Why Nirvana turned down opening for U2: “Only a matter of time”
From day one, Kurt Cobain was going to be in charge of everything Nirvana was associated with. Even if it didn’t work out at the time or confused millions of people, Cobain would have rather made something that was authentically him than be called a sell-out for going along with what everyone else wanted. So once Nevermind actually started becoming the kind of album even suburban kids could listen to, he insisted that he was not going to go out on tour with a band like U2.
If you look at where they were at the time, U2 was everything that Nirvana was against. Here was a group that were just looking to be one of the underground bands, and suddenly, they were going to go on the same tour with what some might consider the most pompous rock act in the world? No, thank you.
It’s not like there wouldn’t be demand, either. The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was already gaining traction on MTV, and Cobain was willing to throw himself into every performance, but the idea of committing to playing arenas didn’t really make sense at the time.
For all intents and purposes, Nirvana was still a baby band, and U2 were about to undergo one of the biggest changes of their career. They may have embraced the same ironic look that most grunge acts did around that time, but Nirvana wasn’t just looking to turn down some of Ireland’s finest. Dave Grohl said they were one in a long line of people they all said no to.
Recalling his final days in Nirvana to Rolling Stone, Grohl said that they had to decline to join U2 out of self-preservation, saying, “I go to see U2 play a show with the Pixies and get pulled into Bono’s dressing room: ‘You guys have got to come on tour with us’. I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ It was good for us to not do much. But it was like holding a match and watching it burn down to your fingers. It was only a matter of time before something happened.”
Then again, for a group to have one of the most successful records of the 1990s under their belt, it’s a bit insane that it had no proper promotional tour for it. Nirvana may have served as the opening act for Red Hot Chili Peppers around this time, but it was only a matter of time before Cobain wanted off the road again, thinking it had gotten far too overblown.
That didn’t stop fellow Seattle natives Pearl Jam from hopping on the bandwagon, eventually opening a number of shows on U2’s ZooTV tour and ending up getting ridiculed for not being Bono half the time. If Cobain had peeled back the layers of what U2 was doing, he might have reconsidered his position.
Achtung Baby was all about going against the flashy pop band that U2 had turned themselves into, and by using those over-the-top images against themselves, they made something that could stand head and shoulders above anything else they had ever done. Cobain was still not a fan of the touring lifestyle, and since Nirvana were already growing up too fast, he didn’t need the huge platinum screens behind him yet.
