The song originated in the classrooms of British Sunday schools, only to be twisted into weird shapes by The Vaselines, the terminally adolescent, shambling Scottish group that Kurt adored. The first is a reading of ‘Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam’ (with the accordion, and Dave Grohl on bass) that sounds a little like the Velvets at their most folky: dirge-laden, hushed, slightly Celtic. …And there are two nods to the indie-rock seedbed that produced them. There’s the ominous, disquieting finale: a reading of Leadbelly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ that leads Kurt to wail and mewl as if the song means more to him than we’ll ever know, and manages to retrospectively cast him as another variant of the archetypal bluesman… For that reason, encapsulated in the fact that it rides on a divinely simple verse/ chorus/ verse undertow, it may be the most beautiful song here.Įlsewhere, there’s a cover of Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ -trailed by Kurt mumbling “I guarantee you I will screw this up” – featuring a lone fuzzed-up guitar (the only instance of cheating) and delivered with a frayed panache, boosted by the incongruity of the lank-haired urchin paying tribute to the English dandy. Inevitably, Kurt sings it in a screwed-up rasp, making it sound – as with so many of his songs – like a collision of innocence and tortured experience. The musical backdrop suggests The Beatles in 1964, at their lovelorn best: minor-key introspection gives way to regular traces of lightened-up calm, only to regain the upper hand within bars. So, it begins with ‘About A Girl’, lifted from ‘Bleach’ and made to sound a thousand times more lithe and streamlined. Listening to four or five of these tracks is enough to reveal the band’s essence to make out the patchwork lineage that was sometimes obscured under that steely, adrenalised noise. But what’s most appealing about ‘Unplugged’ is the way that it roots Nirvana at the meeting point of a web of crucial forces. It also features off-kilter cover versions and sparkling arrangement (with cellist Laurie Goldstein and guitarist Pat Smear) that peak when Novoselic picks up an accordion. I’ll try in a normal key, and if it sounds bad, these people are just going to have to wait.” There follows a welter of sitcom-esque laughter. “Well,” says Kurt, “I think I’ll try it in a different key. “Do it by yourself,” replies Dave Grohl, like a schoolteacher. “Am I going to do this by myself?” asks Kurt before ‘Penny Royal Tea’. For a start, it’s candid enough to be sprinkled with laugh-strewn dialogue. The virtues of this record are almost endless. In all, they matter little, either because they lend themselves to the idea that we’re party to something unfettered by circuitry and production gloss, or because they’re swamped by an overwhelming charm. There may be imperfections here: the way that Kurt’s fingers can’t quite cope with an acoustic guitar, occasionally making the foundations of the tracks sound frail and fractured the fact that his voice can sometimes get a little too nasal, his teeth a little too clenched. It should come as no surprise that listening to large parts of ‘Unplugged’ is like hearing ‘A Day In The Life’ or ‘The Burning Of The Midnight Lamp’ – you are silenced, suddenly made to ransack your thoughts. Thankfully, we have the records: the artefacts that can speak in a language uncluttered by sentimentality and already fill the listener with a strange-tasting mixture of exhilaration and sadness. He’ll probably be talked about by tweed-suited pundits with only the faintest clue about what made him great, end up on Athena posters tacked on to suburban walls and have every last bit of tragedy and gravitas that surrounded him ground into trite soundbites. Kurt Cobain will become one of those revered figures (see also Lennon, Hendrix) around whom there is only the faintest murmur of debate someone who’ll only have the word “over-rated” sprayed on to their headstone by deluded heretics who has already risen way above cultish small-fry to stand as the fantastic exemplar of a whole era.įor sure, what tends to befall the spectres of such people is not always pleasant.
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