A hand-drawn poster from July 9, 1989 advertised an 8:30 p.m. concert featuring “SEATTLE’S SENSATIONAL NIRVANA + THE DEBUT OF PITTSBURGH’S OWN: WORM ART.” The venue—a Masonic Temple that had been renamed “The Sonic Temple” only for the summer of 1989—was located in Wilkinsburg, a Pittsburgh borough about ten minutes away from Carnegie Mellon University by car.
This would be an unusual place for Nirvana to play, but it was July 9, 1989—less than a month after the band released their first album, Bleach, and only two weeks after they kicked off their first U.S. tour. The World Wide Web was less than five months old, so the only way to spread the word was through live music—literally, word of mouth.
Twenty people attended the show.
Nirvana’s name alone wasn’t enough to draw a big crowd yet. That’s why the concert poster featured a black and white grid girl with a flag drawn down to her right and those catchy epithets like “Seattle’s Sensational Nirvana”; the poster was made to draw people to the show with the pomp and flash of what looked like an advertisement for a WWE title fight.
The members of Nirvana were still raw performers. When bassist Krist Novoselic kept botching the first fifteen seconds of “About a Girl” during the show, he stepped into a nearby doorway so he could concentrate without any eyes on him. According to a fan-made online archive, almost a third of their set was either non-album material or premature Nevermind teasers.
Cobain himself wore black converse, white crew socks, a faded forest green T-shirt with bleach splotches, and 4-inch seam shorts that matched the red and white baroque floral carpet on the sixth floor of this former Masonic Temple. He looked like a kid. His hair was armpit length—longer than the blonde bob he would sport five years later on Rolling Stone’s cover. It swirled around his head like a dust storm and made photographs of his face impossible.
Cobain—and Nirvana—didn’t have an identity yet.
But, this isn’t a story about Nirvana. It’s a story about the bands of Pittsburgh who disappeared after this concert, and the quest to find them again.
***
Worm Art never existed. Nirvana’s concert archive explains that the name was a typo on the poster, which should have been spelled Worm Mart. But the band might have well not existed at all—the first Google search result of Worm Mart is a massive database about, you guessed it, worms. The only way to find out about them is to know who to ask.
Jesse Prentiss—brother of Worm Mart member Benjamin Prentiss, and attendee that night—is one such person. Now 54 years old, he’s got silver lobe earrings and a bald head save for a mohawk that’s been shaved down to a patch of hair on the top of his skull.
Currently, he’s a self-described “ubiquitous sideman, infrequent soloist” who runs an open stage at Mr. Smalls Theatre, a legendary Pittsburgh venue that’s attracted the likes of Snoop Dog, Jack White, and Arctic Monkeys.
But in 1989, Jesse was the drummer for Ver-men from Venus. They were a student band from Mt. Lebanon High School in suburban Pittsburgh, playing mostly at empty garages, house parties, holiday shows, and their local recreation center. During these gigs, the Ver-men were six strong, but on July 9, Jesse was at The Sonic Temple with just two other band members: Dan London, lead guitarist, and my uncle, bassist.
Jesse told me that Worm Mart normally went by “The Hester Prynnes” and performed covers of New Wave artists. He also told me The Prynnes and the Ver-men shared a rehearsal space—the Prentiss brothers’ parents’ attic—which entailed overlapping practices. They’d play shows together, too, even though The Hester Prynnes sounded more like The Police and the Ver-men were closer to Talking Heads. The boundary between the bands’ names didn’t matter as much as just making some damn music.
This was a true DIY scene, and this kind of fungibility is probably what inspired The Hester Prynnes to change their name and identity for one night and one night only. According to Jesse, “they just decided they wanted to be more of a thrashy, hard rock punk thing.” And that’s exactly what they did. In the week leading up to the concert at The Sonic Temple, they wrote eleven original rock songs.
***
These songs no longer exist—not even their names. Only Nirvana’s setlist was archived from this concert. All that we know about Worm Mart’s songs, or all that we think we know, comes from the grapevine.
Jesse, Dan, and my uncle don’t remember the songs themselves, just that Nirvana hated them. Kurt Cobain might have said some snarky comment, he might have told them they were garbage to their faces, or he might have just been poking fun at them—we don’t know. This was 35 years ago. What we do know is that by some mode of communication, Kurt Cobain made it clear that he thought Worm Mart was terrible.
A fight between the bands ensued, and the night’s cover image emerged: Kurt Cobain, splayed on the baroque red and white floral carpet, surrounded by the baby blue walls on the sixth floor of The Sonic Temple, tripped by a member of Worm Mart.
That’s the whole story. I wish I could add more details, but there’s absolutely no evidence any of this ever happened besides what we know by word of mouth. I remember hearing a version of the “Nirvana incident” from my uncle when I was a kid. Back then, I thought that Ver-men from Venus opened for Nirvana and so, I was under the impression that one of them was the one who tripped Kurt Cobain. I didn’t even know Worm Mart existed until I talked to Dan and Jesse.
But, it was during my conversations with these two that I also discovered that they didn’t even stay to watch Nirvana perform. Dan went to a nearby diner after Worm Mart finished, and he recalls hearing half of some Nirvana song behind a hallway door before he left; Jesse was talking with some friends outside The Sonic Temple while Nirvana played six stories up.
That’s the thing about 1989. Information traveled slower, which meant “the underground” was smaller—or at least more contained. Nirvana could extend their reach all they wanted with college radio stations like KCMU (now, KEXP) in Seattle, but this was local—for the most part, kids in Pittsburgh like Jesse, Dan, and my uncle had no idea who Nirvana were before the show at The Sonic Temple.
Even if they wanted to, they had no reason to record what they saw, much less stay. Like Jesse said, Nirvana’s band members were “just some kids from another city. They came into town, they played, and they got enough gas money to get to the next one. That was the way things worked back then.”
By the mid to late 1990s, search engines started to document everything, everywhere. In 1989, though, the memory of the July 9th concert was still sacredly arbitrary. The real story belonged to who knew who and who heard what: the people in the right place at the right time. And it survived by word of mouth.
I, for one, am grateful any memories exist from 35 years ago, even if they arrive to us with all sorts of holes.
***
You probably know a band like Ver-men from Venus. Before they disappeared in the early 90s, they were a high school band composed of students who met each other coincidentally—by going to the same school, being next door neighbors, living in the same city. Their rehearsals were less about trying to fine tune a piece so they could make it big and more about just learning what sounded good on their instruments. I mean that literally.
When the band first formed a year or so before The Sonic Temple concert, no one besides Jesse really knew what they were doing. So, as my uncle recalls, they “spent a lot of time listening to records. You actually had to listen to them and play it wrong 30 times before you figured out how to play.”
This is a pretty generic story about the beginning of a high school band, but what made Ver-men unique in Pittsburgh’s late 1980s DIY scene was the fact that they eventually stopped trying to just emulate Talking Heads records; they started to make original songs.
By the time they reached their prime, Jesse explained that college student bands at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh had already been putting pressure on local venues to move away from cover bands and make room for original ones. Unlike the mainstream radio stations, which played what Jesse called “crappy classic rock or pop stuff,” WRCT at CMU and WPTS at Pitt put on bands with names like The Jesus Lizard. There was a growing demand for the alternative in Pittsburgh throughout the early 1980s, which coincided with the rise of a few new hubs for live, original music: the Electric Banana, Graffiti, Beehive, and The Sonic Temple.
When the college students in these bands started graduating, some of them stayed musicians, others became producers. But they all eventually orbited around Manny Theiner. Originally a music reviewer for CMU’s campus newspaper, The Tartan, Theiner started bringing in bands to be featured on the university’s radio. After he graduated, he quickly became the kingpin of Pittsburgh’s independent music scene, and by the time 1989 rolled around, it was Theiner, now a show promoter, who booked Nirvana to play The Sonic Temple on July 9th.
Dan remembers Manny being upset at the show’s turnout that night. But more importantly, he remembers what made Ver-men from Venus unique during their run in the early 1990s, and what made them representative of a new trend in Pittsburgh’s music scene: “We were playing our own weird music.”
***
On July 9, 1989, at The Sonic Temple in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, there were three bands present: Nirvana, Worm Mart, and Ver-men from Venus.
At the show, the playing field was relatively level—these were three bands pretty similar in age and obscurity. But in the days, months, and years that would follow, Nirvana would go on to become one of the most influential bands ever—and not just rock bands. Bands. Period.
Worm Mart and Ver-men from Venus would not. Like so many other high school bands from the pre-internet era, they’d become the stuff of Thanksgiving dinner digressions down memory lane and ice-breaker anecdotes for fellow coworkers.
But it would be a mistake to think that being immortalized on the internet could offer a better alternative. The high school bands of today will probably all find themselves on some corner of some server in some data center. This means that even for the ones who fade away, they will still be hunted down in a matter of seconds.
What’s the fun in that?
It forgoes the collective, generative work of remembrance by the disparate people with which the memories originate—in the case of The Sonic Temple concert, the ex-bandmates who were there, the people who were told about what happened (like me), and the people who were told about what was told about that night (like you).
Fragments, blurs, hazes—these are not mistakes to be solved by an extra-somatic, hyper-accurate machine. Information isn’t truth. Gaps are the stuff of actual memory, signs that someone has fought to preserve something in spite of time’s erasure.
This was the basis for Ver-men from Venus’ appeal in the first place: people wanted authenticity. They still do—to feel something that’s sacred because it isn’t mass-manufactured, to remember something that is traceable. Real. Something with a source, a line of transmitters, a community of storytellers. Something like Ver-men from Venus—a band whose story has gaps which can only begin to be filled by those who have cared enough to remember.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
