Nirvana for Two-Year-Olds

A few days before the start of Christmas vacation, my family was in a post-dinner slump. The mere contemplation of the upcoming holidays—the travelling, the festivities—had exhausted us. Then my daughter, Evangeline—tireless, though by her standards a bit subdued—had the idea to play loud music. I wasn’t in the mood, but I relented.

I played a kid classic from years gone by, called “It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!!” As soon as the song started, Evangeline began to jump around and to demand that I do so, too, while my son pulled the cushions off the couch so that he could stage dive onto them. “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” was a big hit in our family about three years ago, when our family had only three people in it. Was this part of Evangeline’s excitement about the song, that it reminded her of when she had been the only child?

Then my wife, who had stepped out of the room for a moment, came bounding back in, dancing like a maniac. Something snapped in all of us at the sight of her jumping around like that. It was the “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” version of the Harlem Shake. Everyone went crazy.

Then we put up the Christmas lights. We didn’t have a Christmas tree, since we were about to leave town. We had a wreath. I strung the lights around the wreath. It looked beautiful but paltry. My wife and daughter had left the room. My son was hanging around—the basic urge to witness construction. To make the wreath seem less paltry, I turned out all the other lights. Now the room was lit by a spooky, multicolored glow.

The computer, in shuffle mode, started playing a Nirvana song called “Drain You.” I had not heard it in years. Or, at least, I hadn’t listened to it closely in years.

I turned it up. I started bouncing, and soon I was jumping up and down again. Alexander joined in. I wondered if the song was too dark and angry to play for a two-year-old. I stopped jumping and listened. Alexander stopped jumping and listened with me.

I remembered Dave Grohl’s bare back, his shoulder blades, the lean exhaustion of his body at the Nirvana show I went to in September, 1991, in Trenton, New Jersey, four days after “Nevermind” dropped. Grohl hit the drums so hard, and I remembered how spent he seemed when he walked, shirtless, through the crowd after the set. I’d been backstage before the show—the guy who made Nirvana’s T-shirts, Jeff Ross, made T-shirts for the band I was in, which may have been our biggest distinction. I’d stood there, chatting with people and glancing over at Kurt Cobain, who sat quietly for a long time, applying eyeliner. Then, just before he took the stage, he squirted half a bottle of Chloraseptic down his throat. After “Nevermind” came out, a revolution took place: Nirvana sounded like nothing on the radio, and then, all of a sudden, everything on the radio sounded like Nirvana. Cobain and Courtney Love were on the cover of Sassy, there was another record, and, three years later, it was all over.

Listening to the song with my son, I noticed an abandon that was childish in its total commitment. You can hear it in the force with which Grohl hits the drums, in Krist Novoselic’s playing, and, most of all, in the release in Cobain’s voice, which is a somewhere between a wail of despair and a delighted squandering of the moment.

Everything was going along fine in our living room until the song got to the break—the low, murky part—at which point Alexander called out to me, “Daddy! It’s scary!”

Nirvana’s music, in its anguish and energy, is scary. “Nevermind” is scary. But the break in “Drain You” is especially scary. I either had to turn it off or find a way to make this work. I didn’t want to turn it off. Instead, I turned it down an infinitesimal amount and addressed my son’s concerns.

“Alexander,” I said, bending over to talk near his face. “This is the part where they are in the swamp. The water is dark and murky, and the trees are low. They’re walking through the wet mud in the dark underbrush of the swamp.”

He looked at me with wide eyes. The colored lights added to the discotheque-meets-haunted-house mood. I worried that he would have nightmares, and that I would rue the night I played “Drain You.” People would shake their heads and say, “What were you thinking?”

“Right now, it’s very dark, but they are trying to find their way out of the swamp,” I continued.

The song was still in its thumping darkness, but Grohl’s drumbeats were starting to gather force.

“And now they see a ray of light in the distance. They see the light at the end of the swamp. Do you hear it in the music? They see the light and they are going in its direction! Do you see the light, Alexander? Do you hear it?” I sounded like some revivalist preacher. Alexander’s face was alert. He was awake to the idea that there might be a light to see, but he wasn’t sure he saw it.

In my years teaching creative writing, I have encountered scenes about fathers’ sentimental moments with their favorite music. One woman wrote about her father lying on the floor of the den and blasting Bruce Springsteen. At the time, I thought it was a bit cringe inducing. But now, having entered their ranks, I am inclined to forgive the dads and their music. I have always been an enthusiast, and sort of foolish about the music I love. For a period of time, I was very into Nirvana. It seemed that they were saving the world of music from itself, as well as saving the culture at large from itself.

It was important to me that Alexander knew that a happy moment was approaching. So much of the catharsis of Nirvana, and the indie effloresce that came in its wake, was a negativity that was refreshing. As Stephen Malkmus put it in a recent interview, commenting on the years that saw the emergence of Nirvana, and then of his own band, Pavement, “It’s a time that seems romantic to people now, whereas, at the time, it seemed like a cynical era. There were all these worries about selling out and the Man and corporate rock and irony and sincerity. But, in retrospect, being cynical just meant that you cared. There was something at stake.”

The song was now gathering itself for a release. It was rushing to the light. The drums were a tribal force. “Drain You” is a bummer, and it is ecstatic. Depressed ecstasy is Kurt Cobain’s style.

“We’re going to make it, Alexander! It’s going to be all right!” I shouted, as Dave Grohl unleashed a fierce drum roll on the snare. When the guitars came back in, I began leaping around. Then I heard Alexander’s voice calling out to me.

“Daddy!” he yelled. “Daddy? Are they out of the swamp?”

I’d forgotten to narrate that part. I had left him hanging.

“Yes!” I said. “Yes! They are out of the swamp! They are running in a meadow! They are surrounded by sunshine and running in the open meadow!”

I was leaping around. He started leaping around. He still seemed a bit scared. “Drain You,” Nirvana, that whole era—it had been a dormant chapter until this moment. My life then is as unfathomable to me now as my life now would have been to me then, yet, in this moment and this song, it had all briefly come together. The music was propulsive, driving us into the future and the past at the same time. We were, in some way, travelling to both places together. Alexander bobbed up and down in the maelstrom of the song’s end, his eyes shining with excitement at having escaped the murky swamp.

Thomas Beller’s “J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist” will be published this June. He is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University and a frequent contributor to Culture Desk.

Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.