To briefly recap, grunge was the last major, American-born, rock ‘n’ roll movement (coming right before Britpop took off). “Black” provides a blueprint of sorts for navigating the challenges that so many are facing today. This is especially true with the live MTV Unplugged performance of this heavy and, yes, quite dark song. Saying that a song can change your life is often a cliché, but Pearl Jam’s “Black” can probably help change some lives. This may be a perfect time to look back to one particularly remarkable song from the early 1990s and a time when the so-called Seattle grunge scene ruled popular music. What to do with our feelings of intense disappointment, existential crisis, and rage? Do we ignore them, suck it up, and move on as best we can? Do we turn inward, and punish ourselves for not handling things better? Do we lash out at our transgressors, real or perceived? Or are there other options? Given the realities of life in 2022, many have had to address some tough questions. Anxiety levels have shot up and depression rates tripled during the first year of COVID, alone. Nirvana famously played Unplugged on November 18, 1983-just six months before frontman Kurt Cobain passed away.Issues of mental health have perhaps never been more at the forefront of American life than during these bizarro-world, COVID/lockdown/BLM/MAGA-years of 2020 to the present. Nirvana won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance in 1995 for their album MTV Unplugged In New York. This version of the song won three Grammys, among them Song and Record Of The Year. During his Unplugged set, he performed “Tears in Heaven," written after the death of his 4–year–old son Conor in 1991. It was the first Unplugged album to win that award. His album from the performance won six Grammys, including Album of the Year. The following year, Eric Clapton performed on Unplugged. Her album, Shakira-MTV Unplugged also won a Grammy for Best Latin Pop Album in 2000. MTV’s first Spanish–language broadcast was Shakira’s Unplugged set that same year. By the time we got home, we’d decided we’d got an album.”ġ991 also saw Unplugged’s first rap episode, with performances from LL Cool J, MC Lyte, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and instrumentals by Pop's Cool Love. We heard the tapes in the car driving back. He said, “I figured that as Unplugged would be screened around the world there was every chance that some bright spark would tape the show and turn it into a bootleg, so we decided to bootleg the show ourselves.
Paul McCartney performed on the show in 1991 and got a successful album out of it, Unplugged (The Official Bootleg), and his performance garnered a lot of popularity for the show.
Within the first two years of the series, Sinead O’Connor, Sting, Elvis Costello, Aerosmith, and The Cure all played their own Unplugged sets. The first season consisted of 13 episodes and included performances from Elton John, Hall & Oates and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Shear hosted the first–ever episode, which included performances from Syd Straw, Squeeze members Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, and Cars guitarist Elliot Easton. HBO, PBS, and MTV initially turned down the idea, but MTV took it up the second time around. "What if we put these people together and create a show which consists of everybody playing songs together, but only with acoustic instruments, and we'll try to get it on HBO or something?" Shear said.Īccording to The New York Times, Shear got the idea from watching Bon Jovi members Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora play an acoustic set during the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.Ī third version states that the show’s producers, Jim Burns and Robert Small, were inspired by an acoustic encore at a Bruce Springsteen show.
#Pearl jam unplugged musicans series#
According to an article on the Grammy Awards website, the series was actually created as a promotion strategy for Jules Shear’s acoustic album, The Third Party. There are conflicting accounts about how the idea for the show came up. It was revolutionary and rare around the time the first episode aired on November 26, 1989. The idea of playing acoustic, stripped–down versions of songs is familiar to both audiences and performers.
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