The band's first album contained a lot of enthusiastic noise, but also a giddy cover song -- the obscure but irresistible "Love Buzz" -- and one oddly Beatlesque tune, "About a Girl." (Playing covers was another theoretical minefield for indie bands. Many rejoiced in blasting through unexpected schlock classics on stage. But adding covers to albums of otherwise original music by unknown bands was an old major-label trick to get some easy airplay.)
Enter Geffen, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s had one of the industry's canniest A&R departments; the company had unloaded about 20 million Guns N' Roses albums on unsuspecting American teens. The label, presciently, had signed Sonic Youth; for Cobain, that made the label legit by association, and he said, frankly, that he was frustrated, as the band toured the country, when fans told him that his album wasn't available in stores. (Both bands technically ended up on a Geffen imprint called DGC.)
Nirvana got out of its Sub Pop contract; the indie label got $75,000 and, Cross says, a 2 percent piece of the band's next two albums, which together ultimately sold in the neighborhood of 15 million copies in the U.S. On paper this was probably worth at least $2 million to Sub Pop -- not to mention the catalog sales of "Bleach," which eventually went platinum. That's not a bad return on an initial outlay of zero dollars. (In 1995, as the post-"Nevermind" alternative-rock sweepstakes began to wane, Sub Pop's moment past, Poneman and Pavitt sold a 49 percent interest in the company to Warner Bros. for $20 million.)
Geffen grabbed the band and paired the members up with producer Butch Vig. Cobain had found something deep within himself to write about, and some bolt of primal musical inspiration to frame his thoughts. Vig made the songs Cobain gave him roar. The best of this was "Smells like Teen Spirit." The phrase was from an ad for a feminine deoderant. Kathleen Hanna, of the Seattle riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, had written "Kurt smells like teen spirit" on the wall in Cobain's bedroom; it was a reference to another member of Bikini Kill, Cobain's girlfriend at the time, Tobi Vail. Cross captures Hanna's signifiers perfectly: "Kathleen was taunting Kurt about sleeping with [Vail], implying that he was marked with her scent." Cross, making the case for a deep sexual element in the song, says Cobain is referring to Vail in the lyric, "She's overbored and self-assured." "Smells Like Teen Spirit" became the first track on the album, kicking it off with a solitary, low-volume guitar riff; the stunning assault that kicked in on the fifth measure catapulted Nirvana, and Cobain, into the consciousness of a generation.
Songs this loud, this unrestrained, were seldom heard in America at the time. There was criticism in some quarters about how a talented remixer named Andy Wallace had fiddled with some of the songs to improve their radio sound, but that didn't stop "Nevermind" from becoming the most sensational album release of the decade. Cross says that sales peaked the week after Christmas as kids shelled out holiday gift money -- or traded in other records they'd gotten -- for "Nevermind." During the second week of January, the band knocked Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart. The band played "Saturday Night Live" that same week.
Cobain was living amid a squalor that transcends most rock band tales. He crashed with various friends in various filthy apartments. While it appears he never actually lived "under a bridge," as his personal mythology put it and as he sang in the powerful "Nevermind" song "Something in the Way," it's also true that the reality wasn't much nicer: He had so run out of options in the months riding up to the release of his Geffen album that as late as the summer of 1991 he was literally living out of his car when he wasn't on tour.
He hooked up with Courtney Love the month after "Nevermind" was released. Love was a remarkable self-made underground demistar, with her own band, Hole, and a checkered past; like Cobain she'd virtually lived on the streets. (Unlike him, she had a small trust fund to help her out.) Love in many ways was an accident looking for a place to happen, generally to someone else, yet she had a sparkling intelligence and was an undeniable onstage presence. She was a sometime junkie as well but lacked, fortunately, Cobain's lacerating tendency toward addiction. While Novaselic has gone out of his way to note that Cobain was an addict before he met Love, to most of the rest of the members of the band's coterie she symbolized the drug; Cross says Novaselic's wife, Shelli Dilley, was particularly appalled at what Love represented. Cobain and Love's marriage, in February 1992, in Hawaii, marked the effective end of Cobain and Novaselic's friendship. The happy couple had a daughter, Frances Bean, that September; while Love screamed in her hospital delivery bed Cobain was vomiting helplessly in detox in a nearby room.
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