On a quiet Sunday afternoon in December 1991, two of rock’s most iconic figures were standing outside a bar in Edinburgh waiting for their cue to go on. Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl smoked cigarettes, complained about the cold, and were ignored by the majority of people passing-by on South Clerk Street. Nirvana had agreed to appear at a benefit gig for Sick Kids at the Southern Bar after being asked by Edinburgh band the Joyriders. Nirvana had played the capital two nights previous and now two-thirds of the band were making a return engagement under the billing “very special guests.”

A rumor Nirvana were to play this charity gig brought in some wide-eyed fans, but most left after one of the Joyriders announced over the mic that they were not coming. A few fortunate fans stayed on alongside a scrum of regulars. Twenty-minutes later, Cobain and Grohl finished their smokes and made their way inside.
 

Nirvana at the Southern Bar. Photo Mary Boon. Via.
 
This was Scotland 1991, where it seemed to most Scots nothing culturally important ever happened here. The country was still on a desperate high that wee Paul McCartney had a farm down in Campbelltown and, you know, had once written a #1 song called “Mull of Kintyre.” Jings. While over on the west coast, or Glasgow to you and me, there was still long tedious reminisces about that day Elvis Presley set foot on Scottish soil at Prestwick Airport while he waited for a connecting flight back to the States. All the important things in Scotland moved to London or like AC/DC emigrated to Australia. It would take Irvine Welsh in his book Trainspotting and then John Hodge in the film adaptation to articulate why it was “shite to be Scottish”:

Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, tha’s what, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.

That’s one way of looking at it. Maybe not the right one, but it was one that was prevalent at the time. Self-loathing is a gift from the Stork when many Scots are born. With hindsight the appearance of Cobain and Grohl gigging in a wee pub on the southside of Edinburgh was like Jesus taking charge of refreshments at a wedding.

Making their entrance to shouts of “Ya hippie bastards,” Cobain and Grohl perched on two bar stools and played three songs: “Dumb,” “Polly,” and “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.” Krist Novoselic didn’t perform though was rumoured to be in attendance.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
FOOD FIGHT! Nirvana gets thrown out of their record release party on Friday the 13th, 1991
Incredible early Nirvana gig at a tiny East Coast goth club, 1990
‘(This is Known as) The Blues Scale’: Outtakes from the Sonic Youth / Nirvana ’91 European Tour

 
21 years ago, after a decade and a half as the bassist in legendary underground trios the Minutemen and fIREHOSE, Mike Watt released his first album under his own name, and it was a very big deal. Ball-Hog or Tugboat? saw Watt without a band for the first time ever, and so to compensate, Watt made the album with basically everyone. Almost 50 musicians guested on the LP, including members of Sonic Youth, the Meat Puppets, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Nirvana… Like I said, it was a very big deal.

With an all-star roster of players and a major label releasing it, the album got hyped to the moon and back, and the tour that followed attracted similar attention, as Watt’s backing band was made up of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Nirvana’s Dave Grohl and Pat Smear, less than a year after that band’s premature end in the wake of singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain’s suicide. And as if having backing musicians from two of the biggest bands in the world weren’t enough, those musicians’ new bands were Watt’s opening acts. Vedder was giving a guitar assist to the superb band Hovercraft, who were led by Beth Liebling, Vedder’s wife at the time. The other opener was a brand new concern featuring Grohl, Smear, and members of Sunny Day Real Estate, who went on to do quite well despite adopting the preposterous name “Foo Fighters.”

While video of the tour can be found if you dig long enough, there was, inexplicably, no live album ever made of that touring lineup. That’s about to be rectified at long last with the release of Ring Spiel Tour ‘95. The album is a document of the tour’s stop at the Metro in Chicago, and is scheduled for release on November 11.

One of the album’s tracks is a song that Watt has been playing since his childhood—“The Red and the Black” by Blue Öyster Cult. The lineup is Watt on bass and vocals, Vedder and Grohl on guitar, and SunnyDay/Foo’s William Goldsmith on drums. It’s DM’s pleasure to preview that cut for you today, and we got an earful from Watt about Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, the Ring Spiel tour, and “The Red and the Black.”

The whole idea of Ball Hog or Tugboat was OK, I was gonna make this record using my own name so you know who to blame. The idea was “what does the bass player do?” Is it like right field in little league? There’s something about the bass—are you trying to be fake lead guitar or are you the tugboat?

All these guys on the record, I didn’t practice with them, really. The metaphor was kinda the wrestling ring—that’s why the live record is called Ring Spiel. The only guy I really practiced with was Nels Cline. I just had cats come in. My theory was if the bass player knew the song, anybody could come play drums, or sing, or play guitar, you know what I mean? If the bass line drops out the whole tune falls apart, it’s that fundamental. But it can lead to a lot of openness in collaboration because it has limitations the leave a lot of room for other cats, and once you get them on board with their parts then you can feel it. The whole thing is you set things in motion. I get my part together, but I don’t realize the song, I want it kinda unfinished so the collaborators come in. That’s what I was testing out 21 years ago making Ball Hog or Tugboat.

“The Red and the Black” is very intense, very emotional to me. Basically it’s the older Blue Oyster Cult song “I’m On The Lamb But I Ain’t No Sheep” from the first album, but just the last riff, and some A&R guy told them just to do that lick for a whole song! It’s about a guy running from the Canadian Mounties, their uniforms are red and black. So me and d. boon knew it from Tyranny and Mutation, that second album, we played it as boys, 13 years old. We learned to play on that song, it was our primer. Almost every band I did played it. I got to play it with Bloom and Buck Dharma a couple years ago!

 
Continues after the jump…

 
As DM reported several weeks back, Melvins singer/guitarist Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne went on an unlikely-seeming acoustic tour this year, and released a now sold out tour-only acoustic E.P. on the Amphetamine Reptile label. (It’s since been announced that he’ll be releasing a full length acoustic album on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label in June.) Osborne has always been an affable storyteller in interviews, so it was no surprise to hear that his stage banter in these intimate shows were just as worthy of the ticket price as the music, but THIS story, told last week in Chicago about Nirvana/Foo Fighters/Them Crooked Vultures/total rock god Dave Grohl, is just AMAZING:
 

 
Poor bastard COMPLETELY BLEW IT.

In case you were wondering how the music on the tour was, there’s more live King Buzzo after the jump…