No band develops in a vacuum; every band starts out thinking, at least a bit, of other musicians that they want to take after or rebel against. But Nirvana was the first great band of actual music snobs: record fiends who wanted to make it very clear exactly what they listened to. They all loved Led Zep and Aerosmith and CCR and Black Sabbath and Kiss and then some more Led Zep on top of that. Mostly, though, Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic had grown up as Pacific Northwest punk rock kids. They hung out with the Melvins in Aberdeen, Washington, were required by circumstance to define their position with respect to K Records and the Olympia scene and carried Flipper and Bad Brains records like shields to ward off poseurs. (Dave Grohl had a roughly equivalent experience growing up in the DC area.) When they hit the big time, they covered their favorite bands, got them to open for Nirvana, wore their T-shirts every chance they got. Kurt even oversaw reissues of his beloved Raincoats' lost work.

In case there was any ambiguity left about who Nirvana considered their ancestors, it's all laid out in Kurt's Journals -- the scribblings of an inveterate listmaker who clearly loved even writing the names of his favorite records, like talismans of good luck and good punk rock karma. Certain discs turn up again and again in Kurt's pantheons of music: some are multiplatinum warhorses (Meet the Beatles, Aerosmith's Rocks), others are hopelessly obscure (Fang's Land Shark, the self-titled Tales of Terror album). Most of them, though, are remarkable American indie-rock and hardcore albums from the '80s, with a few artier European post-punk records and the inevitable Leadbelly album thrown in. They're worth investigating for anyone who loves Nirvana: these are not just the raw materials Cobain and Novoselic and Grohl transmuted into gold, they're what the band aspired to.

The Best Of Leadbelly Artist: Lead Belly Release Date: 2003

When Nirvana played their wrenching cover of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" (a.k.a. "In the Pines") on MTV Unplugged, it looked like an unexpected gesture toward the blues blood that still courses so powerfully through rock's veins. Actually, though, Kurt doesn't seem to have been so into vintage blues in general -- he just loved Leadbelly obsessively (and had previously recorded four Leadbelly songs with Screaming Trees' Mark Lanegan). This collection is a solid introduction to the "King of the Twelve-String Guitar," a roaring ex-con who miraculously pulled joyful music out of his personal horrors.

Surfer Rosa / Come On Pilgrim Artist: The Pixies Release Date: 1988

Kurt called this 1988 album "a die-cast metal fossil from a spacecraft," and some of the Pixies' favorite tricks -- endlessly looping riffs that had never quite been used before, tense clean-toned verses that bloom into explosive, distorted choruses -- showed up on Nevermind a few years later. Steve Albini's drumstick-to-your-skull engineering work here pretty obviously inspired Nirvana to hire him for In Utero, too. But most of what Nirvana got from the Pixies was an attitude: the sense of being off-balance and screaming while keeping one foot in tightly controlled structure.

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