Searching for the real impact of ‘Nevermind’
30 years later, Nirvana may not have been ‘death knell’ for hair-metal bands after all
Eric Martin insists he didn’t hate Nirvana — even though he knew at the time he was supposed to.
As frontman of the hairmetal band Mr. Big, Martin had been fed a story that Nirvana’s overnight success in the early 1990s came at the expense of the peacocking leather-and-denim types who’d dominated rock just a few years before.
“Everybody said they were taking food out of our mouths,” Martin recalls of the scowling Seattle trio that crashed MTV and the Hot 100 with 1991’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “We’d all been touring, having a great time, and then the grunge thing came in and pulled the rug right out from under everybody. Lot of guys went back to painting houses.
“But I thought ‘Teen Spirit’ kicked ass,” Martin adds. “I didn’t have a (expletive) clue what Kurt Cobain was talking about. But I liked the attitude. It still rocked.”
Martin’s generosity may have been due to the fact that Mr. Big wasn’t among grunge’s casualties: Five months after Nirvana upended the rock world with its album “Nevermind” — released 30 years ago on Sept. 24, 1991 — Martin and his bandmates scored a No. 1 hit with “To Be With You,” an old-fashioned hair-metal ballad.
Pretty, polished and loaded with “baby’s” and “little girl’s,” “To Be With You” was precisely the type of tune that Nirvana was assumed to have killed with Cobain’s disaffected songs about feeling “stupid and contagious.” Instead, it spent three weeks atop the singles chart and drove Mr. Big’s “Lean Into It” LP to platinum sales.
Decades later, the wellreceived power ballad demonstrates that the conventional wisdom about “Nevermind” — that it was “a death knell,” per REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin, for bands that burned through Aqua Net by the case — isn’t entirely accurate.
“Grunge wasn’t a mass extinction event for that earlier hard rock,” says Tony Berg, a veteran producer and A&R executive. “But there was the almost instantaneous perception that it was so not cool. While there may still have been an audience for it, especially in mainstream America, the cognoscenti certainly was not wondering what the next Warrant record was gonna sound like.”
And not just Warrant: Any number of hair bands that had been riding high in the mid- to late ’80s — from Whitesnake to Slaughter to Winger, whose frontman Kip Winger has described the grunge era as “the Dark Ages” — suddenly found themselves crowded out from the table by the brooding likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, all of which put out seminal albums within weeks of one another in the fall of 1991.
Desmond Child, who made his name writing flashy hits for Kiss and Bon Jovi, compares seeing the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video to “Elvis Presley watching the Beatles on TV.”
“My own manager sat me down — I was in my 30s — and he said, ‘Well, basically, you’re all washed up,’ ” Child said. “I was stunned. I was like, ‘At this age?’ ”
Yet as producer Butch Vig points out, this perceived change in taste was driven in large part by industry gatekeepers
rather than by fans. “Trust me, there were still people out there who wanted to hear Tesla,” says Vig, who oversaw the recording of “Nevermind” and went on to produce Smashing Pumpkins’ “Siamese Dream” and albums by Sonic Youth and L7.
Bon Jovi was still playing arenas and stadiums in 1993, while a 1994 tour by Aerosmith — then enjoying a comeback that included its first No. 1 album, “Get a Grip” — outgrossed that year’s traveling Lollapalooza festival with Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day, according to the trade journal Pollstar.
Still, for a record biz attuned to seeking out the next big thing, expending resources on a muscle-teed young act like Trixter was viewed as “pretty much investing in the past,” as
Berg puts it.
Luke Wood, who worked in marketing at Geffen in the early ’90s, remembers a meeting about a hard rock band called Roxy Blue then signed to the label.
“I can’t make a judgment as to whether they were better or worse than Poison or Warrant, but they were in that same vein,” he says. “And there was just zero conversation about them. No ‘Let’s listen again.’ We’d moved on.”
So had decision-makers at radio and MTV. Rick Krim, MTV’s director of talent and artist relations at the time, notes that the influential cable network played Alice in Chains’ “Man in the Box” before “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
“We were ready for a change,” he says, even before grunge blew up. “Our mindset was, ‘Let’s
shake it up and try something new.’ ”
Yet in retrospect, tastemakers’ preoccupation with grunge threatens to misrepresent where the music sat in the larger context of pop music in the 1990s.
“Nirvana wasn’t really mainstream,” says Mark Kates, another Geffen exec who handled A&R and alternative radio promotion. “They were successful, and their impact was huge. But it’s not like they took over Top 40.” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100; “Nevermind’s” second single, “Come as You Are,” got no higher than No. 32.
Grunge bands were big on MTV, no doubt about it; their videos offered viewers a window “into a whole culture,” Krim says, just as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were doing at the same time with their gangsta-rap “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang.” The music informed fashion and movies and defined how Generation X presented itself; it also moved rock away from hair metal’s depiction of women as bikini-clad arm candy.
Like late-stage hair metal, grunge was eventually bled dry through the corporate exploitation of second- and third-generation acts — your Sponges and Creeds and Candleboxes.
By the late ’90s the music industry had moved on, as it always does, to electronica and teen pop and nu-metal — and not without many of the figures who’d been instrumental in creating earlier crazes. Child helped launch the turn-of-the-millennium Latin-pop boom when he co-wrote “Livin’ la Vida Loca” for Ricky Martin; Bon Jovi remade itself with an eye on the fist-pumping country fans who kept Garth Brooks’ “Ropin’ the Wind” album at No. 1 for a combined 18 weeks before and after “Nevermind.”
Even Nirvana’s drummer, Dave Grohl, went on after Cobain’s 1994 suicide to fuse grunge and hair metal, more or less, with Foo Fighters, his arena-packing hard-rock group.
Any Nirvana lover wonders what kind of music Cobain would’ve made after grunge’s inevitable fade; his death after only one additional studio album, 1993’s blistering “In Utero,” recast his success as a cautionary tale about fame.
Yet the songs he wrote and recorded in his short life continue to resonate decades later. Billie Eilish and Post Malone are vocal fans, and Lil Nas X recently cut in Cobain as a credited songwriter when a melody from Nirvana’s “In Bloom” found its way into his song “Panini.”