Spencer Elden, who appears as the Nevermind baby on the cover of Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind, is now 30 years old but he was 4 months old when he appeared on the record’s cover. He is now suing the band and as part of the lawsuit, the paperwork states, “Defendants intentionally commercially marketed Spencer’s pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense.”
Nevermind Baby Seeks $150,000 in Damages
Elden is seeking $150,000 in damages from each of the defendants, including surviving Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, photographer Kirk Weddle, the record label, and Courtney Love, the executor of Kurt Cobain’s estate.
The photographer who is named in the lawsuit, Kirk Weddle, was a personal friend of Elden’s father. Elden’s lawyer says the image of the dollar bill on the front cover makes the baby resemble “a sex worker.”
The lawsuit also claimed that Elden’s parents never signed a release allowing his image to be used and that his parents were only compensated $200 for the photo to be taken.
Eldon Claims “extreme and permanent emotional distress”
The court filing also states that Geffen Records, Nirvana’s label, claimed that a sticker was going to be used to cover Elden’s private area on the album cover. Elden would claim the whole experience gave him “extreme and permanent emotional distress”. It remains to be seen whether the lawsuit will be successful or not but how did Elden end up on the cover?
The whole story starts with Geffen Records’ Art Director, Robert Fisher who was a huge fan of Nirvana before Nevermind even came out. He convinced the record label to let him work on the project.
“Kurt wanted a baby being born underwater…” – Robert Fisher, Art Director for Geffen Records
Fisher met with Kurt Cobain who expressed a concept he had for the front cover with Fisher remembering to Milanote.com, “Kurt wanted a baby being born underwater. Back then, before the Internet you would have to go down to the local bookstore and go through child birthing books and try to find photos. So that’s what I did. But it was just like … there’s no way we can make an album cover out of this. I couldn’t find any really good pictures and they were all way too graphic to use. So they needed an actual baby to shoot.”
It was Kurt Cobain’s idea to include a fish hook on the album cover to make it more menacing. There was a lot of discussion over what to include on the end of the fish hook. One idea was a CD to represent music, another was a burrito while somebody else suggested a dog.
With a concept now established, Geffen Records just needed a photographer to shoot the cover. Fisher would recall in the same interview, “They used to have these things called workbooks — big thick catalogues where photographers would buy a page or two and they’d send them out to creatives to try and get work. And this one guy in there, one of his tag-lines was he specialised in ‘submerged humans’. I thought, ‘That’s our guy!’. That was Kirk Weddle.”
“I’m shooting kids all this week, why don’t you meet me at the Rose Bowl, throw your kid in the drink?” – Kirk Weedle, photographer
Upon being hired, Weddle had originally tried to go to an infant swim class to shoot the cover, but the results weren’t good. Weddle happened to know Spencer’s dad who assisted with photo shoots. Spencer’s dad recalled to NPR “He called us up and was like, ‘Hey Rick, wanna make 200 bucks and throw your kid in the drink?,’ I was like, ‘What’s up?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I’m shooting kids all this week, why don’t you meet me at the Rose Bowl, throw your kid in the drink?’ And we just had a big party at the pool, and no one had any idea what was going on.”
Several months after the photo shoot, Spencer ’s father was driving along Sunset Boulevard when he spotted a 9’x9′ picture of his son on the wall of Tower Records. While the family wouldn’t earn a penny more from the photo, Geffen Records would send them a platinum record of Nevermind several months later along with a teddy bear to coincide with Spencer’s first birthday.
NPR caught up with Spencer when he was a senior in high school and he talked about possibly going to West Point and that his friends sometimes joked with him about the cover saying, “My friend is all like, ‘Hey I saw you today.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, I was working all day.’ And he’s like, ‘No, I went to Geffen Records, and you’re on the floor and you’re floating and I stepped on your face. ‘Cause I guess they have floating things where people can walk on me and stuff … so it’s kinda cool.”
“It’s a really weird feeling being a part of someone else’s momentum.” – Spencer Eldon
Years later Spencer would he would be interviewed by Time Magazine revealing his feeling about the album cover saying, “Looking back, it feels kind of stupid doing interviews about it because I had nothing to do with it. It’s a really weird feeling being a part of someone else’s momentum — being caught up in this wake of stuff.”
Interestingly enough, he revealed in the same interview, he had looked into taking legal action against the record label, but nothing came of it at the time saying, “It’s hard not to get upset when you hear about how much money was involved.”
While he would harbour some resentment, Spencer revealed he thought the concept for the artwork was “genius” but wasn’t a fan of seeing his face appearing on merchandising like coffee mugs.
Despite repeated requests, Spencer would never end up meeting any of the surviving members of Nirvana.
In 2016 Spencer was residing in Los Angeles, still living with his mother and selling his art online. Spencer has previously recreated the cover as an older child and adult to mark Nevermind‘s 10th, 20th and 25th anniversaries.
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