I was contacted by someone recently from a really interesting Nirvana fan site.

http://www.nirvanaguide.com/

A collection of information about Nirvana bootlegs and a message board for all things Nirvana. They had seen apparently my post with a photo of my Nirvana at Del Mar Fairgrounds boot tape from this post

(https://auralretentive.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/bootlegs-part-3-analog-vs-digital-or-the-death-of-aural-retentive-tapes/)

which I have converted to digital and sent me a link to the specific page that has info about the many versions of it that are circulating.

http://www.nirvanaguide.com/1991.php#show_911228

This is the result of someone really really into Nirvana. For those of you who have never collected bootleg tapes, or even listened critically to at least 2 versions of a show trying to determine the quality rating, or which is more complete…etc. the amount of work involved in cataloging this kind of information is beyond comprehension. A real work of love and fandom.

The e-mail I received in part was looking for any bootleg information or contributions, or if anyone I knew had info or recordings that perhaps they had not discovered yet. I thought I had a few, that they probably had no doubt, but I would have to investigate.

First thing I did was looked in my digitized bootlegs. There was the Del Mar Fairgrounds boot. All digitized and safe. It was the only one that had been digitized… so I started looking for my bootleg list. That turned into a cold sweat search of a billion files. I finally found it on a flash drive that I carry in my backpack. I made a copy on my laptop AND my external. Whew. Then I printed it out for old school safety.

I flipped to the page with Nirvana on it.

I was pleased to see that I had 7 Nirvana boots. Then I noticed something I wasn’t expecting.

(R)

You see, the number in front of each in parens indicates the number of the cassette the bootleg is on. Two have numbers… 27 and 164. The others have a mysterious (R) in front of them. It took me a moment, but it finally dawned on me what the (R) stood for. Reel-To Reel. At one point, when I was low on cassettes I had moved some recordings over to (R) for storage. At this point I only have 3 reel-to-reel tapes left, and none are of Nirvana. So… sadly the bootlegs preceded with (R) no longer exist in my collection. They are gone.

The only actual tape I have left is

this December 1993 performance at Pier 48 in Seattle Washington.

The Nirvana site lists 2 entries for this show. One was a rehearsal and one a performance. Mine doesn’t seem to match either and mine is only 37 minutes long. I stopped myself from falling down the rabbit hole trying to figure it out which one it was most likely culled from and decided to play it instead. That is why I collected it so many years ago anyway. It’s damn good to hear it again though.

So, I don’t think I have anything worthy of sharing with the awesome Nirvana site, but it was cool to hear from them. If you are looking for ANY information on a Nirvana show, I doubt you could do wrong looking there first.

I have since my tape trading days come into, thanks in part to Dalton, an obscene amount of Nirvana collector stuff… unreleased rehearsals, outtakes, performances and alternate versions. The Nirvana machine rolls on.

A moment of silence though for my missing tapes.

Nirvana (R) I. P.