Smells Like What?

It was around five in the morning and we were leaving Memphis and on the way to Kansas City, the boyfriend (now ex) and I, to see the Hoodoo Gurus in concert. I'd caught them in Memphis about a month before and wanted to see them again while they were still in the States and before they went back to Australia, so off we went.

We'd grabbed something to eat and stopped to get gas, and were getting ready to head down towards the river and the interstate going to Arkansas. It was still dark out, and I fiddled with the radio dial to find something suitable. We'd just recently gotten a 24-hour alternative music station in Memphis, so I turned the dial over there.

They were playing this song that was unfamiliar, though interesting. "Who is this?" I asked my guy - he didn't know - so we just kept listening.

"It's different," I said. He agreed.

"No, I mean, REALLY different," I said. He shrugged and went to sleep, while I drove and listened to the rest of what I later learned was this new single by this new band called Nirvana called "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

A couple of weeks or so later, you could barely get away from it. Not long after that, a friend returned from an extended stay in San Francisco, where she had seen "this new band Nirvana". They were "pretty cool," she said.

I'd never be one to say Nirvana changed the world, nope. Not like one would normally make a statement like that.

But things were definitely different after that, at least in my own personal chapter of music. I'd even say it was another decade almost before anyone's music would strike me again the same in that "hey, this is DIFFERENT" kind of way... which is a little sad, because that seemed to happen over and over again in the Eighties. In the Nineties, there was mainly just Nirvana.