There’s no denying that Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one of the great rock songs of all time, and it never would have been written if it weren’t for a night of drunken graffitiing.
The story goes: Kurt Cobain wrote the song after he and his friend Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill) got drunk on Canadian Club whisky and, as “angry young feminists… decided we’d do a little public service,” according to Hanna. The year was 1990, and a “Teen Pregnancy Center” had just opened in town, and, wouldn’t you know it, didn’t have a lick of graffiti on its walls.
Calling the facility “a front for a right-wing operation telling teenage girls they’d go to hell if they had abortions,” Hanna and Cobain decided to visit the building after hours, and Hanna wrote “Fake abortion clinic, everyone” on the walls, while Cobain added, in big red letters: “God is gay.”
David Grohl, Curt Cobain and Krist Novoselic in 1992. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
They eventually wound up at Cobain’s apartment, where Hanna painted even more graffiti on his walls, including the words, “Kurt smells like teen spirit,” which was a deodorant brand. “Kurt called me up six months later,” Hanna recalled, “and he said, ‘Hey, do you remember that night? There’s a thing you wrote on my wall… It’s actually quite cool, and I want to use it.’”
Notably, when writing “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Cobain said he had been trying to write “the ultimate pop song,” and noted that The Pixies had been a big influence on him at the time. “I connected with that band so heavily,” he once told Rolling Stone. “We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”
Nirvana recorded the song with producer Butch Vig, who worked on their 1991 album, Nevermind. In fact, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was one of the last songs written before the band travelled to California to record the album with Vig, and had just sent him a cassette demo of the track one week prior.
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“It was a boombox recording of a rehearsal,” Butch recalled in an interview with Kerrang!. “Kurt introduced it by saying, ‘Hey, Butch, we got some new songs for you, and we also got Dave Grohl – he’s the best drummer in the world!’ Then they clicked into ‘Teen Spirit,’ with the scratchy guitar at the start. It was so fucking distorted, I could barely hear anything. But underneath the fuzz, I could hear ‘Hello, Hello,’ melodies and chord structures. And even though the recording was terrible, I was super excited.”
Before recording, Vig got to hear Nirvana run through the songs at a rehearsal space, saying that hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the first time “blew me away.” He added, “It was the first time I heard Dave Grohl play live, and it sounded so amazing. I was floored when I heard it. I remember pacing around thinking, ‘Oh my God, this sounds crazy intense.’”
Finally, when it came time to record, Vig had some ideas to maximize the song’s potential. “I said, ‘Kurt, I want you to double-track the guitars and vocals, to really make this jump out of the speakers.’ He thought it was ‘cheating,’ especially with his vocals. So I had him do multiple vocal takes, and he sang them so consistently I could run them at the same time as a double track, and it really made the song sound powerful.”
The rest is grunge history.