Like most concert DVD’s, Unplugged in New York isn’t exactly heavy with extras, but gold can be found, especially in the snippets between songs that were never aired. He bares even more when seen on “Pennyroyal Tea”, is even rawer on “All Apologies”, and is even more charming when joking about “Pennyroyal”, “I’ll try it in the normal key, and if it sounds bad, these people will just have to wait.” The candles and white stargazer lilies as decorations even conspire to enhance the effect. Looking as healthy and handsome as any rock star, Cobain earns his iconic status on film, whether he wanted to or not. The visuals also heighten the tragedy of Cobain’s early demise. And Novoselic does look odd and too tall when he stands to play accordion on “Sunbeam”. The only bad hairstyles comes from when Meat Puppets Cris and Curt Kirkwood join Nirvana on stage for covers of three of their songs. Perhaps because the group has long been preserved in the amber of Cobain dying young, they don’t look like some anachronistic fashion fad from an I Love the 90’s episode. While recorded before HD, the video has been refined enough to remove any grain.
The addition of cellist Lori Goldston still makes tracks like “Polly” and “On A Plain” into orchestral beauties, while Cobain’s stripped-down solo rendition of “Pennyroyal Tea” is still him at his barest.īut there is something new to seeing the group again, maybe most notably in how unusual they don’t look. Cobain’s guitar on David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” is still affected and not technically ‘unplugged’ – and still too good for anyone to care. Covers “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For a Sunbeam”, “Lake of Fire”, and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” are still the measuring sticks with which to judge alt-country/folk. Krist Novoselic’s bass on “Come As You Are” (the only ‘hit’ played the entire night) is still pitch-perfect. However, “About A Girl” forward, virtually everything on Unplugged in New York still holds up. Most people don’t own it” (while “Girl” was from their pre- Nevermind debut, Bleach, it later charted as an MTV Unplugged single). For instance, some of the irony has been lost from his opening line before “About A Girl”, “This is off our first record. And much of the power and tragedy of Cobain’s voice is already well known to the viewer.
There’s no longer a great surprise at Nirvana so successfully translating into acoustic, or a curiosity at their diverse choice of covers. Of course, the success of the MTV Unplugged: Nirvana record means, to the ear at least, much of the DVD is very familiar. All of that, combined with knowing it all from the album, makes the performance an entity, in and of itself. And picked more for how they would play unplugged (i.e., “Smells Like Teen Spirit” probably wouldn’t have worked acoustic…), they still fit together. However, that meant that the songs on Unplugged in New York have a life of their own, separate from deliveries on album or by their original bands. Now finally available on DVD, in its entirety, the live concert still stands up strong.Įven before the recording began, the set was sure to be something unusual, as not only was the hard-rocking grunge band going acoustic, but they’d devised a set-list almost completely devoid of ‘big hits’ – and almost half of the songs were covers. It’s release on CD the following year debuted at #1 and won a Grammy. Recorded just four months before Kurt Cobain’s death, the live performance has long been thought of as a tragic, moving swan song to one of the most famous and influential bands in rock ‘n’ roll. Fourteen years later, Nirvana’s seminal MTV Unplugged performance is as powerful as you remember in its first DVD release.