Armchair Arts
The greatest testament to one of rock’s most tragic talents
Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991)
Nirvana released only three albums during the short life of their leader, Kurt Cobain. The group’s impact was phenomenal, rebooting rock with a primal power that restored guitar music’s standing as an artistic, generational and commercial force. But it came at a terrible cost to Cobain himself, who died by his own hand in April 1994, aged 27.
The covers of those three albums tell a story in themselves. Nirvana rose in the age of the CD, when the most effective covers essayed conceptual and graphic simplicity to adapt to a shrunken packaging space, down from vinyl’s 12in square to less than 5in x 5in.
Released on American independent label Sub Pop in 1989, Nirvana’s debut, Bleach, features a black-and-white negative image of a frenetic live shot, laid out with a cheap and nasty punk feel reflecting the raw aesthetic of the nascent Seattle grunge scene.
The Onyx typeface was chosen simply because it was already installed in the typesetting machine at free local paper The Rocket, where designer Lisa Orth worked. By the time of Nirvana’s final studio album, 1993’s In Utero, on major label Geffen, that cheap logo had become a global brand, much to the confusion of conflicted singer, guitarist and songwriter Cobain. “We’re so trendy, we can’t even escape ourselves,” he complained as Nirvana’s anti-establishment, emotionally nihilistic rock became the soundtrack of the times.
In Utero’s provocative cover depicted an anatomical model with angel wings, its visible internal organs creating a graphic image of physical and emotional exposure. The album’s working title was I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.
In between came the album that changed everything, with probably the most famous cover of the CD era.
What is it?
The sharp cover photo depicts a naked baby underwater, swimming after a dollar bill on a fishhook. It is an arresting conceptual image, at once cute, strange and disturbing. Presented with the glossy sheen of an advertisement, it simultaneously crystallised and commodified the band’s disdain for the commercial world.
The story behind the cover
The product of a broken marriage, Cobain grew up in a working-class area of rural Washington state. A troubled teenager, he found respite in art and music, and in 1985 he headed to Seattle, started working as a roadie and formed his own band. He was heavily involved in all Nirvana’s artwork, but, as is often the case, Nevermind’s main conceptual image was arrived at by increments.
Cobain initially wanted to show a baby being born underwater after
It is an arresting conceptual image, at once cute, strange and disturbing Neil Mccormick’s cover story
seeing a TV documentary on the subject. A newly promoted art director at Geffen, Robert Fisher, was asked to make this a reality, but the images he found were too graphic for an album sleeve. Fisher proposed a swimming baby instead, and Cobain suggested adding a fishhook to make it more menacing.
“We spent the afternoon sitting around thinking of all the funny things we could put on it,” according to Fisher. One suggestion was a raw steak, another was a CD. “We went to lunch and we were like, ‘How about a burrito?’ ‘Oh, there’s a dog, what about a dog?’ It just went on for hours.” His point was that “Kurt didn’t come up with a grand plan or a message he wanted to get across. One step led to another.” They eventually settled on a dollar bill.
Fisher hired Kirk Weddle, an underwater photographer. “Shooting a baby was new for me,” according to Weddle. “I really didn’t want to drown the little guy.” Close friends allowed him to photograph their four-month-old baby, Spencer Elden, in the shallow end of a domestic LA swimming pool. “I had a snorkel and underwater camera on a tripod. We trained on a doll.” Mother and father passed Spencer between them, while Weddle took pictures, halting when the baby started to cry. “It took about an hour to set up and five minutes to do.”
Weddle had doubts about the session due to the naked boy’s prominent genitalia. “I thought, ‘Man, it’s such a d--- shot!’ I didn’t know if the label would go for it.” He hedged his bets with a second shoot involving four female babies at a Pasadena swim school. But Fisher chose a frame of Spencer. Weddle was paid $1,000. “That was for everything, including the gear and another rescue diver.” Baby Spencer’s fee was $250. Fisher employed a technical team to put the hook and dollar into the shot, add bubbles, and remove the visible swimming-pool tiles, replacing them with deep aquatic blue. If you look closely, you can still see a handprint on the baby’s chest, where his father had been holding him moments before the shot was taken.
For the lettering, Fisher used the band’s budget logo from their debut but created the rippled Nevermind himself by wiggling and scanning the type multiple times in a photocopy machine. The grammatically compressed phrase of the title (from their song Smells Like Teen
Spirit) implies sarcastic pity and resigned despair. The original working title was the arguably more cynical Sheep.
What does it sound like?
It is one of the greatest rock albums ever made, compressing Cobain’s love of Beatles melodies and Sex Pistols’ punk fury through the guitar distortion of Sonic Youth and quietverse-to-noisy-chorus dynamics of the Pixies. Produced by Butch Vig (who went on to form Garbage), Dave Grohl’s drums are monumental, locked tight to Krist Novoselic’s liquid bass while Cobain’s guitar parts offer a mix of strange hooks and crunching power.
At its heart is a set of tightly compressed pop-rock songs evincing a surrealist dismay at the state of the world, delivered in a voice of raw suffering and rage.
What is its legacy?
Nevermind – which sold 30million copies globally – popularised grunge, a downmarket genre mixing heavy-rock power, punk purpose and anthemic melody. It challenged the overproduced arena rock of the CD era and paved the way for Britpop in the UK. But Cobain soon took to wearing a Grunge Is Dead T-shirt. Nevermind remains the greatest testament to his talent at full blast, before the dream soured.
The cover is a design classic and features in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Robert Fisher remains a successful designer whose clients include Netflix, Disney and Playstation. Weddle is still a commercial photographer but prefers portraiture to underwater work.
At 29, Spencer Elden has the word
Nevermind tattooed on his chest and occasionally models for tribute shots, yet admits to some bitterness. “It’s hard not to get upset when you hear how much money was involved,” he said in 2006. “When I go to a baseball game and think about it: ‘Man, everybody at this baseball game has probably seen my little baby penis,’ I feel like I got part of my human rights revoked.”
If you look closely, you can see the handprint of the baby’s father