On October 23, 1993, Nirvana played the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and slipped an unreleased song into the set. As far as anyone has ever found, it was the only time the band played “You Know You’re Right” in concert. Three months later, it would become the last song Nirvana finished in a recording studio. Kurt Cobain was gone by April. The song itself would not reach the public for another eight years.
A sold-out Saturday at the Aragon
The In Utero tour was less than a week old when it reached Chicago. The Aragon, an old ballroom on the city’s North Side, was sold out, with newspaper and trade reports putting the crowd at roughly 5,000 to 5,500. Jawbreaker and Mudhoney opened the night, and Nirvana came on around a quarter past nine.
The band on stage was bigger than the trio most fans knew. Pat Smear, the former Germs guitarist, had joined to play second guitar. Lori Goldston sat in on cello. It happened to be her birthday, and Dave Grohl introduced her to the crowd and wished her a happy one.
“This is our last song”
The set ran through the new In Utero material alongside older favorites. “Heart-Shaped Box,” “Dumb” and “Pennyroyal Tea” sat next to “About a Girl,” “In Bloom” and “Come As You Are.” Krist Novoselic picked up an accordion for “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” Then came “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
After that, Grohl told the crowd it was the last song, and that it was called “All Apologies.”
But before “All Apologies,” the band played something that was not on In Utero or on any record at all. It was “You Know You’re Right,” a song Kurt Cobain had written in 1993 and the band had not yet recorded in a studio. The audience at the Aragon was hearing it for the first time. As far as anyone knows, Nirvana never played it live again.
They then played “All Apologies,” and the night was not even close to over. The encore ran six more songs, from “Something in the Way” to “Endless, Nameless.”
A song with no name
Fans with tape recorders caught the Chicago show, and the new song began to travel among collectors. Since nobody knew its title, it picked up wrong ones. Some tapes called it “On a Mountain.” Others called it “Autopilot.” A Japanese bootleg of the concert, titled The Sermon on the Mount, listed it as “I’m a Mountain.”
For years, that rough audience recording from the Aragon was the only way anyone could hear the song at all.
The last session
On January 30, 1994, Nirvana went into Robert Lang Studios in Seattle with engineer Adam Kasper. The track was logged simply as “Kurt’s Tune #1.” Kurt Cobain showed up on the third day of the session, working with a borrowed guitar and an amp he did not like. He sang the main vocal in one take.
It was the final studio recording Nirvana ever made. Kurt Cobain died in April 1994.
Eight years in the vault
The song sat unreleased while Courtney Love and the surviving members, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, fought over Nirvana’s catalog. Love argued in court that the track was too valuable to be tucked into a planned box set, and she blocked its release there. The dispute was finally settled in late September 2002.
Just before that, a copy leaked online, and rock stations started playing it anyway. In October 2002, “You Know You’re Right” was released as a single and opened the greatest hits album Nirvana. It went to No. 1 on both Billboard’s Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock charts, the first Nirvana song ever to top Mainstream Rock, and it was certified Gold.
Millions of people finally heard the finished song in 2002. The roughly 5,000 people at the Aragon Ballroom had heard it first, nine years earlier, played live, by the whole band, on a Saturday night in Chicago.