1 slot on the Billboard charts. But during much of 1992, as the album continued to sell, Kurt essentially went missing. Courtney was pregnant (she had Frances that August), and Kurt was descending into drug addiction at exactly the same moment he was becoming the biggest star in the world. Nirvana played only a few tour dates during 1992, their biggest commercial year in terms of album sales. But even Kurt’s disappearing act couldn’t stop the cultural shift Nevermind had wrought. As the Seattle music scene continued to gain worldwide attention and other Seattle bands followed Nirvana to the top of the charts, 1992 became the Year of Grunge. Grunge was a media-created label that had both everything to do with Kurt—it wouldn’t have existed without him, or without Nevermind’s success—and at the same time almost nothing to do with him. If the image of Kurt in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video clip, with hair in his face and a striped T-shirt on, had been the indelible vision of 1991 on MTV, 1992 looked like a rocker in cutoff jean shorts, a flannel shirt, and a pair of Doc Martens.
