The Man Who Sold the World

remembering nirvana's greatest performance on the thirtieth anniversary of their last

(TW: mental health, addiction, self-harm, SA)

On March 1, 1994, the legendary Seattle grunge band Nirvana played their last show ever, in an airplane hangar in Munich, Germany in front of a little over three thousand fans. The performance itself was a technical disaster, with electrical problems temporarily pausing the proceedings six songs in. Luckily, the entire show has been preserved in full on YouTube:

The concert also marked a turning point for the band members, as it became obvious lead singer Kurt Cobain was in dire straits. The last notes of their last song (“Heart-Shaped Box”) were sloppy and ragged, even requiring Cobain to change octaves on the final chorus due to his failing vocal abilities. He had been diagnosed with bronchitis shortly before, and the remaining shows on the European leg of the In Utero world tour were paused shortly thereafter. Cobain stayed in Europe instead of returning immediately to America, planning to ride out his illness in Rome. While there, he overdosed on a combination of Rohypnol and champagne that was portrayed at the time as accidental.

Once Cobain was released from the Italian hospital five days afterwards, he returned to Seattle. The shows were cancelled instead of delayed, and the Nirvana machine was jarred to a halt. During the next two weeks, Cobain’s drug use (specifically heroin) increased significantly. His wife Courtney Love staged an intervention for him on March 25th, following another potential suicide attempt on March 18th. According to police at the time, Cobain reported that the fears of self-harm were overblown, and he was merely trying to escape Love. On March 30th, Cobain flew to Los Angeles to receive treatment at an addiction clinic. He initially agreed to seek treatment on the 26th, but for unknown reasons refused to depart the city until four days later.

Immediately prior to flying to Los Angeles, Cobain went with a childhood friend to buy a new shotgun. At two separate points in the past year (including on the 18th), Cobain’s firearms were seized by police due to their concern for self-harm and questions about his mental health. Cobain placed the shotgun in his closet at home in Seattle, then got on a plane to the rehabilitation center.

On his second full day at Exodus Recovery Center, Cobain asked to step outside to smoke. Instead, he climbed a short wall and went to the airport, buying a ticket back to Seattle with his credit card. His return to his house on April 2nd is the last verified appearance of Cobain, following a short trip to a local ammunition store to buy shotgun shells. The next five days are an unsolved mystery, with a tragic result. Cobain was found on April 8th by an electrician hired to re-wire a security light on the property.

Many questions are still up in the air regarding Cobain’s passing, and I’m being mindful of libel laws here to avoid accusing anyone of anything. Besides, we’re here to talk about a different concert entirely than Nirvana’s final show. I’m of course talking about the November 18, 1993 performance at MTV Studios in New York City for MTV Unplugged. Nirvana had been asked for years to play an Unplugged show, but only acceded when allowed to break the mold established by previous artists.

Instead of playing a “greatest hits” style show, Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl wanted to do something different: a radically altered show designed to take advantage of the intimate setting and varied instrumentation. The In Utero sessions had spurred the band to take on a new touring configuration that included Germs legend Pat Smear on second guitar and cellist Lori Goldston, so it was natural to continue to experiment. Of note, the band wanted to perform several cover versions of songs that reflected what they were listening to or inspired by, including multiple songs by their recent tourmates the Meat Puppets.

In fact, the Meat Puppets [consisting of brothers Cris Kirkwood (bass), Curt Kirkwood (guitar, vocals), and Derrick Bostrom (drums)] were one of the reasons Nirvana agreed to do the show in the first place. The spot had been offered repeatedly by MTV, but the band consulted the Kirkwoods for their opinion as to whether it could be done with integrity at all. Cobain et al. agreed, so long as they could pick their guests. MTV was anticipating other grunge luminaries from the Seattle area such as Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell (RIP), but instead Nirvana selected the punk-inspired Arizona band. The Puppets served as emotional support through the preparation and during the performance itself.

Nirvana convened in New Jersey several days prior to work through a setlist and rehearse new songs. Here, they fully elected to eschew their hits, much to the chagrin of MTV producers. Cobain was steadfast that either Nirvana did the show their way or not all. Taking inspiration from Mark Lanegan’s album The Winding Sheet (which Cobain and Novoselic had guested on), the Nirvana catalogue songs were reworked drastically from their original forms. Lanegan’s first solo work apart from his band the Screaming Trees embraced the despair and melancholy of grunge’s emotional center while divorcing it from the distortion and fuzz that gave it energy. Similarly, Nirvana desired to strip down their songs to the bare essence.

The work was not easy, with tensions running high during rehearsals. Cobain was attempting to go “cold turkey” at the time, and was suffering from opiate withdrawal symptoms. Rearranging the songs, especially the unfamiliar covers, proved to be more work than anticipated. The vibes within the band were concerning, with Cobain’s mood ranging from dour to morose. Both the production team and the other musicians had doubts as to whether the show would go on. On the day before the shoot, Cobain refused to play at all.

from left: Lori Goldston (cello), Krist Novoselic (bass), Dave Grohl (drums), Kurt Cobain (guitar, vocals), Pat Smear (guitar)

Veteran TV producer Alex Coletti was in charge of the filming aspect of the show, while alternative music super-producer Scott Litt handled the musical aspects. (Later, Litt would mix and master the formal album release of the performance following Cobain’s death.) The staging of the show was deliberately funereal, with gothic touches like black candles and stargazer lilies strewn throughout the intimate studio. The colors in wardrobe and scenery were muted, apart from Cobain’s taupe cardigan, Goldston’s red blouse, and Smear’s Buck Owens-inspired guitar.

Musically, the band insisted on using acoustic instruments exclusively, deriding other bands who relied on effects and amplification. Of course, people are allowed to be hypocritical so Cobain ran his acoustic through his usual effects board and Fender Twin amp, cleverly disguised as a monitor wedge. Later, the production staff implied it was a sort of safety blanket for Cobain, who was incredibly nervous and insecure about his skill in such a drastically altered setting. The other members played fair, though.

The set was completed in a single take, with no encore. Altogether, Nirvana was on stage for less than two hours including filming breaks. At this point, I will walk you through each song in the performance one by one. We’ll begin with the set opener…

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1. About a Girl

It’s fitting that the first song in the show is also from Nirvana’s first full-length album Bleach. The sole contribution from that album in the setlist, this was many viewers’ first exposure to that album. When Nevermind was released in 1991, its reach eclipsed that of Bleach many times over. Following Cobain’s passing, this particular rendition of “About a Girl” was released as the first single after the dissolution of the band. Cobain wrote it in February of 1989 about his then-girlfriend Tracy Marander, who was unaware of her starring role until she read Michael Azerrad’s seminal 1993 biography of the band, Come As You Are. He was inspired to compose the relatively poppy music after spending an entire day listening obsessively to the Beatles’ Meet the Beatles!.

2. Come As You Are

The second single from Nevermind has a controversial origin. When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” spiraled out of control on its release, the band and the label scrambled to issue a follow-up that could capitalize on the momentum. Cobain had an affection for “In Bloom”, while the label saw the obvious commercial potential of “Come As You Are”, the hookier and catchier song. Cobain was nervous about the similarities between the main riff of the song and the Killing Joke’s “Eighties”, released in 1984. Listen here:

Cobain was worried that he would catch flack for the song from Killing Joke and their label, E.G. Records, which was in the process of being sold to Richard Branson’s Virgin Records. Geffen (Nirvana’s label) won out in both ways, releasing “Come As You Are” and dodging accusations of plagiarism due to inefficiencies at E.G. during the transition. Ironically enough, both songs owe a large debt to “Life Goes On”, released in 1982 by the Damned. Listen here:

3. Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For a Sunbeam (The Vaselines cover)

Way back in 1900, prolific hymnwriter Edwin O. Excell composed the music for a hymn with lyrics by the mysterious Nellie Talbot, a woman with very little historical evidence concerning her existence. The song, entitled “I’ll Be a Sunbeam”, was a moderate hit in comparison to Excell’s other most notable work: the most well-known arrangement of John Newton’s “Amazing Grace”, adapting the melody of the William Walker song “New Britain”. (As an aside, “New Britain” was initially published in the compilation The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, later the title of a Black Crowes album.) In 1988, Scottish alternative band The Vaselines put their own satirical twist on Talbot’s words with their “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam”, soon to be retitled in concert as “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam”. Cobain took that version and ran with it, choosing it as one of many covers for the Unplugged performance. Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, the composers of the Vaselines version, said later that this one track paid for Kelly’s mortgage for years and allowed him to eschew a “real job”.

4. The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie cover)

Speaking of covers, Cobain and Novoselic were introduced to this song by former drummer Chad Channing. He bought a used LP of David Bowie’s third album, then transferred it to an unlabeled cassette for more portable listening. Cobain was enamored with the song without realizing it to be a Bowie composition; the song was never a hit, having never been released as a single on its own.

Its only non-album appearance was as an obscure B-side to “Space Oddity”. It gained more fame as a Lulu single in 1974 (hitting the UK Top Ten) and as a cover by art-rock legend Midge Ure in 1983.

After Nirvana’s rediscovery of the song and its inclusion in the Unplugged set, Bowie’s career resurged. He found it quite comical that his own take on the song was outshone by two artists as different as Lulu and Nirvana.

5. Pennyroyal Tea

Pennyroyal, scientific name mentha pulegium, is also known as pudding grass or mosquito plant. It’s an herbal remedy used for all sorts of things, as it stimulates blood flow (the medical term for that is “emmenagogue”, which is a fun word). In insects and vermin it’s extremely toxic, having been used as a crude form of pest control for centuries prior to the invention of more modern synthetic poisons. Humans have a much wider tolerance, to the point that it was used alongside oregano and lovage during the Middle Ages as a culinary herb. Pennyroyal is most famous, though, for its use as an abortifacient (please don’t try this at home). Cobain wrote the song while in the midst of a flareup of his recurrent stomach pain, for which he primarily turned to opiates to alleviate. “Pennyroyal Tea” was projected to be the third single off of Nirvana’s final album In Utero, but was pulled at literally the last minute from production on Cobain’s death. The few official copies that snuck through can go for more than a thousand dollars. For Unplugged, this is the only song in the set that doesn’t involve the rest of the band, serving as a solo for Cobain. Rehearsals with the full band in different configurations were tried and disliked, but on the day of the show Cobain suggested spur of the moment to do it by himself. With Grohl’s encouragement, it became the showstopper of the first half of the set.

6. Dumb

“Dumb” began as a solo piece, first being performed at a showcase for KAOS-FM in Olympia, Washington on September 25, 1990 and hosted by Calvin Johnson, a member of highly influential Pacific Northwest band Beat Happening. Johnson, in addition to working hand-in-hand with KAOS, was the founder of K Records in 1982. K Records started out as a cassette-only distributor in Olympia focusing on releases by local bands, many of whom were recruited by Johnson through his radio station connections. By 1986, the label outgrew Johnson’s kitchen and began working with Rough Trade Records for both cassettes and small-run vinyl pressings. The next year saw K Records emerge with their “International Pop Underground” series including such bands as Built to Spill, Thee Headcoats, and my beloved Teenage Fanclub.

Their partnerships with other labels such as Dischord and Kill Rock Stars led to a nationwide network of independent groups working to further the lo-fi, do it yourself ethos. K Records was so adored by Cobain that he had their logo tattooed on his arm, though he fell out with Johnson on a personal level before his death. Later, the label receded in both importance and profitability, leading to hard feelings throughout the Washington DIY scene and accusations of mismanagement or poor stewardship.

7. Polly

(TW: SA, violent crime)

The inspiration for “Polly” was the story of Gerald Friend, a violent rapist and kidnapper from Lakewood, Washington. Friend, born in 1937, was tried and convicted in 1960 for an abduction and rape of a twelve-year-old girl in Mount Rainier National Park. He was turned in by his own father, who confronted an armed Friend after his victim escaped. Friend was wounded by his own weapon before police apprehended him. He served twenty years in prison before being paroled in 1980, despite being initially sentenced to life and having two separate escapes from custody. In 1987, Friend struck again by kidnapping a fourteen-year-old girl, who he then assaulted repeatedly at his mobile home going so far as to chain her up to the ceiling. The young girl jumped out of his vehicle to escape, and Friend was caught by police the next day through a routine traffic stop. Friend was tried and convicted once more, sentenced to seventy five years of imprisonment in addition to serving out his first sentence. The second victim sued the state of Washington for improperly releasing him in 1980, which allowed him the opportunity to offend again.

Cobain took the widely-reported story and incorporated it into his song, adding the twist of the victim deliberately deceiving the perpetrator into believing she enjoyed the assault in order to make her escape. In doing so, he completed the metaphor of avian imagery that he used throughout the song. His comparison of a caged bird striving for release to a captive victim in a severely traumatic situation strikes the listener harshly, especially if they don’t realize from the opening stanza that the song isn’t actually about a bird. The combination of intensely dark subject matter and the morose, melancholy performance makes this perhaps the most bleak performance of Cobain’s career.

8. On a Plain

Arguably the most metacognitive piece in the set, “On a Plain” is a song about writing a song. The last work completed for the Nevermind sessions, it also marked the first time that Dave Grohl performed in the studio for Nirvana. Grohl was the fifth official drummer for the band, following Chad Channing who had recorded the majority of Bleach. Nirvana’s first drummer was Aaron Burckhard, who found himself out of a gig after he took Cobain’s car and subsequently got a DUI, leading the car to be impounded by police. That, combined with his propensity for getting into unprompted fights with friends and foes alike, led to his dismissal. Melvins drummer Dale Crover filled in for the first demos, but his placement was always contingent on his Melvins schedule. A more permanent replacement was Dave Foster, but he lasted just a few months due to an unfortunate stint in jail. Both Crover and Burckhard temporarily took up the throne again before Chad Channing of Tick-Dolly-Row claimed the spot. Tick-Dolly-Row played a show with an early incarnation of Nirvana, before they had even settled on a steady name. (Other potential monikers included Bliss, Pen Cap Chew, and Skid Row. No, not that one.) Channing left the band after disputes on both musical direction and songwriting credits just prior to the Nevermind sessions, leaving Nirvana drummerless once more. Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters filled in for a one-off session that resulted in “Sliver” while Mudhoney was in turmoil. Around this time, Grohl’s band Scream imploded, leaving both Grohl and Nirvana in need of one another. Buzz Osbourne of Melvins introduced the two, Grohl passed the audition, and the rest was history.

9. Something in the Way

The initial television broadcast of MTV Unplugged omitted this song, in order to condense the set into a more commercial-friendly forty-five minutes. Lyrically, the song mixes the reality of Cobain’s teenage life when he was unhoused for four months with a fantasy of what it would have been like to continue in abject poverty. When Cobain was younger, he couch-surfed with friends, even spending time sleeping on Dale Crover’s porch in a refrigerator box. Eventually he shifted to staying in hospital waiting rooms for shelter, going so far as to charge hospital cafeteria food to nonexistent patients to feed himself. When it came time to draw on the experience to write a song, he relied on not only his own ingenuity but that of Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan. According to Nick Oliveri (later bassist of Queens of the Stone Age and therefore Lanegan’s bandmate), Lanegan came up with at least some of the lyrics for “Something in the Way”. Instead of asking for songwriting credit, Lanegan chalked it up to repayment for Cobain and Novoselic performing for free on his solo album The Winding Sheet. Needless to say, Lanegan later realized the financial implications of his decision and was kicking himself about it. That feeling redoubled when “Something in the Way” was used in the trailer for The Batman in 2020, leading to a long resurgent chart performance that peaked at number forty-six in 2022. Sadly, Lanegan passed away in February of 2022 at the age of fifty-seven of as-yet unrevealed causes.

10. Plateau (Meat Puppets cover)

At this point in the show, Nirvana was joined by their special guests, Curt and Cris Kirkwood for a suite of Meat Puppets covers. As noted above, the Meat Puppets were instrumental in Nirvana agreeing to do the show in the first place, convincing Cobain et. al. that the performance could be done without sacrificing integrity or compromising their artistry. The Meat Puppets were Nirvana’s first and only choice for guests, although MTV suggested Tori Amos and Eddie Vedder as potential invitees. Cobain had great admiration for the Arizona punk band, bringing them on tour despite (or perhaps because of) their reputation as barely contained drug-fueled hellions both onstage and off. The songs Nirvana chose are all from Meat Puppets II, released in 1984 by SST Records. This album reflects the strong country-and-western background of the Puppets that infused the hardcore punk sound of their first album with folk, cow-punk, and even bluegrass inclinations. That the band didn’t spend the entire time in the studio high on LSD this time around probably has something to do with it.

11. Oh Me (Meat Puppets cover)

The second song featuring the Curtwoods was “Oh Me”, another track left off the initial airing of the Unplugged special due to time constraints. “Oh Me” continues the cow-punk direction, a genre which the Meat Puppets were instrumental in popularizing. Alongside other Southwestern bands like X, the Blasters, and Social Distortion, their blend of country with aggressive punk was something new and provocative. I mentioned the genre previously in my piece on Dwight Yoakam, and I believe it’s well worth your time to peruse that article.

If there’s sufficient interest in doing a longer exploration of cowpunk (or country-adjacent music in general much to Thea’s chagrin), let me know in the comments. If you listen to early Dinosaur Jr, Soundgarden, or Pavement and think you hear a slight tinge of country songwriting, you have the Meat Puppets to thank. All three of those bands cited the Kirkwoods as influential, to the point that Dinosaur Jr bassist Lou Barlow called their sound the most important part of both that band and his later Sebadoh.

12. Lake of Fire (Meat Puppets cover)

Either this song or the later “Backwater” are the most well-known Meat Puppets songs to the wider public, for very different reasons. The Nirvana cover was the first exposure many listeners had to the band, as it received airplay after Cobain’s death as a radio single. Despite being signed to London Records (a subsidiary of Polygram, owned by MCA), the major label reach didn’t seem to make much of a difference with 1991’s Forbidden Places, their first for the imprint. The follow-up Too High to Die (a title parody of the Ramones) was spurred to the top of the Heatseekers chart, becoming their biggest selling work to date thanks to inescapable lead single “Backwater”. In the aftermath of its success, Cris Kirkwood’s drug problems became insurmountable. Following a brief attempt to ride the wave of popularity with 1995’s No Joke!, Kirkwood retreated with his wife to essentially become heroin-addicted hermits. His descent didn’t stop when his wife died as a result of her drug use in 1998. In 2003, he got in a physical altercation with a security officer at a Phoenix post office, leading Kirkwood to suffer both a gunshot wound and a stint in prison. There, he was able to detox and even began making music again thanks to his fortuitous placement in a wing of the prison alongside former Steppenwolf drummer Jerry Posin. After Cris’s release the Meat Puppets reunited in 2008 with new drummer Ted Marcus, who left in 2011 to be replaced by Shannon Sahm (son of legendary southwest country musician Doug Sahm). In 2018, Bostrom rejoined completing the reunion in its entirety. That same year, Curt’s son Elmo officially joined as rhythm guitarist as did keyboardist Ron Stabinsky.

13. All Apologies

The final original Nirvana song of the night was In Utero’s “All Apologies”, which was just a few short weeks away from being released as the second single from the album. It was the only “current” popular song in the setlist, and along with “Come As You Are” represented the two nods to commercial appeal that MTV envisioned. Normally, a single being released would mean that a music video would be in the offing, but between the heavy touring schedule and Cobain’s ongoing struggles with substance abuse, there was no real drive to get something done. One idea bandied about was parodying the John F. Kennedy assassination, with Bobcat Goldthwait suggesting throwing pies instead of shooting rifles to get around the MTV ban on firearms in music videos. The song was released to radio as part of a subversive double A-Side with “Rape Me” in December, a piece that was never going to receive wide airplay thanks to its subject matter. MTV needed something to promote the song, so they used the Unplugged version beginning in February 1994. After Cobain’s death, this version was released to radio as the third single (after “About a Girl” and “The Man Who Sold the World”) to promote the CD version of Unplugged.

14. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (Lead Belly cover)

At the end of the night, Nirvana performed a cover of a cover of a cover of a very old folk song. “In the Pines” was documented by Cecil Young and Alan Lomax (cataloguers of traditional and indigenous music) in the early 1900s, but the skeleton of the song dated back to at least the 1870s. The first commercial recording came in 1926, but by 1970 there were over a gross of versions, each idiosyncratically different.

The primary incarnations that inspired others were from two very different sources In 1941, Bill Monroe recorded a high lonesome take alongside his Bluegrass Boys, while in 1944 Huddie Ledbetter (best known as Leadbelly or Lead Belly) released his significantly darker rendition on the Musicraft label.

Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees owned a copy of Lead Belly’s single, and used it as the template for his own recording on 1990’s The Winding Sheet. This take included both Cobain and Novoselic in its creation.

Cobain knew that he wanted to perform the song this way for Unplugged, channeling all of the negative energy haunting him into a soul-wrenching vocal. Once it was complete, the band left the stage immediately. MTV producer Alex Coletti asked Nirvana to return for an encore (perhaps hoping for a hit like “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “In Bloom” or “Heart Shaped Box”), but Cobain refused saying simply “I don’t think we can top that last song.”

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Thus concludes the MTV Unplugged in New York album. Despite the overwhelming downer that this article is going to be, I wanted to end on a high note. Just a few months prior to the Unplugged performance, Cobain and company were invited to attend the MTV Video Music Awards, where they were nominated for Best Alternative video for “In Bloom”. There, they finally got to meet one of their cultural icons: the Supermodel of the World herself RuPaul Charles. That led to these two fantastic photos:

from left: Dave Grohl, RuPaul, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Frances Bean Cobain, Krist Novoselic

from left: Dave Grohl, RuPaul, Frances Bean Cobain, Kurt Cobain

Join me next time when I tackle a much lighter topic. (I’d almost have to by default.) Your hint: you’ll see how far I’ll go to create a list, with the assistance of the lovely and talented Thea Rettical. I’m off to do some serious research in the meantime. If you have topics for a future article, let me know in the comments or via any number of social media outlets. Carrier pigeons are fine, but must be treated humanely.