How Nirvana Ripped Up a Club on the Eve of Nevermind’s Release

I Was There: How Nirvana Ripped Up a Club on the Eve of Nevermind’s Release

September 23, 1991 was like any other autumn night in Boston – unless you happened to be in the now-long-gone club Axis on Lansdowne Street, Boston, where one of the greatest rock shows of the past two decades blasted the black box room’s lid into the stratosphere.
          
Not coincidentally, September 23 was the day before the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, and the headliner was – you guessed it – Nirvana. Electric, cathartic, explosive, crazy… descriptives fail to capture the energy, joy, sense of community and artistic quality that made that night so special.
          
I was the music editor at alternative weekly The Boston Phoenix at the time. And each year we’d plan an epic celebration taking over all the clubs on Lansdowne Street – still the city’s main party district and the home of the Red Sox – to coincide with the unveiling of the winners of our annual “Best Music Poll.”
          
In early August I’d gotten an advance cassette – I kid you not – from the Sub Pop label of the second Nirvana album, Nevermind. I’d bought a copy of Bleach, Nirvana’s Sub Pop debut, on vinyl in 1989 and already thought the band was bad-ass if not exactly a leader of the post-punk pack. But Nevermind tore my brain open in a way that only two other albums during the alternative rock era did. (For the record, those are Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine and Catherine Wheel’s Ferment.)
          
Although it’s become apocryphal to say that nobody knew Nirvana were going to blow up into a gigantic success, when I heard “Come as You Are,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Lithium” for the first time, I knew this band had a larger destiny than playing punk rock clubs. I immediately assigned ace music journalist Clea Simon, now a successful mystery novelist, a feature story on the band.
And I wasn’t the only one at team Phoenix who smelled something in the wind. Kurt St. Thomas was the music director at the newspaper’s sister radio station WFNX, and we routinely compared notes on new music. He was actually much further ahead on the Nirvana curve than me and was the company’s top go-to guy on new rock. He’d already been all over Bleach on his once-a-week show that previewed new releases in ’89 and had even snuck them into regular airplay a bit. And he was even more blown away with Nevermind.
                     
On September 23, before the show, St. Thomas did an on-air interview with the band. When he asked Cobain why he spelled his first name so many ways – Curt, Kurdt, Kurt… - the singer-guitarist replied, “I just learned to spell.” Brilliant!
          
They also did a really goofy stunt for MTV that must have galled Cobain – playing Crisco Twister with the Smashing Pumpkins during the afternoon soundcheck.


The club Axis was packed to capacity – almost literally to the rafters – by the time Bullet LaVolta finished. Some fans, including me, clambered up on decorative scaffolding to perch over the fray and get a great view of the stage which was long-slung and partly obscured by the tide of humans. A line of easily more than 100 waited outside to get in and never would. And the second after St. Thomas strode onstage and introduced Nirvana as “the greatest f---ing band in the world!” chaos erupted with Cobain’s first guitar stoke of “Aneurysm.”

It was the best chaos I’d ever seen: the nerves of rock and roll’s soul ripped open and exposed, neurons firing crazy sparks in all directions. All I could see was Cobain flying upside-down through the air at the front of the stage while he strummed and the crowd shooting up as he crashed down. People leapt like popcorn kernels on a hot plate – not so much pogoing as shooting in all directions in wild abandon. The band were loud and mighty and intense, jagged waves of sound ripping through the room and then giving way to near-silent quiet passages during which the audience still danced and stumbled and hopped like the pagan islanders in King Kong summoning their monkey god. It was quite the trip.
          
I’m not sure what Nirvana’s exact set list was, although they played a churning “Teen Spirit” and “Love Buzz.” I also remember “Come as You Are” finally bringing some tranquility to the crowd. And I recall being puzzled by how Cobain could play so well as he seemed to ride the music like a leaf in the wind, teetering at all kinds of impossible angles. There was also a joyful sense of being in the middle of the best thing happening in the world at that particular time as Nirvana’s performance unreeled. 
           
And then it was over, and Nirvana left through the back curtain portals without fanfare, stepping away from Axis’ low small stage and toward rock and roll history.
By Ted Drozdowski
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