By the summer of 1988, Tracy Marander was growing increasingly tired of mothering and babysitting her unemployed musician boyfriend.
Having been introduced by a mutual friend, Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne, Marander and Kurt Cobain had been dating for the best part of two years. Their relationship had intensified in the autumn of 1987 when, following Cobain's eviction from the "pigsty" shack he shared with Melvins bassist Matt Lukin for non-payment of rent, Marander invited him to move into her studio apartment at 114 North Pear Street in Olympia, Washington . But although Cobain's band, Nirvana, had started to pick up two or three low-paying shows per month around Seattle, Olympia and Tacoma, the 21-year-old musician claimed to be permanently skint, leaving Marander to struggle to cover both his bills and her own from the meagre wage she earned working night shifts in the cafeteria of the Boeing aircraft factory.
Every time she raised the subject of rent contributions with her boyfriend, Cobain would offer to move out and live in his car, aware that his loving, good-natured girlfriend wouldn't entertain the suggestion. Nevertheless, Marander's patience was wearing thin. and in the summer of '88, during a heated domestic argument, she delivered an ultimatum: if Cobain didn't secure a paying job in the weeks ahead, he would have to find himself a new place to live. As an aside, she pointed out that, despite the considerable financial sacrifices she'd made to support Nirvana's musical ambitions, her boyfriend hadn't even had the common decency to write a single song in her honour, or celebrating their love..
While Nirvana were gaining traction and fans in Seattle, Kurt Cobain was already getting somewhat frustrated with the local music scene, as championed by Sub Pop records. On one of Nirvana's newer songs, titled School, he vented his irritation by screaming "You're in high school again": he'd actually considered naming the song The Seattle Scene.
"We wrote it about Sub Pop," he confessed to Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad. "If we could have thrown in Soundgarden’s name, we would have."
A very conscious attempt to break the mould, About A Girl was the first real indication that Cobain's band had more to offer than the scene's de rigueur misanthropy, negativity and nihilism. Cobain would later claim that he listened to Meet The Beatles for three hours straight before writing the song’s simple chord structure and delicate melodies.
His studies, and his boundary-pushing pop song, had the desired effect: though Marander confessed that she didn't actually realise that the song, with its references to an "easy friend... with an ear to lend" was specifically about her, it bought her boyfriend another rent-free year co-habiting.
Crucially, when included as the centre-piece of Nirvana's debut album Bleach, it also offered to anyone who was listening, the first indications that Nirvana could transcend their roots and the limiting restrictions of their musical community.
"To put About a Girl on Bleach was a risk." Cobain suggested to Rolling Stone in 1994. “I was heavily into pop, I really liked R.E.M., and I was into all kinds of old Sixties stuff. But there was a lot of pressure within that social scene, the underground – like the kind of thing you get in high school. And to put a jangly R.E.M. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky.”
"I’d heard Bleach before, and to be honest, I was not that impressed," Butch Vig, the producer of Nevermind, once told me. "I liked a couple of songs on it - I thought School was pretty cool - but the one song that stood out to me, that I think everybody has recognised, was About A Girl. Most of the record was very one-dimensional, but that song showed someone capable of writing a brilliant pop song, with the melodies and the lyrics and the chord progression, it was like a Beatles song. And looking back now, that was sort of the shape of what was to come."
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