Polly

This song is about the actual kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl. In 1987, she was returning from a concert in Tacoma, Washington when she was abducted by a man named Gerald Friend. He took her back to his mobile home and raped her. The girl, whose name was not released, was tortured with a whip, a razor, and a blowtorch. She managed to escape when Friend took her for a ride and stopped for gas. He was arrested and sent to jail.

The version of this song that ended up on Nevermind was recorded in Madison, Wisconsin at the studio owned by their producer, Butch Vig. These sessions took place in April 1990, and while pieces of these recordings made it on to the album, the recording of "Polly" was the only one that made it on in its entirety (most of what ended up on the album was recorded with Vig at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California in April 1991). The drummer on this song is not Dave Grohl, but Chad Channing, who was with the band from 1988-1990. When we spoke with Chad in 2013, he explained: "I never even realized that 'Polly,' that version, was from the Madison sessions that made it on Nevermind. I mean, it was, I don't know, almost ten years down the road before someone mentioned that to me. I was like, 'Really?' And I listened to it, I said, 'Okay, that makes sense.' They put me in this smaller room that normally has guitars and stuff like that. I sat there with my ride cymbal, and there were these certain parts where I was just going to hit it. And I thought, 'Well, I'll just accent these things.' Because they talked about having something really sparse in it. And I'm like, 'Well, how sparse? I mean, are we just talking maybe a cymbal hit here or there?' And the consensus was, 'Yeah, something like that. Really mellow.' I went in there and just rolled it. And they said, 'Just put an accent here on this certain part each time it comes around.' So I did. And it was like, 'Okay, that totally works.' So we left it that way."

Nirvana had been playing this for a while before it was released on Nevermind. They recorded it in 1989 in sessions for an Extended Play album called Blew, and an early live performance appears on the album Muddy Banks. Bruce Pavitt, who co-owned Sub Pop Records (Nirvana's label at the time), said of the band's concert performances of this song: "It's completely raging and hypnotic. You would go into a trance. It's one of the things that made their live shows so incredible. But that took a while. That took about a year, from like early '88 to early '89, took about a year for them to really step into that. They were really stepping into their power at that time."