The Ringer have up a new article on the 25th anniversary of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance, which coincides with the 25th anniversary of Stone Temple Pilots’ MTV Unplugged performance. STP recorded their set just a day before Nirvana. A publicist detailed how STP refilmed all of their songs, and how their taping took four hours, which left the press there unhappy.
Krist Novoselic (bass): The [Nirvana] rehearsals didn’t go well at all, so to help prepare myself I invited Cris and Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets to my hotel room just to jam out the songs with me to get the details down.
Cris Kirkwood: I remember going up to his room, maybe a couple of times, helping him practice even more, getting the stuff all the way down.
Jim Merlis (publicist): The day before, Stone Temple Pilots had done [Unplugged]. And it had taken something like four hours. They redid every song. The press, that’s who I was dealing with, were sort of lamenting that they had to go through this again. I remember someone from management saying, “The band just signed up for this. They have no idea what they’re gonna do.”
Amy Finnerty: There’s always the chance that somebody could walk if they’re not comfortable. I do remember the night before there was some conversation about them being uncomfortable. I think people were so reactive to everything that Kurt said. So the guy’s saying, “Oh man, I feel nervous, uncomfortable, I still feel like it doesn’t feel like Unplugged. It was too heavy.” I’m not putting words in his mouth, but this was kind of the conversation. It’s tough when you’re in that position and people hang on every word you say. If you even have an opinion, people are like, “Oh my God, he’s gonna cancel, he’s gonna quit.” No, he was just having a feeling.
Stone Temple Pilots bassist Robert DeLeo told Billboard last year about STP’s MTV Unplugged performance, “Oh, that was nerve-wracking. I was so nervous. There’s something about volume and turning things up so loud that allows you to hide behind the wall of sound, and there we were doing something we’d only done together when we were alone in a room, just us. I remember getting to “Creep,” and I have a little vocal part in there where I answer Scott, and looking back at the video you see my hands were shaking, I was so nervous. It was part of growing as a musician in front of a large audience. No one prepares you for that.”
