LIVE NIRVANA SESSIONS HISTORY Early 1994 - Bedroom, Cobain residence, Seattle, WA, US View in Google Maps

  • Kurt Cobain (vocals, guitar)
  • [O] Do Re Mi
Source ID Quality Complete Runtime Lowest Gen Tracks Featured Notes
AUD #1 8.0 0:04:27 CD(X)>FLAC
  • Do Re Mi
  • This source is also known as "WTLO Reference Disc 12, track 16."

Details of this recording first emerged in late 1994, when Courtney Love gave an interview to Rolling Stone's David Fricke. Responding to a question about Cobain's unpublished works, Love cited Do Re Mi (or Dough, Ray and Me) as among the more rounded compositions. Love gushed, Every part of it is really catchy. He was calling it Dough, Ray and Me. I thought it was a little corny. It was the last thing he wrote on our bed. The chorus was Dough, Ray and me/Dough, Ray and me, and then it was Me and my IV. I had asked him after Rome to freeze his sperm. So there's this whole thing about freezing your uterus. (1)

Then, in 2002—amid a legal dispute between Novoselic, Grohl and The Cobain Estate—Chicago rock critic, Jim DeRogatis, was invited to review a selection of the recordings that Love had stockpiled, including the highly coveted Do Re Mi. The sound quality is sketchy, to say the least, Derogatis reported. But as soon as that famously gruff voice kicks in, it's vital, entrancing, and impossible to ignore. The song boasts a beautiful, Beatlesesque melody in the tradition of About a Girl, the standout track from Bleach. In addition to an endearingly rough guitar solo, its other outstanding feature is the moaned/whined/chanted repetition of Dough/Ray/Me, Do/Re/Mi over and over during a long and climactic finale. (2)

Parties eventually reconciled and Do Re Mi was released on 2004's With The Lights Out box-set.

  1. Fricke, David, 1994. Life After Death, Rolling Stone, [online] Available at: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/courtneylove/articles/story/5937442/life_after_death.
  2. DeRogatis, Jim, 2002. A Piece of Kurt Cobain, [online] Available at: http://www.jimdero.com/News2002/CobainMar10.htm.

© Alex Roberts. Last modified: February 22 2024