On September 24, the 30th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, we took our daughter, Magnolia, to her first punk club. It was day three of the five-day Treefort Music Fest, and had you told me ahead of time the Shredder would factor so heavily into my Friday festival experience, I would have thought you were full of shit. Then again, it’s 2021, and at this point I’ll believe just about anything until Mr. Toad’s Wild Covid Ride pulls back into the station.

Billing itself as “the heaviest hitting venue in Boise,” the Shredder is a dank punk and metal club on a dark edge of downtown with a modest beer and wine bar (emphasis on the beer), a bank of vintage arcade games and a baby half-pipe that’s more for show than actual shredding. It’s unfair to say the Shredder lives in a bad neighborhood because Boise doesn’t really have bad neighborhoods, but it’s definitely in a bad location – wedged in between busy streets and bland industrial buildings, difficult to reach by foot or bike, nowhere near a slice of late-night pizza. The Shredder’s status as a live music outlier is even more pronounced during Treefort, when it’s easier to stick to the cluster of venues around the main stage than take a half-mile hike away from the action and find yourself in a game of Frogger with the screeching cars on Front and Myrtle streets. Festival or no festival, you need a good reason to go to the Shredder.

We made a point of getting there for Vision Video, a gothy post-punk band from Athens, Georgia, that’s led by a war veteran and active paramedic/firefighter clad in torn fishnets and glossy black lipstick. The show was a bit of an audible for all three of us. Heading into our ninth Treefort, which was rescheduled twice after Covid canceled everything two weeks before the original March 2020 festival date, my wife, Erica, and I decided to let Magnolia be our guide. Initially Magnolia was going to stay back in Ohio, but shortly before her 13th birthday in July she asked for a festival pass. We were thrilled by this turn of events; it wasn’t too long ago that we wondered, as we emotionally abandoned our daughter every spring to party for five days, if we were conditioning Magnolia to hate Treefort. Suddenly she was eager to dive in, and we were more than happy to swim through the festival with her.

Some years I get my entire Treefort schedule mapped out ahead of time, some years I roll into Wednesday only part of the way there. This was my worst effort yet by far; I only made it through the first two days of the schedule, and around dinnertime Friday I was still scrolling through the app and earmarking potential paths for the evening in case Magnolia stood us up for her friends. That’s when I stumbled upon Vision Video. Each year, I scour the Treefort lineup for dark and drippy post-punk, and usually I attend these shows alone and late at night. But with Magnolia already gravitating toward the likes of Goth Babe, New Order and the Smiths, I texted her Vision Video’s profile hoping for a cosign, and she responded with an eager thumbs-up. Our Friday night course, at least for one 40-minute set, was set.

I already had been to the Shredder that afternoon to catch a coworker’s band, and I assumed it would be the only performance I’d see there during the festival, maintaining my average of zero to one Shredder shows per Treefort. Vision Video ended up being the second of three Shredder sets on Friday alone, as we stuck around afterward to watch Portland krautrockers Motrik for the second time that day, the first being an afternoon in-store performance at The Record Exchange, which Erica and I, along with two coworkers, had just purchased from the retiring owners. When we arrived at the Shredder, Erica and I were carded outside the entrance while Magnolia got the double-X Sharpie treatment on the back of her hands, which instantly flashed me back to my first wide-eyed club show, Morphine at the Cleveland Agora in 1995, age 17. By then, I had been going to concerts for about 18 months, but I could still count my collection of ticket stubs on two hands, and all of those shows, in size and scope, stood in stark contrast to Morphine in the Agora’s tiny ballroom, where my friends and I were surrounded by adult hipsters who looked like extras from Swingers and we could see every scratch on Mark Sandman’s custom two-string bass guitar from our vantage point in front of the stage. One year prior – to the date – my brother, Travis, and I were but two people in a sea of 75,000 for Pink Floyd at Ohio Stadium, and that came on the heels of the concert that started it all for me, Nirvana’s sold-out show at the University of Akron’s James A. Rhodes Arena on Halloween 1993.

Thirty million earthlings have bought Nevermind, so my experience with the album is far from unique, but my 30-year path to ownership of an independent record store certainly isn’t common. Most people I know who work in and around the music industry have an origin story about the pop star, band or genre that hooked them, and Nirvana, ’90s-teen-cliche be damned, is at the center of mine. Yet when Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, three days after my 14th birthday, I had no idea Nirvana even existed. In my narrow suburban world, September 1991 was all about Guns N’ Roses and the excitement surrounding the twin release of Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II on the 17th – not one but two new albums! And on the same day! G N’ R! My best friend Andrew bought Use Your Illusion I and I bought Use Your Illusion II, then we swapped the tapes back and forth because that’s how eighth-grade economics worked before Napster and Spotify.

But soon enough, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the MTV Buzz Bin and Andrew’s father, who worked as a critic and pop culture writer, passed along a white-label cassette promo of Nevermind that we damn near wore out that fall. We listened straight through, over and over again, jaws dropped and young minds blown by this strange, catchy, raw rage of a record coming out of … where? Seattle?! It was the first album I heard that sounded like it was made by humans as opposed to entertainers. They wore torn jeans and lumberjack flannels and looked like normal guys because, in many ways, they were normal guys, and their music spoke to normal guys and girls like nothing else before it. The spandex and big hair that preceded Nirvana in my pathetic tape collection suddenly seemed calculated and comical by comparison, and those Guns N’ Roses cassettes started collecting dust. Then we found out about Bleach. Wait, there’s another album?! Bleach proved to be incredibly difficult to track down. Before we knew what an independent record store was, there was Chapel Hill Mall and Camelot Music, which was a ripoff but it’s all we had, and I had to have Bleach. After calling around I finally found it at Rolling Acres Mall, which may as well have been on the moon but I made it there thanks to my parents, and the cassette was way overpriced but at that point I would have paid anything to hear whatever strange and wonderful sounds were stored on that thin magnetic tape.

And thanks to those parents – and my sister – I got to see Nirvana in the flesh when the band came through Northeast Ohio two years later on the In Utero tour. Up to that point, I had never even considered going to a concert, much less find myself overcome by a burning, I’ll-absolutely-die-if-I’m-not-there desire to be in the same room with a band I loved. But then again, before Nirvana, I can’t say there was a band that I truly loved, or identified with, or seemed to understand me and vice versa. But all of that was wrapped up in Nirvana for me, as it was for many people my age at that point in time. We did not recognize it as a moment until we were told it was a moment, and it was indeed a colossal shift for the music industry and youth culture at large. But the only thing that mattered to us was, we finally felt like we had a band that was ours, and that the moment was ours and it was changing us and molding us in ways we weren’t yet able to comprehend, and it was all very exciting and liberating and even a little scary for good kids like us who were still using hair gel and tucking in our shirts. The music was great – new, fresh, generation-defining great, which turned out to be more than a little scary for Kurt Cobain. Even if In Utero was a conscious choice by the band to make a weirder, less-accessible album than Nevermind in the hopes it would lower their profile and alienate the meatheads who misread Nirvana as another heavy band to play in the high school weight room, it ended up, in its own vulnerable, reactive, shards-of-glass way, being even better than its predecessor, and no less important.

My friends and I first heard about the Nirvana show on the radio, and we could not believe our ears – not only was Nirvana coming, but Nirvana was coming to Akron, not Cleveland. It was unheard of. The biggest band in our universe was playing 10 minutes away, and on Halloween no less. We were never this close to the action; we had to be there or we absolutely would die. But there were hurdles. I had never asked my parents to go to a concert, much less on a school night, much less on a Sunday – which meant I would have to miss youth group and choir practice at church. My parents aren’t holy rollers, but the weekly one-two of youth group and choir practice at First United Methodist Church was damn near mandatory in our household, and I was fully prepared to get a “no,” God dammit. To this day it still feels like a coup that I got a “yes.” Mind you, I was conditioned by an upbringing where bizarre parenting logic forbid me, for instance, from owning one of those portable tape player/recorders with the built-in handle until the very specific age of 9, but that’s another story.

Just as I was beginning to think the broken angel on the cover of In Utero was looking out for me, my sister, Joelle, all but confirmed this divine intervention when she revealed that, as a student at the University of Akron, she had access to an exclusive ticket presale. Before the Internet, there was no private link with a six-digit code for this sort of thing; it meant standing in line for hours, which is what Joelle and I did one gloomy Saturday morning inside Gardner Student Center. We didn’t camp out or anything like that, so when we arrived the line was already wrapped around the hallway, and it was moving colossally slow. Panic set in immediately. There was no way of knowing if, at the end of that line, I would still be able to turn the wad of cash I had collected from my friends into four Nirvana tickets – no Twitter feed to update us in real-time on ticket availability, no text message to tell me to turn around and head home if I didn’t have tickets yet. My nerves were so frayed by the time we got to the ticket window that when the clerk asked “Seats or floor?,” I stood there momentarily stunned, with a blank face and an equally blank mind, not unlike Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he’s finally face-to-face with Santa to ask for the Red Ryder BB gun. I had never been to a concert, had never stood in line to buy tickets, and I had no idea when we got in line that there would be obtuse questions, much less options. Thankfully, I had a brief moment of clarity, and in that moment my brain took me by the shoulders, shook me violently and screamed, “The mosh pit is on the floor! The mosh pit is on the floor!” I quickly snapped out of my fog and blurted a single word to the clerk: “Floor.”

I can’t say I have total recall of the show. It was 28 years ago, and most of that information, sadly, just isn’t there anymore. Meat Puppets and Boredoms opened. Nirvana hit the stage ready to trick-or-treat, including Kurt in a bulbous Barney costume and guitarist Pat Smear dressed as Slash. I do remember some key points, the first of which being that my friends and I were beyond excited, that for weeks it was all we could think about or talk about, and our excitement was magnified by the fact I was taking my driving exam a few days before, and that with my license in hand, we would avoid any potential humiliation brought on by having a parent drive us to the show. Then I failed the exam and my father had to drive us to the show. There were six of us in all – two other friends had purchased tickets separately – and we giddily crammed our flannel-clad frames into my parents’ Celebrity station wagon, the model with one of those rear-facing seats in the way back. Not only was it Halloween, but it was snowing, and even before we arrived at the JAR, we were aware of the strange energy created by the convergence of the holiday and a freak fall snowstorm, and it was quite possible we were contributing to it.

When we got to the arena, my dad pulled up to the curb, turned off the engine and stepped out of the car so he could open the hatch and release my friend, Aaron, and me from the rear-facing seat. The long line to get into the JAR ran parallel to the wagon, and it seemed like everyone in that line turned to stare at us at that very moment as we awkwardly emerged from the hatch. The first kid I made eye contact with wore a blue mohawk and equally colorful sneer, and I half-wondered if, at some point in the evening, some or all of us would get beat up, a misconception that was quickly erased once we got inside, found our way to a spot near the stage and the lights dimmed. I’ve been to hundreds of shows since, and Nirvana remains one of the friendliest I’ve attended; even in the gauntlet of the mosh pit, whenever crowd-surfers hit the hard ground, rather than get kicked and stomped, space was cleared around them until they got hoisted back onto their feet, or in some cases all the way back above our heads. I was awestruck by this kindness, this deliberate care and concern, and from where it emerged amid the collective cathartic aggression, and it instantly recalibrated my perceptions of punk, colored hair, nonconformity, all if it. We were gleeful participants in this sweaty adolescent swirl where a shove was akin to a hug, where in the end it didn’t matter what you looked like or what you wore, only that you were there – come as you are and all that. I had been stepping inside the massive concrete bowls that are event arenas since elementary school, mostly for professional basketball and indoor soccer games, even for the bloody Ice Capades, and never had one of those spaces felt like this or been populated by so many interesting people, and most strikingly, by people my age, unaccompanied by adults. I had no idea where any of them had come from, even though I knew exactly where they had come from – high school hallways like ours.

During the encore, as Nirvana played “On a Plain,” I was crowdsurfing and found myself spun around, my back to the stage, high above the throng of bodies holding me up with their outstretched arms, and as I took in the panoramic view of an arena packed with thousands of kids like me, I let out an involuntary scream of exhilaration. That moment up there on my plain was positively thrilling, and it remains to this day my most vivid memory from the show, the moment I now pinpoint as the moment, the one that set the course for the rest of my life, when Nirvana at the JAR became more than a concert, when I realized the feeling music gave me was something I wanted, needed in my life on a regular basis, in meaningful ways, and that chasing that feeling was a worthwhile pursuit. And I can say with confidence, without a sliver of hyperbole, that buying a record store 30 years later doesn’t happen without that show.

How vividly will Magnolia recall Treefort 2021 in 30 years? Will she remember tapping out from exhaustion at 9:30 the first night? Staying out until midnight two nights later and capping the evening with Pie Hole pizza slices in a rented minivan? Dog-sitting back stage with her friends for the lead singer of Y La Bamba? Dancing in a punk club in her own sweet, singular way while her protectors stood behind her? After Vision Video’s set at the Shredder, we lined up to buy an album and asked frontman Dusty Gannon to sign it for Magnolia while we all chatted. His inscription was, “Stay strange!,” which in our family is something like a badge of honor. I don’t know how much music will influence Magnolia’s path, and what roads it will lead her down, but it’s possible that Treefort 2021 could end up being Magnolia’s Nirvana at the JAR: As the festival drew to a close, she asked us for an electric guitar.

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