On August 15, 1991, Nirvana fans queuing to get into the band's show at The Roxy on Los Angeles' famous Sunset Boulevard were handed a flier.
'Nirvana needs YOU to be appear in their upcoming music video, Smells Like Teen Spirit,' it read. 'You should be 18 to 25 years old and adapt a high school personna [sic], ie, preppy, punk, nerd, jock...Be prepared to stay for several hours! Come support Nirvana and have a great time!'
Inspired by two of Kurt Cobain's favourite films, Ramones' Rock And Roll High School and cult teen rebellion flick Over The Edge, the concept of the Smells Like Teen Spirit video was to have Nirvana lip-sync in front of an anarchic 'pep rally from Hell'. Future Fear Factory frontman Burton C Bell was among those who turned up at the Culver City shoot on August 17.
"About 40 people showed up for the video shoot," he recalled in a 2024 post on Instagram. "The director [Samuel Bayer] had us sit on a riser in the studio, and the band was playing in front of us. The director instructed us to look bored. Me and my friends knew the song quite well, but the rest of the crowd did not. Hearing the song over and over became infectious. The director lost control of the crowd and chaos ensued."
"The band was egging them on because they didn't like making the video either," Samuel Bayer told Rolling Stone in 2010. "I was exhausted at the end of the day. I'm like, 'Okay, you guy want to destroy the set? Go, destroy the set.' And the kids come down off the bleachers, and it's under my lighting, and I'm like, Oh my God, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen! I was like, God is on my side. And that riot became the last minute of the video."
The video received its world premiere on MTV's specialist alternative rock show 120 Minutes on September 29, more than one month after Geffen Records sent the single to US radio stations. Two weeks later, it was moved to the station's 'Buzz Bin', MTV's showcase for hot new artists.
"The video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit," Dave Grohl told me in 2009. "People heard the song on the radio and they thought, 'This is great', but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, 'This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they're tearing up their fucking high school'. And then with the video came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.
"The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. You’d show up to a 500 capacity gig and there were 500 extra people there. We were still in our little bubble and it didn’t seem like anything unusual was happening until we’d get to the gig, and it was fucking chaos. And we started to notice there were normal people here. We were like, 'What are they doing here? That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here?' And it was like, Oh, maybe that video thing is attracting some… riff-raff."
"My band Kyuss was on tour," Queens Of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme told me that same year, "and I remember seeing the video on MTV at 3am in a hotel room. I was saying, Man, this is so good, everyone should be into this music but they’re not going to be, it’s not going to get played because it’s too good. About a week later I realised how wrong I was..."
