The Kurt Cobain-Decorated Melvan Is the Archetypal Tour Van, in All its Filthy Charm

The guitar player wrenches the column shifter, and the van rolls drowsily out of suburbia. The singer farts and yells, “Window!” The bass player groans. A Fritos bag rustles. Black Flag rages on a boombox. The pedal drops. The engine wheezes. The highway opens up.

Another punk-rock concert tour is underway.

This story originally appeared in Volume 15 of Road & Track.

The dream of a musician’s life on the road may reflect in the stainless façade of a luxury tour bus, but more often, the reality plays out between the steel panels of a humble trade van. For decades, ladder-on-frame vans have carried payloads of impoverished punk, heavy-metal, indie, and other acts, like ramshackle, heat-seeking missiles homing in on a shadowy audience desperate to be found.

Aging tour vans supported young outfits that flamed out after a few gigs and those that launched the careers of legends. They helped put tiny music venues on the map—like O’Cayz ­Corral in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights, Ohio—and provided a moving platform for hardworking bands lacking chart success to sustain over time. One of those bands is the Melvins.

Formed in Washington State during the early Eighties, the Melvins, with their heavy experimental rock and album prolificacy, earned themselves a global following, which they’ve cultivated by touring relentlessly, usually in vans, for more than three decades.

These days, the Melvins crisscross the U.S. mostly in Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans, according to drummer Dale Crover, but they started out in a two-tone 1972 Dodge Royal Sportsman once owned by singer and guitarist Buzz Osborne. Dubbed “the Melvan,” it hauled the band to gigs around central Washington, sometimes with a friend named Kurt Cobain at the wheel, and on the Melvins’ first nationwide tour in 1986.

“We were on this tour that we shouldn’t have been on at all,” Crover remembers. The Melvan “had already broken down a bunch before, many times. It was already old by then, and it was pretty beat-up. At every gas stop, it was a quart low of something.”