Music How Kurt Cobain got his vocal style from John Lennon
When Nirvana burst onto the scene, Kurt Cobain was not looking to go along with the mainstream. Most of the rock music reaching the top of the charts at the time consisted of bands like Guns N’ Roses, sporting a macho attitude that didn’t fit within the Nirvana aesthetic. Cobain was set to stay in the underground, but he did have some love for The Beatles when he was making Nevermind.
Across Nirvana’s magnum opus, Cobain’s musical cues were indebted to ‘The Fab Four’. While ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ has a world of its own, songs like ‘Lithium’ and ‘Come As You Are’ have melodies that are taken from the Lennon/McCartney playbook. Though The Beatles were always close to Cobain’s heart, he mentioned always having more love for Lennon, saying (via Cheat Sheet), “John Lennon was definitely my favourite Beatle, hands down. I don’t know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed. So I could relate to that.”
When it came time to do double tracks, producer Butch Vig opted to use a technique that Lennon frequently used: double tracking. The production trick involves singing the exact same vocal take twice to get a layered sound on playback. Although Cobain never liked recording vocals, to begin with, Vig mentioned coercing him to go again because of Lennon, saying (via Classic Albums), “He didn’t really like to do any double tracks, so I had to use the John Lennon reference to get it out of him. Every time he resisted, I was like ‘John Lennon did it’ and he said ‘okay’”. Between the sessions, Cobain was also known for playing snippets of Lennon’s Beatles ballad ‘Julia’.
In a later interview with Guitar World, Vig also mentioned having to record songs in secret when Cobain wasn’t aware of it. When he was cutting his vocals, Vig took to recording all of his warm-up performances, saying, “a lot of times I’d be going for a first take, and he would think it was just a warm-up. If I was lucky, I could get as many as four takes out of him. Then I’d take the pieces from the best ones and make it the master”.
Though John Lennon and the sounds of grunge might not make for the perfect pair, Lennon’s husky vocal delivery was ahead of its time during his solo career. On songs like ‘Well Well Well’ off of his solo album Plastic Ono Band, Lennon’s screams sound like something that Cobain would be doing 30 years later on tracks like ‘Scentless Apprentice’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’.
While Cobain would go on to despise the way that Nevermind was mixed, the mindset behind the record was to keep things fairly simple. Further on in the Classic Albums series, Dave Grohl mentioned that mindset. He noted: “We wanted it to be almost like children’s songs. I remember we would always make that analogy. The goal behind every song was to keep things as simple as possible”.
Fans always latch onto something that’s relatable. When it comes to kickass rock and roll, Cobain couldn’t get more fundamental than Lennon’s honest songwriting.
