Before Mainstream Breakthrough, Nirvana Played in a Mormon Church in Utah
Nirvana played inside Salt Lake City's historic Fifth Ward Meetinghouse just days after wrapping up recording "Nevermind."
Three months before releasing their second album Nevermind that launched them into international stardom, Nirvana played a small show inside a cosy, red-brick Mormon building in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The June 11, 1991 show at the Fifth Ward Meetinghouse, a historic LDS Church building later converted to a concert venue, saw the grunge trio open for noise rock pioneers Dinosaur Jr on the Green Mind West Coast Tour, an eight-stop venture that took the young indie rockers to venues like Jabberjaw in Los Angeles, Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, Melody Ballroom in Portland and Iguana’s in Tijuana, Mexico.
Nirvana embarked on the West Coast tour just days after wrapping up recording for Nevermind with Butch Vig at Sound City in Van Nuys, California, an album that would go on to spark the grunge revolution and would be certified Platinum just five months later.
The tour featured some of the first live performances of the album’s lead single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” an anthem for an entire generation that quickly became one of the best-selling songs of all time.
“The Loudest Show I’ve Ever Been To”
Nirvana’s first show in Utah took place at the most interesting of venues. The Fifth Ward Meetinghouse, an official city landmark and nationally registered historic place, was originally built in 1910 and used by the Mormon Church through 1975 before becoming The Pompadour Rock & Roll Club in 1991. According to Fox 13, “The meetinghouse served diverse people — at one point even serving primarily Native American church members,” while KSL NewsRadio reported that “the Tudor Gothic-style building could hold 300 churchgoers.”
The downtown all-ages venue became a staple of the Salt Lake underground, regularly hosting goth nights and bringing in an array of alternative, punk, metal and indie acts including Smashing Pumpkins, Crash Worship, Cannibal Corpse, NOFX, Napalm Death, Godflesh, Kreator and Melvins (a primary influence of Nirvana).
The Salt Lake City show was the second stop on the tour after an opening show at Gothic Theatre in Englewood, Colorado. A poster for the show advertises limited seating, no alcohol and $10 tickets available in advance at Utah records stores Raunch, The Heavy Metal Shop, Graywhale and Reptile Records.
One attendee, Dave Olson, recounted the show in a February 2024 post in the Pacific Northwest Music Archives Facebook group.
I remember watching the show & my "internal critical monologue" shut down because it was pretty much perfection: The band incredibly well-rehearsed, the songs were instantly hummable, little/no stage banter - just one blitzing song after another, energetic and charismatic – and it felt like they knew what was coming.
The formidable Dinosaur Jr (without Lou Barlow) followed and the over-the/top ear-splitting Marshalls (keep in mind this was a very small venue) combined with their slacker lethargy & the "holy smokes do you know what we just saw?" feeling of Nirvana sent most of the audience out to the parking lot to discuss (over illicit beers stashed in the bushes).
Of course June 11, 1991, Nevermind was in the can but not released so the trio had gone out on a short support tour with Dino Jr. in CO, UT, CA & Tijuana (after mostly PNW/W Canada shows earlier in the year) to roadtest the songs before heading to Europe with Sonic Youth + festivals and apparently, prepare for what was coming.
Another attendee, Ryan Mills, told a Salt Lake City Facebook group it was “the loudest show I’ve ever been to till this date.”
Even those who weren’t at the show have grown nostalgic for the moment. “I ride my scooter past here late night sometimes, smoke a J and reminisce,” Rob Radke wrote on a post about the show. “Never went to Pompadour, I ‘worked’ at (Salt Lake City venue) Club Starz … Still friends to this day with folks I met there.”
The Year Punk Broke
Though Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic were in their mid and early 20s and could’ve passed for record-store-window-shopping slackers, there were inklings that these young punks were about to break.
Speaking about a show in Tijuana on June 15, 1991, just days after the Salt Lake City gig, Ray Farrell of DGC Records told Variety: “This kid had already figured out how to look like Kurt Cobain, with the flannel and the dyed hair. I talked to him and he was like, ‘Nirvana’s gonna be huge!’ After the show [Dinosaur Jr. frontman] J. Mascis said to me, ‘If I could be the second guitarist in that band, I would break up Dinosaur Jr. tonight.’ They were that incredible and exciting live.”
Nirvana followed up the West Coast dates with a European tour opening for Sonic Youth, which is memorialized in the documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke.
By the time Nirvana returned to Utah in 1993 as a fully blown-up band, The Pompadour was no longer. The venue held its last gig in January 1992 before being converted to a Tibetan Buddhist temple.
The multi-disciplinary historic building then went unused for several years before being partially demolished by accident on Easter 2024. Efforts to restore the Fifth Ward Meetinghouse are currently underway.
Nirvana played its final Utah show at the Golden Spike Arena in Ogden — a vastly bigger venue — on December 16, 1993, just a few months after the release of their third album In Utero and four months before Cobain’s death. They recorded that album with famed engineer Steve Albini, whom I wrote about in this tribute after his passing in May 2024.