Published on Jul 5, 2005
It’s dark, with some candles around a stage and a few hundred
people in what looks like a university auditorium. A few guitars
and a drum set are on the stage, looking innocent, and the crowd is
glad to be inside on a chilly November night.
All of a sudden the band that defined grunge walks onto the
stage, flashes brief smiles at each other and the audience, and
takes their place on wooden stools. The singer, wearing a green
cardigan and brushing back stringy blond hair from his eyes,
introduces the first song by saying “This is off our first record.
Most people don’t own it.”
Thus begins
Unplugged In New York, the final album released before said
singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide five months later. Knowing the history
now makes listening to this album much more meaningful – like the
third
Star Wars prequel, we already know the sad story, but
watching it unfold is still emotional every time.
This album meant so much to so many Generation Xers who saw
Cobain as their spokesman. I was one of them. Kurt railed against
authority and hypocrisy and celebrated disenfranchisement by
detaching from the world himself. So it is only fitting the
reluctant spokesman for the grunge generation spends his last major
concert sitting on a stool, barely looking at the audience and
totally focused on his music.
In this acoustic setting, everything is restrained but the
passion of the lyrics. Dave Grohl uses brushes on his drums while
Pat Smear and Krist Novoselic keep the noise to a minimum. Kurt,
however, sings with just as much clenched fury as he can muster
where necessary, switching to ironic observer and tortured teenager
when necessary. The music of Nirvana never felt more urgent and
needed than here, and this album proves their songwriting skills
were among the top of the alternative heap.
Half of this album is covers, in another attempt to appear
humble. But the covers are just as good as the originals – Bowie’s
“Man Who Sold the World,” in particular, lends a whole new
dimension to the 1971 original. The band also invites two of the
Meat Puppets on stage for three songs, which turn out to be the
best sequence on the album. But the most chilling is the final
scream on Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” where Kurt
screams the final line “SHIVER” and then pauses before finishing
that song. You could cut the emotion with a knife during that
silence.
Of course, when Kurt sings “And I swear that I don’t have a gun”
in the beginning and fades out with “All Apologies” at the end, we
are hearing his suicide note. Maybe I helped kill him by asking him
to be something he did not want to be. Maybe the drugs and Courtney
did the job instead. Whatever your theory is, this is Kurt’s final
legacy to the world, and the best album Nirvana ever recorded.