Nirvana has always been for me an evocative indicator of a time and place. I first became aware of them for the second time, riding in a friend's car at night listening to KCMU. Love Buzz came on and the first bass notes wrapped their bony fingers around our attention and we chorused "wait, I heard this the other day- what is this?" The architecture of each song on Bleach gave validity, color and fabric to the cold, dark and wet world we inhabited. I always liked Mudhoney better but Nirvana was like a dark cave with the promise of an opening at the bottom through which to peer up at a clear starry sky. A somber and intense dose whereas Mudhoney felt like a funner lens through to which to peer at the world around me at an aloof and sarcastic distance. Both bands had an awful lot to beg differ with the world around them, it’s just that Mudhoney made it fun and Nirvana placed the issue right in front of you where it could not be looked around.
But what rises through the scraggy ground of memory when I hear Nirvana, are the nascent surf trips I took with my friends to the Washington coast. Before we became interested in points further afield, we began to explore the Gray's Harbor area, and all roads led through Aberdeen. Most reading this will know the place, but if not, allow me to riff a few sequiturs: ‘THIS BUSINESS SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS. A slate grey Chehalis River, becoming an even deeper shade of slate when ruffled with rain. A grandeur abandoned but peering through eroded masonry and sandstone carved edifices. Suffocating blackberry thickets and lilting billboards. Sodden mudflats. Huge lumber mills with half filled parking lots. An unrelenting fog bank that presses the city back on its heels into a tangle of third growth nearly all the time. Thrift stores. The Winner's Circle. Logger bars with amazing photos and a palpable hatred of indicator species.’ This is the landscape that delivered Nirvana and the Melvins to us. And then you are through it, either on Highway 12 or 105. The road takes you on towards the relatively brighter prospect of the coast; either south to Westport or north to the riptides of Ocean Shores. Damon Point, where some dark grey whumping closeout wave would yank you, your motley wetsuit and your waterstained surfboard into a beach log washout. I never liked that place. If the riptide weren’t enough, sometimes the jet skiers would show up to let you know it was theirs. Learning to surf in the Pacific Northwest, for me always meant more time spent swimming, gulping saltwater and ocean detritus than riding a wave. You wonder how you size up to this scarred but still wild landscape, and you know that no one possibly can. But always the promise of a wave; a moment of pristine clarity where the difference of seeing the world from your belly and standing up is where the whole enterprise hinges. The hissing sound that a surfboard makes upon a forming and unforming face of water. To race down the line ahead of the white water, is to see the ocean in its pristine state; free of shorefront development, free from clearcut logging, free from politics as I know it. Just yourself and the wall of water through which the sun passes and shows the suspended pieces of kelp that add to this notion that time is bowing aside for you if only for a moment- or at least rumbling alongside. The cold, gray Pacific, so indifferent in all of its forms, occasionally relents and visits eight seconds of magic upon you.
So this is what Nirvana is to me. Through their sound, I smell mildewing wetsuits, I feel sticky sand gritting against everything around it, I hear cranky amplifiers that sound wonderful because of their neglect and rediscovery. I feel jolting rides in a pickup bed down logging roads. I feel cheap beer and campfires in sideways rain and waking up with a wet sleeping bag - all in the pursuit of a darkened corduroy form, looming at the horizon, slightly different from the water it moves through and you paddle towards it, spin when you think you're in the correct position and hope that you and your discolored, sinking surfcraft make the late, precipitous drop into the wave of the day.
And then I remember when In Utero came out. By then, Nirvana had become a big deal and I'd become leery of anything local becoming big, because, why? Stupid rules that I'd made for myself that made no sense whatsoever. But there was this sense that the world had begun to pay attention. At first when the world pays attention, you run around thinking you need to correct the record, because how could the world know what it felt like in our dark green world? And it wasn’t theirs, it was ours. Then you start to wonder if the rest of the world saw it plainly for what it really was and we were just biased by a low cloud ceiling. Then all you can do is just laugh, seeing how generic something became as it filtered down through fashion and culture, until it was on the end cap aisle at Target for a very affordable price. But the day the album came out, I was over at the Spanish Castle partying with the Steel Wool lads. It wasn’t the actual Spanish Castle of Jimi lore, but simply named in honor of it; the Skullfuckers club house. Steve was debating the relative merits and discredits of the album, because he has a great mind for that. Someone produced a buccaneer sword and waved it about. Schmidt beer had changed their label and it suddenly seemed more cool and punk rock to show up with Black Label, from Carling, Canada. Being a simple sensualist myself, all I could think was: there is no amount of volume sufficient for this album. Please just keep turning it up because I want to watch the sound make plaster fall from the fucking ceiling. I was struggling to make a case in my head that they had sold out, but to pursue that line would just be so much tallest poppy syndrome. They had not sold out. They were just a long long way from Aberdeen and Olympia now and the world had set its hooks and the band was doing its level best to stay afloat with integrity. They were paddling in place and it still sounded fucking amazing.
By this time, we’d branched out from the Gray’s Harbor area and pointed our trips further north on the peninsula. Point Grenville, La Push, Rialto, Shi Shi, Neah Bay, Elwha… Deeper into the murk until you pushed through the ferns and could suddenly see the endless northern sky and the looming ramparts of Vancouver Island. But during my entire time surfing Gray’s, I remember we used to see this crew from Westport. As memory serves, they drove a green and white F-250 Hi Boy flatbed- and I swear they had a three legged German Shepard that rode on the truckbox. Some mystic agreement between the dog and physics seemed keep the animal stuck to the rig. These dudes never seemed friendly. The last time I saw them was at La Push, possibly the northern boundary of their loyalties. Scruffy logger boys stretching into manky wetsuits while the dog frantically pranced from the truck box to the cab and back. They looked disappointed that their world was being invaded by big city kids who looked a lot like them. It felt so familiar, I couldn’t ever really work up any angst against them. Maybe the opposite. Maybe something like seeing your favorite thing grow up, get reinterpreted and redressed by the world at large until it limps back to town, barely recognizable and bandied by the masses.
The weather rarely lets up here. Look at the trees that stand sentry above the waves. They look like Japanese banzai, not from some selective and disciplined process but from a never ending windmill of rain, sand, sun and wind. Paint oxidizes and disappears, and what remains is beautiful and melancholy. If you look from the coast towards inland in profile, it’s as if it’s been sanded at an angle beginning at zero in the sand and rising at about forty degrees as one moves into the dark and quiet forests where the moss and vine maples eat up sound and turn most light into a filtered green presence and the crowns of giant trees sway gently to and fro, echoing the bull kelp forests just offshore. But this is where the land has been left intact. Elsewhere, and in most places on the peninsula, the highway rolls through a continuous patchwork of clearcuts and timber leases. To the initiate here, it is one of the most defining features of the land. Where the land is flat, a sea of stumps rolls out abruptly to the next timber lease yet to be cut. Heaping slash piles are generally piled here and there. Where the land becomes steep, often the logs are pulled up to a point where they can be layered onto a truck and hauled off. This leaves a series of spoke like paths carved into the topography, radiating outward from the loading site. When the land has sat barren for a few years, the blackberry thickets pull any machinery left behind, down into the earth. It is sort of an amazing image, if one is to separate it out from the context.
Stand in a fog bank at the watery end of the planet where nature stands behind you; once thought impenetrable. Teeter upon a thin margin of sand and peer out into a barely navigable mystery, while at your back the thumping wall of steepness leers down upon you. And envision finding a frictionless place to glide over the sand and reef, between these two places. Listen to the sound of the wave crashing against the forest and back to you. Look from the back of the wave at your friends, as you see their torsos glide apparently effortlessly across a wall of water, a mix of euphoria and concentration upon their faces. Watch as they return to the well over and over, until it is dark- pushing back against the relentlessness of time.
As always, RIP Kurt.
The Nirvanapoint project happened because my old friend Tom asked me to make a board for his daughter who is spending her final year of high school getting ready for college and great things. I assume that she loves Nirvana for all of her own reasons but it reminds me of how I loved a lot of the music of my parents generation. From an early age when you learn that magic rises up off of vinyl and through a lightly balanced needle, if so inspired, you can delve into all those documents. Much will seem dated to the spry young eye, but some of it will split you down the middle with a well placed power chord. Tom asked only that I just think about what Nirvana meant to me and to make a board about that. Thanks buddy, that’s a project any artist should be stoked about! And in all things, rip it up Emma!
