Nirvana (Record Store Day 2011)

Record Store Day is always an interesting exercise for me. Unless I take a personal day, I am always working the bulk of that Saturday so I don’t have the opportunity to hit the very few actual record stores in my area. There is one record store about 10 minutes from my house that has never really dealt heavily in vinyl so I pretty much write them off immediately (or at least I had; I found out from the owner the day before RSD 2011 that he’ll do pre-orders for any of the RSD stuff so he’s not left with a bunch of stuff that won’t sell. I will absolutely take advantage of this next year.) The only other record stores that are remotely close to me are an hour and 90 minutes away respectively. They do go all out for RSD and it’s through them that I ended up getting the album that sat at the top of my personal Wish List for RSD 2011. Yeah, I wanted the Ryan Adams double 7 inch and was lucky enough to get one, same for the Foo Fighters release (got it too…write up coming very shortly.) But the re-release of Nirvana’s “Hormoaning” EP was at the very top. And, thanks to a friend of mine who knew this (and knew the record store 10 minutes from my house had 4 copies that were all pre-orders and, thus, spoken for already) I scored that one too.

I’m not entirely sure how many of these were actually pressed. I read somewhere prior to RSD that there were only 6,000 total which, when you consider the sheer size of Nirvana’s world wide fan base that exists even 18 years after the death of Kurt Cobain, is a relatively small pressing run that would surely sell out fast. If you’re not hip to what the deal is with this EP, lets go to Google and get you a little info shall we?

Released in Australia and Japan only for the bands 1992 tour through those areas.

In Australia, 15,000 copies were released. 4,000 on burgundy 12″ vinyl, 10,000 on CD, and 1,000 on cassette.

In Japan it was released on CD, and later 12″ vinyl in large quantities. The two releases have entirely different artwork and as a result, the Australian version is considered rare due to the enduring popularity of the band.

There were only two “official” Japanese Geffen pressings, both on CD with barely noticeable variations in artwork. The Japanese CDs were rushed out without prior consent from the US parent company (note low rent artwork culled from Nevermind) and were subsequently deleted. All Japanese vinyl copies are counterfeit.

I don’t know about the accuracy of those pressing numbers (I got the info from Wikipedia, so we/I should probably take it with a grain of salt) but that kind of paints the picture of the backstory of this record.

As an aside; I actually ended up with two copies of this album in an odd twist. 1 from the previously mentioned friend who picked it up for me, and one from a reader of the blog who worked out the details/purchase through Twitter prior to my friend calling me up and telling me he’d snagged a copy. I ended up trading one of the copies for the Foo Fighters RSD release, which we will feature here very shortly as I mentioned earlier.

The record comes on a sort of orange/black swirl vinyl. It’s a pretty standard and straight forward packaging overall, which I am perfectly fine with. In that regard it stays pretty true to the original release instead of going with a ‘deluxe repackaging’ or some such thing. But it did come with the pretty sweet sticker commemorating the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ which I dig.