Nirvana mtv unplugged dvd series#

The performance was released on DVD in 2007. It also won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in 1996. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, and has become the group's most successful posthumous release, having been certified 5x platinum in the United States by 1997. MTV Unplugged in New York was the first Nirvana album released following the death of Kurt Cobain. As opposed to traditional practice on the television series, the band played a set list composed of mainly lesser-known material and cover versions of songs by The Vaselines, David Bowie, Lead Belly, and Meat Puppets, whose Cris and Curt Kirkwood joined Nirvana onstage. The show was directed by Beth McCarthy and first aired on the cable television network MTV on December 16, 1993.

Nirvana mtv unplugged dvd series#

It features an acoustic performance taped at Sony Music Studios in New York City on November 18, 1993, for the television series MTV Unplugged.

In other words, this iconic performance means what you want it to mean.MTV Unplugged in New York is a live album by the American grunge band Nirvana. But obviously gets magnified in the context of what happened later.' Everyone knew we just saw another side of a very important band. Speaking in the Bare Witness making-of documentary, he says: 'Everyone knew this was special. Perhaps the last word should go to Alex Coletti, the producer of MTV Unplugged at the time. (And anyone prepared to appear onstage with Dave Grohl wearing a turtleneck jumper and a ponytail had to have a sense of humour.)Р”Р‡or once, the extras are worth a look - see the alternate versions of Come as You Are, Polly and Pennyroyal Tea, as wells as covers of Plateau by the Meat Puppets and Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World from rehearsals. Cobain slowly swivels on his chair bringing a wry grin to bear and says, 'I don't think MTV will let us play that,' a reference to the band's appearance at 1992 MTV Awards, when they were banned from playing song. Before the highlight of the evening, a cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night by Leadbelly, someone shouts out a request for Rape Me. And when Cobain sighs before the opening song, About a Girl, while staring in to the middle distance with something like terror in his eyes, it's hard not to think of the words he later wrote in a far from metaphorical suicide note: 'The fact is, I can't fool you, any one of you'.Р”В«ut there was a lighter side to Cobain, too.

The stage set certainly seems pregnant with meaning: dressed with black candles and white lilies, it couldn't look more like a funeral.

It also supports both sides of the you-could-tell-something-was-wrong / it-was-just-a-good-gig argument. Many people will be familiar with this performance from the album, but even so this 66-minute unedited footage (including Something in the Way and Oh Me, which were cut from the original broadcast) makes fascinating viewing. But until now it has never been available as a video or DVD (bootlegs notwithstanding). When it was released seven months after Cobain took his own life, Nirvana: Unplugged in New York sold over 5m copies in America alone, topped the album charts in seven countries, and went on to win a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. Others reckon it to be an interesting and eclectic example of the Unplugged format, but that any deeper meaning is the product of myth-making and hindsight. Some people consider it to be Kurt Cobain, the tortured genius, stripping both his songs, and himself, to the bone in a brilliant, painfully raw performance that amounts to a kind of suicide note. Opinion on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged performance at Sony Music Studios in New York on November 18, 1993, is divided into two camps.