Did Nirvana’s Rise As Grunge Rock Royalty Begin With A Wyoming Garage Band?

Wyoming is usually associated with country music, home of well-known names of the genre such as Chris LeDoux and Luke Bell.

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was all about garage band blues and rock and roll.

In those days, many young Wyomingites were inspired to pick up guitars or drumsticks, find some friends and give it a shot. 

Casper was ground zero for the Wyoming garage band movement, and Casper native Cory McDaniel was in the thick of it. 

He took up guitar, and said he started playing in local bands as soon as “I knew about three or four chords.”

He and some friends were good enough to take their show on the road and ended up touring the West Coast, from Alaska all the way down to California, from about 1969-1985.

They toured under various names, but “The Tremors” was the one most used.

According to legend, at some point during that extended West Coast tour, a young Kurt Cobain attended a Tremors show.

It’s said that Cobain was so inspired by the Tremors’ performance, he went on to form Nirvana and launch the grunge rock movement — achieving stellar fame in the early 1990s.

If the legend’s true, that would mean that one of rock’s most successful genres, the Seattle-based grunge sound, has Wyoming roots. 

Is The Legend True?

Cheyenne resident Rod Miller was a drummer in Rawlins garage bands in the 1970s.

He told Cowboy State Daily that he’s not sure when or how the legend got started, but it’s been told and retold over the years.

“That legend has had legs” for decades and is still talked about today, Miller said. 

McDaniel told Cowboy State Daily that he doesn’t remember ever meeting Cobain, and that the legend of his band inspiring the godfather of grunge is largely unknown to him.

“I would just love to know where that story came from,” he said.

Cobain, who was born in 1967, would have been a toddler when the Tremors first arrived in Seattle. 

But later on in the mid-1980s, it is plausible that a then-teenage Cobain might have snuck into a bar or club to catch a Tremors show, he said.

That’s how the tale goes, Miller said.

“Kurt Cobain heard them when he was just a kid, and he thought, ‘What a great sound.’ Heavy guitars a lot of distortion, and that inspired him to go found Nirvana,” Miller said.

McDaniel said the Tremors were “blues-oriented” and a far cry from grunge.

That was an amalgamation of classic heavy metal (think Black Sabbath), classic album-oriented rock (Aerosmith, for instance), with some strong punk rock influence thrown in.

The Ramones slowed down a bit and put on steroids, if you will.

However, McDaniel said that if a gangly teenage Cobain did in fact attend one of his band’s shows, he can see how the progression from blues-rock to grunge might have happened.

“He could have gone from blues to a little bit harder rock. And then to even harder rock and then to grunge. So, I guess it’s possible,” McDaniel said.

The Journey West

McDaniel said he appreciates Wyoming’s country music connections, but when he was a kid, country didn’t capture his imagination the way 1960s rock did.

“When I first heard The Rolling Stones I was like, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ Then I heard Jimi Hendrix and I was like, ‘Whoa! What is this?’” he said.

The first successful Casper band he was in was called the Eddies, “even though there was nobody in that band named Eddie,” McDaniel said. 

After high school graduation and some personnel changes, the band started going by “Butterfat” and headed west. 

In places like Seattle and Portland, Oregon, they played some gigs with harmonica master Richard “Earthquake” Anderson, and so the name became Earthquake and the Tremors.

Anderson was well-known in his own right. He was connected to the Youngbloods, who are best-known for their flower power anthem “Get Together.”

That song features the memorable chorus: “C’mon people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together try to love one another right now.”

McDaniel’s band opened for the Youngbloods, rubbed elbows with other legends of the era, such as Janis Joplin, and eventually shortened their name to the Tremors. 

It was a crazy time to be young and playing in a band, McDaniel said.

“It was pretty nuts,” he said. “It was truly sex, drugs and rock and roll. I’m one of the lucky ones who lived through that. A lot of the other guys I played with didn’t make it. They overdosed, or their liver blew up, or they went to prison.”

Grunge Destroyed Hair Metal

The mid- to late 1980s were dominated by catchy pop music and a brand of harder rock frequently called “glam metal” or “hair metal.”

That included such bands as Poison and Cinderella. They traded the heavy riffs and doom and gloom of ’70s metal bands like Black Sabbath for flashy clothes, big hair, catchy tunes and lyrics mostly about chasing romance and partying.  

Grunge was a return to a darker, heavier music and lyrics. The Seattle-based giants of the genre included Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.

But Nirvana paved the way.

Propelled by the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” their 1991 album “Nevermind” hit stratospheric sales and changed the music scene practically overnight. 

Grunge musicians traded the spandex and hair spray of the glam metal bands for old sweaters and ripped jeans. Their songs delved into such subjects as alienation, addiction and mental health struggles. 

True to that theme, Cobain — who had long struggled with severe depression — died by suicide at age 27 in 1994.

His bandmate, drummer Dave Grohl, put down his drumsticks, picked up a guitar and started singing as the frontman for the Foo Fighters, who are still massively successful. 

McDaniel said he was aware of the meteoric rise of Nirvana and the grunge movement, but he never really listened to the music.

It was after his time. By then, he’d moved back to Casper and adopted a quieter, more settled lifestyle.

But he and other musicians of his generation appreciated how grunge laid waste to the ’80s hair metal scene.

“The whole hair band thing, we were not into that. We were not into the spandex. In fact, we were making fun of it,” he said.

And although he never listened to much Nirvana, he loves some of the Foo Fighters’ music.

“It’s not simple stuff,” McDaniel said. “They have great arrangements. It’s not my style of music, but man, they are good.”

‘Small Potatoes’

Miller said being part of Wyoming garage band craze of the 1970s was immense fun, and there was plenty of talent in Rawlins.

But the Casper bands set the gold standard.

His bands were successful enough to earn him some spending money in high school, but “we were small potatoes compared to those Casper bands. Those guys were really good,” Miller said. 

McDaniel said he doesn’t really know why Casper produced the best bands of the era.

He’d like to think that perhaps the Eddies were good enough that they inspired others to hit that same level of quality. 

The golden age of Wyoming garage bands eventually faded. But while the local music scene might not be as loud and prominent as it was back then, it’s still alive and well, McDaniel said. 

“There’s still a lot going on with local music. I think it’s just mostly in the breweries now,” he said.

McDaniel still joins some of his fellow old school musicians for gigs in Seattle and elsewhere across the country.

But these days, he spends more time close to home, writing soundtrack music for Wyoming filmmaker Dennis Rollins.

That’s satisfying, he said. It harkens back to the old days, as the Tremors wrote much of the music they played, rather than simply covering other artists. 

And perhaps, he mused, that also might have helped inspire a young Cobain.

“We were doing a lot of our own original music,” McDaniel said. “And maybe he saw us one night and thought, ‘If these yahoos can write stuff, maybe I can write music too.’”

Contact Mark Heinz at mark@cowboystatedaily.com

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.