A funeral joke, then the set
Reading, 30 August 1992. The British music press had spent the weekend on a rumour that Nirvana might not play. Heroin, a new baby, a marriage the tabloids had already decided was a car crash: Frances Bean Cobain was twelve days old. Backstage, Dave Grohl has said, friends in the support bands asked him what he was doing there. Everett True, of Melody Maker, wheeled Kurt Cobain out in a hospital gown and a long blonde wig. Krist Novoselic leaned into the microphone and played the nurse. With the help of his friends and family, he told the field, he’s gonna make it.
Cobain reached for the stand, croaked the first line of Bette Midler’s The Rose, a song about a singer who does not survive the job, and fell over. The joke lasted as long as a breath. Then he was up, guitar on, and the band hit Breed. What followed was the set people still mean when they say Nirvana live. Drain You, Lithium, Come as You Are, the riff of Boston’s More Than a Feeling tipped into Smells Like Teen Spirit, and, later, All Apologies, dedicated to Courtney Love and the child. He told the crowd this was not the last show. He also got them to shout, together, that they loved Courtney. The British press had not been so generous.
Grohl has been frank about the hours before. One rehearsal, the night prior, and it was not good. He thought the career might end on that stage. It did not. The band was loud in the way that band was loud when the songs were still new enough to hurt, and the field, mud and all, sang. At the end they broke what they could break. Novoselic sat in on the remains of the kit. Cobain, still in the gown, worried a version of The Star-Spangled Banner and gave the guitar to the crowd. It was the last time Nirvana played in Britain.
I really thought, this will be a disaster, this will be the end of our career for sure. It turned out to be a wonderful show, and it healed us for a little while.
(Dave Grohl, The Scotsman, 2009)
The wheelchair is the picture. The set is the reason the picture survived. A stunt about being finished only works if the hour afterwards proves you are not. Reading did that, for a while. Grohl’s line, years later, is the size of it: a wonderful show, and it healed them for a little while. Not forever. The winter of 1994 is a different room. This August night is the one where the joke and the music agreed with each other.
Leave the gown in the frame, and listen past it. Three people who had become, inconveniently, the biggest band in the world, playing as if the gossip were a support act they could drown. The funeral lasted one line of The Rose. The concert lasted the rest of the night, and it is still the tape you put on when you want to hear a band refuse its own obituary.
