Three days. That's how much time separated this show from the release of Nevermind.
On September 21, 1991, Nirvana played Les Foufounes Électriques on Rue Sainte-Catherine in Montréal's Quartier Latin. The album was released on September 24. The lead single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," had been out for eleven days. Geffen Records had shipped 46,251 copies to American record stores and were quietly hoping the whole thing might eventually go gold — maybe by September 1992 if everyone worked really hard.
Nobody in the room at the Foufs that Saturday night knew what was about to happen. Including the band.
The last time Nirvana had played this room, things had been rather different.
In April 1990, Nirvana had played the Foufounes Électriques for a fee of $319 Canadian plus $30 US — the receipt made out to "Chris Novoselic" rather than Krist. Chad Channing was on drums. Somewhere between fifty and sixty people showed up. The band played songs off Bleach, told some jokes, and drove away. Dave Grohl wasn't yet in the band. Nevermind hadn't been written. The name Nirvana meant almost nothing outside a narrow band of Pacific Northwest music obsessives and college radio programmers.
Eighteen months later, they were back. Days before the September 24 release, the band had begun a short North American tour in support of the album. The Foufs show was night two. A Canadian TV crew was there filming portions of the set — you can see the camera at certain points on the audience recording that circulates. Someone in the crowd had a tape deck running the whole time, pausing between songs, which is why every track cuts in on the surviving recordings. At the end of the night, the taper caught the band and Buzz Osbourne of the Melvins — who opened — being interviewed in the venue. It is one of the last known recordings of Nirvana playing a room this size.
The Foufounes Électriques had been built for exactly this kind of night.
The club opened in 1983, founded by three friends — Norman Boileau, François Gourd, and Bernard Paquet — from the same musical theatre group, with the ambition of building a bar that would also showcase burgeoning alternative musicians and different types of art. They named it with characteristic irreverence: Les Foufounes Électriques translates from Québec French as "the electric buttocks," a name that originated from the founders' habit of exhibiting their painted derrieres inside old television sets.
The locals call it the Foufs. It is the oldest alternative rock venue in Montréal.
Before the Foufs took that name, the address at 87 Sainte-Catherine Est had been home to Les Clochards Célestes — an inclusive cabaret inspired by Jack Kerouac — and then a transitional space called the Zoobar. The same address, across three names, had been building Montréal's underground culture since the early 1980s. Through the 1980s it became the centre of the city's punk and gothic subcultures, programming new wave, reggae, ska, industrial, and eventually grunge and hip-hop.
In January 1989, the stage was moved to face Sainte-Catherine Street and a C-shaped balcony was installed, raising capacity to around 400 people. By the time Nirvana returned in September 1991 it was already being described as the Canadian CBGB's — the place where Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Mudhoney, the Melvins, Social Distortion, L7, and Nirvana had all played before they were household names.
The graffiti-covered walls, the multi-level layout, the strange industrial bones of the place — none of it had been designed to accommodate stadium-level fame. It was designed for the moment just before that. And on September 21, 1991, it got exactly that moment.
Nevermind debuted at number 144 on the Billboard 200, selling 6,000 copies in its first week. Nobody panicked. The label had expected modest numbers. Then "Smells Like Teen Spirit" began climbing — the video premiered on MTV's late-night alternative show 120 Minutes, then moved into daytime rotation. By November, Nevermind had entered the Billboard Top 40 for the first time at number 35. By Christmas it was selling 374,000 copies a week. On January 11, 1992, it replaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous at number one.
The Foufs show captures something that the Paramount Halloween show — forty days later and already mythologized — doesn't quite capture: the last hours of the before. The album isn't out yet. The wave hasn't crested. Dave Grohl makes a joke about being in Toronto. Someone in the audience is recording on a handheld deck, pausing the tape between songs. The camera from Canadian TV catches a few minutes of footage. Krist Novoselic says something that doesn't quite get picked up by the microphone.
Three days later, the world changed.
The stage remembers.