Nirvana
From the earliest days of rock and roll, being booked to play Maple Leaf Gardens was a sure sign that you'd hit the big time.
Going all the way back to 1956, when Bill Haley and the Comets headlined what was the first true rock concert in Toronto, the arena played host to all the major touring acts, from Elvis Presley, to the Beatles, to Chuck Berry, to the Rolling Stones, to Bob Dylan, to Jimi Hendrix, to Elton John, to Led Zeppelin, to Bruce Springsteen, to Neil Young, to Madonna - and, more than anyone else, to hometown boys Rush. On November 4, 1993, the headliners were a trio from Seattle called Nirvana, playing in front of 8,500 fans in a scaled-down version of the Gardens. Only two years before, on the same day the album Nevermind was released - the record that would make them reluctant superstars - the band had played a brilliant, chaotic set at a small Toronto club in front of only a few hundred fans.
Their style was dubbed grunge, a rough, edgy and dark rejection of the excesses of big, corporate rock, just as punk had been fifteen years earlier, and like so many acts before them, they were viewed as the musical voice of a disaffected generation.
But now Nirvana were arena rockers themselves, who had sold millions upon millions of records, and it was hard not to sense their discomfort. The band's lead singer Kurt Cobain was described by Toronto reviewers as "sullen" onstage, and the band pointedly declined to perform its biggest hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit.
As it turned out, Nirvana would never be back. Four months later, they played their last show in Munich.
Five month later, Cobain was dead, a suicide at age 27.
-Stephen Brunt
Plaque via Alan L. Brown's site Toronto Plaques. Full page here.