Remembering Nirvana's Kurt Cobain
30 years after his death, the reluctant icon still casts a long shadow.
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In March 1994, a rumor ripped through my part of the world like an early wildfire: Lou Gramm was going to be Nirvana’s new frontman. Yes, that Lou Gramm. Yes, that Nirvana. To hear it, Kurt Cobain was out, and the former Foreigner frontman was in.
Of course, this was absurd. Even typing it 30 years later feels awkward, as if it somehow reflects on me. But like most rumors, if you squinted hard enough and thought about it, it was just bonkers enough to kind of make sense.
Gramm had been out of Foreigner for a few years at this point. Cobain was increasingly uncomfortable with his—and the band’s— fame. One of the working titles for In Utero was "I Hate Myself, And I Want to Die." Nirvana had been signed to a big label, and this was still a time when they were always thirsty for more & more units shipped. Why, a big name fronting the band might be just what they needed to tap into new markets and ship more units! And if Cobain wanted out anyway, then it’d be a win-win.
Sadly, Cobain’s death at the peak of this frenzy only fed the fire, with tasteless takes and gallows humor completing the circle. It all made sense now. You’d do the same if you were being replaced in your own band with someone like Gramm, right?
Wrong. Of course, none of this was true, and none of it fair to anyone involved. But nature abhors a vacuum, and disinformation traveled as fast then as it does today; only the vectors have changed. For many Gen Xers, the reality was that an icon was gone, and many of us were left asking why.
Today marks 30 years since that day, and we’re still waiting for answers. Ones that will likely never come, no matter how many whisper campaigns or conspiracy theories bubble up the surface. We were asking all of these questions; we were just asking the wrong person.
Had someone actually bothered to talk to Cobain, I mean really talk to him, I think the arc of history would've bent in an entirely different direction.
Below the jump is a post I wrote a few years ago that speaks to that: how Cobain’s death shook a generation to its core, how much in the world has changed since April 5th, 1994, and how much of it hasn’t.
Time marches on, of course. In Utero turned 30 not too long ago. It’s been a few lifetimes since Nevermind changed the world. Bleach turns 35 in June. Smart Studios, where the band recorded some of their work, was most recently an AirBnB. It’s not in the greatest shape, but the owner is hoping that trafficking in that loose tie to fame will help guests overlook its shabby exterior and place right next to a busy thoroughfare.
It’s the sort of thing that if Cobain were still around to ask, he’d probably tell you he hated.
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It’s weird to find myself at an age where I can start a story with “I remember when” without irony.
Nirvana and Kurt Cobain are no exception. I recall with razor-sharp clarity how hearing ‘Negative Creep’ live off “their upcoming record” felt like a kick to the head. It was amazing, and everyone in the crowd that night knew we were at the starting line of something special.
Barreling to my local Tower Records in a car whose steering wheel I couldn’t see over to get Nevermind? Yep. That too.
They played great music, no doubt. But their relatability was magnetic. Come for the music, stay for the down-to-earthiness. Krist Novoselic always struck me as the proverbial older brother of my friends. The one who was either an upperclassman in HS, or went to Reed. An itinerant presence, but one that always came with a smile and cool records.
Cobain was something else. I think what made Cobain so relatable was the feeling that he was one of us. Aberdeen Washington isn’t that close to where I grew up, but people tend to generalize the entire Pacific Northwest as where they’re from.
Different license plates be damned; he was one of us.
There’s a great line early on in Michael Azzerad’s recent article about his time with the musician where he says :
…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.
Reading that 30+ years later hit me the same way ‘Negative Creep’ did all those years ago. I “knew” that guy, too. In a lot of ways, I was that guy.
That’s just one great sentence in an in-depth—and worthwhile—read, but I think it goes a long way to explain why the aftershocks of Nirvana’s music and Cobain’s death still reverberate.
We tend to put people on a pedestal and project all our hopes and dreams onto them. If you were on the “scene” in the early 90s, you likely projected some weird orthodoxies about selling out on to musicians as well.
We loved that they became big enough for us to see them play, but we didn’t want them to grow larger than that. As if we had agency over their career trajectory. In hindsight, it was absurd, all this acting like a crab in a bucket, but there we were. We thought we were holding him up, but that pressure was actually an anchor.
We’re cynical now, but it’s not a new thing. Back then, people had already lost faith in institutions, religion, and pretty much everything. Old enough to know better but not yet out in the world, we railed against the systems we didn’t quite understand.
Corporate music may have sucked (it did), but it’s okay that people liked it. We literally told musicians not to sell out, and they obliged, which somehow made them even more popular. That dissonance had to be maddening.
We loved Cobain because he was one of us. We loved him because, as far as we knew, he didn’t want to use us as a stepping stone to greater fame, but I’m not sure anyone ever asked him what he wanted.
We didn’t want him to leave. And then he did.
We knew him. Or so we thought.
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Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
So hard to fathom Cobain has been gone longer than he was alive. I turned 20 years old April 6, 1994 and at the time I had spent the better part of two years playing in a band that toured up and down the east coast. We played every bar, theatre and festival we could land on. I had been living out of a van and sleeping on couches of anybody that cared to assist an "up and coming" act. We had a song that charted in the college radio top 5 and major label interest with a strong management team.
A highlight for us had come a few months earlier when we met and chatted up Dave Grohl at a gig we played at a bar called Mexicano's in Nags Head, NC. Dave was on a break from Nirvana staying in Nags Head visiting his sister that lived there and he showed up at the venue that night. If I remember correctly, Dave knew the bar's owner and was helping him out by working the door, but the news was flying around that the drummer for Nirvana was there.
Our singer, Troy, who was often mistaken for Lenny Kravitz, chatted up Dave and they talked music and whatever else was going on at the time. Troy was trying his hardest to get us an "in" with Dave and the band's management, and maybe we could get on some opening dates with the band. It was a long shot, but things happen. Months earlier we had worked a cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" into our set and we were buzzing with excitement that we had the chance to play it for Dave that night, and maybe that would be the deal clincher.
Dave was gone long before we played our final note, and we're not sure he ever heard us attempt his band's radio hit. Probably best he left before he heard it.
Just a few months later Cobain would be gone. We heard the news over the radio in the van on our way to a show in Florida. We took "Teen Spirit" off the set list that night and never played it again. We had lost one of our own.
30 years later my 16 year old daughter is discovering Nirvana. She's watched the documentary, YouTube clips of the band performing and has discussed with me what she likes/dislikes about their music and body of work. Much like Cobain inspiring so many to pick up a guitar and start scratching out lyrics and chords, Nirvana's music, as a whole, has helped inspire my daughter to pick up the drumsticks again after not playing for a few years.
30 years later Cobain's music and legacy lives on. If there's a silver lining to his tragic passing it's that he has helped create more musicians, and continues to do so.
Two things I remember about my introduction to Nirvana:
- Doing laundry in some town in (recently reunified) Germany while backpacking Europe, and wandering the streets when I found a record store with Nevermind covers plastered all over the windows. It didn't look at all out of place in Germany, but it was still arresting. Didn't hear any of the music though. This was probably October of 1991.
- At home that Christmas, I had MuchMusic (MTV equivalent in Canada) on in the rec room. My bedroom was also in the basement, and I distinctly remember "Smells Like Teen Spirit" start just as I was about to walk into my bedroom door. The song grabbed me, and I stood there watching the video. This very, very rarely happens. I need to hear a song several times until I become obsessed. But I was transfixed.
I never was huge into Nirvana, other than that song. I do *like* the album, but I've never *loved* it.
The thing I remember about the end of grunge is that the music press (including MuchMusic and probably MTV, etc.) were already waiting for the next big thing. I had the sense that the music journalists wanted to be talking about something else and had already moved on, emotionally at least. But they had to keep writing about this beast. Cobain's death put a cap on it. An end date.
I've since searched, but I never saw anyone else write about that feeling, so maybe it was just me. Or maybe, like so many things, the myth was told so many times that the truth got buried. If rock journalists weren't going to talk about wanting grunge to end *before* Cobain's death, they certainly weren't going to talk about it after.
In any case, do you remember any of that, Kevin?
I have a much bigger appreciation for Cobain and Nirvana in general now (though I still wouldn't classify it as "love"). Their episode on Classic Albums is eye-opening as to how nuanced that "grungy" album actually is. I also have much more sympathy for Cobain and the band during that period. But that's not hard, going from a 20-something boy to a 50-something (let's face it) boy. It was a sad day, -- a sad week, since it took several days to go from "missing" to "found dead" -- but it was a galvanizing day as well. A JFK moment for Gen-Xers: where were you when...? And, perhaps, an end of childhood for many of us. I got married a few months later, which doesn't automatically turn you into an adult, but is certainly a shove in that direction.
Great insights here, Kevin. You nailed it.