Fans To Mark 10 Years Since Cobain Death

[Kooperman]

10 years later, Cobain lives on in his music

On April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain wrote a suicide note, in which he said he couldn’t stand to think of his daughter becoming “the miserable self-destructive, death rocker that I’ve become.”

By Eric Olsen

MSNBC contributor

Updated: 11:12 a.m. ET April 02, 2004

Quoting Neil Young — “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” — Nirvana singer, songwriter and guitarist Kurt Cobain put a shotgun under his chin and ended his short, sad life of 27 years on April 5, 1994. He left behind toddler daughter Frances Bean, wife Courtney Love, a legion of stunned fans, and a small body of music that changed the course of rock history.

In the intervening decade, Cobain, a small, frail but handsome man in life, has become an abstract Generation X icon, viewed by many as the “last real rock star” (oddly, “real rock stars” Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison all died at 27), a messiah and martyr whose every utterance has been plundered and parsed, whose childhood home sold for five-times its real estate value, as if his lingering aura still charged the air with some tangible magic.

A cynic might charge that the heroin-addicted Cobain’s best career move was to die young and violently — and in a sense his self-annihilation did confirm an unwillingness to “compromise,” to reconcile his self-loathing with his newfound fame and fortune — but this would ignore the brilliance and significance of his best work, in particular the mega-platinum 1991 album “Nevermind” (more than 14 million copies sold), that established not just “grunge” (the Seattle-based hybrid of punk and big-riff metal), but also the cultural and commercial viability of alternative rock in general.

Nirvana — the trio of Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl (now the leader of Foo Fighters) — formed in Cobain’s hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, in the late '80s and drifted to Seattle by way of Olympia. Their first album, “Bleach,” displayed Cobain’s gift for combining raging rock power with emotional vulnerability, but on “Nevermind,” produced with the buoyancy of a pop record by Butch Vig, Cobain’s melodic touch fused perfectly with his ragged guitar roar to produce the album of the decade and one of the cornerstones of rock history.

“Nevermind” was able to bring together music fans from the usually warring tribes of hard rock and alternative rock under one umbrella for the first time as one outstanding, alternately catchy and vicious song followed another: “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “In Bloom,” “Come As You Are,” “Breed,” “Lithium.”

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" (named after a teen deodorant) embodies all the contradictory certainty, confusion, bravado and vulnerability of adolescence in one tight package as Cobain shouts, screams and coos in a voice both hoarse and delicate, straining and resigned.

The sonic difference between “Nevermind” and the stark, spare “In Utero” ('93) is akin to the difference between the Beatles’ “Let It Be” with Phil Spector’s orchestration, and the recently released “Let it Be … Naked,” with Spector’s sweetening stripped out. “In Utero” (with “Heart-shaped Box,” “Dumb,” “Rape Me”) ably continued the band’s legacy, but it would not have established Nirvana as pivotal on its own.

A man of contradictions

By 1994 Cobain was dead, the band was over, and the deification begun. In retrospect it’s all pretty obvious: the personal poles of raw hyperactive energy and beautiful pain, is right there, literally, in the music. No real need to read the journals or read a medical diagnosis. It’s there in Cobain’s voice: beauty and symmetry dragged through mud and broken glass on its way from his diaphragm to his mouth, reflecting the strain of the journey upon emerging into a microphone. Ultimately, Cobain’s contradictions could not be contained within his mind and body.

Of Cobain’s “Journals,” published in book form in 2002, Pete Townshend wrote in a review for the Guardian, that they show his “resentful, childish, petulant and selfish desire to accuse, blame and berate the world for all its wrongs, to wish to escape, or overcome and, finally, to take no responsibility for any part of the ultimate downfall.”

Townshend seems a bit peeved with Cobain, perhaps resentful that the younger man actually did die before he got old, (although his shotgun suicide hardly left behind a beautiful corpse). Deeper than that, Townshend’s generation, the generation of the '60s, ultimately failed in its bid to transform the world, retreating into entertainment and materialism after the high point of Woodstock and the low of Altamont.

In the journals Cobain wrote that he blamed his “parents’ generation for coming so close to social change, then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media and government to deface the moment by using the Mansons and other hippie representatives as propaganda examples.” Townshend perhaps felt a bit guilty about this.

But Cobain’s journals aren’t art, they are just the bits and pieces from which the art was built, and don’t doubt Cobain’s artistry, his ability to transform the personal into the universal, the real into the artificial that feels real.

“There’s something wrong with that boy ... He frowns for no good reason,” said William Burroughs in 1993 after Cobain had stopped by for visit to the “Naked Lunch” author’s Lawrence, Kansas, home. Indeed there was: the nervous, darting eyes, the lack of comfort within his own skin — a restless spirit squirming around, trying to find something solid and dependable to cling to, something it never found other than in music, and that music is how Kurt Cobain is best remembered.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4652653/

[Shawn]

Good article.

[Kooperman]

Fans to Mark 10 Years Since Cobain Death

Sun Apr 4, 8:23 PM ET

By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

ABERDEEN, Wash. - Kurt Cobain and his band, Nirvana, spent only three years in the public eye, and they released only three studio albums. But what he accomplished before committing suicide 10 years ago Monday at age 27 — deciding it was "better to burn out than fade away," as he quoted Neil Young in his suicide note — was remarkable.

Beneath this bridge above the muddy banks of the Wishkah River, a troubled young Cobain would come to escape his unhappy home and the persistent gray drizzle of the Washington coast.

Among the cracking concrete supports, he would smoke pot and drink and plot his stardom, bragging to friends of his "suicide genes" and that he would die a young rock star.

It's here that many of his fans have come to pay their respects since he fulfilled that prophesy with a needle and a shotgun.

"Peace, love, empathy," reads one message scrawled in graffiti under the bridge.

"Kurt," says another, "Your spirit will bounce on happily."

Critics describe 1991's "Nevermind," which has sold more than 10 million copies, as one of the decade's most important albums. Its biggest hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," remains a seminal expression of teen angst. Cobain brought the dark, driven sound of grunge rock to the nation, helped save the world from hair metal, and with a single line — "Here we are now, entertain us" — captured and captivated a generation that had grown bored and cynical about popular music.

Andrew Harms, a 24-year-old disc jockey on a Seattle radio station, still remembers his first exposure to Nirvana, which remains his favorite band: seeing the video for "Teen Spirit" on MTV.

"It filled me with an energy that music had not done for me before," Harms says. "The guy had an amazing creative mind, and he took all the emotions within him and expressed it through music. It was music of substance, music that seemed real to me."

Cobain biographer Charles Cross says that when Nirvana went to record "Nevermind," they followed Warrant into the studio — a band known for big hair, open shirts and their "Cherry Pie" video.

"Music at that point was so prefabricated, so fake, so hairspray that Nirvana was really a breath of fresh air," Cross says. "It was more organic than anything we'd seen in music in years."

Much of the screaming desperation in Cobain's songs can be traced to his life in this timber town on the Washington coast, and in Montesano, just inland, where his grandparents and father lived. Cobain's parents divorced when he was 9, an event that scarred him deeply, and much of his adolescence was spent bouncing among the homes — and garages and vans — of his parents, grandparents, relatives and friends.

As Cross writes in "Heavier Than Heaven," a family history of alcohol abuse and suicide weighed on him, but several relatives on both sides were artistically talented. Many friends recall Cobain saying he would one day join the "27 Club" — a reference to the age Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were when they died.

Cobain found an outlet for these emotions in guitar, punk rock and painting, through which he would express himself for the rest of his life. He spoke frequently during the last two years of his life of giving up music for painting.

Shortly before he dropped out of Aberdeen's Weatherwax High School, Cobain began playing with classmate Krist Novoselic. They formed Nirvana after moving to Olympia in the late 1980s, and drummer Dave Grohl — now of the Foo Fighters — joined the band in 1990, the year Cobain began taking heroin, and the year Nirvana's first album, "Bleach," helped it win a major label deal with DGC, part of Geffen Records.

Over the next year, Nirvana — and grunge — exploded onto the national stage, with Seattle becoming the locus, thanks to Nirvana and other local bands such as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. In September 1991, when "Nevermind" went on sale, Cobain had just been evicted from his Olympia apartment and was sleeping in his car. Geffen initially expected to sell only 50,000 copies of "Nevermind." By year's end, it sold 2 million.

Shortly before Cobain brought his dyed locks and emaciated frame onto "Saturday Night Live," he learned "Nevermind" had knocked Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" out of the No. 1 spot on the charts.

As his fame soared, though, so did his heroin use, in part as a self-treatment for his chronic stomach pain. Encouraged by his wife, Courtney Love, who had her own drug problems, Cobain checked into detox several times over the next 2 1/2 years. But he always returned to heroin, even around the time his daughter was born in the summer of 1992.

Nevertheless, his songwriting remained impressive and became more polished with Love's collaboration, especially on "Heart-shaped Box" and other songs for Nirvana's third album, "In Utero."

In January 1994, as Cobain's despondency spiraled, he recorded his last great song, "You Know You're Right." It would not be released until 2002, following a long legal battle between Love and the surviving Nirvana members, but the song's ironic couplet "Things have never been so swell/ and I have never been so well" lent a serious insight into Cobain's mind at the time.

While in Rome a month after recording it, he tried to kill himself by taking 60 tranquilizers. The overdose left him in a coma.

He survived, but in early April he jumped a wall at a detox center in Los Angeles and flew back to Seattle.

On April 5, 1994 — give or take 24 hours — Cobain wrote a suicide note, in which he said he couldn't stand to think of his daughter becoming "the miserable self-destructive, death rocker that I've become." He went into the greenhouse of his mansion, injected himself with a massive dose of heroin, put a 20-gauge shotgun against the roof of his mouth, and fired.

An electrician found his body the morning of April 8.

Thousands of people attended a vigil for him at Seattle Center back then. There is no such widespread event planned for the 10th anniversary of his death, though some fans communicating on the Internet have suggested meeting at Seattle Center. Others will come here, beneath the Young Street Bridge, or to the benches at Viretta Park, next to Cobain's house in Seattle, where some of his ashes are scattered.

Radio stations around the country plan to devote airplay to Nirvana's music Monday, and the Aberdeen Museum of History plans to open an exhibit and walking tour of Cobain-related sites this summer.

"You can't get around the drug use, but we're not going to dwell on it a lot," curator Dann Sears says. "What's important is his legacy, his music ... and he revolutionized music."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...years_later&e=5

[Kooperman]

Cobain's Art Shows Flip Side of Genius

Sun Apr 4, 1:53 PM ET

By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

MONTESANO, Wash. - Leland Cobain spreads a few yellowing pieces of art across his dining room table. The Aberdeen Museum of History, in the next town over, has asked him to contribute to an exhibit about his grandson, late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.

One adorable Christmas card Kurt made for his grandparents at age 13 shows a hapless toddler, fishing, who has hooked the back of his shirt. There are radiant watercolor seascapes and depictions of Disney characters.

Then there are the other paintings, in an apartment 55 miles northeast of Leland's trailer. They are surrealistic, stark and powerful, revealing skeletons, aliens and the dark forests of a haunted mind.

Like Cobain's music, these images illustrate the tormented genius of the man who shot himself 10 years ago Monday.

"By the time he left here, I saw him as the type who could have been a professional painter in New York, L.A. or Chicago," says art teacher Bob Hunter, Cobain's favorite teacher at Aberdeen's Weatherwax High School. "But even then I don't think I appreciated how sensitive he was. When I look at his lyrics now, I can see more of what went into his art."

In fact, says Cobain biographer Charles Cross, during the last two years of Cobain's life the singer frequently spoke of giving up music for a career in visual arts. In 1992, he spent six months in Los Angeles, taking time off from Nirvana to focus on his heroin-inspired painting.

It was a prolific time for Cobain, a time when he was experimenting with mixing his own blood and semen with paint. But those works have been seen by very few people — Cross being one of them.

"People only think of Kurt as a musician, but he was a very multitalented guy," Cross says. "I got access to a lot of those paintings, and they're just amazing. There's a possibility he could have been a visual artist of note."

While Cobain's estate keeps his Los Angeles paintings in a secure vault and did not respond to a request from The Associated Press asking to see them, the AP was able to view several paintings owned by one of Cobain's close friends in Tacoma. The friend asked to remain anonymous to help ensure the security of the paintings in the apartment.

The paintings were done while Cobain lived in Olympia in the late 1980s. One shows a fetus floating amid what appears to be the white silhouettes of tree branches. Another shows a smiling, mad, dwarfish creature surrounded by childish stick-figures.

A third is of a strangely bent skeletal figure resembling a ghostly white E.T. It was a self-portrait, the friend said.

Some of the paintings were done on the back of board games that Cobain bought at thrift stores because he was too poor to afford canvas. None is titled or signed, though he wrote a birthday message in red ink on the frame of one. "Love Kurt," it ends.

According to Leland Cobain, 80, Kurt could draw well from the time he was 6, and Leland's wife, Iris, an amateur painter herself, encouraged him and taught him.

"He come over the house one day and he had a picture of Mickey Mouse. He says, 'Grandpa, look what I drew,'" Leland recalled. "I said, 'You didn't draw that, you traced it.' He got mad and said, 'You give me a piece of paper and I'll draw it again.' And he sat down and drew it again."

Hunter recalls that Cobain was a good art student, that he took most assignments seriously and, when he didn't feel like participating, he would sit at his desk and read, which Hunter didn't mind.

After Cobain's death, Hunter found a striking picture Cobain had done in class of a sperm turning into a fetus in 12 steps. He thought about auctioning the picture off to raise money for a Kurt Cobain scholarship for Weatherwax High art students.

Instead, Kurt's mother, Wendy, asked to have it. In exchange, Nirvana's management company, Gold Mountain Entertainment, donates $3,000 to $5,000 for the scholarship every year.

Of course, some of Cobain's visual art can be seen more readily. The cover of "Incesticide" is one of his paintings. He also designed the cover of "Nevermind," which shows a baby boy swimming underwater after a dollar bill, and the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which shows a pep rally gone wrong.

Said Hunter: "The art he had within him did as much for the music as the music did for the art."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...nting&e=4&ncid=

[Ken]

Had he not killed himself, perhaps we would have better music today.

I suppose the very nature of Cobain's mind, is what ensured that he would end his own life.

I've seen a lot of people try to play the grunge mindset; be the exception to the rule. In the end you find out they were the rule in disguise all along, nothing more than music industry, million dollar mansion servants.

He was the real thing.

[Bombardier]

Kurt Cobain: His History And Legacy

Monday (April 5) marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Nirvana founder and frontman Kurt Cobain at the age of 27. Cobain, who killed himself with a shotgun in a room above the garage of his Seattle home, instantly joined the pantheon of rock legends who died too early, including Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bon Scott, and more. Yet while many of those artists lived and loved the rock star lifestyle to the fullest, Cobain was branded as something that he, by all accounts, never wanted to be--the spokesman for an entire generation. It's widely felt that Cobain's inability to reconcile his inner demons and fear of "compromise" with Nirvana's massive success drove him to depression, drugs, and ultimately, suicide.

Cobain did leave behind a small, yet incredibly significant, body of music. Nirvana was one of many bands--including Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Mother Love Bone--to emerge from the Pacific Northwest music scene, where a mix of influences ranging from punk to New Wave to metal fused into what became known as "grunge." The combination of this heavily distorted sound with Cobain's pop sensibilities, plus the emotional pull of his vocals and lyrics, catapulted Nirvana to the front of the pack, giving the world and the media a face to put to the entire alternative music genre that got pulled into the mainstream in Nirvana's wake.

Born in Aberdeen, Washington, on February 20, 1967, Cobain lived with various relatives after his parents divorced. Cobain met bassist Krist Novoselic in 1985, forming Nirvana with him in the late ‘80s. The fledgling group drifted through several drummers and kicked around Olympia, Washington, before finally settling into the Seattle rock scene.

Novoselic told LAUNCH that it was the band's own belief in the power of music that attracted people to them right from the start. "Nirvana always listened to music or always wanted to connect with something, and the best music is music that you connect with in a way that you can't really put your--you just emotionally connect with it,” Novoselic said. “So if we were projecting anything like that, people caught onto it."

The group recorded demos with legendary Seattle producer Jack Endino, who played the tapes for Sub Pop Records co-founder Jonathan Poneman. Poneman signed Nirvana to Sub Pop, and their first single, a cover of Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz," came out in December of 1988. The group's debut album, Bleach, recorded for the princely sum of $600, arrived in 1989. It sold 35,000 copies, was a success at college radio, and brought major record labels sniffing around the band.

Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman told LAUNCH what song on Bleach he thought epitomized the sound that made him want to put out Nirvana's music. "I would have to say 'Negative Creep,' because it was very aggressive, and even though it is not one of the beautiful songs, mournful songs, that people have come to equate with Nirvana, it has the anthemic quality, and the purely emotive quality that I think charged the band in their ascendancy to pop stardom," Bleach said.

A six-song demo produced by Butch Vig led to a deal with DGC/Geffen Records, while Dave Grohl signed on as the band's permanent drummer. The band recorded their second album during the summer of 1991, and the disc, titled Nevermind, arrived in September of that year.

DGC expected to sell about 100,000 copies of the record. Instead, it became a colossal hit, bolstered by the single and video, "Smells Like Teen Spirit." An authentic rock anthem, the song captured the alienation, frustration, and apathy of young people worldwide. The song rocketed to the top of the radio charts as Nevermind climbed the Billboard Top 200, finally perching at Number One by the beginning of 1992. The album went on to sell over 14 million copies. Krist Novoselic told LAUNCH why he thinks Nirvana took off so explosively. "Well, it was a phenomenon,” Novoselic said. “I think a lot of it was timing as what was going on in the music business. And a lot of the Sunset Strip hair bands were past their prime and people were ready for something new. Nirvana always tried to be sincere."

Drummer Dave Grohl recalls playing at England's Reading Festival in 1992 as one of the biggest highlights of the band's initial success. "It was a huge show, and we were headlining, and we hadn't practiced for about three months, and we just stepped onstage and we expected it to suck really bad, and it turned out to be totally amazing," Grohl said.

In February of 1992, Cobain married Hole frontperson Courtney Love, and the couple had their first and only child, Frances Bean Cobain, in August of that year. Rumors began to circulate that the two were heavy heroin users, which led child care authorities to threaten the couple's custody of Frances. Although Cobain claimed to suffer from stomach troubles, several canceled tours fueled the perception that he was already on a self-destructive path.

With recording of a new album delayed, the band's label released a collection of rarities and B-sides in 1992 called Incesticide. Finally, in the spring of 1993, the band recorded their third album, In Utero. Almost immediately, more rumors surfaced, this time suggesting that DGC was unhappy with the record and threatening not to release it. Nirvana expressed disappointment themselves with the sound of Steve Albini's production and re-mastered it.

The album came out in the fall of 1993 and, while not quite the blockbuster that Nevermind was, sold strongly and garnered positive acclaim. Guitarist Pat Smear was added to the band for their fall U.S. tour, but the shadows of drug use and depression were growing. Cobain had reportedly overdosed several times during 1993, and on a post-tour vacation in Rome in early March of 1994, he tried to commit suicide with an overdose of the tranquilizer Rohypnol and champagne.

Things got worse when Cobain returned home. On March 18, police had to come to the Seattle home he shared with Love and talk him out of the bathroom, where he had locked himself in and threatened suicide. An intervention by friends and business associates led to Cobain checking into the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles on March 28, but he fled back to Seattle on March 30, where he convinced friend Dylan Carlson to buy him a shotgun "for protection."

Cobain spoke with Love for the last time, by phone, on April 1. On April 5, he wrote a long farewell letter, took a mixture of heroin and valium, and shot himself in the mouth. His body was discovered three days later, on the 8, by an electrician, and cremated on April 14. A public memorial service in Seattle on April 10 drew 7,000 fans.

In the decade since Cobain's death, MTV Unplugged In New York and an electric live album called From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah surfaced. Grohl went on to form Foo Fighters, while Novoselic also dabbled in music, most notably with Sweet 75.

A proposed box set of unreleased Nirvana material has been held up in legal battles between Grohl, Novoselic, and Love, although a greatest hits collection, released in 2002, included the band's final recording, "You Know You're Right." Grohl recalled the sessions for that song. "We had some time off before a tour, and Kurt wanted to go in and demo some stuff, so I said, 'Hey, why don't we do it at this studio down the street from my house,'” Grohl said. “And we went down there, and we had three days booked. Kurt came in the last day and we were like, 'Okay, what do you wanna do?' And Kurt said, 'Well, why don't we do that song we've been doing at soundcheck?' And so we rehearsed it, I think, once, and then recorded it. Kurt did three or four vocal takes, and that was it."

Nirvana's music brought rebellion, raw emotion, and a punk attitude back to rock music at a time when it was sorely needed, opening the floodgates for Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, and many inferior imitators. And while Kurt Cobain was anointed as the spokesman--even after his death--for what came to be called "Generation X," his own tortured reluctance to accept that role mirrored the confusion felt by Nirvana fans over their identity, their gender, and their place in the world.

Krist Novoselic told LAUNCH that some fans took their devotion to Cobain to an unhealthy extreme. "There's a cult that's developed around the media perception of the person, Kurt Cobain, which has nothing to do with the person I knew (laughs),” Novoselic said. “You know, it's a cult of personality, the cult of celebrity. Nirvana really impacted a lot of people and connected with a lot of people, and when you deal with things on that level, it's very positive, but there's some negative aspects of it too, like, you know, just obsession."

Even to this day, conspiracy theorists speculate that Cobain was murdered, possibly on the orders of his own wife, Courtney Love. A documentary, Kurt And Courtney, tackled this very subject several years ago, while a Dateline special on NBC-TV this past Friday (April 2) explored a brand new book on the subject called Love And Death.

Private detective Tom Grant, who was originally hired by Love to find Cobain in the days before his death, says that Cobain had such a lethal amount of drugs in his system that he couldn't have pulled the trigger himself. "In the last 20 years, we haven't been able to find a record of any suicide, murder, or any case of a dead body where there's any evidence that someone with that much heroin in their system survived long enough to pick up a handgun, to do anything, much less pick up a shotgun and shoot themselves."

Despite all this, Nirvana's musical legacy endures. Ten years after Cobain's death, "alternative" and "grunge" are marketing cliches, "Teen Spirit" is back to being a deodorant, and rock has become fodder for commercials, video games and movie soundtracks--which makes Nirvana's music more vital and important than ever.

http://launch.yahoo.com/read/news.asp?contentID=217647

[Kooperman]

Death of a grunge legend

Authors of new book on Kurt Kobain allege unanswered questions about involvement of Courtney Love.

Read an excerpt from this book here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4638575/

[desdemona]

geez, this courtney love sounds like a mess, what a way to live, it's sad what stardom does to some people.

[Ken]

I've read all the so called "conspiracy theory" topics.

The odd thing is

A. All arguments they present sound almost cut and dry that cobain did NOT kill himself, but was murdered.

B. All arguments that oppose (cobain killed him self) seem to be cut and dry.

It's almost like "yes it is", "no it's not".

It's flat out who's got facts and who is lying!

I don't really know, I don't have enough information.