Did You Know That Fear Factory’s Burton C. Bell Was In The “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Music Video?

While Fear Factory are noted as the forefathers of cyber metal, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is arguably the song that helped Nirvana kill hair metal in the early 90’s. So what do the two have in common? If you had asked us before we heard frontman Burton C. Bell’s interview with MusicFrenzy.net, we would’ve said” not much.” As it turns out, the Fear Factory frontman actually appeared in the music video for Nirvana’s breakout hit.

You can listen to audio of the entire interview over at Blabbermouth. However, here’s what Bell had to share in regards of how he ended up in the music video:

“I was a big Nirvana fan for a long time, and I saw them a bunch of times on the Bleach tour. After seeing them a few times, I’d run into them, a friend of mine actually played on the record, Nevermind — he played cello on ‘Something In The Way’. So we had a copy of that record almost five months before it came out. What happened was that, before the record came out, they had a show in L.A. at the Roxy, and after the show, they threw out flyers saying, ‘Hey, come to our video shoot.’ And so me and my roommate got the flyer with the directions on it and we went to the video shoot the next day. . . And what happened in the video wasn’t even supposed to happen. The audience just went nuts.”

As many times as we’ve seen the music video (who reading this actually hasn’t seen it once? …Didn’t think so), we’ve never found ourselves going “Oh hey, that mosher looks like Burton from Fear Factory!” Then again, we can’t say we’ve ever actually tried looking for him. You can watch “Smells Like Teen Spirit” after the jump in case you want to try and find Bell in the clip. Read more »