Former Fear Factory frontman Burton C. Bell has shared his memories of appearing in Nirvana's iconic video for their breakthrough single Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Having recently revealed the story behind his face appearing on the sleeve of Nirvana's final Sup Pop single, Sliver, Bell has shared an even cooler story about how he came to participate in one of the most memorable music videos in history.
Writing on Instagram, the singer explains, "In late Spring in 1991 I started working in the shipping and receiving department for NaNa, a Doc Marten’s distributor in Santa Monica, where I unloaded trucks full of Doc’s, to be unboxed, inventoried and reboxed to be shipped off to punk rock stores all across the country.
A friend I worked with, Kirk, worked there. He was married to Dee [Plakas], the drummer of L7, who worked in the main office.
In June of 1991 Kirk had an advanced cassette of the newly recorded Nirvana album, that was not released yet. Kirk played cello on the song Something In The Way. We blasted that album daily for 2 straight months and I was loving it.
August, 15, Nirvana played a show at The Roxy on Sunset Blvd. I was not able to go to the show because I had rehearsal with my new band Fear Factory, but my two roommates did. At the show Nirvana threw out flyers to the audience that was an “invite” to their video shoot in Culver City on the 17th.
On the day of my two roomies, another friend @smalce and I drove down to Culver City for the video shoot for a song called SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT.
About 40 people showed up for the video shoot, including my friend and bassist tony baumeister. The director [Samuel Bayer] had us sit on a riser in the studio, and the band was playing in front of us. The director instructed us to look bored.
Me and my friends knew the song quite well, but the rest of the crowd did not. Hearing the song over and over became infectious. The director lost control of the crowd and chaos ensued. Most crowd shots were unplanned.
Everyone who showed up was in the video.
After the crowd shots “lunch” was served, and everyone matriculated outside with the band while eating finger sandwiches with Kurt Cobain and Chris Novoselic.
I remember talking to the new drummer, Dave Grohl. I told him how I thought it was funny that he had the the tag CHAKA on his drum set because CHAKA was a prolific tagger in LA during that time. His tags could be seen from Venice to a Hollywood. He had no idea 😆
I can be seen BRIEFLY 4 times in the video. It’s quick, but IT IS ME.
I have LONG, blonde hair, wearing a white tee shirt."
Watch Burton's isolated appearances in the video on his Instagram post below:
"The video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit," Dave Grohl told this writer in 2009. "People heard the song on the radio and they thought 'This is great', but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, 'This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they're tearing up their fucking high school'. And then with the video came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.
"The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. You’d show up to a 500 capacity gig and there were 500 extra people there. We were still in our little bubble and it didn’t seem like anything unusual was happening until we’d get to the gig, and it was fucking chaos. And we started to notice there were normal people here. We were like, 'What are they doing here? That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here?' And it was like 'Oh, maybe that video thing is attracting some… riff-raff'."
