Z'BRDA · LIFE
The last cigarette on stage
30 September 2026 · Nino Ciglenečki & Iris · hrvatski
Pat Smear lit a cigarette while Nirvana were accepting an award, and people talked about it more than about the award. Once nobody would even have noticed, because everyone smoked - on stage, outside school and on planes.
You know how award shows go: the next day nobody remembers who won what, only who did what. At the MTV awards on 27.9.2026 the surviving members of Nirvana received the Video Vanguard Award for their videos, and while Krist Novoselić was giving the speech, Pat Smear calmly lit a cigarette.
To some it was pure rock’n’roll and a nod to Kurt, to others bad taste in the middle of an award show. And anyone who grew up forty or fifty years ago probably didn’t even notice it at first.
When everyone smoked
In the mid-sixties four in ten American adults smoked, and today fewer than one in ten do. People smoked in cars and on planes, which had smoking sections, and outside school both pupils and teachers smoked during the break.
Musicians smoked at rehearsals, in clubs and in music lessons, and there could be so much smoke that you couldn’t see from the door who was playing. It never crossed anyone’s mind to complain.
If we look back at old footage, the picture is the same. The Beatles smoke in Get Back, Miles Davis smokes in the background while Coltrane solos on So What, and after them come Hendrix, Jagger, Bowie, the Clash and Amy Winehouse. A cigarette was as much a part of the stage as the amp.
A raspy voice on credit
Singers believed a cigarette gave them a raspier, better voice, and while they were young, they were often right. The bill came with the years, when the vocal cords lose their elasticity, and how that ended for Sinatra can be heard on his late recordings.
A question to finish
This piece was prompted by a video from Rick Beato. Last year, among tens of thousands of people at a huge music gear show, he saw just one smoker, and it stuck in his mind. At the end he floats an idea he refuses to judge himself: maybe it’s no accident that musicians quit smoking at roughly the time rock stopped being what it was.
It isn’t his first idea of the kind, because when he argued that the world ended in 2012, the culprit was the smartphone. He leaves the verdict to us, and we leave it to you.
The video is below, the channel is Rick Beato. There are more stories in there that I didn’t want to give away, so if this caught your interest, watch the whole thing.
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