Everything about Nirvana is an in joke. We look at em and hear and every “Son Of A Gun” every “I don’t have a gun” every “I Hate Myself And I Wish I Was Dead” is a black ha bloody ha, driver’s license, blown off face, sick in puke fest that festers and ruins so much of the pleasure while adding a fillip of terror as what you listen to, watch you watch, slips away before your eyess.
Kurt Cobain in a hospital robe, pretty like an angel, blonde like a babe, scruffy like a Messiah and positively, definably insane and two years away from succeeding in killing himself: is all neck stretch intensity at the packed out reading Festival where the people far away woulda only seen a light show and only heard an intense trio who, well at least two of em, had been together for a long time, and the third seemed to be steering them into the hardest as most concentrated of hard rock.
The year was 1992 and Cobain was married and his daughter had just beem born.
Nirvana, three years and two albums into their career, were exhausted and decided to play a handful of big dates instead of a fullscale US tour.
The reading festival was one.
As a joke, at the start of the concert Nirvana is wheeled out in a whhel chair, staggers up, warbles into the mic and collapses. Than he jumps up and the band starts “Breed”.
Nirvana are all move, all rhythm, all movement. All all cold heat. Bass player Krist Nivoselic, with long straight hair and leather coat is the epitome of a rock star, shaking his way across the huge stage. Dave Grohl a powerhouse who seems to have grown extra arms and Cobain… well, Cobain is about as introverted as you can in the middle of a stage. Among his friends he still seems alone and the band might connect musical -do connect musically, still there is a weird disconnect. They don’t seem very close at all!!
And it is down to Cobain -there is something so glassy and removed in his performance. For all its emotions, fo alll its not inaccurate, posit as a major statement by one of the biggest bands ever, it isn’t as moving as the later MTV Unplugged. Raw power, yes, but raw power about using the raw power to remove yourself.
It’s hard not to love a show, or wish you’d been there to see a show, with a definitive “Negative Creep”. Or even a set that doesn’t build: it roars from one end to another for a straight ninety minutes.
How can something so open be so closed down? Therein lies Cobain’s mystery. the In Joke