When I was nineteen years old, me and my best friend Phil, moved from our little rural towns in the central California foothills up to Stockton to go to school and to start our lives away from our parents. I don't remember why we picked Stockton exactly, but it did have a nice community college, Delta.
We started going to Delta in the Fall of 1989, and we soon noticed flyers around campus advertising for punk rock and "college rock" shows in a place called The Cattle Club in Sacramento. We took note of quite a few shows that we wanted to go to, but we had no idea how far away Sacramento was, or how we would even find this club once we got there. On Feb. 12th, 1990 we finally felt bored and adventurous enough to get in the car and find this Cattle Club so we could check out a band I'd read about in Pulse! called "Nirvana". We'd never heard Nirvana, but we decided to go anyway. Well, we had our teenage minds completely blown away that night. Neither one of us had been to that many shows at that time because there simply was none where we grew up. We could barely even dial in the college radio station from our parent's houses. So, we were already freaking out when we walked in to the small, smelly, cramped room where TAD was in the midst of destroying eardrums with their sludgy metal. By the time Nirvana started, I knew it was going to be a memorable evening. I recall Nirvana being extremely powerful live, with a frenetic energy and tunes at once aggressive and memorable. As a matter of fact, here is a link to video of this show in its entirety. No need for me to try to describe it:
In the weeks following this show I tracked down and purchased the sole copies of Bleach and the Blew EP that Tower had in stock. I played those records daily, for months and months on end. By the summer, I had a job working construction about a two hour drive from Stockton up in the hills. I had to leave our apartment by 5 am to make the 7 am start time. It was a rough, lonely drive on desolate country roads. Bleach was what I blasted out of my shitty stereo every day, desperately trying to stay alert and awake in the hours before sunrise. The cassette player was set on "auto-play" and I would let it roll through two or three times, back to back to back. It was between side 1 and side 2 one morning when I started to nod off. In those 30 seconds of silence I completely fell asleep.
Just then, Negative Creep came roaring in, scaring the crap out of me and shocking me wide awake. As I had fallen asleep, the car drifted to the right and was just about to head down a steep embankment. Startled and fully panicked, I jerked the car back on the road and whipped around a corner going way too fast. Luckily, I didn't overcorrect and I gained full control of the car at just about the last possible moment. I drove for a mile or so, stunned, confused, my heart pounding. I turned the music down, pulled over at the next turnout and tried to gather myself. I took a few deep breaths and it suddenly hit me, Nirvana had literally just saved my life. The music I had become rather obsessed with had had an actual impact on my life.
Now, I reckon it could have been any band or record or song in this story and things might have turned out the same way. But it wasn't. This experience not only deepened my fondness for the music, but made my connection to it seem even that much more personal. I guess that is what music is supposed to do. It's supposed to become part of our lives. To enrich them. To make them better. And even on occasion, to save them.
