Nirvana’s Final Song Surfaces

Nirvana’s final completed recording, “You Know You’re Right,” has gained mythic status during the eight years it has remained officially unreleased.

Now the recording has surfaced, unauthorized--first on Internet file-sharing services and this week on radio. In Los Angeles, KROQ-FM (106.7) played the song Monday and Tuesday, then received a cease-and-desist order that a station spokesman says it is honoring (though it was heard there again on Thursday).

Even if the song is banished from the airwaves, the exposure it’s receiving will probably make its official release--presumably as part of a Nirvana anthology release planned before Christmas--anticlimactic.

In any case, the song stands above the rock crowd as much today as it would have eight years ago. With its insistently menacing two-note figure and Kurt Cobain’s deadpan delivery of his sarcastic lyrics of self-recrimination and despair, it’s perhaps too easy to hear the song as a harbinger of his suicide, which came just four months after the Seattle recording session: “Things have never been so swell / I have never been so well,” he sings, then screams, “Pain!”

Interscope/Geffen Records officials will not comment about the planned anthology, though reportedly it will be one CD rather than the multi-disc set once planned for release a year ago.

“You Know You’re Right” has been part of the ugly legal wrangling between Nirvana’s two surviving members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, and Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, but the scheduling of the anthology suggests that recent reports of a settlement are accurate.

Love said last week on Howard Stern’s radio show that a settlement had been reached, and according to a clerk in King County Superior Court in Seattle, all previously scheduled hearings for the lawsuit have been pulled from the calendar, further suggesting that a settlement has been reached.

An attorney for Grohl and Novoselic said Thursday that he could not comment on the matter.