The Nirvana song that encouraged Krist Novoselic to join the band: “Really good”
For most casual grunge fans, Kurt Cobain was the reason the movement existed in the first place. The Seattle scene could have gone under the radar for years, but once Cobain found his muse on Nevermind, everything changed within a few months as teenagers started donning flannel shirts and getting in touch with reality. Despite Nirvana being a glorified version of The Kurt Cobain Experience, Krist Novoselic first got the bug to join when he heard the song ‘Spank Thru’.
Then again, if it weren’t for Novoselic, Cobain may not have been able to reach such great heights at all. While the gigantic bass player had no real interest in writing songs like his bandmates, he was the glue that ended up tying a lot of the tracks together. Whether it was the bluesy flair on ‘Lithium’ or the thundering power chords on ‘Heart Shaped Box’, every piece of Novoselic’s sound helped make the better a tighter unit, especially when working off Dave Grohl.
When Cobain and Novoselic met as kids in school, they were far away from the kind of pop songs that Cobain would write later. They were children of the second generation of punk rock, and some of their biggest inspirations were into more abrasive sounds like Flipper and local heroes like Melvins.
It’s not like Cobain was the greatest guitarist in the world, either. He was brilliant when he was playing his own songs, but there was no real need to think that the guy who wrote riffs like ‘School’ was going to be giving Eddie Van Halen a run for his money any time soon.
Once Novoselic heard Cobain’s ‘Spank Thru’, he knew that he wanted in on the group, telling Guitar World, “He had this little demo of his band Fecal Matter, and it had ‘Spank Thru’ on it. I listened to that cut and thought, ‘That’s a really good song.’ So I said, ‘Let’s start a band.’ He had lots of riffs.”
Compared to where they would be just a few years later, ‘Spank Thru’ is more indicative of the Seattle sound. It’s not the most pop-flavoured thing in the world, but every now and again, there are those little nuggets of brilliance that Cobain would continue to polish up until making ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
While the song was shelved as a B-side once Nirvana started working on their debut album Bleach, it’s still one of the few records that saw them flirt with punk before their commercial transition. According to Novoselic, he was just as surprised as anyone once they started flirting with songs that could actually get on the radio.
When being interviewed for Classic Albums, Novoselic remembered how big a jump they made in that timeframe, saying, “Nirvana were kind of this whacked out dissonant punk thing…it was the dissonant punk. And then somewhere, it started to venture more towards pop music.” Cobain would later talk about how much he loathed the band’s pop-adjacent songs, but when you listen to ‘Spank Thru’, you’re hearing a closer depiction of what was going through his head in the late 1980s.
