(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
In an era when rock stars were glamorous, Kurt Cobain was the anti-hero of rock and roll in many ways.
Not everything that he made was against the status quo, but looking at the ascent of Nirvana, he seemed content to work on whatever he could and not worry if the rest of the world was listening or not. But when the spotlight was thrown onto him against his will, he was never going to be comfortable with serving as the voice of a generation whenever he got onstage.
There are a lot of people who have been celebrated as the cultural touchstones of their generations, but when you look at all of them, it’s not like all of them are comfortable with that title. Bob Dylan ran away from fame, and John Lennon wanted to distance himself from the limelight when he had enough, so if that kind of pressure was put on a kid that never wanted that kind of attention to begin with, it’s not like he was going to be welcoming fame with open arms or anything.
The band’s success did have the silver lining of wiping out a lot of the meatheads that had been cluttering up the charts, but Cobain could never really find any kind of pleasure in playing the kind of music that he was being asked to play. Nevermind had already been a smash success, but after years in the business, he felt like his music was being treated as an aesthetic more than a legitimate form of music.
Granted, it was going to be difficult to figure out what the hell he was saying every single time he played a song, but it was bound to hurt seeing how Pearl Jam was being treated around the same time. Cobain only saw Eddie Vedder as a posturing version of what grunge was, and yet he was being treated as a lyrical genius while he was becoming known for singing gibberish. There had to be a way for him to turn things around, but even when he found an outlet on MTV Unplugged, Cobain even had a few doubts about how the production went down.
Despite the record being one of the greatest shows that the band ever played, MTV exec Amy Finnerty remembered Cobain being dejected after they left the stage, saying, “I asked him what’s up. He was like, ‘I think it was bad. I think that the show was really bad. I don’t think I was very good.’ And I said, ‘I think that you’re wrong. I think that it was stunning.’” Then again, Cobain had a good reason to be a little bit frustrated with how they tore through their performance.
If you listen to the record, there are many times when Cobain was out of tune on a few spots, and you can hear the moments where the band sound a little bit off. They’re never completely out of tune by any stretch, but a handful of tunes have a few foul-ups in the mix, like when the frontman hits an off-key note in the middle of ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ before correcting himself or when he overshoots the lead guitar line on their cover of David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’.
While this is far from the show he hoped it would be, a lot of those imperfections actually make the whole thing legendary. Not everything shines in the same way, but when listening to the way that he works off of the rest of the band during the show’s high points, he was clearly leagues above everyone else, especially when he hits that final note of the night on ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’.
There are still a lot of people that like to be an armchair psychologist and say that Cobain was waving goodbye to his fans at this show, but that’s not really the case. This was made months before he took his own life, but had he been able to conquer his own demons, this could have been an interesting look at where the band could have gone in the future as a more rootsy version of grunge.
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