- #Where did you sleep last night nirvana mtv unplugged full
- #Where did you sleep last night nirvana mtv unplugged series
So naturally, they covered shambling twee-pop duo the Vaselines for the umpteenth time, recorded a song popularised by Lead Belly (a big hero of Cobain’s since Slim Moon had played him Lead Belly’s Last Sessions in the late 1980s), did an obscure David Bowie song (again, a favourite from the early days of the band this time the man who got Cobain hooked was Chad Channing, Nirvana’s pre-Grohl drummer) and invited their friends the Meat Puppets to sit in with them as they played no fewer than three of the band’s songs. Cobain, Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic had always sought to deflect attention away from themselves and on to their peers and influences it was a big part of how they handled their runaway success, and a very laudable part, too. In the event, they chose to play acoustic arrangements of a few other Nirvana songs, then filled the rest of the set with works by other songwriters. What else would they do, though? They needed, like, 10 other songs. As was Dumb from In Utero, and it would have been easy enough for the band to imagine About a Girl being played on acoustic guitars.
Something in the Way and Polly from Nevermind were natural fits, of course. Shorn of the power of volume, which of their songs would work? They relied on the intensity of a full-bore rock band to put them in their proper context.
#Where did you sleep last night nirvana mtv unplugged full
Would Strawberry Fields Forever sound like Lennon’s best work played on one guitar? Would, say, I Feel Love sound like a classic that needed to be heard over 12 minutes to get the full impact if played by one earnest guitar player? Cobain was a first-rate songwriter, but that didn’t mean that all of his songs sounded their best played on an acoustic guitar and a brushed snare drum. That old saw about a song not being a good song if you can’t play it with one acoustic guitar or a piano is actually a vast oversimplification. The first problem the band had when approaching the show, other than Kurt Cobain’s basic unreliability due to his drug use, was material. In the annals of MTV Unplugged, it’s Nirvana, Clapton and then everyone else. Whatever it is that MTV producer Alex Coletti had wanted them to do at the outset, Nirvana’s performance turned out to be one of the absolute signature moments of the show. Nirvana had included a couple of acoustic songs on Nevermind, but essentially they were a rock band, and an unusually raw and ragged one at that. The show’s production team had been after Nirvana for a while, although quite what they had expected the band to do in such a setting is a little mystifying. MTV Unplugged in New York was recorded at Sony Music Studios, Hell’s Kitchen, on 18 November 1993. Joel Stillerman, Executive Producer, MTV Unplugged And they were secure in that, and it turned out to be incredibly right. They obviously had a very clear vision of what they wanted to do. So here we go, the first of them (which as we shall see isn’t a double album and is generally not very gonzo).
#Where did you sleep last night nirvana mtv unplugged series
I decided to write about the record as the first in a series of posts about live albums (all old staples of my record collection). Other writing commitments and general seasonal business got in the way. I’ve been meaning to post something about the resulting show/album since I saw someone post something on Facebook about the 25th anniversary of the recording last month. On 18 November 1993, Nirvana taped an acoustic performance for MTV’s Unplugged strand.