Credit: Julie Kramer
When a band ceases activity prematurely, regardless of the reason why, if there’s enough of a fanbase around them, they’ll begin to create their own mythologies of what could have been had they been able to continue.
One of the greatest examples of this is Nirvana, who were forced to separate after the loss of frontman and songwriter Kurt Cobain. Given how he wasn’t just the face of the band, but was largely responsible for dictating their creative direction, it would have been impossible for the two remaining members to continue without him under the same name, and so after just three studio albums, that was all the world was ever likely to hear from a band who could have continued to dominate had it not been for the tragic circumstances.
Bassist Krist Novoselic would go relatively quiet in the subsequent years, even turning his hand to politics in recent times rather than further pursuing music as much as he could have. Drummer Dave Grohl, on the other hand, has had an illustrious career, most notably as the leader of Foo Fighters, but as a sideman in countless other projects that are beloved by many.
However, despite there having been good things to have risen from the ashes of Nirvana, that doesn’t necessarily mean that their collective decision to move on means that the more rabid contingent of their fanbase were content with that being the last they ever heard from the band. People will go to great lengths to dredge up unheard material and rarities, but if they’re not there to be discovered, then what’s the point in such fervent yet fruitless quests?
While there have been demos released, most notably those that appeared in incredibly raw form on Cobain’s posthumous Montage of Heck release and documentary soundtrack, and one final song in ‘You Know You’re Right’, which was tacked onto their greatest hits compilation in 2002, that was supposedly it as far as unheard material was concerned. Or was it?
Is ‘You Know You’re Right’ really the final Nirvana song?
People generally regard ‘You Know You’re Right’, released eight years after Cobain’s death, as being the final complete song by Nirvana, but there’s always been a suspicion among fans that the band have been hiding other finished work from them. Although this smacks of ‘wild conspiracy’, there are elements of reality attached to this idea.
Plenty of journalists asked Grohl about the possibility of unheard Nirvana material being unearthed in the years immediately following their disbandment, and in a 1998 interview, he alluded to there actually being one other unheard song aside from ‘You Know You’re Right’. “I think in one interview, someone asked: ‘Do you know if anyone’s planning on releasing any more Nirvana stuff?’ and I said probably,” he claimed. “So then it comes out in the headlines saying ‘Dave Grohl says Nirvana will release demos’ and blah blah blah. I don’t know, I’m not the boss.”
He then continued by loosely stating just how much unreleased material exists. “To be perfectly honest, there’s probably two completed songs that no one’s ever heard,” Grohl added. “There’s not like hundreds and thousands. I mean, we were only a band for five years or something, and we went into the studio four or five times. It’s not like The Beatles: Anthology.”
Perhaps it was only ‘You Know You’re Right’ that felt worthy of a wider release, and that the other track will never see the light of day, or perhaps there isn’t another song waiting to be discovered at all, and Grohl is just more than aware of how to stoke the fire. However, if there’s any remote possibility that there’s more Nirvana material out there waiting to be discovered, you know that the die-hard fans are going to spend every waking hour searching for it. We can live in hope.
