It never really struck me like, ‘Oh, s**t, that's me on the cover’.The baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind is all grown up and is now suing the band for alleged child pornography. “But I feel pretty normal about it because growing up, I've always known I was the Nirvana baby. “It's kind of cool, knowing that I've been on an album cover,” Spencer said. He's now hoping to either enrol at West Point Military Academy, or a local art school. Last year, he was sent to a military boarding school. In 2001, Rolling Stone asked Spencer to remodel the Nevermind shot to mark the album's 10th anniversary. Another time, he met ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, who lampooned the Nevermind cover on his 1992 disc, Off the Deep End, in which a doughnut replaced the dollar note. He was once invited to swim in a wealthy woman's pool because of his status as the Nirvana baby. He grew up with a platinum copy of Nevermind on his bedroom wall and once confessed, in moments of hormonal frustration, to using the chat-up line “You want to see my penis again?” at teenage discos. Spencer, for his part, says the record helped bring about a typically choppy adolescence. Three years after Nevermind's release, he shot himself. It was listed 17th in Rolling Stone magazine's “500 greatest albums of all time” but the pressures of superstardom weighed heavily on the lead singer, Kurt Cobain. Released in September 1991, it became the band's breakthrough album, bringing the Seattle grunge scene to a worldwide audience. Babies have a reflex that stops them choking.”įor Nirvana, the success of Nevermind was a mixed blessing. I asked his father how they shot the original, and he said the trick had been to blow in the baby's face just before throwing him underwater. “It was a pain for him, because he wasn't wearing goggles, so by the end his eyes were killing.
“Spencer just jumped straight in,” Chapple said. The original photograph and the recent recreation by the British photographer John Chapple were shot from the bottom of the pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Centre in Pasedena, 17 feet (5m) underwater.
NIRVANA NEVERMIND COVER BOY FREE
Receive today's headlines directly to your inbox every morning and evening, with our free daily newsletter.Įnter email address This field is required Sign Up And no one had any idea what was going on.”ĭaily Headlines & Evening Telegraph Newsletter So we all just had a big party at the pool. Why don't you meet me at the Rose Bowl, we'll, you know, throw the kid in the drink, it'd be cool'. His father, Rick, said: “He calls us up and he goes, ‘Hey, Rick, you want to make 200 bucks and throw your kid in the drink?' I said, ‘What's up?' And he goes, ‘Well, I was shooting kids all this week. In 1991, Spencer's parents were paid just $200 for allowing their friend, underwater photographer Kirk Weddle, to photograph the then nine-month-old baby. He lives in Eagle Rock, near Glendale, California, recently bought a car and - ironically, given the nature of his fame - is a mustard-keen water polo player. Now 17, he is a typically laid-back high school student of the sort who once formed Nirvana's core audience. But I'm just a normal kid living it up and doing the best I can while I'm here.” “I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star. “It's kind of cool, I guess,” Spencer said. He is Spencer Elden and, thankfully, this time he chose to wear shorts. Seventeen years later, the cover boy of Nirvana's second album, Nevermind, has recreated the classic underwater shot that went on to adorn more than 26 million record sleeves and the bedroom walls of teenage grunge fans. To a generation of music fans, he was the “face” of the 1990s: a naked baby in a swimming pool, reaching towards a dollar bill on the end of a fish hook.
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