The quest for bleach

like most impressionable middle-class youths in the early 90s, i was deeply in love with the revolutionary sound of nirvana. from the minute i heard the very first guitar riff from smells like teen spirit, i was a fan fanatic obsessed.

i recall saving my money so i could buy the entire album, one of the first three CDs i ever bought (the other two were queen's greatest hits and eric clapton unplugged).

but it wasn't until i found out that smells like teen spirit wasn't actually their debut album that i showed my first signs of being insane. of course, in those days, there was no internet, there was no itunes. if dude wanted some obscure music, he had to work hard to get it.

the music store where i bought my tapes and CDs was little help. they said they would try to order it but, for whatever reason, it couldn't be ordered.

but i didn't give up. some friends and i teamed up, and we began a rigorous search to find what we were looking for and after several weeks of letter writing, information pooling and lots of guts, we finally had a dubbed tape of the bleach album.

up to that point, i had never tasted such sweet victory, despite coming to the conclusion that indeed, bleach was a pretty shitty debut album.