I’d heard that he was something of a visual artist. Let’s do it and get out of here.’ But Kurt seemed to like to take things and internalize them. Some bands will just walk in and it’s like, `Whatever. “That one experience of working with Kurt showed me how sensitive he was as a person. The January ’92 taping was an impromptu session, knocked together at the last minute, but it gave Coletti some useful insights into the band. There were 10 or 11 songs, and there’s stuff like `Molly’s Lips,’ `Stain,’ and other great stuff that’s never been seen.” On January 10, 1992, when Nirvana were in New York City to do Saturday Night Live, he had videotaped a live set with the band, “Various clips from that have been aired on MTV,” Coletti notes, “but never the whole thing. Coletti had work-ed with Nirvana once before. “I was surprised but delighted when they said yes to doing the show,” says Alex Coletti. Unplugged gave Nirvana a chance to test its acoustic mettle under slightly more favorable conditions. “But people still manage to writhe around and throw shoes and land headfirst over the barrier and crack their heads open.” In 1993 Nirvana had begun working some acoustic numbers into their live set, “just to wind things down,” Nirvana bassist Chris Novoselic told MTV News. The show gives tunesmiths an opportunity to strip away the high decibels and big production values and let their compositions stand on their own melodic and lyrical integrity. “I don’t pay attention to polls and charts, but I thumb through them once in while and see, like, Eddie Vedder is nominated number-one songwriter in some magazine, and I’m not even listed.”įrom its debut broadcast back in January of 1990, MTV Unplugged has always been a songwriters’ forum. “I’m embarrassed saying this, but I’d like to be recognized more as a songwriter,” Cobain told Details magazine in November of ’93. “I don’t want to read too much into it,” says Coletti in retrospect, “but that memory sure spooked me out a couple of months later.”Īpart from any of the show’s real or imaginary morbid overtones, for Cobain, the opportunity to do MTV Unplugged may well have meant the confirmation of his arrival as an important rock songwriter. “You mean like a funeral?” Coletti asked. In fact, when Unplugged producer Alex Coletti showed the Nirvana leader some preliminary sketches for the stage set, Kurt called for more flowers, more candles. And the lilies, candles and heavy drapery that adorned the Unplugged set that night were all chosen by Cobain. But of the six cover songs Cobain chose to sing that evening, five mention death in some way. Or singing to us from some tranquil, blue world beyond our own.Īn eerie coincidence? Probably. It was as if the guy was singing at his own funeral. It may have helped some viewers find a calm, quiet way to resign themselves to Cobain’s violent departure. Seen, again and again, in the hours after the artist’s death, the somber MTV gig had an oddly lulling effect. It has become impossible to hear this music outside the context of Cobain’s terrible end. The recent release of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged In New York, the CD version of the television concert, was a mournful dÈj‡ vu experience for many. Instead, there was Nirvana Unplugged, taped just five months before Cobain’s death, and designated as the wake which, through its repeated showings served to diffuse the rock community’s grief and shock. Who can say why MTV chose to air Nirvana’s Unplugged performance over and over, like a tape loop, in the hours and days following the discovery of Cobain’s lifeless body on April 8, 1994? Many fans might have preferred some bracing footage of Nirvana fully amped up and defiantly live before a seething mosh pit. The images have already been burned into some deep, tender part of rock’s collective consciousness: Kurt Cobain, slumped over his Martin acoustic, his tattered librarian sweater and basketball sneakers, the clusters of lillies, the subaquatic blue light…
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