4.52am Issue: 025 16th March 2017 - The Kurt Cobain Nirvana Issue

READING ‘92
Colonel Gimp
If seeing Nirvana for the first time among
the sweaty teens of Birmingham was
memorable for all of the right reasons,
standing just a few years later among the
same type of chaps after days living on
burgers, falafel and warm cider to watch
perhaps their greatest gig ever in a little
corner of Reading, could have been a
little surreal.
Of course it started off oddly with Mr
Cobain arriving in a wheelchair, a nod,
apparently, to all of the talk of his ongoing
drug-induced woes and visits to the
‘Friends of Betty’ or whichever rehab
clinic he was enjoying at that point.
It wasn’t just the crowd that was unsure
as to how things would go, Dave Grohl,
not a man one feels who lacks confidence
was convinced things were likely to turn
sour,
“Kurt had been in and out of rehab,
communication in the band was
beginning to be strained, Kurt was living
in LA, Kris and I were in Seattle. People
weren’t even sure if we were going to
show up.
We rehearsed [for Reading] once, the
night before, and it wasn’t good,” he said.
“I really thought, ‘This will be a disaster,
this will be the end of our career for
sure.’ And then it turned out to be a
wonderful show, and it healed us for a
little while.”
And in terms of a gig, ill-prepared or
not it is the very definition of a triumph.
The band had fallen out over money as
well as drug use, but that was clearly
forgotten as one of the great Festival
performances of any time was writ
large in the history books.
The moment that stayed with me
forever more was when the crowd
joined in on Territorial Pissings and you
could see that the band were taken
aback, not sure whether it was
(credibly?) the thing to be happy about,
but that it struck a nerve with the band,
and there was a moment, a beautiful
moment when you saw them look at
each other. It still worked.
I’ve often thought that without that
moment Nirvana would have died that
day, and yet I’m not sure that we
should be pleased that they didn’t or
not. Who knows the way the road
would have wound otherwise.