Smells Like Teen Spirit and chlorine

My first semester of college started in September of 1991. I was already musically-obsessed by that time and quickly bonded with like-minded people, mostly guys. I attended a university boasting of a 5 male-to-1 female ratio. Okay, the university didn't boast about the ratio nearly as much as I did. I'm not going to lie, it was fun being around all of that testosterone and cologne.

I remember whose dorm room I was in the first time I heard Nirvana's Nevermind. We were having a party that involved quarters, red plastic cups and a foam-topped beverage. I was newly 18 at the time, and we were all underage, so don't assume it was an alcoholic beverage or that we were playing a game of quarters. It could just as easily have been that they were charging .25/cup of Sprite. But they weren't. I mean, it was college. C'mon now!

One of our friends worked at the local indie record store, and he came to the party after his closing shift ended. By the time he got there, we were all lazing around on the couch and floor. He made quick work of stepping over the people blocking his way to the stereo. As usual, he had a new CD in his hand, by a band none of the rest of us had ever heard of. We all sat up and leaned in toward the speakers as soon as we heard the opening guitar riffs of the first track, and when it ended, we made him play it again. And again.

"Hello-hello-hello", indeed.

Seventeen years ago, the album with a swimming baby on the cover made it all the way from Seattle to Wisconsin, and we couldn't get enough. It was the beginning of an era, a noticeable shift in our group's collective musical mind-space. Nirvana not only opened the door for this new genre of music, but ripped that door right off the hinges. Grunge had arrived.


The swimming baby aka Spencer Elden, then.

More than 17 years ago, when he was still an infant, Spencer Elden's parents dropped him into a swimming pool in California, where underwater photographer Kirk Weddle was waiting to snap an entire roll of film of the naked, buoyant baby. The picture was later used as the cover image for Nevermind, the second studio LP from a little rock band out of Seattle called Nirvana.

Now, 17-year-old Elden is a high school student, who told MTV News last year that "it's kind of creepy [to think] that that many people have seen me naked — I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star." Elden recently re-created the iconic album's cover in the same pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena, California, where it was originally shot — only this time, he was wearing shorts. Elden's parents were paid just $200 for allowing him to be photographed back in 1991.

Spencer Elden, now.


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