D7 – Nirvana

We’re putting wheels in motion very close after Clash week to touch on another massively influential band in the history of punk, of rock, of pop culture and most importantly (for me) of bands SteveForTheDeaf really really likes.

So have at it Sports-fans. Welcome to Nirvana Covers week. I’m not going to lay down a week of Nirvana songs by Nirvana. We’re going to let the women, the Scottish and the weirdos play Kurt’s songs. And yet it’d be rude not to let our lost captain Kurdt Cobain kick things off.

One thing that always shone through with this mega-band and their ascension to every teenage bedroom wall in the know universe was their love of the underground punk rock that made them. When Nirvana were playing basement shows they wanted to sound like The Wipers. When they were high on the hog and playing festival fields and sold out arenas, they wanted to sound like The Wipers.

The thing with that was, no matter how they tried, Kurt’s voice was pure pop, their rage sounds ‘like the most fun’ and it was their discord that stuck chords with the state of the alternative nation.

The dark malevolence on Nirvana’s cover of The Wipers D-7 is one of the most sinister sounding tracks in the bands cannon. It came to most as the B-Side to one of the mega hits from their breakthrough album Nevermind.

Cobain and Co successfully smuggled some 1970’s Oregon based Punk Rock into the CD towers of Chad’s and Jenny’s all over the world. Of course not everyone plays the B-Sides. And of those that do, many run a mile from this type of noise and head off to buy some Matchbox 20 instead.

Some of us out there though, some of us have now just heard of The Wipers for the first time.

This is also how a lot of kids (me included) got to know about The Vaselines, Meat Puppets, Pixies, The Jesus Lizard.

They didn’t just kick the doors open for the grunge scene they threw back to bands who’d already come and they left a trail of breadcrumbs from The Stooges to Punk to Hardcore to whatever was coming next…

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