Recorded November 18, 1993, in one take, no rehearsal. Six covers — The Vaselines, Lead Belly, David Bowie, The Meat Puppets — and almost none of the Nirvana songs anyone expected. Cobain reportedly wanted the stage decorated like a funeral: black candles, Stargazer lilies, a crystal chandelier. He died five months later.
The Lead Belly cover — “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” his 1944 recording of an Appalachian folk song called “In the Pines” — is one of the most haunted vocal performances in recorded music. Cobain holds the final note and doesn’t look away from the camera, and the song goes somewhere the audience can only watch from outside.
The set was happening at the exact same historical moment as the rave scene’s peak — E-fueled, collectively oriented, music built for crowds and the dissolution of self. Cobain’s performance ran on entirely the opposite current: solo, acoustic, surrounded by flowers, covering a man who died in 1949. The cultural collision between those two things happening simultaneously in the early ’90s is one of the great unresolved tensions of the decade.
Recorded November 18, 1993, in one take, no rehearsal. Six covers — The Vaselines, Lead Belly, David Bowie, The Meat Puppets — and almost none of the Nirvana songs anyone expected. Cobain reportedly wanted the stage decorated like a funeral: black candles, Stargazer lilies, a crystal chandelier. He died five months later.
The Lead Belly cover — “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” his 1944 recording of an Appalachian folk song called “In the Pines” — is one of the most haunted vocal performances in recorded music. Cobain holds the final note and doesn’t look away from the camera, and the song goes somewhere the audience can only watch from outside.
The set was happening at the exact same historical moment as the rave scene’s peak — E-fueled, collectively oriented, music built for crowds and the dissolution of self. Cobain’s performance ran on entirely the opposite current: solo, acoustic, surrounded by flowers, covering a man who died in 1949. The cultural collision between those two things happening simultaneously in the early ’90s is one of the great unresolved tensions of the decade.