustic In Utero.
The box set does make clear that Nirvana honed these songs over a long period. Listening to the various sessions leading up to the one that gave us the album we know-- especially the nearly unlistenable "boombox" mixes of early demos-- you learn very quickly that these songs didn't arrive perfectly formed in one sustained burst of inspiration. The hours of rehearsals and the expensive time spent tinkering in the studio shaped them into classics. It helped that there are songs on Nevermind that might appeal to people who've never heard a hardcore album in their lives, who might have even (gasp!) kinda liked the glossier hard-rock bands whose era largely ended with the rise of grunge. Moving away from the heavy-at-all-costs sound he'd always been both enamored with and suspicious of, Cobain worked diligently on his big hooks and decided to stop smothering his natural melodic gifts under so much self-conscious sludge.
Even as they moved toward the mainstream, Nirvana were trying shit that no one would have called an easy route to success. Nevermind is drenched in the filthy Pacific Northwest roar that slapped Cobain into action as a teen, but it's as catchy as any of the radio giants that caught his ear as a kid. It's driven by pain as naked and personal as the riot grrrl bands whose company he kept and as fuck-around goofy as the Seattle contemporaries who both reveled in and mercilessly parodied machismo. And despite the fact that none of those modes would seem to fit together on the same album, let alone all of them, it's all hammered into a still-disarming whole, a collection of anthems that retain the idiosyncrasies of the very weird band that made them. It helped that Cobain had yet to be disabused of the idea that you could be an idiosyncratic indie kid and a rock star without compromising on either front.
That's probably why the bonus material here feels less like a revelation and more like the kind of peek-behind-the-curtain that you wind up regretting. Nevermind is basically a great fake-out. It presents itself as an off-the-cuff explosion, a from-the-gut expression of realness and energy in the grand punk tradition, but it was actually the product of a shit ton of hard work. If you don't hold with the first-take-is-the-best-take philosophy, your respect for Cobain may actually increase when you realize how dedicated he was to getting every element right. Listening to him fumbling his way toward greatness on the "boombox" mixes of songs like "Come as You Are" and "Something in the Way" or hearing a newly cemented group working out the kinks in their interplay in the studio, you may also realize that you don't want to hear the missteps and rewrites and second guessing that went into the perfect-as-is final product. The "boombox" mixes, Devonshire mixes, and Smart Sessions (early Vig-produced takes recorded with drummer Chad Channing that were initially intended for release on a second album for Sub Pop) are largely work tapes. Listening to them feels like studying every unused scrap of a film classic that someone managed to sneak out of the editing room, which is about as fun as that description makes them sound. If you've always been suspicious of the album's production sheen, there's no Holy Grail here that's going to give you the raw take you're looking for.
That charisma is a big reason why Nevermind remains a 10. But in-concert takes on "Sliver" and "Been a Son" that are the third most thrilling live versions officially available on CD? It's not as if all this "exclusive" dreck-- most of which has been floating around on bootlegs and .zip files and YouTube for eons-- will permanently dull the excitement of the Nevermind, but trying to swallow it all might put you off the album itself for a long while. If you're truly interested in hearing this stuff, the two-disc deluxe set is easily the better deal, giving you a little hint of the various stages of Nevermind's construction without wearing you out the way the four-disc set will. But if you really want to celebrate the 20th, you'll be better off just giving the original album a few spins. Despite how much better-left-forgotten material is being offered up here as essential, there's still more life in the real Nevermind than anything that's attempted to replicate its attack since.
On the evening of Friday the 13th in September 1991, the funky little counter-cultural and gay friendly nightclub Re-bar at 1114 Howell Street in downtown Seattle is the site of a music-business party held to celebrate the pending release of a second album by the then still pre-fame "grunge rock" band Nirvana. While Nevermind will go on to make music history by selling more than 10 million copies in the U.S. alone, on this night the members of Nirvana make minor rock 'n' roll history by becoming perhaps the only group ever to be 86'd from their own party for engaging in a drunken food fight.
It has long been a rock 'n' roll tradition for a band (and its associated record label) to throw a "listening party" to mark the occasion of a new album's release. Usually the artists don't perform at such functions, but instead act as genial and grateful hosts to a crowd of industry insiders, family members, and friends who all gather to listen to the disc being played over a sound system. Typically attendees are also offered an array of appetizers and a few libations and perhaps some promotional souvenirs.
Nevertheless, Re-bar was the spot chosen for a party focused on Nevermind, the soon-to-be-released album by Nirvana -- a punk band on the very cusp of becoming established among the biggest pop celebrities of their generation. Adding to the overall excitement of the times was that the commercial and cultural concept of the Pacific Northwest's rock scene (and sound) as "grunge" was already taking hold in the mainstream consciousness.
Originally from Aberdeen, the members of Nirvana had already established a solid underground reputation for their excellence as songwriters and players since their first recordings debuted on Seattle's Sub Pop label in 1988. The band -- now composed of singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain (1967-1994), bassist Krist Novoselic (b. 1965), and drummer Dave Grohl (b. 1969) -- had seen "Smells Like Teen Spirit," its first single for David Geffen's big-time DGC label, issued in the United States on September 10, 1991, and find massive immediate success. But no one could have predicted the whirlwind of craziness that would erupt globally following the official September 24 release date of the Nevermind album.
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