The covers that Nirvana played unplugged in New York
Thirty years ago, on November 1, 1994, it was released “MTV Unplugged in New York” of the Nirvanathe band’s first live album Kurt Cobain. Among the 14 tracks contained in the album and recorded the year before in Sony Studios in New York, one song comes from their debut “Bleach”four from the album “Nevermind” (read the review here), three from “In utero” (read the review here) and six are covers. Let’s see which ones.
By Maurilio Giordana (blog owner “MyWay”)
“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” is a song that the Scots Vaselines they first released in 1987. It is a parody of a Christian children’s song that dates back to the early 1900s.
Before singing it Kurt explains: “it’s a reinterpretation of an old Christian song, I think. But we do it the Vaselines way”
David Bowie writes “The man who sold the world” in 1970 when he was only 19 years old, as a metaphor for his tendency towards continuous transformation and as a celebration of the charm of dual personalities. According to the manufacturer Tony Visconti the text was composed at the last moment, starting from a verse of the poem “Antigonish” Of Hughes Mearnsquite well known in Anglo-American culture. At the time the album “The Man Who Sold the World” it didn’t go beyond number 105 in the US charts. Bowie will joke about the unexpected popularity of the song thanks to Kurt Cobain: “I know that when I sing it live, the younger kids in the audience think: ‘How cool, Bowie is doing a Nirvana song!'”.
The version of Nirvana it’s dirtier and darker than the original. The lyrics are also different: in the second verse, where Bowie sings “we must have died alone”Kurt chooses instead “I must have died alone”a sinisterly prophetic verse in light of what would happen a few months later. To date the cover of Nirvana it has over 550 million views on YouTube while the original version does not reach 9 million.
In the concert lineup Cobain included three songs by Meat Puppetswhich were performed together with the brothers Curt and Chris Kirkwood. All three songs, “Plateau”, “Oh Me” And “Lake of Fire” they come from the group’s second album entitled “Meat Puppets II” published in 1984 and bear the signature of Curt Kirkwood. THE Nirvana they had never performed the Arizona cult band’s songs before and will not do so again in the future.
Plateau – Meat Puppets
Plateau – Nirvana
Oh Me – Meat Puppets
Oh Me – Nirvana
Lake of Fire – Meat Puppets
Lake of Fire – Nirvana
The album ends with the cover of “Where did you sleep last night?”a song from the American folk tradition. It is impossible to establish its authorship but it is probable that the piece was composed around 1870 with the title “In The Pines”. Over the years it was brought to the attention of an increasingly wider audience by the bluegrass legend Bill Monroe and the blues musician Lead Belly: Both recorded various versions of the song between the 1940s and 1950s.
To make the song known to Kurt Cobain it was his friend Mark Lanegansinger of Screaming Treeswhich he discovered “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” thanks to his father’s vinyl collection,
Lanegan will record a cover of the song on his first solo album, “The Winding Sheet”released in 1990 and will involve in the recording Kurt Cobain on electric guitar and choirs. In both Lanegan’s and Nirvana’s versions the lyrics of the song are changed and “Black Girl” becomes “My girl”.
The cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” was the final piece of the performance Nirvana; Kurt announces it as “a song written by my favorite artist” and jokes to the audience that he asked David Geffen to buy him the original guitar of Lead Belly which is on sale for 500 thousand dollars. The producer of the show, Alex Colettisaid that he tried to ask Cobain to do an encore but that he refused, explaining: “I don’t think we can do better than the last song”.
