Cris and Curt Kirkwood-of the influential but often overlooked Arizona psych-punk outfit Meat Puppets-sat in for luminous readings of not one but three of their own songs. Dave Grohl, whose outsized drumming had concerned Cobain and the producers ahead of the performance, played with brushes for the very first time, showing total control as the drums kicked in on Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”. And yet, there was Krist Novoselic, swapping his bass for an accordion (his first instrument) to reimagine The Vaselines’ “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” itself a parody of an old children’s Christian hymn. This wasn’t just the world’s biggest band at the moment, but one of its loudest and most dissonant, too. (“I was never going to talk them into ‘Teen Spirit’,” Coletti says.) Instead, they came armed with covers and deep cuts and guests that definitely weren’t in rotation. They’d upended the hopes and expectations of the network by electing to play anything but the hits, “Come As You Are” being one exception. Everyone had seen it.” But on its own, Unplugged remains one of rock’s great live albums, as well as a glimpse of Nirvana at their most naked and idiosyncratic. “We’d aired it so often that year it was a shock that the album sold so well. “We used it as a way to mourn Kurt on air,” Coletti says of the show. (The cardigan he wore, still unwashed since the performance, just raised $334,000 at auction, making it the most expensive sweater ever sold.) The live album wouldn’t see release until nearly a year later. It’s impossible at this point to divorce the recording from images of Cobain, from the mythology of the night. But we didn’t know at the time-we moved on.” “It should all still be sitting there,” Coletti says of the set. “And Tony Bennett the day after that.” Almost immediately after the band had finished, a production crew was tearing the set down, including the black candles and white Stargazer lilies that would later give viewers the feeling that they were watching a living funeral.
ABOUT A GIRL NIRVANA MTV UNPLUGGED SERIES
“I think the next day, we did Stone Temple Pilots,” series producer Alex Coletti tells Apple Music. Recorded in New York on 18 November 1993, five months before Kurt Cobain’s death, it was the first of three tapings in three days that week for MTV. It’s worth remembering and repeating: Unplugged was never meant to be Nirvana’s final statement.
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