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

Share

0000

Share

0000

Scentless Apprentice live in Rio, January 1993

The Priest They Called Him

In the autumn of 1992, Cobain taped an extended noise jam at a small Seattle studio owned by a friend of Dave Grohl’s; the Laundry Room. The resulting recording was edited down and formed the setting for William S. Burroughs’ reading of a story called ‘The Priest They Called Him’ (AKA ‘the Junky’s Christmas’.)

There’s no indication whether the original unexpurgated tape featuring what may be a full half hour of Cobain’s sprawling improvisation still survives. It’s potential preciousness, however, is down to it being a rare example of Cobain’s skills as a guitar improviser and as a manipulator of feedback.

Cobain always downplayed his own talent with the guitar, at times seeming almost embarrassed about his standard of guitar playing. Live material, however, such as an excoriating ten minute version of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ premiered in Brazil in 1993, reveals that whatever formal limitations he possessed pushed him to develop a truly unique talent for tearing sounds from the guitar and for crafting the results into intriguing noisy shapes. Cobain left a very limited handful of freeform instrumental pieces behind making the full recording of this session a potentially valuable addition to portrayals of Cobain as a guitarist.