The 1993 concert that Nirvana couldn’t stand watching: ‘We didn’t like many of them’
Nirvana weren’t a band that was deadset on following rules every single time they made a new record.
They were already a freak of nature when they first arrived on the rock and roll scene and decimated the entire Sunset Strip, but when everyone expected them to be the new pinup stars, Kurt Cobain wasn’t going to give them the time of day at all. He felt that the band needed to remain true to themselves, and that meant almost missing out on some of the greatest gigs that they ever played.
Then again, Cobain wasn’t above making the kinds of tunes that were meant to upset people. No one in their right mind would have been able to make the same kind of discordant noise that he did throughout In Utero, and when they went up onstage for certain festivals, there were many times when he was seen teasing the melody of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, only to forget playing the song completely and moving on to something else.
That might have been absolutely infuriating to the average rock fan, but Cobain didn’t cater to them. Everything he did needed to have an artsy slant to it whenever he made a new record, and while he was capable of doing a lot more than a bunch of heavy riffs, the idea of them toning things down wasn’t exactly on their minds when they first got the idea of making their version of MTV Unplugged.
The premise itself was fairly novel for the time, but when Dave Grohl talked about the band watching the show on their own, they felt that the whole thing was a load of crap, saying, “We’d seen the other Unpluggeds and didn’t like many of them. Most bands would treat them like rock shows – play their hits like it was Madison Square Garden, except with acoustic guitars.” And when you look at the ones that were previously on, you can see why Nirvana were hesitant.
It’s bad enough trying to shoehorn an arena-style show into an intimate setting, and while Kiss was turning over a new leaf in the 1980s by taking off the makeup, the idea of all of them trying to play a tune like ‘Goin’ Blind’ with acoustic guitars only emphasises how gross Gene Simmons always was. But it’s not like the grunge icons couldn’t find their way into the mix if they had the right idea.
Other executives would have been pissed to hear that they weren’t going to play any of their hits outside of ‘Come As You Are’, but Cobain felt that this was a chance for them to play a more intimate show. LL Cool J practically turned the whole thing into a spectacle when he played, but there’s a far more organic build over Nirvana’s show, from ‘About A Girl’ kicking everything off to Cobain eventually working his voice until it’s raw on the cover of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’.
And while it’s not easy to watch the performance knowing what would happen to Cobain later, this could have been a sign of things to come for them had he lived. Cobain was already a big fan of REM’s Automatic for the People, and the thought of them making a more subdued record made a lot more sense given how well their songs like ‘Dumb’ and ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ translated in a live setting.
It was possible for them to make the best unplugged record that the rock and roll world had ever heard, but Cobain was already moving much too fast for the rest of the world to keep up with him. As soon as we had a handle on him, he was gone, and all that was left was a record like this that put every single Unplugged performance to shame by the time it made it to air.
