Over The Edge Artist: Wipers Release Date: 1983

Kurt's "Top 50" list ultimately included three albums by Portland, Oregon's Wipers: Is This Real?, Youth of America and 1983's Over the Edge. Singer-guitar monster Greg Sage's band was ferociously chugging and deeply into its own alienation -- and operated independently of the music-business machine -- years before anyone else in the Pacific Northwest caught on to their techniques. Nirvana and Hole both eventually covered Wipers songs; "So Young," from this album, could very easily be mistaken for a Cobain original.

Singles 1-12 Artist: Melvins Release Date: 1997

If you were a punk rock kid in Aberdeen, Washington in the mid-'80s, the Melvins were IT: they spiked their hardcore with brutal metal, they could play scorchingly fast or tortuously slow, they got to play in Olympia and Seattle and their practice space was the locus of the local punk scene. They also had a knack for doing screwed-up things on their recordings, and the 1996 series of singles collected here is classic Melvins -- tributes to the Germs, Flipper and Butthole Surfers, corrosive audio experiments and straight-up blasts of the grunge style they helped to invent.

Jamboree Artist: Beat Happening Release Date: 1988

In some ways, Kurt never quite fit in with Olympia's K Records, their flagship band Beat Happening and the "love-rock" scene around them -- too much tummy-rubbing, not enough gut-punch -- but he loved it enough that he got the K logo tattooed on his left arm, and its fascination with childhood fed his own. 1988's Jamboree, evidently his favorite Beat Happening record, is half pastel nostalgia, half savage dread, a la-la pop album that collapses into a puddle of screeching noise at the end.

Bayou Country Artist: Creedence Clearwater Revival Release Date: 1969 Like a lot of other punk bands, Nirvana adored classic rock; unlike most of their peers, they embraced it -- one of Cobain and Novoselic's first attempts to play music together was a Creedence cover band. Kurt cited this 1969 album as a favorite of his, and you can hear a lot of John Fogerty's throaty bellow on "Born on the Bayou" in the way he taught himself to sing; you can also hear how Creedence's sturdy chording and simple melodies resurfaced in Nirvana's music. What Nirvana might also have picked up from Creedence, though, was the art of self-reinvention and presentation: remember, Fogerty's really a Cali kid, not a bayou native.

LiliPUT Artist: Kleenex / LiliPUT Release Date: 2003 "Anything by Kleenex" was the way Kurt usually put it on his lists of favorite records. The young Swiss women who recorded first as Kleenex and then as LiLiPUT between 1978 and 1983 had a garbled discography, and this compilation of everything by them didn't appear in the US until 2001. So start with their delirious, glorious singles "Split," "Ain't You" and "Eisiger Wind," full of shrieks and chirps, and powered by the rhythms of people who are determined to play their way and nobody else's.

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