Nirvana: "Unplugged in New York"
 

after playing some unplugged tunes on the guitar this morning I realized just how creative and diverse that album really is..

I strummed through "Oh Me" which is a rather serious, hauntingly beautiful rendition of that tune, very dreary and somber.

Then I said fuck it and played "About a Girl" which when I got into the solo realized was a rather upbeat 50s rock and roll number..

My awareness came because I played in a blues band and we did a lot of jazz, reggae and even ol rock n roll like Chuck Berry numbers and it felt the same..

Now I have been playing About A Girl unplugged version as a warm up tune for years but i never had this epiphany before.. Sure, I knew all the record critics had hailed this album for being groundbreaking and diverse, obscure and artistic, but I had never really comprehended this as a musician

I mean look at all the diverse styles of music represented in that one performance, and from a punk band no less!

I think that one of the reasons i have evolved into such a diverse musician and guitar player is because I literally learned to play the guitar from this album.. the track list of unplugged was the first tunes I could play on the guitar because duh, it was the only simple acoustic album I had at the time in my then more limited record collection.

I have been in metal bands, chaos punk bands, delta blues, chicago blues, roots reggae, dub reggae, folk, jazz, I even play Ethiopian music on the guitar flawlessly as if it was a damned masinqo



perhaps Nirvana Unplugged had a big influence on this, because initially I only listened to heavy tunes, Unplugged is the album that softened my ear. The Dead blew it away, but Nirvana ironically softened it..

What do y'all think? I mean this was a Top40 album, playing good coffee shop tunes across the airwaves of america for like 96-99 running.. Surely it influenced a lot of folks to get into more obscure things like old David Bowie albums and Leadbelly records..

You think David Bowie is obscure?!

Yeah, Unplugged is a great album.

I think this album is hard to sit through and a bit boring, and that's coming from a guy who always jerks off to the sound of guitars with holes in them.

Having said that, Kurt actually was an interesting guitar player, and he played in a lot of different styles, and some of his stuff is actually kinda odd (verses in "Lithium"). Can't deny that. I mean, he was untrained, right? Lots of interesting untrained guitar players -- but very few ever do anything interesting in a mainstream context.

That David Bowie cover is the best song on the album, though Kurt stumbles through it a bit.

that particular bowie album was sort of dug out of the vaults for that particular era, so yes in the context of 1993.

look at that album, it had rock n roll, ballads, country-folk, dreary early metal ( I mean a distorted acoutic, thats cheating for unplugged but in a good way)
coffee shop soloist, jazzy acoustic music, straight up Nirvana, almost Flaminco.. and closing it with the best version of Sleep Last Night kurt ever managed to perform, absolutely nailing the edge and drama of that delta blues, giving it the macabre that Leadbelly never could with that haunting scream and refrain..

I love this album. I also got the Unplugged DVD last year. Love it and NIRVANA.


I must say though that NIRVANA the first band to ever to resally get me into music. They were my favorite till da yoof came along...

I love MUDDY BANKS.

FUCK YEAH! The intro is amazing as well as the version of Spank thru....Fucking great live comp

I waited years and years for that fucking dvd, it was one of the most exciting and anticipated releases in a long time.. we still need 1991: The Year That Punk Broke damn it!


that was as kick ass an album as unplugged in the opposite direction.. Just as Unplugged demonstrated how creative, diverse, talented and original Nirvana could be, Muddy Banks reminded all the mainstream Nirvana fans just how loud and obnoxious Nirvana is live.

fuck yeah. I still need to get Sold Out on DVD though. My brother's got a copy on VHS that he left here after he moved out....

Best unplugged easy. My favorites were Dumb and Where Did You Sleep Last Night. All the covers rocked too.

I agree with ASP that Kurt was an interesting guitarist; Not a good guitarist, but an interesting one on how he wrote. Lithium is a good example.

~Jeremy~

I think if you had the slightest formal relationship to music you'd have dismissed this thread as absolute idiocy. Not because it's wrong, but because it's a bit like pointing out that mirrors are inclined to reflect things.

I think it's brilliant. I think it's my highest rated album on WMP. It was NR Essentials #3 or so...

quite a long time ago unplugged was the only nirvana i didn't completely dismiss...

quit bein' a cunt.

I'm actually gonna put the intro from Muddy Banks of Wishkah as a ringtone on my phone.

After all these years I still love the album. It is so haunting and beautiful. I have a different take on it now then I did when it came out. It is very revealing as to what was going on in the bands lives and minds when they were at this juncture. Especially Kurdt of course. Where did you sleep last night....such a fitting end. I cannot believe it was the ending song unintentionally. I suck at guitar, but my husband loves to play this album. He plays more of it than any other Nirvana. He basically taught himself how to play off of this album. Every song can be related to a goodbye of sorts (All Apologies) or a peek into Kurdt's view of himself (The Man who Sold the World). It's Classic.

brother, that is entirely the point of this thread! Sometimes you walk by the mirror so often you don't notice a subtle aspect of what is reflected the whole time. I didn't see just how diverse this album was, from a musician's ear, because I simply hadn't realized it. Sure, the rock critics had mentioned all that in their critiques, but I didn't feel it, it was purely an intellectual understanding, not an intuitive, experienced based one.. But strummin on those tunes on the guitar yesterday, for the first time I actually FELT the different styles, based on my experience as a musician in bands of those different styles.

never got into this thing.
Nirvana without volume and distortion and raw amplifier wattage is like eating pussy with a dental dam.

ha! that is funny :)

hmmm..
perhaps its a bit less a tease then the dental dam, maybe its like stink finger at the movies in middle school? Still a tease but perfectly satisfying in its own kind of way, especially for the time?