The invitation for the ‘Nevermind’ record release party held at Re-bar in Seattle on September 13th, 1991.
 

“Nevermind Triskaidekaphobia, Here’s Nirvana. On Friday the 13th, join Nirvana and DGC Records for a release party in honor of Nirvana’s DGC debut album Nevermind. Edible food, drinks, prizes you might want to take home, a few surprises, people to meet, the band to greet… But nevermind all that, the important part is the music. Hear Nevermind in its entirety and loud.”

—the details for Nirvana’s album release party for Nevermind.

The first signal that things at Nirvana’s record release party for Nevermind might get out of hand was it was a strictly “beer only” event. To remedy this, Kurt Cobain’s pal Dylan Carlson of the band Earth snuck in a huge bottle of whiskey (allegedly Jim Beam) served it up covertly in a photo booth inside the infamous Seattle entertainment mecca/gay-friendly watering hole, Re-bar. Smuggling booze into a bar is a thing thrifty drunks do, but you also might be asking yourself why did it have to be smuggled into a bar hosting a party full of industry types from Geffen Records, local label Sub Pop and thirsty musicians? To explain this, we have to consider Seattle’s long, complicated history with hard liquor. Prior to the 1970s, it was illegal for people to drink whilst standing up, and women were not permitted to sit on bar stools.

Additionally, and until very recently, all sales of hard liquor were controlled by Washington State and obtaining a license to sell booze in clubs, restaurants, and other establishments was challenging. Getting a license to sell booze was even more difficult for venues that catered to lovers of “black” music or that was welcoming of gay people. The Washington State Liquor Board started watching Re-bar (a gay hotspot) microscopically, and would often roll into the club close to closing time to check up on Re-bar’s clientele and essentially harass patrons and employees.
 

A photo of Nirvana (apparently with former publicist Susie Tennent) taken inside the whiskey bar/photo booth at Re-bar.
 
In Everett True’s book Nirvana: The Biography, author and journalist Carrie Borzillo remembers she was told the reason Re-bar wasn’t able to serve liquor at the Nevermind record release was due to the venue also serving food (or the frightening promise of “edible food” as the invitation at the top of the post notes). Borzillo arrived at the party, and after surveying the food, spotted Cobain allegedly knocking back a fifth of Seagram’s straight out of the bottle. There were several kegs of beer but the free suds disappeared quickly. Sub Pop’s Bruce Pavitt was DJ’ing the party, and around the time the beer ran out, he had already spun Nevermind twice and twice was enough for Kurt, Krist, and Dave, who started feeding Pavitt requests to play new wave and disco hits. Naturally, Pavitt, a purveyor of good taste, complied. It wouldn’t be long before some of the edible food offered up at Re-bar starting flying, and Borzillo’s new dress was covered by onion dip.

The first food item that became a projectile was a tamale hurled by Krist Novoselic at Kurt and Dylan Carlson.

Since Nirvana was no newbie to food fights, Kurt whipped some guacamole back at Krist, though Nirvana fan club founder Nils Bernstein was certain (as noted in Nirvana: The Biography) Kurt actually threw Green Goddess dip at Krist, because these details are fucking important. Amid the flying food chaos, someone thought it would improve the party’s awesome anti-ambiance by rolling the tapped kegs around the bar. Steve Wells, the owner of Re-bar at the time collected the three knuckleheads who started the food fight, the guests of honor, and tossed the trio (as well as Bruce Pavitt) out on Howell Street, where they would proceed to puke, because it’s not really a night to remember until someone barfs.

Recently, Screaming Trees guitarist Gary Lee Connor shared his memories of the night recalling that after Nirvana got booted, he heard Krist egging on the people still inside their party through a barred open window, sarcastically “begging” to be let back in. Since this is Seattle in the magical year of 1991, Susie Tennant, the band’s publicist at the time, pulled up in a limousine and brought the band and a few friends back to her house to continue the festivities. Kurt slingshot eggs at her neighbor’s cars with Fastbacks vocalist, the always well dressed Kurt Bloch. Now that’s a fucking party. A few photos of the night Nirvana got kicked out of their own party because they knew how to party follow.
 

A photo taken at the Re-bar party by Jennifer Finch of L7.
 

Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic.
 

A thrilled looking Kurt Cobain at the Nevermind record release party. Photo by Charles Peterson.
 

Dylan Carlson (standing), Screaming Tree’s vocalist Mark Lanegan and Kurt playing dress up at Susie Tennant’s apartment. Photo credit.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe, 1989’: Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt on his new book
Incredible early Nirvana gig at a tiny East Coast goth club, 1990
Watch a very tired Nirvana being interviewed just a few weeks after ‘Nevermind’ came out
Nirvana, Mudhoney, and the audience battle shitty security guards during Sub Pop’s ‘Lame Fest,’ 1989

A photo of a young Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul on the queen of hearts card from a playing card set released by the NME in 1991.
 
I’m going to break the bad news to you quickly when it comes to obtaining your own set of NME’s l playing card set from 1991: Coming across a complete 52-card set is pretty much a mission impossible. Single cards occasionally pop up on auction sites and can sell for five bucks or more when they do. As somewhat of a collector of this type of ephemera, I can completely understand coveting a set of these rare cards as they include an array of arresting black and white photographs featuring the music world’s most elite talents.

Whoever did this for the NME really must have had fun. I mean, Morrissey is the queen of diamonds, Mark E. Smith is the joker, and James Brown is the king of hearts. NME even added an extra number six to all of the number six cards so the tops of the cards read 666. Before I completely nerd out more than usual, let’s take a look at the best of NME’s playing card set below. You can see all of the cards here.
 

 

Kim Gordon + 666 = YES.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
There was a time when Nation of Ulysses was the most influential underground rock band in the world. It may not have been for a very long time, and it may have been 20 years ago, before Nirvana took punk aesthetics into the heart of the mainstream, but for a while it seemed like everyone who heard or saw this band just couldn’t shut up about them. It’s not hard to see why Nation of Ulysses drew such cultish adulation - they were always about much more than being a simple band. They had a defined visual aesthetic that drew more from jazz and Soviet art than hardcore. They spoke politics. They worse suits. They described themselves in statements that by today’s standards would spell career suicide for a rock band:

We’re not only a political party, but also a terrorist group. The imperative started with the recognition of the colonialization of youth culture by youth imperialists and the establishment. It was initially formed as a response to that, but now we’ve broadened our breadth to encompass a complete destruction of the American legacy. We understand the workings of oppressions big and small.
...

At the time [they formed] was Ulysses Speaks your primary medium?

Yeah, we were mostly just proliferating literature and bombing buildings, and then we realized the medium of noise not only creates a perfect cover for our organization but it also creates a camouflage for maniacal riotous behavior and provides a context for acting like an idiot and going beyond the structures of everyday behavioral codes. When you see a show, everybody is jumping up and down screaming—if it’s good—and that’s because they’ve been allowed to step outside the boundaries of regular behavior. We want to go one step further. It’s absurd behavior—dancing is incredibly absurd—and we want to take that one step beyond, and that’s why we have so much violence on stage; we’re trying to bring it to the next level. We’re fighting a war there in the room…the room that we took over.

Since you began this mission, have you become more optimistic that you can effectively utilize the facade of populist entertainment to convey the party message?

Yeah…our message is visual, it’s aural, and it’s olfactory. Our message couldn’t be progenitated properly just with sound. We see the whole idea of music as a sound phenomena as really bogus and an idea which has only taken root since the proliferation version of recorded medium, like records. Before then, nobody would have ever thought, “this is only attacking my ears”, because there’s always a visual side to that whole phenomenon. We’re into the true experience, and that’s why the whole idea of music has really aligned us. What we’re wearing on stage and the way we move on stage has just as much to do with the idea that we’re getting across as the sound that we’re putting forth.
...

Have you been able to stir up as much antagonism as you might have hoped for?

Yeah, you know - the old order; people who sense the dissolution and the proliferatrion of new ideas. There’s a Kill Ulysses conspiracy - It’s called the Kill Ulysses National Workers Socialist Party; they’re just trying to destroy us. Rock and Roll is trying to destroy us.

From The New Puritan ReView, 1991 - read the whole interview here.

Still, for all the word-of-mouth hype that surrounded Nation of Ulysses in their brief but dazzling career, for kids like me who lived in the sticks their music was harder to come across than hen’s teeth - another situation that seems impossible by today’s standards. Back in the days when you had to travel to a big city and visit a specialist record shop in the hope of picking up an import 7”, it was easier to find releases by Ulysses’ UK adherents like Huggy Bear than it was the band’s own originals. Thankfully, the hardcore NoU fan base still exists and has been doing a pretty good job of disseminating footage and material on the internet, ensuring the band’s legacy will live on and attract more fans. Sure, Nation of Ulysses weren’t the first punk act to adhere to hardcore left-wing politics, or to have a well defined look and outlook, but no-one did it with this much goddam style: 

Nation of Ulysses “Introduction/Spectra Sonic Sound” live 1991
 

 
OK, so the audio quality in that clip was pretty poor, but it gives you an idea of what their shows were like. Plus, I do love that washed out, third-generation VHS-copy look. Here’s another clip of NoU live from 1991 (minus suits):

Nation of Ulysses “A Comment on Ritual” live 9:30 Club, 1991
 

 
You can now buy the Nation of Ulysses back catalog direct from Dischord.
 
After the jump, even better quality footage of NoU live in DC circa 1991, including a further 30 minutes of that 9:30 Club show above (in color)…

 
“If it goes any further it might as well be rock and roll”

Kevin Saunderson on the the mutation of house and techno into “rave”.

Here’s an interesting little adjunct to the rave documentaries I have been posting recently - this is not a full length doc like the others, but a much shorter news-type item for what was presumably a youth culture show. It is interesting for a number of reasons - it’s cataloging the emergence of “rave” as a defined type of music as represented by acts such as SL2 and The Prodigy, and that kind of music’s growing popularity. In fact, the clip features an interview with a 19 year old (!) Liam Howlett, bemoaning the lack of radio play of rave music, despite it regularly reaching the upper reaches of the British charts. Ironically, it was The Prodigy who were charged with killing rave music by turning it into novelty records of the likes of “Charly Says”. In this clip rave-based dance music is referred to as “techno”, even as a Detroit-based techno pioneer such as Inner City’s Kevin Saunderson criticise the new music for lack of “soul”. At a time when dance culture in the UK was moving from the overground to the underground it is interesting to see the schisms opening up that would split it into many different categories:
 

 
Sonic Youth perform fiery versions of “Mary Christ” and “The Bedroom” in the parking lot of the San Franciso Tower Records in 1991. Video shot by Matt Cornell.