Nothing to confirm if this was a band endorsed “fan club” or simply a fan in New Jersey that put their PO Box address out there into the world in the hopes of trading bootlegs with another sorry soul such as myself.
One day, I’m skimming the classified section in the back of an issue of Spin magazine and I saw a tiny little box that read “Nirvana Fan Club” with a listing for a PO Box address in Hoboken, New Jersey. In other words, I owned a crap ton of Nirvana bootlegs and despite it all, I was always on the quest for more! (Hey, 17 year old mentality.) I’d see something titled “Imodium” for example and be bummed that it was just yet another demo for “Breed.” I can’t count the amount of Nirvana discs I own that have “Everything & Nothing,” “Verse Chorus Verse” and “Sappy” which are all the same track. If I saw a title on the back of a CD I didn’t recognize, I’d pick it up hoping to discover a never-before-heard Nirvana track, hence proving I was the biggest fan on the planet. If you were lucky and the cashier at the record store was cool, they’d pull out a discman from behind the counter and let you skim through a few tracks before you bought it, but you never knew if you’d be granted that luxury. (Boots were more my thing.) It was always a gamble buying a bootleg CD, because they often ran for about $20 bucks a piece, which even now is pretty steep for a single CD, especially one with questionable sound quality.
Some catered specifically to vinyl (his thing) and others carried a lot more bootlegs than you could ever possibly imagine.
In those days, every weekend my buddy/band mate Pete and I would take the ol’ LIRR train into Manhattan and we had our whole itinerary of about 4 or 5 record stores completely mapped out. And since Nirvana was my favorite band of all time, I couldn’t rest at just collecting every one of the albums and singles (in just about every conceivable format), I had to search for bootlegs. No Napster, no iTunes, no downloading, maybe AOL at it’s infancy. It was long before the days of what you now know as the modern internet. You have to keep in mind that 1993 was a completely different time. How it all came to be requires just a little bit of backstory. (Read the Reddit threat RIGHT HERE, I’m user Pollyweb1) This past November 18th marked the 20th anniversary of the Nirvana Unplugged performance (if you can believe it’s been 20 years!) and for Record Store Day this past weekend, the 2013 Steve Albini remixes of In Utero were made available on vinyl as an exclusive collectible release, so… what better time than right now to share this story? Seeing the reaction and responses from other Nirvana fans was so warm and rewarding that I always told myself that I’d one day write out a whole article chronicling the entire event. It just doesn’t come up in regular daily conversation, so I decided to log on, reach deep back into the recesses of my mind and answer the questions posted on Reddit as best as I could remember. It’s a rarity that I get to talk about the whole experience.
About a year ago, Icons Of Fright co-creator Michael Cucinotta pointed me over to a Reddit threat where a Nirvana fan was asking a series of questions for anyone that was actually there for this monumental performance. I was just so happy I finally got to see my favorite band live for what would be the third of three consecutive times in a single week. I didn’t realize at the time just how important this gig would end up being, both for the band and for pop culture music history in general. When I was about 17 years old, I was at MTV’s live taping of Nirvana’s now legendary Unplugged performance.