Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Photo: WireImage.

Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago this week.

This is where you expect me to say something about how time flies and not believing it could be 30 years already. But it seems about right. All the change the world has seen since then took time.

Rendering: Adam Pardee/STAFF.

So then this is where I start the tribute to his talent, but you’ve already read plenty of that this week. Or maybe I write about how Nirvana changed everything and dozens of writers have already covered that ground this week. It becomes background noise. It’s like writing a tribute to the Beatles or the Stones. What else could possibly be said?

But the thing is, it’s all true. I was there.

Oh, not in Seattle. Never been there. Never met anyone in Nirvana. Talked to people who knew them. Never played a show with them in some ugly dive before they got famous. I never even saw Nirvana live after they got famous.

But please indulge me for a minute as I step into the way-back machine.

“I was there” in that I was in a band in L.A., where everyone still went to get pre-Internet record deals. I watched how things changed pretty rapidly once Nirvana and Cobain became a household name. I was born the same year as Cobain (so if he was still alive, his left knee would also threaten to give out when he walked up stairs). I saw the effect Nirvana’s success had on just about everyone in our generation of bands almost immediately.

Here’s how we know how big of a deal Kurt Cobain was: Kids still listen to his music. They still wear Nirvana gear. They’re still played on the radio. “Something in the Way,” which was the 12th song on Nevermind and treated like a throwaway 33 years ago, now gets played fairly regularly on the radio, since it was featured, quite perfectly, in Matt Reaves’ “The Batman” in 2022. It’s been treated like a new single because it’s simply an excellent, moving song that hardly anyone listened to because they were too busy replaying all the hits before it.

You want validation? Nineteen years after Cobain’s death, Paul McCartney recorded the fantastic “Cut Me Some Slack” with Nirvana’s surviving members. It was the heaviest thing he’d done since “Helter Skelter,” and it sounded like he had a blast.

That staying power is something very few musical artists have. Certainly it’s unique among the early ’90s Seattle scene, though Pearl Jam is still motoring forward with new music and tours.

Soundgarden and Screaming Trees are gone. Alice in Chains and the non-Seattle grunge bands like Stone Temple Pilots and Bush are around mostly in name. Alice in Chains also had a big effect. Especially on metal bands. And their first record came out a year before Nevermind. But it wasn’t as world changing. Soundgarden was also groundbreaking and the first to get attention in the later ’80s, but it was in its own category and didn’t hit really big until after the others.

You can’t say Nirvana is relevant only because its singer died, because the singers of four of those other bands have since died, too.

Bands like Nirvana just didn’t make it big then. The ’80s were bright and glittery and silly. That made things ripe for the Seattle bands. Nobody could figure out Nirvana’s angle, other than it sounded like the Beatles crashed their bus into Black Sabbath’s with some punk kids along for the ride. And their look, which was a huge deal by the late ’80s and early ’90s, was basically not having one—unless rolling out of bed, ignoring the shower, wrapping up in a flannel and going right to a video shoot is a look. In 1991, that was brilliant.

Nirvana changed everything from the Sunset Strip scene to what so-called alternative bands were doing. Suddenly, everyone was dressing down and writing hooks to loud, distorted guitar riffs. Drummers eschewed fancy fills and concentrated on quiet-to-loud dynamics. And, yes, everyone grew goatees and stopped brushing their hair.

All I knew about Nirvana was what my plugged-in roommate told me (he knew about Nirvana, Green River, Screaming Trees, Mother Love Bone and what was coming. Of course, he also thought my band was going to make it, so…).

I’d seen the cover of Nirvana’s first record, Bleach, which was noteworthy because the photo was taken at Raji’s, where we used to play. The men’s room was right by the stage so, if you happened to be standing in the wrong spot, either on stage or in front of it, you could see someone sitting on the can. Or maybe I was just afraid of seeing it.

Nirvana was such a big deal, that I actually remember where I was the first time I saw the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video on MTV’s “120 Minutes,” which was on late Sundays, and only played alternative music not popular enough to play during normal business hours. That didn’t last long.

I also remember where I was when I heard Cobain died. There’s no spectacular story attached to it. I barely remember where I lived back then. But I remember those two days. I also remember being kind of pissed when he died.

Nirvana, and the ensuing Seattle scene, was such a big deal that bands left Hollywood and moved to Seattle. Considering you still had to go to the record companies back then, and those were in L.A., that seemed totally insane to me.

Nirvana was one of the few bands truly as good as its hype. It changed everything, and set the tone for the entire decade that followed. It had a lot of help from some other great bands from the same scene. But Cobain was probably the single greatest creative force shaping that change. Not that he looked like he was trying (but he was). It was brilliant, because everyone else was trying so damned hard to be the next … whatever.

Meanwhile, this guy just wanted to be like The Melvins. Nobody was ready for that. Bands still covet that attitude. We were sick of MTV pushing awful bands like Warrant. Cobain has now been a cultural fixture longer than he was alive. If you don’t remember, go listen to the music. He’s more than worth remembering this week.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.