Live at the Paramount (video)

Did You Know?

• On December 12, 2021, Live at the Paramount was screened at the Paramount Theatre by Seattle Theatre Group, with opening sets by Them and the Black Tones.
• The Black Tones' set at that screening was mixed by Nirvana's sound engineer, Craig Montgomery.
• The show was originally to feature Mudhoney as headliners before Nirvana's success changed the billing.

Background

The Paramount show was the third of three Pacific Northwest concerts with Mudhoney and the final North American date of the Nevermind tour before the band left for Europe. Originally booked with Mudhoney as headliners, Nirvana was moved to the top spot after the unexpected success of Nevermind, released the previous month. The Seattle concert also featured Bikini Kill and was moved from the Moore Theatre to the larger Paramount due to ticket demand.

About 2,800 people attended, the largest audience the band had played to on that tour leg; tickets cost $10. The set list drew from Nevermind, the 1989 debut Bleach, and regulars like "Aneurysm", "Been a Son", and "Sliver", plus a cover of the Vaselines' "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" and an early version of "Rape Me". The show was filmed on 16 mm film by a crew hired by co-manager John Silva for $250,000. Cobain invited friends Ian Dickson and Nikki McClure to dance onstage wearing shirts reading "Girl" and "Boy".

Everett True called the show "the end of an era", while photographer Charles Peterson noted that the label had set up a large film shoot, which he felt stilted the performance and "reeked of money".

Reception

Jayson Greene of Pitchfork wrote that the release captures "the charge of this moment: a great band newly famous, still reeling and flooded with nervy adrenaline." Mark Deming of AllMusic compared it to the 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, saying both captured artists at a moment when success was a pleasure. Reviewing the 2019 vinyl release, Kerrang!'s Nick Ruskell stated the concert "doesn't even sound like the best show Nirvana ever played" but that this makes it special—a spectacular band captured without hype. The Blu-ray version has been widely criticized for audio sync problems; Amazon posted a statement from Universal denying the issue, but Blu-ray.com gave the audio a score of 0/5. Later prints from 2012 onward fixed the sync issues.

Bonus features

All video releases include hidden tracks (easter eggs) from March 8, 1991, at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver: "Territorial Pissings" and "Breed". The DVD in the Nevermind "Super Deluxe" box set also includes the music videos for the four Nevermind singles—"Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Come as You Are", "Lithium", and "In Bloom"—but these are not on the standalone DVD or Blu-ray.