Alongside being one of the greatest rock stars of all time, Kurt Cobain was a passionate and outspoken supporter of women’s rights. This advocacy often bled into Cobain’s work within music – from penning anti-rape songs in ‘Rape Me’ and ‘Polly’ to platforming female-fronted bands with Nirvana support slots.
Cobain often called in up-and-coming, female-fronted bands whose music he admired to join them on tour. When the band hit the road in promotion of Nevermind, Cobain called in Japanese pop-punk girl band Shonen Knife to open for them. Later, in 1993, they took The Breeders on their In Utero tour. Just a year earlier, Calamity Jane supported them at a show in Buenos Aires, Argentina, an event which would demonstrate Cobain’s staunch commitment to supporting women, to the point that he was willing to sabotage his own performance.
During a show at Estadio José Amalfitani in October 1992, Portland-born all-girl band Calamity Jane’s support slot was poorly received. As the frontman recalled it in Nirvana: The Chosen Rejects: “During their entire set, the whole audience – it was a huge show with like sixty thousand people – was throwing money and everything out of their pockets, mud and rocks, just pelting them”.
The hostile reception eventually got too much for the band, who, as Cobain recalls it, “stormed off crying. It was terrible, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, such a mass of sexism all at once”.
Cobain, expectedly, was enraged by the action, and bassist Krist Novoselic needed to talk Cobain out of “at least setting myself on fire or refusing to play”.
Rather than Cobain’s rage reaching those extremes, the band decided to have fun with the audience and ridicule them following their sexism. Cobain reminisced: “We ended up having fun, laughing at them (the audience). Before every song, I’d play the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and then stop. They didn’t realise that we were protesting against what they’d done.”
Cobain also tailored their setlist to irk his crowd, opening with an improvised jam and playing a number of songs from their 1990 compilation album Insecticide: “We played for about forty minutes, and most of the songs were off Insecticide, so they didn’t recognise anything,” he explained. “We wound up playing the secret noise song (‘Endless, Nameless’) that’s at the end of Nevermind, and because we were so in a rage and were just so pissed off about this whole situation, that song and whole set were one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had.”
Though Nirvana did play most of their beloved breakthrough record, Nevermind, they withheld their biggest hit, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, teasing the crowd with it twice but never playing it in full. Cobain refused to play to the wishes of a crowd whose cruelty had been so relentless it had driven Calamity Jane offstage.
Watch Kurt Cobain sabotage Nirvana’s set at Estadio José Amalfitani, Buenos Aires, in 1992 below.
