Nirvana’s last UK gig remastered on CD: “Live at Reading”

Kurt Cobain and Nirvana played one of their most famous performances in 1992 at the Reading Festival in England. The concert took place a few days after Cobain’s daughter Frances Bean was born and the new parents were under heavy attack. Kurt’s mental condition was the target of one and Courtney’s self-confessed drug use during the pregnancy (she retracted after she saw her words in print in Vanity Fair) and her general lack of parenting skills. As a parody bit to deflect media’s pressures, Kurt had music journalist Everett True push him out on a wheelchair. He wore a white patient’s coat, the like he came straight from the asylum.

Kurt was clear-headed and witty and very much on fire that night, the good kind that burns clean and strong. Watch the clip. Right before “All Apologies” he encourages the crowd to yell “Courtney, we love you!”

We came across a link to the new live disc that came out earlier this month: it sounds fantastic! Download Nirvana “Live at Reading,” but only to verify how good it is. This is how it works: you like, you pay. Got that? Good… now go support Courtney Love and the rest of the crew (like the two dudes who played with Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic) by purchasing a legit, physical copy from your local independent record store. Yup, those places still exists. Barely.

Nirvana
Live At Reading
Store Date: November 3, 2009
VBR VO
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Track List:
1. Breed
2. Drain You
3. Aneurysm
4. School
5. Sliver
6. In Bloom
7. Come As You Are
8. Lithium
9. About A Girl
10. Tourette’s
11. Polly
12. Lounge Act
13. Smells Like Teen Spirit
14. On A Plain
15. Negative Creep
16. Been A Son
17. All Apologies
18. Blew
19. Dumb
20. Stay Away
21. Spank Thru
22. The Money Will Roll Right In
23. D-7
24. Territorial Pissings

Mia Zapata

Born: August 8, 1965, in Louisville, Kentucky
Died: July 7, 1993, in Seattle, Washington
Band: The Gits

Raised in Kentucky on Bessie Smith, Jimmy Reed, Hank Williams, Billie Holliday, and hardcore punk Mia founded the Gits at Antioch College in 1986. A few years later, the band and a group of friends moved to Seattle in search of a new audience. Seattle’s alternative music scene, what was later labeled grunge, was about to blow up, and the Gits’ post-punk music, attitude, and poetic lyrics garnered the band a devoted following. They took the show on abroad by nickel and dimeing an independent tour of northern Europe.

The following year saw the band’s first release, Frenching the Bully. In 1993, the band was busy working on an anticipated follow-up when Mia Zapata was raped and murdered late one night on her way home, ending the band’s career. Kurt Cobain, who was a friend of Mia’s, was profoundly affected by her murder and Nirvana played a benefit concert for the singer August 6, 1993. After nine years on the run, Florida fisherman Jesus Mezquia was sentenced to 36 years in prison in 2004 for her murder.

Kristen Pfaff

Born: May 26, 1967 in New York
Died: June 16, 1994 in Seattle, Washington
Bands: Janitor Joe, Hole

Born in New York, Kristen Pfaff picked up bass at Boston College and ended up studying women’s studies at the University of Minnesota. After graduation she founded and toured with a local trio called Janitor Joe.

While playing a club gig in California, Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson asked if she wanted to play bass for Hole, and after a few days she accepted. Kristin Pfaff moved to Seattle to be close with the band and almost immediately joined the band for the recording of Live Through This, Hole’s first major label debut. The record went platinum and many feel Pfaff’s bass playing, piano, and backup vocals that helped elevate the overall sound. Moving to Seattle was both good and bad: Pfaff became successful, but developed a heroin habit too (which she kicked for a while in 1993).

Pfaff was deeply affected by Cobain‘s suicide, whom she was friendly with, and decided to quit Hole and move back to Minneapolis where she had a new band lined up called Palm. Courtney Love supposedly didn’t take the news lightly. Kristin Pfaff was found dead in the bathtub from an apparent overdose the morning she was supposed to leave. Over the course of two months Love lost a husband and her band’s bass player. Conspiracy theories about Love’s supposed role in the deaths abound.

Janitor Joe
Courtney-Love.org

Kurt Cobain

Born: February 20, 1967 in Aberdeen, Washington
Died: April 5, 1994 at his home in Seattle, Washington
Band: Nirvana, Fecal Matter

By Cobain’s own account, he had a happy childhood until his parents divorced when he was eight years old. For the first year he stayed with his mother, followed by a couple of years with his father, Don Cobain. After Kurt’s rebellious teenage spirits reared its ugly head his life turned transient, as he was forced to live with various friends and family members until they could no longer deal with his negativity and tantrums. Don Cobain changed the course of his son’s life when he gave Kurt a guitar for his 14th birthday.

Kurt didn’t find many people to jam with in high school, but he set out creating songs and improving his chops. One of his first bands was named Fecal Matter, fittingly named by Kurt who loved anything gross & perverted. Nirvana’s first incarnation came to life in 1987 after Cobain convinced Krist Novoselic to start a band with him. The two friends went through seemingly more drummers than Spinal Tap until they settled with Chad Channing. The trio recorded Bleach in 1988, which Sub Pop released the following year to great underground acclaim. Cobain still wasn’t completely happy with Channing’s skills on the skins, so the latter was casually replaced when Dave Grohl was available for a new gig.

With Grohl behind the drums, Nirvana gelled better than any power trio since Cream or the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and with the music industry finally looking for something else besides hard glam rock, divas, and pop posers, Nirvana seemed to fit the bill. In 1991, Nirvana’s major label debut, Nevermind, crushed the charts with a vengeance. The press jumped on the “Seattle—Grunge City” bandwagon and Cobain became an involuntarily spokesperson and tastemaker for Gen X.

Kurt Cobain first met Courtney Love after a show in Portland, Oregon, but it remained a casual encounter until Dave Grohl introduced the two during the Nevermind recordings in the summer of ’91. The two quickly developed mutual crushes, which evolved to a cross-country courtship during the fall. They didn’t bond strictly through romance, however, both claim that heroin and pills were an important part of the mix too.

The following year, in early 1992, Courtney Love was pregnant, so Kurt Cobain soon proposed they get married. The ceremony took place on Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach and photos show Kurt smiling, but his eyes are sedated from shooting up that afternoon. It didn’t take long for the press to catch on, and Courtney Love was often lambasted as a new Yoko Ono. Kurt & Courtney preferred to be compared to punk’s dreaded couple, Sid and Nancy. Following a highly publicized magazine article in Vogue where Love was quoted as saying she’d been using drugs during her pregnancy, Frances Bean Cobain came to the world August 18, 1992, as a normal healthy baby.

Although the becoming a father turned Kurt Cobain’s life into something positive, the dichotomy of mainstream success and underground cred became sort of an existential struggle for Cobain, and he chose to self-medicate with copious amounts of heroin. Cobain overdosed on heroin in July 1993 before a concert in New York City, and again from a combination of champagne and Rohypnol in March 1994 at a hospital in Rome, Italy. Cobain’s last week included a failed intervention, followed by a heroin binge, before Kurt bought a shotgun, and flew to LA where he checked himself in to rehab. Unfortunately, the stay was cut short when he jumped the fence and went back Seattle. During the first week of April Cobain’s wife, family, and friends searched for him in vain.

April 8, 1994, an electrician found Kurt Cobain with a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. According to the coroner’s report, Cobain died April 5, 1994. He was 27 years old. For those interested in learning more about the conspiracy theories surrounding Kurt Cobain’s death, be sure to read Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain.

TotalNirvana.net
NirvanaClub.com