Inside Nirvana’s last ever show: Kurt Cobain, power outages and a prophetic declaration about the band’s end
Kurt Cobain of Nirvana Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
It was during a power outage midway through a growling, uneasy Come As You Are that bassist Krist Novoselic stepped up to the microphone and, trying to fill dead air with some throwaway chatter, made a chillingly prophetic prediction. “We’re on our way out,” he told the 3,000 people in the crowd, joking that their next album would be a hip-hop record. “Grunge is dead. Nirvana’s over.”
By all accounts, March 1, 1994 at the Terminal 1 in Munich had been an inauspicious sort of gig. As the name suggests, the since-shut venue was a repurposed airport hangar with the acoustics of Somerset’s Wookey Hole. Frontman Kurt Cobain, struggling with a hardcore heroin addiction and growing paler by the show, powered through the gig’s final song Heart-Shaped Box, having to fight for the high notes. Though they’d found time for covers of The Cars’ My Best Friend’s Girl and David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World, the band left the stage for the last time, 30 years ago this week, not even having played their most iconic hit Smells Like Teen Spirit.
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