KRIST NOVOSELIC

It’s 30 years since the release of Nirvana’s era-defining album, Nevermind, and high time that we revisited this 2011 chat with the great bassist turned political activist, Krist Novoselic, a musician who witnessed a truly chaotic period in music history

- Joel McIver

I’m never in any bass magazines!” snickers Krist Novoselic, legend for an entire generation of grunge fans. Why should this be, we ask ourselves? Perhaps it’s because his old band Nirvana have been defunct since 1994, when the singer Kurt Cobain ended his life in tragic circumstances—or maybe it’s because Novoselic is best known these days not for his bass playing, but for his political writings and activism.

Gibson have recently unveiled Novoselic’s new RD bass, a tasty, retro-looking instrument, and unlike so many signature models, it seems that it didn’t take too many prototypes to complete. As the man himself tells us, “It didn’t take long to do, because it’s just a reproduction of an RD with a new look. They built them in the Seventies, and now you can buy a new one. What I did was, I shipped my standard RD to Gibson in Tennessee and said, ‘I really like this thing, but the pickups are kinda dull’ so they put a new Seymour Duncan Hot Stack on there. They made the headstock elongated and the fretboard is made of sustainable wood, too. I played it—and they nailed it first time.”

What we at BP find hard to believe is that no bass manufacturer has offered Novoselic a signature model before, even though his old band’s biggest albums—Nevermind and