Before Nirvana hit it big, the band gave a rousing performance at their local Radio Shack. In 1988, the band played a set at the electronics store's Aberdeen, Washington outpost, shredding in front of the audio/video section. Clips of the performance have appeared online before, but the complete video is now available thanks to video archivist Mike Ziegler, as SPIN reports.
The video isn’t a live recording, per se; it’s more of a really low-quality music video. The day before, the band had gone into the studio to record their first official demo. In the Radio Shack video, drummer Dale Crover (best known as a member of the Melvins) is playing live, but Kurt Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic are playing along with the newly recorded demo. (After they recorded the demo, the band played a show in Tacoma, Washington, which you can see footage of running on the TVs in the background.)
The whole 17-minute video is worth a watch. There are multiple takes of Cobain taking a running jump to enter the frame like a flying squirrel. Novoselic decides to take a dramatic fall at the end of one song—and then you hear an “oh!” as he hits his head on an acoustic guitar sitting by the drum kit. Nothing like seeing famous rockers show off their stuff as kind-of-dweeby amateurs.