FEATURE: Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle: Nirvana’s In Utero at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle

  

Nirvana’s In Utero at Thirty

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ARGUABLY the greatest album from…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Nirvana pictured in 1993 (from left): Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl./PHOTO CREDT: Anton Corbijn

the legendary Nirvana, their third and final studio album was released on 21st September, 1993. In Utero was the Washington icons returning to a more lo-fi and rawer sound following the more commercial tones of Nevermind. Not that the seminal Nevermind lacked grit and Grunge roots. It was very much that…but I think Nirvana were keen to have a more abrasive sound. One that was similar to their 1989 debut, Bleach. Released under a year before Kurt Cobain took his own life, you can feel a combination of that debut urgency with Cobain’s scars all over the album. There is some melody and moments of relative quiet on the album, though it is those captivatingly raw moments. Cobain claimed that the album was impersonal – though one cannot help reading into the lyrics and applying them to him. Alongside bandmates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, In Utero was recorded with producer Steve Albini over two weeks in February 1993 at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. A major commercial success, that combination between complex songs but a direct and potent sound meant that it resonate with diehards and newer fans alike. One might have suspected those who loved Nevermind to balk at the idea that an anticipated follow-up would keep very few elements from that album. Maybe annoyed and tired of the exposure and new fame, In Utero seems like a very deliberate attempt to make something non-commercial. Few radio-friendly single options. Although nothing as masterful and iconic as Smells Like Teen Spirit exists on In Utero, there are more than a few Nirvana classics on 1993’s In Utero – including Heart-Shaped Box, Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle and Pennyroyal Tea.

To mark thirty years of a classic, there is an anniversary release coming. The Line of Best Fit provide details of an exciting release that is going to be a must for all Nirvana fans!

“In Utero went on to mark Nirvana’s first number debut on the Billboard 200 and has since been certified 6x platinum in the United States. Geffen/UMe commemorates the 30th anniversary of the album with several multi-format reissues.

The three Super Deluxe Edition releases comprise a total of 72 tracks with 53 previously unreleased tracks. Among the unreleased material, two full In Utero-era concerts, namely Live In Los Angeles (1993) and the band’s final Seattle performance, Live In Seattle (1994), are included in addition to six bonus live tracks from Rome, Springfield, and New York.

Seattle producer and engineer Jack Endino — who helmed the band’s 1988 debut Bleach —reconstructed the live tracks from stereo soundboard tapes for this year’s reissue. Additionally, In Utero’s original twelve songs, along with five bonus tracks and B-sides, have been newly remastered from the original analog master stereo tapes by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Services, who assisted Albini as the only other engineer at the original sessions.

The physical Super Deluxe Edition box sets also boast a removable front-cover acrylic panel with the album’s iconic Angel; a 48-page hardcover book with unreleased photos; a 20-page newly designed fanzine; a Los Angeles tour poster lithograph by hot rod artist Coop; replicas of the 1993 record store promo Angel mobile, three gig fliers, two ticket stubs for Los Angeles and Seattle, an All-Access tour laminate, and four cloth sticky tour backstage passes: Press, Photo, After Show, and Local Crew.

Originally released September 21, 1993, the band recorded the album over the course of six days in February 1993 at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, MN with Steve Albini. In Utero's unadorned sonic rawness was received by critics and fans with equal measures of shock and elation, as Albini's recording laid bare every primal nuance of the most confrontational yet vulnerable material Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl would ever record.

With its 1991 predecessor Nevermind having sold some 30 million copies and causing a seismic pop cultural shift, In Utero was essentially the first record Nirvana would make with any expectations from the public.

In Utero: 30th Anniversary is set for release on 27 October via Geffen/UMe Records, and is available to pre-order now”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the album. The second concerns the twentieth anniversary edition of In Utero. There is a great track by track guide that is worth checking out. I wanted to start out with an article from The Guardian. Looking back at In Utero in 2013, they highlighted how it was so influential still after twenty years. The band’s legacy is huge. I can hear many artists in 2023 taking to heart the sounds and reverberations of Nirvana’s 1993 masterpiece:

“Nirvana never set out to change the world. In 1991, they were a promising punk-rock band from Washington State with a debut major-label album that might, with luck, sell in the six figures. Then MTV started rinsing Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nevermind unseated Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the top of the Billboard chart, and Kurt Cobain became the reluctant poster boy of a new sound – grunge. "The first thing we did when Nevermind went huge is cancel everything and go into hiding," recalls Grohl. "U2 and Guns N' Roses wanted us to tour with them, Lollapalooza wanted us to headline. All these offers, and we thought, 'Let's just go home and take the ball with us.' Like, game over."

Nirvana's musical response was In Utero. In defiance of their label, Geffen, they called upon the production talents of Steve Albini, alternative rock firebrand behind acerbic noise groups Big Black and Rapeman. Instead of radio-friendly unit shifters, there was a song sarcastically titled Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, smothered in squalling feedback. Cobain's songs touched on fatherhood (Milk It, Scentless Apprentice) and feminism (Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle, a fantasy of cosmic vengeance for a 1940s actress subjected to brutal mistreatment while incarcerated in an asylum). But it also dwelt on the gynaecological and the diseased: see the sickly-sweet Heart-Shaped Box, with its cancerous growths, carnivorous orchids and "umbilical noose". Occasionally, the album's bluntness still alarms.

It's hard to draw much holy wisdom from In Utero's tumult of anger, black humour, principle, guilt and confusion. "Nirvana were conflicted," says Novoselic. "We cut our teeth on 1980s American hardcore – intense and political music about independence from the state, independence from corporations. We were appalled by the first Iraq war, the jingoism, the petty nationalism. But at the same time we signed a record deal with Geffen, a subsidiary of this Japanese industrial electronics company. Bands like Pavement and Fugazi remained fiercely independent. We had punk-rock values, but we signed those papers. I can't sit here and give you the spiel about independence, especially knowing [Fugazi's] Ian MacKaye. I could never face them again."

From their major label vantage point, though, Nirvana reached an audience their indie peers could only dream of. "We meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people," says Grohl. "That's one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they'll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons." Ever upbeat, Grohl is optimistic about the current state of rock, thrilled to hear young bands still cite Nirvana as an influence. "We were real and visceral, fucked-up and ugly. That was what people were craving. And that will never go away. There's a band in a garage right now writing songs for an album that will do the same thing Nevermind did some 20 years ago. We don't know who and where, but it will fucking happen again. All it takes is for that storm to break."

More so than Nevermind, In Utero pointed underground – to alternative rock and the punk feminism of riot grrrl. But its influence spread outwards, too. Liam Howlett heard the gnarly riff of Very Ape, the two-minute blast that kicked off side two, and sampled it for the Prodigy's 1994 single Voodoo People. Following his death, Kurt became a lyrical namedrop for rappers from 2Pac to 50 Cent to Jay-Z, who evidently found something relatable in this nihilistic rock star and his tale of drugs, guns and untimely death. Grunge was supplanted in the marketplace by nu-metal, but Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst described Kurt as "an inspiration". And when the next Voice Of A Generation came along, you couldn't help but look at Marshall Mathers, a bleach-blond Molotov of rage, and spy something faintly familiar”.

There are a lot of other features about the album. Some dislike it because they feel it is inaccessible and far too hit and miss. Others expecting something similar to the sound of Nevermind were never accepting of something that is nothing like it. Regardless of personal feelings, one cannot deny that In Utero was a massive critical and commercial success. One of the greatest albums ever (from a band who managed to release two classics in their brief careers). I want to go to The Boar, as they wrote a retrospective last month. Thirty years on, and In Utero remains such a powerful statement:

“But to look back at In Utero, whether after three or thirty years, one can’t help but see the eerie disconnect between the album’s name and the tragedy that transpired shortly after the album’s release. In Utero seems to foreshadow that tragedy. Yet, that story has been told, its sombre light cast again and again upon those events of the early Nineties – in short, it is far too easy to employ this form of historical revisionism. Thirty years ago, Cobain was alive, his artistry evolving, and Nirvana were the mainstream (whether they liked it or not). In Utero was the product of this, and now, thirty years later, it is an artefact of its time, hailed for its vision and authenticity.

But the legacy of In Utero can only be understood in relation to its predecessors.

If Bleach, Nirvana’s 1989 debut LP by independent champions Sub Pop, was just a drop in the ocean of music success, with its sludgy Seattle sound tapping almost exclusively into the underground punk scene to which Nirvana was adjacent, then 1991’s Nevermind was a tidal wave.

Chewing up and spitting out the status quo, leaving it unrecognisable, is a feat that very few albums have achieved. But Nevermind, with all of its contradictory prowess, as an album that is equal parts Beatles as it is Black Flag, made by a DIY band with the backing of major label DGC, did just that. Selling more than 30 million copies worldwide, Nirvana were no longer toeing the line between the underground and the mainstream – they had stormed straight across it. Nevermind had made them icons, and in doing so a grunge gold rush had begun as record labels turned over every stone in Seattle seeking their own musical goldmines. Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam – the underground had been unearthed.

But for righteous punk rockers, this was not a good thing. To them, Nirvana had ‘sold out.’ After all, Nevermind was a polished record, produced with the help of a major label, and promoted by the mainstream’s weapon of choice: MTV. Aware of this, Cobain sought to fortify his punk-rock credentials and from out of this storm, In Utero was born.

In recruiting the producer, Steve Albini (Pixies, The Breeders), the very DNA of In Utero was determined to be read as both punk and entirely distinct from the bubble-gum-sweet sounds of Nevermind. Working quickly, recording was completed in six days, with most tracks recorded live. Mixing took a further five days – quick by Nirvana’s standards, slow by Albini’s. The result? A raw record that was almost the antithesis of Nevermind – leaving DGC Records with a slightly sour taste in their mouths.

Although a compromise was forced between the band and DGC, with Scott Litt (R.E.M) being bought on board to remix the record in a more radio-friendly way, it is within the authentic producing and mixing process that the artistic charm of In Utero resides. ‘Of course,’ said Cobain, ‘they want another Nevermind, but I’d rather die than do that.’

Of frenzied intensity yet understated fragility, art and aggression, In Utero is a lesson in true disorder. Rockstar angst replaces teenage angst, and the mainstream is met with a sardonic grin as Cobain pushes against their mild inclinations. ‘Scentless Apprentice’ frames the abrasive direction the band had been moving towards, as visceral screams are aggravated by disturbing lyrics and darker basslines. Grohl is animalistic and, in parts, apoplectic, exhibiting his deftness behind the drum kit. ‘Rape Me,’ controversial for its fiercely feminist overtones, channels authentic rage, while ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ crescendos into choral fury in essential Nirvana fashion.

But buried inside this hysteria is soft reflection. There is almost a brittleness to the record, like glass, or old bones; with no way of relieving the intense pressure of some tracks, others show the cracks. ‘I’m not like them, but I can pretend,’ ‘Dumb’ is a bleak lullaby. ‘All Apologies’ is confession. By providing listeners with a place of refuge, with more soothing rhythms, the discomfort of the record can be keenly felt. Although docile in comparison, and considered to be ‘gateways’ to the more alternative sounds on the record by bassist Novoselic, these songs are no less dark.

In fact, no song is devoid of the themes of sickness and care, life and death. From the umbilical nooses of ‘Heart Shaped Box,’ to the parasitical pets of ‘Milk It,’ unease is the primary essence of In Utero. While this feeling is worsened retrospectively, with our knowledge of Cobain’s death just months later, not even Cobain’s claim that the record is impersonal, nor the fact that several songs were written as early as 1990, is able to dispel such discomfort. The songs, at best, are unsettling, at worst, plain ugly.

But in spite of this ugliness, or rather because of it, In Utero, thirty years on, is hauntingly beautiful. ‘This is exactly the kind of record I would buy as a fan, that I would enjoy owning,’ said Cobain. Millions agree: In Utero debuted at number one in the UK and the US. In 2011, a poll run by The Guardian saw In Utero ranked as Nirvana’s greatest album. Through its corrosive authenticity, In Utero exists as pure art. Through its unsettling essence, In Utero captivates.

Bleach is a diamond in the rough, Nevermind the crown jewel. As for In Utero? Well, take the crown jewel and smash it into smithereens. While for some the remaining crystallites will be invisible and invaluable, for those that know where to look, they will be cherished for their beauty amidst the destruction”.

I am going to end with some reviews. The first one, from Kerrang!, was a 2020 article where they revisited their original 1993 review. Epochal, epic and hugely moving, I don’t think anyone was quite expecting In Utero or knew how it could possible follow Nevermind:

“You can almost taste it. The anticipation. Another Nevermind? Kurt Cobain's descent into fear, self-loathing and unholy noise? Neither, really.

The title says a lot. Nirvana have withdrawn and headed womb-ward to dodge the general bullshit that's tracked ’em ever since they hit multi-Platinum pay-dirt.

A couple more spins of In Utero, and it becomes even clearer: this ain't no piece-o’-shit stab at punk rock non-conformity. This is Nirvana making the kind of record they want to make. On their own terms.

Following the controversy of Albini-gate – the bizarre episode where producer Steve Albini's kiss-and-tell confessions suggested that the band were bowing to record company pressure – In Utero emerges as a subtly ironic and cathartic record, shaving the territory between the band's formative Bleach platter and its groundbreaking successor, Nevermind.

The rougher, Bleach-styled material is the most vitriolic, with Kurt's fuzzbox set on stun, his lyrical barbs personalised and sharpened. When he chortles 'One more solo?' on album closer Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip, the track and the album implode in a two-fingered salute of defiance. Radio Friendly Unit Shifter further sums up Kurt's challenging mood as he snarls, 'I love you for what I am not, I do not want what I have got', swiping at the bitter irony of multi-Platinum success against a backdrop of Sonic Youth-styled six-string abuse.

Despite the twists of gratuitous Punk-oid anger that Kurt inflicts throughout the 13 tracks on offer, on the current single Heart-Shaped Box, the sublime All Apologies (a likely candidate for a 45), and the convalescent croon of Penny Royal Tea, he re-stakes his claim as one of his generation's most absorbing songsmiths. The former pair (which benefit from additional engineering from Scott Litt) are Nirvana’s most commercial moments, with all three hinting at the possibilities that lie ahead.

Elsewhere, the triumvirate of Kurt, bass lank Krist Novoselic and traps-tapper Dave Grohl nod ironically at their unwitting former glories. Kurt kickstarts Rape Me with a familiar and doubtlessly intended …Teen Spirit shuffle, while Dumb has an infectious Come As You Are feel. Both ripple with Kurt's poignant observations, allowing fleeting glimpses at his anger and frustration without ever resorting to the trite and obvious.

The heaviest moments bubble up on the metallised canter of Tourette's, the searing Milk It, and the winsome Frances Farmer…, all of which have a familiar, lived-in feel. In fact, it's this kind of immediate intimacy which makes In Utero such a passion-filled ride.

If anything, after all the irritating speculation, the whole affair hollers defiantly. You can almost sense the relief at the band's discovery that they can still pick up the tools of their trade and play. Sure, it won't reach the heady heights of its predecessor, but who gives a shit about sinful sales figures? This is the sound of absolution”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Nirvana in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Renaud Monfourny

I will end with Pitchfork and their 2013 review. With the twentieth anniversary release out there, they had a perfect opportunity to give a perfect score to an album that shook the world when it came out on 21st  September, 1993. In Utero still moves me now (and I have heard it so many times):

“For the past two decades, we've essentially been living with two versions of I**n Utero. The first was officially released Sept. 21, 1993, though its legend was established several months prior. As the intensely anticipated follow-up to the most transformative rock album of the 1990s, Nirvana’s third record was pre-destined to become a battlefield in the heightening clash between indie and corporate culture, as mediated by a band that was philosophically faithful to the former but contractually beholden to the latter.

While Kurt Cobain famously used the liner notes for 1992 rarities compilation Incesticide to call out the jocks, racists, and homophobes in Nirvana’s ever-expanding audience, In Utero promised a more aggressively hands-on process of weeding out the mooks, a concerted effort to realign Nirvana with the artists they actually listened to and away from those they were credited with spawning. And where the album’s title would reflect Cobain’s lyrical yearning for a back-to-the-womb retreat from celebrity scrutiny, it also proved emblematic of the record's messy birth: A by-all-reports harmonious two-week quickie session with recording engineer Steve Albini in a rural Minnesota studio would lead to months of acrimonious exchanges in the press among the band, DGC, and Albini over the purportedly unlistenable nature of the results, requests for cleaner mixes, and cruddy cassette copies leaked to radio that falsely reinforced the label’s misgivings. (The second-guessing circumstances were not that dissimilar to those of the preceding Nevermind-- wherein Butch Vig's original recordings were eventually handed over to Andy Wallace for a platinum-plated finish-- only this time, the outcome had the potential to affect Geffen's share price.)

Upon release, In Utero may have debuted at number one, but initially it was something of a pyrrhic victory: Rather than lead a wave of Jesus Lizard-inspired noise bands to the top of the Billboard charts, In Utero would send millions of Nirvana’s more casual crossover fans scurrying into the warm embrace of Pearl Jam’s record-setting October '93 release Vs., an album that, from a music-biz perspective, was the true blockbuster sequel to Nevermind. In that sense, this first version of In Utero resonates as much today as a symbolic gesture as a collection of 12 unrelentingly visceral rock songs, a how-to manual for any artist at the top of their game-- from Kid A-era Radiohead to Kanye West circa Yeezus-- that would rather use their elevated position to provoke their audience than pander to it.

The second version of In Utero came to be on April 8, 1994, from which point the album would be forever known as the rough draft for rock‘n’roll’s most famous suicide note. In the wake of Cobain’s shotgunned sign-off, it became nigh impossible to hear In Utero in any other context. The infamous album-opening lyric that once dripped with sarcasm-- “Teenage angst has paid off well/ Now I’m bored and old”-- now sounded coldly nihilistic. Where the seismic stomper “Scentless Apprentice” invoked Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume as metaphor for Cobain’s festering disgust with the music press and industry, the song’s grueling shriek of “get awwwwwaaaayyyy” suddenly seemed to be directed at humanity itself. The “Leonard Cohen after-world” fantasy of “Pennyroyal Tea” turned into wish fulfillment; “All Apologies” ceased to be an innocently plaintive pop song and was instead permanently etched into its writer's epitaph.

But with this two-disc 20th-anniversary reissue, we now have a third version of In Utero, and I’m not just referring to the newly remixed iteration of the album. Taken as a whole, the package-- which also includes a remastered version of the original mix, B-sides, outtakes, a slew of embryonic demos, and a cheeky but affecting liner-note essay by comedian/tourmate Bobcat Goldthwait-- puts lie to the notion that In Utero is the soundtrack to a suicide, commercial or otherwise. In charting the songs’ evolution from rough instrumentals to the militaristic blasts of fury heard on the album proper, and through the outré experiments scrapped along the way, we hear a band that was on the cusp of an intriguing new phase.

In a surprisingly conciliatory Musique Plus interview conducted just prior to the album’s release, Cobain stated that In Utero would mark the end of Nirvana as grunge torchbearers and, throughout the record, the band screech and howl like they're skinning themselves alive to expedite their reinvention. But not a lyric goes by on the album where Cobain doesn’t sound conflicted between what he wants to do and what he feels he has to do. The scowling verses of “Serve the Servants” are countered by the chorus’ soothing incantation of the song’s title, as if Cobain had to anesthetize himself in order to answer his audience’s populist demands. You didn’t need to hear the feedback assault of “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” to sense the irony reeking from its title, while the sludgy savagery of “Milk It” deploys Cobain’s fascinations with bodily fluids and birthing to depict a soul being run through the music-industry wringer. Though Cobain claimed in the aforementioned interview that the deliberately bald language of “Rape Me” was his response to misinterpretations of Nirvana’s more ambiguous portraits of sexual/power dynamics (“Polly”, “About a Girl”), the fact that it cops the riff to his most famous song unsubtly directs the titular demand to his hit-seeking minders; when he answers his request by repeating “I’m not the only one,” he seems to be placating himself with the knowledge that he’s not the first punk-rocker caught in a boardroom power play. (And, in light of Cobain’s mounting disdain for the media, I can’t be the only person who’s always heard that line in “All Apologies” as “choking on the ashes of her NME”.

On 21st September, we will mark thirty years of Nirvana’s In Utero. Sadly the final album from the band, it cemented their place as Grunge godfathers and legends. The fact that, as we can see on Wikipedia, In Utero has been placed so high on critical lists speaks for itself:

“In 2004, Blender named In Utero the 94th greatest American album, and in 2005, Spin named it the 51st best album of the previous 20 years. In 2005, In Utero was ranked number 358 in Rock Hard's book of The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time. In 2013, Diffuser.fm named In Utero the fourth best album of 1993, while NME ranked it at number 35 on its list "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In May 2017, Loudwire ranked it at number six on its list "The 30 Best Grunge Albums of All Time". In April 2019, Rolling Stone placed it at number eight on its 50 Greatest Grunge Albums list”.

In 1993, In Utero caused a major stir and reaction. Nirvana returning to a rawer musical aesthetic. Wanting to go back to the start. Kurt Cobain’s lyrics were at their very peak. Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota had not heard or seen anything like Nirvana in 1993. Maybe they didn’t after. It is an album that will be discussed for decades to come. I was keen, thirty years on, to show my respect and love to…

A truly remarkable album.

Sam Liddicott