Over the course of researching and writing my next book, I’ve been watching, show by show, what recordings are available of the band’s 1991 tour in support of Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

The tour itself is wildly interesting purely because of the context surrounding it and succeeding it. Obviously there’s the band themselves, about to blow up, plus there’s the scrappy little bands they brought with them, all of which went on to become some of the biggest bands of all time. There’s John’s quick descent into his own personal hell and his abrupt departure, so on and so on.

But the early part of the tour is especially interesting, because none of that stuff has happened yet. It could all go either way. Blood Sugar hasn’t blown up (in fact it was already dropping from its initial peak in the charts), Pearl Jam and the Pumpkins were still basically unknowns, and John was still there, as expected, physically and mentally.

One of these early shows, only the third of the tour in fact, took place at Stephens Auditorium in Ames, Iowa, on Saturday, October 19, 1991. Thirty five years ago today.

Back in 2007 or so, there was a user on a Nine Inch Nails board I frequented that started his own “band,” released his own FL Studio music and conceived of his own little world, all of which, of course, was a poorly done, note-by-note rip-off of NIN. I will try not to be mean here, but his music was the kind of thing that you make when you’re 15, and you’re forever glad, later on, that’s it been deleted forever. Except I’m pretty sure this guy was in his mid-30s.

I don’t even remember his name, but all I know was that he was not cut out for a life in music, and he was pretty frequently the butt of jokes. The politest comments he got were things like er…keep at it! He obviously lived with some sort of low-level developmental disability, and people were occasionally cruel to him, but he was intent on being the next Trent Reznor; a real spectacle, even if only in that tiny corner of the internet. If you spent any time on forums in the early 2000s, you ran into a lot of guys (and some girls) like this.

I remember distinctly that he lived in Ames, Iowa. Who knows why that specific bit has stuck in my head, but there you have it. Has the town of Ames, Iowa ever come up in my life since? Is anyone reading this in Ames, Iowa now? Who knows. What else do I know about Ames, Iowa, or Iowa in general? Is Iowa the potato state? Or is that Idaho?

All of this is to say, my knowledge of, and my main impression of Ames, was this bizarre guy, with his bizarre, outsider art, a small town in a small state that hardly seems all that glamorous or exciting, or is in the news very much. There are more people in my city than there are in the entirety of the state of Iowa to really belabour the point.

So, when I got to this show a few days ago, I - unfairly - didn’t have very high expectations. Ames, Iowa? Where that kooky guy lived? I couldn’t imagine the band pulled up in the tour bus and were thrilled with what lay ahead of them. Another show in a small town as winter sets in. They started the tour playing smaller venues and out of the way places: the show before this was in Dekalb, Illinois, and the one after in Omaha, Nebraska. They were mostly small universities, and while a lot of them were sell-outs, they were small, dinky venues in cold, distant places.

Or, well, so I thought.

Stephens Auditorium, which falls within Iowa State University, is incredible. From the outside, it’s a bit like any other convention centre or university library you’ve ever seen - nothing that remarkable:

But once you’re inside, well, inside is amazing:

It’s beautifully brutalist. I love that colour combination. Something straight out of CONTROL, if there was an auditorium inside the Oldest House. It was named Building of the Century by Iowans at one point, and I can see why. And I love that there’s such an obvious tilt upwards from the stage. The band are looking upwards at a funnel of cheers the entire show.

Thankfully, someone sitting up in one of those balcony seats brought their camcorder and recorded the set. Give yourself an hour and twenty minutes and take yourself back in time thirty-five years:

For a video from three decades ago, the vision isn’t bad, and despite the odd cut-out, the audio is actually really good: clear, and not too boomy, and you can hear each instrument pretty well. A newer generation copy would still be an amazing upgrade, but it’s hardly unwatchable.

The band start, as they did for most of that tour, with the one-two punch of “Love Trilogy” and “Organic Anti-Beat Box Band,” and continue on from there: the current single, “Give it Away” and the upcoming single, “Suck My Kiss,” the occasional looks backwards to “Blackeyed Blonde” and “Funky Crime,” the heavier (“Nobody Weird Like Me”) and the funkier (“If You Have to Ask”) in equal measure. Throughout this tour it feels like the band are quite often playing about 10 BPM too slow, but it never really matters, because it makes the songs seem like different things; these lumbering beasts, instead of tight, funky workouts. It brings out the metal in the funk-metal, but more of a kind of stoner doom metal, like Sabbath or Sleep, than something like Slayer or Metallica.

The one song that could - and still occasionally does - throw a wrench in proceedings is “Under the Bridge.” But here it’s… great? Anthony is a little pitchy, but he always is, and he’s still clearly finding his feet playing the song live. It’s powerful here. The ending gets very heavy, again in a way that isn’t really present on the album version. The SNL version the following year touched on that, but it’s better known for its opening.

Unthinkable in previous years, this tour is the start of the period when they had to pick a ballad to play, from either “I Could Have Lied” or “Under the Bridge.” Though there are a few gaps where we don’t have a set list, from the start of the tour allll the way until December, the band did “Under the Bridge” at every show.

Then after a particularly disastrous, abandoned version of it in early December, they switched to playing “I Could Have Lied” instead. Maybe that would have been the end of their experimenting with it. But its release as a single changed things, and it was back in the setlist in early 1992. When it returned, John toyed with it continuously.

Tonight, however, John is on spectacular form throughout the show. His playing and behaviour doesn’t really go downhill until November, so he’s still firing on all cylinders here. If he was miserable, he wasn’t showing it. He plays the songs as he’s supposed to, he does the backing vocals as he’s supposed to, his solos are actual solos instead of atonal screeches (listen to “Party on Your Pussy”!). He even does his own solo song, this time it’s the Velvet Undergrounds’ “After Hours,” which becomes a real rarity afterwards. Soon he basically refused to even speak on stage, and then he was refusing to speak to anyone on or off stage.

One of the more unique things about these run of performances is the use of “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” as the first song of the encore. I guess technically any song could work here; half of the Lollapalooza tour had “Mommy Where’s Daddy?” in the post-encore spot, which must have sent much puzzlement through the crowd.

Maybe because it was a Saturday night, but the crowd is rowdy, constantly stage diving, to the point where security have to intervene, and then someone has to intervene with the security because they’re roughing people up. It gets really intense during, and after “Subway to Venus,” and in the encore break.

Perhaps in response to all of this, and in a move that he wouldn’t dare repeat today, Anthony takes the show to the crowd, and dives into them himself, risking his body if not the microphone, singing the last chorus of “Blood Sugar” up against the front row. That version of Anthony is long gone.

Then there’s a run-through of “Fela’s Cock,” and the old favourite “Me and My Friends,” and that’s it. Time to go home. Or, more likely, back to your dorm room.

In one sense, this is just another show in a long line of them. The crew tore down the stage, they packed up the buses and trucks, and they were off to Omaha the next night. There’s nothing too remarkable about it. I could have accidentally gotten myself invested in the previous show or the show afterwards.

But it’s a moment in time.

A bootleg is a beautiful thing. It’s not just capturing a band’s performance on the night, but capturing the entire world as it was on that night, the world as it existed in that auditorium. October 1991: think about how different everything was, how the things we take for granted these days didn’t even exist, how daily life was pretty close to the way it is now, but completely different in a million other ways.

There were just over two thousand beautiful Iowans in the auditorium. One of them filmed this recording, and thanks to that anonymous person, we’re in the room too. You can see one of them jump onto the stage afterwards and take, I think, Anthony’s setlist. A fair amount of them are probably dead, sadly. Some of them are in the Youtube comments, remembering dates and details completely incorrectly. We’re lucky the band is still together, still playing these songs, but that’s its own miracle. The show, in essence, is always happening now, looping endlessly. It’s always Saturday night in Ames.