An uneventful first week in January. My thoughts were on the coming weekend and what music I would listen to, having missed the opportunity the previous weekend due to New Years Eve celebrations. And there was so much good music to pick from.
Naturally I stopped in to visit Jack Jensen on Friday. In the short time I was there four paintings flew off the wall, including the one I purchased below. Either there is an instant connection or not.
First up was Nirvana who performed at the Reading Festival in the UK on August 30, 1992. Public Image Limited performed at the festival two days earlier. I'll listen to that one next weekend. Nirvana's performance was stunningly good from beginning to end, Kurt being particularly chatty with the audience in what I assume is an excellent soundboard recording.
This was 12 days after his daughter was born. His wife Courtney said "The day Frances was born this dealer came to the hospital [to see Kurt]. There were eight thousand nurses and doctors outside the door, and Kurt was in the hospital, on a morphine drip for his stomach. He's already on a fucking morphine drip, and then he arranges for this dealer to come and stick a needle into the IV!"
Although Kurt was on and off the heroin, suffering from depression and under pressure from the publicity he hated, he was phenomenal on stage.
He was inexplicably brought on stage in a wheelchair wearing a blond wig amid much speculation that the band was breaking up, Kurt making a joke about the noise that he was a junkie.
This is how that particular show was described:
“The staggering energy and intensity radiating from the stage never let up… Cobain’s ravaged pop songs coming off like some dream marriage of the Sex Pistols and the Beatles, borne on bracing waves of distorted guitar noise.” –Rolling Stone (October 29, 1992)
Ranked #1 in Kerrang Magazine’s “100 Gigs That Shook The World” and voted as “Nirvana’s #1 Greatest Moment” by fans in an NME poll, Nirvana’s historic August 30, 1992 headlining appearance at the UK’s Reading Festival is one of the most bootlegged concerts in the annals of rock’n’roll.
While the show’s centerpiece was a performance of nearly the entire Nevermind tracklist, also noteworthy were early performances of three as yet unrecorded songs which wouldn’t be released until two years later on - In Utero’s All Apologies, Dumb and in its first ever public performance, tourette’s. The career-spanning setlist also reached back to the band’s 1989 Sub Pop debut album, Bleach, for Blew, About A Girl, School, Negative Creep and first single Love Buzz and even further back to the mid-‘80s for Spank Thru. Other songs from the Reading set would appear in studio form on the Incesticide compilation later in the year: Aneurysm, Been A Son and Sliver. Additionally, the band played a pair of beloved covers by two bands that helped shape the formative Nirvana sound – The Money Will Roll Right In by Fang and D-7 by The Wipers.
Saving the best for last, Echo & The Bunnymen next performed live in Hamburg on May 6, 1999. This particular excellent quality recording appears to be an edited version of the show, limited to 11 songs. Was still a fun show to listen to.
Back in the house by midnight.
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