The Nirvana Baby Still Chases the Dollar

Is it just Curmie, or does it seem to you, Gentle Reader, that there’s some kind of rule that to truly reach the heights of rock and roll immortality, you’ve got to release at least one controversial album cover? 

There was The Who’s “Who’s Next,” featuring an image which seemed to suggest the band-mates had just urinated against a concrete piling.  The Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” showed a crotch shot of a man in tight jeans, complete with a little bulge suggesting an erection and, in the initial release, a working zipper that revealed underwear-like fabric underneath.  Supergroup Blind Faith stayed together for only a single eponymous album, which features a topless pubescent girl on the cover.  

Led Zeppelin’s cover art for “Houses of the Holy” shows naked children climbing a hillside of basalt rocks.  (A post about Facebook’s censorship of this image a couple of years ago—a decision they quickly reversed after public uproar—came around on my feed just last week.)  Even the good-guy Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today” shows the Fab Four posing with slabs of meat and broken doll parts (not to mention the photo of fully nude John and Yoko on the cover of their “Two Virgins.”)

The album cover in question.

Nirvana wasn’t yet at the summit when they released “Nevermind” in 1991.  (Curmie may not include them in the pantheon now, but that’s only because he never really got into the grunge sound.)  The record is significant in numerous ways.  It was their first with drummer Dave Grohl, subsequently the driving force of the Foo Fighters.  It featured at least two songs, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Lithium,” which are legitimately regarded as classics (whether or not an individual listener likes them).  And there was that album cover.

After attempts to find a photo that was neither too graphic nor subject to a steep royalty the producers didn’t want to pay, the band hired a photographer and sent him out to local swimming pools.  The photographer had a friend whom he knew had a baby boy. According to the boy’s father, “[He] calls us up and was like, ‘Hey Rick, wanna make 200 bucks and throw your kid in the drink?’  I was like, 'What’s up?' And he’s like, ‘Well, I’m shooting kids all this week, why don’t you meet me at the Rose Bowl, throw your kid in the drink?’”

And so was born the now famous shot of Spencer Elden, then aged four months, in the water.  Eldren is naked, and his penis is visible.  Add a little computer magic, and the shot now shows the baby apparently swimming after a dollar bill with a fishhook attached; fishing line leads out of frame to the top of the picture.  The symbolism isn’t hard to comprehend.

Elden has become a minor celebrity in the ensuing 30 years.  He reportedly has “Nevermind” tattooed on his chest, has developed a cottage industry signing copies of the record, and has posed for underwater photos on several anniversaries of the album’s release.  All involved swim trunks, although he told the New York Post that he wanted to do the 25^th anniversary shot naked.

A few examples of how assiduously
Mr. Elden has avoided the horrors of
his infancy.

Needless to say, Elden has been an active participant in this process.  Ah, but now, at age 30, he’s suing the band members and anyone else he can think of for “extreme and permanent emotional distress with physical manifestations,” plus loss of education, wages, and “enjoyment of life.” He claims his parents never signed a release for the photo, and accuses virtually anyone he could think of—the band, the producers, the record company, and everyone who ever bought a copy of the record—of dealing in child pornography. 

OK, I made up that last part.  But let’s look at those arguments point by point.

“Extreme and permanent emotional distress.”  This is the guy who pronounced his notoriety as “kinda cool,” and who would be unknown if he hadn’t decided to publicize his own identity as the “Nirvana baby.”

“Physical manifestations.”  Name them.  Next.

“Loss of education.”  He is now a student at the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena; it’s unclear whether he is a grad student or an undergrad.  What is clear is that just tuition (not counting incidentals like food and lodging) there is at least $47,000 a year for undergrads, and more for grad students.  Somehow, the loss of education argument seems a little strained.

Wages:  How does that work?  Is he truly arguing that someone wouldn’t hire him because of something that occurred when he was four months old?  He’s worth a half a million dollars, by the way.  Curmie has a fair number of 30-year-old former students, college grads (and good ones) who would be willing to undergo such financial suffering.

“Enjoyment of life.”  Apparently exploiting one’s own purely accidental celebrity status just isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

Parents never signed release: assuming this to be true, then the time to deal with this was 30 years ago, and the people to do it were his parents.  But to imagine that a professional photographer and an established record label wouldn’t have the necessary paperwork in hand before proceeding with the cover design rather strains credulity.

Child pornography.  Two responses. 

Response #1: Bullshit.  Shyster lawyer Maggie Mabie, Elden’s mouthpiece, argues that “The focal point of the image is the minor’s genitalia.”  This statement can have two equally possible explanations: 1). Mabie is lying.  2).  She’s really, really creepy.  Curmie must have seen that image a dozen times before even noticing the boy’s penis.  The focal point, of course, is what appears to be the stretch towards the dollar bill.  As even a relatively dim bulb like Chris Cuomo points out,

I don’t ever remember anybody ever writing or anything being out there in society about this image as a sexualized or pornographic image.  I always thought that it was a suggestion of how right out of the womb, people are just grabbing for money and doing anything they can. I thought it was more about capitalism than it was sexuality.

That, Chris, is because the image is not sexualized, and only an attention-seeking jerk or his utterly irresponsible lawyer could see it otherwise.

Response #2: if this is true now, it was true 30 years ago.  Why the wait?  Could it be that the average music consumer today wasn’t even born when Kurt Cobain died, and that the demand for Nirvana memorabilia has dwindled accordingly?  Could it be that this is one last desperate effort to exploit a situation Elden did not create?

Many Curmiphiles will know that Curmie often seeks a parallel between life and art.  This time it’s Betsuyaku Minori’s The Elephant that provides the latter.  The central character in that is a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing.  He survives by posing shirtless, showing off his keloid scars and allowing himself to be photographed—for a price—by and with tourists.  But the scars fade over time, and even when covered in baby oil they don’t shine the way they used to.  So it would appear to be with 30-year-old baby pictures, even famous ones.

Finally, there’s Elden’s other lawyer, James Marsh, who opines that anyone who thinks he’s an unethical hack who demeans the experiences of people who really did experience some form of abuse is indulging in “idol worship when it comes to famous people, bands and places.”  Marsh is almost as disingenuous as Mabie, and even more pompous.  It would be a stretch to say that Curmie has any particular positive feelings towards the defendants in the case.  He couldn’t care less if they’re famous, and recognizes that to most of them $150,000 borders on pocket change.  But he also knows a money-grabbing hypocrite when he sees one.  Elden is a jerk.  His lawyers are worse.

None of this changes the ethical quagmire that surrounds the use of the picture to begin with.  It, and at least the Led Zeppelin and Blind Faith examples noted above, are problematic, not because they are necessarily sexualized (although you could make a pretty good case in regards to the latter), but because those photos are now eternal, and the subject of them was in no position to give consent.  If you want to argue the laws ought to be configured differently to better protect minors from exploitation (in whatever form), Curmie’s ready to at least listen.  

But to bring a lawsuit that most experts agree has little if any chance of success, some 30 years after the fact… yeah, when you describe yourself as “being a total little bitch about this,” Curmie can’t help but agree.  And Ms. Mabie and Mr. Marsh are walking lawyer jokes.