No. 221 – Come As You Are

Performer: Nirvana

Songwriter: Kurt Cobain

Original Release: Nevermind

Year: 1991

Definitive Version: The studio version.

In the dark of the nuclear winter of 1993-94, I became convinced of something that I denied earlier: Nirvana was unquestionably a great band.

Yes, I had been something of a fan since Jenna first showed me her sweet shimmy to Smells Like Teen Spirit (good ol. No. 260), but I could take or leave Nirvana as a whole. That changed the night I saw Nirvana’s performance on MTV Unplugged.

I remember the night very well, although the brain being a tricky thing, my memories don’t seem to jibe with the facts. My recollection was that the broadcast took place in the fall, when it was in fact in December. That being the case, it was likely that snow would have covered the ground in Grand Blanc when my memory was that it was cold—fall-like—but not snowy.

It also meant that my recollection of having to run a gantlet of spiders didn’t happen that same night, although I would swear that it did. Any spiders would’ve been long gone by December.

What isn’t in doubt was that I did laundry the night of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance. I clearly remember running back and forth from my apartment to the laundry room between songs and trying to miss as little of the show as possible. I also remember having clothes all over my apartment to air dry (shirts mostly).

Anyway, considering how seeing Pearl Jam’s stripped-down performance a year before affected me, I was eager to see what Nirvana brought to the table stripped of their punk bombast. My eagerness was heightened after MTV began to run a clip of About A Girl at least a week before the performance. I liked that song a lot, and I had my VCR rolling and the volume on my stereo turned up.

Nirvana started with About A Girl, of course, and just as I was wondering whether they’d play my favorite song, they did—this one. Aside from Come As You Are, they didn’t play many of their biggies, and I was fine with that, but what I realized about the music was—stripped away of their electric power—what really great songs they were. There was as much Johnny Lennon in there as Johnny Rotten once you got past the angst.

Speaking of angst, so, yeah, the gantlet of spiders. Maybe it didn’t happen that night, but it definitely happened while doing laundry. My Grand Blanc apartment complex used to be a motel, although I couldn’t tell you how long it was before I moved there that it was used that way. The complex was two buildings built into the side of a hill. They looked like one-story buildings from the driveway and two-story buildings from the lawn in back.

My apartment was at the end of the first building up the driveway. The laundry was in the second building where the landlord lived. The door was up a small staircase that had iron railing on either side; inside were two coin-operated washers and two dryers, and on laundry night, there was a lot of back and forth, as I noted.

Well, in the fall, spiders looking to fatten up before laying their eggs before winter would set up shop outside the laundry room. They built their webs from the iron railing to the overhang of the roof.

And these were spiders of the gigantic variety, you know, where you’d have to whack them over the head with a baseball bat a couple times just to get their attention. Well, one night, they built a tunnel of Webs that seemed to link with each other. There must have been seven on either side of the walkway to the laundry room, so it really was a gantlet.

And with the outside lights on to show the way to the door, you could see the gantlet and the spiders’ huge black bodies from yards away, if not miles. Somehow, I survived and finished my laundry even though I was convinced that I faced certain death when not just one but multiple spiders sprung from their webs onto my face.

Actually, I was just glad none got the keen idea of building a web ACROSS the stairway itself instead of alongside it. Then, I suppose, I would have had to just turn all my underwear inside out until the coast was clear.

But no, the spiders just stayed where they were along the sides and in their webs, which sometimes swayed slightly in the wind. The spiders didn’t really care about me. But I still was relieved when winter came, and the gantlet was gone.