If they played a great set, it was a distortion-fueled celebration to end it on a high note filled with noise & feedback, but if they played a mediocre set plagued with mistakes and/or sound issues, it was an outlet to take out their frustration and give themselves & their fans something fun to make up for it. However, the destruction sessions became expected by Nirvana fans at the end of their concerts, so toward the end of their career they turned them into a kind of self-parody by spending increasingly longer periods of time destroying their gear in creative and often sardonically humorous ways to satirize and mock the act (such as Dave Grohl throwing his snare drum in the air and Kurt wielding his guitar like a baseball bat and swinging at it, both repeating this for several minutes).
Kurt also said in interviews that when everything went right in a concert - when the sound engineering was spot-on & the monitors worked perfectly and he was feeling good, playing well, and connecting with the audience & in sync with the band - that it was a euphoric, almost spiritual experience.
That kind of adrenaline rush and Nirvana’s intense Rock & Roll energy and rebelliousness - often veering into self-destructiveness - explains the instrument destruction and offers insight into why he enjoyed it, as does his growing frustration with fans’ & critics’ expectations of him after the success of Nevermind and his dark period of isolation following its promotional tour. Whether the result of mania or depression, of impulsiveness or calculation, Kurt’s instrument destruction was a huge draw of Nirvana’s live performances as he was mesmerizing to watch in his reckless abandon…ramming his head repeatedly into an amp, jabbing the headstock of his guitar into a speaker with cranked distortion pedals overloading the signal and feeding back into a cacophony of noise, jumping headfirst into the drumkit from the top of a pair of 4x12 cabs, hanging onto his guitar by its strap and swinging it around over his head…and all with no regard for his safety. It was sad to see his enthusiasm for live performance - including the destruction aspect of it - die down near the end of his life from the In Utero tour on when he grew tired & cynical and suffered from declining health.
It’s also worth noting that Kurt didn’t destroy his best or his favorite guitars such as his ’65 Fender Jaguar with dual humbuckers, his ’69 competition Fender Mustang or three modified Mustang reissues, or his various ’70s Phase 3 model Univox Hi-Fliers; he had a slew of cheap Japanese- and Mexican-made Fender Strats (this was before Fender opened plants in Korea and Indonesia and created Squier, their subsidiary company for manufacturing low-end guitars & basses) he brought on tour for the specific purpose of destroying (as well as using them throughout concerts to quickly switch guitars for songs in different tunings), and he got replacement necks (mostly Fernandes and later Kramer Strat-style ones) for his techs to repair them from their salvageable parts so he could reuse them. Kurt would also commonly throw his destroyed guitars into the crowd which made for incredible and quite valuable souvenirs for lucky fans, so it was far from a mere waste.
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