By the time Nirvana recorded their performance for MTV Unplugged in November 1993, they were the biggest band in the world. Not that they looked like it. Dave Grohl in his turtleneck and ponytail, Krist Novoselic wrangling his giant, borrowed bass, Kurt Cobain struggling to act relaxed in a room filled with people who thought he was a prophet.
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. 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. “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.
Cobain was reportedly miserable before the taping, worried the band didn’t have the grace to pull off something so subtle. “We’re just musically and rhythmically retarded,” he’d told Guitar World in the wake of 1991’s Nevermind. “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. 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. Afterward, Cobain reportedly complained to Unplugged programmer Amy Finnerty that the audience must not have liked it because they were so quiet. “Kurt,” she said, “they think you are Jesus Christ.”
MTV had started hosting “Unplugged” in 1989 as a way to package famous artists in comparatively approachable contexts. (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. Between 1991 and 1993, 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. 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. The day before Nirvana filmed their set, the show’s guest was Duran Duran.
As with all creative endeavors, Cobain seemed eager to strip the charade of its artifice and do something he perceived to be real. At the very least, he hadn’t clawed his way out of Aberdeen, Washington to let Nirvana become Mr. Big. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. (“He did it just to get us worked up,” Finnerty said. “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. The performances are creaky, intimate, eerily temperate for a band known to explode. 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. I get it. Unplugged makes me feel like Nirvana could fill my body with arrows and I would still keep walking.
Cobain 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. In Utero, which had only come out a couple of months before Unplugged was recorded, sounded like a corrective to whatever Cobain heard when he listened to Nevermind: brutal, mean, the sound of the puffy, white skin that rises around wet sores. Listening to it now, I can almost smell the turpentine I used to huff after school. Its popularity should’ve made me feel less alone. Instead, it made me feel like stabbing my stepdad and driving his car into a pole, which, when I think about it now, is probably exactly how a 12-year-old is supposed to feel.
The critic Chuck Klosterman called it “guilt rock,” as in rock music one makes because you feel guilty for making something as successful as Nevermind, guilty for reaching across the aisle to the meatheads you hated. But listening to Unplugged—the delicacy of the sound, the brittleness of the performance, the grit of Cobain’s voice—I came to understand that rage finds its anchor in fragility; that Unplugged and In Utero were necessary counterweights to an increasingly polarized creative mind. Where In Utero had validated my anger, Unplugged revealed a place beyond it: steady, understanding, wounded but at peace—less a funeral than the empty, eerily settled feeling one gets after a tantrum.
This is the Nirvana you hear on Unplugged: Not the voice of their generation but a strange holler from old, wet earth, a band who didn’t break with tradition but constellated it in new and intuitive ways. I liked the old blues song (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”) because it reminded me that Cobain’s pain wasn’t a new kind of pain and neither was mine, just a realm of feeling people had been passing through forever and one I would eventually pass through too. As a kid—fitful, agitated, outwardly miserable but possessed by a secret hope everything will suddenly change—you dream of something like this, the calm hand on your shoulder telling you not that you should feel better, but that it’s OK to feel bad, that people have felt bad forever, that sometimes feeling bad is enough.
It’s an unsettling legacy. A working title for In Utero was I Hate Myself and Want to Die, a kind of expression that is everywhere now: the sarcasm that preempts genuine pain; the hyperbole that strains to turn suffering into a joke. Killing yourself, the meme. Acting blasé about the heat death of the universe. The idea that we are so acclimated to misery that it becomes boring. “I’ve always felt it was kind of necessary to help out the ‘now generation’ internally destroy the enemy by posing as or using the enemy,” Cobain wrote in his diary. “The Now Generation”: Even in private, Cobain couldn’t escape his cynicism. The deeper tragedy of his story wasn’t his addiction or even his suicide, but the Icarian stubbornness of insisting he could take fame’s bait but dodge its hook—that he actually could destroy the machine from inside. Run that gauntlet enough, and you not only want to name your album I Hate Myself and Want to Die, you hate yourself, and you want to die, and then, a few months later, you do.
In the five months between Unplugged and Cobain’s suicide, Nirvana filmed two more spots for MTV. The first was an interview by Kurt Loder and Finnerty that devolved into Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl destroying an alleged $12,000 worth of hotel furniture—the kind of macho display you wanted Nirvana to be a corrective to, not an example of. A few days later, they played a show in an empty warehouse on Seattle’s Puget Sound, later packaged as Live and Loud. Here was the brutal, incandescent Nirvana again. If Unplugged’s crystallizing moment was Cobain gasping before the last phrase of “In the Pines,” Live and Loud’s was Cobain riding waves of feedback out of “Endless Nameless,” shoving his guitar into a camera and spitting at the lens. He was, by all accounts, in a good mood. And he finally got to play “Rape Me” on MTV.
At the end of Unplugged, between “All Apologies” and “In the Pines,” Cobain tells the story of a man from the Leadbelly estate trying to sell Cobain Leadbelly’s guitar for $500,000. You can hear him stretch the figure out for comic effect, as though anyone, especially someone as knowing as him would be so stupid as to pay a half-million dollars for a collectible guitar. Real punks don’t buy history; they desecrate it.
Still, he couldn’t contain his petulance and self-loathing, adding that he’d asked David Geffen to buy it for him personally, playing the black-sheep son of a rich and endlessly indulgent dad. He’d already practiced this bit once before, in the October 1993 issue of Spin, but with a slightly different punchline, complaining, “I just wish there was some really rich rock star I could borrow the cash from.”
About a month before he shot himself, Cobain bought a 1965 Dodge Dart for $2,500. He didn’t end up driving it much, if at all. It was recently displayed in an exhibition in Ireland called “Growing Up Kurt Cobain,” while the car’s title—State of Washington, VIN number 2155173082—was sold in 2010 at auction, for a winning bid of $640. “The soul is cheap,” Cobain wrote on “Dumb.” Yeah. And the crap is expensive, and in the end almost nothing is priceless.
