When Nirvana refused to play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’
The relationship between Nirvana and their biggest song, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, was complicated. Kurt Cobain didn’t even write the song until the band already had an underground following. Once the song’s video hit big on MTV, it became easy to tell who the lightweight fans were depending on what song they were calling out at shows.
“Everyone has focused on that song so much,” Cobain told Rolling Stone in 1994. “The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It’s been pounded into their brains.”
It was a standard part of their setlist almost continuously from 1991 to their final shows in 1994, but there were some stops and starts in the frequency of playing playing ‘Teen Spirit’. At one particular show in Buenos Aires in 1992, Cobain was so pissed off at the audience that he decided to intentionally mess up the concert just to prove a point. The band’s opener, Babes in Toyland, had been booed off the stage, and Cobain made the audience pay for it.
“Before every song, I’d play the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and then stop,” Cobain was quoted as saying in the 2004 book, Nirvana: The Chosen Rejects. “They didn’t realize that we were protesting against what they’d done. We played for about [40] minutes, and most of the songs were off [the odds-and-ends compilation record] Incesticide, so they didn’t recognize anything.”
That wasn’t entirely true: well-known Nevermind cuts like ‘Lithium’ and ‘In Bloom’ were included in the setlist. But the show also found Nirvana at their most combative, opening with an aggressive improvised jam before careening into ‘Aneurysm’. For the next two tracks, ‘Breed’ and ‘Drain You’, Cobain teased the audience with ‘Teen Spirit’ before swerving into different songs.
“We wound up playing the secret noise song [‘Endless, Nameless’] that’s at the end of Nevermind, and because we were so in a rage and were just so pissed off about this whole situation, that song and whole set were one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had,” Cobain would express. Anyone who was expecting ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ left disappointed – the band didn’t wind up playing the song that night.
Of course, that wasn’t the permanent end of ‘Teen Spirit’. Three months later, Nirvana returned to South America, this time playing in São Paulo, Brazil. The band played one of their most out-there concerts ever, bringing in Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea to add trumpet onto ‘Teen Spirit’. At one point, all three members switched instruments for a series of covers that included Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’, The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’, Tommy Tutone’s ‘867-5309/Jenny’, and Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’.
Watch Nirvana tease the Buenos Aires crowd with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ down below.
