Remember When: Nirvana Got Kicked Out of Their Own Album Release Party

The year was 1991, the day was Friday the 13th. Nirvana was celebrating the release of their second studio album, Nevermind, with an album release party at Re-bar in Seattle. While this sounds like the beginning of a delightful evening for anyone else, it was not so for the grunge three-piece.

Allegedly, Nirvana had been told the party would be low-key, but they arrived at the downtown adjacent dance club to find the place packed with industry types. The band was already weary of publicity, and now “they had to schmooze with all kinds of dull music biz types and endure hearing their album played twice in a row,” wrote Michael Azzerad in the 1993 book Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana.

While Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic were cordial at the start of the evening, it quickly devolved into debauchery and mayhem typical of the three rowdy punks. They had “smuggled in a half gallon of Jim Beam [bourbon], a violation of Washington liquor law. But before any liquor inspector could bust them, mayhem erupted,” wrote Charles R. Cross in Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain in 2001.

Re-bar was constantly plagued by the Washington State Liquor Control Board. According to Steve Wells, co-founder of the bar, it was extremely difficult to get a liquor license in Washington State. It was made even more tedious if you were located downtown, and “new clubs, especially gay clubs or any clubs that played Black music, were under the microscope,” said Wells in an article on Re-bar’s 25th anniversary. Wells recalled the Nirvana members sneaking up to the DJ booth and getting progressively more drunk and disorderly.

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Nirvana Starts a Food Fight, Gets Kicked Out of Their Own Party

Wells shared at the time that he rounded everybody up—mainly Cobain, Grohl, and Novoselic—and “with the help of the doormen, got them out of the door just in time for them all to barf on the curb.” He recalled that just before, they had started a food fight in the venue.

“After the band finished ripping all the posters off the walls [Krist] heaved a tamale at Kurt and [their old pal, and guitarist/vocalist with Earth] Dylan Carlson. Kurt remembers retaliating with a salvo of guacamole…Soon food was flying everywhere, with no regard for the industry geeks whose suits were getting splattered,” Azzerad wrote in 1993.

The party was over, but Nirvana allegedly continued on a destructive tear from a limo to someone’s loft to another person’s apartment, setting off fire extinguishers and doing something with slingshots and eggs. While outside the venue, though, Novoselic once recalled laughing and saying “‘Oh my God, we just got kicked out of our own record release party!’”

Nevermind would soon skyrocket up the charts and cement Nirvana in grunge history. However, their antics at the album release party also helped cement them as a trio of incorrigible hellions bent on adolescent mayhem. Oh, to be young in a band in the 1990s.

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