The one tour Kurt Cobain refused to perform: “No point”
Touring can be both the best and worst experience for any band. It might be exhilarating to have millions of fans singing your songs back to you night after night, but the toll of little to no sleep, constant travel, and the pressure to always put on a happy face can be overwhelming. While playing on tour is hardly a chore for most artists, Kurt Cobain struggled with it. When Nirvana was asked to put together a junket for Nevermind, Cobain found it difficult to muster the enthusiasm to perform on demand.
When Nirvana’s second album first came out, though, no one could have predicted the amount of damage it was going to do. The biggest bands in the world were artists like U2 and Van Halen, and hearing a small rock album from a former indie group from the Northwest didn’t exactly sound promising.
In fact, the whole idea that Geffen Records had for Nirvana wasn’t exactly about getting everyone’s hopes up. They had signed Sonic Youth in the past, and their logic was that if Nirvana were able to sell half of what the New York noise rock outfit could do, then that would pay the bills for a little while.
There was only one tiny problem: it started with the juggernaut that is ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Despite being the songwriter, Cobain himself probably didn’t even realise what he had hit on here, capturing that spirit of adolescence and teen angst in the 1990s that everyone needed to hear after years of MTV schlock.
Suddenly, people weren’t just reacting to Nirvana like another great band. This was a movement that was going to take over the world, which meant that everyone had to radically change their plans for what to do. Since no one had predicted such high demand for them, the CD manufacturers at Geffen eventually had to focus all their attention on printing more records for Nirvana to get them into stores.
It’s one thing to have albums to sell, but did you ever notice that there aren’t that many documented concerts from that time? There are still some key festival slots open and the pre-fame shows from places like The Paramount, but once everything blew up, Cobain fell out of love with performing the material.
Outside of his growing resentment towards ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, Cobain said he struck down any chance of doing a promotional tour for Nevermind, saying, “One of the biggest reasons we didn’t go on tour with Nevermind was really big was because I thought: ‘Fuck this, why should I go on tour. I have this chronic pain in my stomach, I could die on this tour, I’m selling a lot of records, I can live the rest of my life off a million dollars’. But there’s no point in trying to explain that to a fifteen-year-old kid.”
There was probably a little bit of embarrassment that came with getting big, too. Cobain had still thought of Nirvana as an indie band, so to have them join the same festivals that housed classic rock acts did nothing to endear him to the jocks that were turning up at shows now.
Then again, one can only imagine the money that the group was leaving on the table when calling it off. They had reached the same kind of iconic status that was reserved for only the biggest musicians, but it takes someone with a strong frame of mind to tell when playing stadiums too quickly becomes a disaster.
