"Scentless Apprentice" is a song by the American rock band Nirvana, written by vocalist and guitarist Kurt Cobain, drummer Dave Grohl, and bassist Krist Novoselic. It is the second track on their third and final studio album In Utero, released in September 1993.
Based on the novel Perfume by Patrick Süskind, "Scentless Apprentice" is unique among Nirvana songs in that the main guitar riff was written by Grohl, rather than Cobain. The band briefly considered releasing it as the album's second single, following "Heart-Shaped Box," but no single for the song was released by the time of Cobain's suicide in April 1994.
Early history
"Scentless Apprentice" was written during a band rehearsal in 1992. Unlike most Nirvana songs, the guitar riff was written by Grohl, rather than Cobain. "It was such a cliché grunge Tad riff that I was reluctant to even jam on it," Cobain told Michael Azerrad, in the 1993 Nirvana biography, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. "But I decided to write a song with that just to make [Grohl] feel better, to tell you the truth, and it turned out really cool." Cobain added the descending guitar riff played over the main riff and arranged the song, while Novoselic helped compose the song's second section. "I think most of the reason that song sounds good is because of the singing style and the guitar parts I do over the top of the basic rhythm," Cobain told Azerrad, "But hell, that was great." It is the only song on In Utero on which all three band members received songwriting credits.
The earliest known recording is an instrumental studio jam, recorded on October 6, 1992, featuring former Scratch Acid drummer Rey Washam on drums, along with Grohl on guitar and Novoselic on bass. The first recording featuring Cobain is a boombox-recorded rehearsal demo, over nine minutes long, that was released on the posthumous Nirvana box set, With the Lights Out, in 2004.
"Scentless Apprentice" was first recorded in the studio by Craig Montgomery at BMG-Ariola studios in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in January 1993. This demo version was closer in duration and structure to the finished version of the song, although it featured unfinished lyrics. The song was debuted live shortly before this version was recorded, on January 16, 1993 at the Hollywood Rock Festival in São Paulo, Brazil, and performed again shortly after, on January 23, 1993 at the Hollywood Rock Festival in Rio de Janeiro. Although the song's structure had been trimmed by that point, as evidenced by the studio version, the latter of these performances still developed into an extended jam that lasted nearly 20 minutes. During this performance, Cobain spat into the lenses of the TV cameras filming the show, and also exposed himself to one of the cameras, in a sequence that he referred to as "the penis and flower petal face in camera performance piece" in the posthumously released Journals. Footage of this part of the performance appears in the 1994 home video, Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!.
In Utero
The final studio version of "Scentless Apprentice" was recorded by Steve Albini in February 1993, at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. This version was released on the band's third and final studio album, In Utero, in September 1993.
The song was recorded on February 13, the first day of the In Utero sessions, under the working title "Chuck Chuck Fo Fuck", a reference to the rhythm of the guitar riff. According to Albini, Cobain recorded two vocal takes for the song: one main vocal take, and a second "where Kurt was just singing parts of the song to emphasize them or parts of the song with a different sound quality."
Post-In Utero
The final live performance of "Scentless Apprentice" was at Nirvana's second-to-last show, at Hala Tivoli in Ljubljana, Slovenia on February 27, 1994.
Composition
Music
"Scentless Apprentice" is a grunge and hard rock song that runs for a duration of three minutes and forty-eight seconds. According to the sheet music published at Musicnotes.com by BMG Rights Management, it is written in the time signature of common time, with a moderately fast rock tempo of 111 beats per minute. "Scentless Apprentice" is composed in the key of F Minor, while Cobain's vocal range spans one octave and four notes, from a low of B4 to a high of F5. The song has a basic sequence of F5–E5/C–F5–E5/C–F5–E5/C–F5 in the verses and F6–F7–Fmaj7–F during the refrain as its chord progression.