Nirvana Live at Reading: Fun again!

We're fast approaching the 20th anniversary of Nevermind, the album that launched a thousand big label deals for indie acts in the '90s and defined a new movement of rock. So great is that album and the influence it had on everything that followed that it's hard to talk about Nirvana the band. It seems that every time you talk about Nirvana it takes on the weight of a whole musical movement. The band is not just a great rock trio. It is the sound of a generation.

Still, despite all of that cultural weight, there are several revelatory things about the new Nirvana concert album: Live at Reading released this month -- particularly for anyone who hasn't really listened to the band in a while, and then only their commercial releases. I count myself in that group. Loved them when they came out, but quickly tired of the overexposure. By the time they were doing their famous MTV Unplugged appearance, I was over the band. It just wasn't fun anymore.

The first time through the new CD, it occurred to me that Nirvana may be the loudest and most discordant band to ever go multi-platinum. This CD, a document of a legendary headlining gig at the 1992 Reading Festival in the U.K., is an hour and 17 minutes of gloriously loud and furious sludge topped by all those great melodies delivered by a singer that sounded like he just might loose a lung. It's power pop run through a bloody meat grinder.

If the greatest virtue of rock music is its ability to scare the listener and make the squares cover their ears in pain, Nirvana may be the best there ever was. No band playing to tens of thousands was ever so messy. And no arena band ever delivered such lyrically painful and dark material as "Drain You," "Polly" or "Aneurysm." The F-You ethos of the generation had already been well worn by the post punk of the late '80s, to which Cobain always acknowledged a great debt. But here, in Nirvana, that attitude was perfected in a screaming, distorted yet musical way that never really had a peer.

The second revelation, along those same lines, is that Butch Vig really polished this band when he recorded Nevermind. The album -- which has been certified 10-times platinum -- might have had success, but probably would never have been in the position to knock Michael Jackson out of the number one spot in January of 1992 had the band's sound not been processed into a more listener friendly format by Vig.

On Live from Reading, the band plays nearly all of its smash-hit album Nevermind intermixed with great tracks from the band's muddy debut Bleach -- "School," "Negative Creep," "Blew" and "About a Girl." None of the songs have ever sounded better. Live from Reading gets the Nevermind classics the raw energy they deserve.

Finally, it's just great to have a Nirvana album that's a blast from start to finish. The energy in this long set never flags. Not even for a moment. It's a terrific collection that even includes an early version of the In Utero classic "All Apologies."

If you forgot why Nirvana is considered the standard bearers of the early '90s grunge/alt/indie or whatever-you-want-to-call-it scene, this album will remind you.