Nirvana
From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah

THE REVIEW

Listening to this CD, I can only think of one thing: I wanted to be there too!
I wanted to be there among the thousands of people bowing before their (and my) idol. I wanted to be present when Kurt writhed on stage, when he spat at the cameras, or when he didn't care about the dollars spent and destroyed the guitar.
I wanted to be there when the blonde angel screamed his anger into that microphone in the form of childish “eeeeeeh” while Dave “played” with his drums. I wanted to be glued to some other fan, shoving, screaming together during “School.” I wanted to be there to listen to “Drain You,” because in the interlude of “Drain You,” a friend of mine told me he had always felt something satanic: he imagined that in hell there was that insistent drum that increased as you got closer to the entrance, and that guitar scratching with every flame coming out of the earth's bowels; up to here it's true, then he thought the door opened and there he was playing. No! The devil doesn't deserve Kurt: a funny and sarcastic angel who dresses as a woman to sing one of his most beautiful songs (“Aunerysm”) cannot end up down there.

I wanted to be there when they played their “Losing My Religion” and forgive me if the comparison might be bold, but this is “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for Nirvana. I would have loved to go wild with “Been A Son” or to stay calm during the verse of “Lithium” and then grab some ecstatic fan and throw him in the air to the rhythm of “yeeeeeeeah yeah!” in the chorus.

“‘Mom and dad went to the show...’ and I'm at the Nirvana concert,” maybe it even sounded good as a phrase, but I never got the chance to say it because I wasn't there; I wasn't there when they played one of my favorite songs “Heart Shaped Box”; I would have told Kurt “Hey, wait” while he was getting ready to pull the trigger, but that, I think, no one could have done but himself.
I would have appreciated the quirky guitar intro of “Milk It” played as “it comes” and the verse lyrics sung just the same. I would have loved the revolution applied to the calm “Polly”; who knows if I would have made it home alive after the shocking “Tourette’s”! Unfortunately, in 1994, when Kurt decided that Nirvana had to end there, I was a tender 10-year-old. I got to know them later, and the most I could do was sit down, listen to this CD with my eyes closed, and imagine myself there among the crowd.