It became one of the band’s most memorable performances. Then we sat down and the cameras started rolling and something clicked. Even the people from MTV thought it was horrible. We did a few rehearsals and they were terrible. “That show was supposed to be a disaster,” the Foo Fighters frontman said. In a 2015 American Way interview, Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl gave even more insight into band’s state of mind prior to the performance. 'Any time you have a band that's so electric and try to unplug them, there's always a lot of challenges, creatively,' Beth McCarthy-Miller, who directed Nirvana's 'Unplugged' episode, adds. But I’m a huge Bowie fan, so I couldn’t fight too hard against the song.” “I actually fought pretty hard to leave that song out, because I felt it wasn’t as genuine as the rest of the songs. There’s no trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes,” Coletti said. “It’s an acoustic guitar, but he’s obviously going through an amp. He wanted those effects.”Ĭoletti explained Cobain’s use of an amp was most apparent on “The Man Who Sold the World,” Nirvana’s cover of David Bowie’s 1970 song. He was used to hearing this guitar through his Fender. “Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away, but I built a fake box out in front of the amp to make it look like a monitor wedge,” Unplugged producer Alex Coletti told Guitar World. To feel more comfortable with playing an acoustic guitar, Cobain insisted on running the instrument through his Fender Twin Reverb amp and an array of effects boxes, which were then disguised by MTV producers. “They were really nervous about doing Unplugged because they were really leaving themselves wide open.” “It was the first time in a long while I’d seen them all so nervous about doing something,” said Nirvana tour manager Alex MacLeod. As it turns out, however, the performance didn’t fully live up to its name.Īs documented in a March 1995 Guitar World oral history, Cobain and the band were uncharacteristically nervous about the performance. 1 on the Billboard 200 and became the group’s most successful release after lead singer Kurt Cobain’s death. When the live album, MTV Unplugged in New York, was released 25 years ago today, it debuted at No. Nirvana’s November 1993 MTV Unplugged appearance is widely considered one of the best performances in the acoustic television series' history.
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