“Nirvana already did their first song—it’s from the new album that came out just this week. The song was different—but a good, raw different, I think.”
That was my first reaction to hearing a song from “In Utero,” which came out 25 years ago today, Sept. 21, 1993. It was scribbled in my journal entry from Sept. 25, 1993, when Nirvana played two songs from that album on “Saturday Night Live.” I was writing while half-watching that show.
My, my … time marches on. As I finished up my work this afternoon, I listened to most of
“In Utero” for the first time in a very, very long time. Until recently, I couldn’t listen through a Nirvana album without feeling profoundly sad that Kurt Cobain left us way too early.
I still, all these years later, feel like Kurt and the rest of the band were trying too hard on a couple songs to drive away their newfound fans—“Scentless Apprentice” and “Tourette’s” come to mind. But that was a couple songs. This album, especially in “Pennyroyal Tea” and “All Apologies,” also soars with some of the most gorgeous melodies and lyrics Nirvana ever crafted. I’d even put “Dumb” in that category, as I have always loved the chorus lyric of “I think I'm dumb / Or maybe just happy.” It’s a lyric to which I still relate.
When I wrote about the death of Dolores O’Riordan on this blog back in January, I mentioned Kurt and how his death wounded me deeply as a 23-year-old. By the time “In Utero” came out, the drama around Kurt—the dreaded sense that something was not going right—had begun. In July, two months before this album came out, he nearly died of a heroin overdose. By the next spring, he was dead. I wouldn’t be able to listen to his band’s songs for the next two decades or so without the heaviness of his suicide enveloping the music.
But in September 1993, he was alive and screaming on the “Saturday Night Live” stage, with me watching from the living room of my first post-college apartment. At my first professional journalism job at a weekly paper on the Oregon Coast, I was busy taking “grip-and-grin” photos to mark community achievements, responding to accidents and writing any assignment that came my way. A couple weeks earlier, I had my first date with the woman I’ve now been married to for 21 years, though we both denied at the time that it was a “date.”
Oh, and only a few days after “In Utero” came out, I bought an album at the only record/CD shop in Florence, Oregon. That was “Pablo Honey” by a new band known as Radiohead.
While listening to “In Utero” again, I ran across this article, which is sweet, nostalgic and reverent all at the same time. The article’s title refers to one of my favorite lyrics ever: “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally.”
Kurt said listening to Leonard Cohen made him feel even worse when he was depressed. Cohen does the opposite for me; his songs and his voice lift me or, at the least, seem to commiserate with whatever mood I’m carrying.
And the idea of an afterworld where Leonard Cohen might be hanging out, singing his poetic lyrics in that singular voice of his … I could think of worse soundtracks for the afterlife. So I hear that line in “Pennyroyal Tea” again, think of that, and hope Kurt’s maybe just happy somewhere.