Nirvana Palmer Auditorium, Davenport, Iowa, Oct 22, 1993 Two Converse high tops, mismatched. One black Reebok. One tan loafer. One Birkenstock. The shoes, friends, never lie. And Nirvana's Oct. 22 blitz at Davenport, Iowa's Palmer Auditorium -- judging from the array of ownerless footwear dotting the floor of the hall after the house lights went up -- was at least a five-shoe affair on the rock & roll Richter scale. In a town like Davenport, which usually doesn't make the cut when it comes to one-off shows, tickets for Nirvana's first U.S. tour in two years were probably the most coveted ducats of the year, a chance not only to see the band but to see it up close. Rejecting the arenas they could surely fill at this point, Nirvana are playing mostly 3,000 to 5,000-capacity general-admission venues. (The only exception to date: the opening show in Phoenix, where fans who paid the $6 admission to the Arizona State Fair could see Nirvana in the same 15,000-seat coliseum that Billy Ray Cyrus played the night before.) Some pundits predicted that fans of Nirvana's last album, "Nevermind," would be alienated by "In Utero," given its rawer sound and Kurt Cobain's extremely personal outpourings of anguish and I-hate-fame bitterness. But if the Davenport audience was any indication, the majority are in it for the long haul. Scott McBride, a 22-year-old student from Cedar Falls who drove two and a half hours to see the Davenport gig, says he prefers the band's newest release to "Nevermind." "It's more straightforward," says McBride. "It makes more sense than 'Nevermind.' I think he's putting his heart on the line, talking about what it's like for him to be what he is. I can't necessarily relate to it, but I understand him somewhat." David Kemp, a 19-year-old student and musician who had never seen the band live before, gave Nirvana's performance an enthusiastic thumbs up. "It was bizarre," Kemp says of the crush on the floor. "I lasted five songs, and then I had to get out of there." Some of the shows have fared better than others. The Oct. 18 Phoenix date drew rave reviews, while the following night's show, in Albuquerque, N.M., was reportedly spotty. In general, the Kansas City, Kan., show on Oct. 21 lacked energy, owing largely to Memorial Hall's poor acoustics, an absence of ventilation that turned the venue into a smoke-filled steam bath by the time Nirvana took the stage and a surprisingly jaded crowd that might as well have been standing, arms crossed, beneath a banner bearing the words: "Here we are now, entertain us." Cobain began the evening by wandering onto the stage while the house lights were still on. "Is Kevin here?" the singer asked. "My friend that I met last night? If you're here, raise your hand." Hundreds of wise-asses promptly raised their hands, eliciting an exasperated shrug and a good-natured "Don't f--- with me" from Cobain. Kevin, it was revealed later, was a local drag queen the band had met the previous night; Cobain had his heart set on working him into the encore. But Kevin never showed, and the encore the Kansas City fans got instead -- "Scentless Apprentice" and "On a Plain," followed by an almost unbearable 10 minutes of uninspired, feedback-laden wanking off -- left the audience, aside from a few die-hard body surfers, looking restless and glassy eyed. Even Cobain seemed bored with the crowd's dogged insistence on hanging in there for every last ear-splitting shriek. "I'm not gonna turn my guitar off until you just go home," he warned the fans. "You can stick around and listen to this bullshit if you want to." All told, aside from sterling versions of "About a Girl," "Come As You Are" and "Pennyroyal Tea" in the first third of the set, the show was a letdown. Not so in Davenport. You wouldn't exactly expect the young inhabitants of this town -- a sparsely populated farming community where nearly everything is named after tractor kingpin John Deere and the local entertainment listings boast such events as Riverbend Storytelling Guild Ghost Story Session and Great Pumpkin Day Sale -- to outdo their more urban Kansas City peers in the kick-out-the-jams department, but they did. The youth of Davenport descended upon Palmer Auditorium like a plague of rowdy, yahooing locusts, and Nirvana, soaking up the crowd's rampant energy, turned in one of their most dazzling shows in recent memory. Within a few bars of the set-opening "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," the floor of the hall was a writhing, cathartic jumble of bodies -- a massive slam pit stretching clear to the exit doors and threatening to engulf the band's soundboard, which was protected by only one rickety barricade and three distinctly panicky-looking security guards. From there, Nirvana -- energetically abetted by former Germs guitarist Pat Smear and cellist Lori Goldston, who sat in on some of the acoustic numbers -- took the ball and ran with it. Flanked by winged anatomical mannequins like the one featured on "In Utero's" artwork, the band members bounced around a stage decorated like an enchanted forest -- complete with creepy, dead-looking trees -- and steamrollered in rapid-fire succession through "Drain You," "Breed," "Serve the Servants," "About a Girl," "Heart-Shaped Box," "Sliver," "Dumb," "In Bloom" and "Come As You Are." By the time they played "Lithium," they'd turned the audience into virtual puppets, a synchronized army that sang every word of the song's low-key verses and erupted into pogoing pandemonium every time the chorus rolled around. The band maintained the fever pitch with "Pennyroyal Tea" and "School," finally slowing the pace and giving the audience a breather with "Polly" and "Rape Me." The crowd response to the latter -- 4,500 angelic voices softly crooning, "Rape me, my friend" -- provided the evening's most surreal moment. It's doubtful that the parents of those present would understand why a song like "Rape Me" would attain anthem status. But their kids, the latchkey children of the Nasty '90s struggling to overcome the havoc wreaked on their psyches and their planet by the generation that preceded them, know why all too well. Capping the hour with breakneck run-throughs of "Territorial Pissings" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (which Krist Novoselic introduced as "a song for our infomercial"), Nirvana left the stage, prompting what was easily the most thunderous demand for an encore heard by this reporter in five years. After returning for "Scentless Apprentice" and "Blew," Novoselic and Cobain hung their still-squealing guitars on the angel-like mannequins, leaving the dummies to bear not-so-silent witness to the fans as they filed out. Most of the departing concertgoers looked exhausted. But they also looked like they'd just witnessed the show of their lives, and it's doubtful that any of them -- not even the five luckless mosh-pit casualties who shuffled into the 45-degree Iowa night one shoe poorer -- had any complaints. KIM NEELY Copyright 1997 by Rolling Stone