Those who like to summarize American generations by certain cultural signposts seem to have settled on the Nirvana album "Nevermind" as the most significant such signpost for the generation born between the middle 1960s and the early 1980s, commonly referred to as Generation X. My generation, as I was born in 1966. This album was released exactly 25 years ago last Saturday, and while it was never particularly important to me personally (I think of Douglas Coupland's novel or maybe the Butthole Surfers' brilliant "Hairway To Steven" as far more important documents from that era), I knew this would be thought of as the song for people my age, from about one minute into my first listen. And, because at that moment I understood that I'd be subjected to the album's Big Hit Single by nostalgia-obsessed peers for the rest of my life, the time and place remains burned in my memory.
September, 1991: Heading south on Interstate 5.
1991 was a rough time to be a recent college graduate in California, with the horrific recession that Joan Didion documented so harshly knocking millions out of work and barring the door to any kind of steady employment for newcomers to the workforce. I applied for several hundred jobs between 1990 and 1993, but all I could get was miserable temp work lifting boxes in warehouses or filing colonoscopy photos in medical offices. I lived in squalid flops, cheek by jowl with other unsavory unemployable Gen-Xers, in sketchy San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods, and every few months I'd scrape up the gas money to hop in my hooptie 1965 Chevrolet Impala sedan and go on a couch-surfing expedition to visit my many friends in Southern California.
My
In late September 1991, an actor friend in San Diego had lined up some sort of not-very-well-defined performance/installation/music gig in an art gallery, and he invited me to come down and help him put on some kind of show. I had a respectably unlistenable noiso-nihilo-industro band called Murilee Arraiac at the time (yes, that's the partial origin of my goofy pen name), and so I packed up my Roland TR-707, my Casio SK-1, my police-scanner and shortwave receivers and all the rest of my noise-making crap into the Impala's spacious trunk and headed 500 miles to the south.
Murilee Martin in Death Mickey T-shirt, September 1991
We called our band Nureochiba and the Lizards, and the art-gallery gig became known as "The Weekend In Hell" by all those who participated (including the brother of my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend at the time), due to a combination of zombie crackheads trying to steal our equipment, fights among and with the psychotic art-gallery owners, Jake Leg triggered by consumption of a band member's acetone-contaminated stovetop banana moonshine, generalized existential terror and the Generation X-defining sense that the future was always going to suck and that we were every one of us fucked forever.
Murilee Martin doing incomprehensible performance art piece, 1991
Of course, the post-Generation-X generations, whatever they're calling themselves now, hate the Xers because we have nailed down all the jobs and cheap housing and they have to suffer with endless repetition of our terrible music. This attitude is correct, as was the attitude we Xers had about those goddamn baby boomers back in the early 1990s, when you couldn't evade nostalgia for the 20 most tedious examples of hippie and Motown hits, and schmucks born in the 1940s and 1950s had dumb-lucked into all the good stuff and built an unscalable wall around it. Things looked especially grim in 1991, because we'd all had our hopes raised up by the ousting of the odious Marcos regime in the Philippines and Haiti's Baby Doc in 1986, plus the collapse of the oppressive Warsaw Pact gerontocracies in 1989 … only to be shredded to bits by the brutal reality of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, cynical blood-for-oil triumphalism in the Middle East and the beginning of the genocide-o-rama wars in the former Yugoslavia. Yeah, I know, it's even worse now.
This car was 26 years old at this time, as old as a
Grunge music was about to hit big that fall, but I was only vaguely aware of the Pacific Northwest bands that would soon make such a big impression on the world when I headed to San Diego that September. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Primus' "Frizzle Fry," Ice-T's "O.G. Original Gangster" and Mr. Bungle's first album, but I already had the plaid flannel shirts and pessimistic outlook that would be perfect for the Seattle sounds coming our way.
I built this removable audio system to sit on the transmission hump of my Impala.
My Impala had a homemade removable audio system made of junkyard parts, but my tunes in that car were nearly 100 percent cassette, almost no radio. A couple of days after the Weekend In Hell fiasco (Tuesday, Sept. 24, 1991, to be exact) I was riding to a San Diego taqueria in the front passenger seat of my actor friend's crappy, orange, barely-running 1971 Volkswagen Transporter with Tijuana-based 91X on the staticky-ass Sparkomatic radio. That's when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on.
When the first chorus hit, conversation in the van stopped and my friend turned up the radio. We listened. About 90 seconds in, I could tell this was going to be one of the most overplayed hit songs ever recorded, maybe even more overplayed than anything Elvis or the Beatles ever did. When it was finished, all of us, riding in that gasoline-reeking sputtering van on that bright smoggy San Diego day, knew that we had experienced something important. The whining-yet-angry tone, the hopelessness, the depictions of cruelty to self and others, and the general sense that things would always get worse -- the songs on "Nevermind" made up a sort of grim flowchart that looked like all of our worst-case visions of the future.
Flannel shirts make a lot of sense in coastal California, fashionable or not. But for a brief period, you could dress for San Francisco weather and be fashionable at the same time.
In subsequent months and years, I liked the entire "Nevermind" album quite a bit and listened to it more than any No. 1-on-the-charts album I can think of. However, I was more into another album by a West Coast band that was released on Sept. 24, 1991, a band I had hated prior to the release of "Blood Sugar Sex Magik." I liked the Melvins and Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees and all the rest of those gloomy, rain-soaked Washington bands, but Alice In Chains, particularly "Dirt," was my favorite out of all of them. When I'm 95 years old, in a robot-tended retirement home on Titan, I'll be listening to "Sickman" over and over until those 85-year-old youngsters around me lose their minds.
My Impala with one of Christo's umbrellas
One of my San Diego friends bought "Nevermind" (on LP, of course, because CDs were still expensive luxury toys meant for the wealthy at that point) while I was in town, and I made a tape of the album to listen to on my drive home (sorry, Kurt, but at least Courtney got her cut of the royalties when I bought the CD a few years later). I packed up my stuff and headed north, stopping in the Grapevine to shoot some photos of my car with one of Christo's umbrellas. On the way back to San Francisco, I listened to "Nevermind" several times, and to this day I think of that running-on-two-cylinders orange VW bus when I hear the first song.
