By now, Nirvana’s 1991 show at Boston nightclub Axis — 30 years ago today, September 23, 1991 — is the stuff of legend.
The iconic band was booked to play the 8th birthday party for the now-defunct WFNX 101.7 FM, the night before Nevermind would hit the shelves and change music forever. Nirvana were on the bill at the intimate Lansdowne Street rock club, located roughly where The House of Blues restaurant now sits, with locals Bullet LaVolta and Cliffs of Dooneen and another rising alternative rock band called Smashing Pumpkins, who just released Gish a few months earlier.
In 2006, the show was ranked by The Boston Phoenix as the #2 greatest concert in Boston history, trailing only James Brown’s performance at the Boston Garden in 1968.
In the weeks prior to the performance, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had begun to shake up the musical landscape after hitting MTV and radio earlier in the year, and by the time the WFNX party rolled around, excitement was in the air for what was about to happen the very next day. The dam was about to burst.
Elsewhere on the block, Chapterhouse, The Candyskins, The Wonder Stuff, School of Fish, and others filled the ‘FNX birthday show lineups at clubs like Bill’s Bar, Avalon, and Venus de Milo (see the iconic flyer below). At Bill’s, members of Nirvana and the Pumpkins played “Crisco Twister” for a television segment.
“MTV approached all three bands about doing some kind of impromptu video interview at Bill’s Bar,” wrote Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd A. Philips in a 2011 Phoenix post. “We walked over and were met by an MTV producer, armed with a bucket of Crisco and the game Twister. Her vision, ‘Naked greasy Twister with interview’ seemed funny at the time, but the taping ended up being a bust. I sat out and tried to hit on D’arcy.”
Later on, as Nirvana played Axis, three decades ago tonight, the band was introduced by WFNX program director Kurt St. Thomas as “the fucking coolest band in the world.”
We’ve written about the show plenty of times, thanks to audio captured by former ‘FNX DJ Duane Bruce (in fact audio from this show has been around for years), and two years ago some new video, allegedly “previously uncirculated,” as Dangerous Minds put it, made the rounds, giving a real glimpse into the show that we’re still talking about decades later.
“Axis was packed to the gills,” Bruce wrote a few years back. “Think ‘Green Line on a Friday rush hour with a Sox game at home’ packed… 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.”
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“If Big Black, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth had all gotten base hits to load the bases, Nirvana had just crushed the pitch and hit the grand slam with Nevermind. This was their moment in history,” Philips wrote in The Phoenix a decade ago. “The Geffen execs at the show knew it. The radio programmers knew it. The fans knew it. Nirvana knew it, but didn’t give a fuck. That attitude was exactly what made them special and was exactly what made the show that much more important. They played a raucous 60-minute set, probably no better or no worse then the hundreds of shows they had played leading up to that moment, but the excitement in the room of the impending rock revolution was downright palpable.”
Philips added: “Sometime around ‘Drain You,’ I looked around the room and noticed that everyone had this dough-eyed yet-wide-awake look on their faces; that they were really seeing something important, or really being a part of something important. It was hot, sweaty, loud and reckless. And quite literally the precise moment in musical history when that weird glitch in the cassette tape took place; when good music became popular… if only for an instant.”
After all that’s been written about this era and Nirvana and Nevermind, it’s also great to be able to see it and hear it as it happened. And the energy in Axis that night can be felt from watching the tape.
The footage below, unearthed in 2019 by someone, somewhere, features the first four songs from Nirvana’s set that night (“Aneurysm,” “Drain You,” “School,” and parts of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) as well as closer “Negative Creep.” The video is about 17 minutes in length, with still images placed in where the video cuts out.
It’s a time capsule back to a historic moment in Boston, and for music in general.
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Nirvana: Live at Axis, September 23, 1991
“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”
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