On a quiet Sunday afternoon in December 1991, two of rock’s most iconic figures were standing outside a bar in Edinburgh waiting for their cue to go on. Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl smoked cigarettes, complained about the cold, and were ignored by the majority of people passing-by on South Clerk Street. Nirvana had agreed to appear at a benefit gig for Sick Kids at the Southern Bar after being asked by Edinburgh band the Joyriders. Nirvana had played the capital two nights previous and now two-thirds of the band were making a return engagement under the billing “very special guests.”

A rumor Nirvana were to play this charity gig brought in some wide-eyed fans, but most left after one of the Joyriders announced over the mic that they were not coming. A few fortunate fans stayed on alongside a scrum of regulars. Twenty-minutes later, Cobain and Grohl finished their smokes and made their way inside.
 

Nirvana at the Southern Bar. Photo Mary Boon. Via.
 
This was Scotland 1991, where it seemed to most Scots nothing culturally important ever happened here. The country was still on a desperate high that wee Paul McCartney had a farm down in Campbelltown and, you know, had once written a #1 song called “Mull of Kintyre.” Jings. While over on the west coast, or Glasgow to you and me, there was still long tedious reminisces about that day Elvis Presley set foot on Scottish soil at Prestwick Airport while he waited for a connecting flight back to the States. All the important things in Scotland moved to London or like AC/DC emigrated to Australia. It would take Irvine Welsh in his book Trainspotting and then John Hodge in the film adaptation to articulate why it was “shite to be Scottish”:

Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, tha’s what, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.

That’s one way of looking at it. Maybe not the right one, but it was one that was prevalent at the time. Self-loathing is a gift from the Stork when many Scots are born. With hindsight the appearance of Cobain and Grohl gigging in a wee pub on the southside of Edinburgh was like Jesus taking charge of refreshments at a wedding.

Making their entrance to shouts of “Ya hippie bastards,” Cobain and Grohl perched on two bar stools and played three songs: “Dumb,” “Polly,” and “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.” Krist Novoselic didn’t perform though was rumoured to be in attendance.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
FOOD FIGHT! Nirvana gets thrown out of their record release party on Friday the 13th, 1991
Incredible early Nirvana gig at a tiny East Coast goth club, 1990
‘(This is Known as) The Blues Scale’: Outtakes from the Sonic Youth / Nirvana ’91 European Tour

The Björk skateboard deck from Girl. Part of a new series featuring photographs taken by Spike Jonze. Available here.
 
So far there are five different skate deck designs that are a part of a Photos by Spike collaboration between skateboard company Girl and director Spike Jonze. The boards feature the beyond cool shot of Björk (seen above) taken by Jonze, and another that pays homage to the Beastie Boys who appear in character as seen in the 1994 “Sabotage” video (directed by Jonze) that is forever burnt into our collective consciousness.

All of the decks in the group are quite different looking. Both the Sonic Youth and Nirvana decks utilize black and white photos, while the image of Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs lounging on the bottom of her deck is vibrantly colorful as is the yellow skate deck itself. Jonze’s relationship with Girl goes back to at least 2007 when he co-directed a film on the company, Yeah Right. However, the director’s love of skateboarding goes even further back than that as his very first film, Video Days was about, you guessed it,skateboarding. Each sweet deck will run you about $50. I’ve posted photos of all the decks below for you to see below as well as some footage from Video Days.
 

The Sabotage deck.
 

Sonic Youth.
 
More after the jump…

 
One of the primary accomplishments of Montage of Heck documentary on Kurt Cobain that aired on HBO earlier this week was to remind me how much I fuckin’ love Bleach. Nirvana’s three studio albums are very distinctive, of course—all three albums are excellent, but in my mind I classify them as “raw (low budget),” “polished (medium budget),” and “raw (high budget).” I really like Nirvana in its “raw (low budget)” state. The whole first half of Montage of Heck consists largely of quasi-animated sequences with Nirvana music churning underneath, and damned if I don’t find “School,” “Negative Creep,” and “Blew” just as galvanizing and toe-tapping as I did when the album became lodged in my CD player back in 1990.

When Bleach was released, a big portion of the mystique of the album derived from its doomy, mysterious album cover. What the hell is a “Kurdt Kobain”? This really cost $606.17? What is happening in the picture on the cover? Why is “Bleach” in quotation marks? And so on. The front cover is a classic, and the tall, serif letters of “NIRVANA” would shortly adorn ten thousand T-shirts as well as all of the band’s official releases, from Nevermind all the way to From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (but not the B-sides comp Incesticide).

Remarkably, one of the most important decisions of the band’s career—what the logo would look like—was decided by chance, indeed, as Jacob McMurray has written, “mostly by accident.”

Quoting from the indispensable volume edited by McMurray, Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses, which documented the 2011 exhibition of the same name,

The layout for the Bleach cover was created by graphic designer and musician Lisa Orth at the offices of The Rocket, where she also worked. The cover comformed to Sub Pop’s design aesthetic: a stark field of color with bold type and a striking photograph. The photo, by Kurt Cobain’s girlfriend Tracy Marander, was reversed-out as if it were a film negative. It featured the band (including [Jason] Everman, though he didn’t perform on the album) playing at the Reko/Muse Gallery in Olympia, WA, on April 1, 1989. Orth asked The Rocket’s typesetter, Grant Alden, to set the band’s name in whatever was already installed in their typesetting machine. And thus Nirvana’s logo was born, mostly by accident.

That typeface, based on Bodoni Extra Bold Condensed, was called Onyx, and it looks like this:
 

 
The differences between Bodoni Extra Bold Condensed and Onyx aren’t 100% clear to me, but as Caitlin Richards helpfully explains, “The difference between Onyx and Bodoni is that Onyx’s letters are tracked closer to each other.”

Art Chantry gets into the jargon in the book Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses,
 

It was a typeface called Onyx which is a Compugraphic bad design of Bodoni Condensed—really hunky, ugly, and those Compugraphics, if you didn’t use the right kerning programs you had really bad letterspacing. And so Grant Alden basically just sat down, slammed it out, charged Lisa Orth 15 bucks, which she paid out of pocket, and that is where Nirvana’s logo came from.

 
While we’re on the subject of the Bleach cover, here are three fascinating images of the design elements that went into it. I had never seen these before like two days ago (clicking spawns a larger version).

 

 
And finally—my favorite of them all—here’s the cover image in its un-inverted state, which I’ve been dying to see for 25 years:
 

 
Again, if you find this even a fraction as interesting as I do, you really have to pick up Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses.

Photos: Lance Mercer