Great Moments on Video №17: Nirvana - Breed

(The Paramount Theatre, Seattle, Washington, October 31, 1991)

Great Moments on Video №17: Nirvana - Breed

(The Paramount Theatre, Seattle, Washington, October 31, 1991)

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone — this may be one of the more trite bits of lyrics out of Joni’s pocketbook, but for some reason it swirled around in my mind while watching random bits of Nirvana’s concert given at The Paramount Theatre, a little more than one month after the release of Nevermind. It’s so funny to remember these days that back when the world was going crazy over ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, I remained steadily neck-deep in my Beatles and Stones albums and couldn’t really tell Nirvana from Metallica — to a 15-year old me, it was all about cheap anti-musical noise...

It’s also funny to realize now just how much, despite all the gigantic historical differences, America and Russia — especially American and Russian youth — in the early Nineties had in common. Disillusionment, frustration, sickness of both the stuffy pop glamor of the Eighties and the stuffy conservative ideologies (where Reaganism and communism, in some ways, turned out to be two sides of the same coin) — combined with poverty, dirt, drugs, AIDS, and, at the same time, a certain feel of ragged-rugged idealism and an ability to convert one’s freedom into powerful (if ultimately doomed) artistic expression. You could be a dirtbag, but you could express yourself in a million different ways, breaking rules, being offensive and insensitive, and sometimes creating great art in the process. It was a horrible time, and it was an amazing time, the likes of which our current century has not yet been able to reproduce or recreate on a new level.

There are probably hundreds of video images that could illustrate this feeling for me, but for some reason, my current vision seems to have locked in, quite specifically, on this Paramount show from Nirvana, which I don’t even own on video; I have the Live At Reading DVD from 1992, which is also great, but by that time, Nirvana had already been big stars for a year, and it shows quite a bit in the performance — while Kurt did an admirable job fighting the chains of stardom until he could fight them no longer, they still show up there quite a bit.

The Paramount performance, on the other hand, is a truly unique historical document (and emotional experience) in that it is Nirvana’s first, or at least one of the first, professionally filmed shows, captured at a time when stardom had not yet properly begun to catch up with them. So while this is, of course, already not quite on the ultra-raw DIY level of, say, the fabulous early gig from 1989 at Rhino Records, it is still a unique chance to see Nirvana in their grizzled prime, well-connected with their own hometown audience on their very own home turf, with great sound and picture quality, professional and even inventive camera work to boot. And if there is a more perfect document to bottle up that amazing «spirit of 1991», I’d sure like to see it.

‘Breed’ has always been one of my favorite tracks on Nevermind — one of the fastest numbers in the band’s catalog, and yet somehow managing to be perfectly melodic, distinctive, and catchy in all of its brutal aggression. The opening riff here is played, I think, with a little less distortion and in a slightly higher tuning than in the studio, which is a bit surprising (usually it is the live versions that tend to sound «dirtier» than studio ones, but the best of the grunge guys liked to defy expectations) — but despite the sheer madness ruling both onstage and in the audience, the band remains consistently tight, continuing the grand old tradition of all the best hard rock outfits (i.e. you’re allowed to make as much chaos as you want, provided you stay in total control over it). Even when Cobain is spasming on the floor during his solo drone, he knows damn well what he is willing to play, and he plays it — sure, it’s nowhere near the level of Angus Young technique, but it doesn’t really pursue the same goals as AC/DC, either.

What’s really great about the performance is that it is one of those classic «you KNOW something is happening, but you don’t know what it is» moments. There’s one guy standing out there in a kind of burlap sweater that looks like his Mum might have knitted for him (hey, we wore those kinds of sweaters over here in Moscow, too!), abusing the crap out of a guitar that bears the sticker «Vandalism: Beautiful As A Rock In A Cop’s Face» (not easily seen on this video, but well notable on other performances, e.g. on ‘About A Girl’; it was apparently taken out of the 1986 LP Teachers In Space by The Feederz). There’s a barefoot guy jumping around the stage while playing his bass as if the hot floor were burning his feet. There’s a Keith Moon wannabe on drums who somehow manages to fit an entire bottle of water in his mouth before releasing it in an impressive shower at the moment the song kicks in in full.

And that’s just the band. In addition, there’s a girl wearing a "Boy" T-shirt, doing the kind of ridiculous dance vaguely reminiscent of the idiotic dancing styles of the backing girls on every teen-oriented music TV show in the early 1960s. (Her name is Nikki McClure, and she would go on to become a reasonably successful papercut artist illustrating children’s books). There are people randomly climbing up on stage and diving into the audience (certainly not a tradition that originated with Nirvana, and it doesn’t even look like it organically belongs with their music, but the idea here is that anything belongs). And then there are the astonished cameramen trying to capture all that pandemonium — and actually doing a much better job at it as could be guessed by watching them skedaddle around the stage. (The way they manage to capture that stage dive at 1:50 is quite impressive).

But the hidden ingredient here, the one that makes this whole performance transcend the usual «underground rock» formalities of the late Eighties / early Nineties, is Kurt’s individual pain, as reflected in both the singing and the guitar playing. Here, as I already mentioned, it is still fairly pure, untampered with the burden of trying-and-failing to be understood by the miriads of average Joes who like our pretty sings and like to sing along. Here there might still be a faint trace of an idea of finding the proper feedback for the desperation coming through, and this means 100% commitment to the performance. When the guy falls to the floor in the middle of his solo break, you could break out your cynicism and say he’s only doing it for show — but note how he is not doing anything of the sort at Reading in 1992, or still later, back in Seattle in 1993. No, this is more like getting really captured by the moment — and then not reproducing it later for the simple reasons of good taste.

People who look back at the early grunge era with condescension and resentment, remembering the genre mainly for its contribution to the blandness of Nineties’ «alternative rock» that essentially reduced rock music to stale formula and doomed it to creative extinction, forget what sort of an emotional wave the best grunge bands brought with them — where punk rock in the late 1970s was mostly about anger, bands like Nirvana and Alice In Chains combined it with pain to get a wholly new and unique cocktail. But somehow, Nirvana could also throw in some humor and absurdity — being as much influenced by the Pixies as they were by the Clash, the Doors, and Black Sabbath — and it all shows in the video. It gets me to headbang in fury, to die a little inside each time I hear the self-condemnation of I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, don’t have a mind (maybe one of the greatest lines of minimalist poetry ever written in the English language), to laugh out loud each time I see Nikki McClure dancing or the nerdy-looking guy taking the dive (I hope his glasses survived the crash!), and to wallow in self-pity as I realize that nothing like that kind of spectacle shall probably take place ever again in my lifetime, for better or for worse.