When it came time to do the MTV Unplugged special and feeling the spirit of the moment, the band closed out their show with their memorable rendition of the song. According to the New York Times, the two musicians bonded over the original song that Lead Belly recorded in 1944 and Cobain played guitar on Lanegan's version. Other covers included David Bowie's " The Man Who Sold the World," which would serve as a single from the album release, Lead Belly's " Where Did You Sleep Last Night," which closed out the set, and a re-titled " Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam," which was initially done by The Vaselines.Īs for the Lead Belly cover, the song dated back for Cobain to the aforementioned Mark Lanegan disc The Winding Sheet. They were one of the only bands I'd seen since the Butthole Surfers that I really felt was in the same ballpark as us nihilistically and aesthetically and spiritually." Nirvana, "The Man Who Sold the World" I think they immediately warmed my heart because I immediately felt some sort of spiritual kinship. Musically - by the time we heard them - we were too far gone into our own thing. He stated, "We'll never know how much influence we had on Kurt because we can't ask him that. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Curt Kirkwood was asked about the band's influence on Nirvana. Producer Alex Coletti told Guitar World, " wanted to hear the 'right' names - Eddie Vedder or Tori Amos or God knows who." Cris and Curt Kirwook joined the band for performances of " Plateau," " Oh, Me," and " Lake of Fire," the latter of which would receive plenty of play in the aftermath of the airing. Speaking of covers, three of those belonged to the Meat Puppets, whom Nirvana had been touring with just prior to the taping. Among the set list, only " Come As You Are" could be considered a major hit for the band. Unlike a lot of their peers, Nirvana didn't view this as a "greatest hits" show, instead opting to go deeper in choosing cuts and including a number of cover songs, something that didn't exactly sit well with the network. The disc featured a more stripped back sound and it should be noted that both Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic made guest appearances on the Lanegan disc. As Dave Grohl stated, "We'd seen the other Unpluggeds and didn't like many of them, because most bands would treat them like rock shows - play their hits like it was Madison Square Garden, except with acoustic guitars." Instead the band looked at Mark Lanegan's 1990 album The Winding Sheet as a source of inspiration. But the band wasn't exactly keen on replicating what had been done by others before. As Pitchfork masterfully states it, "the delicacy of the sound, the brittleness of the performance" revealed the true fragility behind all wrath, particularly as a counterpoint to the rage of 1993's "In Utero." "Unplugged" was post-tantrum peace, a "realm of feeling people had been passing through forever."Īnd the entire thing nearly didn't happen.Nirvana, who had released their In Utero album just two months prior to the taping, had been pursued by the network for what would definitely be considered a coup for the show.
There's banter, digressions, and hollowness and fullness in equal portions. It contains 14 tracks, only eight of which are Nirvana's. The "Unplugged" album was recorded November 1993 in a single, live take in Sony Music Studios in New York City, and released a year, later in November 1994, after Cobain's suicide. Born from the fusion of '80s antiestablishment punk acts like "Black Flag" and the ragged-edged, trashy pop sensibilities of "The Pixies" and "The Vaselines," Nirvana had exploded almost overnight between 1991's "Nevermind" and 1994's "Unplugged." During those few short years, even including their 1989 debut "Bleach," they'd re-written the rules about not only what record labels believed the public at large wanted, but about what constituted "popular" music as a whole, especially rock. These words, uttered by Kurt Cobain at the end of "Something in the Way" during their 1993 "MTV Unplugged" performance, not only precisely encapsulate the cynical levity of Cobain's mind during the evening's candled, flowered, dimly lit affair, but the entirety of Nirvana's journey to that point. We should have a whole bunch of extra guitars." "What are they tuning, a harp? I thought we were a big, rich rock band.