Gigantic.17
Just Another Night
I bumped into Erik on Capitol Hill where he worked at the Roma when he wasn’t being Soundgarden’s tour manager.
“You gonna see Nirvana tonight?” he asked me.
I’d sort-of heard of them, maybe I scrunched my face. For my own good, he wasn’t gonna let me off easy.
“I know you’re not into it,” he said, meaning the Sub-Pop scene in general, “but this band is different, you should come.”
“Yeah, maybe…”
Joe was still in town at the time. We headed over to the Vogue that night to check it out.
I was struck by the energy immediately, the crowd was losing its shit. The gaping size-difference between singer and bass player was also a detail I noted, but their names were unknown to me. At one point the small singer jumped onto a speaker cabinet, their manager bear hugging the thing to keep it from toppling over.
The thing that struck me more than anything were the songs. They were really good. The reason I wasn’t so much into other Sub-Pop bands was the noise-to-content ratio usually favored noise, but these guys hooked me every song.
I looked across the crowded room, Erik was looking back at me, like, “See?” I nodded, a convert.
Nirvana were actually the openers that night. Oddly enough, the headliners were the Flaming Lips, a band I was only vaguely familiar with at that point.
It was one of those times where the openers packed the room more than the headliners. Joe and I went right up to the stage to check the Lips out. I had no idea that in just a few short years I’d be in a band with two of them.
Combing through my journal from that night, I find surprisingly few details about Nirvana, and almost nothing about the Lips, except this:
During their set, some guys around us started slam dancing. Joe and I did this back in Kingston High School, we were bored with it. We elbowed a few of them to get some space. When this didn’t work, I apparently punched somebody. That worked. Amazing I could pull crap like that and walk away unscathed. Shortly, Joe and I retreated to the bar, still in our early 20s but feeling very old.
The next day I went to Orpheum Records and bought Bleach, Nirvana’s first album, with the blurry, black-and-white Charles Peterson photos. I listened repeatedly, thrift store acoustic in hand. Within a week I could play Blew, Love Buzz, and About a Girl.
I tried to see them again in September, but they cancelled, so that one show at the Vogue was it. According to my journal, other than finding a new favorite band, it was just another night.
But being there that night, along with working as an espresso jockey, helped square my time in Seattle in 1989 with what was about to be exported to the planet. It foretold my life to come in more ways than one.
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