Nirvana's Akron Halloween Show Put Cobain in a Barney Suit

On October 31, 1993, Kurt Cobain walked onto the stage of the James A. Rhodes Arena in Akron, Ohio, in an oversized purple dinosaur suit. Nirvana's Halloween show on the In Utero Tour is one of the best documented stops of that run, with complete audience recordings, archived reviews and photographs of Cobain dressed as Barney that circulate every October. This Saturday it turns 33, and the paper trail is the reason it still gets retold.

Barney Versus Slash Opened the Night

The costume bit came first. Cobain was Barney, and touring guitarist Pat Smear was Slash, curly wig and top hat included. The two staged a mock guitar duel to open the set, with Cobain carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels onstage before setting it down and trading squealing feedback with Smear in an impromptu jam, according to Loudwire's account of the night.

The rest of the band was in costume too. Loudwire reports that bassist Krist Novoselic went as a white faced Ted Danson, a jab at the actor's recent stunt involving Whoopi Goldberg, and that drummer Dave Grohl was a mummy. Those two details come from a single retrospective, so treat them as that outlet's reporting. The Barney and Slash pairing is the one the photos carry.

Smear's presence is part of why the joke worked. Cobain asked him to join as a second guitarist for the In Utero Tour, he accepted right away, and he toured with the band for about six months. His first public appearance with the band came on Saturday Night Live on September 25, 1993, where Nirvana played "Heart Shaped Box" and "Rape Me." By Halloween he was five weeks into the job, which made him the obvious target for a duel and the obvious Slash.

Twenty One Songs and No Teen Spirit

The setlist is on record at setlist.fm and in the live archives. The main set ran "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," "Drain You," "Breed," "About a Girl," "Heart Shaped Box," "Sliver," "Dumb," "In Bloom," "Come as You Are," "Lithium," "Pennyroyal Tea," "School," "Polly," "Milk It," "Rape Me," "Territorial Pissings" and "All Apologies." The encore added "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam," "Dive," "On a Plain" and "Serve the Servants." That is 21 songs, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is not among them.

Leaving out the band's biggest single on a night built around dressing up is the more interesting choice. The set draws from all three studio albums, from "About a Girl" on Bleach to "Pennyroyal Tea" and "Heart Shaped Box" from In Utero. The Breeders and the Boredoms opened the bill, according to Loudwire, which pushed the evening toward the noisy end of the band's taste.

The encore ends on "Serve the Servants," the first track on In Utero. The tour was promoting that record, and the show closes by returning to it.

The Paper Trail Is the Reason It Lasts

Plenty of Nirvana shows were recorded. The audience recording sits in the Internet Archive under the venue name, remastered full length versions of the concert are on YouTube, and the photographs are easy to find. Photographs from the night are credited to Jay Brown and Seiji Matsumoto, and the LiveNIRVANA archive collects more of them along with details of the concert.

That archive matters because the costumes would otherwise be a rumor. A purple dinosaur suit is the kind of detail memory improves on, and the photographs fix it. The same holds for the setlist, which can be checked against the audience tape. Even the archives disagree on small things: one listing titles the encore opener "Jesus Don't Want Me," while setlist sites call it "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam." A fan maintained chronology of the night also describes a Slash style jam built around "Sweet Child O' Mine" and Novoselic joking about Barney and Slash. That chronology is partial, and the exact wording cannot be verified from it, so it stays a footnote.

The calendar helps. Every October the images come back around, and every year they arrive attached to the same few facts: Akron, October 31, 1993, a dinosaur, a wig, a top hat, and a mock duel that opened a 21 song set.

What remains unsettled is small. Which costume Grohl wore, and what the crowd made of the Ted Danson joke, rest on one outlet's account and the surviving recordings. What is settled is the part people retell, and it fits in a sentence: Cobain was Barney, Smear was Slash, and the band played 21 songs in costume and out of it.