“Everybody up on stage”: the true story behind Nirvana’s St Louis riot
There’s a fine line between love and hate and an even finer line between partying and rioting. From Jimi Hendrix to The Clash, history’s most groundbreaking, revolutionary artists have often sparked rioting at their live shows through no fault of their own. Seemingly, when you get hordes of young people hopped up on rock and roll rebellion, it doesn’t take much to push them to violence. Harbingers of the grunge era Nirvana came face to face with this fact during their first and only concert in St Louis back in 1991.
A few months into the new decade, Nirvana had already established themselves as the definitive sound of the 1990s. Prior to their astonishing rise to success, the abrasive sounds of grunge were largely resigned to the grassroots scene of Seattle, Washington. Nirvana managed to bring that musical rebellion and punk spirit firmly into the musical mainstream of the United States, crafting the groundbreaking record Nevermind, which quickly became one the most popular and widespread releases of the decade.
Ever since the very early days of Nirvana, the Kurt Cobain-led outfit was a group that thrived on live performances. Following a long lineage of anarchic punk groups, the trio’s live shows were often noted for their chaos and unpredictability. In short, violence was never out of the question when it came to Nirvana gigs, either in the audience or on stage. Cobain, in particular, was never afraid to let the audience, venue, or security staff know exactly what he thought of them, which often derailed the shows.
Perhaps the most notable example of this endearingly violent stagecraft came less than a month after the release of Nevermind. At the time, the band were arguably the biggest rock outfit in the United States and, given how quickly they amassed such a reputation, their concerts would often attract an audience that was much bigger than the venues could hold. So, when the trio arrived at Mississippi Nights in St Louis, there were more attendees than there were tickets, and tensions were already fairly high.
Nevertheless, the band took to the stage and began their performance without many issues, commencing with a cover of The Vaselines. As the set continued, however, Cobain started to notice that the venue’s security team were being overly heavy-handed with the audience. As Dave Grohl once recounted, “The security guys are being kind of rough with the kids. So, [Cobain] says, ‘Hey, motherfuckers, if you don’t cool it, we’re gonna stop playing.’”
This threat did not seem to deter the security from their authoritarian approach to crowd control. Nirvana stopped the show a few more times before taking matters into their own hands. “We played a couple more songs, and they were rough, so we stopped one more time. We stopped, and we said, ‘You know what, everybody up on stage.’” This well-meaning example of punk defiance did not exactly go to plan, as the hopped-up crowd descended into rioting almost immediately after getting up on stage.
“The whole fucking club got on stage, it was this radical fucking kick-ass riot that was happening,” Grohl recalled while appearing in St Louis with the Foo Fighters. After an initial panic, Nirvana’s drummer was forced to head back into the heart of darkness, rescuing the various pieces of a drumkit he had borrowed from supporting band Urge Overkill in order to complete the show.
By the time the grunge heroes reached their final song, ‘Territorial Pissings’, the gig and the venue around them resembled a natural disaster. Unsurprisingly, Nirvana never returned to the scene of the crime–St Louis–but the riot that defined their appearance in the city spoke to their rapid rise to prominence and the powerful nature of their revolutionary material.
