The American Spencer Elden He was not just any child. Thirty years ago, when he was barely four months old and without being aware of it, he starred in one of the most famous covers in the history of music: Nevermindthe album that catapulted Nirvana to fame and put the grunge on the international radar. “It’s strange to be part of such an iconic image culturally because, really, I had nothing to do with it. My mother has a crazy story. She says that, when she was young, she had some kind of vision that her baby was going to be everywhere,” she told the pages of The Guardian in 2015.
And so it was. Considering that the second LP by the defunct band led by Kurt Cobain has sold more than 30 million copies since its release, and that the cover has been reproduced ad nauseam on all kinds of products, merchandising, His face is anything but unknown, and is literally in millions of homes, entertainment venues and showrooms around the world.
Initially, both the group and Robert Fisher, the art director of the Geffen Records label, considered a much more explicit visual concept to illustrate Nevermind“Kurt wanted a baby that was being born underwater. Back then, before the internet, you had to go to your local bookstore and look through birthing books to find pictures. So that’s what I did… but there was no way to make a cover out of it. I couldn’t find any good pictures. They were all too graphic to use.” explained Fisher. After discarding the idea of showing a birth, they had no choice but to resort to a submerged baby.
“So Kurt came up with the idea of adding a hook to make the scene more impactful. We sat around all afternoon thinking of all the fun things we could put in there. Like a piece of meat, like a big raw steak. Or a CD or something to symbolize music. We went to lunch and were like, ‘How about a burrito? ’ Or, ‘How about a hot dog? ’ We were like that for hours. I don’t remember who came up with the dollar bill idea, but we all thought it was pretty cool.”
With the premise already clear, all that was left was to find an executor. The chosen one was the photographer Kirk Weddle. “At that time I was trying to make a name for myself as the underwater photography guy,” he narrated in The Guardian in 2019, “but when they asked me to do the cover for Nevermind I had no idea if I could do it. Taking photos of a baby was new to me. I didn’t want him to end up drowning because of me! Fortunately, there was no misfortune to be regretted. Especially since the hook and the banknote were inserted in a laboratory days later.
For the five-minute shoot at the Pasadena Aquatic Centre, he was paid $1,000 (about 820 euros at current exchange rates). The amount covered everything from the necessary equipment to hiring a diver for possible rescues. “I knew I had the right photo. That’s the thing with old-school photographers: as a professional, you have to know you have the right one before you go. However, I wasn’t sure the record company would accept it. So, just in case, I decided to go to a children’s swimming school and put half a dozen babies in the water. There was a 10-month-old girl who I thought might work, so I took a profile photo of her. But the record company loved Spencer’s original,” Weddle explained.
“They ended up choosing me. And I think it was because of my penis – a lot of the other babies were girls. I’m glad it wasn’t for something like a Backstreet Boys album,” Spencer joked in the 2015 interview. In the interview, he added: “My parents knew who Nirvana was, but they weren’t really into the scene.” grungeMy father, Rick (who worked in Hollywood as a special effects artist), was attending art school at the time and his friends would often ask him for help with their projects. So his friend Kirk called him and said, ‘Do you want to make some money today and throw your kid in the pool? ’ My parents took me there, apparently blew in my face to stimulate my diving reflex (which causes babies to close their glottis in water), dunked me in, took some pictures, and brought me out. That was it. They got paid $200 and went out for tacos afterwards.”
At first, the one known as Nirvana Baby He was proud of his aquatic feat. He even tattooed the logo of Nevermind on his chest. After dropping out of school a year before graduating from high school, his parents encouraged him to enroll in a military school. It didn’t last long, as he already knew he wanted to pursue a career in the art world. His first opportunity came thanks to Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer behind the poster Hope (hope) that Barack Obama used during his presidential campaign. He spent five years with it. He currently lives in Los Angeles and is professionally dedicated to urban art.
Of course, as with every good story, there is a less pleasant side to this story as well. Unlike when she was a teenager, Spencer has changed her discourse over time regarding her participation on the famous cover. Although in 2011 she I was joking Despite many people laughing at the size of his member – “my girlfriend knows the truth about that,” he said – he told the magazine in 2016 Time Quite the opposite: “When I go to a baseball game I think, ‘Man, everyone in the stadium has probably seen me naked as a baby. ’ I feel like my rights as a person have been trampled upon.” He also doesn’t take kindly to the fact that neither of the band’s two surviving members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, have contacted him.
Another aspect that helps to understand this resentment is that the Eldens, beyond the $200 that Kirk Weddle gave them, have not received a cent since 1991 for the rights to an already legendary image. In fact, when Spencer turned one, Nirvana’s label limited itself to sending them a platinum album and a teddy bear. “Everyone who participated in the album has tons and tons of money. I feel like it’s the last of the grunge. I live at my mother’s house and drive a Honda Civic. It’s hard not to get angry when you hear the amount of money that was at stake,” he explained in TimeFive years ago, the possibility of taking legal action against Geffen Records was considered, but he ultimately gave up, believing it was a lost battle.
Elden’s case is not unique in the music world. It is littered with covers, especially of debuts that were not expected to sell much, that eventually became legendary. Roxy Music’s first album, titled after the group and released in 1972, has one of the most recognizable covers in rock, with model Kari-Ann Muller posing as a pin-up from the fifties. She charged 20 pounds for that photo.
In the case of the famous Meat is Murder (1985), by The Smiths, the album contains a quadruple image of a soldier whose helmet reads the title of the album. His name was Michael Wynn, he was from Ohio, he was 20 years old at the time and the image was captured by photographer and director Emile de Antonio for his documentary on Vietnam In the year of the pig (1968). Wynn, like Spencer Elder, is not too happy.
On an official website of war veterans, wrote in 2019: “They never contacted me to tell me they were going to use that photo. And I didn’t like the way The Smiths changed the words. I found out about all this when my sister found the record one day while shopping.” In the original photo, his helmet didn’t have the words “Flesh is murder” written on it, but instead: “Make war, not love.”
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