Nirvana
With The Lights Out
DGC


As music fans, we must decide if it's a good or a bad thing that major labels have gotten into the bootleg business. What am I talking about?  Major label sales are up at year-end for the first time since all of our computers crashed at the start of this millennium. One of the major reasons, according to scuttlebutt "in the industry," is record label concentration on both music DVDs and back catalog, making all those old titles fresh again with outtakes, demos, live crap recorded poorly, and other novelties to make hardcore music geeks froth at the goatee. This new box set from the band that saved punk rock (only to send it off to its ultimate doom… or maybe that was Fat Mike's fault) is loaded with rarities and unreleased tracks. What does that mean? Acoustic versions of heavy songs, demos, rough, rough live recordings, and a DVD filled with live shows you likely haven't seen. Is this a good thing?

Hard to say. I would file myself as a bigger-than-average Nirvana fan in that I have all of the official releases in terms of full-lengths, but when it comes to comps and splits, I'm not really hardcore. Bootlegs, got a couple. Only saw them once live. Know Pat Smear personally (who is relegated to footnote status in the liner notes). As such, I found this collection pretty great in terms of interesting, different versions of music I love, as far as the three CDs go. It's a fun listen, and given that we're talking about a band, influential though they were, who only released three proper full-lengths (augmented by posthumous live collections, the unplugged set, the previous collection of rarities and singles), there is quite a lot of unheard material to choose from.

Each of the three CDs focuses, more or less, on one of the three periods—Sub Pop indie Bleach, breakthrough major album Nevermind, and artier Albini-produced follow-up In Utero. Each CD includes upwards of 50 percent previously unreleased recordings. How hardcore are you? How many times will you want to hear "Rape Me" as a solo acoustic Kurt Cobain performance, or the earliest version of the band stumbling through a botched version of Zep's "Heartbreaker?" Even the most ardent fans will probably not require repeated viewings of the DVD, nearly half of which features the band playing in some stoner's apartment in Seattle (it reads better that it plays). Other live footage of the band tends to fall in the fixed-position shaky-cam production variety. Cool to see… once.

As with most box sets dedicated to a single artist, love of the set is directly related to the love of the band. Still, the bootleg quality and rare track feature is not always the greatest thing. Sometimes it's better if the band actually made more than three records to begin with to provide more approved masters from the band's actual existence to flesh out the multiple discs.