MTV Unplugged in New York - Nirvana (1994)
a selection of live albums I love
One of MTV’s lasting contributions to music history is “MTV Unplugged”, a series of specials that challenged artists to represent their music live on stage with primarly acoustic arrangements. Not everybody followed the rules: Springsteen just ignored the rules, REM and Neil Young brought the ready-made acoustic shows they were already doing. But it also featured a forum for not-very-acoustic artists like Jay Z and Seal to work out genuinely new approaches to their work. (and Bjork, but she doesn’t really need a reason to stand out)
Nirvana’s session has musical importance for more than just being part of the Unplugged series. It’s the last Nirvana album, a roundup of a lot of spare threads about music the band loved, and a glimpse of what could have been.
They open with About A Girl, possibly the only song from Bleach that they could have done in an acoustic arrangment and possibly the song most likely to be played by people who hated the rest of that record.
The tracklist includes quite a few tunes from the two world-beating albums that had made them the biggest band in the land, along with a cover of The Vaselines that they’d played live for years.
Then they bring on The Meat Puppets to join in on 3 of tracks from that band’s second self-titled record, which Cobain had long touted as one of his favorites.
They close with Leadbelly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night, also called In The Pines depending on where you find it. The band probably learned it from working on Mark Lanegan’s first solo record. The gutteral scream at the end is haunting as much as it is thrilling.
There’s nobody who doesn’t know the story. This was Kurt Cobain’s last recording project. He’d take his own life in the spring of 1994 and leave us all wondering how the new, more nuanced, less rageful version of the band might have sounded in the future.
