Classic Albums: Nirvana - Nevermind

I'm a big sucker for the Classic Albums series. I discovered it on MuchMoreMusic a while back, and was blown away. An album that I actually knew note by note - Deep Purple's Machinehead - was being deconstructed by the heavy metal gods who made it. There was bassist Roger Glover sitting at a mixing console and punching up individual tracks, showing how they got this sound and that effect. All five band members, now pushing 60 and considerably less hairy than in 1972, were telling stories about the greatest piece of work of their lives. It wasn't just rock'n'roll heaven (though the 15-year-old that's still inside me somewhere certainly felt that way), it was a really effective look inside the creative process. (OK, we're not talking Mozart here, but Deep Purple could really play, and the album is a rock'n'roll masterpiece.)

Since then I've heard that Classic Albums actually didn't do all that well in the ratings on VH-1, where it originated, because - it was felt - it was too "Inside Baseball." Turns out, rock fans actually want to know more about what goes on "Behind the Music" than about the music itself. Whatever. Once again I'm out of step with the masses.

Fortunately, the Classic Albums episodes are pretty widely available on DVD. I've picked up a few over the last couple of years, but have largely been disappointed. For some reason, the heart of the story was missing. Queen's A Night at the Opera is a good example. The episode is driven more by the format - going through the album song by song (at least half of which aren't actually any good) - than by the story. And then of course there was the huge hole in the middle - the absence of Freddie Mercury. The bottom line was, it felt less like a documentary and more like a mass-produced TV show.

So when I picked up the episode on Nirvana's Nevermind, I wasn't terribly optimistic. Like Freddy Mercury, Kurt Cobain wasn't around to be interviewed. But something about this show really worked. The surviving band members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic (looking, in a blue buttoned-down shirt, like a middle-aged accountant) speak intelligently about the time and about Cobain. Butch Vig, the producer, picks out just the right elements of the songs to focus on, and tells good stories from the studio. And the usual array of publicists, A&R people and music journalists for the most part actually add some good anecdotes and analysis.

But I think what works best about the show is this: the rise of Nirvana intercuts effectively with the song progression on the album. The songs are so personal that they allow the story to build, revealing elements of Cobain's character through their content and the way he played them. The show climaxes with Smells Like Teen Spirit, the second-last song on the album, which segues perfectly into the band's becoming an international phenomenon, and leads naturally into the wrap-up, which sums up Cobain's character and foreshadows (though never mentions) his death. All this makes it sound easy. But I bet the director and editor had to wrestle pretty hard to shape all those interviews into a story with a strong emotional climax.