Somewhere Between the Transcendent and the Mundane You’ll Find Nirvana

When MTV arranged for Nirvana to play a show with The Breeders, Cypress Hill and a last-minute-cancelling Pearl Jam in a cold, aging warehouse on the Seattle waterfront in December of 1993, no one had any way of knowing that Nirvana were less than three months away from playing their final show. So when the network aired a heavily truncated version of Nirvana’s performance from that night two weeks later on New Year’s Eve, the expectation was that the touring cycle for Nirvana’s third album In Utero would continue on into the foreseeable future. Of course, things didn’t turn out that way, and in the quarter-century since frontman Kurt Cobain’s death, so much mythology has accumulated around the band that it’s gotten difficult to focus on the band strictly in terms of its music. In many ways, Live and Loud is the ideal release for just that purpose.

If you were searching for a live recording that best represents the thundering power Nirvana were able to summon live, this late-stage performance at Seattle’s Pier 48 probably wouldn’t jump out as a top candidate. Given the presence of TV cameras and the fact that the show took place in a setting that wasn’t actually a music venue, it’s not like you’re quite getting an audio-verité snapshot of the band in its natural habitat. You’d also probably overlook Live and Loud—even the title screams “unremarkable”—because it never reached the same legendary status as the band’s iconic appearance on MTV Unplugged, filmed just a month prior. When Live and Loud was first released in its entirety in 2013 as a DVD bonus with the deluxe reissue of In Utero (which also includes a disc of the audio), it didn’t cause much fanfare on its own, presented amongst a host of other bonus material.

Last week, on the same day that Live and Loud was released in standalone audio form for the first time, the official Nirvana YouTube page debuted video of the entire show, albeit chopped up into a playlist of all the individual tracks—hardly the ideal way to take it all in. Listening back without the benefit of the visuals to enhance what you’re hearing, there are times when, if not exactly rushed, the pacing comes across as if the band is almost too comfortable in its capacity as a well-oiled machine built to market itself. Nirvana certainly talked a good game about resisting corporate influence. In many respects, they walked the walk too, but as Live and Loud shows, they had a professional smoothness about them that belies their underground instincts. This sense of almost automatic proficiency is highlighted by the total lack of interaction or between-song banter (at least that made this final edit), making it difficult to read the energy between the band and the hometown crowd.

Moreover, you get the impression that the band is less invested in songs like “Come As You Are,” a single from the monster hit album Nevermind. It’s not just that Cobain had by 1993 shit-talked what he referred to as the slick sound of Nevermind in interviews and looked visibly weary from hearing his own songs get overplayed on radio and MTV. He was by that point shit-talking Steve Abini’s far more abrasive production on In Utero too. In fact, you don’t need to go by anything Cobain said in the press at all—you can listen to Live and Loud blind, without knowing any of the context of what you’re hearing, and detect a pretty dramatic contrast: Roughly a third or so of the album’s 17 songs give off the vibe of a business-savvy band doing its act, while another third captures a fraught, almost cornered group of musicians really going for it as if their lives depended on it. (Looking back, maybe they did.)