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. Coletti had worked with Nirvana once before. “I was surprised but delighted when they said yes to doing the show,” says Coletti. Unplugged gave Nirvana a chance to test its acoustic mettle under slightly more favorable conditions.
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“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 gave 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 a while and see, like, Eddie Vedder is nominated number- one songwriter in some magazine, and I’m not even listed.”īeginning with its debut broadcast in January 1990, MTV Unplugged was always 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. It had become impossible to hear this music outside the context of Cobain’s terrible end. The subsequent release of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York, the CD version of the television concert, was a mournful déjà 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 performance on the network’s Unplugged program 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 lilies, the sub-aquatic blue light…