Kurt Cobain ที่ผมไม่รู้จัก
จาก Keynote speech ของ Dave Grohl ที่งาน South by Southwest (SXSW)
At one meeting, after playing a demo of our song “In Bloom” for Donnie Ienner in his high-rise office in New York city, Donnie turned to Kurt and asked “So. What’d you guys want?”.
Kurt slouched over in his chair and looked up to Donnie sitting behind his massive oak desk and said “We want to be the biggest band in the world!”.
I laughed. I thought he was fucking kidding. He wasn’t.
You have to remember where music was at the time.
Here the Billboard top-10 songs of 1990:
number 10 Jon Bon Jovi, Blaze of glory
number 9 Billy Idol, cradle of love
number 8 N vogue with hold on
number 7 Phil Collins another day in paradise
number 6 Marriah Carey vision of love
number 5 Madonna with vogue
number 4 Bill Bav DeVoe with poison
number 3 Sinead O’Connor with nothing compares to you
number 2 Roxette with it must have been love
and the number 1 song of 1990 Wilson fucking Phillips with hold on
How Kurt could even think we make a ripple in this ridiculosu mainstream world of polished pop music was beyond me.
It was beyond everyone.
It made absolutely no sense.
It was simply unimaginable.
The initial pressing of Nevermind was around 35,000 copies.
Enough by their estimate to last the label a few months.
A pretty good inidication of everyone’s expectation.
Well. Those were gone within a few weeks.
Within a month, the record was gold.
By Christmass, the record went platinum.
By the new year, we were selling 300,000 records a week.
That ripple that seemed so unimaginable had become a tidal wave.
