Artist: Nirvana
Title: “Live! Tonight! Sold Out!”
Label: Geffen Records
Release Date: 11/7/2006
Genre: Grunge Rock
Rating: 4/5

The original release of “Live! Tonight! Sold Out!” was in 1994 and this is a film about Nirvana that captures the band shortly after the release of “Nevermind” – the album that was going to define a generation and would launch a music scene unlike any other. Finally issued on DVD the release comes from the reaction to the recording which led Kurt Cobain to document the band’s rise in popularity. He did so by culling together a wide assortment of interview segments and live performances from around this time. The work would be begun on this but the singer would take his own life and leave this uncompleted. Surviving members Dave Grohl and Krist Novaselic wisely decided that this needed to be released so they completed it as best as possible. To some it might come off as disjointed as it does tend to scatter about from here to there and there are some concert segments that are glued together from different performances to make one consecutive piece. For the most part these are interesting based on the way that the song does not always sound like the record but instead reflects the way Kurt and the band were feeling at the particular moment. For instance he drones through “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on some foreign language program, while screaming at the top of his lungs on a song that didn’t go like that at all on another. The interview portions are quite telling as well since you find Cobain and the band not as the typical “Rock Stars” but instead just a bunch of guys who were unimpressed by the trappings that so many others seek with a record deal. They definitely had no love of the music business and its machinations either and Cobain states how he would rather hang out with the kid who was not on the ball team smoking cigarettes than the popular ones on the team. Perhaps this mindset led him to become such an important role model to kids who were not always considered the cool ones.
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