Nirvana's appearance on MTV Unplugged might now be considered one of the most iconic live performances of all time, but the run-up to the show left the band and crew bracing for a veritable car crash.
Recorded on November 18th and first broadcast on December 16th 1993, Nirvana's now-legendary MTV Unplugged was a runaway success, widely praised by fans and critics alike - but recollections from those behind the scenes are far from rosy.
Speaking with American Way magazine in 2015, Dave Grohl recalled some of those gloomy expectations: "That show was supposed to be a disaster. We hadn’t rehearsed. We weren’t used to playing acoustic. We did a few rehearsals and they were terrible. Everyone thought it was horrible. Even the people from MTV".
Alex Coletti, producer of the MTV Unplugged series, remembered Cobain feeling much the same: “Kurt wasn’t happy with the way rehearsals were going; he didn’t like the way Dave sounded playing drums with sticks."
"He’s a heavy hitter, and the thing about Unplugged, especially with rock bands, is if the drummer doesn’t really, really get it under control and tries to play a rock show on a smaller kit, then it brings the show to a bad-sounding electric show instead of a good-sounding acoustic show.”
For Cobain, Unplugged presented a chance to do something different, and he was anxious for the band to make the most of it. "Kurt wanted something that would break away from just the normal, dull TV set", recalls the band's tour manager, Alex MacLeod. "He didn’t want it to look like just a bare stage".
"He had seen a lot of Unplugged shows before, and felt they weren’t really unplugged. His feeling was that a lot of the bands would just use semi-acoustic instruments and play their songs exactly the same way they would if they were doing a full show. He wanted to make Nirvana’s Unplugged appearance slightly different, sort of a downbeat kind of set. Really laid back."
According to MacLeod, "Kurt wanted to make it something that would show a whole different side of the band", but their loud, distortion-heavy style presented issues when it came to choosing a setlist. "They were like, ‘We’d love to do that, but a lot of those songs are really dull if we were to do them that way.’ The band just thought that there were other songs better-suited to the acoustic format.”
"We knew we didn’t want to do an acoustic version of Teen Spirit," said Grohl, "That would’ve been horrendously stupid. We felt it would be better if we found other songs."
Eventually, the band settled on several covers from the likes of David Bowie, Leadbelly, and Scottish rockers The Vaselines - in the end, only eight of the 14 songs from the final set were Nirvana originals.
Coletti recalls the final setlist received a a lukewarm reception from MTV's management: "There was this whole subtext of ‘try to get Kurt to do more hit songs’ that prevailed throughout the day among myself, my boss, and management. The other thing was we were really pressuring Scott Litt, like, ‘Hey, see if you can get more songs out of them, or better songs’".
The rehearsals on November 16th and 17th did little to lift the air of pessimism - if anything, they entrenched them. According to MacLeod, “They were still like, ‘Oh my God, we haven’t rehearsed enough. Oh shit, we’re gonna blow this totally.’"
Thankfully, things fell into place once the day of recording finally came around. "We sat down and the cameras started rolling, and something clicked," said Grohl, who believes the show quickly “became one of the band’s most memorable".
"I think what we got was great," says Coletti. "Kurt just chose to take a different road with it. I guess it wasn’t the road we were all in sync on. Not that he went in a bad direction at all.”
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