The greatest moments from ‘Nirvana: Unplugged in New York’
The stage set for Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance looked like a funeral, and that was no accident. According to Charles R Cross’ Nirvana biography, it was a directive from Kurt Cobain himself. As we know Cobain now, it was almost certainly a joke. After all, his sense of humour has only become more unsettling in hindsight. Ever actually sat down and listened to I Hate Myself and Want to Die? Exactly.
Quite what this is a joke about is difficult to know, especially three decades later. There are two major options. One is, again, queasily uncomfortable in hindsight. At the time, Cobain had noticed how every other headline about him seemed to be predicting his early death due to his mounting health problems and addiction to heroin. It’s a similar gag to the one he pulled at the Reading Festival in 1992, being pushed onstage in a wheelchair while wearing a hospital gown.
The other option is a little less morbid and fully contextualises what this show meant at the time. Cobain felt this was commercial suicide. At the time, an unplugged show was the antithesis of everything Nirvana represented. It was the domain of the stadium-slaying superstar, where middle-aged white men donned blazers and Gibson acoustics that were more expensive than your apartment to snooze through some dad-rock classics.
Put it this way: Nirvana played their unplugged set in 1993. Earlier that same year, Rod Stewart and Duran Duran had done the same. The year previously, an unplugged set revitalised the career of Eric Clapton. The next unplugged show was from Tony Bennett. You get the idea; the idea that a fiercely independent punk band could do this and retain any of their integrity was ridiculous at the time.
Nirvana, in a very real way, were risking everything by playing this show. They could have gone from the world’s biggest band to a laughing stock in one fell swoop. Yet today, we know that it’s one of their finest moments. Let’s have a look at the five greatest moments from Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged concert.
Top five moments from Nirvana: Unplugged In New York:
5. ‘About A Girl’
For all his punk credentials, Cobain was a pop devotee at heart. The John Lennon obsessive had a knack for melody that rivalled The Beatles legend and his bandmate Paul McCartney. However, he almost always hid them behind screeching guitars and thunderous drums. There were only a few occasions that he let his love of pop simplicity shine through, and this sublime cut from their debut album, Bleach, is the most compelling of all.
Stripped of all distortion and with Dave Grohl uncharacteristically restrained behind the kit, it’s telling that ‘About A Girl’ is the opening song for the whole concert. Welcoming the audience in with one of Cobain’s most winning melodies, but also providing a song that the Fairweather fans in the audience, who they’d also skewer in ‘In Bloom’ wouldn’t have even heard of, let alone heard. It’s a phenomenal choice for an opener, showing a different side to them that also shows those who know that it’s still them at heart.
4. ‘Come As You Are’
Then, being the rascals that they were, they immediately followed it with a hit so big your grandmother could probably hum it. Even transposed onto an acoustic guitar fed through a pedal board Cobain charmingly refers to as his “security blanket”, the riff to ‘Come As You Are’ sends shivers. With that, one can feel the tension in the room break. It’s one thing to take a song like ‘About A Girl’, already one of the lightest and softest moments of the band’s catalogue and make it work unplugged, but this is quite another.
This was a sign that the band had the technical and creative chops to actually adapt their biggest hits to fit their surroundings. That this was no two-bit bunch of slackers who’d settle for thrashing through ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ but this time on an acoustic guitar. Instead, they were a proper rock band who couldn’t just create songs with depth and dynamics but rework their existing songs to match. Look, they even had the cellist Lori Goldston on stage.
3. ‘The Man Who Sold The World’
They may not have had the time to show it off, but Nirvana knew their way around a cover. ‘D-7’ by The Wipers was a regular fixture in their live set, as was ‘Love Buzz’ by Shocking Blue. That’s not even getting into the sneering snippet of ‘More Than A Feeling’ they’d herald the arrival of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in concert with. With their expanded live band and no real restrictions on what could go on in the setlist, it’s only fitting that Nirvana found a new cover to add to their repertoire, and this David Bowie classic is the absolute best of the bunch.
What it also shows off is the range of Cobain’s voice. Of course, we all know now that he was a generational singing talent. At the time, though, he was considered more or less another punk screamer. This song shows what he was capable of without the studio double tracking, which Cobain would have been the first to admit he used as a crutch. Bowie was also beyond flattered, saying in a radio interview with Kurt St Thomas, “I was simply blown away when I found that Kurt Cobain liked my work, and have always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.”
2. The entire Meat Puppets segment
Yes, I’m cheating here, I know. However, considering I’m fairly certain this whole part was there to make sure Cobain could sleep at night after playing this show (as much as he ever could), I think the whole segment deserves a special mention. It was common practice at the time for MTV Unplugged shows to have some form of special guest coming in to do a few songs with the headline act. 10,000 Maniacs had David Byrne stop by, the aforementioned Rod Stewart had Ronnie Wood and, wonderfully, Soul Asylum had Lulu show up.
While the higher-ups at MTV were hoping for an Eddie Vedder or a Tori Amos, Cobain was adamant that he’d give that slot to one of his favourite bands and key influences, the Meat Puppets. Thank God he did, too, because it leads to not only one of the most compelling segments of the show, but the most charming as well. That said, Cobain was also adamant that he wouldn’t change the key of any of the songs to suit his voice better. It works, but only just gives the songs an edge that keeps them from sliding into self-congratulation.
1. ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’
Come on, what else would it be? Not just one of the most compelling live music moments of the decade but of all time. Cobain decided that the show’s closer would be a cover of his “all-time favourite performer,” blues legend Lead Belly. That’s closer full-stop, by the way. The story that there was an encore planned that Cobain refused to play is apocryphal. After this song, the band left the stage, and the crowd was baying for more, so an encore was considered.
The show’s producer, Alex Coletti, told The Ringer: “I said (to the band), ‘Is there anything else you guys wanna do? Now’s the time. You’re not gonna get to do this again.’ And they listened, and they weren’t just dismissing it… Cobain thought about it, and he said, ‘I don’t think we can top the last song.’ And the minute he said that, I pressed the button on my headset and said, ‘We’re wrapped.'”
Cobain was 100% on the money, and you can see it in that final, soul-shredding “shiver” he gives in the final verse. The band drops out, he gives a single, plaintive “oh-oh-oh”, before opening those shockingly blue eyes. Seemingly a new man, they finish the song. Whatever happened next, they arguably cemented their place in rock history with that show. This show, and this moment in particular, was proof of how much more Cobain could have given with a little more time.
