Nirvana - With The Lights Out (2004)

“He was an amazing artist… completely original. The best art draws you into its own world, so Kurt built his own world.” — Krist

1985

Kurt Cobain is vocalist/guitarist on all sessions.

“Kurt asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him and gave me that Fecal Matter tape. I listened to it and thought, ‘Hey, this is really good.’ I thought it was cool. So I went, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ Then we labored to put the ensemble together, find a drummer… and a drum set.” — Krist

Krist Novoselic is bassist on all subsequent sessions.

[photo of Kurt’s house] - Kurt’s home in Aberdeen, Washington. Birthplace of Nirvana. The band first rehearsed here.

1987

“I don’t know whose house it was. We were just snotty and jumped around. We rocked, though.” — Krist

1988

“He just said, ‘Hi, my name is Kurt. I’m from Aberdeen, and I’m friends with The Melvins. We want to come in and record some songs really fast; we’ve got Dale Crover from The Melvins helping us out on drums.’ And I thought, well, it’s not going to be some shitty band if Dale’s playing with them — ‘Yeah, come on up.’ They showed up right after noon and they were out the door by six. It was the best thing I’d heard in a while at the studio.” – Jack Endino

The band is billed as Nirvana for the first time.

“OH, OUR LAST AND FINAL NAME IS NIRVANA.” — Kurt, letter to Dale Crover, Journals

May - Chad Channing joins Nirvana

“Nirvana is a trio who play heavy rock with punk overtones. They suually don’t have jobs. So they can tour anytime. NIRVANA has never jammed on “Gloria” or “Louie, Louie”. Nor have they ever had to re write these songs and call them their own. NIRVANA is looking to put their music to vinyl or accepting a loan of about $2,000.” – Kurdt

“I got a van…that was the breakthrough.” – Krist

“They were planning on the B-side being Blandest. And I said, ‘Look guys, the A-side is a cover, so you want the very first original song that people hear from you to make more of an impression.’ And Big Cheese is a way more lively tune.” – Jack Endino

December - Sub Pop releases the three EP compilation box set Sub Pop 200, featuring “Spank Thru”.

“Kurt came in with About A Girl and goes, ‘I was listening to the Beatles over and over again and I got this song.’ He started playing it, and I go, ‘Oh cool, I know what I’ll do, I’ll do this walking pop song bass line.’ Then Chad started playing drums. Then of course Kurt steps on his distortion pedal! It’s kind of the bridge between grunge and pop right there.” – Krist

“The fact that we spent five days in the studio, for $600 bucks, and were able to put out an album that sounded as amazingly good as Bleach did – that wasn’t going to happen again. That only happens once in a band’s lifetime.” – Chad Channing

1989

January 6 – Performance at Satyricon in Portland, Oregon (first out-of-state gig)

June - U.S. release of “Bleach” (first 1000 copies on white vinyl)

“We were listening to Celtic Frost, and they were s oheavy, we though, ‘Let’s tune everything down to D.’ But we were already tuned down to E-flat, so it was like tuning down to C-sharp, so it was pretty low. – Krist

“Kurt and Lanegan told me they were going to write some songs together. But when they showed up they said, ‘Well, we tried writing some songs, but we didn’t record them and we forgot ‘em all. So were going to do some Leadbelly songs instead.’ It was just an off-the-cuff session. At the end I said, ‘I’ve got to write something on the reel, what do I call it?’ And someone said, ‘Call it the Jury!’ And they all laughed.” — Jack Endino

“Shortly after Bleach came out, we were packing clubs and getting booked overseas in Europe. We were like, ‘Wow, this is cool. We might actually do something.’ I don’t know if I ever thought it would get as big as it did. I don’t think Kurt did, either.” – Chad Channing

November - CZ Records releases the compilation EP Teriyaki Asthma Vol. 1 featuring Nirvana’s Mexican Seafood.

December - Blew EP released in the UK

1990

“…just a song that Kurt really liked a lot. …but it didn’t come out sounding how he wanted it to, and for some reason or another he wasn’t going to let it die.” – Chad Channing

“The thing I noticed right off the bat, was that Kurt wrote amazing songs and Krist wrote super hooky bass lines. The bass lines are really melodic, and the hook under the song was actually in the bass, at least musically. And that works so well with Kurt’s vocal melody. They had a really cool interweaving quality. And Kurt was always playing songs; when we’d be setting something up or I’d be changing a mike, he was always playing his own little things that sounded amazing. And I’d say ‘What’s that? You should record that. That sounds really cool.’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, nothing, I’m just fooling around,’ then he’d stop playing. I think part of that was a nervous energy and part was just because he loved doing it. But as soon as I’d try to draw it out of him he’d shut down.” — Butch Vig

“My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They’re split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have and sarcastic opinions and feelings that I have and sarcastic and hopeful, humorous rebuttles towards cliché, bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean I like to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork… Geeks unite.” – Kurt

“There were a lot of ‘Grandma take me homes’ in the chorus…we had to cut ‘em back a little.” — Krist

August - C/Z Records releases the Kiss tribute album Hard To Believe with Nirvana’s Do You Love Me.

Prior to the tour, Kurt and Krist see Dave Grohl playing with Scream in San Francisco.

“An experiment in dynamics and simplicity inspired by Half-Japanese, ELP and ELO.” – Kurt, Incesticide press release

“Scream broke up in LA, and Buzz Osbourne told Dave that he should join Nirvana. So Dave called us and the first question I could think to ask was who his favorite bands were (I thought I should ask!)…Kurt’s in the background going ‘Shut up! Why are you asking that shit? Tell him to get up here!’ It all sort of snowballed from there.” – Krist

Dave Grohl is drummer on this and all subsequent performances.

1991

“They had been playing Aneurysm live a lot, and it was really huge with the tom fills and the vocals coming in and the way the guitar goes from clean to dirty. What I was trying to get was the huge-osity of a live show. Kurt’s ability to scream like that was always otherworldly to me.” –Craig Montgomery

“There was always some song that we’d go home excited about. Then we’d lose the tape or just forget it. If you saw the apartment Kurt and I lived in, you’d understand. The place was a fucking pit. I think a lot of tapes were lost there.” – Dave

“Hello, we’re major-label corporate rock sell outs.” – Kurt, introducing the show

“I knew Smells Like Teen Spirit was going to be one of the key tracks on the record. It was just amazingly powerful. Kurt wanted to play his guitar live all the way through, but I wanted to focus on the sounds of each section, instead of him stepping on the pedal to change it. So first we did the clean guitar part for the intro, then we did a couple heavy guitars for the main body of the song, then we overdubbed the little chimey parts. I think we probably spent the better part of a day doing the guitar overdubs. I was actually amazed that he seemed to be relatively patient with the process. Normally, if he couldn’t get something in a couple takes, he would lose interest and want to move on to something else.” — Butch Vig

June - Release of Velvet Underground tribute album Heaven and Hell Vol. 1, featuring Nirvana’s cover of “Here She Comes Now”.

August 21 – Release of Kill Rock Stars compilation, featuring Nirvana’s “Beeswax”.

August 23 - Performance at the Reading Festival (Reading, UK)

September 10 - Smells Like Teen Spirit single release.

September 24 - Nevermind album release

“A cool $2000 worth of draft beer was consumed by just 200 people in two hours. It also goes down in the history books as the only record release party where the band was thrown out (Chris started a food fight that got a little out of hand). The evening wound down about 10 hours later in a giant heap on their DGC rep’s living room floor, Kurdt and Dave in two of her finest smocks, and all busy defacing a beloved Nelson gold record. Oh yeah KIDS, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. NIRVANA ARE TRAINED PROFESSIONALS, NOT ROLE MODELS.” – Fan club newsletter

“Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, nirvana means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of punk rock.” – Kurt, Nevermind press release

1992

January - Hormoaning EP released in Australia (released later in Japan)

First week “Nevermind” hit #1 on the U.S. sales charts

March 3 - “Come As You Are” single release

“We got to the point where we could just crank out songs. Kurt would be improvising, and we were so good at playing we’d just pick up the song; the second time we’d play the song we’d record it. That’s what happened with those B–sides we did at the Laundry Room.” — Krist

June 20 - Singles box tribute “Eight Songs for Greg Sage & The Wipers” featuring Nirvana’s “Return of the Rat” released on Tim/Kerr Records

July 21 - “Lithium” single release

August 30 - Performance at the Reading Festival (Reading, UK).

October 4 - Performance at the Crocodile Café (Seattle), as the surprise opening act for Mudhoney.

October 15 - Video Shoot for “In Bloom” Sunset Stage (Hollywood, California).

December 15 – “Incesticide” album release

1993

“They played Heart-Shaped Box at soundcheck in Sao Paulo, and even then the vibe around the band was, ‘This is going to be our new single.’.” –Craig Montgomery

“They told me about the quick-and-dirty Laundry Room sessions; those had reminded them of what they liked about being in a band. They said they wanted to do sessions that were like that in spontaneity, but with better sound quality. I had just finished PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me at the same studio, and I gave Kurt a cassette copy of that to listen to. He said if their record came out sounding like that, he would be happy.” –Steve Albini

Feburary 22 - Touch and Go releases a Nirvana/Jesus Lizard split single, Oh, the Guilt/Puss.

March - Sliver video shoot at Kurt’s Seattle home.

Late August - Video shoot for the Heart-Shaped Box video. Los Angeles

“It was all Kurt’s vision. Spooky.” — Krist

September 21 - In Utero is released

October 18 - In Utero tour begins Arizona State Fair (Phoenix, Arizona).

November 9 - “No Alternative” compilation released featuring “Verse Chorus Verse”.

“We put a lot of work into pulling that together. We tried to do those Meat Puppets songs but couldn’t really pull ‘em off without having actual Meat Puppets there. Kurt was really happy after that show — and relieved. He did such a great job. Everybody did such a great job. It turned out really good.” – Krist

November 23 - Geffen releases The Beavis & Butthead Experience compilation featuring Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.”

1994

January 8 - Nirvana’s final US show Seattle Center Arena (Seattle, Washington)

“It all happened so fast. It wasn’t like a normal session where you have a song and then you get sounds and then you all talk about it and then you work on it. It was like — catch it while it’s happening.” – Adam Kasper

It was the music… that’s what brought us together… that was the mission. – Krist

When our lighting designer Suzanne went on tour with Nirvana in 1992 she came back with tales of van rides where Krist, Dave and Kurt played REM, Pixies and Beatles tapes all the time. A little different from our van where it was either extreme noise (me), San Fran hippie spoo (Lee) or old country bluesmen (Steve). She liked Kim’s tapes best, Dinosaur’s “You’re Living All Over Me” and the first Royal Trux LP. Steve’s droning blues tapes really bummer her, “complaining old men” she deduced. At that time none of us were admitted enthusiasts of the REM/Pixies straight up pop rock moves and to find such a heavy edged band like Nirvana referencing them was at first confounding but it certainly made sense in how it informed their music’s accessibility. Our primary connection was more through a shared and direct association with subterranean units like Scratch Acid, Killdozer, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Saccharine Trust, Minutemen and, for Nirvana certainly, hometown mentors the Melvins. It was the fusion of Beatles melody sense and those challenging bands along with Kurt’s voice, a punk rock hybrid of Lennon and Lemmy which worked such toxic magic. Those elements are what first hit me when they completely kicked our asses at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey July 13th 1989. That and the band demolishing the stage at the end of the set. Me, Kim, J Mascis and Suzanne went that night and we were like, “what the…” , I mean no one had much money, especially these dudes, and they were tossing amp heads across the stage, just wasting their guitars, all ending with a 6 foot 7 Krist Novoselic swan diving into Chad’s drums.

Bruce Pavitt, Sub Pop headmaster, acknowledged the above mentioned bands early on in his campaign to promote the regional USA avant garde post punk pop axis. At one point in the mid-1980s he toyed with situating himself in NYC and came to stay with us. We walked him around, hit a few galleries, saw some gigs. He had this vision of releasing a series of LPs by bands that would reflect their specific communities across America. He ultimately settled in Seattle near where he originally had run the Sub Pop newsletter and cassette label. After releasing the first Sub Pop LP, Sub Pop 100, in 1986 which included Scratch Acid (Texas), Wipers (Oregon), Sonic Youth (NYC), Naked Raygun (Chicago), U-Men (Seattle), Dangerous Birds (Boston), Boy Dirt Car (Milwaukee), Savage Republic (L.A.), Shonen Knife (Japan) and others, he began to focus on the rock action broiling right out his front door. He released defining sides by Green River, Soundgarden and the catalytic first 7” by Mudhoney “Touch Me I’m Sick”.

Suzanne worked at Pier Platters record store in Hoboken and at that time it was the only place to get independent, underground new music in the NYC area. The Mudhoney 7” was pressed in fecal brown vinyl slipped in a clear sleeve and she hung about fifty of them in the storefront window. It was totally boss. We were committed to Sub Pop and we were going to check out these new guys (Nirvana). Suzanne had done the label art for the single and said the record was OK, maybe not as happening as Mudhoney’s. Our expectations were moderate but I was psyched by the oddity of the single being a cover of Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz”.

We stood in front, with maybe thirty people there, and it was insane how awesome it was. They were a four piece with the soon-to-be Soundgarden dude Jason Everman wailing on second guitar. He looked just like he looks on the cover of Bleach (which he doesn’t play on). All long curly hair in the face and rocking way hard. It was just after the time when punk rock began incorporating metal lickage into the scene. Black Flag kind of instigated it, growing their hair out and espousing Dio (as well as Charlie Manson), but it was really noticeable in Seattle in the late 80s as a radical route from hardcore and indie. Our first gigs in Seattle were with Green River who were pulling in weird directions from punk to garage to metal to glam. It kind of worked and Mudhoney was a boss refinement of it focusing more on the punk/garage moves. The metal went to the other guys. The glam was for all.

You could sense the excitement with punks getting into heaviosity but no one really had the psycho edge that Black Flag was exhibiting…though I suppose the Melvins had something similarly gnarly going on. Regardless, the underground scene was in transition all across the USA and it was obvious Nirvana were a galvanizing entity. After the gig we hung out and I remember Mascis telling Kurt that he was reconfiguring Dinosaur with ex-Screaming Trees bass player Donna Dresch and I remember Kurt saying, “don’t do that, join us instead!”. Mascis looked incredulous, I was all for it.

Nirvana were masters of repetition. Punk always utilized repetition, from the Ramones’ variations on three killer chords to the Fall’s tune in dour salute to it, “Repetition”, to NYC’s high energy guitar composers Glen Branca and Rhys Chatham creating pure punk euphoria from massed tuning double-strum loudness. It all sounded great and it was deceptively simple. But it only worked through an artist’s vision, which the above certainly had. Nirvana had tapped into the magic of repetition through the phenomena of American hardcore by investing the physical means of Minor Threat and Negative Approach. Their genius was melodicizing it by taking the parts they liked best, the sweet rock melodies of the Beatles, Pixies, REM, Vaselines and other twee poppers, and repeating the riffs over and over again in their own punk rock way until you thought your soul would burst into flame. It was a boss mix for sure and made for a real cool time, and a radical one at that. The happy and weird basement punk/pop aesthetic of Olympia, Washington’s K Records had become as much a signifier as the hardcore label Dischord or the more outsider punk noise of Black Flag’s SST regime. It was a timely convergence. And it lit up everyone involved.

By the end of 1991 we were all fairly delirious to be in Nirvana world. On the tours we did together it was all good times and seemingly endless kicks. But the paradigm switch from Guns n Roses being the hip band for mainstream youth culture to Nirvana made the independent punk scene nervous by any association with upscale industry. The creative underpinnings of punk rock would scatter and reconvene in a whole new dynamic network throughout the 1990s embracing and and all avant garde genres outside media radar. Conversely it’s been an amazingly healthy and inspiring period which has resulted in a startling contemporary underground music and art scene. A scene investing with Kurt’s living energy and one in which he would have intellectually thrived in.

Kurt was a no show when we blew through Seattle late summer 1993. Kim, Suzanne and myself went to the Novoselic house for some grub. It was a weird vibe for me as I felt profound emotion for what nirvana had done musically up to this point and just being with Krist having dinner, checking out his new pinball machines, him being as happy as he could be, knowing maybe that the inner band dynamic was being stressed, I felt slightly cowed and confused by the environment. A lot of it was maybe my own personal desires moving somewhere else away from Nirvana rock even though they had still such a magic spell on me. And beyond the friendly vibe of that evening a sense of trouble was apparent and disheartening. Krist was playing a Cheap Trick album and Suzanna, who was more his age than I, was way into it. I was being annoyed by it’s 90s anthem sound and was craving some no-wave to destroy it. I wished Nirvana to embrace noise and freedom and frisbee the Cheap Trick LP into Lake Washington. At some point Dave dropped by saying he was gonna go to their practice space to listen to the finished mixes that Steve Albini had done. I totally wanted to hear this and got in Dave’s car, Krist got on his motorcycle, and we buzzed over. We smoked a little weed and drank beer and that was about it for me. The weed had made me even more freaked and self conscious and really super thinking about the fragility of these guys and the heavy mystic rock action of what they were involved in.

They played some of the tunes. The first one I heard was “Moist Vagina” where Kurt intones over and over in artful and damaged REPETITION, “marijuana! marijuana! marijuana!”. I thought it was the greatest thing they ever did, a crazed meeting of atonal psychosis and crunge rock pummel. It ruled. “It’s gotta be the first song on the record!”, I declared. It’d be completely awesome, the first tune where Kurt lays out his passion, where it all comes down to…marijuana. How banal yet utterly iconic and beautiful. It’s almost as if hippie and punk became, for a cosmic moment, unified. Krist and Dave weren’t too sold on my splutter. They then decided to play me what they thought was the song the record company would want to use for the hit, “All Apologies” and, yeh, I guess that’s the one, beautiful, classic. Then Dave ran into the playing room and started thrashing on his kit. Me and Krist went in and I plugged in a guitar and we bonked around for awhile. Dave and Krist talked about how the three of them came up with so many different tunes in practice but they never recorded them, a lot of them totally amazing.

When In utero was handed into Geffen there was some consternation at the label about it not having the accessibility of Nevermind. Nirvana felt like the record company dudes were not digging it for its own inherent worth. I thought the record ruled and was a boundary pusher and signaled new exciting ideas for the band to develop. I called Kurt to tell him as such. That along with the apparent influence of underground bands like Jesus Lizard, Sebadoh and others the music was entirely genuine and new. I related it to when we played with them in Sacramento at the Crest Theater in August 1990 and they handed us a cassette of what the band were working on for the follow up to Bleach. It was called Sheep.

We jammed it in our van and it was very cool but it was a somewhat shocking move from the full molten drive of Bleach. There was some discussion that they were maybe going a little too pop. Of course it became a universal classic. Nirvana had the propensity to get weirder, more experimental in style. Through the haze of conflict and stress, In Utero somewhat signified this.

Krist and Dave were to appear on the MTV Music Awards in 1995 and were asked to prepare a film tribute for Kurt. They elected Dave Markey to put it together as Dave had traveled with both our bands on tour (The Broke, a film in which Markey has a solid hour plus of outtakes and dialogue for potential DVD reissue). We gathered at Markey’s tiny West Hollywood apartment and went through the boxes of video tapes Kurt had made of films he shot during his high school years and compilations he made of bizarro public access shows off TV. The films were strange and wonderful, one showing a young Kurt contemplating moves with abstract oversized dirt and mortar game pieces. Krist wanted to use as much of this as possible as it was the real deal as opposed to the more popular images of MTV. The Markey piece was about a minute long and it was odd and dark and, to us, a bit more reflective of the Kurt we knew. Kim and I went to the awards show and the film played floating over the glitterati all low key and out of context, beyond the comprehension of the night’s event. The executive beside me was distracted and said, “what the hell was that?”. Krist and Dave sauntered to the podium to speak and I held Kim’s hand as she quietly cried, both of us feeling sad surrounded by inattention and chatter.

Intensive detailed fan sites for bootleg audio and video from Nirvana’s 1987-1994 existence abound. This collection is legit and put together with devotion by friends and associates who continue to work with and love the band and their living legacy. Nirvana were their generation’s greatest voice, and continue to be. With only a few recordings officially released they identified and validated a complex and factionalized youth demographic, one alternately entertained and disserviced by a homogenized culture industry. Nirvana expressed anger, amusement, satire, defeat, emotion and debate. They just wanted to be part of the scene they began with and were so inspired by. Their music ruled so hard that they became so much more - whether they liked it or not. Maybe they felt they were losing touch at the end there but we always knew, no matter how high up they flew, they could never ever really leave us.

– Thurston Moore September, 2004

Sunday afternoon, Tower Records, Sherman Oaks. He is 17, the boy, looking through the rock racks. The Bs. I approach, as I have several dozen people all day. We discuss music. His name is Grant Baylor. The boy. When the subject of Nirvana comes up, he gives me that stare. The blank one.

“Who?”

And then he returns to the racks, looking for the discs of bands whose names are hardly worthy of being immortalized in the liner notes of this box set.

In an independent study of 30 teenagers Sunday afternoon in Toward Records in Sherman Oaks, only eleven had heard of Nirvana.

Yes.

There lies the body of the last important rock band.

When I say important, I don’t mean merely good. And I don’t mean just musically seminal. I mean important to culture, to society, to the fabric of existence in a brief period of time known as the 90’s. High school history book important. Like Genghis Khan and Bach and Appomattox and Woodstock. (For what it’s worth, only ten teenagers surveyed had heard of Bach.)

Of course, such a legacy isn’t necessarily good news to Nirvana, which always had a conflicted relationship with success. This is a band that wanted to be a memorable footnote, not the whole story. They wanted to be the balm in the ear of the adolescent outcast; they wanted to belong to the disenfranchised, not the whole world. Thus, when offered the cover of Time Magazine in 1991, they opted for Alternative Press instead. That was their goal: to destroy the system from within, and along the way earn the respect of their musical peers and mentors.

Truth be told, it’s not easy to write liner notes to a Nirvana boxed set. The band would have hated the idea of a lengthy critical exegia on its muso-historical significance. It’s odd enough to see a multimedia box set from a band that started out with the best of counter-commercial intentions: a vinyl-only limited-edition seven-inch single.

So instead of a critical diatribe or a detailed band hagiography (all of which is available ad infinitum online and in bookstores), I will tell you a story. Put disc 1 in your stereo, sit back, relax, and listen.

The story begins with the words “once upon a time” and concludes with “it’s a tragic ending.”

Once upon a time, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, as music changed, there was a quest for volume. Old-fashioned acoustic guitars just weren’t cutting it in noisy nightclubs and dancehalls. So a teenager named Les Paul stuck a phonograph pickup and a telephone mouthpiece under his guitar strings, then wired it all to his parents’ radio, which he used as an amplifier. It wasn’t long before George Beauchamp found a more elegant way to electrify the guitar and mass market the results. Already, the spirit of rock as we know it had been born: a noisy living room experiment borne of youth and folly had been converted in just a few short years to a mainstream commodity.

Jazz was the pop music at the time. But its crescendo, swing, would also result in its death throes. For out of the swing bands came Louis Jordan, punching up the rhythms and adding fire to the vocals to create jump blues, which led to rhythm and blues, which would be tripped down to rock and roll. For a complete recipe, add to this influences from country’s founding families in the hills around Bristol, Tennessee and the blues brothers from the flat delta of Mississippi and Arkansas.

Now the doors were really opening. Johnny Otis. Muddy Waters. Fats Domino. Little Richard. Howlin’ Wolf. Chuck Berry. Bo Diddley. And, why not, let’s throw in Bill Haley, Roy Brown and Wild Bill Moore sang of rocking and rolling, but it was Ike Turner who cut what would be acknowledged as the first rock and roll single, “Rocket 88,” at Sun Studio in Memphis. And so the first generation of snarling punks came: the Elvises, the Jerry Lee Lewises, the Carl Perkinses. A generation gap was born. Sexualized youth versus scowling adults. Rockabilly rebels like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly played fast, in a code only the kids could crack, and they died young.

Dick Dale ushered in wet guitar surf music, only to be declared obsolete when the Beatles made vocals, lyrics, harmonies de rigeur. Then the rest of the British invaded, schooling America in its own traditional music, taking the blues and reinventing rock ‘n’ roll as just plain rock. The Rolling Stones. The Who. The Kinks. The Pretty Things. All evolved fast and furious, influencing the Bob Dylans to plug in and spawning generations of garage bands. The Count Five. The Standells. The Sonics. Hundreds upon hundreds more with a guitar and a dream. The second wave of punks. The hit-and-run wonders who sang unabashedly of drugs and sex.

Those twin pillars of decadence, combined with civil disobedience, social unrest, better drugs, and an antagonism for the man in all his forms, expanded the music. And so came a glory period in the late 60’s of thunderous festival rock, of ambitious multimedia musical experimentation from the Mothers of Invention and Pink Floyd, of Dylanista songwriters whose sword was the pen, of psychedelic jams that shimmered in the reflected glory of a belief in the power of a united youth and then, inevitably, led to the bloated carcass of the indulgent 70’s rock and roll. The sword became a flashlight.

Yet lost in the shuffle were the underdogs, who felt alienated equally by both guns and flowers. They were the Stooges, singing about being bored in the most exciting year for American youth, and the Velvet Underground, casting a net of influence that led to few sales but thousands of imitators. This was the third wave of punk.

In the meantime, the disillusioned hippies and the disaffected garage-rockers backed the blues into a corner. Turned it up. Made it hurt. Took more drugs. Cream. Led Zep. Black Sabbath. And as communal love turned back into me-first narcissism, the workers put on makeup. T. Rex. The Sweet. Gary Glitter. Glam rock. The inevitable outcome would come to pass a decade later in Los Angeles, the capital of narcissism and disillusion, which would give heavy metal its bad name.

As the 60s died, so did its stars: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. Gone. Drugs bad. Art good. Out of the art schools of England marched another invasion, to save rock, by bloating its carcass further, to out-glam glam-rock. Roxy Music. David Bowie.

Yet, as always, the flat-broke and bypassed sat imprisoned by the walls of their hometown, completely oblivious to the outside world, creating something new by accident. The place is CBGB on New York’s Bowery. The bands are the New York Dolls, Television, the Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads. Bands that English moguls, art-students, and jobless losers would idolize and reinvent as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Jam, Generation X, Wire. Welcome to the fourth wave of punk.

Where the first wave of punks in Memphis had invented rock to dance over the lifeless pop crooning like poison over the radio, punk was now a destructive act. Rock was dead, so let’s have a party and tear it apart. It doesn’t take skill to destroy something, only to build it. Anyone can do it. The world was a noisy place. Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall and was shattered. IN the debris were not just guitars to chose from, but there was funk, there were electronic instruments, there was the rumbling of a passing dumptruck, the noise of modernization and technology. The world was an even louder, more chaotic place than the one Les Paul had tried to compete with. Pere Ubu. Devo. ESG. The Bush Tetras. Post-punk begat new wave begat no wave. In England, the kids stuck a needle into punk rock and sucked it dry. Theory replaced life. There came Joy Division. Gang of Four. The Pop Group. The Raincoats. Throbbing Gristle. Just add black and you have goth.

Oblivious, the pop machine marched on, well-greased by that lubricant of the 80’s, cash. They even invented a technology that allowed radio to be played on the television: the video. And so purist rockers that embraced the moneyless classes – U2, Bruce Springsteen – were catapulted into a realm of superstardom equaled by none before them, joining Michael Jackson and Prince and Madonna in an exclusive multi-million-dollar playhouse in the sky. It was time for the people to speak again. You know, the ones without villas on the Italian Riviera. Time for the fifth wave of punk rock. Localism was its credo. Its rallying cry: fuck corporate rock. Words it would later eat.

Each explosion in each city sent shrapnel in to the hearts and minds of the lost, impressionable teens chugging beers and sneaking smokes in the back alleys. By the late 80’s, an entire underground infrastructure had been created as an alternative to the hackneyed MTV-groomed mainstream rock of the time. It spun off of labels like Amphetamine Reptile, Touch and GO, K, Teen Beat, and Sub Pop and onto the airwaves of the noncommercial college stations of the country, infecting whole new impressionable minds with the desire to pick up a guitar and a distortion pedal.

One band would emerge that would lead them. Not by design but by accident. All those symbols of artistic oppression that alternative rock had been created in opposition to – major labels, MTV, top 40 radio, fashion catwalks, velvet ropes – would come to embrace it. The bands would be bought, the labels would be bought, the scene would be bought. That was the bad news. The good news was that the unexpected influx of real rock – with meaning, with anger, with confusion, with intelligence, with care, with passion – suddenly pumping out of Impalas and BMWs alike would impact the lives of millions impact the lives of millions in a way no rock music has since.

We all know the name of that band (unless you’re under 18, in which case one-third of you knows the name of that band). You hold their boxset in your grubby greedy hands. It is all here. The alpha and the omega. The blueprint of the band that became the last gasp of rock and roll in the 20th century. The ending of our story. The before, behind, and beyond the studio albums that have been burned so indelibly into your neurochemistry: The infant thrashings on KAOS. The legendary rehearsal in drummer Dale Crover’s bedroom. The demo tape that out 21-year-old anti-hero sent to the independent labels mentioned three paragraphs ago. The aborted fetus of the supergroup that could have been, the Jury. The should-have-been classic songs – from achingly beautiful Beatlesesque moments to ear-splitting thrash -- that never made it onto any studio album. The demo of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” recorded onto a boombox to send to producer Butch Vig. The entirety of the band’s first blistering basement studio session after the release of Nevermind. The demo tapes for In Utero – one of the most anticipated CDs of its decade -- recorded on tour in Brazil, with markedly different lyrics. And cassettes from Kurt Cobain’s personal stash so intimate that they’ll blow your mind: collect every bootleg you can find, and you still won’t get this deep.

Yes, here it all is. For the fans. For the freaks. For the fuckers who have forgotten. A soundtrack to the lives of millions of lost, alienated, substance-starved souls ignored by the pop machine. Perhaps even the endpoint of rock and roll as a cultural crowbar of change.

Who will stand up and speak for those millions now?

It’s a beautiful tale. But it’s a tragic ending.

– Neil Strauss (with respect to Haruki Murakami for the literary device)