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 meaning of the word dangerous. But the scrappy Seattle trio were still staying in low-budget motels (a step up from sleeping in their tour van) and ordering the cheapest items on coffee shop menus. Over greasy zucchini sticks at a Holiday Inn Express outside LA, we talked about what it took to hold onto your punk rock ideals in a very unpunk world. On a small stage in the bar, a busboy was setting up a mic stand, speakers and a wide-screen TV. I wondered out loud if we were going to hear a bad lounge act. “No, it’s worse” Cobain said, blowing the hair out of his eyes. “It’s karaoke.” Karaoke? “Yeah, you know when drunk secretaries get up and sing ‘Feelings’.” Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who’d go down in history as the angsty, nihilistic voice of the post-boomer generation, had cracked a joke.

Anyone who thought Cobain was an easy read probably wasn’t a Nirvana fan. Next month, however, he’ll become an open book, as Riverhead Books publishes “Journals,” a collection of handwritten diary entries, letters, band memos, drawings, screeds and cries from the heart that editor Julie Grau culled from stacks of the late singer’s notebooks. Riverhead is said to have paid the Cobain estate – i.e., his widow, Courtney Love, and his 10-year-old daughter, Frances – in the neighborhood of $4 million for “Journals.” The book is already controversial among some fans, who worry that it’s an invasion of Cobain’s privacy, his suicide in April 1994 being tragic, irrefutable evidence of his desire to be left alone. (Love declined to be interviewed for this story.) “Journals” can be tremendously raw and unsettling, as Cobain spirals from an ambitious kid in a garage band to a disillusioned pop star with a deadly heroin addiction. The book also illuminates Cobain’s sweet, whimsical side. These contradictions may enhance the way we listen to Nirvana, especially now that the previously unreleased single “You Know You’re Right” tops rock-radio playlists and the band’s greatest hits album waits just around the corner.

Not that Nirvana ever sounded anything less than revolutionary. They didn’t just make Michael Jackson seem as over as the ’80s, they made a mockery of Skid Row, Poison, the declining Guns N’ Roses – and the other rockers with more hair than your mall-rat sister. It was an unwitting coup by a band who often hit the stage in the clothes they’d slept in. Their songs were searing and vitriolic, but beneath all the reverb and distortion were perfect pop tunes. Much to Cobain’s chagrin, Nirvana would spawn a movement with a name (”grunge”), paving the way for band’s like Pearl Jam and, later, inspiring corporate labels to take chances on weirdos like Beck. But most important, Nirvana would prove that the best moments in rock are not created in labs or test-market meetings. They are sloppy mistakes that grow into sonic revelations. “I remember watching Kurt coming through and thinking, ‘God, this music is nuclear”, says Bono, of U2. “‘This is really splitting the atom.’ They raised the temperature for everybody. Manufactured pop never looked so cold as when that heat was around. Nirvana made everything else look silly.”

After Cobain shot himself, fans camped out in the park next to his lake-side Seattle home, some staying for weeks. Inside the gates, there was chaos. An ever-changing cast of guards patrolled the property, and a cavalcade of long-lost friends and distant family members moved in and out of the house at will. It wasn’t long before the remnants of Cobain’s life began disappearing, Journals, tapes, equipment. Cobain’s grieving friend Eric Erlandson, who played guitar in Love’s band, Hole, saw what was going on and moved to safeguard valuables, including Cobain’s notebooks. “From day one I treated the whole situation the way I would have for any friend – keeping their stuff safe,” he says. “But from a historical perspective, I treated it like I would have treated John Lennon’s legacy. I guess I knew even then it was important.”

Fans have been awaiting the release of “Journals” for months, some posting breathlessly on websites, others calling the ever-controversial Love things like “a blood-sucking leech.” Nirvana’s drummer, Dave Grohl, and its bassist and cofounder, Krist Novoselic, recently settled a lawsuit with Love over control of the band’s legacy. Still, the waters are not entirely calm. Novoselic preferred not to speak for this story, his band manager Cory Moore saying “He just feels it’s wrong to talk about something this private. He doesn’t want to be involved with these diaries on any level.” Even Erlandson is ambivalent about seeing the journals that he saved become public property. “I just pray that the benefits received by the world outweigh the negativity caused,” he says. “But if my journals were made public, I would make sure I was re-born as a thorn in the side of the perpetrator. That’s the least I could do.”

There’s no way that Cobain intended all these entries to end up on somebody’s coffee table. (The 800 number for Nordic Trac? The recipe for “Mom’s Seashell Shrimp Salad”?) But then Cobain never thought he was worth as much as we did. “A lot of the older generation don’t look at him as anything special,” says Erlandson. “They don’t get it. But future generations are already looking up to him.” Cobain probably would have hated that idea. “Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend,” he wrote in his journal. The tragedy is, he got his wish.

Source: Newsweek – October 28th, 2002

Who can say why MTV chose to air Nirvana’s Unplugged performance over and over, like a tape loop, in the hours and days following the discovery of Cobain’s lifeless body on April 8, 1994? Many fans might have preferred some bracing footage of Nirvana fully amped up and defiantly live before a seething mosh pit. Instead, there was Nirvana Unplugged, taped just five months before Cobain’s death, and designated as the wake which, through its repeated showings served to diffuse the rock community’s grief and shock. The recent release of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged In New York, the CD version of the television concert, was a mournful dÈj‡ vu experience for many. It has become impossible to hear this music outside the context of Cobain’s terrible end.

Seen, again and again, in the hours after the artist’s death, the somber MTV gig had an oddly lulling effect. It may have helped some viewers find a calm, quiet way to resign themselves to Cobain’s violent departure. But the effect was pretty spooky, too. It was as if the guy was singing at his own funeral. Or singing to us from some tranquil, blue world beyond our own.

An eerie coincidence? Probably. But of the six cover songs Cobain chose to sing that evening, five mention death in some way. And the lilies, candles and heavy drapery that adorned the Unplugged set that night were all chosen by Cobain. In fact, when Unplugged producer Alex Coletti showed the Nirvana leader some preliminary sketches for the stage set, Kurt called for more flowers, more candles. “You mean like a funeral?” Coletti asked. “Yeah,” replied Cobain. “I don’t want to read too much into it,” says Coletti in retrospect, “but that memory sure spooked me out a couple of months later.”

Apart from any of the show’s real or imaginary morbid overtones, for Cobain, the opportunity to do MTV Unplugged may well have meant the confirmation of his arrival as an important rock songwriter. “I’m embarrassed saying this, but I’d like to be recognized more as a songwriter,” Cobain told Details magazine in November of ‘93. “I don’t pay attention to polls and charts, but I thumb through them once in while and see, like, Eddie Vedder is nominated number-one songwriter in some magazine, and I’m not even listed.”

From its debut broadcast back in January of 1990, MTV Unplugged has always been a songwriters’ forum. The show gives tunesmiths an opportunity to strip away the high decibels and big production values and let their compositions stand on their own melodic and lyrical integrity. In 1993 Nirvana had begun working some acoustic numbers into their live set, “just to wind things down,” Nirvana bassist Chris Novoselic told MTV News. “But people still manage to writhe around and throw shoes and land headfirst over the barrier and crack their heads open.”

Unplugged gave Nirvana a chance to test its acoustic mettle under slightly more favorable conditions. “I was surprised but delighted when they said yes to doing the show,” says Alex Coletti. Coletti had work-ed with Nirvana once before. On January 10, 1992, when Nirvana were in New York City to do Saturday Night Live, he had videotaped a live set with the band, “Various clips from that have been aired on MTV,” Coletti notes, “but never the whole thing. There were 10 or 11 songs, and there’s stuff like `Molly’s Lips,’ `Stain,’ and other great stuff that’s never been seen.”

The January ‘92 taping was an impromptu session, knocked together at the last minute, but it gave Coletti some useful insights into the band. “That one experience of working with Kurt showed me how sensitive he was as a person. Some bands will just walk in and it’s like, `Whatever. Point and shoot. Let’s do it and get out of here.’ But Kurt seemed to like to take things and internalize them. I’d heard that he was something of a visual artist. So, beyond making sure he was happy with the stage set, since he seemed to show some interest in it, I thought it would be good if he had some creative input into it.”

Early in the planning stages of their Unplugged appearance, Nirvana tour managers Alex MacLeod and Jeff Mason acted as intermediaries between Cobain and Coletti, passing the guitarist’s ideas and wishes on to the producer. “Kurt wanted something that would break away from just the normal, dull TV set,” says MacLeod. “He didn’t want it to look like just a bare stage. He had seen a lot of Unplugged shows before, and felt they weren’t really unplugged. His feeling was that a lot of the bands would just use semi-acoustic instruments and play their songs exactly the same way they would if they were doing a full show. He wanted to make Nirvana’s Unplugged appearance slightly different, sort of a downbeat kind of set. Really laid back. To just go in and play a bunch of songs and make changes to the arrangements to some extent. They tried to stick to acoustic instruments as much as possible. Kurt wanted to make it something that would show a whole different side of the band.”

After exchanging these preliminary ideas through MacLeod and Mason, Coletti felt the time was ripe for a face-to-face meeting with Cobain. In November of ‘93, a few weeks before the taping, Coletti flew up to a Nirvana gig in a remote part of New England, somewhere north of Boston. He was armed with rough sketches of the stage set which embodied Cobain’s ideas, and with his own personal Ovation semi-acoustic bass guitar. The latter was meant to be loaned to Chris Novoselic in the event that the Nirvana bassist didn’t have an “Unplugged bass” of his own.

“It was not a glamorous backstage by any means,” Coletti recalls. “The show was in a high school hockey arena. After the show, the band went back to this room and had a catered meal. It was nothing fancy, just franks and beans and a bottle of wine. There were a good dozen people in the room: the band and some friends. So I just got thrown in this room and sat down next to Kurt. No one even bothered to introduce us or anything; it was sort of an awkward situation. So I said, `Is this a bad time? Do you want to do this now or what?’ But he immediately became very friendly, like, `Oh, oh, the MTV thing. No, let’s do it now.’ I was prepared to give him the whole Unplugged spiel, which is to talk about set lists, sound equipment and things. But it just seemed like it wasn’t the right time. So I simply said, `Hey look, I’ve got some set drawings.’”

Like many people who worked with Cobain in a professional capacity, Coletti describes the late guitarist as a courteous collaborator, respectful of other people’s expertise and quietly hopeful of being respected in turn. “He gave us flexibility. He was pretty cooperative,” says Coletti. “He did specify that he wanted star lilies, which are these big, white flowers.”

It was at this meeting that the ominous “funeral” remark went down. But before anyone could dwell on it, Chris Novoselic burst into the room brandishing the Ovation bass Coletti had left for him. “He was like, `Look what I got!’ Like a big kid,” Coletti narrates. “Kurt just looks up and says, `That’s the ugliest fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Chris is like, `Oh, man, I wanna use it on the show.’ Kurt said, `Well maybe if we fuck it up and bash it up and put some stickers on it….’ And I went, `Umm, you can’t do that, Kurt. That’s mine!’ He got really apologetic, like, `I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean the ugly crack.’”

The set list was another point of discussion, if not contention, between Nirvana and MTV. There were two potential sore points between the parties. First, the band wanted to fill nearly half of their set with obscure covers. “Right away,” recalls Alex MacLeod, “we started sorting out how many covers there would be time for, how many songs MTV wanted them to do in total. Just general things like that.

Also disturbing for MTV was the fact that-with the exception of “Come As You Are”-the band wasn’t planning to perform any big, instantly recognizable Nirvana hits. “We knew we didn’t want to do an acoustic version of `Teen Spirit,’” drummer Dave Grohl later commented. “That would’ve been horrendously stupid. We felt it would be better if we found other songs.”

According to MacLeod, there was also a practical side to the band’s decision not to perform many hits: “They were like, `We’d love to do that, but a lot of those songs would be really dull if we were to do them that way. They didn’t really work acoustically.’ The band just thought that there were other songs better-suited to the acoustic format.”

The decision to do so many covers reflects a selfless (some would say insecure) desire on Cobain’s part to share the spotlight with other songwriters. He was a tireless proselytizer for bands he really loved, like the Vaselines, Scottish buzz-pop supremos led by Eugene Kelly, who now fronts the band Eugenius. Nirvana had covered Vaselines tunes in the past, including “Molly’s Lips” and “Son Of A Gun.” (These early recordings were later collected on the Incesticide CD.)

The Meat Puppets were another of Kurt’s obsessions. “He told me the second Meat Puppets album [Meat Puppets II (SST)]was great,” Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, recalled in a December ‘94 interview with Rolling Stone. “I couldn’t stand [the album]. Then he played [those songs] to me-his voice, his cadence and his timing. And I realized he was right.”

Thanks to Unplugged, Cobain’s fans got a chance to replicate Love’s experience. Kurt’s performance of the Puppets’ “Plateau,” “Oh Me” and “Lake Of Fire” have a ragged vulnerability that’s far more personal and affecting than any calculated run-through of “Teen Spirit” could have been. In retrospect, there was solid wisdom in Coletti’s decision to weather his MTV superiors’ pressure to see Nirvana play their hits and honor Cobain’s intentions instead.

“Kurt said he really enjoyed those Meat Puppets songs because he really had to push his voice,” Coletti observes. “Like he didn’t feel good singing them. He picked them purposely because they were challenging vocally for him.”

Many of the decisions about songs and arrangements went down at two day-long rehearsals held prior to the day of taping. “They were at the SST rehearsal facility in New Jersey,” Alex MacLeod recalls. “We brought our own monitor system in. Also, because we were on tour at the time, they were working on stuff during soundcheck. Kurt worked on his own, too.”

Since the Meat Puppets were on tour with Nirvana at the time, and Cobain was planning to sing three of their tunes, it seemed a natural move to invite the two principal Puppets, siblings Curt and Cris Kirkwood, to come lend a hand on acoustic guitars. “Why not?” Novoselic later quipped. “We weren’t learning their songs right anyway.”

Back at MTV HQ, the decision to include the Meat Puppets in the broadcast was hardly greeted with jubilation. Alex Coletti recalls: “I said to MTV, `They’re going to bring some guests on.’ And at first everybody’s eyes lit up, like, `Who’s it gonna be?’ They wanted to hear the `right’ names-Eddie Vedder or Tori Amos or God knows who. But when I said, `the Meat Puppets,’ it was kind of like, `Oh, great. They’re not doing any hits, and they’re inviting guests who don’t have any hits to come play. Perfect.’”

Nirvana seemed intent on bringing sonic variety to their set. Along with the Kirkwood brothers, they also included cellist Lori Goldston and former Germs guitarist Pat Smear, both of whom had been playing with Nirvana on tour. Covering the Vaselines’ “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam” gave Chris Novoselic a chance to put down his bass and strap on an accordion. The accordion, he told MTV News, “was the first instrument I learned when I was young. And Kurt bought one, this really neat red one. And I go, `Hey, check this out.’ And I put it on and started playing it. And then we were starting to screw around with rehearsals for Unplugged and we did `Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam.’ There’s this violin or organ [on the original recording] and I go, `I know. I’ll play the accordion on in this song!’ I picked it up and started playing, and it sounded really cool.”

Despite the band’s preparations, Alex MacLeod describes their overall mood as “nervous” as the day of the show approached: “It was the first time in a long while I’d seen them all so nervous about doing something. Things had gotten to the point where they’d go out playing in front of 7,500 or 10,000 people and it was just like [very nonchalantly], `Okay, boom, let’s do it.’ But they were really nervous about doing Unplugged. Because they were really leaving themselves wide open.”

As Alex Coletti remembers it, Dave Grohl and Chris Novoselic were the first to turn up at Sony Music Studios, at 54th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan, on November 18th, 1993. It was around 3:00 in the afternoon, the appointed time for Unplugged’s pre-show camera rehearsal/ soundcheck. Concerned with Grohl’s propensity to hit the drums really hard, Coletti presented him with some brushes and sizzle sticks, a type of stick used in classical percussion which consists of several slender dowels loosely wrapped and which creates a softer impact than a solid drumstick. Since it was around the holiday season, Coletti had the sticks wrapped up in Christmas paper.

“I figured I’d be remembered forever as the dick MTV producer,” Coletti laughs. “I was afraid Dave would just roll his eyes, like, `Oh great, the asshole from MTV is trying to be my friend.’ But instead he opened the package and said, `Cool, I’ve never had brushes before. I’ve never even tried using them.’ As it turned out, he used both the sticks and the brushes, which helped [audio producer] Scott Litt out immensely, I believe. It’s nice that the band was so amenable to trying new things.”

In the end, Novoselic didn’t use Coletti’s Ovation bass, but rather a Guild acoustic/electric bass rented from S.I.R. in New York-an instrument that has been used on other episodes of Unplugged. Pat Smear played an inexpensive, red-white-and-blue Buck Owens model guitar that belongs to Novoselic and had been extensively reworked by Nirvana guitar technician Earnie Bailey “to get it to sound like a guitar and not a kid’s toy,” as Alex MacLeod puts it.

Up in the soundbooth sat noted record producer Scott Litt (R.E.M., John Mellencamp), who had remixed two tracks from In Utero and worked with Nirvana on MTV’s Live And Loud New Years’ Eve show. (Litt, who was there as the show’s audio producer, went on to produce the Unplugged In New York CD.) The band and cellist Lori Goldston were already on stage when Cobain arrived, notably unaccompanied by Courtney. “I think that was planned,” says Alex Coletti. “I think he was a little too nervous to have Courtney and the baby there.”

For the show, Cobain played a Martin D-18E that he had purchased at Voltage Guitar in Los Angeles during the fall of ‘93, and which had become his main acoustic. With his characteristic flair for the oddball, the guitarist had picked up a rare misfit. The D-18E, one of Martin’s earliest stabs at an electrified guitar, is essentially a D-18 acoustic with two pickups, three control knobs and a selector switch grafted on. Introduced in 1958, it was discontinued in 1959; only 302 were ever produced. The instrument was the perfect acoustic for Cobain, a counterpart to the trashed old Mustangs and Jaguars he favored, not to mention the thrift shop clothes and doll parts he accumulated.

But unlike his beautifully threadbare cardigans, this Cobain cast-off had some real intrinsic value: “I don’t believe he had any idea how rare it was before he bought it,” says Earnie Bailey. “Kurt was neither a collector nor a connoisseur of rare guitars. I think he saw the D-18E as an oddity, hoping it would sound as good as it looked. Unfortunately, the instrument’s DeArmond pickups were designed with nickel strings in mind, so hearing it with bronze-wound strings was pretty disappointing. Our solution was to attach yet another pickup-a Bartolini model 3AV-to the top of the Martin. Kurt first became interested in that pickup when he saw Peter Buck using one and really liked the sound.”

While the usual Unplugged procedure is for acoustic guitars to run direct, Cobain insisted on putting his Martin through his trusty Fender Twin Reverb amp and his usual array of effects boxes. [See accompanying story, page 68.]

“Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away,” Alex Coletti says with a laugh, “but I built a fake box out in front of the amp to make it look like a monitor wedge. It was Kurt’s security blanket. He was used to hearing this guitar through his Fender. He wanted those effects. You can hear it on `The Man Who Sold The World.’ It’s an acoustic guitar, but he’s obviously going through an amp. There’s no trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. I actually fought pretty hard to leave that song out [of the final edit of the show], because I felt it wasn’t as genuine as the rest of the songs. But I’m a huge Bowie fan, so I couldn’t fight too hard against the song.”

As a concession to the Unplugged aesthetic, Earnie Bailey did modify the amp for the show: “To keep the Twin as clean as possible, I switched the 7025 power tubes to 12AX7’s and substituted the 12AT7 phase inverter to a 12AU7. By the time Kurt showed up, everything was pretty much dialed in, right down to listening to the pickup balance from the control room.”

It is standard Unplugged procedure to videotape the camera rehearsal/soundcheck for each show. Nirvana’s Unplugged rehearsal tape is packed with revelations. More than anything else, Cobain looks tired. His face reflects that unmistakable road weariness that takes hold of musicians after months and months of dealing with strange places, strange situations and even stranger people. Throughout the rehearsal, Cobain’s mood varies from low-keyed bitchiness over technical foul-ups to a kind of deadpan, humor us take on the whole proceeding. He calls the second number of the rehearsal, “About A Girl,” to an abrupt halt, demanding, “How many more times is that fuckin’ feedback gonna happen when I turn my head to the left?” Later on he calls for Finger-ease to help him smooth out the song’s solo: “You know that goofy-ass stuff? It’s like anal gel.” He later explains that he’d never used the fretboard lubricant before, but that his “country and western aunt” used to do so. He nevertheless knows enough to specify that he wants the roll-on rather than the spray. “God, I’m being picky today,” he says with mock self-derision.

The whole band seem mildly amused at receiving the superstar treatment from MTV. “Uh, my candle went out. Can somebody please light it?” Dave Grohl demands at one point with stagey hyper-professionalism. “This fucking sand is ridiculous,” Cobain says of the substance in which the candelabra and vases were anchored.

What also comes across unmistakably on the videotape is the extent to which Cobain was in charge of Nirvana. He tells Dave Grohl when he’s singing flat and directs him to play louder at several junctures. He directs Pat Smear not to keep changing his amp volume. And although he is known for the punkish nonchalance of his guitar approach, the rehearsal tape shows that Cobain could be quite obsessive about tone and guitar equipment. He enters into a lengthy debate with one technician over the various qualities of his two Electro-Harmonix Echo Flangers. Later he asks about the feasibility of acquiring replacement machine heads for his Martin. “These aren’t good machine heads,” he sadly observes.

As the rehearsal progresses, the trouble spots in the set soon become obvious. One is the aforementioned “The Man Who Sold The World.” Cobain can’t seem to get past the first chorus without blowing the chord changes. “Sorry,” he tells the others. The band tries the song again and again, but never manages to get all the way through it. In the end they decide to move on.

“What should we do next, Scott?” shouts Cobain into the darkness above his head. Of all the people on the set, Litt is the only one to whom he seems to defer. The band moves on to a flawless performance of “Polly” and get halfway through “Dumb” before a monitor snafu again brings things to a halt. “MTV Poltergeist,” Cobain quips. Trouble rears its ugly head once more when they move on to “Pennyroyal Tea.” Pat Smear persists in resolving his chorus harmony vocal to a flagrantly wrong note. Again, the band attempts the song repeatedly, with no success. They try it with Grohl playing Smear’s guitar so he can concentrate on his harmony. That doesn’t work either. The situation grows increasingly tense, before the band again decides to move on without resolving the problem. “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam” comes off infinitely better. But Cobain still seems uneasy. He calls out for someone named Amy (perhaps the Amy Finnerty mentioned in the Unplugged CD liner notes): “Amy, can you sit in the front when we play?” Cobain asks. “You and Janet and everyone I know? [Presumably Janet Billig, from Nirvana's management company.] ‘Cause I hate strangers.”

The onstage arrival of Cris and Curt Kirkwood, “The Brothers Meat,” lightens the mood considerably. Their three numbers go well, and the rehearsal closes with a confident reading of “All Apologies.” Nirvana leave the stage having assayed 11 of the 14 songs in their set.

According to Alex MacLeod, the post-soundcheck vibe was fairly tense: “They were still like, `Oh my God, we haven’t rehearsed enough. Oh shit, we’re gonna blow this totally.’” After leaving the stage, the band retired to a room upstairs at the Sony facility for a two-hour dinner break. Over the meal, the delicate question of the set list again presented itself. Alex Coletti narrates: “There was this whole subtext of `try to get Kurt to do more hit songs’ that prevailed throughout the day among myself, my boss and management. The other thing was we were really pressuring Scott Litt, like, `Hey, see if you can get more songs out of them, or better songs.’ Again, I’m not saying it was the right thing to do. I think what we got was great. Kurt just chose to take a different road with it. I guess it wasn’t the road we were all in synch on. Not that he went in a bad direction at all.”

At 8:30 that evening, the audience was “loaded in,” as they say at MTV. As it turned out, many of the front row seats were given to New York-area Nirvana fan club members-probably not familiar faces to Cobain, but far from hostile ones. Taping began at nine. Somehow, magically, the rough spots from soundcheck seemed to simply vanish. “I guarantee you I will screw this song up,” Cobain nervously announces before starting “The Man Who Sold The World.” But he doesn’t. The “Pennyroyal Tea” problem resolves itself nicely too. “Am I doing this by myself or what?” Cobain demands. “Do it yourself,” Dave Grohl calls out, deftly seizing the moment. This impromptu arrangement decision contributed greatly to the show’s informal, intimate vibe. Cobain turns in a memorable performance of a song that was always one of his most affecting statements about his own ailment and discontent. From here on in, Cobain seems to grow more relaxed and confident. One of the recurring themes of jokes during soundcheck-MTV’s “superstar treatment”-winds up working well during the show too. “Aren’t we, like, a rich rock band?” Cobain cracks as everyone waits for one of the Meat Puppets’ guitars to be brought out. “Shouldn’t we have a million guitars?”

Despite the informal, jokey vibe, Coletti recalls that the Nirvana Unplugged shoot was remarkably tight and hassle-free. “With most Unplugged’s, we tend to run through the set, have a chat and then do a few songs over again. But this was truly one take for every song, straight through, in one hour. We didn’t have to change tapes, which is a rarity. Usually we have to stop and put up a second load of audio and video tapes to get the last few songs. But this was really tight-something like 56 minutes from start to finish.”

Cobain pulled out all the stops on the final song-a riveting version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” a traditional tune recorded by another of his musical heroes, the American folksinging archetype Leadbelly. Having done pained, screaming justice to the death-haunted ballad, Cobain left the stage, never to return.

“I really tried to get him to do an encore,” Alex Coletti remembers. “I had Dave, Chris and Pat ready to do it. But Kurt just wasn’t into it. I was just doing my job for MTV at that point, trying to get that one extra song in the can, to see if the night could produce one more gem. The pleading went on for about five minutes. Finally Kurt said, `I can’t top that last song.’ And when he said that, I backed off. ‘Cause I knew he was right.” l string was one of the keys to Kurt’s signature sound.”

When the instrument was finished, Cobain and his missus, Courtney Love, stopped by Ferrington’s shop to collect it. “They had to be the weirdest couple in the world,” the luthier says with a laugh. “She’s so over the top, and he was so sensitive and soft-spoken and polite. He couldn’t have been a nicer young fella. You could tell he was really talented. He’d sit there and play the guitar and he had really beautiful hands, with real long fingers. Chet Atkins has hands like that. Courtney asked him, `Honey, are you gonna smash that guitar too?’ He said, `Oh no, this is going to be my recording guitar.’”

That was shortly before work began on In Utero. Not long after the album was completed, Cobain became involved with the Fender Custom Shop. Once again, Nirvana’s management had initially contacted Fender in a desperate search for replacement necks and parts.

“I was able to track down what they needed,” says Fender Director of Artist Relations Mark Wittenberg, “so they could keep his guitars up and running. Then we were contacted and told that Kurt had an idea for a guitar-something that he had in his mind’s eye but wasn’t really seeing out there in the real world. His favorite guitar was a Mustang, but there were things about the lines of the Jaguar that he really liked too.”

Wittenberg and Fender master builder Larry L. Brooks journeyed to Cobain and Love’s Hollywood apartment to discuss the guitar. The couple were just in the process of moving out. Like Ferrington, the Fender guys were impressed with Cobain’s courteous manner.

“He was very soft-spoken and very gentle” Brooks recalls. “As it turned out, we’d gotten him out of bed. He’d been out or played the night before, so he was still a little tired. But as we started talking about the guitar, the adrenaline started flowing. He was very easy to work with. He knew what he wanted, but at the same time he was able to say, `You’re the builder, so you know the best way to accomplish what I’m after.’ He was very open minded that way.”

To explain what he wanted, Cobain hit on the idea of taking Polaroids of a Mustang and a Jaguar, cutting the photos in half and gluing them together in a way that combined the upper part of the Mustang body with the lower portion of the Jag body. The resulting hybrid creature was named the “Jagstang.” Brooks blew up the composite picture in an enlarger, traced the body shape and cut out a body that was sent to Cobain. The guitarist suggested some modifications to enhance the body’s balance. At one point he also sent Brooks one of his favorite necks to copy. In very short order, a prototype instrument was completed. “It took less time to design and build the guitar than it does just to communicate with some other artists,” says Brooks.

The resulting instrument has an alder body, plus a 24-inch scale maple neck with a rosewood fretboard and vintage-style fretwire. At Cobain’s request, Brooks used stock Mustang hardware from Japan, where the guitars are still produced. (According to Nirvana guitar tech Earnie Bailey, the bridge was later changed to a Tune-O-Matic.) The neck pickup is a single-coil Fender Texas Special, which was originally designed as a bridge pickup for Fender’s Stevie Ray Vaughan model. The bridge pickup is a DiMarzio H-3 Humbucker.

“The Texas Special is a little hotter than most single coils,” Brooks explains. “With a humbucker at the bridge, the Texas Special in the neck position really helped to balance things out so that there wasn’t such a drastic drop in volume and output going from one pickup to the other.”

“Kurt requested two guitars,” says Mark Wittenberg, “one in Solid Blue and one in Fiesta Red.” The blue instrument was delivered to Cobain, who used it on Nirvana’s 1993 tour. “We were just finishing the Fiesta Red one,” Wittenberg continues. “In fact, we were literally ready to deliver it when we received word of his death.”

The red guitar has been earmarked for the Fender Museum which is being planned. Meanwhile, Fender is discussing plans to make the Jagstang model available to the general public.

Source: Behind Unplugged, Guitar World, March of 1995

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 found with a shotgun and a suicide note that reportedlyended, “I love you, I love you.” The singer had been missing, andhis mother has feared that the most troubled and talented rock star of his generation would go the way of Jim Morrison and JimiHendrix. “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club,” she told the Associated Press. “I told him not to join that stupid club.”

Cobain didn’t overdose like Morrison and Hendrix, of course.But the singer’s self-destructive steak seems to have been boundup inextricably with drugs. In March, while in Rome, Cobainoverdosed on painkillers and champagne. Nirvana’s spokespeopleinsisted that it was an accident, portraying Cobain and his wife,Courtney Love, as stable, happy parents who drug days were behind them. But the truth about Cobain’s last months was farmessier than we’d been led to believe. On March 18, Cobainreportedly locked himself in a room of his spacious Seattle homeand threatened to kill himself; Love is said to have called thepolice, who arrived on the scene and seized medication and firearms.On April 2, the police were summoned once more-this time by O’Conner, who told them her son was missing. The rumor mill hasit that Cobain and Love’s marriage was on the rocks; that his friends performed an “intervention,” and that while Love was promoting a new album by her band, Hole, Cobain was fleeing arehab clinic in Los Angeles. According to the AP, O’Conner’s missing person’s report read, in part, “Cobain ran away from [a]California facility and flew back to Seattle. He also bought a shotgun and may be suicidal.” All these dark machinations willmake for an uneasy legacy-precisely the sort of legacy he didn’twant. “I don’t want my daughter to grow up and someday be hassledby kids at school,” he once said of Frances Bean Cobain, now 19months. “I don’t want people telling her that her parents werejunkies.”

Which raises a question: what will they tell Frances Bean?Where her father’s career is concerned, at least, the answer isreassuring. They’ll tell her Cobain and his band hated the slick,MTV-driven rock establishment so much they took it over. They’lltell her that with the album “Nevermind,” Nirvana replaced theprefab sentiments of pop with hard, unreconstituted emotions. That they got rich and went to No.1. That they were responsiblefor other bands getting rich and going to No.1: Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains. That Cobain never took his bandas seriously as everyone else did-that he once wrote, “I’m thefirst to admit that we’re the ’90s version of Cheap Trick.” Butthat despite his corrosive guitar playing, he wrote gorgeous,airtight melodies. That he took the Sex Pistols’ battle cry”Never Mind the Bullocks,” mixed it with some twenty-somethingrage and disillusion, and came out with this lyric: “Oh, well,whatever, never mind.” And finally, that he reminded his peersthey were not alone, though all the evidence suggests that he was.

Cobain was born just outside the desultory logging town ofAberdeen, Wash., in February 1967. (Yes, he was 27, as wasMorrison, Hendrix and Joplin.) The singer hated being the crownprince of Generation X, but the fury of Nirvana’s music spoketo his generation because they’d grown up more or less the sameway. Which is to say: grunge is what happens when children ofdivorce get their hands on guitars. Cobain’s mother was a house-wife; his father, Don Cobain, was a mechanic at the Chevron station in town. They divorced when the singer was 8.

Drugs and punk: Cobain always had a fragile constition (hewas subject to bronchitis, as well as the recurrent stomach painshe claimed drove him to a heroin addiction). The image one getsis that of a frail kid batted between warring parents. “[Thedivorce] just destroyed his life.” Wendy O’Conner tells MichaelAzerrad in the Nirvana biography, “Come As You Are.” “Hechanged completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became veryinward-he just held everything [in]….I think he’s still suffering.” As a teen, Cobain dabbled in drugs and punk rock, and dropped out of school. His father persuaded him to pawn his guitar and take an entrance exam for the navy. But Cobainsoon returned for the guitar. “To them, I was wasting my life,”he told the Los Angeles Times. “To me, I was fighting for it.”Cobain didn’t speak to his father for eight years. When Nirvanawent to the top of the charts, Don Cobain began keeping a scrapbook. “Everything I know about Kurt,” he told Azerrad,”I’ve read in newspapers and magazines.”

The more famous Nirvana became, the more Cobain wanted noneof it. The group, whose first album, 1989’s “Bleach,” was recorded for $606.17, and released on the independent label SubPop, was meant to be a latter-day punk band. It was supposedto be nasty and defiant and unpopular. But something went wrong: Nirvana’s major-label debut, “Nevermind,” sold almost10 million copies worldwide. On the stunning single “Smells LikeTeen Spirit,” Cobain howled over a sludgy guitar riff, “I feelstupid and contagious/Here we are now, entertain us.” This wasthe sound of psychic damage, and an entire generation recognizedit.

Nirvana-with their stringy hair, plaid work shirts and tornjeans-appealed to a mass of young fans who were tired of falseidols like Madonna and Michael Jackson, and who’d never had adangerous rock-and-roll hero to call their own. Unfortunately,the band also appealed to the sort of people Cobain had alwayshated: poseurs and bandwagoneers, not to mention record-companyexecs and fashion designers who fell over themselves cashing in on the new sights and sounds. Cobain, who’d grown up as anangry outsider, tried to shake his celebrity. “I have a request for our fans,” he fumed in the liner notes to the album”Incesticide.” “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals,people of different color, or women, please do this one favorfor us-leave us the f–k alone!…Last year, a girl was rapedby two wastes of sperm and eggs while singing…our song ‘Polly.’I have had a hard time carrying on knowing there are planktonlike that in our audience.”

By 1992, it became clear that Cobain’s personal life was astangled and troubling as his music. The singer married Love inWaikiki-the bride wore a moth-eaten dress once owned by actressFrances Farmer-and the couple embarked on a self-destructive pas de deux widely referred to as a ’90s version of “Sid and Nancy.” As Cobain put it, “I was going off with Courtney and we were scoring drugs and we were f–king up against a walloutside and stuff…and causing secnes just to do it. It wasfun to be with someone who would stand up all of a sudden and smash a glass on a table.” In September ‘92, Vanity Fairreported that Love had used heroin while she was pregnant withFrances Bean. She and Cobain denied the story (the baby ishealthy). But authorities were reportedly concerned enough toforce them to surrender custody of Frances to Love’s sister,Jamie, for a month, during which time the couple was, in Cobain’s words, “totally suicidal.”

Tormented rebel: By last week the world knew Cobain had aself-destructive streak, that he’d flailed violently against hisunwanted celebrity-but the world had been assured those dayswere over. Nirvana recently postponed its European concertdates and opted out of this summer’s Lollapalooza tour. Still,spokesmen maintained that Cobain simply needed time to recuperatefrom the overdose in Rome. They offered a tempting picture:Cobain the tormented rebel reborn as a doting, drug-free father.Even Dr. Osvaldo Galletta, of Rome’s American Hospital, says hebelieved the overdose was an accident: “The last image I haveof him, which in light of the tragedy now seems pathetic, is of a young man playing with the little girl. He did not seemlike a young man who wanted to end it. I had hope for him. Some of the people that visited him were a little strange, buthe seemed to be a mild sort, not at all violent. His wife alsobehaved quite normally. She left a thank-you note.”

It’d be nice if we, too, could come away with that imageof Cobain and his daughter. And, in truth, those who knew thesinger say there was a real fragility buried beneath the noiseof his music and his life. Still, there are a lot of otherimages vying for our attention just now. Among them is the image of Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain, who are saidto have arrived at their home in Seattle, via limo, late Friday. Again: what will people tell Frances? Ed Rosenblatt,Geffen Records president, says, “The world has lost a greatartist and we’ve lost a great friend. It leaves a huge voidin our hearts.” That is certainly true. If only someone hadheard the alarms ringing at the rambling, grayshingled homenear the lake. Long before there was a void in our hearts, there was a void in Kurt Cobain’s.

Source: Newsweek – 04/18/94

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. Rumors floated through the music industry that the singer-songwriter’s band, Nirvana, was breaking up; that Cobain, who had survived a tranquilizer-induced coma just six weeks earlier, had suffered another overdose. The stories seemed to be justified when the group unexpectedly backed out of headlining the Lollapalooza tour this summer.

The truth, it turns out, was that Cobain, who claimed to have overcome an addiction to heroin, was indeed abusing unspecified drugs. A record-industry source told TIME that two weeks ago Cobain’s wife Courtney Love, front woman for the group Hole, gathered doctors and friends together in Seattle, the couple’s home, to try to scare Cobain into dealing with his problem; Nirvana’s managers even threatened to drop Cobain from their roster unless he got cleaned up. The intervention seemed to work, for Cobain checked into a California treatment center. But according to a missing-persons report filed by his mother, he fled early last week. Seattle police periodically checked Cobain’s house, finding no traces of the singer.

Last Friday, an electrician visited the house to install a security system. When no one answered the front door, he walked around the house, peering through windows. He thought he saw a mannequin sprawled on the floor, until he noticed a splotch of blood by its ear. When police and the coroner broke down the door, they found Cobain dead on the floor, a shotgun still pointed at his chin and, on a nearby counter, a suicide note penned in red ink, reportedly ending with the words “I love you, I love you,” addressed, a source said, to Love and the couple’s 19-month-old daughter Frances Bean.

Kurt Cobain, dead at 27. The news came as a shock to millions of rock fans, and MTV pre-empted its usual programming for hours of J.F.K.-like mourning, with a somber Kurt Loder playing the Walter Cronkite role. Given Cobain’s talent and influence, however, the reaction was understandable. Nirvana came from the music-industry equivalent of nowhere, with a rough-edged first album recorded for a chiselly $606. The next, Nevermind, released 2 1/2 years ago, contained a series of crunching, screaming songs that also had catchy melodies, part punk, part Beatles. Selling almost 10 million copies and knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the charts, the album fibrillated the psyche of a generation. It also launched the commercial vogue for grunge and made Seattle famous for something other than cappuccino, rain and bad professional sports. Before long, equally abrasive Seattle groups like Pearl Jam (a Nirvana rival), Mudhoney and Alice in Chains joined Nirvana high on the charts. The New Liverpool, Rolling Stone called the city in early 1992 (launching searches for the New Seattle).

Cobain was at the center of it all, the John Lennon of the swinging Northwest, a songwriter with a gift for searing lyrics as well as seductive hooks, a performer with a play of facial expressions so edgy and complicated that they rivaled Jack Nicholson’s.

If the loss of an oddly magnetic, brilliant musician was jolting, though, the manner of his death was not entirely unexpected. Cobain spoke so openly on the subjects of drugs and depression and suicide that writers searching for easy obituary ironies didn’t have to look very hard. Cobain himself even began joking about it; a song called I Hate Myself and I Want to Die was recorded but dropped from the last album. “It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves,” Cobain told a reporter earlier this year. “I’m thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. I thought it was a funny title.”

Love, an alternative-rock star in her own right, was in Los Angeles at the time of Cobain’s death but reportedly flew to Seattle Friday morning. While talking to the pop-music critic Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times early last week, Love broke into tears describing her husband’s recently fragile condition. “I just don’t ever want to see him on the floor like that again. He was blue,” she told Hilburn, recalling Cobain’s overdose in Rome last month. “I thought I went through a lot of hard times over the years, but this has been the hardest.” A source who had been close to Cobain confirms what now seems obvious: the European incident, labeled an accident at the time, was an unsuccessful suicide attempt. “You don’t take 50 pills by accident,” notes the source. Two weeks after returning to Seattle from Rome, Love had to call police when Cobain locked himself in a room along with some of the guns he enjoyed keeping around the house; police removed four weapons that day, including a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

Growing up in the depressed logging town of Aberdeen on Washington’s Pacific coast, Cobain had, by his account, a relatively happy childhood until his parents, a cocktail waitress and an auto mechanic, got divorced. He was only eight at the time, and he claimed the traumatic split fueled the anguish in Nirvana’s music. He shuttled back and forth between various relatives, even finding himself homeless at one point and living under a bridge. His budding artistry and iconoclastic attitude didn’t win him many fans in high school; instead, he attracted beatings from “jocks and moron dudes,” as an old friend once put it. Cobain got even by spray-painting QUEER on his tormentors’ pickup trucks.

Cobain formed and reformed a series of bands before Nirvana finally coalesced in 1986 as an uneasy alliance among Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic (a hometown friend) and eventually drummer Dave Grohl. Cobain married Love in 1992, when the band was first peaking on the charts, when she was already pregnant with Frances Bean, and when both parents had already developed heroin habits (Love claims to have kicked hers immediately after finding out she was pregnant). “It’s a whirling dervish of emotion, all these extremes of fighting and loving each other at once,” is how Cobain described the marriage last year, proudly showing off nasty fingernail scratches on his back.

It was Nirvana’s unexpected stardom that seemed to eat at him. He appeared unusually tortured by success, even in a profession famous for containing people who are tortured by success. “He was a very bright, sweet, generous and caring individual, perhaps a little too sweet and sensitive for the business he was in,” says Michael Azerrad, author of Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Danny Goldberg, the former head of Nirvana’s management company who now runs Atlantic Records, says, “In all the years I knew him, he had very mixed feelings about being on this planet.” Goldberg remembers another of the band’s handlers once asking the singer why he was moping. “I’m awake, aren’t I?” Cobain replied.

He suffered the usual torments of the underground poet moving into the mainstream, and was worried that his band had sold out, that it was attracting the wrong kind of fans (e.g., the guys who used to beat him up). True, he liked the money that went with mall-rat adulation. But in interviews he exuded a pain beyond standard-issue superstar whining. He said his heroin use was a kind of self-medication for stomach pains, but what he really seemed in search of was psychic equilibrium.

“None of this would have happened had he not been famous,” insists Daniel House, a friend of Cobain’s and the owner of an independent record label in Seattle. “When Nirvana started catching on, he was kind of bewildered. His music was so personal, it amazed him when people came out in droves to hear it.”

They were there, though, because Cobain conveyed meaning and even beauty in his harsh recordings. His lyrics could be sour, occasionally frightening if opaque. Take these simultaneously blase and acerbic lines from the group’s biggest hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit: “And I forget just why I taste/ Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile/ I found it hard, it was hard to find/ Oh well, whatever, never mind.” Cobain’s sometimes fierce, sometimes weary growl, the sometimes convulsive, sometimes grating guitars, the very loud drums: all of it communicated anger, maybe loathing, definitely passion, no matter how inchoate.

His subject was the same perennial, youthful fury captured by the Sex Pistols, before they too self-destructed, and by the Who, before Pete Townshend survived to purvey nostalgia to Broadway theatergoers. Youthful nihilism may not be new, but no artist invents all his materials; it’s what he does with them that counts, and Cobain wrote great rock songs as he explored a familiar theme with genius.

Last year a journalist visited a home he and Love were renting before they moved into the house in which Cobain would end his life. He had decorated one of the walls with this graffito: NONE OF YOU WILL EVER KNOW MY INTENTIONS. It could serve as his credo as well as his epitaph. “Guess we won’t be getting the deposit back on the house,” he joked.

Source: TIME Domestic – 04/18/94

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 the influential band Nirvana, killed himself with a single shotgun blast to the head.

A note was found next to Mr. Cobain’s body, which was discovered by an electrician who had gone to the house this morning to do some work, said Vinette Tichi, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Police Department. Mr. Cobain was 27.

Although police officials were initially reluctant to identify the body, late today the King County Medical Examiner, Donald Reay, said a fingerprint examination confirmed that it was that of Mr. Cobain.

Nirvana is a leader among the half-dozen Seattle-based musical groups, lumped together as grunge, that combined heavy metal with a punk sensibility.

With its 1991 album, “Nevermind,” Nirvana put alternative rock, the noisy, icon-smashing spawn of punk rock, into the commercial mainstream. The album sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide, knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the popular music charts and established an anthem for a generation with the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Dressed in thrift-shop plaid shirts and torn jeans, a fashion soon copied by designers around the world, Mr. Cobain and the members of his band raged against the material and synthetic trappings of pop music. They concocted a sound that was close to both the nihilistic fury of punk rock and the tunefulness of the Beatles. Nirvana’s popularity signaled the acceptability not only of grunge but also of many other bands once considered far too raw and scruffy for the mainstream.

“Nirvana will be remembered for revolutionizing the state of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1990’s, pulling it away from a processed, rather synthetic sound and returning it to something more sincere,” said Michael Azerrad, the author of “Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana,” published last year by Doubleday.

As the group became successful, Mr. Cobain struggled with addictions to heroin and alcohol. He was hospitalized last month in Rome after he lapsed into a temporary coma brought on by a combination of drugs and alcohol. The coma forced his band to cut short a European tour. ‘Psychic Pain’

Upon hearing of Mr. Cobain’s death today, his mother, Wendy O’Connor, said, “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club.” She was referring to rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison who died young after having problems with drugs.

Mr. Azerrad, who last spoke to Mr. Cobain in January, said the musician became a heroin addict, in part, because of a persistent and unexplained stomach ailment.

“He was also in a fair amount of psychic pain,” said Mr. Azerrad. “He was a very sensitive person, sweet and bright, which are not the best qualities to have if you are a rock star.”

Nirvana’s last album, “In Utero,” was released last year to critical acclaim and large sales. Mr. Cobain reproached his own fame in songs he wrote for the album, singing “I do not want what I have got” and “What’s wrong with me?”

Founded in 1986, Nirvana, which included Christ Novoselic on bass and Dave Grohl on drums, produced its first album, “Bleach,” in 1990 on the Seattle-based Sub Pop label. “Bleach” was recorded for $606 and initially sold 30,000 copies, respectable for an independent label but tiny by commercial standards. The album helped the group establish a strong following on the college circuit with loud live shows that sometimes ended with bouts of equipment smashing.

The band recorded its later albums with Geffen Records. The company’s president, Ed Rosenblatt, said, “We are all devastated by the unbelievable tragedy of Kurt Cobain’s death.”

The band’s success, coming out of small clubs in a distant corner of the country, helped to clear the path for other Seattle bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Complaints About Fame

After he became famous, Mr. Cobain frequently complained about his own success. “I do not want to have a long career if I have to put up with the same stuff that I’m putting up with,” Mr. Cobain said in an interview with The New York Times last November. “I’m trying it one last time, and if it’s more of a pleasant year for us, then fine, we’ll have a career. But I’m not going to subject myself to being stuck in an apartment building for the next 10 years and being afraid to go out-side of my house. It’s not worth it.”

Lori Goldston of Seattle, a cellist who toured with Nirvana last fall, said she was surprised by Mr. Cobain’s suicide. “He sort of had a depressive streak but he basically seemed optimistic and had ideas for the future,” she said. “But I think he was pretty overwhelmed in general by his fame.”

His drug problems and squabbles over royalties nearly broke up the group, as did the travails of Mr. Cobain and his wife, the singer Courtney Love, in regaining custody of their young child, Frances, from a relative after a Vanity Fair article reported that Ms. Love had used heroin well into her pregnancy.

At Mr. Cobain’s house today, a large, Northwest-style home just off Lake Washington in the Seattle neighborhood of Madrona, fans stood in the rain and cried.

“It’s hard to be a young person nowadays,” said Renae Ely, a 20-year-old college student. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “He helped open people’s eyes to our struggles.”

Jim Sellars, a 21-year-old nursing assistant, said, “The bond is hard to describe, but he was a lyricist who could feel the way we do.” He said Mr. Cobain was an inspiration. “I’m still in shock, I feel so numb that someone who helped us understand is now dead.”

Police said Mr. Cobain was alone at the time of his death. It is not known where Ms. Love, the lead singer of the band, Hole, and their daughter were. Over the last year, the police had been called to their house after a complaint of a domestic dispute and a gunshot being fired.

Mr. Cobain’s body was found today in the upper floor of a detached garage to the side of the house.

Mr. Cobain was born in Aberdeen, a gray, sodden timber town of 16,000 people on a Pacific bay about 100 miles southwest of Seattle. His parents, Don and Wendy Cobain, divorced when he was 7, and he was given guitar lessons to keep him out of trouble. He dropped out of high school and left Abderdeen with his hometown friend, Mr. Novoselic, a co-founder of Nirvana.

Mr. Cobain has said that he always sympathized with homosexuals and felt trapped in the male culture of Aberdeen. He said that, as a teen-ager, he often felt that young men had no choice but to play sports and eventually work as loggers or in the lumber mills. Lyrics Full of Angst

Mr. Cobain’s lyrics, often contradictory and full of angst, spoke to a generation overshadowed by the enormous baby boom and coming of age when jobs were shrinking.

“As a songwriter, Kurt was really one of the greatest talents of pop music,” said Charles Cross, editor of the Rocket, a Seattle music magazine. “His songs were so emotional and so full of personal pain.”

Mr. Cross said, “The sad thing is what we’ve lost on the music scene. Regretfully, his body of work is small. He could have done so much more.”

When the grunge look became a fashion rage, ending up in Kmart, Mr. Cobain took note of the irony that that is where the look started. He once said he wore plaid shirts and boots because they best suited the marine climate of the Pacific Northwest. In his hometown, plaid shirts were a working a uniform well before they were a Calvin Klein fashion statement.

A recent movie, “Singles,” celebrated the Seattle scene and the grunge sound. But by last year, Nirvana and the other bands identified as the grunge pioneers said they were sick of it all. When asked last year if a band that rode the wave of a revolt could still be considered an underdog, Mr. Cobain said, “I think we look ridiculous already.”

His problem with heroin was told in numerous interviews. In the 1992 Vanity Fair interview, Ms. Love, implied that she had taken heroin into the late stages of her pregnancy. Using the article as evidence, child welfare officials forced the couple to surrender their child, then still an infant, to a relative.

Mr. Cobain and his wife soon regained custody. Mr. Cobain said the child was named for another tragic Seattle figure, Frances Farmer. A major movie star in the 1930’s, Ms. Farmer was forced into a mental institution by her family, and underwent a lobotomy.

Source: New York Times Obituaries, April 9, 1994

Nirvana’s head guru Kurdt Kobain lives in Olympia now, but he first began crunching out Melvins/Soundgarden style riffs in the town that time forgot, learning everything he knows by watching the Melvins practice. Endlessly.

“I’ve seen hundreds of Melvins practices,” Kurdt recalls. I drove their van on tour. Everybody hated them, by the way. And me and Matt [the Melvins’ old bassist] even used the same calling card; it’s almost like we were married.”

Nirvana, consisting of Kurdt on guitar and vocals, Chris Noeoselic on bass and Chad Channing on drums, is still a young band, but they’re fast on their way to becoming Buddhas, or at least Bodhisattvas, of the Northwest pain-rock circuit.

Since some people seem to think Backlash is a consumer guide (what a novel idea!), it’s probably only fair to inform you that if you didn’t like the Melvins, or if you did like the Melvins but think lead-belly music has run its course, you won’t like Nirvana. But it’s also important to stress that this is not a clone band. The group’s already way ahead of most mortals in the songwriting department and, at the risk of sounding blasphemous, I honestly believe that with enough practice, Nirvana could become…. better than the Melvins!

“Our biggest fear at the beginning was that people might think we were a Melvins rip-off,” Kurdt admits. Yet the association has probably also worked to the band’s advantage. Nirvana recorded an ear-splitting demo tape which immediately had every noise addict in town flapping his lips over the next great white hope of grunge… and it probably didn’t hurt that Melvin Dale was sitting in on drums (this was before Chad joined).

The band played its first gig as Nirvana at a Sub Pop Sunday at the Vogue. They weren’t ready.

“We were uptight,” recalls Kurdt. “It just didn’t seem like a real show. We felt like we were being judged; it was like everyone should’ve had score cards. Plus I was sick. I puked that day. That’s a good excuse.”

“We already had songs on the radio,” adds Chris (KCMU has been playing “Paper Cuts”). “Everyone was already talking about us. There was a lot of pressure.”

Unfortunately, Kurdt’s nervousness was apparent on stage that night, but I’ve seen them twice since and they’ve gotten tighter each time. They’re becoming the kind of band that can turn an entire audience into zombie pod people by their sheer heaviness (this is a compliment).

My only complaint is that Kurdt still can’t seem to work up as much vocal finesse as he does on tape, since he’s gotta play lead guitar and scream at the same time. But he’ll work it out. In the meantime, look for the band’s upcoming Sub Pop single, featuring one original and a cover of Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz.”

And keep your ears tuned to Aberdeen, because idle towns are the Devil’s workshop.

Source: Backlash – September 1988.