The word came into local media outlets shortly after 10 a.m. Friday. An electrician had found a dead male body at 8:40 a.m. in Kurt Cobain’s house on Lake Washington Blvd. A shotgun and an apparent suicide note were nearby. Authorities refused to identify the body, but that didn’t stop Nirvana fans (and reporters) from gathering outside the house. Thirty people were there within half an hour of the first announcement; an hour later the street had become too crowded for regular traffic to get through. Shortly after noon, investigators confirmed that it was indeed Cobain who had done himself in.
The AP quoted Cobain’s mother as saying he hadn’t been heard from in six days. That Wednesday, it was announced that Nirvana was bowing out of plans to headline the Lollapallooza ’94 package tour. His wife Courtney Love, who’d saved him when he took the champagne-and-sedatives overdose in Rome in March (officially billed as an accident), was off in LA wrapping up preparations for the release of a new album by her band Hole.
During the Rome coma-watch, The Stranger ran a piece by Eric Fredericksen on how the media would treat a Cobain death, as a cultural icon and a nostalgia industry just like Hendrix and Morrison. I’ll try to avoid that shit here, but I’ll try to give a personal view on the guy’s work. Like most of you, I didn’t know him personally, had never seen him offstage. I knew people who knew him; they inveriably described him as just a soft-spoken regular guy who loved to make music and art and who hated the bullshit of The Industry.
Punk rock had developed in New York as an arty affectation. England took it seriously as a voice of youthful anger. The local new wave scenes across the US took the DIY aesthetic of punk even more seriously, eventually questioning the very need for New York/London tastemakers. Cobain emerged amidst this indie-rock movement, among guys who’d chosen not to listen when the industry said punk was dead. Cobain and Krist Novoselic started playing together when they were 19, and by the time Cobain turned 21 in 1988 Nirvana was becoming a big fish in the still-small pond that was the Seattle club scene. By the next year they had an album and were part of TAD’s European tour; by all accounts it was a miserable experience, with Cobain having a nervous breakdown onstage at the last show.
While tagged by out-of-town media as the Leader of the Grunge Rock Revolution, he hadn’t been a central member of the hard-partying, extroverted schmoozers who had developed the punk-metal crossover sounds in Seattle. He was an inwardly-directed soul who, during Nirvana’s club years, holed up in an Olympia apartment and lived on corn dogs and cough syrup. While he kept his private life private, he put his personal torments into his work with a rare purity and clarity. It was his curse/blessing to be the best songwriter of his generation, and to be ripe for the picking just as “alternative rock” was becoming a big business. But it was his decision to go to Geffen; if Nevermind had come out on Sub Pop, as was first planned, it might have sold a few thousand copies, the label would have continued its slide into bankruptcy, and the Seattle rock hype would have died down leaving Soundgarden as national stars but few others.
We’ll probably never really know what finally led him to quit the world. Perhaps it was the slip back into drugs after the highly-publicized hell he went through to get off heroin. Or perhaps the hype and the pressure finally got to him. To the end, however, he maintained a public image as a survivor.
On March 27 the following statement, credited to Cobain, appeared on the Internet’s Nirvana mailing list:
“So this is the Information Highway our illustrious VP has been jawing to the nation about. Well, my manager told me some kind of fan-thing was going down here and that I should come over and check it out. Well, here I am. I’d be lying if I said I’m not surprised to see the band’s popularity reaching even into the depths of the electronic underworld. Cool.
“Well I won’t keep you people long, but I thought you might be interested in what the band is up to. Last month Chris, me, and Dave came out of London Bridge finishing up a revamped “Pennyroyal Tea” (I didn’t much care for how we did the album version and thought we could’ve done much better with the song). Geffen should have that out shortly, knowing the speed with which their money machine rolls.
“We’re all taking a break from the music and touring for a bit. I’m still a little freaked over the Rome thing and need some time to rest and get over it, you’d think they could make a good milkshake, but no. Hope you people are ready for a calmer moodier album. Yep, Nirvana’s going back into the studio at the end of the summer. I’m already working on the new songs and artwork for the new album. If you’re expecting the same verse-chorus-verse, well, I suppose you have but two choices, don’t buy the new album when it’s released in early ’95 or get used to the fact that the band is changing. Longevity folks.”
(latter-day note: An Internet user in Victoria later claimed to have fabricated the note. My excerpts from it got printed up as authentic in Dave Thompson’s quickie Cobain exploitation book.)
GATHERING OF THE VULTURES: The vehemence with which conservative and old-hippie commentators alike treated Cobain and his fans is unprecedented in my lifetime, unless you count the bio-sleaze books of Albert Goldman (who thankfully died before he could write a Kurt exploitation book) or the Arizona politicians who wanted to prevent a Martin Luther King holiday by red-baiting King 20 years after his death. Rush Limbaugh called Kurt “a piece of human debris” and treated Nirvana listeners with equal disrespect; thus proving for all time the essential cruelty behind his worldview. If Limbaugh deliberately gloated over the demise of an opposition spokesperson, Andy Rooney was merely clueless in his denunciation of Cobain, and by extension anyone who loved him, as a “loser” not worthy of respect, only condescending pity. Locally, that professional pious hypocrite John Carlson echoed the Limbaugh party line in claiming the “sad and pathetic” Cobain should have quit music and found religion (as if Carlson has ever represented sincere Christian charity). P-I cartoonist David Horsey was at least more sympathetic when he suggested that Kurt could’ve found solace if he’d done more hiking in the woods; Kurt grew up near the woods, and from all accounts was more in touch with the terror of timber country than with its majesty.
Then there’s Times columnist Eric Lacitis, whose profound and utter incomprehension of Cobain, his music, his depression and his audience was matched only by his intransigence. First, he wrote a snide “joke” about Cobain’s March coma for a Sunday feature section that was printed before his death but distributed after it. Then, he wrote a “serious” column questioning what somebody with all that money could possibly have to worry about. Then, when many readers rightfully objected, Lacitis wrote a succession of shallow arguments attempting to defend his earlier bluster.
This is more than just the case of some oldsters who don’t get that new music (even though Cobain worked in a nearly 20-year-old genre). It’s the case of people who are paid to communicate, yet who lack a basic understanding of their topic, and in some cases have been defensive and even proud of their own ignorance. If the media business really wants to know why today’s young adults are consuming more books but far fewer newspapers and TV newscasts, it need only look to its own industry-wide “just call me another old white guy who doesn’t get it” attitude. Not “getting it” is not a positive quality, and neither is inhumanity.