Forever ours

Nirvana and Cobain still have the power to move us

by Stephanie Zacharek

The only people capable of being completely unsentimental about From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (Geffen), the new CD of unreleased live Nirvana performances, are the ones (most of them in their mid 30s -- my age -- or older) who when Kurt Cobain shot himself in 1994 said, "Well, it's not as if he were John Lennon or anything."

I hated those people then, and I hate them now.

I hate them for thinking they can dictate how big a hole any public figure -- musician, politician, writer, composer, painter -- should leave in our lives when he or she dies. I hate their generational snobbery, their smug assumption that their icons are inherently more significant than today's. And I hate them for thinking, as many of them probably do, that a recording like From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah isn't much more than a marketing event.

The fact is, for people who loved Cobain, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (the title comes from the name of the river that cuts through Aberdeen, Washington, the hometown of Cobain and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic) is going to be a hard album to get a handle on. Not because it's an excuse for renewed mourning, an opportunity for us to wince at every shivery golden guitar chord, thinking, "Look what we've lost." In fact, it doesn't invite any hand wringing at all. As hard as you might think it will be to listen to any "new" material from Nirvana without feeling a creeping sense of sadness, it's likely that From the Muddy Banks will make you feel anything but wistful.

That's because the CD isn't so much an album about what we've lost as about what we've been given. Just as it's hard to think of John Lennon as dead whenever we hear "She Loves You" or "In My Life," it's hard to think of Kurt Cobain as dead when he sounds so alive on these versions of "Lithium" or "Aneurysm." From the Muddy Banks doesn't make me feel any better about what happened to Cobain, but it does make me feel much happier for myself: Nirvana have been one of the great joys of my adult life. Listening to From the Muddy Banks, I reveled in that for the first time in more than two years. I hadn't even realized until my husband mentioned it recently that for a year and a half after Cobain's death, I made him change the radio station whenever a Nirvana song came on. At last, From the Muddy Banks has allowed me to reclaim Nirvana -- or, more precisely, allowed them to reclaim me.

The more I listen, the more I think that From the Muddy Banks may end up being one of the year's true rock-and-roll treasures precisely because it doesn't go after any sort of maudlin response in us. The sound of the music -- rusted out and blossoming, cathedral-sized and pinpoint-focused -- is just too vital, too exhilarating (and, yes, too despairing) to give us time to stop and take its pulse, or even to take our pulse.

That's probably the kind of response Nirvana bassist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl, who culled the album's tracks from more than a hundred hours of tape, were hoping for. Their mission seems to have been to remind us all that Cobain was a person before he was an icon, and that he was the leader of one of the hardest-rocking (and best) bands in the world. It's also their way of reminding the world that they still inhabit the land of the living -- and that they're still young. You can almost hear how the album's 16 tracks, recorded between 1989 and 1994 in venues all over the world, fight tooth and claw against nostalgia. What they fight for, instead, is the brashness, the unabashed beauty, the unsaintliness of imperfection. You hear it on "Been a Son" (from a late-1991 performance in Amsterdam) in a whorl of guitars that's like a tornado of ash and gold dust, a cloud of rage and confusion that's barely burned off by the end of the song. You hear it in Cobain's scraped-raw cry of "No denial" at the end of "Smells like Teen Spirit" (from a 1991 West Coast performance), an aggressive, tattered version that roughs up the familiar contours of the song as we know it from Nevermind. Novoselic's liner notes for the LP read like a poster for an action movie: "Let all the analysis fall away like yellow, aged newsprint. Crank this record up and realize the bliss, power, and passion . . . TOTAL NIRVANA!" But he didn't need to tell us that in words. He and Grohl have chosen so carefully that From the Muddy Banks, unlike a lot of live albums, works as a whole; there isn't one track that sounds as if it were there just for filler, or just for kicks, or because it has an especially flashy guitar solo. Each song is there because it breathes.

The tracks here, recorded in different places at different times, are connected by a gossamer web of consistency. As far as we can tell from From the Muddy Banks, Nirvana were an astonishing live band: many of the songs here are more blistering, more rough-edged, than their studio counterparts. The guitar chords on "Aneurysm" (from the 1991 West Coast show mentioned earlier) sound especially lush, velvety, and static-charged. From the Muddy Banks also stands as a record of Cobain's dedication and tenacity as a live performer. His voice must have taken a beating on tour, but you'd never know it from these recordings: it's cracked and vulnerable one instant and bigger than Texas -- and a lot more pissed off -- the next. He never sounds rehearsed, or even exhausted.

The big danger in scrutinizing a posthumous release like From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah is that we're all tempted to play junior psychoanalyst, looking for clues about what caused Cobain so much suffering. But if the songs on From the Muddy Banks are difficult in some ways -- their imagery of parasites and cancer have probably been giving concerned parents nightmares for years -- they're also ultimately cathartic and strangely comforting. Part of the reason Nirvana, and Cobain in particular, are so well-loved is that they dared to speak the unspeakable. Hearing a line like "Look on the bright side is suicide/Lost eyesight I'm on your side" (from "Milk It") is terrifying if you think of it as a precursor to Cobain's suicide note. But if you think of it as a pledge to stay alert to all the signs that tell you you're alive -- to acknowledge that expecting not to suffer could actually be the thing that does you in -- it's actually weirdly bracing. And "Lithium," which sketches out a state of mind in which you're so numbed-out that the possibility of both pain and pleasure have been erased, raises a daring challenge: is a life that's been flattened into a plateau of calm really worth living? From the Muddy Banks reminds us that if Cobain was slowly slipping into an abyss from which no one could save him, he was also clinging to a buzzing current of feeling -- a current that may have been his lifeline for longer than anyone should dare to guess.

Maybe that's not so surprising when you consider Nirvana's sound: its richness mirrors the majesty and unpredictability of nature the way certain kinds of classical music do, conjuring the loaded rush of the ocean, the warm dampness of the forest, the crushing loneliness of a wide-open sky. The rough-and-tumble spontaneity of that sound on From the Muddy Banks also suggests impermanence and mutability: hearing these songs now, you wonder how we ever expected to hold onto this band -- onto this person -- forever.

If impermanence can seem like nothing so much as a broken promise, a wonderful thing dangled in front of us and then snatched away, it can also seem like a gift. The German painter Anselm Kiefer makes huge, ambitious abstract canvases, covering every inch with paint and also partly with bits of straw, pieces of ceramic and wood, and dribbles of once-molten lead. Kiefer incorporates those unstable materials on purpose, and some of his earlier paintings -- he's been working prominently since the late '70s -- are already starting to disintegrate. Their impermanence, it seems, is part of their value: not a way of reminding ourselves that the things we love best can't last forever, but a way of freeing us, of forcing us to rely on sense memory to keep the images that mean something to us alive forever. We couldn't have expected to hold onto Nirvana forever, and yet the kind of forever they've given us -- bought and paid for, sadly, with Cobain's life -- is priceless beyond belief. The twigs and straw and bits of wood have already fallen away from their canvas; what's left, as we hear it on From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, only seems more valuable than ever.