and had a huge influence on Nirvana's sound (probably a helluva lot more than the other way around).
Really??? I find this extremely hard to believe. By the time Cobain met Love in 1992, Nirvana had already released most of their songs. I have the Hole album, Live Through This, which is a great album. But as soon as I heard it, I instantly thought the sound was just like Nirvana.
having grown up in the NW music scene, billf is more correct than shmokes. Cobain and nirvana had not only released most of their songs, but cobain had probably written of imagined any of the remaining ones. The main thing that Love brought to Cobain was an even MORE self destructive environment to spend his final days.
Agreed. Courtney Love had no influence on Cobain's music other than to make it stop a lot earlier than it should have. A lot of the songs on Nirvana's In Utero album (their last studio one) were actually written before Nevermind (the one with Smells Like Teen Spirit), including Heart-Shaped Box, Pennyroyal Tea, All Apologies, Very Ape, and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter. That means they were written before he met Courtney Love.
Cobain wrote or co-wrote a lot of Hole material, including Old Age, Drown Soda, and a bunch of others, but goes uncredited for just about all of it. He also did backing vocals on the original mix of the Live Through This album, but when he died, she had him lowered in the mix. For a while there was a bootleg copy of one of the songs floating around with his vocals still in it. He is thought to have written either all or most of the music on that album.
As for the best debut albums, I'd have to second Ruby Vroom by Soul Coughing and add in a vote for STP's Core.