The first time I saw Nirvana, at the club First Avenue in Minneapolis, I didn't really get it. At first. Then the band played "About a Girl," which sounded like something off Meet The Beatles — bent out of shape by punk-metal noise and a much darker take on gender relations than the young Lennon or McCartney had.
Released in 1989, Nirvana's Bleach (reissued this month) didn't make much of a splash at the time. But with hindsight, the album shows a band clearly hurtling toward greatness. A mere two years later, Nirvana headlined England's Reading Festival — and by then, the greatness was obvious.
When Cobain took the stage on Aug. 30, 1992, costumed in a hospital gown, his daughter, Frances Bean, had just been born a week prior, and he and his wife, Courtney Love, were in the midst of media firestorm surrounding their heroin use. At points during the Live at Reading DVD, and the slightly edited CD version, the singer sounds like an animal in a bear trap; at other times, you hear pain turned into the pure joy of sonic mayhem.
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