Enter The Vaselines

To write one song that gets covered by Nirvana may be regarded as good fortune; to write three looks like genius. Having 'Molly's Lips', 'Son of a Gun' and 'Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam' all included on albums by the then-biggest band in the world (the first two on Incesticide, the latter on MTV Unplugged) has certainly kept the prospect of wage-slavery from Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee's doors. "It's classic Vaselines that we became famous through someone else covering our songs" says McKee in the liner notes to this new compendium of the band's oeuvre. "How great for slackers like us to get another band to do all the hard work."

Famous superfans are both a blessing and a curse-- just ask the Vaselines. In 1992, at the urging of ardent admirer Kurt Cobain, Sub Pop released The Way of the Vaselines, a compilation of the short-lived and then-little-known band's extant recordings (a whopping 19 tracks). Hooray for them, right? Maybe . If the Vaselines originally slotted neatly into the mid-to-late 80s Scottish shambolic pop underground of the Pastels, Shop Assistants, and BMX Bandits, their origins-- and the band's actual recordings-- became overshadowed by a single factoid: They influenced Nirvana. Nirvana's (good-intentioned, I'm sure) covers of "Molly's Lips" and "Son of a Gun" were more-or-less faithful, bouncy renditions, but they lacked the humor, menace, and complexity of the naïvely played, ambivalently sung originals. And "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" has long been associated with Nirvana's funereal MTV Unplugged performance, during which Cobain caressed the sweetly sacrilegious song with the reverence due a cultural relic-- something it neither wanted nor deserved.