Unplugged makes me feel like Nirvana could fill my body with arrows and I would still keep walking.Ĭobain had been unhappy with Nevermind, at least in retrospect at one point, he described it as “candy-ass,” at another, he compared it to Mötley Crüe, which, coming from a punk rocker obsessed by humility and authenticity, indicated the presence of a rot so total as to make the host unsalvageable. On first hearing their cover of Leadbelly’s “In the Pines” (here titled, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”), Neil Young reportedly compared Cobain’s voice to a werewolf’s: neither dead nor undead, but beyond. The performances are creaky, intimate, eerily temperate for a band known to explode. “He enjoyed that power.”) Three of the six covers were originally by then-tourmates the Meat Puppets, an Arizona band that, like Nirvana, ventured to create a world that collapsed the distance between brilliant and dumb, ordinary observation-“the sun is gone, but I have a light”-and cosmic insight. (“He did it just to get us worked up,” Finnerty said. The setlist, submitted to MTV without concession or explanation, contained six covers and no hits other than “Come As You Are,” a point of contention so contentious that Cobain was still threatening to cancel the performance a day before it taped. And what were Nirvana’s best songs but demonstrations of how the most corrosive blasts of noise could turn into lullabies fit for a T-Mobile ad? If you buy flowers, you already know: nothing stinks quite like a big, sweet bouquet of lilies. Cobain himself regularly appeared in torn dresses and smeared makeup, storming through performances with the fury of a shattered debutante, more Sunset Boulevard than Black Flag. A treatment for the “Rape Me” video documented in his diaries called for lilies and orchids-“ya know, vaginal flowers,” Cobain wrote-to be shown blooming and withering in time-lapse, as though incapable of retaining pageant posture for more than a few seconds. He’d ordered the stage to be decorated with black candles and stargazer lilies, a funereal scheme routinely invoked as a premonition of his suicide, when in actuality it had more to do with his penchant for twisting conventional beauty into something grotesque. At the very least, he hadn’t clawed his way out of Aberdeen, Washington to let Nirvana become Mr. The day before Nirvana filmed their set, the show’s guest was Duran Duran.Īs with all creative endeavors, Cobain seemed eager to strip the charade of its artifice and do something he perceived to be real. A few hair metal bands came through in an attempt to be taken seriously, as though the lust of teenage girls was not serious enough. Between 19, guests of the show included middlebrow alternative acts like Elvis Costello and R.E.M., legacy artists like Eric Clapton and Paul Simon, and contemporary pop stars like Mariah Carey. (The name alone-“Unplugged”-conjured an imagined utopia where music was nothing more than the spontaneous expression of people in a room.) You’d come in, strip down, show your fans the heart bleeding under the armor. MTV had started hosting “Unplugged” in 1989 as a way to package famous artists in comparatively approachable contexts. “Kurt,” she said, “they think you are Jesus Christ.” Afterward, Cobain reportedly complained to Unplugged programmer Amy Finnerty that the audience must not have liked it because they were so quiet. For musicians whose sound was so essentially electric, the idea of playing acoustic-or, as it came to pass, in a subdued, semi-amplified state-wasn’t just like going on stage naked, but amputated. “We play so hard that we can’t tune our guitars fast enough.” As few as 24 hours before Unplugged, he was considering having Dave Grohl sit out because he thought Grohl’s drumming would overpower the rest of the band. “We’re just musically and rhythmically retarded,” he’d told Guitar World in the wake of 1991’s Nevermind. “This is from our first record,” he mutters before “About a Girl.” “Most people don’t own it.” Never mind the five million people who had bought the one that came next.Ĭobain was reportedly miserable before the taping, worried the band didn’t have the grace to pull off something so subtle. A month or so after Unplugged was taped, he bought a black Lexus, but was so mortified by it-and mocked so thoroughly by his friends-that he returned it within a day. Of course, that was the point of Unplugged, and, in a way, of Nirvana: Even after Cobain got famous, he tried, often painfully, to seem normal.
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