With The Lights Out

Sometime towards the end of 1997, I was at home late one Friday night. I forget the precise details of my emotional state, but I had recently turned 16, and given that my adolescent years were largely whiled away in a fugue of alcohol, boredom and depression, I don’t have any reason to believe that the circumstances of my life at that particular point in time were anything other than ridiculously grim.
A fit of random channel-hopping landed me on a compilation of musical highlights from The Word, which some readers may recall as being the full-stop after ultra-bad-taste early ‘90s yoof TV. Blur and Oasis reeled off impressive renditions of, respectively, ‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘Supersonic’, but my attention really perked up when presenter Terry Christian announced that they had “saved the best ‘til last”.
Cut to the chaotic scene of three lank-haired, rag-pile-clad punk musicians from the Pacific Northwest tuning up against a back-drop of hallucinatory light-effects and grooving dancers, whilst a group of especially excitable grunge fanatics waited expectantly in the mosh-pit in front. Eventually, Kurt Cobain announced that the song they were about to perform was dedicated to “Courtney Love, lead singer of the sensational pop-group Hole – and the best fuck in the world”.
Three and a half minutes later, after a blistering, abbreviated rendition of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Dave Grohl had reduced his drum kit to rubble, an up-ended Krist Novoselic was adrift somewhere in the crowd, and Cobain was elicting wave after wave of deafening feedback from his guitar courtesy of a smashed mic stand. All lingustic eloquence aside, it was totally fucking awesome. So much so that within months, I had purchased the entire Nirvana back catalogue, and continued to repeat-play the albums so much throughout 1998 that my stereo damn near well exploded.
Of course, there is nothing particularly exotic about this tale; I was just one of the millions of disaffected, confused kids who fell under the strange spell of this eerily brilliant Seattle three-piece. Following the posthumous releases of Unplugged In New York and From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah (excellent releases both: a major American record label dealing with the death of a global superstar in tasteful and dignified fashion - just fancy that!), comes the exhaustive anthology With The Lights Out, which is sure to be the final word on the legacy of the greatest band of the 1990s.
The package (comprised of an immaculately designed fold-out sleeve, extensive booklet with superb liner notes from Thurston Moore and Neil Strauss, and three CDs and a DVD), opens with the nascent Nirvana jamming on Led Zep’s ‘Heartbreaker’, swiftly followed by radio-session performances of ‘Anorexorcist’, ‘White Lace And Strange’ and ‘Help Me I’m Hungry’. You can very much hear the band gradually piecing together the constituent elements that would make Bleach such a bewitching sonic brew; the gonzo experimentation and guitar pyrotechnics of the ‘80s US underground, married to Cobain’s Beatles-like melodic sensibilities and, of course, that searing, indelible voice.
Perhaps the highlight of CD1 is a tune called ‘Blandest’. Recorded with Bleach engineer Jack Endino, it features everything that made the late ‘80s Nirvana such a thrilling prospect: a sludgy, bluesy guitar riff dueling with a characteristically catchy Novoselic bass line and breakneck drumming, topped off with Cobain’s winningly sardonic lyrics - “You’re my favourite of my saviours/You’re my favourite oh no/And the situation wasn’t quite as intense as I thought/I need someone around to remind me when not to be calm”.
Remarkably, the band didn’t see fit to include it on their debut, but I suppose when you’ve got tunes as strong as ‘Floyd The Barber’ and ‘About A Girl’ (here included in, respectively, live and solo-acoustic form) fastidiousness in track selection is eminently excusable.
CD2 is a decidedly different affair. The avant-garde tendencies and pain-threshold guitar freak-outs are gradually being squeezed out in deference to Cobain’s Pixies/REM-style pop touch, but Jesus H. Christ, what a touch. Even in their crude home-demo and rehearsal room incarnations, the likes of ‘Lithium’, ‘Aneurysm’ and ‘Drain You’ still buzz with zeitgeist-defining potential. Most exciting of all, though, are the embryonic versions of The Song That Ate The World, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
The group’s first stab at it, recorded in demo-form in early 1991, is more frenzied than the take that eventually opened Nevermind, featuring alternate lyrics and extended choruses. By May of that year, though, the writing is on the wall for legions of useless hair-metal non-entities and anodyne manufactured pop acts (and also, sadly, probably for Cobain himself). With master groove technician Butch Vig in situ at the mixing desk, the tempo has slowed, the verse-chorus-verse dynamics (which the singer so fretted over) are to the fore, and those familiar brooding lyrics are really starting to take shape. Even though I’m listening to it for the 5 millionth time, when that “With the lights out…” chorus kicks in, it’s like I’m back in my living room listening to that Word performance again.
Disc 3, which features demos, live performances and out-takes from the In Utero era, sees the band travel down a very dark path indeed. Like Unknown Pleasures, The Holy Bible and The Downward Spiral, In Utero is one of those bleak rock classics that fearlessly explores the darker aspects of the human psyche. Whether it be the corrosive punk riffing of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ (the lyric of which was inspired by Patrick Suskind’s classic novel of misanthropy and sexual disgust, Perfume), the world-weariness of ‘Serve The Servants’ or the utter desolation of ‘Heart Shaped Box’ (the line “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black” still sends a chill down the spine), this, as the late John Balance of Coil memorably put it, is musick to play in the dark.
The footage on the DVD is mainly culled from the band’s formative years, with the opening eight-song performance dating from a 1988 rehearsal at Novoselic’s mother’s house in Aberdeen, Washington. From a purely Irish perspective, one of the most startling moments occurs at an in-store performance at Rhino Records, LA in 1989. As the band run through ‘Big Cheese’, one’s attention can’t help but be drawn to the face adorning the large poster behind Kurt Cobain: that of Newbridge, Co. Kildare’s very own Christy Moore!
The concluding track, a cover of ‘Seasons In The Sun’, was recorded at a studio in Rio De Janeiro in early 1993. Inter-cut with grainy, home movie-style footage of the band filmed during their early ‘90s heyday, the emotional impact is actually similar to Mark Romanek’s video for Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’.
Any number of theories can be hung on this most extraordinary of stories; three punks from the Northwest of America who liked to “get drunk and goof around”, and ended up becoming perhaps the most beloved band of their generation. But perhaps the most elegant way to sum up is Don DeLillo’s treatise on the nature of the rock star’s lot in Great Jones Street:
“Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors…perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.”

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