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Kurt Cobain: an icon of alienation

In the days after Cobain's death on 5 April 1994, Jonathan Freedland reported from Seattle for the Guardian's Weekend magazine, charting the troubled life of a reluctant rock star. On the 20th anniversary of Cobain's suicide, we republish the piece

Would the real Kurt Cobain please stand up

I t smells like nirvana. Up here in Madrona, one of Seattle's smartest neighbourhoods, the air from Lake Washington breezes new and sweet. The trees, their leaves shiny, add an extra tang of their own, and what breath you have is taken away by the view. It's the kind of place which makes visitors sigh, "I could live here." No wonder the street signs welcome you to "Madrona - The Peaceable Kingdom".

But one house on the hill has been spoiled. Black plastic tarpaulins hang from the trees to keep out prying eyes, bed-sheets have been pulled across the windows. Nevertheless, you can still see into the room above the detached garage, the room estate agents would call "the mother-in-law apartment".

The patterned lino is visible, so is the bare table, and the vase of pink tulips placed on the floor to mark the exact spot where Kurt Cobain took a shotgun and blew his brains out.

The birds keep singing outside, undisturbed by the police paraphernalia that has cordoned off the driveway since Cobain's body was found. Occasionally a robin comes down to peck at the pools of red candlewax, leftovers from the vigil of fans who gathered here the moment Seattle radio stations declared April 8 the day the music died.

They were mourning the passing of the king of grunge, the frontman of Nirvana whose 1991 hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit, was credited with exporting the Seattle sound worldwide, injecting "indie rock" into the mainstream, and so altering the course of modern music. The grown-up media followed close behind, reporting that Kurt Cobain's death had deprived the world's twentysomethings of a spokesman, that Generation X had lost its crown prince.

To outsiders, the fuss was hard to fathom. For one thing, Nirvana's music is an acquired taste, a blend of punk and metal, in which melody is often buried under layers of sheer noise. And Cobain's story seemed so obvious, so familiar. The words "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" came so easily - and Kurt Cobain's demise had all the elements. From the coma induced by a tranquilliser-and-champagne cocktail in Rome a month earlier (now regarded as a first suicide attempt), to the tales of long-term heroin addiction, to the self-pitying note he left behind - it was a saga of self-destruction that made Cobain look like nothing more than a Nineties Sid Vicious.

But the seven thousand Seattleites who gathered in a memorial service for him - venting their sense of betrayal by chanting a chorus of "Fuck You, Kurt", led by the star's widow, punk singer Courtney Love - felt they had lost something special. "Kurt died for your sins," bellowed one overwrought fan to his fellow mourners. Another showed off the K-U-R-T scar she had razored on to her wrist. There was a ritual burning of flannel shirts, the trademark garment of grunge.

For these people, and for the ten million others who bought Nevermind, Nirvana's blockbuster album, Cobain was a musical original. He was, too, a symbol of his generation and even of his country. But not quite in the way those early obituarists would have you believe. KurtCobain's life and music were much more complex, more riven by tension, than the simple, voice-of-alienated-youth eulogies let on. His 27 years included ironies and confusions that do not fit easily into the conventional Generation X wisdom, but ultimately reflect what it is that distinguishes today's under-30s, and perhaps modern America itself.

This roomy house, complete with skylights and an exterior of grey, wood-slice tiles, is a case in point. Generation X-ers are meant to be the slacker generation, yet here was the slacker-in-chief living the yuppie dream: married, padding around a $ 1.1 million luxury mansion with a garden for his baby daughter to play in, and Microsoft and Boeing executives for neighbours.

It proved to be no refuge for Kurt Cobain, the boy who had come from blue-collar nowhere and made himself an international star and millionaire. Holed up inside the house overlooking the perfume-scented lake, he pumped his veins full of heroin, wrote his rambling suicide note, and did so much damage to his head that police could only identify his body through fingerprints. Dental records were no use, because nothing was left of his mouth.

The neighbourhood will soon be back to normal. No one would ever admit it, but there is probably some relief that there will never again be nights like the one last year when police arrested Cobain after a resident reported hearing the sounds of domestic violence. (He and his wife insisted they were merely jamming and then play-fighting around the house). And no repeat of the March 18 episode - just days after the Rome crisis - when Love called out the emergency services after her husband locked himself in the bathroom with three pistols, a rifle and 25 rounds of ammunition.

Now the house will be quiet. And soon there will only be a trace of irony hanging over the sign, not 50 yards from the Cobain residence, that says "Madrona - drug free zone."

Listening to tonight's line-up at the Crocodile Cafe, grunge's equivalent of the Liverpool Cavern, you realise that Kurt Cobain got lucky. Nirvana once performed at the Crocodile to an audience of six, and they could easily still be here. They did not invent the sound called grunge, but they got the breaks: among them a session on the John Peel show, and the cover of Melody Maker. (Seattle acknowledges that Britain was first to shift the city from the furthest northwestern tip of the US to the centre of the rock universe.)

The punters at the Crocodile, in their punk-hippie hybrid garb of goatees, dungarees, and clothes from Value Village (this area's Oxfam) all say grunge died long before Kurt Cobain. It died when it became big, when the fashion industry got hold of it. Now, they say, they dress the way they do because "we're poor and it rains a lot", and if they occasionally still tie a flannel shirt around their waist, well, that's because it gets cold.

They give equally short shrift to the notion that Cobain was any kind of spokesman for Generation X, or that any such thing exists. "It's just a way to market us," says Teresa de la Rosa, 24. Next to her is Gary Paul, 28, who, despite a college degree is working as a postman - a textbook case of the X syndrome which has overeducated kids working in low-status, low-paid jobs, from office temps to despatch riders. All around him are people in the same position, but he is adamant that there is nothing that unites them. "I think the media are making a big thing of it," he says.

Kurt Cobain would find such talk gratifying. He was utterly disdainful of his own role as the "voice of a generation". Central to his message was a rejection of what he saw as the crude, commercial motive of labelling an age group. The "Teen Spirit" satirised in Cobain's most famous song is a deodorant aimed at young girls.

The fact that Nirvana made millions by appealing to a niche market, partly defined by youth, was an irony not lost on Cobain, who wrote the words and music to all Nirvana's songs, as well as singing and playing the guitar on all of them. The opening lyric of In Utero, the band's last album, was direct: "Teenage angst has paid off well, Now I'm bored and old."

It seems funny, this contract that existed between Kurt Cobain and people like the Crocodile crowd: they deny they are a group, and he denied that he represented them. But one can't fully escape the other. So much of what these kids are about - even if they deny it - was reflected in his short, urgent life.

Take the definitive extract of Cobain poetry, the couplet in Teen Spirit that manages to evoke disillusion, fatalism and inertia in a stroke. "I found it hard, it was hard to find," he croaks, "Oh well, whatever, never mind." "That was his message, that life is futile," muses 26-year-old Bob Hince, who has completed six years of study in molecular biology but is now heading for Alaska to work as a salmon fisherman. His dyed red hair nearly covers his eyes, falling behind the lenses of his retro, Buddy Holly glasses. He's drinking bloody Marys tonight, and paying no attention to Flake, the band strutting furiously on stage.

"It's just ambivalence. You're at a crossroads, and you don't know what to do," he says. "What am I supposed to be?" Hince says his employment prospects have left him feeling bottled up with anger. "We all are. We all feel the monotony, we all feel we cannot control our circumstances."

And all those feelings are there, in the music. If it's frustration you're after, there's the screaming rage of Cobain's singing, the screech of metallic guitar noise and lyrics like, "Gotta find a way, a better way." Alienation? Try "Stay Away", or the verse which explains, "I'm not like them, but I can pretend." Paralysis? How about Come As You Are, which urges, "Take your time, hurry up." And for sheer pent-up anger, taken neat, there's Tourette's, a hoarse tirade on In Utero. Lyric: "Fuck, shit, piss."

The untrained ear might strain to hear what's new in all this. After all, punk, with its near-identical message, happened a long time ago. Nearly 20 years have passed since the Sex Pistols swore at Bill Grundy, and the Adverts - to name but one - snarled, "It's no time to be 21, To be Anyone."

Kurt Cobain saw this point himself. "I'm the first to admit that we're the Nineties version of Cheap Trick," he said once, and he constantly cited the influence on him of charmingly-named, if little-known British punk bands like the Raincoats and the Vaselines. But punk never made the breakthrough in the US that it did in Britain. The Sex Pistols may have reshaped the pop landscape in the UK, but punk stayed marginal here. "It didn't really catch on," remembers Jeff Gilbert, Seattle-based writer for Guitar World.

The result was a vacuum which Kurt Cobain stepped into effortlessly. "Things had gone soft on us and Nirvana gave it a real boot to the butt," says Gilbert. What Never Mind The Bollocks did for the UK, Nevermind did across the Atlantic.

But Cobain did more than resuscitate punk to rehash perennial themes of teen rebellion. He had an instinctive feel for what made his audience's growing pains different from those of their predecessors. According to Newsweek, "grunge is what happens when children of divorce get their hands on guitars". The one hard item of demographics amid all the guff about Generation X is that, more than any other group in history, they come from broken homes.

"I know only two people whose parents aren't divorced, and one of them - his mother got shot," muses Bob's friend, Mara Rivet, 22, an assistant at Tower Records. She knows that Kurt Cobain's mum and dad, a secretary and a car mechanic, split when he was 10. She's heard him sing, "As my bones grew, they did hurt/They hurt really bad/I tried hard to have a father/But instead I had a Dad."

Bob, Mara and friends understood what Cobain was up to when he jetted off to Hawaii to marry Courtney Love, leader of the band Hole, in 1992. They watched the ceremony (not knowing that Cobain was juiced on heroin at the time), and wished him luck. They had heard the star say he proposed to Love because she was "the best fuck in the world", and they'd seen him show the scratches on his back to prove it, but they identified with another, deeper motive. They knew well that urge to find a home, to belong to a family.

"I was in search of the Brady Bunch, and I didn't find it," smiles Mara, deploying one of the X-ers' favoured cultural touchstones. She ran away after her parents' break-up, and curses Cobain for inflicting a similar, parentless future on the 19-month-old Frances Bean he has left behind. Having seen Cobain's attempt at domestic bliss fail, she is more pessimistic than ever. "There is no Brady Bunch family, goddammit. It's TV, and you're not told."

The cynicism is unsparing. Bereft of the idealism of flower-power, or even the exuberant iconoclasm of punk, grunge is a movement entirely without coherent politics. "There are little things we do, like vegetarianism," says Mara, "but we all know that in the end it'll all be futile."

"There's nothing to believe in anymore," says Mindy Brown, enjoying a night off from looking after her three-year-old daughter. She remembers taking sedatives to calm her fears of a nuclear holocaust. Now she gets her news from MTV. "We all believe there's nothing to believe in."

Kurt was the same way, stumbling only rarely into politics. He occasionally called on his fans to support the rights of women and gays. But he spoke just as often about his passion for guns. He kept an M-16 and 10,000 rounds of ammunition in the hall cupboard, unselfconsciously parroting the right-wing line about the right of Americans to protect themselves.

This is what distinguishes Nirvana and its generation most from the teen rebellions that have come before. Hippies and punks were both public movements, whether they were strumming to stop the Vietnam war or spitting about Anarchy In The UK. Both believed in the possibility of change. But Cobain, like the 20-plussers who listen to him, was private and self-absorbed. "What is wrong with me?" he sang. "I'm so tired, I can't sleep."

He knew this introspection was unattractive, once describing his public image as a "pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time." But that only made him loathe himself more. In this, he was a Generation X exemplar. "We're spoilt, rotten brats," says Mindy. "Slap Us!"

Typically, Cobain's suicide note, read by Courtney Love to the thousands at the Seattle service, did not complain about Aids or divorce or homelessness or any of the other things said to be preoccupying the post-1965 generation. It talked about the chronic stomach condition which Cobain always said impelled him to use heroin, "to medicate himself".

"I thank you," he wrote, "from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach …" It was somehow a perfectly apt ailment. For one thing, it proved that Cobain's pain was no affectation: he felt it deep in his gut. But it was also grimly appropriate that the boy-prince of the brat generation should die complaining of a tummy ache.

"Our parents built up this sense of expectation, and we can't live up to it," whines Bob Hince about his economic future. Cobain reflected even this, the ugliest of Generation X's traits: its passivity, its self-pitying feeling of entitlement, its expectation that mummy and daddy owe them a future. Cobain was smart enough to send up the sentiment. "Here we are now, entertain us," he wailed in Teen Spirit. And his grieving widow, reading his suicide note to the fans, was able to show similar contempt. When she came to the passage in which Cobain moaned that he was a "sad, little, sensitive Pisces-Jesus man", she stopped reading and yelled at the ghost of her dead husband, "Oh, shut up!"

Aberdeen, Washington is not yet a shrine, but it may become one soon. Already, graffiti adorns the wall of a burnt-out restaurant: Kurt Cobain RIP. This shabby, peeling town of 16,000 lumbermen, loggers and fisherman, was where the frail, blue-eyed blond with a penchant for drawing and poetry grew up. The 100-mile road between here and Seattle is full of lorries packed with tree-trunks, stacked like cigarettes. There is timber everywhere, firs and pines scraping the sky like sharp pencils, and cut into tiles on the houses - including the neat, green one where Kurt Cobain's mother still lives.

Her son was born in February 1967, and, he said later, he was happy for seven years after that. (In his farewell letter, he wrote that he had felt "hateful toward all humans in general" from age seven onwards). His parents divorced when he was eight, and he didn't speak to his father until he started making hit records.

After the divorce, the child turned inward. The teachers at Aberdeen High School remember him as withdrawn, someone the other kids would avoid. "When I had him in class, the anger was definitely there," recalls Bob Hunter, a soft-spoken art teacher whose classes Cobainmade a point of attending. (He bunked off most of the others, only to sneak back into the library.)

Surveying his art-room, Hunter points out Kurt's seat, close to his own. A rock station is playing on the radio, just as it would have done then. Cobain used to offer a song-by-song critique of whatever came on, usually "pretty sarcastic", says Hunter. The teacher held on to oneCobain effort which he thought showed exceptional "originality, creativity and sophistication". It was a pencil drawing that showed, in 12 stages, the transformation of a sperm into a foetus.

Ironically, given his ultimate fate, Cobain seems to have been far more obsessed with birth than death. Several hired cleaners fled his Seattle home after they spotted his collection of model foetuses, bought from a medical supplies manufacturer. He used the smashed remnants of some of them to assemble a collage for the sleeve of In Utero - which led the Wal-Mart store chain to ban the record.

Cobain was bored by school and dropped out, passing up an art school scholarship. He became a janitor at the YMCA, living with the family of another Aberdeen High teacher, LaMont Schillinger, whose sons were friends of his. Cobain came to stay for a few days, after a row with his mother's boyfriend. He ended up rooming there for a year.

"I think Kurt was a kid that nobody ever got to know," says Mr Schillinger now. Cobain later told a biographer that he began shooting up heroin while he stayed at the Schillingers', but the head of the household thinks his former lodger made the story up, mischievously seeking to inflate his own rock 'n' roll myth.

The boy LaMont Schillinger remembers took his turn cooking, cleaning, chopping wood. He may have also been running around town spray-painting "Abort Christ" on born again Christians' pick-up trucks, but at the Schillinger table he sat quietly, even during grace.

The teacher's pupils have been asking about the suicide, accusing Kurt Cobain of an act of gross selfishness. "He was an inward-directed person," Mr Schillinger has been telling them. "I don't think there was a choice." At Rosevear's music store, the only one in town, Kurt Cobain's spirit was always in the air, even before he died. Manager Les Blue, a music enthusiast with Wayne's World looks, had thought of putting up a No Nirvana sign - to deter the legions of wannabe guitarists who all try out the merchandise the same way, playing the intro to Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Blue has strong memories of Aberdeen's most famous son, from the days when he, Blue, managed the local drive-in. "He graffitied the hell out of my bathroom," he says. In red marker, Cobain wrote HEROIN next to a picture of a syringe, and the words SID AND NANCY.

He heard Nirvana play before they were Nirvana - when they were Pen Cap Chew; Ted, Ed, Fred and Skid Row. "They kinda sucked," he recalls. Their eventual success was, says Blue, an inspiration to Aberdeen, a town depressed by cutbacks in the logging industry, forced by environmental regulations. "People thought, 'If they can do it, anybody can do it."' A cassette of Blue's own band is on sale at the counter, just in case.

There is an irony in this late embrace of Kurt Cobain by the people of his hometown. It takes only a brief visit to the local music venue to see how miserable a time he would have had fitting in here.

In Aberdeen, which even now has Wild West-style saloons and card rooms, new bands cut their teeth at the Pour House, a wooden tavern where the men wear tattoos and mean it. This must have been a harsh training for the waif-like performer, who, once in liberal Seattle, was fond of donning his wife's cotton dresses, lining his eyes, and painting his nails a lurid red.

Many in Cobain's position would have gloated as Nirvana's success turned many of the redneck jocks who had made a sport of beating up young Kurt into loyal fans. But it gave the singer no pleasure. The chorus of In Bloom was a musical jeer at the band's new audience: "He's the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun, but he don't know what it means," sneered Cobain.

It twisted his stomach to think that he was providing a soundtrack to the lives of those he despised. When he learned that his song, Polly, an ironic essay with a rapist-narrator, had been used as musical accompaniment to a real-life gang rape, he was horrified. On the sleeve notes for his Incesticide album, he issued a plea: "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different colour, or women, please - leave us the fuck alone."

The fact that Nirvana struck a chord not only with Generation X, but with a large swathe of blue-collar white, male America - men with despair and alienation of their own - was just one of dozens of problems Kurt Cobain had with success. For a champion of the punk ethic of anti-commercialism, multi-million record sales were a confusion. And intrusion by the press into his private life was insupportable for a man who had been a loner since childhood. "It was so fast and explosive," he said once, "I didn't know how to deal with it. If there was a rock star course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me."

The life that suddenly became possible for Kurt Cobain was riddled with contradiction. The layabout rock-star now lived in a Seattle suburb with a little girl, a working wife, and a home in the country. He was feeding a heroin habit that was draining $ 400 a day (the largest daily dose dispensed by his cash-machine), driving to his dealer in a Volvo.

You could hear the pop junkie and the doting dad fighting it out in the music. On Nirvana records, din and harmony alternate within a single song, sometimes at the same moment. Last year Cobain clashed with the producer of In Utero, who wanted a harder, less commercial sound for the album. Cobain triumphed, and you can hear the melodies, many of them Squeeze- or even Beatles-esque, struggling to break through the sheet metal on top. He promised that future work would be more tuneful, acoustic - even ethereal.

Hippies, punks and every other teen movement in history would have taken this Volvo-driven volte-face as a sell-out. But not the twentysomethings, the children of Reagan and Thatcher who have shed politics and who came of age in the consumerist 1980s. X-ers don't have a problem with the system - they just can't find their place in it.

They cheered as Cobain seemed to find his. And this is the strangest irony of all. Sceptics have rightly debunked the Generation X idea for failing to account for all those in their mid-20s who are not working in McJobs, but married and high-achieving. These Xuppies probably outnumber the slackers five to one - yet the bizarre fortune of Kurt Cobain was that, by his success, he reflected them, too.

That's why stock analysts listened to Nirvana on their car CDs. His disenchantment with success-without-meaning - singing, "I do not want what I have got" - spoke to them, too. Douglas Coupland's novel, which dumped the Generation X moniker into the language, coined another new term: Successophobia. He defined it as "The fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten".

Cobain had a bad case of successophobia. "I just hope," he said in January, "that I don't become so blissful I become boring." One of his best chorus lines was, "I miss the comfort of being sad."

He coped by mixing his blood with the soothing nectar of heroin, but its healing power could not last. He had wanted to call his last album, I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. He decided not to because, he said, no one would realise he was joking.

Looking at the house on Lake Washington Boulevard, with its space, its quiet, its pure aroma, you feel about Kurt Cobain the way nations around the world often feel about America: why are those who have so much so desperately unhappy? Kurt Cobain's anguish might have been just as poisonous, just as lethal had it remained anonymous. He took his own life for private reasons - it has been reported that his family had a history of suicide - even if those reasons were magnified by the lens of fame. And, in the end, the greatest impact of his death will be private, too.

It is now late afternoon, and a black limousine has turned into the driveway. A pale Courtney Love steps out, her platinum hair looking lank, hugging herself in a plain, grey tunic. She clutches a copy of Newsweek, the one which shows a staring picture of her dead husband.

She heads immediately for the garage-apartment, getting closer to the spot where Kurt Cobain's body lay for three days before it was discovered. She doesn't see the nanny coming out to greet her, cradling the couple's newly-bereaved baby daughter. For Courtney Love is looking the other way, shouting simply, "Where are you?"

• Kurt Cobain
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Kurt Cobain Biographer: I Changed My Mind—Let’s Leave the Legend Alone

I wrote a biography about Kurt Cobain in 2006. Since then, I’ve come to the realization that it’s better to let his legacy lie because I believe he would have wanted it that way.

Kurt Cobain kicked drummers out of his band because they wouldn’t play nice with his not-so-punk-rock, practice-makes-perfect ethos. He frustrated associates ( Nevermind producer Butch Vig once said Kurt was a “pain” in the studio) who couldn’t immediately grasp some vague vision he had for specific songs or his big-picture plan for Nirvana Inc. He even almost didn’t allow Dave Grohl to sit in on his band’s MTV Unplugged session because he hadn’t liked the way the drummer’s hard hitting had translated to the acoustical arrangement during rehearsals.

When it came to his image, Kurt was the careless loafer in threadbare jeans and worn flannel we still recall him to be today, more than 21 years after his death. But when it came to his art, Kurt was a perfectionist who would never allow the mediocrity that’s now being released with his name attached to see the light of day.

Were it not for Kurt’s fastidiousness, to cite another of countless examples of such, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” might have left early 1990s disaffected youth screaming, “A deposit/for a bottle/stuck inside it/no role model” for the past two and a half decades. But to Kurt, those lyrics weren’t good enough, so he scrapped them in favor of the mulatto, albino, mosquito, libido sequence those kids – myself included – came to know and still sing.

Those alternate “Teen Spirit” lyrics were published in 2002’s Journals , which was one of the earliest posthumous in-depth looks at the way Kurt worked behind the scenes. In the book’s first pages, Kurt writes:

“Don’t read my diary when I’m gone.”

And a few words later:

“Please read my diary. Look through my things and figure me out.”

Those who engage in Kurt-related voyeurism today by purchasing what’s offered them often use that last quote to justify their actions: It’s OK for us to look because Kurt wanted us to see . But — as the above example indicates — Kurt was contradictory. He also tells us through his journals that he despises celebrity, yet he specifies ways in which he is working toward achieving it. He tells us he’s not addicted to heroin, then he tells us he’s a junkie. “My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions,” Kurt writes in Journals .

When Journals came out, I ate it up. I knew the author — we were friends as teenagers — and the primary source came in all-too handy two years later when I set about writing my book on Kurt. But as I’ve grown, I’ve thought deeper. Why were these journals available for me to read? Should they have been? Would Kurt have wanted them to be?

After I honestly answered those questions for myself, I stopped caring about subsequent Kurt-related products. But – thanks to my circle of influence and that ubiquitous fiend social media — I still learned of each of the dozens of products as they came into existence. The pre-distressed Converse tennis shoes scribbled with lyrics. The 18-inch stubble-faced action figure (“with sound!”). The lifeless “Lithium”-playing avatar in Guitar Hero 5 .

The humanity.

Though I may try to avoid it, celebrity exploitation constantly surrounds us. Many believe the recent release of Harper Lee’s long-buried novel, Go Set a Watchman , is an example of such, a financially motivated manipulation of an 89-year-old mentally fragile recluse. Dead celebrity exploitation – like what’s happening with Kurt — also is everywhere. We’ve even given dead celebrities a name, “delebs,” and they are a multi-billion-dollar business .

The Montage of Heck product line, which includes the HBO documentary and the forthcoming soundtrack/Kurt Cobain “solo album,” is the latest release in the posthumous Kurt Cobain machine. The film is sanctioned by Kurt’s estate — most notably his daughter, Frances, who was the executive producer of the documentary — and I’ve heard it’s a quality film, even if its script follows the convoluted myth-making tact so many other biographers, myself once included, have followed.

“Unfortunately, it matters very little what the facts are; what matters is what people believe,” Kurt’s good friend and mentor Buzz Osborne recently said in a review of the film. “And when it comes to Cobain, most of what they believe is fabricated nonsense.”

Those who knew Kurt know that he was a shy self-doubter who never would have allowed the public to view his drafts or his discards. The Kurt I knew practiced incessantly because he wanted his work to be as good as it could be before it was released for public consumption. The audio tapes being used for Kurt’s new solo album may have been made available, but that doesn’t mean we should listen to them.

Again, from Journals : “The most violating thing I’ve felt this year is not the media exaggerations or the catty gossip, but the rape of my personal thoughts ripped out of pages from my stay in hospitals and aeroplane rides hotel stays etc.”

That’s the quote I’m citing — and basing my actions on — these days.

See Art Kane’s Most Memorable Music Portraits

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My Time with Kurt Cobain

By Michael Azerrad

In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet.

It was dusk when a taxi dropped me off at his place. Courtney greeted me at the door and graciously offered me a plate of grapes. There was a tiny, dimly lit living room with no furniture, LPs and guitars strewn around the floor, and a small Buddhist shrine with burning candles. As “Norwegian Wood” played faintly on a crappy stereo, Courtney led me down a short hallway to the bedroom. I got to the door and opened it to find Kurt lying in a little bed in a little room, his back against the wall, facing the doorway, his shocking blue eyes gazing at me through the subdued lighting. His bare feet stuck out past the bedsheets, and his toenails were painted a rosy hue. The smell of jasmine flowers wafted through the screen of the window above his head. To this day, whenever I smell jasmine I’m transported to that moment.

“Hi,” he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien—he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.) All the nervousness went away. The other thing I realized is uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. I’d never met someone like that before or even known many people who had died at all. I just sensed it. It turns out that a lot of other people around him did, too: his bandmate Dave Grohl sensed it, and so did Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love. Even Kurt’s own mother acknowledged it. It just wasn’t something that anyone would say out loud at the time.

I sat down on a little footstool next to his bed, started up the tape recorder, and began asking him questions. I asked Kurt what he was like as a kid, and he said something about being small for his age. I stood up, unfurled my wiry five-foot-six-inch frame, and said, in a theatrically manly voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” We exchanged smiles, and our bond grew from there. Somehow I got to talking about Arlo Guthrie’s “The Motorcycle Song” and how I’d play it on the family record player and run around the house pretending I was a motorcycle. And Kurt said, “I did that, too!” He said that his parents had divorced by the time he was ten years old and he’d been melancholic ever since. I told him how I’d felt the same way about my own parents’ divorce, when I was the same age. We grew up on the bands that so many American kids of our era did—Kiss, Cheap Trick, Queen, Black Sabbath—before having our lives changed by punk rock. So here I was, a bespectacled college-boy Rolling Stone journalist from New York City, connecting with a high-school dropout from the rural timber town of Aberdeen, Washington, whose dad worked in a lumber mill counting logs. But that didn’t make me anything special—a whole lot of people could have connected to Kurt Cobain. The beautiful thing was, he had a knack for conveying that in song, and in the most ineffable way.

As I was talking with Kurt, he was experiencing heroin withdrawal. He told me he was in bed because he was nursing a cold, which made sense—he was coming off a tour that had gone from Australia to New Zealand to Singapore to Japan to Hawaii. All those shows and travel would naturally take a toll on anybody, even someone who had just turned twenty-five. It didn’t really seem like he had a cold, but I ignored that. Like many people around him, I just didn’t want to know. Which is ridiculous—I was a reporter .

A few months after the Rolling Stone story came out that April, in 1992, the magazine sent me to England to cover the big Reading Festival, whose final day featured a bill almost entirely composed of grunge bands, with Nirvana headlining. I was staying at the Holiday Inn, where a lot of the bands stayed, too. One evening, I was standing in the lobby, spacing out for a moment, when I swore I felt something gently pass over the top of my head, like a hand an inch away. I ignored it and waited for whoever it was to give up and introduce themselves, but there wasn’t anyone near me. Finally, I turned around, and there, twenty feet away, was Kurt, staring at me with his laser-beam eyes.

I walked up to him. He was glad to see me and said that he liked my Rolling Stone story. In retrospect, I can see why: the article served his purposes. I quoted an anti-drug speech he gave—which he seemed to think let him off the hook for using drugs. I acknowledged that he was truly in love with Courtney, who was getting a lot of grief from the media. I took his crippling stomach pain seriously, which few people did. And I let him plug some of his favorite bands, which helped him feel a little better about his burgeoning fame. In the hotel lobby, we furthered the connection we’d made during the interview. I bought him a vodka-and-orange-juice at the packed bar, and we chatted a bit before the swirl of acquaintances and gawking onlookers compelled Kurt to retreat to his room.

Nirvana’s concert at Reading was a triumph—and not just because they played at all. The U.K. music press had been speculating that Kurt was too heroin-sick to perform, and the rumor was that Nirvana would cancel. But not only did they play; they played what is widely regarded as one of the greatest rock concerts ever. Along with a gaggle of other journalists, I stood at the back of the stage, looking out at thousands of faces bouncing up and down in huge, rolling swells as they pogoed in the light. Onstage, some freaky guy danced with the band like a blissed-out rag doll, doing what everybody in the crowd wished they had the room to do. The music, including a new song called “All Apologies,” was transcendent.

Late one evening a month or so later, the phone rang. It was Courtney. She wanted to know whether I would like to write a book about Nirvana. “That sounds interesting,” I said, playing it as cool as I could manage, “but could I talk to Kurt about it?” She handed the phone to Kurt. “Hey,” he said, in his cigarette growl. I asked why he wanted to do the book. This was shortly after Vanity Fair had published a story that was used as evidence to briefly relieve them of custody of their infant daughter, Frances. Kurt promised me access to anyone I wanted to talk to, and that I could write whatever I wanted. “Just tell the truth,” he said. “That’ll be better than anything else that’s been written about me.”

Before I began writing what would become “ Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana ,” Courtney would sometimes call me, I think partly to try to frame the narrative and partly to ingratiate herself with the guy who was going to write the book—or maybe it was just because she and Kurt liked and trusted me without even knowing me that well. Her conversation was dense with references to various pharmaceuticals I’d never heard of, like Klonopin and diazepam and Vicodin, as if everybody knew what they were—that’s how Courtney talks, as if you’re intimately familiar with all the arcane things and people she’s mentioning at such high velocity. The pharmaceutical thing was so relentless that one day I walked over to the Strand Bookstore and bought a used copy of the “Physicians’ Desk Reference,” a big, fat book listing all prescription drugs and their uses and effects.

On the walk home, I bumped into a particularly distrustful and controlling member of Nirvana’s management team. This was before any of the interviews for the book had begun. If this manager had suspected I was going to write a lurid exposé about Kurt and Courtney’s drug use, I knew that the book would be cancelled. Of course, this person noticed the Strand bag I was now carrying and asked the very question I was dreading: “Oh, what book did you buy?” I mumbled something and quickly changed the subject, dangling the bag behind my back. I can laugh about it now, but my legs were shaking.

From 1994: a final jolt to the rock world he loved and loathed.

For the next six months, I flew to Seattle to conduct interviews, returning to New York to transcribe, research, and write. Being around intense people like Kurt and Courtney, with their constant drama and palpable charisma, was exciting but also stressful and exhausting. The publication of the book was timed to coincide with the release of the “In Utero” album that September, and, when it was done, the publisher felt that we should let Kurt read the book “as a courtesy”—publishing-biz speak for “He can read it, but he can’t change anything”—before advance versions went out to the press. But, given Courtney’s notoriously combative tendencies, they didn’t want her to see it, so we couldn’t simply mail Kurt the manuscript. Instead, I’d fly out to Seattle and have Kurt read the book in my presence. Kurt completely understood why we had to do it this way—Courtney could make things complicated, we all knew that. So I booked a room at the Warwick Hotel, in downtown Seattle, and flew from J.F.K. with the manuscript. The first night, I took out the thick pile of photocopied paper and a box of the chocolate-covered butter cookies that we both liked, set them on a little desk in the corner of the room by the windows, and waited.

Around midnight, there was a knock on my door. Kurt was sober at that time. Courtney had ordered the car-service driver not to make any detours and had somehow slipped me a tiny note asking me to make sure that Kurt didn’t call any pager numbers: “P.S. Xtra secret don’t tell I wrote this.” Kurt sat down at the desk and began reading. He smoked constantly and read intently. I kicked back on the bed and worked on an article or played solitaire on my laptop. It was very quiet. The only sounds were the distant gurgling of the hotel’s plumbing, a hum whenever the ventilation system switched on, and Kurt turning pages.

Occasionally, he’d pipe up and say, “Yeah, yeah, this reads real good.” Sometimes he would chuckle at something funny or sigh at something painful. A few times, he moaned and asked, “Aw, do you have to keep that in?” I don’t remember every passage that bothered him, but one was about a breakdown he had onstage in Rome, in the autumn of 1989. Every time Kurt objected, I’d explain why it had to stay in the book, and he never pressed the matter. After all, that was our original agreement—to do it any other way would be, as he said in our first conversation about the book, “too Guns N’ Roses.” Once in a while, he’d point out a factual error, like correcting the name of the aunt who gave him his first guitar lessons.

That first night, he got about a third of the way through the book before he started to fade. It was a lot to absorb. I imagine that he was mostly thinking about how this would play to the authorities who wanted to take his child from him. I also think he may have been looking at it as Nirvana’s chief conceptualist, weighing how everything squared with how he wanted the band—and himself—to be perceived.

Kurt, being a student of rock history, knew that the story of a rock band is essentially a legend—in the sense that there’s some wiggle room in the truth as long as it serves the over-all myth. So Kurt was an unreliable narrator of his own story. That’s nothing new—it would be hard to name any rock star who wasn’t the same. It’s up to the journalist to determine what’s true and what isn’t. But sometimes journalists play along because they’re naïve, lazy, or overworked, or they want to be in on the game because it makes for sensational copy. Whatever the reason, it works to the artist’s advantage. I wasn’t rigorous about investigating Kurt’s mythologizing—for one thing, a tight deadline meant that I just didn’t have the time, and, for another, he had charmed me and I unquestioningly bought a lot of his tall tales—which turned out well for him.

The second night was a repeat of the first: me and a guy reading the book I wrote about him, in a generic little hotel room, punctuated by the rustle of paper and the occasional grunt of appreciation or soft chuckle. He told me it was illuminating to read about his entire life in chronological order. Very few people have that luxury. Sometimes he’d take a break, and we’d stand together by the window overlooking Fourth Avenue and talk, eat cookies, or look down to the street, where little gangs of homeless kids swarmed around taxis stopped at red lights, trying to wangle a few bucks out of the cabbies. During those breaks, we didn’t speak about the book—instead, we talked about people we knew in common, music we were listening to, or politics. Sometimes we’d just stare out the window at the city without saying anything at all.

A little before dawn on the third night, he turned over the last page, planted his palm on the top of the stack as if absorbing its vibrations, and took a long drag on his cigarette. Then he got up, walked over to me, and said, “That’s the best rock book I’ve ever read.” He hugged me and looked me in the eye. “Thank you,” he said, and then he was gone.

My publisher was surprised and immensely relieved that Kurt had only a few minor factual corrections. They were expecting him to raise a fuss, possibly to the point that it could torpedo the whole book—which had already happened with another book about the band. What the publisher overlooked was that the most sensational things were said by Kurt himself. But also, once again, I had dutifully noted down Kurt’s key talking points, particularly about being a good, loving parent; that’s all he cared about. The rest was window dressing. There’s a popular misconception that Kurt was just a guileless junkie. But that’s a fallacy. He totally knew what he was doing.

After I was done with the book, Kurt and I became friends. I don’t claim to have been his exclusive confidant or anything, but, every once in a while, the phone would ring in the wee hours of the morning. It was ridiculous that he’d call at such an hour—he didn’t seem to have considered the time difference between Seattle and New York, or maybe he thought that everyone else was as nocturnal as he was—but I always picked up. I worried that he might be in a crisis, and I didn’t ever want to regret that I’d ignored a crucial call.

Usually Kurt would want to rail, sometimes volcanically, about management or the label or the band. And after he’d gotten it all off his chest he’d suddenly realize that he’d been talking completely about himself, pause, and ask, “So how are you?”

In July, 1993, Nirvana came to New York to play a show at the Roseland Ballroom, a cavernous former dance hall in midtown Manhattan. It was for the CMJ convention, which catered to college radio stations and was a key platform for promoting the forthcoming “In Utero.” While he was in town, Kurt had a business dinner with a bunch of “the grownups,” as he disdainfully referred to the various executives involved in the band’s affairs, at a fancy restaurant on the East Side. He asked me to come along—I suppose so he wouldn’t be completely alone with business types. Or maybe he wanted me to see for myself what he was always complaining about.

Eight of us sat around a large, circular table. I sat directly across from Kurt, out of conversation range, but I could see that he was uncomfortable. He was withdrawn and not responding much to anything anyone said to him. Everyone tried to pretend like nothing was wrong. They all ordered food—appetizers, entrées, and wine—but Kurt ordered only a slice of cake. “That’s all you’re going to have, Kurt?” someone asked. Kurt just kind of mumbled.

Kurt excused himself to go to the bathroom. He was gone a long time. I considered the possibility that he had sneaked out of the restaurant. That would have been brilliant. But, eventually, just as I was starting to think that someone should go check on him, he returned. He was high, dazed, his eyelids nearly closed. He was nodding slightly. It was the first time I’d ever been sure that Kurt was high on heroin. Surely everyone else at the table could see this, too, but no one acknowledged it in any way, and the conversation continued around Kurt, as if he were a senile grandparent. It was obvious to me that Kurt got high at that dinner deliberately, as a self-destructive protest.

The ostensible purpose of the dinner, aside from dining at a fancy restaurant and putting the bill on the expense account, was to discuss some pressing business decision with Kurt. But Kurt was in no condition to make any decisions. When the check was paid, everyone scattered. So I found myself standing on the sidewalk with Kurt, who was stoned out of his mind on heroin in a city he didn’t know well. I walked him back to his hotel, holding on to his arm—as if he were an elderly person—in case he stumbled. I made sure that he didn’t walk into other people, or traffic.

When we arrived at his hotel room, Courtney was lying on the bed, reading a magazine. She wasn’t surprised that Kurt was high, just disappointed. She’d been working hard to keep him away from drugs, and she scolded him a little bit while he stood there, sheepish and unsteady, offering only halfhearted protests and denials. Then he flopped down on the end of the bed, sidewise, and Courtney nonchalantly put up her feet on his back like he was a sofa cushion. I got the sense that something like this had happened many times before. Kurt was sleeping, or something like it, and Courtney apparently had things under control, so I left them and headed down the hall to stop by a little party the rest of the band and crew were having. Kurt overdosed later that evening. He had gone to the bathroom for a long time. Then Courtney heard a thud. She opened the door—or tried to, but Kurt’s unconscious body was blocking the doorway.

The band and crew’s party couldn’t have been more different from the heartbreaking scene in Kurt’s hotel room: here, there was booze, horseplay, and a blaring boom box. But it, too, became terrifying. Soon after I arrived, one of the guys in the band stepped out the window and onto a broad ledge on the side of the building, several stories above the street. He started walking on the ledge toward the next window of the room—which was maybe ten feet away. I was petrified. He was hammered, not the ideal condition for tightrope walking. I thought that I was about to witness a horrific moment in rock history, but he made it. Everybody in the room cheered. Then one of the crew tried it. And I was petrified all over again, but he made it, too. Then the guy in the band went a second time. By now, I was thoroughly freaked out. But he made it again, and, thankfully, there were no more ledge walks. I made a beeline for the drinks table.

Courtney eventually forced her way into the bathroom and saw Kurt turning blue. Terrified, she sent word out to the band’s crew: pack up the equipment—there will be no show tomorrow, because Kurt is dead. I’m not sure who resuscitated him, or how, but he played a great concert at Roseland the following night.

In October, 1993, I visited Kurt in Seattle while the band was rehearsing for the “In Utero” tour, and one night he invited me to a practice. He claimed it would be boring, but then he said everything about his life was boring. It wasn’t, of course.

The band’s practice space was in a loft building in the SoDo neighborhood, a grim industrial area south of downtown. The long, concrete-floored hallway leading to their room was lined on one side with cremation urns, which were manufactured in another area on the floor. It was late when we arrived, and the entire building was silent. At that point, Nirvana was perhaps the biggest band in the world, but you’d never know it from their rehearsal space. The room was about six hundred square feet, with windows that looked out onto other industrial loft buildings. A small riser for the drum set was as fancy as they got. There was a modest P.A., some ordinary-looking amps, and a couple of standard-issue microphones. They had no soundproofing, no sound person, no special lights, no recording equipment, no well-stocked bar. A few mismatched old chairs were strewn around the room, some concert posters hung on the wall, and there was a small fridge. It could almost have been your band’s practice space.

They fussed with the P.A. a little, and then they were off, running down songs from “In Utero.” Kurt ran the rehearsal, giving specific directions to each of the musicians. They played sections of songs, starting and stopping until Kurt felt that things were right. I suppose this was what Kurt thought was the boring part, but it was illuminating to see how much he controlled things, how exacting he was with music that appeared so rough-hewn. It was difficult to hear some of the flaws Kurt wanted to correct, but when the band fixed them it was obvious that everything had snapped into place.

The following month, Courtney decided that it would be good if I joined Nirvana’s U.S. tour for a little while. I was a relatively steady person, a little older, and drug-free. She figured that I would be good company for Kurt on the road, maybe help keep him on the straight and narrow—if only by example. I don’t know if I accomplished that, and I didn’t wind up spending all that much time with Kurt, but I think that having someone else on the bus did break up a little of the tension and boredom. Sometimes a cloud gathered over the touring party. That was largely due to Kurt’s mental state; his mood, dark or light, pervaded every room, and it depended a lot on whether he’d been fighting with Courtney. But everyone in the band felt some sort of tension: even if they tried to make light of it, Kurt, the bassist Krist Novoselic, and the drummer Dave Grohl felt the enormous pressure of being a world-famous rock group and resented the invasive journalism that comes with it. There were tensions within the band, too.

Once, I stopped by Kurt’s hotel room when he started yelling that he wanted to fire Dave, unquestionably one of the great rock drummers, for being an unsubtle and unspontaneous musician. The thing was, Dave was staying in the room right next door. I hissed at Kurt, “He can hear! ” “I don’t care!” Kurt yelled back, more at the adjoining wall than at me. I was sure that Dave heard the whole thing. Regardless, Dave was already aware of Kurt’s feelings. He told his biographer, Paul Brannigan, that on a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles he had overheard Kurt bad-mouthing his drumming two rows back. Once they landed, Dave told their trusty Scottish tour manager, Alex MacLeod, that he was quitting the band after the last scheduled show. MacLeod talked him out of it.

After we reached Dallas, Kurt called my room and asked whether I wanted to walk around downtown with him, the kindly Pat Smear (an early L.A. punk icon and now a rhythm guitarist on the tour), and Kurt’s daughter, Frances, fifteen months old at the time. We rolled out with Kurt pushing Frances in her stroller, making her laugh with a ridiculous assortment of rude noises. The emptiness of downtown Dallas on a weekday afternoon was baffling to me, a provincial New Yorker, but great for Kurt, who could stroll around without being hassled by fans.

Walking down a wide boulevard, we found ourselves at the edge of a big open space. An enormous flock of grackles circled above, forming an undulating disk so vast and dense that the sunlight filtering through looked gray. It felt apocalyptic. Except for the occasional car, there was not another human being in sight. It dawned on me that this was Dealey Plaza, the site of the John F. Kennedy assassination. There was the former Texas School Book Depository and, surprisingly close by, the “grassy knoll.” Like countless other people, we examined the crime scene, considered the angles, weighed conspiracy theories. Eventually, Frances needed baby supplies, so Kurt rolled off with her to a drugstore. That was the last time I saw Kurt Cobain.

On or about April 5, 1994, Kurt went up to an attic over his garage, took a lot of heroin, and then killed himself with a shotgun. He left a note. Its closing words were “peace, love, empathy.”

The quality of empathy was very important to Kurt; he spoke of it often. Which might come as a surprise, given all the wanton vandalism and assorted other mischief he committed as a teen and indeed throughout his all-too-brief adult life, not to mention his avowed disdain for so many of the people around him. How much empathy did he have when he hit a man on the head with his guitar during a show in Dallas, in 1991?

But maybe, as Kurt claimed, opiates really did still his misanthropic impulses and help him experience empathy, or something resembling it. Maybe his outspokenness about empathy was actually a passive-aggressive plea for people to have empathy for him . At any rate, Kurt avowedly cherished the ability to imagine what other people are feeling, right down to the last moments of his life. In his suicide note, the word “empathy” was underlined twice. His name was in the smallest lettering on the whole page.

Then there’s the question of why he did it. In an outtake from Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary, “Joy Division,” there’s an interview with the iconic English post-punk band’s former road manager Terry Mason. Mason describes what happens almost every time someone finds out that he used to work with the group, whose singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself, in 1980. “All the time, they’re dancing around their humbug to ask me the big one. They always want to ask that, and it usually starts with the line ‘I’m not a ghoul like the others, but why did Ian kill himself?’ ” Mason says. “Everyone thinks there’s some deep, dark, mystical secret. And there’s not. He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and the only way he could think about [it] at that time was to kill himself. Sorry, no secrets.” And then, twenty-seven years after his friend’s death, it looks like Mason might start to cry. But before he does he looks straight into the camera and says, “Cut.”

People often ask me why Kurt killed himself. Actually, what frequently happens is, they wind up telling me why he killed himself. They have their opinions, despite never having met him, and dismiss my firsthand observations of Kurt as incompatible with what they already believe. Very few of them acknowledge this simple, unsensational fact: Kurt had several clinically established risk factors for suicide, including inhuman levels of professional pressure, chronic and severe physical pain, and a heroin addiction that he just couldn’t seem to shake (or didn’t want to). He also had a long family history of suicide.

Both sides of Kurt’s family are marked by suicides. In 1913, his great-grandfather’s sister Florence Cobain, seventeen years old, wanted to go to the movies, but her father wouldn’t let her, so she shot herself in the chest with a rifle. Somehow she survived and lived to be ninety-four. One of Kurt’s great-grandfathers on his mother’s side attempted suicide with a knife. He survived but died later, after purposely reopening the wounds in a psychiatric hospital. In 1938, when Kurt’s grandfather, Leland, and Leland’s brothers Burle and Kenneth Cobain, were young men, their father, John, a deputy sheriff, was sitting on a stool at the beer counter of a store in Markham, Washington, twelve miles southwest of Aberdeen. John apparently reached in his pocket for a cigarette and accidentally knocked his pistol out of its holster. The gun dropped to the floor and discharged, killing him. In 1979, when Kurt was twelve, Burle killed himself with a gun. Five years later, Kenneth did.

I didn’t know any of that history when I wrote “Come as You Are,” nor was it the kind of thing I even thought to ask about. All I knew was that I had the distinct feeling that Kurt would not live a long life. But what, if anything, could I do about it? Was it even my place to get involved?

A couple of times, I did get involved. One evening, in 1993, I got a panic-stricken call from Courtney, who told me that Kurt had locked himself in a room in their house. He was distraught, she said, and had a gun and was threatening to use it on himself. She was terrified. So was I. I asked if I could speak with Kurt, but there was no way to get the phone to him. I could hear him yelling in the background. I told her to call the police and to keep me posted. Then I called one of Nirvana’s managers. I relayed what was happening and said that such a volatile person, who did drugs and had a small child, absolutely should not have guns. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then a reply: “I’ll take care of it.”

When Kurt started spiralling down, I remembered a visit to his hotel room while he was on tour in New Orleans. We were lying on his bed, talking and watching a Pete Townshend concert on public television with the sound off, and Kurt marvelled at how Townshend was so passionate about making music—even after, in Kurt’s opinion, his music was no longer any good. I’d been a huge Who fan as a teen and noted his respect for his fellow guitar smasher Townshend. Months later, I was part of a team working with Townshend on a project about the history of the Who’s 1969 rock opera, “Tommy.” Townshend had helped his friend Eric Clapton recover from a heroin addiction years earlier and was all too familiar with substance abuse. I asked Townshend whether he might have a word with Kurt about beating heroin and dealing with the slings and arrows of fame. I gave him Kurt’s phone number, hoping that he would call and that Kurt would listen.

An appreciation of Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”

“When Cobain was in deep trouble with heroin addiction in 1993,” Townshend wrote in the Guardian , in 2002, “Azerrad asked if I would contact Cobain, who was in constant danger of overdosing. I had chosen this year to give booze another gentle try after 11 years. When Azerrad approached me, I was not drunk, nor unsympathetic, but I did not make the necessary judgment I would make today that an immediate ‘intervention’ was required to save his life.” To this day, Townshend probably wonders what might have happened had he gotten through to Kurt. That’s the kind of thing that haunts people who know people who have committed suicide: Is there something I could have done? Twenty-seven years later, I still ask myself that question. I tried, but perhaps I could have—and should have—tried harder. The thing is, although I was in my early thirties, I was still immature and naïve. Maybe I wasn’t so well suited to the task.

And there were other people much closer to Kurt. Krist Novoselic had known for a long time that Kurt didn’t exactly have a lust for life. In Krist’s interview with the historian John Hughes for the Washington State Web site, he recalled an early tour when he was reading “ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ,” the 1962 classic by the Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Kurt asked him what the book was about, and Krist said it was about prisoners suffering in a brutal Soviet Gulag in Siberia. “And he’s like, ‘Ah, and they still want to live?’ ” Krist recalled. “He was disgusted.”

Krist could have been a crucial port in the storm, but, sadly, Kurt had begun to push his friend away in 1990, when Krist told Kurt that he disapproved of his heroin use. They were never as close again. Things got a little better when they were rehearsing before the recording of “In Utero”—there was the excitement of playing new songs, working with the revered recording engineer Steve Albini, and starting a new, more artistically liberated phase of the band. But, by the time they recorded the “Unplugged” show in New York, in November, 1993, they had become distant again. Kurt surrounded himself with his wife and child and a different set of friends, several of whom were drug addicts, and Krist didn’t feel welcome.

In rereading “Come as You Are” recently, for an annotated version that I’m working on, I began to notice leitmotifs that I had missed when I was in the thick of writing the original. Twenty-eight years can give you some objectivity. One of those recurring themes was how Kurt understood that every good legend has a protagonist and an antagonist. There’s a Greek word for this eternal conflict: agon. The protagonist of this particular legend is Kurt Cobain, but the antagonist changes over the course of his story: Aberdeen bullies; the town of Aberdeen itself; Kurt’s mother; Kurt’s father; various drummers; homophobes; misogynists; racists; the band’s previous label, Sub Pop; his own body; “the grownups”; Pearl Jam; heroin addiction; their current label, Geffen/DGC; and so on. For every setback, there is something or someone else to blame, and when one antagonist left the stage he found a new one, usually embellishing or even manufacturing their sins in order to enhance his own victimhood. There was always, as one of his songs put it, something in the way.

This coping mechanism may have started when Kurt was very little and had imaginary friends. “There was one called Boddah,” his mother, Wendy, told me for the Rolling Stone story. “He blamed everything on him.” Another antagonist was Kurt himself: the self that he hated and wanted to die. In legends, the protagonist is supposed to vanquish the antagonist. That didn’t happen this time. Or perhaps it did.

I thought that I was prepared for Kurt’s death, although I didn’t know whether it would come in days or decades. Then, suddenly, it happened. That’s when I found out that you never really can be prepared for such a thing. I don’t remember much from the weeks and months after. I could outwardly function, but inside I felt catatonic and remained grief-stricken for several years. I can’t even imagine what people who were closer to Kurt went through. “The awful thing about suicide is, the person who commits suicide, their problems are over,” the Joy Division bassist, Peter Hook, said, in a 2020 podcast about the band. “And yet yours, and everybody left behind—his family, his parents, everybody else, in every occasion—theirs is just beginning. And they last all your life.”

Dealing with the death of someone you know is always difficult and strange, but that difficulty and strangeness is vastly compounded when the person was a public figure. When a parent dies, for instance, you can dole out the information at a rate you’re comfortable with. You can tell friends and co-workers one at a time—or not at all. They offer their condolences, share a memory of the person if they knew them, say a few supportive words, and that’s it. But, when it’s a public figure, everyone knows right away. If people know that you knew the famous person, a lot of them will reach out to you, even if they wouldn’t have done the same had a relative died. Often, they have a parasocial relationship with the celebrity, an emotional attachment to someone who did not know them. They tell you, unbidden, what that person meant to them. They don’t seem to understand that you did actually know and love this person, and they knew and loved you, and that you’re on a different level of grieving.

Many people asked what Kurt was really like. The more I explained it, the more my answer became rote, in turn pushing Kurt further and further away, reducing him to a few pat, well-rehearsed anecdotes. This went on for a long time—in fact, decades.

There are the people who tell me with absolute certainty that Kurt was murdered. They have seen a movie about it, or read something on the Internet that left them utterly convinced of this outlandish and highly improbable scenario. I understand that people have trouble coming to terms with the fact that someone they adored so much would do this to himself—and to them—so they look for someone else to blame. At first, I would patiently explain that Kurt was deeply depressed, repeatedly telegraphed what he was going to do, and that there was no evidence to the contrary. Explaining this time and time again only deepened my sadness, so eventually I learned to just abruptly cut off the conversation.

The mainstream news media were largely clueless about Kurt, and often tasteless and cruel. In an episode of “The Larry Sanders Show” that aired after Kurt’s death, Garry Shandling’s character is reading the newspaper. “It turns out the electrician found Kurt Cobain’s body two days after he was dead,” he says. “Talk about grunge.” By far the worst was the crotchety “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney. “Everything about Kurt Cobain makes me suspicious,” Rooney ranted. “This picture shows him in a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee. I doubt that Kurt Cobain ever did enough work to wear a hole in his pants. He probably had ten pairs just like these hanging in the closet—all with fake holes in the knee. . . . If Kurt Cobain applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, it’s reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense, either.” I wanted to kick in my television screen.

Sales of “Come as You Are” spiked in the wake of Kurt’s death. I felt awful that I was benefitting financially from this horrific, heartbreaking thing. A wise friend reassured me, “Being a good journalist means being in the right place at the right time. That’s what you did. Don’t feel bad.” That made me feel a little better. The truth is, I would soon need the money—I was so depressed for the next few years that I couldn’t work much. The world became like the iris in old silent movies, when the picture closes up into a circle in the middle of the screen, surrounded by blackness.

For many years, if Nirvana’s music started playing, I would quietly step outside until it was over. I never played it at home, either. Hearing it triggered such vivid, intense memories—and feelings of regret. The music’s strength—it really is an open window into Kurt’s soul—only reminded me of all the hints I’d missed, things I could have done and stupid things I shouldn’t have done. But a few years ago, at a loud bar in the East Village with some friends, several songs from the band’s 1991 blockbuster album, “Nevermind,” started playing at high volume. This time, instead of stepping outside, I stayed and listened. And you know what? Those are great, enduring songs played by a world-class rock band and sung by one of the great rock singers. Despite Kurt’s torment—or in a determined attempt to overcome it—Nirvana made life-affirming music. It made me feel better.

Until recently, I hadn’t read anything about Nirvana, either. I didn’t want other people’s reminiscences and speculation to muddy my own memories. “Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?” Elvis Costello once sang. I didn’t want someone else’s fingerprints on my memories. But my strong desire to put my experience with Nirvana behind me was nothing compared with how Kurt felt. “I wish nobody ever knew what my real name was,” Kurt says in “Come as You Are.” “So I could some day be a normal citizen again.” His desire reminds me of a daydream I still have now and then, in which Kurt faked his death. He staged it so he could quit everything, run away somewhere, and start a new, anonymous life. In this fantasy, I’m walking down the street and I recognize him. He’s disguised somehow, maybe with a big beard and a baseball hat pulled down low, but his laser-blue eyes instantly give him away. He sees me, too, but we just nod at each other, smile, and keep walking.

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Kurt Cobain is still shaping culture – 30 years after the Nirvana frontman’s death

Senior Teaching Fellow, Music Management, University of Southampton

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Howard Monk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Thirty years from his death on April 5 1994, the impact of Kurt Cobain and his band, Nirvana, and their values, still resonates in today’s culture and music.

Nirvana were everywhere at the start of the 1990s, much like Taylor Swift’s omnipresence today. But unlike Swift, who has embraced and mastered the business side of her fame, Cobain was very much the anti-superstar of his time.

While Nirvana were certainly at the very top of the industry, headlining sold-out festivals , Cobain clearly felt uncomfortable being in the corporate music business. He expressed this discomfort in many ways, from merchandise emblazoned with the words “corporate rock whores” to his rows with MTV and journalists . No Swift-style media savvy slickness here.

Since 2010, the person responsible for Cobain’s name and image rights has been his daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. Nirvana LLC, meanwhile, is managed by a team including original band members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic.

These rights are expertly managed and controlled in a way that benefits from hindsight, showing an understanding of what Nirvana stood for which would scarce have been possible when the band was active, or Cobain still alive.

Cobain and the press

I’ve often said that Nirvana were the last band to reach the very top on their own terms. It didn’t hurt that they embodied the rags-to-riches type stories the press love so much. Cobain had an unhappy childhood and his art was a solace while he worked shifts as a janitor , relying on his girlfriend to fund his band.

Cobain’s relationship with fellow musician Courtney Love also attracted a lot of snide celebrity journalism attention, as did his struggles with his mental health and addiction. Looking back at some of the supposedly supportive headlines of the time, it is clear how the press perpetuated myths and heaped pressure onto an already vulnerable Cobain. I wonder whether headlines today would be quite so leading, or unthinking.

Today it’s not at all uncommon for artists to cancel or postpone shows and tours in order to protect their own mental health. Fans no longer tend to see this admission as weakness – in many ways it strengthens their devotion to the act.

This can be seen in the reactions to artists like Lewis Capaldi and Sam Fender , who have both postponed live shows to protect their mental wellbeing. In this respect, Cobain’s death by suicide paved the way for the press and fans alike to discuss the mental health of musicians in a more serious way.

Cobain’s cultural legacy

It is important to note that his final couple of years saw Cobain battle addiction and depression. Working with him would clearly have been a lot of fun, and yet very difficult. For the five to six years that Nirvana shined, they shined very brightly. And it has to be said, they rocked. Their music was simple, no frills, rock and roll.

That the band didn’t tour with Guns N’ Roses in 1992 may be a blessing for purists. Nirvana’s music was an authentic antidote to the hair metal which had dominated rock music in the few years prior. Cobain took time off with illness while they were supposed to be on that tour. In reality, Courtney Love states in the 2015 documentary Cobain: Montage of Heck, he just wanted to “stay and home and shoot up”. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett claims that Cobain “just didn’t like what Guns N’ Roses stood for”.

The band’s influence on fashion can also still be felt. Particularly in the proliferation of blokes wearing dresses in heavy rock bands like Idles , as Cobain often did on stage .

The iconic “Flower Sniffin’, Kitty Pettin’, Baby Kissin’, Corporate Rock Whores” band T-shirt, now sells for over £2,000. But in recent years, Nirvana LLC have granted rights to print new merchandise to several affordable brands, in keeping with Cobain’s anti-elitist values. In 2019, they filed a lawsuit against high fashion designer Marc Jacobs, when the brand released a t-shirt with a twist on the iconic X-eyed Nirvana smiley face.

Brand Nirvana today is clear on its values. It is hard not to believe that Cobain would have something to say about today’s identity politics (Cobain once declared he was “gay in spirit and … probably could be bisexual” and called himself a feminist ). A man for our times, in his times, so to speak.

As an expert in the music industry (particularly the indie side), it is clear to me that Cobain would remain a marketer’s dream in 2024. Thankfully, the custodians of the Cobain brand continue to advance and protect his thoughts and ideas long after his tragic death at just 27.

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Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died 30 years ago, but his legacy lives on

His influence and music remain vital today.

Kurt Cobain, Nirvana frontman and music icon, died April 5, 1994, 30 years ago Friday.

With Nirvana, Cobain released only three albums during his lifetime over a five-year span, including the RIAA Diamond-certified "Nevermind," making him the face of counterculture and the grunge and alternative movement of the early ‘90s. Yet despite their brief tenure, Nirvana and its frontman had a profound impact on both rock music and pop culture, which continues more than a generation later.

Kurt Donald Cobain was born February 20, 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. While in high school, he met fellow musician Krist Novoselic, and they started a band together.

After various personnel and name changes, Nirvana was created, with Cobain on guitar and vocals, Novoselic on bass, and Chad Channing on drums. They released their debut album, "Bleach," in June 1989, on the influential, independent Seattle label Sub Pop – the choice a reflection of Cobain’s passion for the anti-corporate ethos of punk and indie rock.

“Kurt subscribed to that very deeply,” Michael Azerrad, who interviewed Cobain as author of the 1993 authorized Nirvana biography "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana," told ABC News. “And yet, he had this conflicting impulse to be as famous as he felt his talented merited. That was a large conflict, I think, that he never managed to resolve.”

MORE: Video -- Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died April 5, 1994

After "Bleach," Nirvana jumped from Sub Pop to a major label, DGC Records, and brought on a new drummer: Dave Grohl, who cut his teeth playing in Washington, D.C. punk bands. Together, the band recorded what would become "Nevermind," adding a glossier, expansive finish to their sound.

"Nevermind" was released in September 1991, and word quickly spread of its lead single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and its video , which showed Nirvana performing in a high school gym while surrounded by anarchist cheerleaders.

By January 1992, "Nevermind" hit #1 on the all-genre Billboard 200 album chart. Driven by hits that also included "Come as You Are," "In Bloom" and "Lithium," the album ultimately sold over 10 million units and was RIAA-certified Diamond just seven years later.

MORE: Nirvana's 'Nevermind' Turns 25

Cobain’s lyrics, about self-hatred to adolescent rebellion, coupled with Nirvana’s hook-filled, distorted rock, spoke directly to the disaffection felt by that generation’s youth, and was viewed as an antidote to the excess and debauchery of the ‘80s hair metal scene. “Grunge” quickly became a household term, and the Seattle bands Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains – all of which embodied the same sound and ethos – surged up the charts.

As Nirvana's popularity grew, so too did interest in Cobain’s personal life, which deeply affected his already fragile mental and emotional health. Reports of his heroin use, as well as his relationship with his wife, Hole frontwoman Courtney Love, became tabloid fodder.

Cobain and Love welcomed a baby girl, Frances Bean, in August 1992. Shortly thereafter, Vanity Fair published an article that alleged Love had used heroin while pregnant. In September, Los Angeles officials investigated the couple's fitness as parents, with Cobain and Love briefly losing custody of Frances.

Nirvana’s third and final album, the dissonant "In Utero," dropped in September 1993. The following November, at the height of their popularity, the band recorded an intimate show for the TV concert series "MTV Unplugged." The performance was released in 1994 as the live album "MTV Unplugged in New York," which ultimately was RIAA-certified eight-times Platinum. Nearly thirty years later, the guitar Cobain played during the concert sold at auction for a record-breaking $6 million in 2020, while the tattered green cardigan he wore sold a year earlier for $334,000.

Yet Cobain remained a troubled soul. His drug use continued, and on March 4, 1994, he was hospitalized in Rome for an overdose while Nirvana was on tour in Europe. Following a five-day hospitalization, Cobain returned home to Seattle.

On April 8, an electrician who arrived at Cobain's Seattle home to do some work discovered him dead. Following an investigation, it was ruled that he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 5. Cobain had turned 27 not two months earlier.

Cobain’s death marked the end of both Nirvana and the grunge era, and enhanced the dark notoriety of the so-called '27 Club,' which includes the late musicians Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, all of whom died at the same age. More poignantly, his death raised national awareness of both suicide and mental health, and focused a spotlight on Cobain’s past comments and lyrics that referenced guns or self-harm.

“It’s very painful,” Azerrad told ABC News of revisiting those earlier Cobain comments. “You smack your forehead metaphorically and just think, ‘Oh, why didn’t I notice that?’ It was staring at you in plain sight. But sometimes there’s such thing as hiding in plain sight, and that was one of those things.”

MORE: Frances Bean Cobain Talks About Father Kurt's Death

With Nirvana over, Grohl formed his own band, the chart-topping Foo Fighters. He and Novoselic have reunited several times, perhaps most notably at the 2014 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where Cobain and Nirvana were inducted during their first year of eligibility, and during which they performed Nirvana hits with guest singers including Lorde and Joan Jett.

MORE: Video -- 2014 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nominees Include Nirvana, The Zombies

In the three decades since Cobain's death, Nirvana's influence never waned, and has reached beyond rock music into other genres, and pop culture in general. Rapper Post Malone livestreamed a celebrated Nirvana tribute set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, while actress and singer Selena Gomez – born less than a month before Frances Bean – recently shared that she was “obsessed” with Kurt Cobain growing up. In 2022, the "Nevermind" song “Something in the Way” enjoyed a resurgence due to its use in the trailer for the hit movie "The Batman."

"That's why Kurt made music – to rock people and himself," Azerrad said. "To make him feel better, and, by extension, hopefully, the audience feel better."

Josh Johnson writes about alternative and active rock music for ABC Audio.

If you're struggling with thoughts of suicide or worried about a friend or loved one, call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for free, confidential emotional support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Kurt Cobain, The Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck

By David Fricke

David Fricke

A shirtless, disheveled Kurt Cobain pauses on the backstage stairway leading to Nirvana ‘s dressing room at the Aragon Ballroom, in Chicago, offers a visitor a sip of his après-gig tea and says in a drop-deadpan voice, “I’m really glad you could make it for the shittiest show on the tour.”

According to the Cobain press myth — “pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic,” as he quite accurately puts it — the 26-year-old singer and guitarist should have fired the soundman, canceled this interview and gone back to his hotel room to sulk. Instead, he spends his wind–down time backstage, doting on his daughter, 1-year-old Frances Bean Cobain, a petite blond beauty who barrels around the room with a smile for everyone in her path. Later, back at the hotel, armed with nothing stronger than a pack of cigarettes and two minibar bottles of Evian water, Cobain is in a thoughtful, discursive mood, taking great pains to explain that success doesn’t really suck – not as much as it used to, anyway – and that his life is pretty good. And getting better.

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“I still see stuff, descriptions of rock stars in some magazine — ‘ Sting , the environmental guy,’ and ‘ Kurt Cobain , the whiny, complaining, neurotic, bitchy guy who hates everything, hates rock stardom, hates his life.’ And I’ve never been happier in my life. Especially within the last week, because the shows have been going so well — except for tonight. I’m a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am.”

Cobain took some long, hard detours to get there over the past year. The making of In Utero , Nirvana’s long–awaited studio follow — up to Nevermind , was fraught with last–minute title and track changes as well as a public scrap between the band, its record label, DGC, and producer Steve Albini over the album’s commercial potential – or lack thereof. Cobain’s marriage to punk-noir singer Courtney Love of the band Hole – dream fodder for rock gossips since the couple exchanged vows in February 1992 — made headlines again last June when Cobain was arrested by Seattle police for allegedly assaulting Love during a domestic fracas. Police found three guns in the house, but no charges were filed, and the case was dismissed.

But the roots of his angst, public and personal, go much deeper. Born in the logging town of Aberdeen, Wash., Cobain is — like Nirvana’s bassist, Krist Novoselic , drummer Dave Grohl and a high percentage of the band’s young fans — the product of a broken home, the son of an auto mechanic and a secretary who divorced when he was 8. Cobain had early aspirations as a commercial artist and won a number of high-school art contests; he now designs much of Nirvana’s artwork. (He made the plastic-fetus collage on the back cover of In Utero , which got the record banned by Wal-Mart.) But after graduation, Cobain passed on an art-school scholarship and took up the teen-age-bum life, working as a roadie for the local punk band the Melvins (when he was working at all) and applying himself to songwriting.

No Apologies: All 102 Nirvana Songs Ranked

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For a long time, after Nirvana catapulted from junior Sub Pop-label signees to grunge supergods — they won the Best Band and Best Album trophies in our 1994 Critics’ Poll — Cobain could not decide whether his talent was a blessing or a curse. He has finally come to realize it’s a bit of both. He is bugged that people think of him more as an icon than a songwriter yet fears that In Utero marks the finish line of the Nirvana sound crystallized in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Cobain remains deeply mistrustful of the music business but says he has done a complete U–turn on his attitude toward Nirvana’s mass punk-wanna-be flock.

“I don’t have as many judgments about them as I used to,” Cobain says, almost apologetically. “I’ve come to terms about why they’re there and why we’re here. It doesn’t bother me anymore to see this Neanderthal with a mustache, out of his mind, drunk, singing along to ‘Sliver.’ That blows my mind now.

“Just little things that no one would recognize or care about,” he continues. “And it has a lot to do with this band. If it wasn’t for this band, those things never would have happened. I’m really thankful, and every month I come to more optimistic conclusions.”

“I just hope,” Cobain adds, grinning, “I don’t become so blissful I become boring. I think I’ll always be neurotic enough to do something weird.”

Photos: A collection of Kurt Cobain photos from over the years

Along with everything else that went wrong onstage tonight, you left without playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Why? That would have been the icing on the cake [ smiles grimly ]. That would have made everything twice as worse.

I don’t even remember the guitar solo on “Teen Spirit.” It would take me five minutes to sit in the catering room and learn the solo. But I’m not interested in that kind of stuff. I don’t know if that’s so lazy that I don’t care anymore or what. I still like playing “Teen Spirit,” but it’s almost an embarrassment to play it.

In what way? Does the enormity of its success still bug you? Yeah. Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It’s been pounded into their brains. But I think there are so many other songs that I’ve written that are as good, if not better, than that song, like “Drain You.” That’s definitely as good as “Teen Spirit.” I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it. Maybe if it was as big as “Teen Spirit,” I wouldn’t like it as much.

But I can barely, especially on a bad night like tonight, get through “Teen Spirit.” I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can’t pretend to have a good time playing it.

“Teen Spirit” was such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or “Louie, Louie.” When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, “That is so ridiculous.” I made the band play it for an hour and a half.

Where did the line “Here we are now, entertain us” come from? That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was “Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here.”

How did it feel to watch something you’d written in fun, in homage to one of your favorite bands, become the grunge national anthem, not to mention a defining moment in youth marketing? Actually, we did have our own thing for a while. For a few years in Seattle, it was the Summer of Love, and it was so great. To be able to just jump out on top of the crowd with my guitar and be held up and pushed to the back of the room, and then brought back with no harm done to me — it was a celebration of something that no one could put their finger on.

But once it got into the mainstream, it was over. I’m just tired of being embarrassed by it. I’m beyond that.

This is the first U.S. tour you’ve done since the fall of ’91, just before Nevermind exploded. Why did you stay off the road for so long? I needed time to collect my thoughts and readjust. It hit me so hard, and I was under the impression that I didn’t really need to go on tour, because I was making a whole bunch of money. Millions of dollars. Eight million to 10 million records sold — that sounded like a lot of money to me. So I thought I would sit back and enjoy it.

I don’t want to use this as an excuse, and it’s come up so many times, but my stomach ailment has been one of the biggest barriers that stopped us from touring. I was dealing with it for a long time. But after a person experiences chronic pain for five years, by the time that fifth year ends, you’re literally insane. I couldn’t cope with anything. I was as schizophrenic as a wet cat that’s been beaten.

It has nothing to do with the larger venues or people kissing our asses more. It’s just that my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore. I’m eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice to be able to do that. And it just raises my spirits. But then again, I was always afraid that if I lost the stomach problem, I wouldn’t be as creative. Who knows? [ Pauses ] I don’t have any new songs right now.

Every album we’ve done so far, we’ve always had one to three songs left over from the sessions. And they usually have been pretty good, ones that we really liked, so we always had something to rely on — a hit or something that was above average. So this next record is going to be really interesting, because I have absolutely nothing left. I’m starting from scratch for the first time. I don’t know what we’re going to do.

One of the songs that you cut from In Utero at the last minute was “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” How literally did you mean it? As literal as a joke can be. Nothing more than a joke. And that had a bit to do with why we decided to take it off. We knew people wouldn’t get it; they’d take it too seriously. It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves. I’m thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked–out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. “He isn’t satisfied with anything.” And I thought it was a funny title. I wanted it to be the title of the album for a long time. But I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand it.

Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself? For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in 20 minutes. I would sing and cough up blood.

This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.

What kind of mail do you get from your fans these days? [ Long pause ] I used to read the mail a lot, and I used to be really involved with it. But I’ve been so busy with this record, the video, the tour, that I haven’t even bothered to look at a single letter, and I feel really bad about it. I haven’t even been able to come up with enough energy to put out our fanzine, which was one of the things we were going to do to combat all the bad press, just to be able to show a more realistic side of the band.

But it’s really hard. I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

I feel very, very lucky to be able to go out to a club. Just the other night, we had a night off in Kansas City, Mo., and Pat [Smear] and I had no idea where we were or where to go. So we called up the local college radio station and asked them what was going on. And they didn’t know! So we happened to call this bar, and the Treepeople from Seattle were playing.

And it turns out I met three really, really nice people there, totally cool kids that were in bands. I really had a good time with them, all night. I invited them back to the hotel. They stayed there. I ordered room service for them. I probably went overboard, trying to be accommodating. But it was really great to know that I can still do that, that I can still find friends.

And I didn’t think that would be possible. A few years ago, we were in Detroit, playing at this club, and about 10 people showed up. And next door, there was this bar, and Axl Rose came in with 10 or 15 bodyguards. It was this huge extravaganza; all these people were fawning over him. If he’d just walked in by himself, it would have been no big deal. But he wanted that. You create attention to attract attention.

It’s never been entirely clear what this feud with Vedder was about. There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed — not probably against their will — but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.

Don’t you feel any empathy with them? They’ve been under the same intense follow-up-album pressure as you have. Yeah, I do. Except I’m pretty sure that they didn’t go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They’re a safe rock band. They’re a pleasant rock band that everyone likes. [ Laughs ] God, I’ve had much better quotes in my head about this.

It just kind of pisses me off to know that we work really hard to make an entire album’s worth of songs that are as good as we can make them. I’m gonna stroke my ego by saying that we’re better than a lot of bands out there. What I’ve realized is that you only need a couple of catchy songs on an album, and the rest can be bullshit Bad Company rip-offs, and it doesn’t matter. If I was smart, I would have saved most of the songs off Nevermind and spread them out over a 15-year period. But I can’t do that. All the albums I ever liked were albums that delivered a great song, one after another: Aerosmith ‘s Rocks , the Sex Pistols ‘ Never Mind the Bollocks . . . , Led Zeppelin II , Back in Black , by AC/DC .

You’ve also gone on record as being a big Beatles fan. Oh, yeah. John Lennon was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down. I don’t know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed [ laughs ]. So I could relate to that.

No matter how hard you try, it only comes out like you’re bitching about it. I can understand how a person can feel that way and almost become obsessed with it. But it’s so hard to convince people to mellow out. Just take it easy, have a little bit of respect. We all shit [ laughs ].

In Utero may be the most anticipated, talked-about and argued-over album of 1993. Didn’t you feel at any point during all the title changes and the press hoopla stirred up by Steve Albini that the whole thing was just getting stupid? After all, it is just an album. Yeah. But I’m used to it [ laughs ]. While making the record, that wasn’t happening. It was made really fast. All the basic tracks were done within a week. And I did 80 percent of the vocals in one day, in about seven hours. I just happened to be on a roll. It was a good day for me, and I just kept going.

So what was the problem? It wasn’t the songs. It was the production. It took a very, very long time for us to realize what the problem was. We couldn’t figure it out. We had no idea why we didn’t feel the same energy that we did from Nevermind . We finally came to the conclusion that the vocals weren’t loud enough, and the bass was totally inaudible. We couldn’t hear any notes that Krist was playing at all.

I think there are a few songs on In Utero that could have been cleaned up a little bit more. Definitely “Penny Royal Tea.” That was not recorded right. There is something wrong with that. That should have been recorded like Nevermind , because I know that’s a strong song, a hit single. We’re toying with the idea of re-recording it or remixing it.

You hit and miss. It’s a really weird thing about this record. I’ve never been more confused in my life, but at the same time I’ve never been more satisfied with what we’ve done.

It is a dynamic style. But I’m only using two of the dynamics. There are a lot more I could be using. Krist, Dave and I have been working on this formula — this thing of going from quiet to loud — for so long that it’s literally becoming boring for us. It’s like “OK, I have this riff. I’ll play it quiet, without a distortion box, while I’m singing the verse. And now let’s turn on the distortion box and hit the drums harder.”

I want to learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way but with a lot more structure. It’s a really hard thing to do, and I don’t know if we’re capable of it – as musicians.

Songs like “Dumb” and “All Apologies” do suggest that you’re looking for a way to get to people without resorting to the big-bang guitar effect. Absolutely. I wish we could have written a few more songs like those on all the other albums. Even to put “About a Girl” on Bleach was a risk. I was heavily into pop, I really liked R.E.M. , and I was into all kinds of old ’60s stuff. But there was a lot of pressure within that social scene, the underground-like the kind of thing you get in high school. And to put a jangly R.E.M. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky.

We have failed in showing the lighter, more dynamic side of our band. The big guitar sound is what the kids want to hear. We like playing that stuff, but I don’t know how much longer I can scream at the top of my lungs every night, for an entire year on tour. Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

So what does this mean for the future of Nirvana? It’s impossible for me to look into the future and say I’m going to be able to play Nirvana songs in 10 years. There’s no way. I don’t want to have to resort to doing the Eric Clapton thing. Not to put him down whatsoever; I have immense respect for him. But I don’t want to have to change the songs to fit my age [ laughs ].

It’s not a pretty image. But a woman who is being raped, who is infuriated with the situation . . . it’s like “Go ahead, rape me, just go for it, because you’re gonna get it.” I’m a firm believer in karma, and that motherfucker is going to get what he deserves, eventually. That man will be caught, he’ll go to jail, and he’ll be raped. “So rape me, do it, get it over with. Because you’re gonna get it worse.”

What did your wife, Courtney, think of the song when she heard it? I think she understood. I probably explained it better to her than I’ve explained it to you. I also want to make a point, that I was really, honestly not trying to be controversial with it. That was the last thing I wanted to do. We didn’t want to put it out so it would piss off the parents and get some feminists on our asses, stuff like that. I just have so much contempt for someone who would do something like that [to a woman]. This is my way of saying: “Do it once, and you may get away with it. Do it a hundred times. But you’re gonna get it in the end.”

When you were arrested on the domestic-violence charge this summer, Courtney admitted to the police that you kept guns in your home. Why do you feel you need to be armed? I like guns. I just enjoy shooting them.

Where? At what? [ Laughs ] When we go out to the woods, at a shooting range. It’s not an official shooting range, but it’s allowed to be one in this county. There’s a really big cliff, so there’s no chance of shooting over the cliff and hurting anyone. And there’s no one within miles around.

Without getting too PC about it, don’t you feel it’s dangerous to keep them in the house, especially with your daughter, Frances, around? No. It’s protection. I don’t have bodyguards. There are people way less famous than I am or Courtney who have been stalked and murdered. It could be someone by chance looking for a house to break into. We have a security system. I actually have one gun that is loaded, but I keep it safe, in a cabinet high up on a shelf where Frances can never get to it.

How does Courtney feel about keeping guns at home? She was there when I bought them. Look, I’m not a very physical person. I wouldn’t be able to stop an intruder who had a gun or a knife. But I’m not going to stand by and watch my family stabbed to death or raped in front of me. I wouldn’t think twice of blowing someone’s head off if they did that. It’s for protection reasons. And sometimes it’s fun to go out and shoot. [ Pauses ] At targets. I want to make that clear [ laughs ].

People usually assume that someone who has sold a few million records is really livin’ large. How rich are you? How rich do you feel? According to one story, you wanted to buy a new house and put a home studio in it, but your accountant said you couldn’t afford it. Yeah, I can’t. I just got a check a while ago for some royalties for Nevermind , which is pretty good size. It’s weird, though, really weird. When we were selling a lot of records during Nevermind , I thought, “God, I’m gonna have like $10 million, $15 million.” That’s not the case. We do not live large. I still eat Kraft macaroni and cheese — because I like it, I’m used to it. We’re not extravagant people.

I don’t blame any kid for thinking that a person who sells 10 million records is a millionaire and set for the rest of his life. But it’s not the case. I spent a million dollars last year, and I have no idea how I did it. Really. I bought a house for $400,000. Taxes were another $300,000 — something. What else? I lent my mom some money. I bought a car. That was about it.

You don’t have much to show for that million. It’s surprising. One of the biggest reasons we didn’t go on tour when Nevermind was really big in the States was because I thought: “Fuck this, why should I go on tour? I have this chronic stomach pain, I may die on this tour, I’m selling a lot of records, I can live the rest of my life off a million dollars.” But there’s no point in even trying to explain that to a 15-year-old kid. I never would have believed it.

In “Serve the Servants,” you sing, “I tried hard to have a father/But instead I had a dad.” Are you concerned about making the same mistakes as a father that might have been made when you were growing up? No. I’m not worried about that at all. My father and I are completely different people. I know that I’m capable of showing a lot more affection than my dad was. Even if Courtney and I were to get divorced, I would never allow us to be in a situation where there are bad vibes between us in front of her. That kind of stuff can screw up a kid, but the reason those things happen is because the parents are not very bright.

I don’t think Courtney and I are that fucked up. We have lacked love all our lives, and we need it so much that if there’s any goal that we have, it’s to give Frances as much love as we can, as much support as we can. That’s the one thing that I know is not going to turn out bad.

What has been the state of relations within Nirvana over the past year? When I was doing drugs, it was pretty bad. There was no communication. Krist and Dave, they didn’t understand the drug problem. They’d never been around drugs. They thought of heroin in the same way that I thought of heroin before I started doing it. It was just really sad. We didn’t speak very often. They were thinking the worst, like most people would, and I don’t blame them for that. But nothing is ever as bad as it seems. Since I’ve been clean, it’s gone back to pretty much normal.

Except for Dave. I’m still kind of concerned about him, because he still feels like he can be replaced at any time. He still feels like he . . .

Hasn’t passed the audition? Yeah. I don’t understand it. I try to give him as many compliments as I can. I’m not a person who gives compliments very often, especially at practice. “Let’s do this song, let’s do that song, let’s do it over.” That’s it. I guess Dave is a person who needs reassurance sometimes. I notice that, so I try and do that more often.

It’s not like they’re afraid to bring up anything. I always ask their opinion, and we talk about it. And eventually, we all come to the same conclusions.

Haven’t there been any issues where there was at least heated discussion? Yeah, the songwriting royalties. I get all the lyrics. The music, I get 75 percent, and they get the rest. I think that’s fair. But at the time, I was on drugs when that came up. And so they thought that I might start asking for more things. They were afraid that I was going to go out of my mind and start putting them on salary, stuff like that. But even then we didn’t yell at each other. And we split everything else evenly.

With all of your reservations about playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and writing the same kind of song over and over, do you envision a time when there is no Nirvana? That you’ll try to make it alone? I don’t think I could ever do a solo thing, the Kurt Cobain Project.

Doesn’t have a very good ring to it, either. No [ laughs ]. But yes, I would like to work with people who are totally, completely the opposite of what I’m doing now. Something way out there, man.

That doesn’t bode well for the future of Nirvana and the kind of music you make together. That’s what I’ve been kind of hinting at in this whole interview. That we’re almost exhausted. We’ve gone to the point where things are becoming repetitious. There’s not something you can move up toward, there’s not something you can look forward to.

The best times that we ever had were right when Nevermind was coming out and we went on that American tour where we were playing clubs. They were totally sold out, and the record was breaking big, and there was this massive feeling in the air, this vibe of energy. Something really special was happening.

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That’s what I’d really like to see this band do. Because we are stuck in such a rut. We have been labeled. R.E.M. is what? College rock? That doesn’t really stick. Grunge is as potent a term as New Wave. You can’t get out of it. It’s going to be passé. You have to take a chance and hope that either a totally different audience accepts you or the same audience grows with you.

And what if the kids just say, “We don’t dig it, get lost”? Oh, well. [ Laughs ] Fuck ’em.

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The Destructive Romance of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love

That was a quote taken straight from the infamous 1992 Vanity Fair story on Courtney Love, written by Lynn Hirschberg, who would go on to depict the Hole frontwoman as an obnoxious, rabble-rousing, image-obsessed opportunist who reveled in being the newly anointed Mrs. Cobain.

READ MORE: Kurt Cobain: The Inspiration and Meaning Behind Nirvana's Hit 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'

Cobain and Love got married just months after they started dating

It was just a year before the bombshell article that Love and Cobain crossed paths (There are varying reports that they briefly met in 1989 and 1990, but were officially reacquainted in 1991). Nirvana was at its peak, and Cobain was confused and depressed with the meteoric fame that came with his music. When Love re-entered his sphere, she had allegedly pursued him with dogged determination and according to numerous sources , was the one who introduced him to heroin.

Mirroring Cobain's life, their courtship was intense and brief. After four months of dating, Love was already pregnant with their daughter when they decided to wed in Honolulu, Hawaii, on February 24, 1992. The bride wore a dress previously owned by Hollywood actress Frances Farmer, while Cobain wore green flannel pajamas.

After the wedding, Cobain went into a funk. Despite Nirvana's soaring popularity, the frontman had no desire to tour and further retreated into himself.

“We went on a binge,” Love confessed to Vanity Fair in 1992. “We did a lot of drugs. We got pills and then we went down to Alphabet City and Kurt wore a hat, I wore a hat, and we copped some dope. Then we got high and went to SNL. After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.”

In 2015 Love, who at the time was promoting Montage of Heck , a biopic of Cobain, would later add: "He wanted to stay in the apartment and do heroin and paint and play his guitar. That's what he wanted to do."

They attempted to get clean before the birth of their daughter

But interlaced among the drug-fueled binges were moments of laughter and sincere affection. In never-before-seen video footage from Montage of Heck , Cobain is seen joking with Love in the bathroom, while another moment captures Love teasingly climbing on Cobain's back while singing a tune. The couple also made intermittent attempts at getting clean. In March 1992 they enrolled in separate detox programs but within days, they would check out and dive back into their addictions. (In Vanity Fair , friends told the publication that Love did heroin while pregnant.)

By the time their daughter, Frances Bean , was born that August, Cobain had briefly considered quitting the band so he could focus on fatherhood. But he didn't. And despite his good intentions, he couldn't quit his drug habits, either.

In additional footage revealed in the film, Cobain's descent into self-destruction becomes more evident. In one scene, he suddenly walks out of Frances' first birthday party. In another, he's nodding off while she's getting her first haircut. "Kurt, you don't want your daughter to see you behaving like this, on drugs," Love screams off camera. "I'm not on drugs!" Cobain claims. "I'm tired."

Cobain attempted suicide more than once

Despite their love for their daughter, the couple's marriage was also unraveling, exacerbated by their drug use. Love would later admit that the reason Cobain attempted suicide in Rome in early March 1994 was because she was considering having an affair. "He must have been psychic or something," she told TVGuide.com . "I almost did one time, and he knew it. ... I have no idea how he knew it. The plan didn't ever go anywhere. Nothing happened, but... the response to it was he took 67 Rohypnols and ended up in a coma because I thought about cheating on him. I mean, f-ck."

But Cobain's problems weren't just with Love – he was never able to quell the inner demons that stemmed from his lonely youth nor could he embrace his newfound celebrity, which he felt delegitimized his music. His world was caving in on him, and he couldn't take the pressure.

Isolated and inconsolable and under the tight grip of addiction, Cobain killed himself by a gunshot wound to the head at his Seattle home on April 5, 1994. He was 27.

“He is considered to be the rock star who didn’t want fame, the weak pathetic guy who was taken over by this controlling female, and yadda yadda," Love told Loudwire in 2015. "It kind of f--ked me up... He’s a hard act to follow. I love him and I always will.”

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Category: Articles

If you read, you’ll judge – newsweek.

by Lorraine Ali Kurt Cobain introduced me to karaoke. In May, 1991, Nirvana was promoting its upcoming major label debut “Nevermind” – an album that would sell more than 10 million copies, revitalize rock and roll and teach Michael Jackson, who had an album about to be ejected from the No. 1 spot, the real […]

Behind Unplugged – Guitar World

The images have already been burned into some deep, tender part of rock’s collective consciousness: Kurt Cobain, slumped over his Martin acoustic, his tattered librarian sweater and basketball sneakers, the clusters of lillies, the subaquatic blue light… Who can say why MTV chose to air Nirvana’s Unplugged performance over and over, like a tape loop, […]

The Poet of Alienation – Newsweek

by Jeff Giles He’d come to install an alarm system. The irony is that longbefore electrician Gary Smith found Kurt Cobain’s body, it wasclear that what Nirvana’s singer really needed protection from was himself. Cobain wasn’t identified for hours, but his mother,Wendy O’Connor, didn’t need anyone to tell her that it was herson who was […]

Never Mind – TIME Magazine

Kurt Cobain was the dour, brilliant leader of Nirvana, the multiplatinum grunge band that defined the sound of the 1990s. Last week he killed himself. BY BRUCE HANDY Reported by Lisa McLaughlin/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and Dave Thompson/Seattle The last weeks of Kurt Cobain’s life were filled with turmoil and anguish – and gossip. […]

Kurt Cobain, Hesitant Poet Of ‘Grunge Rock,’ Dead at 27 – New York Times Obituary

By TIMOTHY EGAN Kurt Cobain, the ragged-voiced product of a Pacific Northwest timber town who helped to create the grunge rock sound that has dominated popular music for the last four years, was found dead today at his home here. The police said they believed that Mr. Cobain, the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for […]