With Montage of Heck premiering this past Monday on HBO (check out six must-see clips), there’s been a lot of Nirvana in the news lately. We now have audio, and some video, of the band’s set at Boston’s historic Axis club. The performance was part of WFNX’s 8th birthday party, a bill that also included a young Smashing Pumpkins. If all of that isn’t cool enough, it also happened to be the night before Nirvana’s influential album Nevermind was released.
The audio quality of the show is poor in some spots, but it improves as the show goes on. To imagine Nirvana playing the Axis, a tiny club where up-and-coming bands play when they’re passing through town, completely blows my mind, especially considering that it came a day before one of music’s most seminal albums was released. WFNX’s Duane Bruce, who had the audio, said this about the performance:
“The concrete walls and floor of Axis provided the perfect acoustics for the raw energy. Dave Grohl’s first Boston gig with the band. This is also the first time that they ever played ‘Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’ by the Vaselines. Both Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic comment that “We just learned this one today”. It was a rare night that only a small number (1200+) saw.”
(By the way, you can also listen to Smashing Pumpkins’ set from that night.)
Listen to the full performance, and check out the setlist below:
Intro
Aneurysm
Drain You
School
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Come As You Are
Sliver
Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam
Floyd The Barber
Polly
About A Girl
Breed
Rape Me
Blew
Been A Son (Excerpt)
Negative Creep
(Via WFNX’s Duane Bruce, h/t Vanyaland)
