Ten from the vaults: the unseen works of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana

Hairspray Queen Home Demo

The Bleach Session Version of Hairspray Queen

In the early days, Nirvana recorded on shoestring budgets. This cash-poor lifestyle scars their early studio work in numerous ways. At their first full session in January 1988 they left one song, in the words of producer Jack Endino, “permanently unfinished,” because they didn’t want to pay for more tape. That summer, recording the ‘Love Buzz’ single, the band again refused to pay for more tape so asked Endino to erase a number of early demo versions of new songs plus the rare song ‘Blandest.’ All current copies of these songs subsequently survived thanks to Endino having dubbed them onto cassettes for the band to listen to at home.

This simple lack of funds was still a factor when the band prepared their first album, Bleach. The fact that the album was recorded and mixed in four days for only $600 dollars, is often made to sound like a triumph when, in fact, it was just a sign of poverty – the band still had to borrow the money from a friend and simply never paid him back. This background explains why only two songs were recorded and subsequently left unreleased – the band couldn’t afford waste. One, ‘Big Long Now’, became a highlight of the 1992 Incesticide compilation. The other was a reprise of the song ‘Hairspray Queen’ with Chad Channing on drums, now only known via an earlier Dale Crover version the band preferred. It remains unclear whether the version with Channing survives in any form but a video of a home rehearsal from that time is available showing a few notable tweaks and changes from the studio version visible today.

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