News The disasters behind Nirvana’s ‘Unplugged’ show: “We’re gonna blow this”
Every generation has those few concerts that define what that era of music was all about. It’s hard to imagine the counterculture of the 1960s without Woodstock, and anyone who had access to a television in the 1980s probably remembered where they were when they saw Queen at Live Aid. Though Nirvana‘s appearance on MTV Unplugged has entered that realm of all-time classic gigs, it didn’t come without a few stumbling blocks along the way.
Before the band even got to the gig, they didn’t have the best reputation with MTV. Despite possibly being one of the channel’s greatest benefactors, with ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ becoming a mainstay video on the network and, therefore, launching the group’s career into the stratosphere, censorship issues had begun to rear their head with song titles like ‘Rape Me’.
By the time they got to the gig that day, things were already going a little haywire. They had already begun incorporating acoustic segments into their show. Still, there’s a difference between trying to slow down a stadium show and holding the audience’s attention for an hour with just acoustics.
Even worse was the band’s refusal to play most of their hits. Outside of ‘Come As You Are’, there weren’t too many songs that actually hit the radio, with most of the pieces from In Utero having just been released. Cobain chose the tracks that suited the show, but you can’t really rein in someone like Dave Grohl behind the drumkit.
Since Grohl is known to hit with the same intensity as John Bonham, Cobain considered ditching him for the entire show. Even though Grohl did have to scale things back, his last-minute decision to use brushes was a minor miracle. Because if the drummer can’t turn down, the next best thing is to take away his toys.
During the rehearsals, things still weren’t coming together. Looking through the different pieces of the band’s rehearsal, Cobain continued to screw up the chord changes in their version of David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, not even bothering to run through the entire song. ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ didn’t go much better, as Cobain continued to get more agitated that Pat Smear was singing his harmony wildly out of tune.
Nerves might have been tense when they took to the stage, with producer Alex Coletti telling Guitar World, “They were still like, ‘Oh my god, we haven’t rehearsed enough. We’re gonna blow this, totally.’” The Bowie cover would end up going off without a hitch, and the decision for Cobain to sing ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ by himself was the best possible way to fix the problem. After hearing him scream at the top of his lungs at every show, this was a look at the singer-songwriter Cobain could have become had he decided not to pick up the fuzz pedal.
Even though some fans may have been disappointed that they didn’t get to see their favourite songs played acoustically, the entire night has the feeling of an impromptu jam session among friends. Cobain even slips in a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour towards the show’s end. As someone yells out for the band to play ‘Rape Me’, he snidely replies, “I don’t think MTV would let us play that.”
For all of the great moments that were captured in that hour of footage, it ended up getting much more morose when Cobain passed away a few months later, making it look like he gave a pre-emptive memorial service for himself. That’s not what we should take from Nirvana’s set. As much as the group were known as the voice of their generation, this was a suggestion for what the band could sound like if they could continue on.
