“Hey!” Cobain shouts as an extemporaneous preamble, foreshadowing the iconic instant in which he’d do the same for the hit “Heart-Shaped Box.” It’s like a lost rehearsal, then, a forgotten worktape for a forthcoming classic. In fact, its most significant feature comes in quickly, during each turnaround before every reiterated second verse. It’s structurally rudimentary, with two verses falling up and down over a simple buzzsaw riff, a tune clearly in need of more arrangement. It survives only as a clipped, static-damaged copy of a copy of a copy, salvaged and bootlegged, Endino hypothesizes, from a band member’s own tape. “When they recorded it,” wrote Jack Endino in 2005, “the band had just showed the song, and they hadn’t even learned or really practiced it yet.” You can hear that instability throughout “Blandest,” a plodding number that the trio recorded in the late 1988 sessions that also yielded “Love Buzz.” They didn’t intend to use this early runthrough for anything, so, as instructed, Endino recorded over it. Jarring, unsettling, and darkly nostalgic, it’s pure distillation of the obsessions that would follow Cobain for a career: Childhood (crackly kids records), meta-commentary on music (the repeating word “disco”), KISS (the opening of Alive), homophobia (Archie Bunker) and the human body (puerile toilet noises). 9” to Public Enemy’s sample slaughter It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (one of Cobain’s favorite records, and – if bootleggers can be trusted – released the same month that “Montage of Heck” was recorded). The mucky tangle connects dots between John Cage’s tape-splice symphony “Williams Mix” to the Beatles’ “Revolution No. Cobain went ballistic on his 4-track, mixing scratchy records, Nirvana demos and screams. The 1988 track emerged from the same era of “culture-jamming” copyright criminality like Negativland. This half-hour collage is unquestionably the most avant-garde moment to emerge from a band that ended their major label debut with five minutes of squealing feedback. But “Black and White Blues,” which came long before the year that punk broke, makes his interests in rock & roll’s basics both clear and incredibly frustrating: Cobain might’ve made an incredible aging bluesman, and these two minutes excepted, we’ll never really know. That path has long seemed like an obvious one for Cobain, had he survived beyond 27. Onetime punk rockers who turn toward folk – or, at the least, folk-rock – as they age are legion. Warped by the buzz of a tape machine and a cheap microphone, it could even slip into those Paramount Records boxsets White’s been building. It’s not elegant, but it is endearing, with the strings buzzing and a few notes erroneously muted as Cobain tries to untangle the intricate picking patterns and rhythms of the primitive American blues. Does Jack White know about this one? Kurt Cobain apparently recorded this brief acoustic guitar ragtime shuffle in the late Eighties, perhaps even before Fecal Matter morphed into Nirvana.
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