Nirvana-shaped box (continued)

With the Lights Out is not a greatest-hits collection. It’s not a mere retrospective, either. And it’s also more than just a compilation of outtakes from the studio sessions for the three albums mentioned above. Those are all good things because I, for one, would have little use for just a repackaged collection of material I’d already heard in one form or another. No, With the Lights Out is a revealing look inside the musical mess that was Nirvana. All the other bullshit — the suicide and its aftermath — disappears once you start finding your way through the three CDs and one DVD that make up the set. Because this is a warts-and-all collection that takes you through the development of Nirvana from just a noisy piece of an idea to a fully realized band capable of storming the charts with a song as powerful and complete as "Smells like Teen Spirit."

Indeed, it’s the pop side — or at least the polished pop side — of the band that gets remarkably little attention on this set. You have to work your way through four tracks thick with distortion and raw-throated screaming (including the opening number, a mostly instrumental attempt at Led Zeppelin’s "Heartbreaker") before you catch even a hint of a voice and a clear guitar chord that sounds distinctively like Cobain. "Anorexorcist," "White Lace and Strange," and "Help Me I’m Hungry" (all from a 1987 radio performance) could be from any of dozens of bands from that era who’d been taken in by Black Flag, the Melvins, and the Butthole Surfers.

That’s exactly the kind of band Nirvana were trying be. And they did it pretty well. But by the following year, Cobain was already committing softer, prettier (if still dark in subject matter) songs like "Polly" and "About a Girl" to tape accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. Those performances are also on the first disc, and if you split the difference between them and the electric mayhem of, say, "Pen Cap Chew," you’re getting close to what made Nirvana such a special and maybe even revolutionary band. They do find a middle ground between the noise rock they wanted to impress their friends with (and that they enjoyed themselves) and these fragile poems with subtle melodies that were part of Cobain’s inner make-up. The fact that "About a Girl" was ready in time for their first album, Bleach, a disc recorded before Dave Grohl joined as their drummer, is a testament to how quickly the two sides of Nirvana came together as one.

Listening to it all take place on disc one will be a lot of fun for people like Thurston Moore, who also contributes liner notes to the box set, and who it’s clear had more of an affinity for the atonal feedback frenzy of "Territorial Pissings" than for a polished anthem like "Smells like Teen Spirit." For those of you who programmed your CD players to skip the noise experiments on Nevermind, said listening will be more challenging. And it’s that aspect of Nirvana that made their commercial triumph seem so improbable at the time. "This is a hardcore beat," Kurt sing-speaks almost by way of explanation at the start of "Raunchola" on disc one, a song whose title resembles the sound he’s trying to get his guitar to make throughout; then, suddenly, the song morphs into something vaguely recognizable. That’s right, it’s another Zep tune, "Moby Dick." But that lasts for only a few minutes before Kurt and the rest of the band embark on a noise jam that’s right up Thurston Moore’s alley. Nirvana brought these three elements — hardcore punk, heavy metal, and avant-noise — together and in doing so set off an explosion in the music industry.

It’s funny how unremarkable the song that accomplished this — "Smells like Teen Spirit" — sounds in its rehearsal demo form on disc two of the box set. And yet, everything that would make it an anthem for a generation is right there for your ears to hear. The guitars aren’t quite as imposing, the drums aren’t nearly as explosive, and there’s more vulnerability than bravado in Cobain’s voice on the demo version. But the hooks are all firmly planted, just waiting for the right studio polish to bring them to the surface. That may provide a lesson of sorts to young bands looking for inspiration in the future. And there are at least a half a dozen other revelations here that offer a window into how particular songs — "Rape Me," for example — came together.

That’s how disc three begins — with two versions of "Rape Me," the first solo acoustic, the second in full demo form. The rest of the final disc is something of an odds-and-sods collection of B-sides like "I Hate Myself and I Want To Die," demos like "Milk It," and "Verse Chorus Verse" retitled as "Sappy" for a B-side. There’s also a touching rehearsal demo of the Vaselines’ tune "Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam" from 1994, just before the MTV Unplugged session the band did. Ending the CD portion of the set with an undated solo acoustic version of "All Apologies" is a little heavy-handed, but how else do you fix an ending onto a story that ended so abruptly? Sadder still is the way the DVD ends: after watching mostly early films of the band learning the ropes and genuinely enjoying what they’re doing, we get Kurt, seated behind a drum kit as Grohl plays along on bass and bassist Krist Novoselic handles the guitar, singing lyrics like "Goodbye papa please pray for me/I was the black sheep of the family" as they have a little gentle fun with a cover of "Seasons in the Sun." That was filmed a year before Cobain died and created the mess that is now Nirvana’s legacy. With the Lights Out doesn’t try to tidy up that legacy. And that’s one of it’s biggest strengths.