NME reports that a previously unheard version of a Nirvana song from around 1991 titled “Sappy” has surfaced on YouTube. A track by the same name appeared on the 1993 AIDS-benefit comp No Alternative, while a 1990 version of it showed up on the Nirvana box set With the Lights Out. The song’s described in some depth in the video’s caption:
The band took another stab at recording Sappy at Sound City. Cobain played lead guitar while attempting to sing one live scratch vocal. He also made one formal vocal pass. After overdubbing the lead fuzz guitar with his Rat pedal, Cobain laid down his guitar and walked straight into the control room. I don’t want to do this, he insisted. I’m not into this song right now. So let’s leave it. The song is in a different key to that of previously recorded versions, it opens without instrumental intro and features a few lyrical changes, the guitar solo is also subtly different.
Listening again to “Sappy,” it’s not hard to hear why it didn’t make the cut for Nevermind—not when there were superior efforts in that vein like “On a Plain” “Something in the Way,” or “Polly.” “Sappy” just never hits the melodic or dynamic highs of that classic album, plodding in middling seethe mode, with lyrics that portray a depressingly smothering relationship or oppressive situation. However, the repeated phrase “You’re in a laundry room” is distinctive and utterly redolent of despair, and Cobain gets off a nice, muted-fuzz guitar solo.
In other major American ’90s band news, Pavement‘s rarities compilation The Secret History, Vol. 1 is streaming at NPR (Matador Records is releasing the double-LP version August 11). The 30-track collection originates from the band’s fertile Slanted and Enchanted period (1990-1992) and includes 25 songs previously unreleased on vinyl (those cuts can also be found on the 2002 CD Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe). You can purchase The Secret History, Vol. 1 here. It contains essays by creative core Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs, commentary by representatives from Matador Records, Billions Corporation, and Drag City, and a gatefold sleeve designed by Rob Carmichael (Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors).
The definitive slacker-rock group, Pavement raised sonic and vocal nonchalance and cryptic lyrics to high art throughout the ’90s. By sounding like they didn’t care much about this music lark, they somehow made hundreds of thousands people care a lot. While Slanted and Enchanted stands as Pavement’s best album proper (followed closely by Wowee Zowee), their greatest recorded document is actually Westing (By Musket and Sextant), a Drag City-curated compendium of early singles, EPs, and stray tracks, as it captures with even more acuity Pavement’s essential ramshackle brilliance, before they thought they’d have a “caree-ah” of any sort. This deserves a double- (or triple-) album reissue, too. Pavement were the rare band whose obscurities and ephemera often surpassed their canonical works.
Some of the revelations and anomalies on The Secret History, Vol. 1 include “Secret Knowledge of Back Roads (Peel Session 1),” which features a gorgeous piano motif, something you rarely associate with a Pavement creation; the Fillmore West psych-rock blowout of “Ed Ames (Peel Session 2)”; the hard-rock bluster of “The List of Dorms (Peel Session 2)”; and the utterly delirious run through of “Conduit for Sale (Live Brixton 1992),” which is still the finest homage to the Fall’s “New Face in Hell.”
Even though I disagree with my colleague Sean Nelson’s contention that Pavement improved with each album, he is correct—in a passage from this 2002 review of Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe—in asserting that Pavement were “essentially a holy goof of an art project which happened miraculously to coincide with a freakish moment in our recent cultural past wherein being sloppy and ‘bad’ and elitist and contrary actually made you famous.”
TRACKLISTING:
1. Sue Me Jack
2. So Stark (You’re A Skyscraper)
3. Summer Babe (7” Version)
4. Mercy Snack: The Laundromat
5. Baptiss Blacktick
6. My First Mine
7. Nothing Ever Happens
8. Here (Alternate Mix)
9. Greenlander
10. Circa 1762 (Peel Session 1)
11. Kentucky Cocktail (Peel Session 1)
12. Secret Knowledge Of Backroads (Peel Session 1)
13. Here (Peel Session 1)
14. Rain Ammunition (Peel Session 2)
15. Drunks With Guns (Peel Session 2)
16. Ed Ames (Peel Session 2)
17. The List Of Dorms (Peel Session 2)
18. Conduit For Sale [Live Brixton 1992]
19. Fame Throwa [Live Brixton 1992]
20. Home [Live Brixton 1992]
21. Perfume V [Live Brixton 1992]
22. Summer Babe [Live Brixton 1992]
23. Frontwards [Live Brixton 1992]
24. Angel Carver Blues Mellow Jazz Docent [Live Brixton 1992]
25. Two States [Live Brixton 1992]
26. No Life Singed Her [Live Brixton 1992]
27. So Stark (You’re A Skyscraper) [Live Brixton 1992]
28. Box Elder [Live Brixton 1992]
29. Baby Yeah [Live Brixton 1992]
30. In The Mouth A Desert [Live Brixton 1992]
