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In late May, Nirvana took a break from recording Nevermind to play a special surprise concert at Jabberjaw, in Los Angeles. Guitarist Eric Erlandson from the band Hole was at the show, which still featured a Bleach-heavy playlist but included rough, commanding versions of "On a Plain," "Come As You Are," "Lithium," and "Smells Like Teen Spirit." He remembered that "about 400 lucky souls crammed into this dingy, dinky art space to sweat and stink as one. Every rock voyeur and band geek in town was there to hear, for the first time, the songs that would be Nevermind. The show was a mess, but, as always, Nirvana’s wild yet child-sweet spirit filled the room. I remember somehow deciphering parts of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Lithium’ out of the noise and confusion and feeling overwhelmed. Nirvana were beautiful like no other." Later that evening, the band attended the Butthole Surfers, Red Kross, L7 show at the Hollywood Palladium. It was at this show that Kurt Cobain met Courtney Love for the first time.

She was born Love Michelle Harrison on July 9, 1964, in San Francisco, California. She toyed with many versions of her name, including Courtney Michelle Harrison, Courtney Michelle Rodriguez, and Courtney Manely, before finally settling on the well-known Courtney Love. Her father, Hank Harrison, went to college with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and thus became an early Grateful Dead associate. Harrison even managed the group when they were called the Warlocks, and he has written two books about the band.

Courtney’s mother, Linda Carroll, is an Oregon therapist who made headlines of her own in the 1990s when she convinced one of her patients, 1960s radical Katherine Ann Power, to turn herself in after 23 years as a fugitive. Linda and Hank lived in Northern California in the late 1960s, but their marriage dissolved in 1969. Linda took Courtney and returned to Oregon shortly thereafter. It was a painful separation for Courtney, who would not have contact with Hank again until she was 15 years old. According to an article that appeared in Premiere in February 1997, Courtney spent much of her early life living off a $400-a-month, $100,000 trust fund left by her grandmother. She left home at age 13, and exhausted the trust by the time she was 22.

Growing up in Oregon was not easy for Love, and she eventually left for Japan, where she found a new way to earn a living without being under the watchful eye of those who knew her: she became a stripper.

The late 1980s found Love surfing the globe in search of her own identity. She dabbled in college in Ireland; was in a relationship with rock star Julian Cope; moved to Portland, Oregon, where she formed the band Sugar Baby Doll; found herself singing in an early version of the band Faith No More; developed another incarnation of Sugar Baby Doll with Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland and Jennifer Finch (a founding member of the punk band L7); auditioned for Alex Cox’s film Sid and Nancy (where she got a small part as Nancy Spungen’s best friend); played in an early incarnation of Babes in Toyland; went to Spain to appear in Alex Cox’s spaghetti Western Straight to Hell with Joe Strummer of the Clash; and finally, in 1989, ended up in Los Angeles, where, after placing an ad in Los Angeles’s Recycler newspaper, she formed a new band, Hole, with Eric Erlandson. "After I called her, she didn’t call me for two weeks," Erlandson said. "Then she called me back at three in the morning and talked my ear off."

Perhaps that was a sign of things to come for Courtney, whose never-ending search for people who would listen to her speak, to listen to how she felt, would become legendary. Even her marriage in 1989 to James Moreland, the leader of the punk band Leaving Trains, appeared to be a relationship built more on a public-relations move than one of romance. The marriage didn’t last long, and within two years it was over. "I think the main problem was that I was on SST Records," said Moreland of their brief rendezvous. "[Courtney] thought that was too small of a label for her husband to be on. That wasn’t very punk rock of her, was it?"

Kurt and Courtney’s first meeting after Love’s departure from Moreland didn’t exactly plant the seeds for a promising, blissful romance. But at least they weren’t strangers to each other. "I saw him play in Portland in 1988," Courtney said. "I thought he was really passionate and cute, but I couldn’t tell if he was smart or had any integrity."

Kurt thought she looked like Nancy Spungen. She had a classic punk-rock-chick look he was attracted to. But there seems to have been some question about Kurt’s ability to reveal his feelings. "I wasn’t ignoring her. I didn’t mean to play hard to get. I just didn’t have the time. I had so many things on my mind," said Kurt.

"I really pursued him, not too aggressive, but aggressive enough that some girls would have been embarrassed by it," added Courtney. "I’m direct. That can scare a lot of boys. Like, I got Kurt’s number when they were on tour, and I would call him. And I would do interviews with people who I knew were going to interview Nirvana, and I would tell them I had a crush on Kurt. Kurt was scared of me. He said he didn’t have time to deal with me. But I knew it was inevitable."

Getting serious with a new girlfriend in the middle of recording an album was an idea Kurt fought. "I couldn’t decide if I actually wanted to consummate our relationship," he said. "She seemed like poison because I’d just gotten out of the last relationship that I didn’t even want to be in. I was determined to be a bachelor for a few months. I just had to be. But I knew that I liked Courtney so much right away that it was a really hard struggle to stay away from her for so many months. It was harder than shit. During that time that I attempted to be a bachelor and sow my oats and live the bachelor rock-and-roll lifestyle. I didn’t end up fucking anybody or having a good time at all."

Soon after that first encounter with Love in the summer of 1991, Nirvana returned to the studio to continue work on Nevermind. The production on the album was becoming slicker than Nirvana’s earlier work, and with more tracks to work with, the band had more opportunity to do overdubs. But as Kurt explained it, the difference between Bleach and Nevermind went deeper than production values. "The production is obviously different; a lot of people think that it’s a major change between the two albums, but it’s really not. Nevermind just has a lot more pop songs on it."

Kurt told Everett True of Melody Maker, "It’s fine, because we do play a lot of grunge, but we consider ourselves a bit more diverse than just full-out raunchy heavy music. We’re aiming towards a poppier sound, and we’ve been into pop music for years; it’s just that when we were recording Bleach we happened to be writing a lot of heavy songs at the time."

Nirvana’s conscious attempts at simplicity in their songwriting may have had a lot to do with their awareness of what happened to electric jazz in the 1970s. Like Nirvana’s heavy-rock timbre, fusion jazz was a fast-growing underground sound that was being embraced by pop culture. But it died out quickly because it was not simple in its melody structure and, therefore, made it hard for the average listener to remember a song. So as a collective group, the three members of Nirvana would make sure that their songs would be simply written, like kids’ songs, so that the more simple the melody, the more likely fans would be able to recall their song. This, of course, is a key factor in a pop song’s success.

And if there was any doubt about whether Nirvana were abandoning their punk roots for a simpler, pop-leaning sound, Kurt explained that there was more to the punk lifestyle than just guitar chords. "Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing, and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering, and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of punk rock. By definition, pop is extremely catchy, whether you like it or not. There are some pop songs I hate, but I can’t get them out of my head. Our songs have a standard pop format: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like the Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath."

Major-label celebrity status did not affect the creative process behind Nevermind. The only difference between producing Bleach (which took six days to make) and Nevermind (three weeks) was that the band had more time to play around in the studio. Nirvana knew the record would have turned out the same if they had made it themselves. However, what they hadn’t anticipated was the pressure to stay underground in their sound. As Kurt noted, they experienced the indie-band-signing-with-a-major-label punk-identity crisis when recording Nevermind, and weren’t quite sure if it was even important to label themselves when the recording was completed.

Determining the band’s image was always a struggle for Kurt. "On one hand, we’re not a political band — we’re just some guys playing music — but we’re not just another mindless band asking people to forget either. There’s no rebellion in rock and roll anymore. I hope underground music can influence the mainstream and shake up the kids."

Though he didn’t know it at the time, Kurt’s words were truly prophetic. When Kurt wrote "Polly," he intended only to write an unopinionated story about rape. "It’s definitely an anti-rape song, but I threw a few twists in," he explained. "Actually, the story is about a rapist and a girl who is picked up by the rapist. The girl is a sadomasochist, so she played along with him while he was trying to rape her, and eventually escaped because of that."

"Polly" was apparently based on a true story that occurred in Tacoma, Washington, in June 1987. A man ironically named Gerald Friend kidnapped and tortured a 14-year-old girl who was on her way home from a punk-rock show at the Community World Theater. After raping the young woman, Friend hung her upside-down from a pulley attached to the ceiling of his mobile home and tortured her with a leather strap, a razor, hot wax, and a blowtorch. He dragged her to his car, where, after he stopped for gas, she was able to escape. Friend was later arrested and convicted for the crime.

Songs like "Polly" gave Kurt an opportunity to write and sing from the first-person perspective and to explore the possibility of writing through the voices of others. "Just because I say ‘I’ in a song doesn’t necessarily mean it’s me. A lot of people have a problem with that. It’s just the way I write usually. Take on someone else’s personality or character," said Kurt. "Hardly anything I’ve written is autobiographical, you know. Well, I mean, it’s autobiographical in the sense that I have the same feelings and emotions that some of these songs are written about, but I’d rather just use someone else’s example because my life is kinda boring. So, I just take stories from things that I’ve read, and off television, and stories I’ve heard."

About "Polly," Kurt said, "I think the reason ‘Polly,’ in particular, has such impact is because it could be considered a Top 40 song, a very simple, easy-listening song, with acoustic guitar and harmonies. But I decided to put some disturbing lyrics in, just to counteract that and make that the statement — that the song should not be that kind of song."

Written three years before the Nevermind sessions, "Polly" has since emerged in various solo acoustic versions that have been leaked out onto bootlegs. The version on the album is actually the same one recorded at Smart Studios in 1990, remixed and mastered for release with Channing on drums. He is uncredited.

The delicate melodies in "Polly" played by Kurt come from an acoustic guitar tuned unmistakably flat. It only had five strings, and it was tuned a step and a half below E. "That’s a 20-dollar junk-shop Stella guitar — I didn’t bother changing the strings!" Kurt joked. "It barely stays in tune. In fact, I had to use duct tape to hold the tuning keys in place." Vig recorded Kurt playing the raggedy guitar using one microphone.

"Territorial Pissings" opens with Krist venturing an unplanned and very strange interpretation of the Youngbloods’ classic "Get Together." "They just said, ‘Sing something,’ so I did it in just one take," Krist explained. "It just kind of happened. I wanted to put some kind of corny hippie idealism in it. But it wasn’t really that thought into. I like that Youngbloods song."

According to Kurt, the song was loosely based on and somewhat inspired by a book he read by Valerie Solanas called The Scum Manifesto. Solanas, a radical feminist who died in 1988, had been an unpopular regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the late 1960s, but she gained most of her fame by shooting the pop artist in 1968. The Scum Manifesto was a satire on the genetic inferiority of the male gender, the word Scum being an acronym for the Society for Cutting Up Men. It contains lines like "a man will swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him," which entertained Kurt, who found the book strangely insightful: "It’s an amusing little book; I laughed really hard when I read it. It’s really cool. I was almost embarrassed to realize that I agree with a lot of it.

"Basically, it’s just women taking over the world and men agreeing to go out with a bow of grace. They should all be assassinated, and those who agree with the ideals of this little manifesto should be in concentration camps and fed bread and water."

Kurt was intrigued by Solanas’s writing. "[Solanas] was a militant feminist who, in my opinion, had some incredible ideas. Everybody called her insane because the ideas are pretty violent. [The book] pretty much says women should rule the earth, and I agree with it."

Kurt took the inspiration and wove it into a song. "I guess you could call it an ode to women, my love and respect for them — and how they’re mistreated."

Taking a different spin on love is "Drain You," the story of the friendship between two babies, or more to the point, two young lovers. Originally called "Formula," this song directly links Kurt to his old girlfriend Tobi Vail. Kurt said in Nevermind’s press release, "Come to think of it, almost all of the songs on Nevermind are about love or confusion, which is usually the result of love. Outcries of confusion about love and not understanding relationships, not just with your mate but with anybody, with yourself, with animals, etc."