![]() We felt it would be better if we found other songs.”īut Nirvana’s outside-the-box approach proved to be a masterstroke, dramatically expanding the perception of the band that people considered Nirvana to be, a band who still sounded exactly like themselves not playing any of their anthems, not using any distortion pedals, not relying on the sonic violence. “We knew we didn’t want to do an acoustic version of Teen Spirit,” Grohl later said. It was the ultimate move in how not to yield to corporate pressure. Basically, if these covers were a mixtape, it would’ve been titled Who And What?. ![]() These included three songs by cult US rockers the Meat Puppets, whose brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood joined Nirvana onstage for the tracks, The Man Who Sold The World, a David Bowie song that was considered a deep cut at that point, a track by blues pioneer Lead Belly and a cover of a track by Scottish indie duo The Vaselines. But Nirvana pretty much ignored anything that could be considered amped-up in their catalogue – the only songs in their MTV Unplugged set that could be considered rock-ish were pared-down versions of Come As You Are and On A Plain – and instead honed in on more introspective cuts from their records with the rest of the show taking in surprise cover choices of mostly-unknown songs. Even Pearl Jam, who had already began to show their discomfort at following traditional norms, had acquiesced, playing straightforward acoustic renditions of Even Flow and Alive in their set. MTV Unplugged was usually viewed in the same way as any other mainstream music show, in that you play the hits. Just because they were willing to play the game doesn’t mean they didn’t rework some of the rules, though. “His creative mind at that time was going in a more quieter direction.” “Kurt wanted to prove to himself that he could do this in an artistically successful way,” Geffen Records A&R Mark Kates told The Ringer. Nothing about them screamed: “MTV Unplugged material”.Īnd yet, they were bang up for it, keen to show they were a more dynamic and nuanced band than their quiet-loud-quiet-loud-super-loud smash hits. Nirvana acoustic was just not a thing: Nirvana were the loudest and most aggressively chaotic live band on the planet, Cobain’s howl rendering PAs useless, Dave Grohl’s powerhouse drumming style the sort that could register on the Richter scale. Bar some of the more restrained moments on their records, no-one had ever really heard Nirvana raw and stripped-down. This one, though, was less about whether Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl would actually show and more about if they had the chops to pull it off. Similarly, there was much fretting about the grunge superstars’ MTV Unplugged performance, an all-time classic set that turned 30 this week.
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