Watch nirvana unplugged in new york online12/28/2023 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. Beyond inducing a sense of loss for Cobain himself, Unplugged elicits a feeling of musical loss, too: The delicacy and intimacy of these acoustic rearrangements hint at where Nirvana (or at least Cobain, who was said to be frustrated with the limitations of the band) could have gone.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. On record, the combined effect is ! hypnotic: The slowed-down ”About a Girl,” a yearning garage-band rocker from Bleach, sounds more urgent than the original, and the rendition of Leadbelly’s ”Where Did You Sleep Last Night” is terrifying, especially when Cobain’s voice leaps from a dazed murmur to a phlegmy, mesmerizing screech in the last verse. Cobain’s voice wheezed out as if through a tightly clamped throat, and the arrangements, starting with his own scruffy guitar plunking, were as rough-hewn as country blues. (That, and the resurrection of Eric Clapton and of the live album, will be the show’s lasting contributions.) Yet, if anything, the music Nirvana played that night was nearly as coiled up as their electric numbers. At its best, the overdone Unplugged format has loosened up some of rock’s most choreographed performers.
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