chunks of flommus
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nevermind

In September 1991, a few weeks before Nevermind came out, I was a weird arty kid getting ready to become a high school senior.

I was into the kind of music that got you called “fag” and ostracized in spite of the fact that we were just 6 short months away from those same bullies getting really into the exact same stuff.

Important also to remember that Nirvana was merely the final crack in the ceiling that alternative had been threatening for months to bust through anyway.

That spring was when R.E.M. finally became superstars and that summer was when the inaugural Lollapalooza tour took place, showing the world that there were lots of us weird kids out there and showing us kids ourselves that even though we felt alone in our high schools there was a huge subculture of us spread out over the country.

So anyway, I was a kid into punk and alternative that spent a ton of time in used record stores. I didn’t really have any money so a lot of what I would do was constantly trading records back in and out and for every 6 I’d take home maybe 1 would make it into my permanent collection and the rest would wash back into the shop and I’d get more.

Now at this time, radio was starting to shift away from hair metal into this odd half-step of stuff like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden mixed in with late-period hair bands like Junkyard that weren’t into the glam thing and were more bluesy than glammy.

It was a strange brief limbo period that did feel like we were tentatively waiting for something to happen.

So I’m in my car and Teen Spirit comes on. Fun Fact: With its metallic guitar sounds and half-screamed vocals, it sounded like one of those half-step acts that didn’t quite know what to do post-Warrant.

The song was instantly gripping, but I remember thinking that I would find a promo copy at the used store and it would be 10 tracks of crap and this one good song and I’d burn myself out on it or just put the song on a mixtape.

So that sunday I’m at a used shop in Omaha called Recycled Sounds (owned by Stuart Kolnick) and lo and behold there’s a promo copy in the ‘Just In’ section. It was so new that the clerks didn’t even know they had it and when they realized it they didn’t want to let me take it, but I convinced them that I’d probably just be trading it back in on Wednesday anyway.

It was one of 5 CDs I took home that day and the very last one I listened to. I would generally play Nintendo and listen to music so that’s what I did. Castlevania in fact.

It’s around 7 Sunday night when I finally put on Nevermind and I am *floored*. I’d never heard anything like it, and I listened to a lot of music. It not only felt like a statement but one that grabbed your collar and made you pay attention.

It’s impossible to overstate how exhilarating it was to hear it that first time. Every track built on the one before it and over the course of the album (and the 5 or 6 repeat listens I gave it that night) I became convinced that this was something important.

I ran out to Shopko ten minutes before closing and bought a brick of TDKs and spent the night making tapes. The next morning I was evangelical. I gave tapes to everyone I knew that had tastes similar to mine and a few that didn’t. It was one of those records. You had to let the world know that it existed and you wanted to make everyone hear it.

In retrospect, there are of course naysayers that would like to posit that it was a product of hype or media but as someone that was there at absolute ground level I can tell you that’s nonsense. Nevermind was an atom bomb on the culture and its rep is absolutely earned.

Nevermind came out 28 years ago this week.