Cleveland's Screaming: The Movie

I just re-did the trailer and posted the new version. It's still not right (as the song says, "I'm Not Right" by The Guns). But it's better than before. It gives a better feel for what the movie's actually like, I think.

Today I was looking for old stuff to sell back to Amoeba Records and I pulled out the Nirvana box set. Yeah. I bought the thing. But I bought it used. I figure Coutney Love can stand the loss. Anyhow, I put the DVD in just now, to see how they handled the video portions.

I remember what it was like seeing those kinds of scenes on TV in the early 90's. Total deja vu. It looked exactly like a bigger version of the scenes when ODFx and the rest had played at The Dale in Akron or the Lakefront in Cleveland. It never bummed me out kids were still doing that stuff and I had to admit Nirvana was a damn good band. What bugged me was how the media reacted as if this was all brand new & completely without precedent. It also bothered me how the whole thing was being promoted as some kind of amazing grass roots movement, absolutely spontaneous. In actual fact, the same kind of publicity machine was pushing Nirvana the way they'd been pushing the New Kids on the Block. A friend of mine was a radio programmer at a small Akron radio station back then & he told me how the folks at Geffen were doing everything in their power to get him to play Teen Spirit. If they were spending that much time, effort and energy on a station in Akron that you couldn't even pick up 10 miles away, just imagine what was happening in the rest of the country.

In terms of intensity, Nirvana in 1991 couldn't hold a candle to ODFx in '81, or Starvation Army or Agitated. The difference was that what we were doing actually was wholly without precedent. Punk rock back then wasn't just pretending to be dangerous, it actually was dangerous. Take a gander at the "Dover Story" segment of the documentary (over there to your right). I'm amazed no one was killed at that gig.

I have to admit, though, that songs like In Bloom or Teen Spirit are quite simply better songs than most of what our bands came up with. In their own way Nirvana were originals just because what they did came from their own real experience. And that is important. I think what actually killed Kurt was the media. He knew what really went on ten years earlier. He knew it was all hype. He was a genuine person. His songs deserve to live on. It's too bad he couldn't find a way to live with it because he was an amazing artist.