Pictures of my dad and Kurt Cobain playing together back in the day😎 pic.twitter.com/y7lXh6acVn
— Maggs🪴 (@mjpoukkula) July 16, 2015
MJ Poukkula didn’t know what she had when she shared photos of her father Tony and Kurt Cobain playing together “back in the day.” As the internet was quick to point out, MJ had uncovered never-before-seen photos from Nirvana’s first show in 1987.
The house show took place in Raymond, Wash. at Tony Poukkula’s house, and he joined the then-lineup of Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Aaron Burckhard to play second guitar on several Led Zeppelin jams.
Alternative Nation had a partial setlist for that first show (which Cobain regularly joked was just Flipper’s “Sex Bomb” for an hour):
Incomplete Setlist:
Aero Zeppelin
If You Must
Heartbreaker (jam)
How Many More Times (jam)
Mexican Seafood
Pen Cap Chew
Spank Thru
Hairspray Queen
Poukkula explained her dad’s connection to Cobain in a later tweet, beyond his living in the house where that first show took place.
“My dad went to high school with Kurt and played with him before he got big,” she tweeted at someone who mistakenly thought she was Novoselic’s daughter. Tony had previously helped compile a history of Nirvana by recounting that first show to author Nick Soulsby.
Soulsby told Alternative Nation, “I enjoyed recounting the story of Nirvana’s first show entirely through their then manager Ryan Aigner plus Tony Poukkula and Duke Harner from the band Black Ice who lived in the house in Raymond where it took place. They made it really personal, this sense of Nirvana having to be railroaded into playing, then being jumpy and nervous performing.”
(Via Stereogum)
