That time Nirvana came to Italy

The story of the Nirvana in Italy covers the entire arc of the band, from the early days of Bleach in 1989 to the so-called arena tour of In Utero in 1994. In between, the revolution of Nevermind (1991), the album that changed everything not only for Kurt Cobain’s band but for the entire alternative music scene, when the label hadn’t yet been normalized and the term underground was still preferred. The story of Nirvana in Italy might never have existed—or would likely have been very different—if not for Daniela Giombini, author—alongside Tino Franco & Marco Porsia—of the recent documentary Rome As You Are, which recounts the band’s first stops in Rome.

Having become a tour manager and booking agent in the mid-’80s, Giombini began moving in the Italian live music scene of small clubs, promoting bands that belonged to the so-called Seattle underground scene and the record label Sub Pop, which would soon fall under the definition of Grunge. In early ’89, Giombini accepted the proposal to bring Nirvana to Italy: the band had not yet released their first album, and the only thing out was the single Love Buzz/Big Cheese, printed in just a thousand copies and thus nearly impossible to find in Italy. It was practically an act of faith. The recognition of the early Nirvana by the Italian underground church niche only came after summer, with the historic review of Bleach in Rockerilla written by Claudio Sorge—almost a prose poem, memorized by all the followers because of its strong emotional drive, of which we report a small excerpt:

The vision of Nirvana is cruelly Spartan, ruthless, analytical. It is pure art-metal, geometric deconstruction and reconstruction of tempered steel riffs; material never seen before, unknown metals held together by ultra-fast bonding rhythms. And the carpenters building these new structures are nervous and brilliant individuals. Bleach is the manifesto of modern hard rock that officially opens the 90s. Bow down.

It was probably these words that attracted the few paying attendees of their first two Italian concerts, along with the fact that the Nirvana were paired with Tad, another Seattle band, rougher and even more famous and established at the time.

Nirvana’s First Tour in Italy - 1989

When the two bands arrived in Italy for the first time, in November 1989, things didn’t go exactly great. It was their first European tour, put together with the few means available and the implicit requirement of a very high level of physical and mental endurance: it was probably too much for clueless and broke twenty-somethings, crammed nine into a Fiat Ducato. Stopped at the Chiasso customs checkpoint, also due to the thick Po Valley fog, they arrived very late at the venue. Their first Italian stop, scheduled at the historic Bloom in Mezzago, was in its own way an epic disaster. As Giombini recalls, «they were supposed to do the soundcheck at five in the afternoon, but by eight in the evening they still hadn’t arrived». Someone from Bloom even went out to look for them by car, but with no luck. In the end, they showed up and played straight away. Too bad that the Tad singer, Tad Doyle, had to leave the stage after just three songs due to a perforated ear infection that sent him to the emergency room. In his place, Kurt Cobain quickly jumped in, improvising the lyrics of the songs—at least according to some eyewitnesses. Now, how many people exactly were in the audience that night is something that remains shrouded in mystery along with the fog. Some say a hundred, some two hundred, some three hundred—certainly few—but if you’ve been around the scene even a little, you’ve probably met at least a thousand people who claim they were at Nirvana’s first concert in Italy. According to those few actual spectators, however, the Nirvana set was something devastating.

The second stop, the next day at the Piper in Rome, was even more surreal. Cobain, clearly in a nervous breakdown, smashed his guitar, knocked over the mic stand, then climbed up on the speakers, and no one could tell if he wanted to throw himself down, smash the hanging disco ball, or both; in the end, they pulled him down before he could harm himself or the venue. To some, it looked like an act, the stereotypical rock pantomime, but in reality, they were the first signs of the band's breakdown. «Looking at the audience, all I could see were the faces of the kids who used to beat me up at school,» the singer later explained. It remained an event he was ashamed of, to the point of asking journalist Michael Azerrad to remove it from his book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, as told by the author himself in the New Yorker. Fortunately, the next day Cobain and the band had a day off to spend around Rome, which in some way reconciled them with the outside world, also thanks to the founders of Sub Pop – Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman – who had flown to Rome specifically to support their protégés. Pavitt, the author of some of the most iconic photos of Nirvana in Italy, has often said that day touring the beauty of Rome saved Cobain and made him «literally» breathe again.

The Nevermind Tour – 1991

Two years later, Nirvana returned to Italy with the Nevermind tour for four dates, the first of which was in the remote town of Muggia, near the Slovenian border, only because bassist Krist Novoselic wanted to play as close as possible to his people of origin, who had been involved for months in the bloody Balkan War. From there, they returned to the Bloom in Mezzago, but this time thousands of people were actually waiting for them, most of whom were left outside the venue. No one could have predicted the massive success that Nevermind would have in ‘91, which is why all the venues, booked well in advance, turned out to be completely inadequate for such large crowds. At each concert, there were similar scenes of people left outside pounding on the doors hoping to get in. The most furious were in Turin, where the concert was unfortunately canceled due to – allegedly – a strike by gas station attendants (though it seems there were issues with the promoters). In Rome, organizers said they had to steal barricades from the streets just to secure the stage from the crowd. The capital was chosen as the main stop, complete with a live broadcast on Radio Rai and TV coverage by Videomusic (our MTV before MTV). The Nirvana phenomenon had officially exploded. Unfortunately, not only in a positive sense.

The Final Arena Tour – 1994

Proof of this was the famous arena tour that in February 1994 saw Nirvana perform at the Palasport in Modena, the Palaghiaccio in Rome, and the Palatrussardi in Milan with a double closing date. This time, the venues were much bigger and more suitable for hosting a mass phenomenon. The one who was no longer ready to handle it was likely Cobain himself. Fame had changed everything. In the podcast I Met Kurt Cobain – The Story of Nirvana in Italy – it is told that the first time Nirvana came to Italy, they looked like regular guys, maybe a bit scruffy, but basically «they looked like guys like us, just with guitars». At the Bloom, they even helped the waiters put chairs on tables to make things easier for the cleaning ladies arriving the next day. In ‘94, however, they were the most famous rock stars on the planet. The music still had the same power, but Cobain, now fully addicted to heroin, looked like a shadow of himself. His voice still carried the same rage and frustration, but his eyes were dull, apathetic: a screaming ghost who only occasionally moved his arm as the only sign of life. After all, he had already held his public funeral during the famous MTV Unplugged recorded in November 1993 and released posthumously. Even the RAI studios in Rome paid tribute on TV with the historic Nirvana performance on Tunnel with Serena Dandini, featuring a (tragic)comedic sketch by Corrado Guzzanti.

As proof of Cobain’s love for Rome, after the Italian concerts, Nirvana only played two more shows before deciding to cut short the European tour. But the singer returned for a short vacation in the capital with his wife (Courtney Love) and daughter (Frances Bean Cobain). His inner pain had become unbearable, and one night Cobain tried to kill himself by taking a pack of Rohypnol. The doctors at Umberto Primo Hospital in Rome saved his life by waking him from a coma, even though we all know the sad end of this story. A month later, Cobain fled the rehab clinic where he had checked himself in, and a few days later his lifeless body was found in the greenhouse of his home: on April 5, 1994, the biggest rock star on the planet had shot himself in the head. At the bottom of his final letter, before the dedication to the women in his family, three words that had been buried beneath the noise of his music now seem to rise from those depths no one could reach: «peace, love, empathy.»