Kurt and cardie! How Nirvana’s 1993 Unplugged performance “let the audience in”
“It’s the one True Cross and the Shroud of Turin!” declares Alan Di Perna, music journalist and co-curator of Kurt Cobain Unplugged, an exhibition at London’s Royal College Of Music Museum that reunites the guitar that Cobain played on Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged performance with the olive-green mohair cardigan he wore on the same occasion. The guitar – a 1959 Martin D-18E – is the most expensive ever sold in auction at more than $6m, while the cardigan sold for $334,000 in 2019 after being gifted by Courtney Love to Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny.
“It’s the one True Cross and the Shroud of Turin!” declares Alan Di Perna, music journalist and co-curator of Kurt Cobain Unplugged, an exhibition at London’s Royal College Of Music Museum that reunites the guitar that Cobain played on Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged performance with the olive-green mohair cardigan he wore on the same occasion. The guitar – a 1959 Martin D-18E – is the most expensive ever sold in auction at more than $6m, while the cardigan sold for $334,000 in 2019 after being gifted by Courtney Love to Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny.
These items are accompanied by posters, records and other items that explore the history of Nirvana and explain the importance of their appearance on MTV Unplugged in December 1993.
MTV Unplugged was “an important show for a lot of reasons,” says Di Perna. “Cobain really took advantage of the opportunity to personalise the appearance and was active in designing the stage set. He was under a bit of pressure to make it a ‘greatest hits’ evening, but he wanted to show his influences with Bowie, The Vaselines and Lead Belly to create a sort of musical autobiography. It wasn’t a generic episode, it was an event.”
MTV producer Alex Coletti recalls having to sandwich Nirvana’s recording between similar performances by Stone Temple Pilots and Duran Duran on the days either side. He’d flown up to see Nirvana in Massachusetts a few weeks beforehand to get Cobain’s thoughts on the staging and set list, and was instrumental in presenting these to MTV. “Nirvana approached it with real thought,” he says. “They wanted to do covers of artists that mattered to them and have special guests. Some people at MTV thought that might be somebody like Pearl Jam, but we told them it wasn’t going to happen – they just had to trust the artist.”
In typical Cobain fashion, Nirvana’s special guests turned out to be the rather more underground Meat Puppets. The set was adorned with candles, drapes and funereal lilies, though Cobain’s only instruction to the editor was to make sure they included some shots of him smiling. He was also permitted to bend the rules of the Unplugged format by running his Martin through a Fender amp disguised as a stage monitor, housed in a wooden box.
After the final song – Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” – Coletti tried to coax one or two more songs from the band, perhaps even an acoustic “…Teen Spirit”, to no avail. “Kurt said he didn’t know how to top the last song, and he was absolutely right,” admits Coletti. “They had carefully constructed the show and nothing would’ve worked.”
After Cobain’s death in April 1994, the intimate MTV Unplugged performance took on greater significance, not least because it looked as if the stage had been deliberately designed to resemble a wake. “We played it over and over – that was how we mourned him,” says Coletti. “But at the time, I didn’t think it was depressing. I thought the set was bright and light and rather beautiful.”
Cobain’s Martin D-18E guitar – which he bought in 1992 for $5,000 – was one of only 302 made, the model seen as something of a failure because the magnetic pickups compromised the quality of the acoustic sound. In 2020, it was sold at auction by Frances Bean Cobain’s ex-husband, who acquired it in the divorce settlement. The new owner, Peter Freedman, is a sponsor of the Royal College and was happy to lend it to them for an exhibition that entices rock fans into a space usually reserved for classical music. “We have designed it to appeal to both those audiences,” says Di Perna. “We have secured a fabulous collection of vintage posters and rare vinyl, and will also explore Cobain’s career in the context of the 1990s.”
Coletti believes this is an important celebration of a historic occasion. “Nirvana really did let the audience in on who they were as a band and what inspired them.”
