Kurt Cobain’s Montage of Heck tape: his ex-girlfriend sets record straight

As the internet implodes over a ‘newly’ surfaced pre-Bleach mixtape by the Nirvana frontman, one of its original recipients reveals how and when it was really made

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“I think he just did it because he was bored. He started doing it, and just kept going. It was a project.

These are the words of Tracy Marander, Kurt Cobain’s girlfriend when the Nirvana frontman made his newly infamous mixtape, Montage of Heck.

The internet is a strange place. The mixtape compiled by Cobain in his hometown of Aberdeen – recorded before Nirvana’s 1989 debut album Bleach – has been doing the rounds in the bootleg world for decades. A short excerpt was even used to introduce Nirvana’s first single, Love Buzz. So why is the news “Mixtape surfaces, with music and sounds compiled by Nirvana frontman before band’s 1989 debut” suddenly a top trending topic on Facebook?

The tape itself is a surreal, often psychedelic insight into the mind of the 20-year-old Cobain: cut-ups of 60s, 70s and 80s TV shows interspersed with the sound of the toilet flushing and people vomiting, bits of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin interspersed with troubled Austin singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston screaming about Satan, and white noise so intense that when Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence starts up it comes as physical relief.

There are snippets of a few unreleased Nirvana songs, too, among the tumult and screaming and dead-end repetition, amid the excerpts of William Shatner, The Partridge Family, Queen, Queensryche, Butthole Surfers, James Brown. In many respects, Montage Of Heck echoes and predates turntable culture, the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up and the Beatles’ experimental sound collage Revolution No 9.

And even though everyone made mixtapes back then (it was part of underground culture; a way of asking people out; a means of self-expression), Cobain’s foray was a particular favourite among his peers. It has a level of sophistication to its sound manipulation – recorded via a simple handheld two-track tape recorder – that most of us simply couldn’t be arsed with.

Two versions of Montage Of Heck were made: a shortened form clocking in at eight minutes that Kurt initially pushed to have included on the Love Buzz single, and a longer 36-minute take. One fan posted up the mixtape in its entirety on Vimeo in 2012. (I think we can discount his claim that “Kurt personally gave this tape to me” – it’s been available on bootlegs for 15 years).

This being the internet, no one has bothered to go far enough back to check either a) the original source or b) whether this “recent” resurfacing is indeed recent. Livenirvana.com, which is dedicated to cataloguing and documenting every Nirvana performance and recording ever made, already has an extensive article detailing at length the various recordings that make up Montage Of Heck. The story has been up on its site since 2006 (inherited from digitalnirvana.net, who originally ran it in 2002).

What seems to have happened is this: a Frank Zappa-loving blog called United Mutations picked up on the Livenirvana post a couple of months ago, and reprinted it wholesale, credited – Zappa is among the many artists sampled on the tape. A couple of days ago, the influential website Dangerous Minds picked up on the United Mutations post and treated it as a “new” story, reprinting the tracklist (wrongly credited) alongside some commentary.

And then everyone else leaped in, republishing the following quote as fact: “Kurt assembled Montage of Heck around 1988 using a 4-track cassette recorder. It features sounds from Kurt’s wide-ranging collection of LPs, manipulated recordings of the radio, elements of Nirvana demos, and sounds created or recorded by Cobain.”

If Tracy Marander remembers rightly, it was actually 1987 and Kurt used a two-track recorder. “I don’t think he had a 4-track until 1988 or so,” she told Guardian Music in a private Facebook conversation.

“I love Montage of Heck,” she says. “He made it using records, some TV, and random sounds he recorded. It was all made in Aberdeen, I believe. It took him quite a while. He used to like to make TV montage VHS tapes too. The TV ones are a mix of 60s to 80s TV shows, old movies, bad movies, bits of commercials and late night infomercials.”

Marander, notable as a primary source who actually knew Kurt at the time (she was living in Olympia, he was still in Aberdeen, but would shortly move there to be with her), continues: “There are a lot of copies of copies out there. I’m not even sure where mine is. He may have been stoned during part of it, but he didn’t smoke every day, at least not at that point – too broke. He made a few others, but mostly just complete songs with a few oddities thrown in.”

She would listen to it on her drive to work – it helped keep her awake. “He used to listen to it while stoned or on acid too,” she says. “It always trips people out.”

Many of Nirvana’s fans have been aware of Montage Of Heck for years, and have enjoyed it for what it is – a turbulent, random, exhilarating, mashed-up headfuck of a sonic experience. However it’s got here, it’s great to see it doing the rounds again.

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