Happy Birthday Nirvana

Twenty years ago today Nirvana released “Nevermind” and changed the world of music and pop culture forever. The summer before my senior year in high school (yes, the 20 year reunion is coming up in November, shudder…) my friends and I had rented a one room apartment for god knows how many people in Ocean City, MD and that’s where we met Dave Grohl. He was dating our friend Nicole who lived upstairs in the same house on the boardwalk and he would come see her on the weekends. Dave was from DC and had just left a band called Scream to join Nirvana whose first EP I was remotely familiar with. I remember when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” started spinning on WHFS in Baltimore. A few months later Nirvana appeared on the cover of Musician (or was it Guitar magazine?) And then a few months after that Dave finally broke up with Nicole because Nirvana exploded beyond belief and well, that was that. Most of us that spent time in the music scene in Baltimore and DC, dipped in our Salvation Army threads, felt a little adolescent resentment at the attention Nirvana brought to our insular rebel world. “Grunge” wasn’t really a term used by any of our friends but a marketing tool in our eyes. But that album changed the way the world saw us, for better or worse. And it certainly changed the scope of music history, which is amazing to think about now, how much of an impact that one album had on so much. Music before and after that period has been one of my biggest influences, it has shaped my aesthetic, my eye and my taste as much as film school and as much as fashion, if not more so. Happy birthday Nirvana…

Early promo shot by Charles Peterson below…

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