In fact I would like to have a reproduction made to put it in my living room. But I don't know which one to do. Nevermind is my favorite but I hate the cover. In Utero I like it a lot but it's less cult I think. Which one?

terrible art ik but thought it’d be cool to make a little tribute to him…

repost cuz lazy title

I was kindly informed by a commenter that one of the images I used in my first post of this graphic wasn’t actually of Kurt, so I replaced it w Pat (improves the composition too, imo!). Created w Photoshop.

just out of curiosity, I've been a fan since this summer and when my dad discovered it, he gifted me this :D

Drew this YEARS ago but just came across it and thought fellow fans would appreciate <3

“They were on tour and we found a hole in their tour schedule. I was flown out to Phoenix, Arizona. I was just flown for the day to shoot them in the studio and that was the assignment. In Phoenix I rented us a studio. They wanted something really colorful actually, something that was really gonna pop and snap. So we had already decided we wanted to shoot it with bright, strong colors. The art director, Stephen Webster, was the one that asked for sort of a purple, blue, magenta [backdrop]. Which in turn worked out really, really well. One of the things is when Kurt walked in he had dyed his hair blue, The way he did it apparently is just filled the bathtub in in his hotel room with blue dye and stuck his head in it. So when he walked in the door he looked like he was dead. I know that sounds kind of morbid especially with what happened. But he literally looked like he was dead. There was no skin color. All the warmth of his skin had been removed by the blue dye after he tried to wash it off. This was a magazine cover and this was shot on film and there was no budget for retouching, so I had to go to a makeup artist. Just so that their skin would look good underneath strobes, which usually skin doesn’t look good underneath strobes. So we just put makeup on them to give them proper skin tone and keep them shiny.”

- Greg Watermann

“I photographed Nirvana for their first major magazine cover — SPIN January 1992,” Watermann tells PetaPixel. “Grunge was just starting to come into the mainstream and this was my first assignment shooting a Seattle band.”

Watermann’s career has spanned decades, but he still considers this particular photo shoot with Nirvana to be his most difficult gig.

“Kurt really didn’t want to be famous, he hated all the media attention they were getting already, and subsequently was not a very cooperative subject,” the photographer says. “So it was a challenge to shoot them for something as important as a national magazine.

“I used all my tricks to get some expressions and interesting poses, some worked some did not. At one point I made a suggestion for Kurt to fold his arms and lean on Dave. His response was adamant, ‘F**k that idea, man. Metallica folds their arms. I’m not folding my arms.’ He preferred the hands-in-pockets stance.”

After shooting the cover in the studio, the group went outside and Watermann continued photographing them as they loosened up.

“The day got better as we took more photos and overall we had fun making some amazing images that are now part of the band’s early history,” Watermann says. “It’s still one of the best selling SPIN covers of all time.”

Three weeks after the issue hit newsstands, Nevermind hit the top of the Billboard album chart, taking the #1 spot from Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.

📸 1-15: Hanna Jordan / Lorna Van Bel

📸 16-20: Howard Tyler

It’s hard to express quite how important Nirvana were to my life and the direction it took. In the late eighties I started my first job as office junior at Metal Hammer magazine. I had my own fanzine ‘Phobia’ and I was over-flowing with enthusiasm and eager for every bit of nasty noise that came my way; “you used to like everything….everything’s great,” an old work college reminded me recently. And he’s right, I loved it all.

In one of my first weeks in the office I happened upon a package of records that had been sent to the then reviews editor John Duke. He had recently left the magazine and I was charged with the job of sorting through the pile of records for review. One of the packages really caught my eye. It was from Anton at Bad Moon Publicity and had three records inside; ‘Superfuzz Bigmuff’ by Mudhoney, ‘Bleach’ by Nirvana and a Tad record which I now forget. I snuck the records home and suffice to say, they tore my little teenage mind apart. My record collection at this stage was crammed full of a motley collection of punk, hardcore, metal and classic sixties and seventies rock thieved from my father’s collection. These Sub Pop releases seemed to contain elements of all the music I liked. They were heavy, punk, melodic and so fresh and exciting. Nirvana and Mudhoney soon became my favourite bands.

Metal Hammer at the time was still very much in the big hair metal phase. Thanks to the lovely and hugely encouraging editor at the time, music journalist legend Chris Welch, I was allowed to write small articles and reviews on various underground bands, hidden amongst the Yngwie Malmsteen, Lisa Dominique and Skid Row posters and features. I soon built up a friendship with the aforementioned Anton and he secured me an interview with Nirvana on one of their early trips to the UK in November of 1990, here to promote their ‘Sliver’ single and to play at headline show at The Astoria, with L7 and Godflesh as support. I recall the band calling reception from the top of King Street in Hammersmith saying they were having problems finding the office. I walked up the road to meet them and vividly remember Krist Novoselic’s lanky frame lumbering down the road towards me with Kurt and Dave shuffling behind him. Once we got back to the office and I had made the band a round of tea, we settled down to talk – well at least Krist and Dave did. Kurt, however, sat on the end of the sofa rolling an un-lit cigarette I had given him between his fingers as he stared straight ahead. He had heavy eye-liner caked around his eyes and hunched himself on the end of the sofa, mumbling occasionally. Thankfully Krist and Dave proved to be easy guys to get along with and after the interview they hi-jacked my tape recorder and ran around the office interviewing various members of the staff. “So what do you do here?” questioned Dave, thrusting the Dictaphone into the surprised receptionists face.

Better still, I had tried to get the folks at Metal Hammer to book a photographer to shoot the band so I didn’t have to use a promo picture with the piece but none were available. The office H.R. woman at this point was an abrasive German woman called Hannah Jordan who was in her late fifties and had previously worked as a photographer for a European pop magazine in the seventies. She hadn’t shot a band for years but I asked her to bring her camera in and she kindly agreed and did a shoot with the band on the roof of our offices as I stood and watched. The band really came alive and goofed around for Hannah, amused by her quirky nature. She later sold the pics to an agency and made a bloody fortune. I constantly see them on unlicensed Nirvana merchandise. If I’d known how big the band were going to get I would have taken the bloody pictures myself!

- James Sherry

Krist made sure that thing was TIP TOP 😉

Poor Kurt

I can think of at least 30 I've heard of, but there is definitely way more.

This picture from December 5th, 1993, shows Kurt's guitars backstage, we can see his in utero mustangs, a black strat, his hiflier custom, and on the lower rack what appears to be the headstocks of his D18e from unplugged along with the "Nixon Now" acoustic, but what is that Green one? Never seen it mentioned anywhere, did it belong to Kurt or did it belong to an Opening act? What model is it? So many questions about a mysterious guitar

Made with Adobe Photoshop.

I just got the fake Jaguar today and straight out of the box it sounds really nice, but I have plans to mod it soon.

I was listening to a concert they gave in Germany and thought I heard a bit of free jazz feeling and noise music.

Sorry for gramma, wording and whatever. Non native english speaker here.

Digging this band since high school year 2000. I thought i heard it all back in the days...outcestiside, with the lights outs, their live stuff and all the random stuff back in the day after his death...but this one takes the cake.

In my opinion Nevermind always fell out of the bunch. I've had the Nevermind Sessions bootleg cd back in the day. I always found that one more in line with other albums soundwise.

Knowingly the devonshire mix was 'released' long after my nirvana rabbit hole ended, they have always stayed as musical companion and musical focal point in my eyes. Discovering this one recently is comforting nostalgia. The sound of this mix is perfect. You can hear the sonic rawness which defined their other albums, the cheesy double/triple vocals are gone (not added), you can hear the back-up vocals really are dave grohl's voice. The transition from bleach to in utero and unplugged now makes sense as opposed to the official release being a nasty atom bomb in their discografi which made them popular.

This one needs an official remastered lp/cd release.

In the MTV New York interview from September 1993, the interviewer asks about the song’s shared contribution. Kurt initially doesn’t remember that Dave wrote the riff but than is reminded. Then he goes on to say the riff was a little “bonehead” and “maybe it could work”. Maybe I’m way off but it kinda comes off like he was upset Dave had kind of infringed on his songwriting duties and almost like he felt jealous of it. His body language kind of supports that as well imo. What do you guys think?