(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Nirvana would have been the first to say that they weren’t trying to be the greatest band in the world.
They were the voice of a generation in many respects, but if you look at the guitar playing in a song like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, it’s not like Kurt Cobain was going to be competing with Eddie Van Halen or anything. Even if they didn’t have chops in the traditional sense, they came from an era where the passion behind the music meant a lot more than being able to play traditional scales.
It’s important to make that distinction as well. Most people like the idea of their rockstars playing as fast as possible and trying their best to melt every single face in the audience, but if there isn’t a nice melody over top of everything, there’s hardly anyone who’s going to bother listening to them for more than a few minutes. And even if you couldn’t tell what Cobain was singing about, it was easy to forget about that when the music was as good as albums like Nevermind.
In fact, there are a few parts of the album that seem to spit in the face of traditional lead guitarists. Some of the biggest “guitar hero” moments on the record feature Cobain either playing the melody of the verse on guitar or nearly strangling his instrument and playing every single dissonant note he can think of on the final take. ‘Breed’ is a fantastic song, but when you hear the breakdown “solo”, you can practically see all the virtuosos in the audience shaking their heads, wondering who gave this kid a guitar.
But Cobain was always pretty satisfied with only knowing the basics. He never wanted to be the traditional rock and roll star, and Melvins were the ones who helped open his eyes to what could be done with rock and roll. It was still heavy as hell whenever it came out of the speakers, but there was everything from Chuck Berry licks to the occasional dry humour that you’d find on a Zappa record.
Buzz Osborne was far from the most intricate player in the world, but that attention to detail was enough to get Nirvana taking themselves a bit more seriously when they started rehearsing, saying, “The Melvins were so focused, so Kurt and Aaron and I took that ethic and started playing like that. We said, ‘We’re gonna be like the Melvins, we’re gonna be tight and play a lot’, and Kurt was such a prolific artist that he’d be off drawing something, or doing some kind of sculpture, or some kind of weird collage, and he’d write songs.”
Although you’d never confuse Cobain’s angsty songs for a Melvins tune most of the time, there’s definitely small influences here and there if you know where to look for them. If they had their way, there’s a chance that the band would have only been rehearsing every now and again for shits and giggles, but if they were going to reach the level of writing tunes like ‘Come As You Are’, they were going to have to get a little bit tighter.
And when they first got Dave Grohl in the group, they became a machine whenever they performed live. There was a lot of anarchy going on in the way that Cobain played and when they smashed up their instruments every single night, but no one could deny the raw power behind everything when they started tearing through tracks like ‘School’ with that kind of thunder behind them.
Cobain may have started out loving the likes of Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, but the band’s relationship with Melvins was always about something deeper. They may have helped show them the ropes, but they were also responsible for giving them the model for what all great rock and roll bands are supposed to conduct themselves.
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