In Kurt Cobain's lifetime, Nirvana issued three studio albums -- Bleach (1989), Nevermind (1991) and In Utero (1993) -- and an outtakes package, Incesticide (1992). MTV Unplugged in New York (1994) and From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (1996) memorialized the electricity of Cobain and Nirvana onstage. That leaves a huge body of music -- demos, radio broadcasts and blinding gigs -- which remains unheard by many Nirvana fans. For now, that's how it stays. A Seattle judge recently granted an injunction requested by Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, to halt the release of a rarities set that was planned for September. But the unreleased Nirvana is out there: on bootleg albums and privately traded tapes and CD-Rs that have boomed in number since Cobain's death in 1994.

Bootlegs are, of course, illegal, and rip-offs abound. Yet the best boots -- such as the acclaimed five-CD series, Outcesticide -- are a gift of history, the scholarship behind the sanctioned product. In lieu of an official box, here is a guide to vital episodes in Cobain's rock & roll life -- only available on the black market.

KAOS-FM, Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington
April 17th, 1987

A few weeks old and still playing under goofy names like Skid Row and Ted Ed Fred, the future Nirvana -- Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and first drummer Aaron Burckhard -- made their studio debut live on the air, shredding nine tunes with young-gun glee. "Downer," "Spank Thru" and "Suicide Samurai" are already old songs, baked to tape in 1985 by Cobain and Melvins drummer Dale Crover as Fecal Matter. New meat included Bleach's "Floyd the Barber" and "Love Buzz," the Shocking Blue cover that would be Nirvana's 1988 debut single, here boasting a disemboweled Jimmy Page guitar break that must have sounded wild busting through dorm-room radios. On Outcesticide V: Disintegration.

Home Demos
1987-1988

Here is the Cobain equivalent of Bob Dylan's Minneapolis hotel-room recital of 1961 and John Lennon's househusband recordings at the Dakota in the late 1970s: four-track sketches that Cobain taped alone at home. "Cracker" is "Polly" in an early stab even more harrowing than the Nevermind version. "Sappy" (a.k.a. "Verse Chorus Verse") moves like molasses tears. The other songs were never formally cut by Nirvana. "Seed" (a.k.a. "Misery Loves Company") and "Bambi Slaughter" are magnetic hymns of voice and bass guitar. "Clean Up Before She Comes" features Lennon-esque harmonies. And "Beans" and "Black and White Blues" are the kind of mischief musicians put on tape when they think no one else is listening. On Outcesticide: In Memory of Kurt Cobain; Outcesticide III: The Final Solution; and Outcesticide IV: Rape of the Vaults.

Hollywood Underground Club, Seattle
December 28th, 1988

This is Nirvana at the height of the innocence, live at home, during the very week they recorded Bleach with producer Jack Endino. Drummer Chad Channing had only been in the band since June. The fidelity is B-minus, but the show is black lightning. Cobain crowns "Hairspray Queen" with angular spasms of guitar, and it is fascinating to hear Nirvana shaping their later might. After the echo-drenched metal crawl of "Paper Cuts," a woman in the crowd comments, "I think they need to ditch the effects." On Live in Seattle, with a cover cribbed from a 1994 Rolling Stone table-of-contents illustration.

V4 Club, Vienna
November 22nd, 1989

Grunge goes international. Taped for Austrian radio, this show is a thrilling soundboard artifact of Nirvana's first European campaign. Cobain's saw-toothed yowl is soaked in reverb; in "Dive," he sounds like he's belting the chorus from 20,000 leagues under the sea. One heckler stands out, a drunken oaf who keeps yelling for "About a Girl" and, in return, gets an earful of comic abuse from Novoselic -- proving that, even before Nevermin-mania, there were assholes in the audience. On Play the Fucking Guitar, Man!, minus the show opener, "School," but with bonus cuts from an early-1990 date in Sacramento, California.

BBC Radio Sessions
October 1989-November 1991

Nirvana did four sessions in two years for the BBC's John Peel and Mark Goodier programs. Six tracks appeared on Incesticide, but you need the whole booty. Abiding by the Beeb's strict technical regimen, Nirvana cut this stuff quick and straight. A 1989 "Polly" is crisp and haunting, while the band's third Peel session in September of '91 careens from an electric preview of In Utero's sad jewel, "Dumb," to nine lunatic minutes of "Endless, Nameless."

The Peel sessions, by the way, were produced by Dale Griffin, better known as Buffin when he was the drummer in Mott the Hoople. On The Complete Radio Sessions.

The Palladium, Hollywood
August 17th, 1990

Nirvana went through drummers like Spinal Tap until Dave Grohl signed on shortly after this show. This soundboard document finds Crover from the Melvins back at the kit in place of Channing. (Crover had played on the 1988 demos that led to Nirvana's Sub Pop deal.) The set list is heavy with Bleach, and the song order varies little from the Vienna night above. But Nirvana's attack is vicious and fat, a hint of their imminent leap from punk-rock soldiers to arena-worthy godzillas. They also show off two Nevermind-bound songs, "Breed" and "In Bloom." Cobain's verse-chorus-verse gifts were in exploding flower; his life was about to go nuclear. On Murder by Guitar and Love Buzz, the latter minus a tune but with the sound check and the wrong city and date in the credits.

MTV Studios, New York
January 10th, 1992

The week that Nevermind went to Number One in Billboard, Nirvana made two television appearances. On January 11th, they performed on Saturday Night Live, adding extra spice by French-kissing one another as the credits rolled. The day before, Nirvana burned through seven songs for an MTV studio audience, an atomic thank-you for the channel's support. Live rock & roll on TV is rarely this hot and real. Even the sound check smokes; Cobain and Grohl's vocal harmonies in "On a Plain" are bright and tight. And three sizzlers -- "School," "Molly's Lips" and "Aneurysm" - never made it to air. Which is why we need bootlegs. On Outcesticide V: Disintegration (two sound-check songs, the unbroadcast tunes) and Outcesticide III: The Final Solution ("Smells Like Teen Spirit").

Reading Festival, England
August 30th, 1992

Cobain was up to his neck in joy and shit when Nirvana played the single finest concert of their fame years, a gig fortunately broadcast (not in its entirety) by the BBC. Nirvana was the hottest rock band in the world, and twelve days earlier, Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean, was born. But Cobain was fighting heroin addiction, and there were pre-gig rumors that this would be Nirvana's last show. Cobain mocked the tattle by arriving onstage in a hospital gown, rolled out in a wheelchair. He feigned collapse at the mike, then flew into "Breed" with a vengeance that lasted ninety minutes. There is a trio reading of "All Apologies," harder and poppier than the In Utero take, and the band takes the mickey out of arena-rock success by prefacing "Teen Spirit" with the opening riff of Boston's "More Than a Feeling." Funny, happy and loud, Nirvana demonstrate that success doesn't always suck. On various CDs, of which the best include The Last U.K. Show and Into the Black: Reading Festival.

"Autopilot," Aragon Ballroom, Chicago
October 23rd, 1993

Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl taped this song, now known as "You Know You're Right," at their last studio session, in January 1994. That version was to be the centerpiece of the now-scuttled box set. This audience recording, despite the coarse sound quality, makes you wish for the real thing. The riff and vocal echo the soft-loud dynamic of "Teen Spirit" but with a howling darkness. The band veers between taut funeral march and hellfire stomp, with Cobain tearing his voice to meaty ribbons and his guitar, at the end, bloody with feedback.

Palagacchio, Rome
February 22nd, 1994

The last hurrah. There would be shows in Milan, Slovenia and Munich before Cobain returned to Rome where, on March 4th, he was rushed to the hospital in a coma after a drug overdose. Cobain denied it was a suicide attempt. But the turbulence in his life was reaching critical mass. On April 8th, he would be found dead in his Seattle home of a self-inflicted shotgun wound.

This soundboard recording -- a career-defining crush of nearly two dozen songs, with Pat Smear on second guitar - packs the contradictions of Cobain's path to glory into a seesaw of frenzy and anguish. In the opener, "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," he shoots right into high-speed dilemma ("What is wrong with me?"), then summons an elegiac poise for the acoustic interludes that brake the noise: "Dumb," "Polly," "All Apologies." The schizophrenia behind the scenes and on the boards is apparent in Novoselic's asides to the crowd: "It's sure crazy backstage. I drank six Coca-Colas before I went onstage. Everybody else is drinking double cappuccinos and chasin' 'em with Pepsi." Later, he pleads with the bouncers to go easy on the kids.

The contentious voltage of the night feels, in retrospect, like the end of something, as if Cobain was summing up his life in anticipation of something else. This show does not tell us what that something would have been. But it offers all of the reasons why Nirvana took over the world for three years -- and why they deserve to be missed. On Roma and XXII II MCMXCIV.

Thanks to Erik Flannigan, Mike Oldfield, digitalnirvana.net, nirvanaclub.com and the Nirvana Live Guide, ksproul.threadnet.com/nlg.

[From Issue 877 — September 13, 2002]