10 Live Covers Of Hard Rock Songs You Need To Hear
4. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Patti Smith & Cali
Patti Smith is undoubtedly the queen of punk rock. Her debut studio album Horses was released in 1975, a blend of spoken word poetry and punk rock guitar. Taking inspiration from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, her lyrics were full of evocative imagery that bestowed a mythological quality to her storytelling.
After a string of albums, Smith recorded Gone Again in 1996, which featured the song About a Boy, a tribute to the late Kurt Cobain, who she had admired greatly and recognised as a kindred spirit. Years later, she honoured Cobain further with a stripped-back rendition of Smells Like Teen Spirit that she nestled in her covers album, Twelve.
In 2008, Smith was accompanied by French musician Cali to perform a live rendition of this cover. It's an incredibly understated version of the grunge-rock classic. Within it, was the same raw emotion Kurt Cobain mustered up during Nirvana's MTV Unplugged performance. Surprisingly, Smells Like Teen Spirit was not featured in the MTV performance, leaving fans forever wondering what Cobain might have done with the song if he had traded in the electric guitar for an acoustic one.
This is as close to finding out as you will ever get. William Ruhlman of AllMusic described Patti's voice as being full of "anarchic spirit" - certainly fitting, given the song she chose to cover.