Thirty-five days before he was found dead in his home in Seattle, Kurt Cobain played his final show with Nirvana on 1 March, 1994. The show was at Terminal Einz, a 3,050-capacity hanger in Munich, Germany, and included a cover of The Cars' "My Best Friend's Girl."
At this time, he had been struggling with heroin addiction and had been diagnosed with bronchitis and laryngitis. The show ended with an encore of "Heart Shaped Box," and you can hear the song tearing apart his voice. You can hear the pain he's in—not only emotionally, but physically, as it sounds like his voice is about to snap in half.
"Well, thank you," he says after the feedback shuts off—the last words he ever said to a Nirvana audience. Doctors convinced him to cancel the remaining tour dates, and 35 days later on 5 April, Kurt Cobain was dead.
There's other footage of the band battling through sound issues and Cobain's voice on "My Best Friend's Girl," "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," and "Drain You," but the sound quality is pretty bad in the hangar.
Reportedly, at some point during the show, Krist Novoselic made an offhand sarcastic remark that, "We’re on the way out. Grunge is dead. Nirvana’s over." In hindsight it seems weirdly prognostic.
Three days after the concert—while recovering from his illness—Cobain was taken to the hospital after overdosing on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol. And by the end of March he was back home in and out of rehab.
His bandmates Novoselic, Dave Grohl, and Pat Smear didn't play together again until 2014 when Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
