When JJ Gonson took this photo in July of 1989, she was a 22-year-old student at the Museum School. Nirvana had played at the now defunct Green Street Station in Jamaica Plain, but she didn’t have her camera with her.
“There was like 15 people there,” she says of the gig, “and they said, ‘Do you wanna put us up?’ and we said yes.”
She snapped this group photo the next day at her Watertown apartment.
Gonson is now based in Cambridge, works as a gourmet chef and is the owner of Cuisine En Locale.
“The career switch? I dunno, sometimes you do something else, but I have always worked in restaurants and been interested in food," she says, "and to some extent I still shoot photos, just now they aren’t usually of things people want to see, like my kids.”
Before they found Nirvana
>Nirvana debut gets 20th anniversary reissue >Producer of the legendary grunge album on Cobain and Co.
The beat of ‘Bleach’
“Bleach” predates Dave Grohl’s entrance into Nirvana. Melvin’s Dale Crover played drums on some tracks, but, mostly, it’s Chad Channing. Endino, who’s produced records for Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Hot Hot Heat, thinks that the reissue’s bonus CD, featuring a February 1990 concert recording, will finally give Channing due credit.
“With this record there’s going to be a re-evaluation of his drumming. People think Dave joined and then they got good. But they were already good. The live bonus material really proves this. Chad’s drumming is spot-on. Dave wound up playing Chad’s drum parts, which he’s admitted. There was no reason to change them.”
Jack Endino has done countless interviews since Nirvana became a worldwide musical phenomenon in the early 1990s. The Seattle scene veteran recorded the band’s 1989 debut, “Bleach,” which is being reissued this month in a special 20th anniversary edition.
“After twenty years, there’s only so much new stuff I can say about it,” admits the producer, but he still sounds passionate as he recalls the Nirvana sessions. “It is one of the best-known records I’ve done. The irony is, I’d only been producing for about a year-and-a-half when I did this record. I was just a baby record producer and they were a baby band.”
That innocence is a vital component of the record.
“It’s a young band with no one looking over their shoulder,” he says of the band led by pre-superstar Kurt Cobain. “Business considerations had not entered the equation then, except that they had no money at all. The approach is innocent; it’s ‘Music matters and that’s all. We have enough money for 30 hours,’ so there’s no second-guessing on that record.”
Endino’s first recording session with Nirvana was in January 1988, when they cut a demo. Then he produced the Sub Pop Singles Club 7-inch, “Love Buzz,” that summer, and “Bleach” in December. The album’s notes boasts the record cost $600 to make.
“It was six hundred dollars and some change, seventeen dollars or something,” recalls Endino of the unfathomably small outlay. “It was a little studio. They were really well-rehearsed. It wasn’t like I was a big record producer. I was just a dude turning the knobs.”
