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Remembering In Utero With Nirvana's "Fourth" Member, Pat Smear

“It all started with a phonecall from Kurt...”

The television advert for In Utero

A thousand critics will tell you that Nevermind was Nirvana’s best album. They’re right in terms of sales and critical drool, but In Utero is Nirvana’s most emotionally raw album. With lyrics like “I love you for what I am not, I did not want what I have got” and “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black”, the record gave an insight into Kurt Cobain’s fragile psyche at the time of recording the album. After the million selling success of Nevermind, Nirvana were ready to claim the world as theirs, but In Utero was the biggest about-turn any band has ever done. Foregoing any true “Radio Friendly Unit Shifters”, the record was a journey into the depths of Cobain’s emotional deprivation. The record was my first exposure to the band, the haunting cover featuring an angel with her organs exposed being the first thing that drew me in. Upon my first listen I was so taken aback by the visceral nature of the songs that I gave up on it, only to pick it back up days later after having the jarring dissonance of a song like “Serve The Servants” scare but utterly captivate me. Like a moth to the flame, I embraced what I was scared of.

Annoncering

There’s multiple meanings behind every song. Take “Heart Shaped Box” for example. It can be interpreted in so many different ways yet still brings the listener no closer to figuring out what was really going on in Cobain’s head. Is it a literal reference to the Heart Shaped Box that Courtney gave to Kurt when they first met? Or was it making allusions to his own fears of being suppressed by addiction and trapped by fame? The video for the song gave no straight meaning but instead embraced the ambiguity with its hypnotically surreal imagery.

Pat Smear joined the band around this time. Nirvana were fresh off the success of being dubbed everybody’s favourite band and playing guitar in America’s biggest rock band was a wild ride for Smear. Though it nearly wasn’t meant to be after the band forgot to call him, until right before his first performance with them on Saturday Night Live. “I was just sitting around at home waiting and thinking ‘shouldn’t I be there?’” All was soon sorted when the band’s tour manager phoned him with just hours to spare. Smear didn’t hold any grudges after “it was funny, it really added to my nerves”.

It had all started out as a “surreal phone call” between the guitarist and Cobain. It was “the type of call that you don’t expect to get”. Life had always been a spontaneous journey for Smear, with him starting out as a founding member of LA hardcore legends The Germs. The Germs shows were always chaotic. “You always had to fight back, knowing that you were going to get spit on or that a bottle would be thrown”. But the band’s infamy was short lived when Darby Crash’s five-year plan to be famous culminated in his tragic drug overdose. Going from band to band, he made friends with a young Courtney Harrison, his gift of a sculpture that said love eventually inspiring her new punk rock name, Courtney Love. Smear laughs at the mention of the story, “yeah, you could say I inspired her name, give all the credit to me!”

Annoncering

Getting into the swing of being the fourth member took about “a month or so” for Smear. It was a shock to his punk rock roots “because nobody would throw bottles at my head at shows anymore!” Upon hearing In Utero for the first time Smear embraced the rawness of the record, “I came from a noisy punk background, it was like Nevermind but noisy”.

His shows with the band ranged from their legendary MTV Unplugged appearance to their In Utero tour, his time with them ending as surreally as it started, with both Cobain and Smear coming down with laryngitis. “Kurt was so sick, his voice was kind of crazy. It’s weird when you have to go up there and pretend everything’s great and you feel that bad”. It was both the last complete Nirvana appearance as well as Smear’s last show, there’s quite a bit of interest to hear the audio “I’m just really interested, when a band plays and they think they sucked from a band perspective. A band’s best and worst shows really aren’t that far apart”.

In Utero served as Nevermind’s older cynical brother. The one who’d grown up and realised that the superstar life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old”, Cobain sang. Today Smear thinks the album should be valued as “it shows you can make a really great record and still have hit singles keeping everything noisy and raw”. The bands that the record has influenced are too numerous to even bother listing but for everyone that has found the perfect balance of noise and melody, a definite debt to Nirvana is assured. Smear believes that the influence is on a more underground level to the type of music that is often ignored; “bands that you don’t hear of and music that nobody knows about”, which is all that Cobain would have wanted from making such a record.

Annoncering

Follow Dan on Twitter @KeenDang

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