Songoftheday 2/22/18 - Load up on guns bring your friends, it's fun to lose and to pretend...
from the album Nevermind (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #6 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 19
Today's song of the day comes from the iconic grunge rock band Nirvana, which came together in the Seattle area in the mid 1980s with former schoolmates Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, who went through a handful of drummers before recruiting Chad Channing in time for their debut album Bleach in 1989 (that album also listed friend Jason Everman as a guitarist although he didn't play on the record). That album didn't hit the sales chart nationwide, but was a big underground success in the Northwest and on college radio. After a tour that left Everman gone and eventually Channing sitting out, the band released a one-off single with session drummer Dan Peters, "Sliver", that blipped on to the British singles chart in the beginning of 1991 at #90. By the time of its success, Kurt and Krist had found their latest and last drummer Dave Grohl, and the classic lineup of the band was complete. Leaving their indie label Sub Pop and signing with music mogul David Geffen's DGC Records, the trio recorded their sophomore effort Nevermind with producer Butch Vig. Vig, who had helmed the seminal set Gish from the Smashing Pumpkins earlier that year, gave the rawness of the songs a professional edge, with help from engineer Andy Wallace.
The first single released from Nevermind would be groundbreaking in the world of rock n' roll. "Smell Like Teen Spirit", written mostly by Cobain with musical assistance from Novoselic and Grohl, originally arrived right after Labor Day in 1991, with a sonic pattern much like the Pixies (whom Kurt admittedly cribbed style from ). Named after a graffitiesque scrawl from a female friend about a girl he was dating, the angsty piece of introduction to their sound, their message, and themselves (as I always have taken their "A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito" to be in reference to themselves), the song would by the end of the year move from college radio to mainstream rock stations to finally the whole shebang as they proceeded to change the sound of pop radio from Michael Bolton-esque pap to, well, this. The music video, which became a staple at MTV, featured the band playing in a mock-up of a high school gym, with anarchistic cheerleaders and crowdsourced moshers in the stands, which soon took over it all...
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" became the band's first and undeniably biggest hit, reaching the pop top ten in America in January of 1992. The song spent one week at #1 on Billboard's Alternative radio chart,
and crossed over to #7 on their Mainstream Rock format tally. The record was even a hit in the dance clubs of America, as kids moshed themselves away with the hook-laden track enough to carry it to #14 on the Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the single topped the charts in France (for four weeks), Spain,, Belgium, and New Zealand, and reached the top ten in Germany (#2), Norway (#2), Poland (#2), Italy (#3), the Netherlands (#3), Sweden (#3), Australia (#5), Switzerland (#6), the UK (#7, returning to #11 in 2011), Austria (#8), Finland (#8), and Canada (#9). Nevermind was nominated for a Grammy for Alternative Album in 1992, losing to R.E.M.'s Out of Time, while "Smells Like Teen Spirit" would grab two more nominations the following year, losing Best Hard Rock Performance to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away", and losing "Best Rock Song" to Eric Clapton's remake of his own "Layla" (um, not cool). The video would win two MTV Music Video Awards for Best Alternative and Best New Artist for this song.
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Here's the trio live in their hometown Seattle a month after the single's release in 1991...
They infamously deliberately threw a curve on their live performance (to track) on Britain's Top of the Pops promoting the single, in the end making the clip even more iconic...
Of course they played it straight for SNL...
...and now the trio again in concert after their big fame in 1992 in Reading, England, where they reference a big rumored influence on the guitar hook....
That same year, singer/songwriter Tori Amos did a delicate cover of the song, which was included in the CD EP single of her classic "Crucify"...
Also in 1992, parody king "Weird" Al Yankovic remade the record as "Smells Like Nirvana", which actually brought him back into the pop top 40 at #35...
Forward to a 1993 show in Hollywood...
In 2007 punk icon Patti Smith combined her own poetry with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for her album Twelve...
Seven years later, alt-soul rocker Robert Glasper put his own spin on it for his Grammy-winning album Black Radio for a cover of the song...
Finally, here's Nirvana in 1994 in Rome...
Up tomorrow: Pop-soul singer cherishes your choppers.
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