Kurt Cobain at the Piper Club in Rome, Italy, on November 27, 1989. Photo by Bruce Pavitt.
Bruce Pavitt learned from isolation. In the early 80s, he saw how punk and new wave bands in secluded scenes were producing some of the period's most original music, "like Devo in Akron or the B-52s in Athens," he says. This moment convinced him that contributing to the culture of local indie music was worth it. Pavitt focused on his own Seattle music world through his Subterranean Pop zine, his radio show, his record shop, and ultimately his record label, Sub Pop, which defined grunge.
In the fall of 1989, Pavitt was also a photographer. Along with Sub Pop co-head Jonathan Poneman, he spent eight days touring Europe with two of their bands, Tad and Nirvana. Pavitt captured 500 spontaneous and defiantly amateurish images with his simple Olympus pocket cam, some of which are collected in the new book Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe, 1989.
Pavitt's photo journal captures the final leg of the now-legendary Heavier Than Heaven tour, beginning just in time to witness the dramatic near break-up of Nirvana in Rome—where a 22-year-old Kurt Cobain, feeling homesick and exhausted, smashed his guitar due to frustration with a hyper-masculine crowd made up of "the kind of guys who used to beat me up in high school."
At Nirvana’s show at the Piper Club in Rome on November 27, 1989. Pavitt says he wishes he got a shot of Cobain standing on a speaker stack and threatening to jump later on but was "too stunned to react." Photo by Bruce Pavitt.
But the narrative ends triumphantly at Sub Pop's LameFest showcase in London, where the bands opened for Mudhoney and NME anointed Nirvana as "Sub Pop's answer to the Beatles." The book is a micro-history full of logistical and emotional obstacles, rich with details of sightseeing and cappuccinos in Italy, a graffitied cultural center in Switzerland that blew everyone's minds, European fans clad in flannel and leather jackets, payphone calls to girlfriends at home, and an inexplicable tour-wide trend of Mardi Gras beads (apparently started by Mudhoney's Mark Arm). With grainy, active snapshots and reflective descriptions, Pavitt is able to make this piece of Nirvana history feel direct and unmediated; the story feels within reach.
The photos lingered on Pavitt's mind over the years, and Experiencing Nirvana was finally released as an e-Book in 2012. The hardcover version followed at the end of last year thanks to Brooklyn-based publisher Bazillion Points, now expanded to include a beautiful series of professional black-and-white photos from LameFest by photographer Steve Double. Although Pavitt is no longer involved with Sub Pop, he still keeps up—current roster favorites include Rose Windows, TheeSatisfaction, Thumpers, and Metz. His next book will be an anthology of his writings from his Subterranean Pop zine, with essays by music journalists Charles Cross and Ann Powers, Matador Records co-owner Gerard Cosloy, and more. Pavitt recently moved back to Seattle after living on the Orcas Islands for 17 years, raising his kids; he was sitting in his car just south of the city when we spoke last month.
Pitchfork: As someone who didn't experience the rise of Nirvana or grunge firsthand, it was cool for me to see how young everyone looks in the book. How old were you all?
Bruce Pavitt: Jon [Poneman] and I were both 30, and the bands were in their 20s. I hoped the book would be an inspiration to young musicians, just to witness how it was possible to get over to Europe and travel as a young person. The Nirvana myth is a little overwhelming now, but to see how Kurt could go from a small logging town—from "living under a bridge"—to only a few years later traveling Europe seemed epic in its own right, but on a doable scale.
Pitchfork: The images themselves are pretty amateurish. Do you feel like that grainy quality contributes to the narrative of the story?
BP: It implies a resourcefulness and a respect for imperfection, which would be a very good description of those bands and how they performed. It was spontaneous; an insider's perspective. I rarely gave people a heads-up that I was taking their picture. Almost all of the photos were taken from my hip, or up over my head. There's an intimate quality, which is not something you would find flipping through your typical Nirvana rock-star book.
I had no real photography experience, thankfully. I consciously took a lot of crowd shots. I was influenced by Seattle photographer Charles Peterson, who always seemed to incorporate fans in his live band shots. I think one of the keys to Sub Pop’s marketing was the conscious decision to celebrate the fans as well as the bands.
"When people saw the energy of our bands, they were totally blown away," writes Pavitt, who took this shot.
Pitchfork: You mention in the book that fans want to feel like they are part of a social movement. Did you think about that a lot on this tour?
BP: Jon and I did think about how excited people were about the culture coming out of Seattle. People are hard-wired for tribal identity. Many of the seekers coming to the European shows walked away with our t-shirts, displaying alignment with the culture.
Pitchfork: You took 500 photos on the trip. Did you have a sense at the time that this tour was going to be historically significant?
BP: I absolutely did. I've never in my life taken so many pictures of anything. Three of the best live bands I had ever seen were heading towards the music-media center of the world, and Jon and I knew they were going to blow people away. We felt the show could represent a tipping point for Seattle. It's not really debatable whether the crowd went off or not at LameFest—the proof's in the images. When NME comes up with a quote like "Nirvana is Sub Pop's answer to the Beatles," you know as a record label you've pretty much accomplished what you set out to do, which is to gain international attention for the bands. That's the whole game as a record label—you help discover these acts, but you have to capture the public's imagination, and that involves the media. In the 80s, it was hard to get press attention in the United States. England was the key.
Cobain and Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman. Photo by Bruce Pavitt.
Pitchfork: The bands were actively helping shape the narrative, too, not just with music but with what they said on stage about "the Sub Pop scene."
BP: People in the scene were creating myths. When Sub Pop first started, everything was larger than life. We were famous for hyping stuff. That was part of the fun. We were all building this myth and pretending that Seattle was going to be huge, and we just kept focusing on that, and the next thing you knew, it blew up. Method acting, I would say. People joke about how the Seattle scene was nothing more than a marketing concept, but it was actually about getting loose and letting go. It was inclusive and celebratory. The shows were insanely fun.
Pitchfork: There is a series of professional black-and-white photos at the end of the book. The juxtaposition kind of emphasizes how real the amateur ones feel.
BP: We were fortunate to have Steve Double contribute the incredible photos from LameFest. I love the dynamic contrast between the spontaneous shots and the more formal, pro-rock-star photos. You can see how once Nirvana steps into a media spotlight, their whole presence was exaggerated. That’s how the game works. You can see that in the book—it’s like, "Well, we’re just hanging out with these guys and playing some shows," and then you get to London and boom, instant rock stars. It has everything to do with the photography and the writing.
Bruce Pavitt stands behind Kris Novoselic at LameFest in London on December 3, 1989. Photo by Steve Double.
Pitchfork: Did you keep a written journal on tour as well?
BP: I didn't. The writing is like reconstructed diary entries based on my own amazingly good long-term memory. The photos are like Cliffnotes reminders of what happened, and I was able to tighten the narrative—in a few Nirvana books, they said, "The Sub Pop guys bought Kurt a new guitar in Geneva." Well, actually, no, we didn't, we purchased it in Italy, the morning after Kurt smashed his last guitar, and you can see that in the images. I was a history major in school. I review the past a lot and think about music history and how culture unfolds. I've been processing this trip for a long time.
Pitchfork: There was a huge gap of time between this tour in 1989 and when the book first came out in 2012. It seems like it would be overwhelming to process this piece of music history.
BP: The hardest thing was coming to terms with Kurt's passing. Every day I worked on the book, I was reminded that a friend of mine was dead. That's challenging. However, in piecing the book together, I said, "Wow, here's this epic Nirvana narrative, kind of a hero's journey, resulting in this triumphant showcase in London." It's a great story. It ends prior to a lot of drama [about Nirvana], which I think some people are burned out of thinking about—the stress and the tensions that accompanied Nirvana's success. It's hard to process. But here, we just have the band traveling through Europe and rocking London. It felt healing.
Cobain signs one of his first autographs at Rough Trade Records in London. Photo by Bruce Pavitt.
Pitchfork: It does feel like a rare instance of getting to—as the title suggests—experience the story of the band without a lot of the heavier context.
BP: It's Nirvana lite. [laughs] I had to ask myself: Why was that period of music history so exciting for me? I was a real indie activist in the 80s. I started a Sub Pop fanzine in 1980, reviewed thousands of indie records, and started my own indie record store in Capitol Hill called Fallout. I had radio shows. So, in thinking about the 80s, I had to appreciate how resourceful the culture was at the time—nobody had any money—and how cooperative the scene was. You'll notice in the book that everyone is wearing each other's t-shirts, for example.
It was a very different culture. Post-Nevermind, every band knew in the back of their minds that they could start out in a garage and wind up being famous millionaries because that model had been set. Prior to Nevermind, that just wasn't even part of the conversation. People approached music a little differently.
Pitchfork: You refer to the bands as "mutual admiration societies within a network of hobbyists." Was the idea of a career in music even floating around?
BP: No. Music careerists from Seattle would typically move to the closest media center, which was L.A. The idea of having an indie rock "career" while living in a remote backwater like Seattle was too ridiculous to contemplate. It was simply about having adventures, one day at a time, one song at a time.