The line between cool and uncool has never been less defined: We live in a world where Hall and Oates have become as influential to emergent indie-rockers as Joy Division, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" has become as much of a hipster-bar last-call anthem as "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out". And yet, even in an era of omnivorous musical consumption and boundless genre tourism, the sight of a computerized Kurt Cobain belting out Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" in a recent Guitar Hero 5 demo reel was enough to revert the good/bad taste divide back to 1988 borders. For Nirvana fans, the Guitar Hero scandal was more than just a case of a dead rock-star's visage being exploited for the sake of peddling product. Few artists treated record collections as an extension of personal politics quite like Cobain; having him sing a hair-metal hit is not just contrary to his musical taste, but his entire value system. (Though one can't help but wonder what a guy who once skewered alpha-male behavior in a song called "Mr. Moustache" would make of indie's current facial-hair fetish.)
And yet, Cobain was no stranger himself to challenging accepted notions of cool. When it first emerged 20 years ago, Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, represented an equally heretical notion to some indie aesthetes: Flipper-grade sludge-punk molded into Beatles-schooled pop schematics. By 1989, indie rock was already making a rightward shift across the radio dial-- Dinosaur Jr. had covered Peter Frampton, the Butthole Surfers were dropping in not-too-subtle Black Sabbath and Zeppelin references-- but rather than using post-hardcore noise to desecrate their traditional FM-radio influences, Nirvana used it to give their dinosaur rock more teeth. In Cobain, they had a frontman with uncommonly melodic instincts, but shot through a voice that sounded like it was coughing up blood; in Krist Novoselic, a bassist who could hit the heretofore untapped sweet spot between Paul McCartney and the Melvins.
But unlike most rock bands who divided pop history between before and after, Nirvana's impact was not immediate. Upon its release, Bleach was a modest indie rock success at 40,000 copies sold, and the album's low-budget legend-- it was recorded for a scant $600, footed by the band's temporary second guitarist, Jason Everman-- often overshadows the music within. At that point, Nirvana had yet to divest itself of its Pete Best: drummer Chad Channing, whose scrappy style wasn't fully suited to the band's growing propensity for crater-inducing stompers. (Three Bleach tracks-- "Floyd the Barber", "Paper Cuts", and "Downer"-- were actually helmed by Melvins thud-master Dale Crover, and you can really tell.) And the album's first single-- a cover of 1960s Dutch-popsters Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz"-- is more emblematic of the dementoid new wave that Nirvana would indulge in on their future B-sides than the metallic Pixies-punk that would turn them into stars.
But rather than unfairly compare it to the platinum sheen of sophomore release Nevermind, Bleach is best appreciated today as a snapshot of a specific time and place, of a Seattle scene bubbling up before it turned into a media adjective: In the Aero Zeppelin grind of "School" and the Mudhoney-quoting scum-bucket thrash of "Negative Creep", you have the perfect audio manifestation of the stark, exhilarating black-and-white Charles Peterson photos that captured late-80s Seattle like a series of strobe-light flickers (and which populate much of this reissue's 52-page photo booklet). Original producer Jack Endino's new remastering job gives Bleach a much-needed boost in fidelity, but there's an intrinsic, primordial murkiness to this album that can't be polished-- while Axl was welcoming the masses into the Sunset Strip jungle, Nirvana dragged the Sub Pop set into the bleak, chilly backwoods from which they came.
Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first half-- anchored by the epochal anti-love song "About a Girl"-- ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its second. The bonus live performance included here (recorded in 1990 at Portland's Pine Street Theater) suggests as much, mostly ignoring Bleach's side B to showcase important transitional tracks: the scabrous pop of "Sappy" (later to emerge as "Verse Chorus Verse" on the 1993 No Alternativecompilation); "Dive", a blueprint for Nevermind's plutonium-grade rockers; and "Been a Son", which bears the influence of Cobain's beloved Vaselines (whose "Molly's Lips" is covered here). It's a testament to both Endino's live-in-the-room production style and Nirvana's raucous onstage energy that Bleach and the bonus concert set sound like they were cut in the same session. But the concert also presents Nirvana in a light that the band's subsequently troubled and tragic story so rarely affords them: a simple, playful power trio who could lay waste to a drunk club crowd on a Saturday night.
Two years and one Dave Grohl later, the circumstances couldn't have been more different for Nirvana. Amid rumors of Kurt'n'Courtney drug problems and inter-band acrimony, the trio took to the stage for their headlining Sunday-night appearance at the Reading Festival, effectively cementing their status as the biggest-- and most gossiped about-- rock band in the world. If Bleach contains just trace evidence of the band that would, almost overnight, force radio stations to flip formats and record stores to open up "alternative" sections, the Live at Reading CD/DVD provides formidable evidence of perhaps the last rock'n'roll band to transform the monoculture in its own image. And yet, despite Cobain's cheeky show-biz entrance-- rolled onto stage in a wheelchair by music journalist Everett True, singing a line from Bette Midler's "The Rose", and then mock-collapsing-- the Reading set shows a band that hadn't changed all that much fundamentally from that Pine Street Theater gig two years previous.
Cobain's newly acquired, generational spokesmen duties didn't make him any more fond of engaging the audience with stage banter, ceding emcee duties to the jovial Novoselic during guitar changes. And even when playing to the biggest audience of their career, Nirvana blast through the 25-song setlist with a barrel-down, no-bullshit intensity that suggests it didn't matter if they were playing to 100 people or 100,000. And most pertinently, both concerts capture the band at crucial, between-album turning points: where the Pine Street Theater set shows a band burnishing its pop appeal, Live at Reading betrays Cobain's eagerness to tear it down, dispensing with the obvious Nevermind hits by the mid-set point, while reserving the encores for seething covers of 80s California punks Fang's suitably sardonic "The Money Will Roll Right In" and the Wipers' "D-7". In retrospect, the concert crystallizes the moment when Cobain stopped serving his servants and started serving himself, pointing the way to 1993's notoriously caustic In Utero.
Given its long-standing popularity as a bootleg, you can't help but wonder why Live at Reading wasn't officially released back in the mid-90s instead of the live compilation From the Muddy Banks of Wishkah; certainly, Reading makes for a more appropriate, electrified complement to the band's other career-defining performance, 1994's Unplugged in New York release. And for the sake of squeezing the entire set (save for "Love Buzz") on a single disc, the Reading CD excises pretty much all of the DVD's between-song interactions (most notably, the goof on Boston's "More Than a Feeling" that precedes the similarly riffed "Smells Like Teen Spirit") and key contextual interludes that reveal the tumult leading up to this triumphant performance (e.g., a heartfelt plea from Cobain to have the crowd shout a conciliatory "We love you Courtney" in the wake of her receiving the Yoko treatment from the British tabloids). But the CD's career-spanning tracklist-- touching on the best of Bleach, most of Nevermind, choice singles and B-sides ("Sliver", "Aneurysm"), three In Utero previews ("Tourette's", "Dumb", "All Apologies"), and the aforementioned covers-- actually makes it a far superior, more comprehensive introduction for Nirvana newbies than the band's 2002 greatest-hits compilation. Like the Who's Live at Leeds or Cheap Trick's At Budokan, it's an indispensible document of a legendary band at their most invincible.
And even if you're the sort of Nirvana die-hard who's been sitting on an audio bootleg of this gig for the past 17 years,you really need the DVD-- for a band whose visual legacy mostly amounts to a handful of stylized videos and the lowkey Unplugged special, Live at Reading effectively grants you side-stage access to the band in their mosh-pit-stoking, drum-set-toppling prime, putting you as close to the action as the band's mysterious friend Tony, who's seen flailing onstage throughout the show like an epilpetic Bez. Like the Bleach reissue, the Live at Reading packaging is heavy on photos and other scrapbook visuals, but entirely bereft of liner-note reminiscences and analysis-- because lord knows we don't need another essay-length rumination about Nirvana's cultural import and Cobain's conflicted relationship with stardom. The most lasting images on the Live at Reading DVD-- from the 60,000-strong pogo pit, to the blood sprayed on Cobain's pick guard at set's end, to the awkward but poignant post-show meeting with a young, leukemia-stricken fan-- tell you everything you need to know.
