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I went back to New Jersey for my 20th college reunion last spring, and toward the end of a day of thunderstorms and mud and Rolling Rock I found myself speaking with a classmate named John Zele. John said he'd heard me being interviewed by the sonorous Bob Edwards on XM Satellite Radio, and he thought I'd handled myself with a modicum of dignity. But he also felt compelled to tell me that I'd made a mistake.

He said I'd spent too much time gasbagging about Nirvana. "Nirvana was not a Gen X band," John said.

I might've been taken aback - I mean, huh, wasn't Nirvana the Gen X band? wasn't Kurt Cobain supposed to be our John Lennon? didn't everyone automatically know that? - except that John was echoing something that I wound up hearing over and over when X Saves the World came out in hardcover.

I did a reading at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, for instance, and about 25 people - probably a quarter of the audience - had shown up because they were members of a "Gen X Support Group" on Meetup.com. I was very psyched about this, since I'd devoted a short section of the book to Meetup's power to mobilize the masses. The healthy turnout seemed to validate my point. I decided to read the passage about the breakthrough of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," mostly because I think it's got the right momentum for a hammy performance up at the podium, but within minutes I could sense that the Gen X support-groupers, who were clustered together to my right, were disappointed. Maybe even pissed off. I could feel it. Here they'd come all the way from Sherman Oaks or Santa Monica or wherever and they didn't want to hear about Kurt Cobain.

Afterwards I went across the street with the support-groupers to have some tacos and margaritas at a Mexican restaurant on Colorado Boulevard, and they bluntly confirmed my impression. They said they'd wanted to hear me talk about the music of their (and my) high school and college years - the Smiths, Run-D.M.C., the Psychedelic Furs, R.E.M., Joan Jett, the Pixies, the Pretenders, Haircut 100, New Order, Simple Minds, John Hughes movie soundtracks, Nena's "99 Luftballons" and ABC's "The Look of Love" and Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" That grunge crap? Meh.

Oops.

I few days later I found myself at a lectern at the Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle, and on a lark - because I was in Seattle, right? - I asked the audience if it would be way too crass, predictable, and cheesy for me to read the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" section in, you know, Seattle.

Hands shot up. Voices rang out. "Yes!" they said in unison.

Yes. It would be too crass, predictable, and cheesy. Don't do it.

Gulp.

Somewhere around this point in the book tour I began to wonder: Had I made a terrible miscalculation? Had I devoted a sizable chunk of real estate in XSTW to a generational moment that my generation didn't give a fuck about?

Was this just a classic case of Gen X contentiousness, or were these readers 100% right? Maybe I'd committed the sin of obviousness. Maybe I should've focused on Pavement, instead. Or Liz Phair. Or no, shit, maybe I should've wheeled off in a different direction altogether and examined the socio-political significance of power ballads and hair metal. (Well, I did include that section in praise of Boston's "Don't Look Back," and there are a few lines about the Scorpions...) I thought about how Dave Eggers had, in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, included that scene in which he and Toph drive along the California coastline singing along to Journey's "Any Way You Want It." Yeah, damn it, Eggers was smart. Journey -that's what people wanted.

In retrospect, okay, I'm willing to concede that I might've written a bit too much about Nirvana, and I realize that I was totally pushing it when I compared Kurt Cobain's lyrics to those of the English poet John Donne, but I still think it made sense to give Nirvana some serious airtime. When "Smells Like Teen Spirit" crashed through in the fall of 1991, it had a huge impact on me and on a lot of people I knew. I've got an essay coming up in the March issue of Details about the 15th anniversary of Kurt's suicide, and when I was doing the reporting for that piece I found myself revisiting the way it felt when Nevermind stunned a bovine music business by morphing into a commercial monster.

My friend Matthew Zapruder is now an acclaimed poet, a member of a band called the Figments, and an editor at Wave Books, an independent publishing house in Seattle, but at the time of the Nevermind explosion he was a recent college graduate paying $250 a month in rent in San Francisco's Lower Haight. "We would walk down Fell Street and literally from every single window Nevermind was blaring," Zapruder said to me the other day. "We would go to bars and the record would come on and the bar would just explode with people jumping around, dancing, going crazy, hugging each other. I'm not kidding. You probably remember. The popularity of Nirvana was like a drug for us. We were quite sure the world had changed, that from now on `our' music would be forever recognized for what it was - the best - and only great bands would be #1, and group kissing would become standard behavior, and other serious beautiful delusions."

I mean, have you played Nevermind lately? If not, do so. It's a pretty potent experience, especially if you're, say, cruising off to Whole Foods in a minivan. "The music still sounds as vital and exciting and relevant now as it did then," Butch Vig, Nevermind's producer, told me a few days ago. "I mean, a lot of records wear out with time, or they sound dated. But Nevermind still sounds fantastic. I look back at those sessions fondly. Kurt could be difficult in the sense that he was very moody, so he'd come in and be in a great mood, and then in the middle of the afternoon he would just go sit in a corner by himself. He was very sort of bipolar in that way; he would have these extreme mood swings. And you just had to wait until he snapped out of it to be able to get the right kind of performance out of him."

I don't want to get into Kurt Cobain's death here - I've already written too much about having written too much about Nirvana. All I'll say is what I said (way more extensively) in X Saves the World: The breakthrough of Nevermind was a Cooler King moment, one of those rare, lovely Things That Aren't Supposed to Happen. And when it did happen in 1991, it gave a lot of us a fleeting but stirring glimpse of a mainstream American pop culture that didn't always have to be so lame.

But sure, in the next book I promise I'll write more about Haircut 100.

Jeff Gordiner, X Saves the World, Penguin, Penguin Books