(Credits: Far Out / Geffen Records)
No one’s ever going to find a band that was as good at self-deprecation as Nirvana.
While the last thing that most bands want to do is tell everyone how much their music sucks, Kurt Cobain could only be brutally honest whenever he gave interviews, and when listening to him talk about the mixes of Nevermind, he was more than happy to say when he thought something wasn’t up to his standards. But the lack of quality control that Cobain saw didn’t only apply to the songs they recorded in the studio.
Then again, Cobain was also one of the kings of contradiction. Despite claiming that he knew nothing about music theory and wanted to minimise the band’s success as much as possible, he was still looking to be in a huge band. He wanted to be famous in the same way that Ringo Starr was famous in The Beatles, but he didn’t really have a choice once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ blew the doors wide open for grunge rock.
Because, really, that one song is the biggest double-edged sword in Nirvana’s discography. Sure, it’s one of the biggest hits of the 1990s and a contender for the most important rock and roll song of all time, but Cobain didn’t want to live his life through one tune. It was bad enough that Nevermind sounded like a more glossy version of the sound he heard in his head, but having to perform it all across the world was like taking all the fun out of playing music for him.
So when sessions for In Utero started, Cobain wanted the polar opposite of Nevermind. Everything had to be as natural as possible, and while that did lead to some truly wild moments on songs like ‘Scentless Apprentice’ and ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’, getting more mellow on the album also didn’t hurt. A song like ‘Heart Shaped Box’ may have been the most logical step after tunes like ‘Teen Spirit’, but whereas ‘Something in the Way’ was dark and brooding, ‘Dumb’ and ‘All Apologies’ were absolutely beautiful in their final form.
But if it sounded great in the studio, it was anyone’s guess how they were going to sound when they hit the road. No one expected the same band that destroyed their instruments at the end of every show to suddenly break out the acoustics and play softer songs, and as far as Cobain could tell, getting all of those together on the live stage was a nightmare, especially when trying to get a cello and Krist Novoselic’s accordion into the mix.
To everyone else’s ears, the whole thing sounded beautiful, but Cobain stood by the fact that those performances left a lot to be desired, saying, “We played acoustic for the first time and we had one day before he left to practice our acoustic set, which should explain why it sucked so bad. I think a lot of people thought it sucked. I didn’t hate it that much.” But maybe the frat boy audience that came to those shows didn’t quite know what they were listening to yet.
They clearly needed some time to work out the bugs, and when listening to what they eventually did on MTV Unplugged in New York, they had that sound down to a science. It’s not the most perfect set in the world, and there are a few times where things go awry, but when hearing Cobain sing from the heart on ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ or scream his way through ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’, he left nothing to the imagination once he left the stage that night.
It might not have been what everyone wanted from Nirvana at the time, but in all fairness, the band did warn everyone of what they wanted to play. Their whole mantra was there in ‘Come As You Are’, and they would have rather played what satisfied them than try to recreate ‘Teen Spirit’ 20 different times throughout the live show.
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