mari's Scratchpad

Building a Better Boxset

• Posted by mariteaux on April 5th, 2021 filed in Remasters/Restorations
• Comments Off on Building a Better Boxset

In November 2019, I wrote a very long, very detailed retrospective on With the Lights Out, Nirvana’s official rarities boxset. Since then, rarities and demos have spilled out onto the second (and sometimes third and fourth) disc of Nevermind and In Utero reissues, not to mention the Montage of Heck fiasco, but by and large, that’s the big one. A four-disc lookback at Nirvana’s work tapes.

Now, I love WTLO, but it isn’t perfect. Not by far. I detailed rather exhaustively my issues with it in that essay, but they come down to four main points:

1. The brickwall mastering is rather inexcusable for a rarities boxset (or in any context, really)
2. Not all killer, lots of filler
3. Its evil corollary, songs were rarely represented by their most interesting demo renditions
4. For a rarities boxset, it had an awful identity crisis throughout, unsure of what it wanted its focus to rest on

Now, the thought of putting together anything better hadn’t crossed my mind until recently. In that essay, referred to someone I named the “Montage of Heck leaker at large” having leaked far more interesting material than what made the final cut. Story goes, a few months after the release of Montage of Heck, a fellow by the name of mynameis_elmo started to drop a ton of high-quality unreleased Nirvana material in full lossless on Reddit. We don’t know who Elmo happens to be (other than the world’s most famous Muppet), but given that the leaks often came from the same high-quality sources as the tracks released on WTLO, it was clearly somebody in Nirvana’s camp.

So to give you an example: Sliver: The Best of the Box featured a single track from Illiteracy Will Prevail, that being an early “Spank Thru”. Elmo, on September 5, 2015, released the entire source where that “Spank Thru” came from. This version of Illiteracy was far, far superior than anything circulating, being both more complete and better sounding. (And no brickwalling to boot!) Naturally, people took notice.

18 of these leaks happened in that span of time. Much we didn’t have appeared for the first time, and much we did have sounded much better without the absurd, oppressive brickwalling.

Now, I grabbed bits and pieces of this stuff as it came out, but ended up losing much of it over time, and in general, having it in the collection just wasn’t much of a priority. Until a few days ago, when I found out through a kid in MiloHax that someone collected all this material into a set called The Elmo Collection: A Better Box. This is dense stuff, 93 tracks, all but one in FLAC, of everything Elmo leaked in that span of time, still available to this day on MediaFire. I made damn sure to grab it right away.

However, while that density is priceless to an obsessive hoarder like myself, it doesn’t really make for a great listen straight through. The “better box” tagline is true in the sense that it improves the existing box; it itself is a box in even more dire need of an editor.

But then I got to thinking: what if I could be that editor? Given that I catalogued my issues with the boxset so exhaustively, what if I could put together three hour-long sets that scratched the same itch as the box we got, but solving all four of my big issues with it in the process? What if I could put my knowledge of this stuff (seriously, I’ve been listening to all this fairly regularly for the better part of my entire life) to work on an actual, improved Nirvana rarities boxset?

I was intrigued enough to go looking for additional lossless sources for tracks and renditions that Elmo didn’t leak in his time, and incredibly, I found just that. On the Internet Archive, no less. Who knew that was the place to get all your bootlegs from? A lot of the discs I found were rips of bootlegs I’d known about for years (Roma, A Season in Hell, Into the Black, and Outcesticide, just to name a few), and some of it wasn’t even tied to a bootleg, like this bizarre transfer of “reel 5”, containing some In Utero rough and instrumental mixes (one of which is a fully lossless version of the one lossy track in The Elmo Collection, that being a “Marigold” featuring a cello part). What finds!

With all this in tow, over 500 songs, a solid 10GB worth of demos, live recordings, alternate mixes, and B-sides, I have what I need to start piecing together my own With the Lights Out. I’m tentatively calling it Sunbeams Are Not Made Like Me, which might be a bit distasteful given that Kurt didn’t write that line, but whatever, dude loved the Vaselines, and it’s pretty.

To cover some of the shortcomings I plan to address in the boxset in a little more detail…

Focus and intent

So WTLO suffered from something of an identity crisis, at once being a set for easily-obtainable B-sides, compilation appearances, work tapes, outright demos, and live renditions. What exactly it is isn’t easy to quantify because it covers so much disparate ground.

My focus for Sunbeams is to spotlight Nirvana’s best tracks in another, usually early form. Work tapes, demos, and tracks that you really can’t find unless you’re knowledgeable in random label releases to cash in on the success of other bands, like the Heaven & Hell tribute to the Velvet Underground (“Here She Comes Now”) or the Hard to Believe tribute to KISS (“Do You Love Me?”). B-sides, I think are better covered in demo form if relevant, like with “Moist Vagina”. Live renditions, I’m considering skipping altogether, but the option’s open.

In short: it’s a look into their creative process first, and a look at their tracks in another light failing that. I want the songs you recognize in forms you don’t quite recognize. I’m intending for it to be a three-disc set of about an hour length each. I won’t be doing as much trimming of bizarre pre- and post-song noises as Nirvana’s camp did, but there also won’t be long stretches of tape hiss. The goal is listenability.

Song selection

Now, I haven’t really settled on a final tracklist for Sunbeams just yet, as I’d like to listen through each source and pick out the cream of each crop. The boxset regularly got bogged down in recordings of jams and fucking around, weak live versions of bottom-tier Nirvana originals, and rather drowsy home demos of mostly finished, highly recognizable Nirvana tunes. I’d like to skip all of that.

Consider that the first disc starts off with a Zeppelin cover, goes into another cover two songs later, and of the first ten tracks, only two (“Downer” and “Floyd the Barber”) would be recognizable to someone who isn’t in the Nirvana rarities game, and they’re both taken from a live show I’m frankly not too fond of. Given that half the tracks on Bleach and Incesticide were attempted at the same show as “Heartbreaker” and the same sessions that produced “Pen Cap Chew” and “If You Must”, I consider all this glaring.

It’s one thing to include the tracks that didn’t make the cut for the albums (hell, some of my favorite Nirvana tracks came from the boxset), but it’s another thing entirely to include them to the exclusion of other tracks that would link this to a band with such a legendary spot in music history. You wouldn’t accept stuff of this caliber from any other band, and Nirvana shouldn’t be any different. The goal here is to celebrate Nirvana’s best stuff as it was being written, not waste people’s time.

Similarly, I’d like to take the opportunity to use tracks the boxset didn’t cover at all. None are more emblematic of that than the BBC version of “Something in the Way”, which was done in a full-band, electric arrangement and sounds fucking epic for it. Thankfully, I happen to have a really quality-sounding source of this exact track lined up. This would’ve been a far better inclusion on the boxset than, say, the BBC version of “Dumb”.

That “Something in the Way” checks all my boxes for this project: a unique, highly listenable, enjoyable rendition of a classic Nirvana track. Some others I’ve got on the mind for this: the Smart “Lithium”. The cello version of “Marigold”. The Music Source “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”. The Sound City “Sappy”, really, just for the rarity of it alone.

Sources, quality, and mastering

Elmo’s leaks cover huge swathes of the boxset, but not everything. This means that for some tracks, the only copies we have of them are the highly compressed, brickwalled boxset tracks. Otherwise, I’m relying as much as possible on alternate sources, whether that be Elmo’s unmastered copies or trading circle versions. Assuming it sounds the best, I’m not opposed to using the boxset version of a song, but I’ll make sure to duck the audio on it so everything goes down smooth.

Naturally, this is all being sourced from lossless. I’m not a neanderthal. Here’s some of the potential sources I’ve got lined up to pick from:

• A Season in Hell: Being mostly live tracks and inferior-quality sources for the studio stuff, I don’t suppose I’ll be leaning on this one much. Still, it’s an option, and I’ll be happy to listen through it regardless. Who knows, find a new favorite in it, maybe?
• The Chosen Rejects: Now, this, I know I’m using a lot. This one’s split up into four different discs, one for home demos, one for studio demos, one for radio and TV appearances, and one for live performances. This is my source for the BBC “Something in the Way”, primarily, but naturally, it’ll all get its due as I sift through it.
• The Elmo Collection: Yep, as said. The best source for a lot of the tracks I plan to use on the boxset.
• Limited Single Rare Tracks: This one’s all B-sides, but it has the version of “Do You Love Me?” I’m going with, plus maybe a few others. It also features the William S. Burroughs “The Priest, They Called Him” spoken word piece Kurt scored, but given its length, I’m not too sure I’ll use it. Really neat to have though, wasn’t on my radar beforehand.
• “Reel 5”: As said, this one’s alternate mixes and some earlier takes of In Utero tracks, notably “Dumb” and “Marigold”. I could never get away with including the instrumental versions of either, but they’re neat fucking listens.
• Outcesticide: The classic! This is the remastered Out too, which used much better sources for its tracks than the original issue.
• Rare Trax Vol II: Mostly live stuff with a smattering of studio demos. I’ve not yet decided if I want to include “It’s Closing Soon”, an eerie little thing Kurt and Courtney recorded in Rio that unfortunately only exists in this rather poor quality rendition. But that only helps the eerieness.
• With the Lights Out: Well, duh.

As of late, I’ve really been all over the place, bouncing from one project to another without much of a care as to how and when it gets done. Frankly, the fact that I’m moving, and feeling this good after how this year started, is good enough for me. I just finished the latest Somnol recap last night, I’m cleaning up and doing backups today, I’ve got furry stuff for the group on the way, and I’d like to have a Guitar Hero disc to show off by the end of April. And, of course, I’ve got a boxset to put together.

And yes, I recognize the irony of posting Nirvana stuff on April 5.